Huberman Lab: GUEST SERIES | Dr. Paul Conti: How to Understand & Assess Your Mental Health

00:00:00 - 00:30:00

In this episode, Dr. Paul Conti, a medical doctor and psychiatrist, discusses the structure of the mind and how to enhance mental health through specific practices. The podcast emphasizes the importance of agency and gratitude in leading happy lives and explores the parallel between physical and mental health. The guest suggests that understanding the structure and function of the mind can lead to positive changes in mental health and happiness. The podcast also explains the concept of the character structure and its influence on our engagement with the world and decision-making.

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00:30:00 - 01:00:00

The podcast explores the concept of character structure and its impact on our decisions and interactions with the world. It emphasizes the importance of self-knowledge and understanding healthy versus unhealthy defense mechanisms. The discussion also touches on anxiety and the role it plays in character structure. Overall, the podcast highlights the significance of understanding ourselves and addressing anxiety for personal growth and improvement.

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01:00:00 - 01:30:00

The podcast discusses the importance of beliefs and internal narratives in shaping one's self and how they can be changed over time. It emphasizes that changing these beliefs takes time and effort, and that it is important to approach the process in the right way. The podcast also highlights the impact of rapid gratification culture on this process. It explores practical tools and questions to help individuals address and overcome internal barriers, emphasizes the value of introspection and self-exploration for personal growth and well-being, and discusses defense mechanisms and their role in protecting the conscious mind from risk and negative possibilities.

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01:30:00 - 02:00:00

The podcast explores the concepts of displacement, projection, and projective identification and how they manifest in various situations. It discusses the phenomenon of trickle-down anxiety in academic settings and the impact of stress on others. The use of sarcasm and cynicism as defense mechanisms is also examined, highlighting their potential negative effects. The importance of self-awareness, healthy defense mechanisms, and conscious behavioral choices is emphasized.

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02:00:00 - 02:30:00

The podcast explores the concept of self-awareness and the role of internal and external cues in shaping behavior. It discusses the importance of exploring different aspects of psychology and psychiatry to improve mental health and happiness. The concept of agency and gratitude is also discussed, highlighting their positive impact on our lives. The podcast delves into the controversial concept of generative drive and its relationship to peace, contentment, and delight.

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02:30:00 - 03:00:00

The podcast discusses the importance of creating tangible things and the process of getting there. It emphasizes the difference between negative cycles and generative drives, and how learning from one aspect of life can be applied to others. The guest also addresses the role of thinking and how it can be both productive and harmful. The conversation explores the negative and unproductive nature of repetitive thinking, common distractions that prevent people from starting tasks, and the importance of capturing moments of potential creation and using thinking in a healthy way. The theory of drives, including the aggressive drive and pleasure drive, is discussed, along with how these drives influence human behavior and the pursuit of desires. The relationship between generative drive and desires such as peace, contentment, and delight is examined, as well as the continuum of generative drives that exist in individuals. The podcast also touches on the problems that arise when there is an imbalance in aggression or pleasure seeking, leading to envy and destructive behavior. The movie 'American Psycho' is discussed in relation to aggression, pleasure-seeking, and envy, and how envy can drive destruction and harm others. The conversation explores the relationship between aggression, pleasure seeking, and demoralization, and how low levels of aggression and pleasure seeking can lead to demoralization and a sense of hopelessness. The impact of these factors on mental health and well-being is also mentioned.

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03:00:00 - 03:30:00

The podcast explores the interplay between different drives in human behavior, including the generative drive, aggression drive, and pleasure drive. It discusses how these drives can influence actions such as self-care, overindulgence, and demoralization. The hosts provide examples of demoralized individuals and the consequences of low aggression and pleasure drives. The discussion suggests that these drives can override the generative drive and lead to various problems in society.

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03:30:00 - 03:42:45

The podcast discusses the issue of over-reductionism in medicine and the reliance on medication as a solution for psychological problems. It highlights the importance of understanding the underlying causes of issues and the limitations of medication in addressing non-biological problems. The podcast also criticizes the business-driven approach to healthcare and its negative impact on patient care. The guest provides a framework for understanding the components of self and how they contribute to empowerment, peace, and contentment.

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Welcome to the Huberman 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 ophthalmology 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 Conti.

Dr. Paul Conti 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. Conti 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 self-talk and restructure your self-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 five minutes or so of today's discussion,

Dr. Conti 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. Conti 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, I just want to emphasize my sentiment, which I'm confident will soon be your sentiment as well,

which is that Dr. Paul Conti 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 zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public.

In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.

Our first sponsor is BetterHelp.

BetterHelp 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 remain in high school.

Over time, I really came to appreciate just how valuable doing quality therapy is.

In fact, I look at doing quality therapy much in the same way that I look at going to the gym

or doing cardiovascular training such as running as ways to enhance my physical health.

I see therapy as a vital way to enhance one's mental health.

The beauty of BetterHelp 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 BetterHelp therapy is conducted entirely online,

it's extremely convenient and easy to incorporate into the rest of your life.

So if you're interested in BetterHelp, go to betterhelp.com.huberman to get 10% off your first month.

That's BetterHelp spelled H-E-L-P.com.huberman.

Today's episode is also brought to us by Waking Up.

Waking Up is a meditation app that offers dozens of guided meditation sessions,

mindfulness trainings, yoga-needra 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-needra, 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-needra is really impressive, showing that after a yoga-needra session,

levels of dopamine in certain areas of the brain are enhanced by up to 60%,

which places the brain and body into a state of enhanced readiness for mental work and for physical work.

Another thing I really like about the Waking Up app is that it provides a 30-day introduction course.

So for those of you that have not meditated before or are 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-needra sessions for you as well.

If you'd like to try the Waking Up app, you can go to WakingUp.com slash Huberman and access a free 30-day trial.

Again, that's WakingUp.com slash Huberman.

And now for my discussion about how to understand and assess your level of mental health with Dr. Paul Conti.

Dr. Paul Conti, 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 narcissist,

all the things that we hear about these days, gaslighting, all these sorts of things.

What all of that really is?

Perhaps we can dispel some of the myths that exist during the course of this series.

I'm sure we will.

I'm sure 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 most richness in life,

because of course life isn't just all about being happy.

So to start off this question, I want to raise a parallel with something I think for most people is more concrete,

which is physical health.

Well, there isn't an ideal physical self that's been defined by the medical community.

We know, for instance, that there is a range of blood pressures that are considered healthy.

There's 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 I think it's reasonable to say that the healthy individual is not going to get exhausted walking up a flight of stairs.

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 ways.

So to start things off, you tell us, what is the healthy version of self?

What should we all be aspiring to?

You've worked with people who presumably are healthy and people who have severe pathologies of different psychiatric types,

bipolar, narcissistic, sociopathic, and everything in between.

So for me and for the listeners, what is a healthy self?

What should we be striving for?

A healthy self approaches life through the lens of agency and gratitude.

If you look at happy people, people who like their lives, no matter what stage of life they're at,

no matter what their socioeconomic status is, race, religion, there's so many things that we think matters.

And they matter to a lot of things.

Do they matter to someone happy or not?

They are not factors.

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 there are difficulties, even if there are, if things happen in life 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 we did an entire episode all about gratitude practices.

Some of the neuroscience and neuroimaging and neurochemical 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 I, right?

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 a function of the self.

And if we look at the structure and the function and the parts, the components of structure and function,

we can come to understand, okay, what is going on in us?

What might we change for the better?

How do we build empowerment, right?

Because empowerment is 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 place in the world and our power in the world

to navigate as we choose, but also a sense of the world around us

that's far more complicated than just we are, extends beyond us to other people,

to the climate around us, to the health of the whole planet, right?

We feel a sense of humility that I'm here and I can do good things.

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 sort of imbued with agency and gratitude,

and that leads us forth to happy lives.

Okay, so it's clear to me why having agency 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, right?

Yes.

Because all of that, at least to my mind, sums to 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.

We've heard endless number of podcasts, including this podcast,

about physical health, and we've been told by physicians and everybody else

that we should seek to have a relatively low blood pressure,

we should seek to have a relatively low heart rate

that our cholesterol should be at a certain level, et cetera.

So within the physical health domain, 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 and psychology,

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 lift an object, so some strength, et cetera,

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 undergirded 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 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 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 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?

There's actually quite a strong parallel between the physical health dimension

and the mental health dimension.

So as you're saying, why do you put in the time, the energy, the learning

to be physically healthy?

It's a lot of effort and we put so much of ourselves towards it

if we decide that we value that.

Why do we do it?

Because as you said, it's the best way to approach life.

Like there may be something that I want to do.

I want to run a race, or I want to climb a mountain,

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.

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.

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 sociology and psychology,

agency and gratitude make happiness, right?

They're ways of approaching life.

And just like physical health is undergirded by cardiovascular health, heart health, muscle strength, right?

There's an undergirding of agency and gratitude and empowerment and humility are ways of describing,

okay, what arises from understanding ourselves, taking care of ourselves,

that then gives us the agency and gratitude.

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 interface 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 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 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 can do planks, you know, sit-ups, 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 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,

if you describe 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 neuromuscular connection gets stronger, the muscle might get bigger or just stronger, et cetera.

Flexibility, you know, you just push your range of motion just a little bit into discomfort.

You do that.

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 does a psychiatrist think about that?

How should we think about that?

Okay, if I could start maybe to set the stage for that

by pointing out that as we go up the hierarchy of health,

everything should get simpler, not more complicated.

If you think about physical health, there's so much complexity on the initial levels.

So we think about your physical health status versus mine.

It's going to be different.

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.

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.

It's very complicated when we're on the lower levels of the hierarchy.

As we get higher up, let's say you and I both do the right things.

Then what happens?

We both have endurance.

We both have some strength.

We're both robust.

Things are getting simpler because we're approaching the unique idiosyncrasies in all of us,

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 something that's common for all of us.

So stamina, for example, in physical health and endurance,

and agency and gratitude in mental health.

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.

We all have an unconscious mind, and we pay so little attention to this part of us

that really is the biological supercomputer.

So millions of things are going on all the time, like in every split second.

So for example, I can say these words, and you can listen to the words,

and you can say things back, and I can listen.

There are millions and millions of things going on under the surface,

much of which comes from either biological predispositions or habits over time,

thought processes, patterns.

So this unconscious mind, this supercomputer is doing all of these things,

at the speed of light, there are electrical and chemical signals,

and multiple pathways as complicated as superhighway systems

that then get consolidated and communicate with others.

And then what comes up from all of that is the conscious mind.

So imagine an iceberg, and it's a really, really big iceberg,

and we see the part above the surface, that's the conscious mind.

But there's a huge part of this iceberg, maybe 95% of it that's underneath the water.

There's this hulking mass that we don't see, that's the unconscious mind.

And it's feeding up to the conscious mind, which is a much smaller part of our brain function,

but it's the part that we're aware of.

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, 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 a set of long tendrils that come out from under the water.

There are defense mechanisms that are unconscious to us that sort of gird 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 slings and arrows of the world around us?

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.

So imagine that there's a defensive structure 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 bunch of neurons that are clicking away underneath?

