Speaker 1: Cory Jackson, Welcome mgean pod.
Speaker 2: It's still great to be here.
Speaker 1: Thanks.
Speaker 3: Yes, not that you have been on before for our listeners,
Speaker 3: but we've had a couple of a couple of goals
Speaker 3: that this one was a bit of a technical issue
Speaker 3: with internet, and then the second one was because I
Speaker 3: didn't bloody well press record. But thankfully we were only
Speaker 3: sort of five or ten minutes. And you know I
Speaker 3: once did an entire podcast and didn't press record. Thankfully
Speaker 3: it was well, thankfully that it was with my wife.
Speaker 3: I say thankfully because it was with another guest, but
Speaker 3: I got in probably more trouble than I would have
Speaker 3: done if it was it was an independent guest. So
Speaker 3: mat you were we were talking let's rehash this right,
Speaker 3: let's go down the PhD pathway.
Speaker 1: So the reason that you're.
Speaker 3: On the podcast, you'd heard me interviewing Megan Fleemer. We
Speaker 3: were talking all about mindfulness and she had said something.
Speaker 3: You thought, Oh, that's kind of right up my street
Speaker 3: because of your PhD and you, I reckon, are probably
Speaker 3: three months ahead of me because you have finally submitted
Speaker 3: all of your stuff.
Speaker 2: Uh huh?
Speaker 1: Did you?
Speaker 3: Did you manage to get it in within four years
Speaker 3: or did you are you doing here?
Speaker 1: Is part time?
Speaker 2: Or I had to go part time? Yeah? I had
Speaker 2: to work yeah yeah, yeah, almost five, I think all
Speaker 2: up and COVID interrupted because we were running interventions face
Speaker 2: to face and we couldn't do it. So yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: it was a bit of a There was some some
Speaker 2: obstacles that weren't only me, like I created plenty of
Speaker 2: my own obstacles, but there were others as well.
Speaker 3: You know, PhD is bloody hard enough and there's enough
Speaker 3: moving parts with our bloody COVID coming in in the
Speaker 3: middle of it when you're doing face to face intervention.
Speaker 3: So yeah, I feel Europe and I really do. This
Speaker 3: is actually my second crack at a PhD. Just an
Speaker 3: unfortunate incidence. My first PhD was at University of Tasmania.
Speaker 3: My PhD supervision got Breen cancer and a relationship with them.
Speaker 1: Anyway, I ended up going and started a game. But
Speaker 1: I reckon. I'm three weeks from submitting.
Speaker 2: So yeah, good luck.
Speaker 3: As Sir Alex Ferguson, the Manchester United manager used to say,
Speaker 3: it is squeaky bottom time.
Speaker 2: Right Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know exactly what you yep.
Speaker 3: So talk to our listeners about your PhD. What were
Speaker 3: you looking at in that?
Speaker 2: We were firstly broadly, we're looking at mechanisms of mindfulness,
Speaker 2: so like why why is it? Why does mindfulness or
Speaker 2: sometimes drive down anxiety and depression symptoms? This is what
Speaker 2: we were interested in. And to do that we used
Speaker 2: a combination of Buddhist sort of psychological models and some
Speaker 2: models taken straight out of psychology of course, and the
Speaker 2: it gets really complicated, So I don't want to get
Speaker 2: I want to stay broad brushstrokes here, you know. But
Speaker 2: essentially what we were there's a really interesting model in
Speaker 2: this transdiagnostic sort of movement of psychology, of the meta
Speaker 2: cognitive model. It's technically called the SRIF model. It's the
Speaker 2: self regulatory executive function model. But what it boils down
Speaker 2: to is, in fact, maybe if I explain it like
Speaker 2: this is if you think about symptoms like anxiety and depression,
Speaker 2: for examples, my area's symptoms. For a long time in
Speaker 2: the beginning of psychology, we were throwing things that those
Speaker 2: symptoms to see what we could do, you know, and
Speaker 2: had limited success. Then there's this sort of cognitive behavioral movement,
Speaker 2: you know, and so cognitive behavioral therapy came out of that,
Speaker 2: and so a lot of people said, you know what,
Speaker 2: you can put the symptoms aside and look at some
Speaker 2: of these cognitions, some of the types of thinking that's
Speaker 2: driving the symptoms, and they had a lot more success,
Speaker 2: you know. So there's quite clever, very very impressive, there is,
Speaker 2: actually and it hasn't got anywhere near the sort of
Speaker 2: airplay that I think it should have. And I didn't.
Speaker 2: I stumbled across this after I didn't go looking for this.
Speaker 2: I found this sort of along the way of the PhD.
Speaker 2: There's a thing called this metacognitive model, and what they're
Speaker 2: kind of saying is as a step further that rather
Speaker 2: than focus and try to adjust the cognitions and the
Speaker 2: thinking that's driving these symptoms, it's your beliefs about that thinking.