In other words, where does the vulnerability of the conscious mind really reside?

Not physically where does it reside, but what am I so worried about in terms of my safety?

I mean, right now we're in a room, I feel pretty safe.

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.

Maybe that these defenses are there to protect us from some sort of awareness.

What awareness are we trying to avoid?

So the vulnerability of the conscious mind is to fear, confusion, despair.

There's so many things that we can fear.

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.

We can feel tremendously vulnerable and despairing if we lose others

or we start to see things happening in the world around us that we don't like.

We start to feel like, what will happen to the planet we live on?

Will there be war where I live?

Will my children be safe?

There's so much that we need to protect ourselves again.

So that vulnerable part of us, 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.

And because the conscious mind is sticking out of the water with a defensive structure around it,

it is 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 a nest around all of that.

And that's the character structure that we utilize to interface with the world.

So the character structure is the thing that I'm using.

If you're driving somewhere in a car, the car is the thing that you're using to go there.

The character structure is the thing that we're using to interface with the world.

So for example, how trusting am I versus suspicious?

How readily do I come to make friends with people?

How much do I act out if I'm frustrated?

How much do I exclaim something negative 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?

How much do I avoid problems in the world around me?

How much do I exercise altruism?

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 character structure that we use to interface with the world and the decisions that we make.

So if our character structure is the thing through which we engage with the world, then we're enacting what is inside of us,

what we've determined through our unconscious mind, our conscious mind, our defense mechanism.

There's a certain us 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 where do our lives go?

Because on top of all of this, imagine that the nest of the character structure around all of this grows from the self.

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.

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 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.

And perhaps 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 complex language, but it sounds to me like a bunch of dispositions.

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 street at night that I'm not familiar with and I'm starting to get the sense that this neighborhood might not be the best,

it makes sense for me to be on relatively high alert.

So different dispositions depending on different conditions.

I can't help but mention my bulldog Costello who had basically three dispositions.

It was a sleep, but in all seriousness, the second one was kind of bored.

The bulldog faces kind of bored or if something was given to him that he liked or if we were doing something he liked, delight.

He basically had three dispositions as far as I could tell.

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.

Feed him, he's happy.

There wasn't a lot of, I don't like this particular meal or I don't like this particular park or this Bijon Frise doesn't smell so good to me.

It was so simple and yet people are very complex.

I can look at myself and say, okay, what is my character structure?

Character structure is certain things I like, certain things I dislike, certain things really irritate me, certain environments and people I just delight in.

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 that sort of the ideal much in the same way that we could probably arrive at an ideal degree of stamina that one could have?

I mean, some people run ultra marathons, 100 miles or more, some people want to run a marathon, some people don't really desire to run a marathon, but I want to be able to run a mile if I need to without being completely exhausted and injured.

So when we ask ourselves about character structure, are we asking ourselves about context driven dispositions and how do we start to evaluate that for ourselves?

I think because we're more complicated, I think it's not dispositions as much as it's predispositions.

So in the example that you gave, you have a certain predisposition to be either trusting or wary, and that's healthy in you.

So when you come into a setting where there's not a good reason to feel mistrustful, to feel anxious, to feel vulnerable, then you feel at ease.

So you walk into the work setting, there are people you know, there are people you like, everything is okay.

You have a different 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 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 set of predispositions.

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I think most of us are familiar with assessing and assigning names to the character structures of others.

And at least for most of us, we do that with no professional training or authority.

We say, that person is great. They're super nice. The person's a jerk. They're like weird, you know, et cetera, et cetera.

I think very few of us are familiar with assessing our own character structure.

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, 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 listen to their breathing, listen to their heart.

Right.

Help the stethoscope and figure it out.

These are the probes, whereas 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, in other words, should we be asking what type of character do I have, dependent on one circumstance or another?

Should we ask ourselves what sorts of defenses we have?

And maybe this would be a good opportunity to address this issue of what are healthy versus unhealthy defenses.

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.

The defense mechanisms are unconscious.

The character structure that nest around the defenses in the conscious mind through which we interface with the world is very, very complicated.

So there are as many character structures as there are human beings.

So it's very, very complicated.

But there are factors that are consistently relevant across people and get identified as such.

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 go about thoughts, tasks, approaches to life in a more singular manner, right?

So it's just one element.

I'm making value judgment about it because it can be good or bad on either end of the spectrum, right?

So we're just saying, what are the factors?

So am I more 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?

Does a person use humor and in what way, right?

Does a person use humor to deflect discomfort in negative situations?

Does a person use humor in order to be little others or to be little themselves?

Or does a person not use humor, right?

So 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 thing that we use in order to interface with the world around us, out of which grows our self.

That makes good sense.

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,

measure blood pressure, measure breathing, et cetera, maybe even a blood test, look at some biomarkers.

But what you're describing is a little bit more analogous to the physician addressing a patient who's having some physical discomfort or malaise

and saying, tell me about your day.

What do you do when you get up in the morning?

If the person says, well, I drink a quarter pint of vodka.

It's a very different answer than I go outside and get sunlight in my eyes, drink a glass of water and maybe have a cup of coffee, right?

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 is in.

It comes to life.

Isolation versus engagement as opposed to a read of one specific biomarker.

Yes.

It's character structure brought to life, right?

Yes.

I immediately am thinking about movies and books where we learn so much about somebody through observing the way that they interact with people in very, 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 cuts them off 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 getting explosive and cursing, et cetera, as opposed to if they just kind of laugh it off or laugh at themselves or blame someone within their own vehicle or something like that.

So are those the sorts of things that a clinician like yourself is listening for when somebody says, you know, I don't feel well.

So we'll 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 defense mechanisms can start to reveal themselves, the character structure starts to reveal itself through these action steps that the person seems to be taking?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Maybe one way of looking at character structure is that it's potentialities and predispositions, right?

There's so much that's latent that then interfaces with events like a person 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 there are potentialities, there are predispositions, and then we live through enacting them as we're moving then through life, right?

And the attempts to understand, so using the physical health parallel, right?

If you came in and you said, I don't feel well, right?

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 test may show or how your lungs may sound when someone puts a stethoscope on them, right?

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 can be very, very important, right?

You also want to look at everything that's on the surface, right?

So 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 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, or, well, when do you not feel well, 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 components 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 anymore than there is in physical health.

I mean, you know, rarely someone comes in and they're really not feeling well,

and a whole set of everything that should be done is done, right?

Labs, physical examination, history, imaging, right?

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 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 that so much of character structure

is determined by a set of predispositions and potentialities.

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.

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 overtaken by them

or perhaps even injured, harmed psychologically, physically, or both.

Anxiety to me is a very basic function, I think, about it in terms of the autonomic nervous system

and degrees of excitability and et cetera.

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, most people, including myself,

I don't walk around thinking about my character structure.

I don't walk around thinking about how I'm going to behave in a bunch of hypothetical environments.

I think about the fact that most mornings I wake up and I feel pretty good.

To be quite honest, not as good as I would like to feel,

and then absolutely 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 I would like when I wake up in the morning.

But once I engage, I feel like the speed of that gear turning matches the demands of life pretty well.

I feel agency.

So if you don't mind, could we explore 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 an interesting lens 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.

We all have some awareness that we're navigating the world and not everything is perfect.

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 some anxiety makes sense, right?

It keeps us being careful.

It keeps you, because you're being careful as you're pulling out of a driveway, for example, right?

So okay, 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 you used before,

where you walk into work and there's a group of people that you know well and like, right?

Let's say you told me, when I walk in there, I feel very anxious, right?

I don't feel like things are okay, right?

So then we would go through, we said, 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 higher levels of anxiety, right?

So we could learn, okay, have you always been anxious like this?

Is 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 wasn't that long ago you started being anxious.

Ah, like, did something happen?

Did you walk into a group of people and I don't know, you tripped and you felt bad about something, right?

And then you get more anxious, right?

So are there things going on underneath the surface that are impacting you?

Like, 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's going on?

What are you actively thinking about, right?

So this is where sometimes cognitive behavioral techniques 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 that are 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.

For example, do you tend to avoid, right?

Has this been getting worse for three months, 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 girding your conscious self.

And I would be interested in the character structure.

What decisions are you then making?

Like, are you going anyway, right?

Are you having 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 riding 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 yourself impacted where you started thinking, maybe I can't do this anymore.

I'm not good enough for, you know, we want to understand what's the experience of the self, right?

And if we do all of that, how is it that we don't get to a place where we can understand that anxiety, right?

And we can make things better.

So just like 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 empowerment, right?

And it's also taking away from humility, right?

Because if someone's beating up on themselves, you're beating up on yourself about it, then that's not humility, right?

Then that's being sort of falsely persecutory, right?

This is 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?

And I've thought a lot about that question and 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 wouldn't threaten our conscious mind at a core level.

I used to use the term and joke a lot in my laboratory with the phrase, dissolve into a puddle of our own tears.

It's kind of this hyperbolic explanation of what I think many people fear.

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.

Everything is just going to go so badly wrong that it's just going to dissolve them as a person.

It's impossible, right? Dissolving a puddle 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 this notion of protecting one's ego seems really vital to being a human being at some level like we don't want to dissolve into a puddle of our own tears.

Is confidence the ability to trust ourselves in a bunch of different contexts?

At the same time, I do have to raise this notion of narcissism.

I think this word gets thrown around a lot lately but it seems to me that any truly psychologically healthy person would also not want to be the idiot that thinks that they're better than they actually are.

What are your thoughts on this?

I agree with the things that you said about confidence except I would add two factors that I think are really big factors.

One being state dependence and the other being phenomenology.

Think about the state dependence first.

When we're talking about confidence, it's not uniform or it's not automatically uniform.

If you were to tell me, oh, I lack confidence, then I want to understand is that across the board?

Is that a way that you feel about yourself?

I'm not good enough at anything, for example.

Or do you lack confidence in a specific area?

This is often the case and it's a huge difference.

That person has the machinery of confidence, so to speak.

They have the potentialities and the predispositions for confidence when that character structure, the self-built upon it is engaging with the world.

But they're not able to bring it to bear in a certain special situation, so to speak.

For some people, for example, the way we most often see this is the carve out of romance.

Because it's so emotionally laden, and rejection can feel so bad,

that we can see people who are very confident in many, many aspects of life,

but they are very different about romance.

They'll say, oh, it never works out for me or no one will ever like me.

That's not how that person actually feels about themselves as a whole human being.

Then we are coming at how to make that better in a way that's very robust.

We might say something like, hey, here's the good news.

You have the tools and the machinery that you need.

You're confident in so many ways.

In fact, maybe in all ways, except this one.

So let's go take a look at why is that special?

And where are we?

We're back to, is it something in the unconscious mind?

Is it something in the conscious mind about how that person is engaging?

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.

But then you might more think,

is there an impact of childhood trauma or early life trauma

that took away from that person their ability to gain confidence?

Because if you have no confidence across the board,

there's a deeper problem, right?

Because there would be something anyone can be good about

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, let's say in a different version of this example,

you say, you know, actually, I'm quite,

I feel quite confident when I walk into a room 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 a pretty smart person.