Speaker 2: So it's called metacognitive beliefs. So you target the beliefs
Speaker 2: and then the rest of the system starts to this
Speaker 2: pathway that they've discovered from your beliefs about thinking to
Speaker 2: the thinking itself into the symptomology, that sort of part
Speaker 2: where it starts to break down when you were just
Speaker 2: these metacognitive beliefs. And there's a few reviews comparing CBT
Speaker 2: cognitive behavior therapy and MCT metacognitive therapy, and across the board.
Speaker 2: Metacognitive therapy does actually does better, and it's not symptoms specific,
Speaker 2: so you don't have to have MCT for anxiety and
Speaker 2: MCT for depression and so on. It's sort of this
Speaker 2: transdiagnostic approach. So when I found that, that's the model
Speaker 2: that I used for the mindfulness training.
Speaker 3: And I was taught who the hell was that I
Speaker 3: just interviewed very recently. Oh god, my bloody brilliant is
Speaker 3: full of PhD stuff, and he was talking about that
Speaker 3: transdiagnostic model. Oh it was it was Tom Nemi, tom
Speaker 3: Nemy who actually just got the podcast just got released,
Speaker 3: and he said that when he was doing this PhD,
Speaker 3: the trans diagnostic model kind of came out and it
Speaker 3: was like, oh my god, this is a severe and
Speaker 3: because it's kind of like depression and anxiety and all
Speaker 3: of these dsam issues or are things that they are
Speaker 3: not independent things like diabetes is independent from obesity and
Speaker 3: that sort of stuff.
Speaker 1: There is there's this cross.
Speaker 3: Pollination and it's because the puman brain is bloody complicated, right, Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's an impressive kind of step. There's some resistance
Speaker 2: to it, of course, but it is kind of exciting
Speaker 2: when you look at what's going on, and it comes
Speaker 2: from the sense if you think about like physical ailments,
Speaker 2: and this is oversimplification. I'm sure there's people who know
Speaker 2: more about this listening than I do. But you know,
Speaker 2: if you have a I don't know, something like AIDS
Speaker 2: is a good example. Like back in the eighties, these
Speaker 2: people were getting sick with these like symptom clusters, you know,
Speaker 2: and they didn't know what it was like, Oh, so
Speaker 2: autoimmune deficiency syndrome and you have so you have a
Speaker 2: syndrome because you don't know the cause. We have clusters
Speaker 2: of symptoms, you have disorders or syndromes. Once you find
Speaker 2: the cause, so HIV virus, now you have a disease.
Speaker 2: So it flips from being a syndrome to a disease
Speaker 2: and then you can develop treatments because you know the cause.
Speaker 2: Right before that, you're addressing symptoms. Well, the DSM, for example,
Speaker 2: there isn't a single psychological disease right because it isn't
Speaker 2: a single identified cause for any single not one mental disorder.
Speaker 2: So so yeah, so this is why the trains diagnostic
Speaker 2: thing gets exciting because it's kind of a bit of
Speaker 2: an acceptance of that and saying, well, maybe there are
Speaker 2: deeper causes and underlying causes that we should look into.
Speaker 2: And this metacognitive model, which I was kind of forced
Speaker 2: to examine through an internal review of my PhD. But
Speaker 2: I loved it. I can't when I really got it.
Speaker 2: When he sent it to me, I say, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: actually I need to rework my whole what I'm doing
Speaker 2: and check does mindfulness training reduce these metacognitive beliefs? This
Speaker 2: is sort of the next question, right, and if so,
Speaker 2: then is one of is that an important mechanism that's
Speaker 2: reducing anxiety and depression and is it doing it to both?
Speaker 2: You know, there's lots of questions here and along the way.
Speaker 2: So there's some issues like, for example, the interventions are
Speaker 2: used use traditional Buddhist training techniques, which is very unusual
Speaker 2: in psychology. Almost no research uses the pedagogy as it
Speaker 2: existed in tradition, in the contemplative tradition. And we broke
Speaker 2: down this model. So actually, and this comes to the
Speaker 2: crux of what we'll get to eventually, we broke the
Speaker 2: model down. So in this model, we have metacognitive beliefs
Speaker 2: they lead on too rumination and worry or two. But
Speaker 2: in fact there's two types of rumination. So when you
Speaker 2: start digging into this literature, it gets really interesting. We
Speaker 2: talk about a brooding type of rumination, which is what
Speaker 2: we usually mean, and a reflective type, which is more
Speaker 2: adaptive and so interesting, as I dug around in the beginning,
Speaker 2: and because I did like four lip reviews, you know,
Speaker 2: in different topics to figure out what I was going
Speaker 2: to do, and the it's the true. Same is true
Speaker 2: for mind wondering. So when you look into mind wondering,
Speaker 2: there's what we call a deliberate I don't like these
Speaker 2: terms so much, but this is what we stuck with,
Speaker 2: deliberate and spontaneous, and the spontaneous type is more linked
Speaker 2: with symptoms than the deliberate. So you've got it maps
Speaker 2: onto the rumination and then you got this further question
Speaker 2: people are saying, well, is rumination a type of mind wondering?