I can think on my feet.

I can deal well with people.

If something doesn't go right, I can recover from it.

Like I've got, you know, 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 everybody, right?

Now we have a problem, right?

Like that's not going to go well in other, you know,

in other aspects of life and engagement.

Like there's, you know,

it's not going to lead to humility and gratitude.

So where's that coming from?

And again, maybe there's a deeper problem, right?

There's sort of narcissism, right?

Which can be a reaction, right?

Which is a reaction to vulnerability, right?

So then there's a reaction formation

and now the person is actually deeply diffident, right?

But presents as very, very confident

and with a sense of superiority.

And that's not a recipe for happiness, right?

So in approaching it,

we do want to understand all the things that you said.

What are the factors and 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,

it doesn't work, right?

In situations where we're dealing with human beings,

like mental health, right?

We have to understand something about people

to understand whatever they're telling us means.

Otherwise you have no context, so you have no knowledge.

Another very common set of questions that I get,

that I believe is very directly related to this,

is about beliefs and internal narratives.

You know, people ask me all the time,

how can I change what I believe about myself?

And they also ask, how can I change the script in my head?

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 self,

where 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,

the unconscious mind is protected by these defense mechanisms

that grow up from the unconscious mind,

from that character structure,

and then this thing that we call the self.

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 and 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 your clinical practice,

but if you could tell us a little bit about beliefs and internal narratives

and whether or not they are important to rewire and reset.

This part is extremely important, right?

So imagine, for example, that I'm saying to myself over and over again

that I'm a loser, right, 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'll see under insurance paradigms often, right?

No matter what's going on with someone,

they can 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 you and I chose a word, a random word,

and we decided to say it 500 times, right?

We'd each be saying it tonight, right?

It's not going to be out of our minds by tonight

because we 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?

That'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 therapy.

What does failed therapy mean, right?

I mean, I think therapy failed that person, right?

But we label like, oh, a 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?

It 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,

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?

I'm looking for a romantic partner, right?

So imagine these things are going on,

and they're going on over and over again.

And you can imagine now that it's intruded into the unconscious mind,

it's going on in my conscious mind,

my defensive structure is shifting in negative ways,

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.

So I want to change it, right?

So imagine now when I start to make that change,

I'm blazing a path, right?

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, you know, is going back and forth, right?

I mean, 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 lit and it's 12 feet wide

and maybe we can pave the path so 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 are cracks in the road.

Like we can change all of that,

but we have to understand what's going on and identify it.

Like what is going on inside of me?

What do I make of it, right?

How do I understand the process of change?

How do I increase my empowerment during the process of change?

If we come at it the right way, all of this can be changed.

It's not hardwired in us, it's just very, very strongly reinforced.

The same way our brains are built this way,

so we don't forget our own names, right?

You know, we don't forget where we live, you know,

back when we were hunting and gathering,

we don't forget, you know, where the good fruits are, right?

I mean, this goes on in human life now, like we have to remember things.

It's important if something has high emotional valence

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 give or ask of patients

in order to help them along that pathway?

Because I totally agree that changing beliefs in internal narratives is very, very hard.

Just one quick example that meshes with the physical health realm.

I have a friend and colleague,

he's a very accomplished scientist who was very overweight for a long period of time.

He finally made some behavioral changes that allowed him to lose.

I think he was in upwards of 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 malaise.

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 beliefs and the internal narratives hadn't changed

despite the fact that he was engaging in the world differently and more positively.

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,

they gained a little bit back, but he's still far healthier than he ever was.

He's experienced some relief.

What do you tell a patient who is saying,

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 lack of agency, lack of empowerment.

What sorts of practical tools 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.

If he's afraid that he's going to gain all that weight back

and he has a history that if significant negative things happen,

he throws self-care to the wind.

Then we'd come at it through that pattern

because he would have a good reason to be worried

because this pattern of something bad happens and I don't take care of myself for six months,

and maybe someone in his life is ill or he's fearing a death,

and if it's just something that would say,

that's a very legitimate fear to have, let's talk about that.

Let's look at where that comes from,

what got that person into that pattern in the first place

by understanding the pattern and by working together,

can we stave that off?

But it could be different, the person might say,

well, I'm having a lot of food cravings,

and we're like, okay, what does that mean?

Where's that coming from?

Or maybe he's depressed and he's getting depressed

and when he's depressed, he can't stop eating more.

You would look or it might just be plain old fear,

this is so good that I'm worried it will go away.

Then we might want to reinforce,

you're a person who's able to use circumspection

and perseverance and preserve goodness,

so you do that and you do that really well,

so let's make sure we're doing that here.

A lot of times a person is worried,

but that worry is coming through the lens of health,

like they're healthy, so then we look at,

okay, can we soothe that worry?

Where's that coming from?

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's cravings, we can understand that too.

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,

just like in physical medicine,

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.

How are you not feeling good?

Let me understand that and then 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,

there's a state of health here, but this person is worried.

How do we reassure them?

How do we help someone living a good life,

live a better life?

If we're going to do all of this,

we have to approach people as individuals.

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,

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 an unconscious mind, et cetera,

but 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,

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 humility from life,

that it makes sense to explore the self,

to ask where am I internally strong,

where am I internally weak?

Where might I perceive myself as strong

as I'm actually weak?

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.

It's all about doing stuff.

Why explore the self?

And 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 way that you grate on other people,

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 kind of not really worth the effort

and that's all about action.

What can we say to that person or those people?

Put differently, does one need to change

and need to believe in the power

of these sorts of approaches

in order for them to work?

We often hear that people don't change

until they want to change.

And 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.

The only people who seem to exist in that sphere

are the clear narcissists.

To them, just seem like they're doing great,

but everyone else can't stand them.

By the way, narcissists, no one else can stand you.

What do we say to those individuals?

Because I think it's a big swath of humanity.

And I think it accounts for a lot of suffering

in the world, including their own suffering.

I would make an appeal to common sense.

So imagine you take someone

who doesn't know anything about health.

They don't know how to exercise.

They don't know how to eat well.

They just don't know and they're really, really unhealthy.

They're overweight. They have low energy.

They have sleep apnea.

They don't need to have any.

And why not just say to them,

well, just go be different?

In fact, be different now.

Why aren't you different right now?

Of course, we would never do that

because it's absurd.

And by the way, also would be cruel.

So it's absurd and it's cruel.

So we would never do that.

Let's say now,

let's say we fast-forward some period of months.

Make it up.

And we see that person and wow,

they are much healthier.

They have much more energy.

They've lost weight. 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.

How does one take care of oneself?

Then more specifically, how do I take care of myself?

What healthy foods will I like?

What healthy foods 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?

There's learning. There's diligence.

There's stick-to-itiveness.

There's resilience.

That's how the person gets there.

It is no different

in its mental health.

If we say, well, you feel different

across the board or you feel superior

across the board or whatever it is.

Life isn't going well and you don't have

to worry about it.

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.

I hear people say this

most often to themselves.

Why am I not just different?

I want to be different.

What's wrong with me that I'm not?

It's like everything else.

You have to apply understanding

and effort. The good news is

you can get to whatever change you want.

A person can get to whatever reasonable

change that person wants.

I'm 54 years old

and I'm not going to climb Mount Everest.

I'm not a mountain climber.

I want to climb some mountains.

I can go do that.

The same thing is true with our mental health

goals,

but not at the snap of a finger,

not by magic.

It's through applying the same science

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 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 address

maybe even

whether or not to get therapy

and hopefully we'll remap their notions

of therapy. Of course this critically

relies on the therapist being good

to excellent

and I think in the previous

sit down we had

in the episode on trauma

specifically you mapped out a number

of the features of quality therapy

so we can refer people to that

if they're thinking about it's time

stamped in that episode. What to look for

in a therapist, how to assess whether

or not it's going well or not,

whether or not to move on or stay put

with that therapist and so on.

You've been telling us a lot about

the structure 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.

Could you tell us about the function of

self, the functions of self

verb actions?

Are these things that we are all doing

right now that reflect our character

structure?

Are these things that 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 lend support to that.

Again staying with the parallel

that I can't just snap my fingers and say lower blood

pressure. I have to do some meditative practices

some cardiovascular training

and things of that sort.

What is this function of self

thing? What goes into the functions

of self?

Just stepping back

to the framing.

There are these two pillars upon which

we build our

lives. The structure of self

and the function of self

and we've been talking as 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

how are we using them? 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.

If the structure is more nouns the function is

more the verbs.

The actual engagement.

That would start with an

awareness of I.

There is a person

there is a me

that is separate from

others

and I have responsibility

for this I. It is me

no one else is guiding it.

It's me. I know there's a me.

Then on top of that

we start seeing defense mechanisms in action

because we're thinking about function

we're aware that there's an I

but the first thing that starts happening

to that I are unconscious things

so the defense mechanisms

because we're not choosing them

they start doing things

automatically so if

for example I have

a defense of avoidance

then I'm not thinking

I'd like to meet a new person

but I automatically am

shying away

then it's not good

it's a factor

but it's a factor I'm not aware of

until I start this process of introspecting

so the defense mechanisms

are then determining the lay

of the land

in that example

sorry to interrupt

but in that example

they're turning away

you describe as reflexive

someone who would like to have a romantic

partner or meet somebody

have a companion and

they go to the grocery store

and somebody says something as they're reaching for the milk

there's that moment of opportunity

something back but instead they just kind of go

thanks and then they kind of move away

and then the narrative in their head might be

oh gosh that was

silly but they don't really

think about the alternate possibility

or there might be no narrative

they just head off

they head off to the produce section

and then they go home and someone says

oh did anything happen to the grocery

you mean they want the grocery? No

it's all unconscious

now again can we explore that

and change that? Yes

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

it's performing a function

just because it's an unconscious function

doesn't mean 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 the possibility of rejection

there's a possibility

of over interpretation of what the other person

is talking to them for

is the person interested in them or whether or not

this is just friendly banter

or the sort that

anyone would have next to anybody that is not

special to them so you can see how

the unconscious

turning away is protective

against all the negative possibilities

and in some sense

is pretty rational because

the probability that that one interaction

could ratchet up to a life

of companionship and romance with somebody

is

exceedingly small really

although you could imagine a set of data points

where you string together

like five second clips

all like the time something like that

has happened right so maybe this is a person

that

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

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

an awareness there is an I

the next thing that I

think of in the function of self

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 ideals of agency

and gratitude, empowerment and humility

you know I mean

these seem like very powerful and important

forces 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 is serving us well or not

So I think the place to start

is to say that there's something very, very

complicated going on

the part of the iceberg underneath the surface

that biological supercomputer

that's running at a million

thoughts and a million actions

and a million internal processes a second

is constantly

shifting our defensive structure

so it's complicated

and you can almost imagine that one leaves

and another comes in and they're shifting

and there's a little bit of one and some of another

so it's a very complicated process

but we can look at it and

understand so an example

of a defense mechanism that's very common

and can cause us a lot

of problems is projection

so I'll give two examples of

projection so one

is the experience of sitting

in a car and being

stuck in traffic, being a little bit

late and feeling beleaguered

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 what's going on in me

when I'm doing this

so the thing about feeling

beleaguered as if

what does that mean?

There's something called traffic that exists

and has a mind and wants to

thwart me. Is it individual

cars? Is it the people

in the cars? What's going on?

I'm having a perception of hostility

I feel beleaguered

but it's anger and frustration inside

of me. I'm the one

feeling angry and frustrated

there's no one and nothing but

me that's feeling anything about this

but I have this sense

of the world around me being

hostile because I'm projecting

my anger outward

now I think this isn't

good because instead of sitting in

traffic and saying

maybe it totally makes sense

that I'm stuck in traffic

and that I'm not happy

maybe I should leave a little bit earlier and I wouldn't be late

or I'm going to work

should I live closer to work? I could make a whole

set of decisions that I'm not

making or maybe

I thought it was going to be a 15 minute

drive and there was an accident

and okay there are things that I can't control

I'm not supposed to control everything

if you think about what can I control

if I'm being aware of that and what can I

not control

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

so I think that's a good example

because it happens a lot

it's very very common but projection

then also happens with people

so let's say you and I work together

and we're going to do something collaborative

together and

I'm just not having a good day

that happened before I came to work

and you know I'm not at my best

and I'm a little bit irritable and frustrated

this happens all the time

when the person sits down with someone

and then I'm being irritable and frustrated

which doesn't feel good to you

and you may become irritable

and frustrated and then I say

oh look he's irritable and frustrated

but even if you don't the fact that

I feel that way

that projection often

would lead me 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

but we do this all the time

and then we make incorrect

inaccurate attributions

so projection is an example

of a defense mechanism

that can cause us a lot

of

trouble

another can be displacement

where

if I'm feeling anger or frustration

say in a certain

realm then the idea of

feeling it at work and then kicking the dog

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

and the dog is often

also the family

and it could be physical or it could be through words

but the idea that

there's something negative being generated in us

but inside

we're perceiving

that it's coming from somewhere else

the thought would be

it's all things to lead us astray

when there are negative defenses

there can be positive defenses too

such as altruism

that someone could do something negative

to me

and instead of me passing that along

I could decide I'm going to do something

I'm going to do something nice for the next person

I have an opportunity to do something nice for

that's a defense

and sometimes we could think of it and decide that way

but there are people who react that way

there's something negative that happens

and they respond with something

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

and I think everyone around me is kind of always angry

and frustrated

and there's always bad traffic

but then as we start to talk about it more

and more and more

and I don't agree about

but I'm not aware of it

then reflection or therapy

or a good friend we're talking to

can help us see

that this is going on inside of me

and that can really help us

same with use of humor

if I'm using humor

and I'm kind of decompressing

uncomfortable situations or things that make me feel uncomfortable

maybe that greases the wheels of social progress

but maybe

I'm using humor in a way that's self denigrating

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

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

let's say you were with me at the grocery store

and someone says something nice

and I shy away and you say

we're not even aware someone said hello to you

and then I say

I want to be more aware of that

I don't want that thing to happen unconsciously

so maybe now I think

anytime someone I don't know says something

I'm going to just stop and think

what's going on here

is that person being friendly to me

is that person exchanging money to cash register

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

the example

of displacement that you gave

kicking the dog

I couldn't help but smile

not because I think it's a good thing to do

I never once kicked my dog by the way folks

terrible thing to do

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

phenomenon that's very common

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 and postdocs

will immediately be familiar with what I'm describing

but

for those of you that haven't gone to graduate school

this will be a little bit foreign

of other examples where

when the lab head is under stress

it's

incredibly common for lab 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 I would always say I'm working as fast

as I carefully can because

no scientist ever wants somebody to cut corners

no good scientist anyway

but trickle down anxiety is common

in every occupation I think

we see this sort of displacement all the time

where someone's anxious and so they go

start creating anxiety for other people

I mean you can just

as you're describing I was just seeing how pathologic

is for everybody involved.

So the academic the trickle down anxiety

that you were just talking about is

it's a related but it's a different

defense mechanism and it's

projective identification

which is causing

others to feel the way that you feel

in order to get your needs met.

Is this a form of projection

and actually perhaps you could

clarify the definition of projection

versus displacement

versus projective identification.

So projection is when you don't own it

so it's not me who's mad

it's you. So I don't own

that I'm mad at all. I just think that

it's you even though I'm the one who's mad.

Displacement is

what comes out of us

or what our attribution can

shift. It's not

this person who's making me angry

it's that person because that's a safer person

to be angry at

or if I'm then going

to take out my anger

instead of metaphorically kicking the person

who might respond to me

in a way I don't want maybe I kick the dog

that's helpless to respond back.

So that's displacement. Projective

identification is

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. The person says I'm going to make you anxious

that's not a defense mechanism anymore.

So here's an example 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

so now I'm trying to go

and I can't find my keys

so they say oh I don't know where my keys are

so I start expressing something and I'm anxious

and I'm tense. Now

people around me hear that

and what do they start feeling? They start

feeling anxious and tense the way that I do

and now they're like well now they

want to find my keys. They want to help

me so that I stop spreading

anxiety and tension into the

whole environment around me.

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. I'm getting

my needs met by

making other people feel

in a way that's not a good or comfortable way to

feel so here's a way around that

put my keys in the same place every

day. So then I can

avoid that because it doesn't feel good to me

then if I get out to my car I find

you know I'm a little bit I'm breathing a little heavy like I don't

doesn't feel good because I was just agitated right

and I did that to other people too

right 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 sort of thinking and reflecting

like change that thing

is 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 it 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

the same thing

use sarcasm

as a form of

humor and it can be very funny

but I have to imagine

based on everything I'm hearing from you today

that there's a form of sarcasm

which is an unhealthy defense

I'm thinking of the person that

no matter what someone else says

that's positive or

no matter what someone does that could

be viewed as positive

they find some way to diminish it

by like

through sarcastic humor

I see this a lot and I think

closely nested with sarcasm

is cynicism

in fact

I have a family member I won't name who they are

to protect the not so innocent

who used to be very cynical

and I want to ask

what is the thing about cynicism and they said

well I have had a particular

genre of

schooling growing up a formal

schooling where if anyone

behaved too

happy expressed too much happiness

rather too much delight

they were viewed as stupid

like as if to be happy is to

be unaware of

the sophistication and the

importance of things in life

right and

I hope that this is unrelatable to most people

listening but I do think that

sarcasm is a double edge

blade in this sense

and that cynicism is perhaps

double edge

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 it does seem

protective right it protects one from

disappointment if you're already disappointed

how could you be further disappointed

it also seems to me like a bit of a power move

it's like you're going to be happy well I'm going to take

that away from everybody

as something that's like for myself

I mean

is any of this actually hold in

side of the clinical literature

because again I enjoy a good

sarcastic joke in fact there's

a collaboration around a sarcastic joke

it can be truly funny to everybody

but sarcasm

and cynicism I feel like

are often used to cut down

what would otherwise be

benevolence or

bonding experiences yeah absolutely

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

acting out which is letting our

aggression flow right that's a defense

right so just being aggressive

and pushing someone back

right however that means

like if I don't feel good about myself

I want you to feel not so good about yourself

right is where we start getting into

envy right and humor can be used

that way 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 humor

can be a defense like I trip and fall

I make a little joke people are laughing

with me instead of at me right

hey humor is a good defense I may myself

feel better may things 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 let's talk about a world view 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 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 in the sour grapes like I don't

I don't think there's anything good to be had anyway

right so you can't take anything

away from me can't make me feel worse

right I already feel

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

at least the isolation at least to mistrust

you know we know that people are

happy if they live through altruism

and gratitude and they're well connected with

others so so the

cynical point of view which again to some

degree being in the world build

some cynicism in us right like that that's

okay that's part of that's just a part of

awareness in some sense but I think

what you're talking about is a very pervasive

cynicism that

is an unhealthy defense that is very harmful

to others right the idea

that 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 could 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

and there's nothing about altruism

and gratitude that's not happy right I

mean who's happy in that situation

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 adore

them but it's true I there was once

a moment at a family gathering

where somebody said oh

let's let's hug

or something and the reaction was like oh

we're gonna hug now

it was

it was entirely sarcastic

and cynical and like and the hug

that resulted from that was this like little

like like distant past kind of thing it was

now I'm laughing about and it's funny

and they're very loving people but you're right

it's a it's a different style

of humor and discourse

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 described self-awareness this

notion or this realization that

there is an eye there's a me

and then we've been talking about defense mechanisms

in action and how these play out

in the real world both positive and

negative

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 efforts

or choose to not place our

attention and not place our efforts

do I have that right?

salience is a huge

concept in human

existence right I mean there are thousands upon

thousands of things that

you or I could be paying attention to right now

right but 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 something where to shift

very quickly if we heard a loud noise right

our attention would shift right so

so our attention is its

focus we're salient to one another

because this is what we've chosen

we're focusing our minds

and we are also somewhere inside of

us aware that we could shift away

from it if something more important like something

dangerous like where 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

it's so complicated and determined by

so many factors that is

absolutely worth a lot

of attention to 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 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 person who

really really loved music

right and could have

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 had a history of like that really

working out well like following his

interests 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 yourself right it could be there

in his mind right

so it was a form of self punishment

right it was a form 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

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 other

end of that shift

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 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 true

right it's a dramatic example

but dramatic examples inform us

where the salience shifted

and then the life shifted after that

what you're describing

in terms of this specific example

doesn't resonate with me in terms of

my own experience although as you point

out it's very striking it's very dramatic

but it resonates with me

from a different perspective

I'm not seeking a free

clinical session here but

but to give

meat to the example I'm about to

ask you for insight on

you know I've never allowed myself

to stay in a bad

professional situation for very long

you know when things didn't feel right

and I sense someone I was working with

or for wasn't the right situation

I got out despite

if I were to really think about it

that could have been pretty severe long-term consequences

fortunately it all worked out

in fact so much so that I would say

you know

I pay attention to whether or not

people I work with and for 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 a hundred percent so far

knock on wood but a hundred percent

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 away 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

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 seeking out this

and similar types of situations

I consider myself at least partially rational

human being with some degree

of introspection

you know

when I look at this and I think okay

this is a choice

to focus on placing myself in

I have to assume it placing myself in situations

that are challenging for me

in a way that I know

is preventing me from living in certain ways

that I want and from being

happy in certain ways that I want

when you hear a scenario like that

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

a little bit different than the example you gave a moment ago

because I was driving to work not listening to music

but it 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 sometimes

what is that about

are people trying to

work out something specific

deliberately creating some friction

to accomplish something else

I mean

I realize this could be infinitely complex

and again I'm not trying to extract

the clinical insight

for my own sake

I started the clock on that

thank you

but I think a lot of people do this

they do what they know

they shouldn't be doing

they know they shouldn't be doing it

duh

two ways

but they do it like it must serve them in some way

you know

you think about

when you get a dog and you talk to a dog trainer

they say you know

dogs do what works

they get a reward for doing something

they're going to continue doing it

you apply that to the same sort of thing I'm describing for myself

that I've observed in other people

and you must say it must work for them

you hear this in kind of pop psychology

it must work for them

I'm not trying

why the hell do I do this

why do people do this

is it real pathology

or is it a roundabout way to get to something else

that's actually pretty adaptive

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 describing something

that is common widespread

across human beings

and we can't understand it and make it healthier

I work in a discipline

that wants to put a number on everything

label it as something

and then do something about it

that's more often than not ineffective

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

that we can then understand and make better

if we come at it that way

then we see this is a great example

because here's where structure meets function

so on the structure side

there's defense mechanisms

and we imagine the branches

coming up from the unconscious mind

and here it meets function

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

the professional decisions

there's harmony

to where those branches are

the consciousness is sitting in between it

you can see the elegance to it

that I can just imagine

shifting

when you're not doing

the thing effectively

because now you're using

an entirely different defensive structure

which is going to function differently

and create different salience

and I imagine that it's convoluted

that it's sort of piecemeal

but it's not something elegant

so you say 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

you are not using denial

or avoidance

or rationalization

or projection

or projective identification

or acting out

there are all these things that you are not doing

to us like wouldn't it be easier

to kick the can down the road

wouldn't it be easier to just

everything's going to work out

wouldn't it be easier

instead of being angry at one person

who is really intrinsic to the environment

it's actually somebody else

or you're displacing and projecting

that's how we get ourselves

into trouble

and if that's going on

then that set of defense mechanisms

in action

creates

something that obscures

the ability to make good judgment

but with none of those things going on

then what are you doing

you're applying your intelligence

you're applying your discernment

you're applying your desire to make things better

you're able to look at it

you're able to bring diligence

perseverance

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

what's going on there's a complexity under the surface

but now we're coming up

towards simplicity

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

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 avoidance

or maybe a lie what about denial

what about rationalization

what about projection

you go through the unhealthy defenses

and you see what is it

that you're bringing to bear

that is leading you astray

of course the goal

is to use 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 sort of carving out

and treating differently

and 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 do we repeat things

now 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 this complexity to it

but the compulsion part can be

that we can re-enter

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

and is about to enter the sixth

right and you say it's not

because hopefully

in most cases not because that person like

wants to be hurt right I mean

sometimes it's a different problem right

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 limbic system and how

and how trauma affects us and how

again it's outside the clock and 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

there has to be denial

otherwise the person would map

if the same thing happened five times

and this looks the same it's probably

going to happen now right so

anytime you think a person

most often it's us

is smart enough

or worldly enough to like know better

which it happens all the time right

then look for the answer

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 in action

salience of things that we're talking about

now does that fit

yeah it makes sense and what comes to mind

is the idea of 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

like if certain ubers arrived

with a little flashing light that said

this ride is going to have an accident

it's like getting into that

vehicle and I see this in others as well

and it raises all sorts of

questions like

is the person actually

unconsciously afraid of

the vehicle arriving where they want

to go because then like

are people actually afraid of things working out

I mean this gets to something that

I'm so sorry can I say

that's why I have to know 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

similar they're afraid they're going to get somewhere

but ultimately we're looking for

unhealthy defenses and I

so want to emphasize that that

I will often think that the aspect

of my education that's most helpful

in me doing my job

when I'm in the job as

a practicing psychiatrist is

actually my mathematics minor

because there's a lot more math

to this right people tend to think

oh mental health it's all esoteric

and you can sort of say anything

you know anything you want and there's no way of

proving or disproving 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 if there's a carve out

we say look that's a huge

interest right I mean the probability

that we're going to find something interesting

there's a hundred percent right because

we know that you know better we know that

you do better but but why

here so like that's so interesting

right like that's where the X marks the spot

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 say what is that like do we find

that like oh it's an array of

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 self

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 even as

a field right just met 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

very reassuring

thank you

thinking about the functions of self and

again just to remind

myself and and other people

it starts with self-awareness

both 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

your choices choice making and behavior

and action in the world

I have to assume that for

the person trying to improve themselves and get

to agency and gratitude

that paying attention to all of these

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

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

not with others

but

should I be asking for instance

you know what's salient like what are the

thoughts leading up to that decision

in other words how does salience

of internal and external

cues and

processes relate to behavior

and which of these should we be

paying attention to if our goal is

to eventually change our behavior

so

think about what we're starting

we're starting at the bottom right so we're starting with

okay there is an I right and

that's just not just an apprehension

right there's a lot to that right

so for example I know someone who

is doing some 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

except when I was in elementary

school maybe it was the ninth grade I had a teacher

who talked about look

he gave us an assignment 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 ten different covers right look

in all of them right I mean that's

the idea right that if

we want to know something look

everywhere for it and also

realize what we are building

what we are creating maybe a recipe

there may be things from different covers 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 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 ourself

that there is an eye and this eye is going

through life right

then we know that there are defense mechanisms

and that they're present

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

salience kind of points both ways

salience can point us towards

the unconscious mind

I realize I'm doing this over and over again

or I'm saying this thing to myself over and over again

where is 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'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

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 there

are 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

you know we'll have it out there in a PDF

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 is incredibly helpful

it's absolutely

apparent to me why looking

in all the cupboards is so key

it's also apparent that many

different aspects of psychology and

psychiatry at least

as I understand them might probe

for instance just at the level of behavior

you know I think this is the just do it

mantra well just do the right thing

right you know you're not finding

a romantic partner like you know schedule

three dinners with friends and ask them to invite

over people who are looking for partners sounds really simple

right but

much as with the example of my friend who lost

all this weight through behavioral change

the fear still lives within him

very very strongly and so clearly there's

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 salience and

defense mechanisms self-awareness etc

that the fear he's

still experiencing makes total sense

because the foundation of that

change is not nearly

as strong as it could be

maybe right or maybe he doesn't have to have

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

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

explain these two pillars structure

of self and function of self and how these flow

up to empowerment and humility

and how those flow up to agency

and gratitude you've given

us a set of ideals and

a roadmap of how to get

there and one that we're going to continue with

in a moment here I did

want to reiterate what you said which is that

there is a PDF version of this

structure this roadmap of ideals

and how to get there

that's been provided as a link in the show note

captions 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 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 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 are different covers but the

covers 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 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 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

can't but make in us a respect

for all of it right and the respect

for ourselves

for others brings with it

humility right when we come

to this point of looking at

ourselves and exploring then

yes we become empowered

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 easier

to see it it's an active word

where I'm aware of my ability

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 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 pride in ourselves and others for

being here and and trying to

look 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 compassionate to say including

to ourselves than we are to have

something angry to say that

gratitude accompanies

agency their their active

words and their active

together and if we're living

life through agency and gratitude

I mean there's a lot of wisdom about this

it'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

if they're overjoyed to be alive

they're finding

a sense of peace

they're finding contentment

they're finding delight the ability to

be delighted

this is what people want

our human history

our searchings tell us this

and our own experiences tell us this

and now it could lead a person

to think well okay what's going on

is this someone who's

levitating at the top of a mountain

is this just a state

is this a state that people are in

and the answer is no

sometimes we could be in that state

where we can feel peace there's no tension

inside of us right I can feel

to 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'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 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

it's not just the state

when people want to be happy in that very very

general way yes contentment

peace

delight right but

they're happening as we're living life

right as we're enacting

a generative drive where

we're looking at ourselves in the world around us

and we're interested in understanding

we're interested in making things

better and that's the place

that we're trying to get to I believe

that with all my heart

and my brain

my education training experience

and also experience living

life and for 20 years

doing this work with people

tells me this is what we're seeking

and it's an active way

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 this notion of a

generative drive to me is so compelling

because

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

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 progressively

on the one hand narrower ways but also

with more richness and more detail

could you tell us more

about generative drive

and how this shows up in different

types of people

is it always positive can there be too much

of it

I certainly know a number of people who

are addicted to work

those of you listening I'm raising my hand

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 in depth

you know I think that there were years

in graduate school where I wanted to publish

a bunch of papers and then quickly realized

through the

not so gentle persuasion of my

mentors that like let's just do the best

possible work we can do and there's so much more

richness and experience and

things to be gained from that

so I'm familiar

with generative drive as I

understand it but maybe if you

would if you could flush out a bit of what generative

drive is and does it arrive

in parallel with

or before we are able to

access peace contentment and delight

can it even be separated

out from that

you know what is this

generative drive

yeah so drives are built

into us so

they're synonymous with our existence

like if we exist then

we have the drive I mean that's how the drive

is defined and

we understand going far back

to psychodynamic

and psychoanalytic roots 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

so aggression can be

it can be active violent

aggression for example but

aggression can also be a sort of a sense of

agency right the inaction of

agency like I want to do things I want to

change things I want to make

the world a different place right that

all of that comes under this drive

so aggressive

an aggressive drive is not a bad thing if we

had no aggressive drives the thought is we

would just lie down and nothing else would

happen and then we'd all be gone right

so there's a way in which this drive

within us moves us forward right

and of course extremely complicated

the ways we can manifest too much of it

or too little 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

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 that 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 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 relief right

these drives within us

can be healthy they can be unhealthy

you know they can be anything

right they're well

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

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 idea of

altruism coming to the fore

and having industriousness with us

within right and

and the idea that there is a generative

drive it's strengthened

when you look at how humans behave

when you know we're not

struggling right that people are interested

in learning you know you think about how

how much of the 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'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

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 way

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

naturally of course allies

with agency and gratitude

then I think we're at the place

that is the place we

ultimately seek right and that we

can find it for

brief periods of time so

by really pursuing this

and really strongly in my own therapy

and reflection and attempts to understand

I can have periods of time

where I can feel that way I can

feel outward growth

and interest in the world 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 I think

this is not uncommon you know it may

be far more common in societies

that are allegedly less advanced

right that is have less distractions

or maybe you know less

knowledge of all the awful

things in the world that can happen to us that are constantly

fed to us like this there are a whole bunch of other

questions and topics

about it but this

you know this absolute

belief that there's this generative

drive in us that wants to ally

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 someone says it's

nirvana the other person says

it's joy or happiness or peace

or numbing you know whatever

it is 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 makes

perfect sense why peace

contentment and delight

be so closely linked to this

generative drive

the word peace as you

alluded to often

brings to mind

the idea of passivity

but generative drive

and the inclusion of things like aggression

and a drive for pleasure

or anything but passive

so I think that's important

for me and for

everyone to understand that

peace contentment and delight

can really be action terms

again moving them from

you know from

the more typical conception

of them to verb states

so peace contentment

and delight are not

passive states

there can be periods of time

where we can be just very peaceful

and very much at rest

but those words are not

synonymous with inaction

in fact they're synonymous with

action a lot of the time

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

to come to the forefront

to be paramount over

the aggressive and the pleasure drives

and remember we're not trying to get rid of those drives

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

the search for pleasure

which sure can include

physical pleasures in ways that are

good and reasonable and healthy for us

but also the pleasure of learning

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

this gets very complicated and it's easy to dial

that too far up and it's easy to dial

it too far down

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

self-amplification

feature to it

what comes to mind as you're 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

more physically energized

I'm not somebody who just pops out of bed

and is ready to go exercise or do mental work

but

about 30 minutes or so after waking

my mind starts to wake up

and I've noticed that if I

read a scientific paper

or if I read a chapter

in a book or if I do something

that feels a little bit difficult

cognitively difficult

in particular

that the sense of satisfaction

that I get from that

is immense

and 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 often learning

and sharing what I learn with the world

whether or not they want to hear it or not

is part of my

pleasure loop

and I've learned that

if I don't

capture some new knowledge

in a way that's challenging

in the morning time

I feel like

the gears are still turning

but I start to lose energy

whereas if I find something interesting

in particular and

write it down 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

an animal finding a tool that it can maybe use

to forge more effectively later in life

I get such a sense

of satisfaction that then I find

that I have immense energy to do

whatever is next

that's exercise or learn more

or prepare a podcast or write a grant

or work on a paper

and this feature of my mental life

is so prominent that

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

but when I do

it feels like

a chemical rocket fuel

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 or post on

social media it's more of a deep

sense of satisfaction

and I get energy from it

is that the generative drive

well it's great that that works for you

what you're saying is 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 really

interesting 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 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 really healthy right

it's like knowing that this thing works for you

and then you become committed to it because

the generative drive is really

strongly supported by it

and then you have this sense of good feeling

right so then you have

the peace and you have

just the overall sense of

goodness right

peace and contentment and delight

you're getting that in learning and in teaching

so 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

so let's say you take someone

who really enjoys

gardening and get 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 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 are 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 plot so 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 hey 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 or having the capability

of going back and

you know 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

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

the difference between the person

who's like wants a garden feels

terrible about themselves they're not doing it

and they feels lousy every time they look

at the window and there they are looking out the window

right the difference between that and having

made a garden looking out the window at it

is a night and day

difference and the

person who's looking out the window at the garden

that they build overcoming whatever

was inside of them because they

went and addressed it and and proved 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 overcame overcame to create

the garden and seeing the goodness of it

all 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's tangible right like you

create knowledge maybe 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 certainly hope so because

for me it's it's an incredible

sense of satisfaction

and one that I enjoy

so much that I almost don't want to look at it too much

because to me it it sits in this

rare domain

of perfect like it's just it just feels

so good and

that 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 contentments like

all that coming together and it's

interesting we could contrast that

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 can you can

achieve this and feel this and be in this

state in one aspect of your life

what can you learn from that to bring to the other

place and more yes that's

important it's more it's often

starting with what's going on in the

place that's not doing well right like

is it why the repetition right so this

is how we we can have

what we're seeking in parts of our lives

even if we don't in others

but if we can have it in parts of our lives

we can have it in others too and we can

become role models for ourselves

we can learn from ourselves

we can learn from what brings the good

to how to raise up the things

that about us and in our lives

that aren't there yet

I often get the question

how from the general public

how can I stop over thinking

you know I have to

imagine based on the fact

I get that question so often that there are

a great number of people who

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

the person has to think about it

if you think about what seeds to make

they have to think about where 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

the thinking is in the service

of what is generative

so that's a different kind

it's just thinking in the service of something

is that you know it's planning

it's projecting we tend to glorify

the planning and the projecting and

it can be great when we're learning

when we're figuring things out

but a lot of that is there so that we can do the things

that are good for us to do

the planning and the projecting around making the garden

where the point of it is the garden

it's not the thinking part

we can also use thinking against us

so much thinking

is repetitive

and not just unproductive

but harmful

that person who's looking out the window

at the garden may be thinking

I mean sometimes they're just pauses

in our thinking but a lot of times

a person must be thinking

and what often goes on there

is just repetitive negative

thinking

gosh I used to have a garden

I remember when that was beautiful

or 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 out the window at the garden

and they're in this sort of stuck state

they're not in a generative state

then the thinking becomes repetitive

and it furthers all the negative

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

but we do that when we have this

repetitive thinking which then

can evolve into the narratives

the things that we say to ourselves

so thinking is

wonderful it gets 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

don't

set a time say

9.30 a.m. or 10.00 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 o'clock 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

I don't know too many people

they get distracted by

reading books some do

and doing

complex puzzles or math but

you know social media is

a little bit like mental chewing gum

except that I would add to that that's the

kind of chewing gum that really does

set the appetite in a way

that prevents you from eating nutritious food

unless used correctly

right

and then people feel

bad about themselves because the whole morning

went by now it's noon and then

they require some food like any

a typical person

and they might need a little nap

for the postprandial dip in energy

and then the afternoon and then it goes on and on

I mean I hear this all the time

I've experienced this before

so I'm not immune to this myself

that's why I try and capture that

early wave of energy whatever it might be

adrenaline nor adrenaline

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

potential creation

however small the action might be

to remind ourselves

that we are capable of moving things

from point A to point B

because in the description I just gave

of the person that lets the morning escape

there's really

no external barrier

except these distractions

put differently all the tools exist

within most all of us

to be able to create what we want to create

or at least to create something

right

and yet

many many people just

don't fulfill that

right that they were

and that we've all been given

so let's think about what's going on there

so the person that I'm going to exercise

at 10 o'clock

now they push it back to 10.15

and they do something on social media

push it back to 10.30 it'll be okay

I'll get it all in

what they're doing is

they're engaging in unhealthy defense mechanisms

right so if we go back

to the pillars right

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 kick it down the clock 15 minutes

right they're 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 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 you were 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

bring that right to a

healthier place how

by actually using thinking

for what helps us right so let's

think of what okay what's going let's say

if you're doing that okay what's going on

when you're doing that right

so do you really want

to exercise right but like it's not easy

to exercise and sometimes maybe 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

things hard right I mean I think

that about things in my life sometimes

and it always makes me

makes me weighty and unhappy

right I may as well put 20 pound 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 apply myself and

you know and I feel good about that when I do

difficult things it's like part of my

identity right is like part of how I see myself

so right I'm going to go do this thing

and I'm going to feel good about it and isn't

it amazing that I get to do it right like

look here I am I'm alive I'm healthy right

I can go do this thing my health 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 a come on this is good

right and then I'll feel different

about that right and like

the 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 defenses perpetuate and

even if you get yourself to do it today it's harder to do

it tomorrow that's why sometimes I'll say to a person

like just take a look at it and decide if you want

to do it or not if you don't want to exercise

just decide you don't

right and then okay there's a tradeoff for

everything maybe you're okay with the tradeoff right

but what am I trying to do there right

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 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 at 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

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 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's yes

you know I think these are universal

desires and again you're providing this

wonderful roadmap for people

to arrive there thank you

I do have a question about some of the

underpinnings of generative drive

in particular this notion

of aggressive drive

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

they often do

create great lives to themselves in

work and relationship etc

I've also observed that these people often

don't have the best relationship to themselves

or that they run up against barriers

or frankly sometimes straight into brick

walls in certain

situations 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

what seems to be a low generative drive

I don't know if that's the case or not but

that they

they seem to have a hard time engaging

like in doing things and

often you get the impression that they

somewhat are completely given up

they're just like life is just too hard

or

sometimes it's even more subtle

like I know someone who

they like their job but

they've come to the place that

you know like it's just work

like it's a paycheck 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 just focus on the other

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

is there a continuum of generative drives

that exist in us? Are these intrinsic?

I realize there are a near infinite number

of conditions that

could give rise to one or the other

it could be hardwired, it could be nature, it could be nurture

but what is the

relationship between

I want to say

arousal or

the potential for arousal and aggressive

drive

and these things that we're seeking

if it's okay

I'd like to start

the first principles of the drives

so the theory of drives

came about when

people were observing very closely

human beings and human behavior

individuals

societies, cultures

and identifying

that you can

boil a lot of things down

to a drive

that we call aggressive

is something to impose myself out there

on the world around me

it explains a lot of what people do

and then

the other identified drive

was pleasure

so enjoyment, even relief

of unpleasantness

you can describe a lot of human behavior

and

to understand

what's going on inside of us

that means that we're here

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 not have survived

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 are more things

right and then we start thinking about learning

for learning's sake altruism

things that are not explained

unless there's a self-referential

doing something for someone else so therefore

it's selfish like there's a lot of gyrations

around that if you really observe

humans you do see altruism

you see learning for learning's

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

generativeness 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 technology

to sit here and to be able to do this

so it's the generative

drive 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 generativeness

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 conclusion

though is for all of us the generative

drive being at

the helm is what

what leads us to be

to live good lives right to live to

the things that we aspire to the peace and contentment

right so we want the generative

drive to rule

the day right whether a person

is studying neuroscience or growing gardens

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 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 envy

right too much aggression means I want

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 tear something down

right takes from others

says that the the nasty

comment when it wasn't necessary

and now everyone feels bad right but 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're 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 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

it comes to mind

the movie American Psycho

where Christian Bale

placed this basically

an 80s yuppie

working in finance in New York

and for anyone that's seen it

it can only be described

as a violent parody

of 80s yuppie culture

it's dark a comedy as there's going to be

yeah it's as dark a comedy as it could be

and don't let your young children watch it

because it's very gruesome and like very

sexual but

the

aggressive features within

the character that Bale plays

are immediately apparent in the movie

like you know violent aggression

sexual aggression

seeking money seeking wealth

all the time a

narcissism too an obsession with like everything

from his skincare routine to

his eight pack abs

and like it's ridiculous

but also an interesting window into

some milder forms of those

features that still exist in many people today

right?

but the envy component starts to reveal itself

a little bit later into the movie

where 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 than 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

and the whole movie is about

this one

aspect of culture at that time's ability

to impose their will on

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

that is relevant and so much that's

woven into it that's just purely for people's

kind of sick entertainment

but that

I believe it was Brent Easton Ellis

that wrote that and you know is tapping into

the aggression component the pleasure

component but the envy component

is really what resonates as you come

to the end of the movie it's like there's no

satisfying this guy he could

kill or sleep with as many people as he wants

in the movie and he can

have as much wealth as he wants he can have

entire buildings in fact I think he's living in

an entire building at some point he takes over

people's apartments after he kills them it's

it's wild and disgusting

but it really speaks to the

extent to which envy is woven into

absolutely aggression

and pleasure seeking and it's not something

that had really sunk in for me

until you describe it now

because I think for most people

they imagine okay when somebody has

X number of

millions or billions of dollars

that they'll reach this place of peace contentment

and delight right they'll have enough

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 a lot

more about envy

and just what and what a pit

of despair envy is for everybody involved

right right look

envy may not be the root

of all evil but envy

plus natural disasters maybe

so

much evil

and destruction arises from envy and it

may be that it's at the root

of all of it

and we so under-appreciate that

we so under-appreciate why

people are destructive

which is why the roots aren't always in trauma

but a significant

aspect of where

envy arises from can often

be trauma creating a sense of guilt

and shame and vulnerability

but wherever a person may come by

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 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

as soon as it becomes about another

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 sadly

ever more frequent examples of

active shooters and

school shootings things of that sort

Yes, there are other people who

have life

and that person doesn't feel

envy of you so they want to go

and take it away from them

that's why as long as we have

human tribulation and a lot of guns

it's going to happen

it's a logical

conclusion of enough

people being in places of despair

and how envy can be cultivated

within us and then ultimately

how it blinds people

it creates such

a desire for destruction that then

people will take life away from others

and often people will sometimes take

their own life which

really brings to the forefront

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

a portrait of

where envy can lead

I think as we can find on a one person

basis we can look at wars

and destruction on a societal basis

but I think that's the ultimate

in understanding where envy

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

so imagine very very low

aggression so low

self assertion, low agency

there comes a place

where the person is not

then imposing themselves

or believing that they can

in much of any way on the

outside world and that creates

a sense of isolation understandably

a sense of powerlessness and vulnerability

and isolation and that then

becomes demoralizing

which is not the same as depression

we know depression is a

there's a neurochemical imbalance

whether that imbalance came

purely biologically or came

psychologically or because of external

events there's a neurochemical imbalance

here we're not talking about

an illness state as

identified by modern psychiatry

there's not a number in the

book of diagnoses that goes along

with being demoralized

why because it's a state that humans

can be in and too low

of an aggressive drive

and all the things that come of that

it's isolating and it's demoralizing

the same with too low

of a pleasure drive

so an example that may be

relatable is

to some people is

knowing someone who has had a couple of

really bad breakups and then says

you know what I'm done with that there's no more romance

I'm going to be single right and you know

like that person has a drive in them

they're an interconnected person like they want

romance these are things that are important

to them but they make a

decision I'm not going to have that in my

in my life what would be called

some psychodynamic sense is inviting

death into life a little bit of death

by swearing off something

that the person has a drive towards

the pleasure drive of companionship

and of romance 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 the goodness

then isn't 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

you know is like very overweight

clearly

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 2 diabetes

and an early death

but at some level they've given up

because the pleasure of eating

is something they really enjoy

they really love it and yet it has

a component to it in their life

where they either

soothe with it or they're just trying to hit

baseline levels of satisfaction with it

and

they allow themselves to

effectively be sedentary

and then the other sorts of trouble start to show up

you know sleep apnea from carrying excessive weight

and then they're feeling tired during the day

and then who can exercise when they're too tired

when you got to work and maintain other life demands

and you kind of see where

this could rise and makes

perfect sense

you can also see where

if there were just a little bit more aggression

it could all be turned around but they don't have it

so is the scenario described

something that you've seen clinically

I certainly observe it in my non-clinical

stance out there in the world a lot

well I think the

most important thing you're pointing out

is that aggression

and pleasure on the high end

we know can trump

the generative drive

but that this can also happen on the low end

so you're describing a situation

this is a great example because it's not uncommon

in the world around us

so the aggression meaning the fuel

to put oneself out there in the world

to utilize the sense of

agency so this is going to be a person

who's a low agency

the aggressive drive

has little fuel then to give the sense of agency

it's further squelched

by negative sense

of self and negative self-talk

now you find where the aggressive

drive is too low

and too low can also

trump the generative drive

because then that person can't take care of themselves

the 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

by the way people that you love

and people that love you

there's an animal that you love

so the generative drive

is saying that

but it's not winning the day

because the aggression

is one word we could put to that drive

we could call it an assertion drive

we call it an agency drive

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 the self-conception

would be

I'm in this terrible place

it 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 therefore

no 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 if it gives me pleasure for two minutes

then I'll eat another one

in a sense so what

because I don't feel that I'm worth preserving

or that I can preserve myself

there's a nihilism to it

that then kind of makes it make sense

to overindulge the pleasure drive

whether it's biologically predisposed

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

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

or if the pleasure drive is high

maybe that person overindulges in things

that provide short term gratification

and then that causes a different set of problems

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 I think all problems

that we see like everything fits

into this model

because it honors what we know

it honors what we know about human behavior

and insights into human behavior over hundreds

of years right over thousands of years

the wisdom that we bring forward

and 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

and what it's like

what life is like as we

try and engage with it

I've seen cases of

demoralized people where

they simply

disappear

they hide

they isolate, they slow down

they take terrible care of their health

sadly I've known

several people like this in my lifetime

one of whom killed himself

the other who

just has an immense number of health problems

related to overeating

and inactivity

and knows it and talks about it

but nothing seems to change despite multiple interventions

from a caring standpoint

friends etc

I've also seen examples of people who are demoralized

who seem

to band with other demoralized people

sort of try to

recalibrate the standard that they feel

oppresses them

you know that they

and this isn't necessarily just in the realm of physical fitness

this is also in the realm of

school demands

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 an attentive student

my aggressive and pleasure

drives went into non-academic endeavors

and I regret that

I had so much making up

of learning to do

by time I fortunately got to college

eventually caught up

but

my experience

high school was that there were these

kids scoring perfectly on the SAT

in early admission to Harvard

and early admission to Yale and all these places

you know a distribution in the middle

and then there was a collection

of kids who were not doing well

knew they weren't doing well

and kind of banded together

around the idea of not doing well

I didn't

consider myself part of that group

because I frankly wasn't there that often

and I was focused on other things

as I mentioned but

what came of that group was actually

quite tragic not just for them

but for a lot of other people

eventually

it wasn't a school shooting type scenario

but they eventually

set off explosives on the

school campus as it was after they had graduated

I don't know where they are nowadays

but things did not go well for them

and they

exerted a lot of

destruction

to other people around them

but before they did that there was this

kind of banding together around there

the fact that they didn't fit in

as I recall that I could be wrong about this

but I've seen this in other

forms too like

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

I can understand

I can rationalize why this would be

a reasonable approach

but

I'm seeing this more and more

I'm also seeing by the way

the other end of the spectrum

is overly aggressive and pleasure seeking

and things of that sort

but for the moment I'd like

your thoughts on

how demoralization can

split off into different expressions

depending on how

people feel and who else they're relating to

yeah, yeah

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

or demoralized people

are vulnerable 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

they're injured and cast

aside and from that place

tragic things happen

people then stay isolated

I think it's a tragedy that we don't

all band together and go door to door

to seek people

who aren't coming out of doors

in the sense of we let people be

so isolated

and often times that's the

tragic end of someone's story

but sometimes

people do engage

either demoralized

but they can engage

in ways that involve

an affiliative defense

so sometimes people who are demoralized

can affiliate they can band together

in ways

as I think you were alluding to

that can make things better

so if people are demoralized

because say they're

a group in society

that is chronically very mistreated

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

but if you feel bad about yourself

and then we're together

we help each other feel better

we don't feel so lonely

we don't feel so isolated

we don't feel so ashamed

so an affiliative defense can help

people to say wait a second

there's nothing wrong with me and I'm not going to

take this line down

and to make assertions that create

better rights in the world

around us so very good things

can happen from affiliation

in the context of demoralization

but very bad things can happen too

because people can also

affiliate around things that are very destructive

if I am

hateful of society and I would like to be

destructive and I'm alone

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

instead of maybe I feel that way

or there's racism

or prejudice and I don't feel like I can say that

but then when it's

permissive because other people

are in the same

place then people can accentuate

the hatred within

them so affiliation is

very very powerful

and part of society rushing

so headlong forward and either trampling

or marginalizing people is

that we then don't pay attention

or not enough attention to what happens

with the affiliative groups

how do you guide people towards

being able to affiliate in ways that are productive

how do you give them routes of being

productive how do you try and protect

against the ways that affiliation

can lead to destructive

behavior so I think

these are the natural things that

happen within us but a lot of what we're

talking about now gets

impacted a lot by

society and societal standards

which we of course altogether

determine

and arise from us but

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

in particular

was in a conversation with somebody recently

very successful

like beyond

most people's comprehension of

successful financially successful and

seems to just have you know checked

off their goals one

box at a time you know from

from go

but who described his

underlying

psychology and emotional state as

one in which

much of what he does on a day-to-day

basis is driven by aggression

in fact he

volunteered an anecdote about

the fact that he hates

early morning meetings on zoom

but he shows up to them as sort of

a like an FU

toward somebody that might not even be on the meeting

right and

and so there's a friction point for him that allows

him to engage in a way that he wouldn't

otherwise be able to engage and he

he channels that towards productivity

and clearly it's worked for him

you know I don't know if he's done the sort

of introspective deep dive

I imagine no through the structure

of self and function of self but

you know what are we to make of that sort

of example I mean 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

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 postdoc

I was in a position by virtue of having left

a laboratory in the nature of the field

at a 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 postdoc

working in a laboratory

essentially on my own on this problem

and I remember going to my postdoc advisor

the late Ben Barris 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

you know this is the best

capture Ben's voice he said there 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 concerns

enough that we did well

in publishing certain papers they did

well but those five years

frankly were a lot less

pleasurable 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

purely competitive and I truly believe that we

can't be in our most creative state

when we are competing with someone else

by definition because then you're

creating against a standard as opposed

to raw creation

so in both cases

a lot of aggressive drive frankly

I have some of that and I had

that but

a desire for revenge

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 bit of adrenaline

it's not a comfortable state

it's not 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 you're built to be pretty

good at competition

right so you can size up what are the factors

you know you can strategize right so

if 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 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 whatever that is

that can be part of happiness

but it doesn't have to be right that's not happiness

right so

yes that kind of 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

expedient forward

progress right that's very

effective but again expedient forward

progress is nothing

to do with peace contentment

delight like it's not

you know it doesn't have anything to do with that

nor does it have anything to do with doing

good or bad right and I think

the example you gave it 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 and again

it has to be to two to compete

right so so there's

almost an automaticity right that

like deciding 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 committed and very successful

okay so then

you're like okay I'm in a

competition now again but you never decided

to be in a competition right

but but automatically

right it means interesting right to understand

you're acting as if you're in a competition you're like I don't want this competition

right because like they're bigger than

me it's gonna be unpleasant it's gonna take you

away from really thinking about what you want to do

right it's gonna make it harder to

do a good to do the job you want to do right

because now you're embroiled in

something that's you know that has

aggression behind it right

so so you choose no I don't

I choose not to do that

right and then Ben Baris

reframes it to the truth

and says what this this isn't this is not a competition

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 remind you no

this is not through the aggressive drive

look at it through the generative drive that's what

wins out on you right and then

you go and apply yourself to it

yeah

and bless him for doing it because

from that point forward I've made

it my

firm mission to always

do things from a place of what

I was thinking about as delight

you know curiosity delight that the things that

give me energy and that give me more energy

from doing them

it wasn't a coincidence I believe that

in those five years when I was operating

from a mix of generative

drive and the competition would

then resurface and you know I couldn't hold

hold it constant that

I was absolutely

exhausted by the end

of that phase I just in a way

that sucked a lot of

the pleasure out of it I still

drive some pleasure but then as I mentioned

fortunately I was able to

pivot back to doing things out

of love you know and

and getting back to peace

contentment and especially delight

right now 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 drive in 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 that right now you're competitive

with them there's anger in you

there's you know there's aggression

right that 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 pools for energy

and time from you and also

what seeds would you have planted

in the the microcosm

that you operated 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 you're 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

what's so important to you to do

and what seeds are you sowing then

right you're sowing seeds of collaboration

right and even then

if someone could say well what does even

that matter right say no it doesn't

matter because what you're doing then

we just follow for the math of it

right 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 is 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 a list

really and again we have a pdf

that includes this list and the

structure of the pillars

and how they flow up to this list but

ultimately it's peace

contentment and delight

undergirded by agency and

gratitude as active terms

very simple at some level

and yet for

many people including myself at certain

times in life the

excess or

lack of aggressive drive

or excess or lack of pleasure drive

can interfere with people's

ability to access these simple

but incredibly powerful

being states

because it's nature and nurture

so you might be built

with a greater or lesser

natural amount of one drive

than I am but then we've had

life experience that creates a delta

around that so

we say okay we're built with different amounts

of all these drives yes we are

but we also have control

right through our decisions

through how we handle our lives to modulate

them 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 so if we look at it

as an unlimited upside

then what we see is I want to know

what's going on inside of me

what are all those other factors

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

we can actively look at that

and manage it and I think

that's so what we're striving for

because there's nothing here that we don't

have some control over

and the higher we get up

the simpler it gets

the more we have control over it

and for people who feel like

the ideals that

we're providing a roadmap toward are not

accessible for whatever reason

maybe they're feeling a little bit or a lot

demoralized

overly aggressive and not ending up where

they want to go or ending up where they want to go

and not experiencing deep satisfaction

peace contentment and delight

where should they look

in this framework

that includes these pillars at the deep

levels of structure of self function of self

that

give rise to empowerment, humility,

agency, gratitude

peace, contentment, delight

if someone should find themselves unmotivated

or stuck

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 seeking

or not even in touch with what you really want

infinitely confused

about what to do in relationship

school, work, life

you know 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 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

all 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

draw our attention to what salient for us

ask ourselves you know what am I thinking

about internally what is my internal script

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 I'm just kidding that's not

my behavior but I see a lot of other people doing it

what are my behavioral choices

you know what could bring

about more hopefulness

and strivings do I have that right

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 look 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 because everybody's different and we

can bring different modalities but ultimately

that's what good therapy is doing

right it's looking in all ten 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 pills are more stable

and we can build on top of them

what we want to build on top of them and

the drives come better into line

that we can do that and

it can be an iterative process of

you know if 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 a

process we can use over and over because

it works because

it fits with the

truths and the reality is we as

we have understood

learn them you know our education

the you know this is learning about humans

that across hundreds of years tells

us this

it makes very good sense to me

in the way that you have

mapped it out for us

so much sense in fact that

I'm just struck by

how divergent it is

from what I think most people

think of when they think of therapy

or that some of the risks of

going to a psychiatrist

which I think it's only fair to

consider in particular

the way that

at least from my outside

non-clinical understanding

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

actions in the world the way they want

or not get the results they want is

they'll start asking questions like

you know maybe have a chemical imbalance

or maybe they'll go to a

clinician maybe a cognitive behavioral therapist

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

dopaminergic agonist and of course

as a neurobiologist I

applaud the

exploration of underlying brain mechanisms

and the involvement of neuromodulators

like dopamine and serotonin but what you're describing

today is very

different I think

than what most people

can expect

if they go to the typical

psychiatrist or typical

psychologist which is part of the reason we're having

this conversation but

I'd love your thoughts on that

and I don't want to make this about me

I only offer this anecdote as

a way to round out a little bit of

the earlier discussion I'll

never share this publicly but when I was

a postdoc and going through that very hard phase

of competition that I didn't

want and having a hard time staying in touch

with that and there were some other developmental

things starting to resurface just by virtue of moving

back to the town I grew up 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 couldn't go up the stairway

I've always been reasonably fit

and

just being so exhausted and then

driving home that day on 280

and thinking

none of this matters

what am I doing

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

serotonergic antidepressant

I took that low dose

of serotonergic antidepressant

I don't recall which one it was maybe it was

satalopram would that make sense

and spent that evening staring at my plate

of Thai noodles for about two hours

it hit me really hard

and I hated that feeling and then just stopped

taking the drug

now I'm not this is no knock on

satalopram or the use of serotonergic

agents in the proper context they've saved lives

so the problematic too

but I just you know that

wasn't the route that eventually got me out of it

it was mainly talk therapy

and self-care

but I just

offer that because I you know

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

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

I took the route of talk therapy

which I find immensely beneficial

takes time

but immensely beneficial

so what are your thoughts on the

current strategies for diagnosis

where those succeed

where they fall short 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 Psytallopram

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 you're 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 I don't want the person

what kind of conversations you had about it with

the reason but the idea that a pill will fix

that is like that's insane

right now medicines

can help smooth the way so

let's say

you initially when in 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 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 or you're just having

really high levels of anxiety you 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 but 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 like this is

give you a pill I mean it really

makes no sense but if we're

over reductionist enough you could see

how that's the logical

end point of an illogical process

right I'll give you another example

and this is really it's a true story of

a woman a 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

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 that 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

and 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's 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

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

use psychopharmacology as part of my

practice and I think 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 overly reductionist

world of throughput in healthcare

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 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 often these decisions are

being made based upon business and

money and I understand business and money

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 short

sighted short term perspective

then bonds with the over

reductionist ways that we

approach medicine and then we have these

bizarre things

that happen and these kind of bizarre things

end lives

change the courses of lives

fortunately you got

what you needed and you figured things out

but if you hadn't would you have the career

you have? we don't know

if someone else hadn't realized

let's talk to that woman and see what's

going on would she have survived

we don't know

but the point of that is lots of bad

things happen

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

financially right the thing that we seem

to be caring about most 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

I have to imagine

that both for people who

require medication

in order to cope

in order to manage their way

through these questions about

function of self and how they are in the world

what they're paying attention to etc

and for people who don't

require medication to do this

exploration that this very same

exploration is

the roadmap 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 you see

that whenever that person has a bipolar

manic episode while things get

really really damaged and it's

very very hard to 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 to use

behavioral changes for example right

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 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

anything okay let's we can use medicines to take

the temperature down to to sort of

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 the biological aspect

you know specifically

here we're talking about medicines has its place

but the idea that medicines

are a substitute for understanding

just makes no sense

well you've provided us an incredible

framework thank you

this framework really speaks to

all of us right you know

that the components that make us

who we are 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 out

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 challenges

that can pull down on generative

drive or occlude 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 have you tell us even

more about how this structure

plays out both in terms of

its 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 I'm sure you're going to tell us more about

what the real

both underpinnings and expressions

of things like narcissism in

extreme and mild form

you know anxiety in its

extreme and mild forms

and also some of the

names and diagnoses that we're more familiar

with hearing about

such as bipolar disorder, obsessive

compulsive things of that sort

but that all relate

back to and really are nested

in this structure and function of self

and where it can all go

so first of all I want to say

and thank you

really an immense thank you

for defining this structure

and making it so clear to me

and to everybody else and as you said

it has its complexity

there's an immense complexity down there at the bottom

but that flows up from

complex to very simple ideals

and a road map to get there

and again the PDF is available to people

as a link in the show note captions

should they want to see this in visual form

I also want to thank you

for assembling this 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

non-clinician and not

highly trained psychiatrist

could ever access or understand

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

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 Conti

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

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thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion

this is our first episode in our series

about mental health with Dr. Paul Conti

and last but certainly not least

thank you for your interest in science

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.

Keywords

Mental health, subconscious mind, conscious mind, emotions, behavior, defense mechanisms, anxiety, confidence, self-improvement, self-assessment

People

Andrew Huberman, Dr. Paul Conti, Brent Easton Ellis, Ben Barris, Ben Baris

Organizations and Institutions

Stanford School of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Pacific Premier Group

References

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This is episode 1 of a 4-part special series on mental health with psychiatrist Dr. Paul Conti, M.D., who trained at Stanford School of Medicine and completed his residency at Harvard Medical School before founding his clinical practice, the Pacific Premiere Group. Dr. Conti defines mental health in actionable terms and describes the foundational elements of the self, including the structure and function of the unconscious and conscious mind, which give rise to all our thoughts, behaviors and emotions. He also explains how to explore and address the root causes of anxiety, low confidence, negative internal narratives, over-thinking and how our unconscious defense mechanisms operate. This episode provides a foundational roadmap to assess your sense of self and mental health. It offers tools to reshape negative emotions, thought patterns and behaviors — either through self-exploration or with a licensed professional. The subsequent three episodes in this special series explore additional tools to further understand and improve your mental health.

For the full show notes, including articles, books, and other resources, visit hubermanlab.com.

Thank you to our sponsors

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Timestamps

(00:00:00) Dr. Paul Conti

(00:03:46) Sponsors: BetterHelp & Waking Up App

(00:06:55) What is a Healthy Self?

(00:10:41) Agency & Gratitude; Empowerment & Humility 

(00:16:13) Physical Health & Mental Health Parallels

(00:20:21) Structure of Self; Unconscious vs. Conscious Mind; “Iceberg”

(00:26:15) Defense Mechanisms; Character Structure “Nest”, Sense of Self 

(00:31:27) Predispositions & Character Structure

(00:36:01) Sponsor: AG1

(00:37:27) Character Structure & Action States; Physical Health Parallels

(00:46:20) Anxiety; Understanding Excessive Anxiety

(00:53:12) Improving Confidence: State Dependence & Phenomenology; Narcissism

(00:59:44) Changing Beliefs & Internal Narratives

(01:06:04) Individuality & Addressing Mental Health Challenges

(01:11:21) Mental Health Goals & Growth

(01:17:32) Function of Self

(01:23:00) Defense Mechanisms: Projection, Displacement

(01:30:14) Projection, Displacement, Projective Identification

(01:34:50) Humor, Sarcasm, Cynicism

(01:40:41) Attention & Salience; Negative Internal Dialogue 

(01:45:02) Repetition Compulsion & Defense Mechanism, Trauma

(01:58:55) Mirror Meditation & Self Awareness; Structure & Function of Self, “Cupboards”

(02:04:57) Pillars of the Mind, Agency & Gratitude, Happiness

(02:13:53) Generative Drive, Aggressive & Pleasure Drives

(02:21:33) Peace, Contentment & Delight, Generative Drive; Amplification

(02:24:18) Generative Drive, Amplification & Overcoming

(02:33:00) Over-Thinking, Procrastination, Choices

(02:42:20) Aggressive, Pleasure & Generative Drives, Envy

(02:49:46) Envy, Destruction, Mass Shootings

(02:55:38) Demoralization, Isolation, Low Aggressive Drive

(03:02:50) Demoralization, Affiliate Defense 

(03:09:32) Strong Aggressive Drive, Competition, Generative Drive Reframing 

(03:20:02) Cultivating a Generative Drive, Spirited Inquiry of the “Cupboards”

(03:26:06) Current Mental Health Care & Medications

(03:35:33) Role of Medicine in Exploration

(03:40:41) Zero-Cost Support, YouTube Feedback, Spotify & Apple Reviews, Sponsors, Social Media, Momentous, Neural Network Newsletter

Title Card Photo Credit: Mike Blabac

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