Speaker 2: There are all these other questions start when you read
Speaker 2: into this, start coming out. So we addressed all of these,
Speaker 2: where a lot of them as we because they just
Speaker 2: kept the questions kept coming up, and like you know,
Speaker 2: we're already doing it, so we can just we can
Speaker 2: check and see, you know. So it's my work ended
Speaker 2: up having a lot of moving parts I didn't expect.
Speaker 2: But overall, what we're what it's this idea that now, yeah,
Speaker 2: you know these there's reasons why these traditional pedagogies and
Speaker 2: definitions of mindfoots and so on actually might work at
Speaker 2: least as well as the common modern ones we're using,
Speaker 2: like NBSR and this sort of stuff. There's some important differences.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's super interesting. Let's go back and just talk
Speaker 3: about that brooding rumination versus reflective rumination. So you're kind
Speaker 3: of hinting that one is adaptive one is maladaptive.
Speaker 1: So would that be, for example, I.
Speaker 3: All of a sudden just starts thinking about stuff that's
Speaker 3: happened in the past, and it's dragging me down a hole.
Speaker 1: Or of vortex of negativity.
Speaker 3: That's a brooding rumination versus me thinking about stuff that's
Speaker 3: happening in order for me to do something more effective
Speaker 3: or better than next time.
Speaker 1: Is that kind of what you mean?
Speaker 2: In fact, one of the most important differences between the
Speaker 2: two is the problem solving elements. So you actually kind
Speaker 2: of hit on it's one of them, you know, and
Speaker 2: the reflective rumination shouldn't instigate emotional reactions so much too,
Speaker 2: so you can remember an event but not have the
Speaker 2: emotional reaction necessarily, which gives you this space to develop
Speaker 2: some maybe problem solving. What would I do next time?
Speaker 2: Could I use my experience to help others in a
Speaker 2: similar situation. There's all sorts of things you can do
Speaker 2: with that that you don't have the space for in
Speaker 2: the brooding rumination because you're just reliving to a degree
Speaker 2: at the event of the past.
Speaker 3: Look, this gets to a crux of my view, which
Speaker 3: is just been formed over a number of years of
Speaker 3: different types of psychotherapy. And look, I'm not an expert.
Speaker 3: I'm not a clinical psychologist. I'm doing a PhD in it.
Speaker 3: But I've read enough about this to have an opinion
Speaker 3: that talk therapies that don't have action associated with them,
Speaker 3: I think are just can be a waste of time
Speaker 3: at best and can make things worse because people just
Speaker 3: continue to talk about their issues and investigate what it's around,
Speaker 3: and it can create more of that brooding thing, whereas
Speaker 3: a much bigger fun of stuff like acceptance commitment therapy,
Speaker 3: where there is an action associated with it.
Speaker 1: It's like there's so what are we going to do
Speaker 1: with this now?
Speaker 3: And and I can't kind of think there's there's similarities
Speaker 3: there with that brooding and that reflexive rumination, because you know,
Speaker 3: we all do ruminate it, but sometimes it's adaptive, sometimes
Speaker 3: it's small adaptive, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that's right. The question arises, you know what's
Speaker 2: doing that? Which is so you keep digging you see?
Speaker 4: Well, yeah, and that's where maybe if you turn back
Speaker 4: to two and a half thousand years of sort of
Speaker 4: peer reviewed Buddhist practice, there's some answers.
Speaker 2: Actually, well, at least there's impossibilse to uncover that. You know,
Speaker 2: I'm by no means the first to research it. John
Speaker 2: Dunn and Cliff Saren, there's a few others in the
Speaker 2: US have done some really awesome work on this, and
Speaker 2: so that yeah, it's like, yes, there are these times
Speaker 2: where if you're going to it's not you don't want
Speaker 2: to sit around and just hope that my ruminations, even
Speaker 2: all the talk, it's like, I hope by talking, my
Speaker 2: rumination will be less more adaptive, if you like, you know,
Speaker 2: less brooding, what would you do?
Speaker 1: Well?
Speaker 2: Actually, again, contemplative traditions have a lot to say about this,
Speaker 2: because if you understand, coming back to this idea of
Speaker 2: mental diseases a little bit, there is if there is
Speaker 2: a route kind of cause, or if there's a fundamental
Speaker 2: driver that decides whether it's brooding or not, why wouldn't
Speaker 2: we focus on that and try to cultivate that, learn
Speaker 2: that put that into action so that when I have
Speaker 2: a room and even if I have a brooding rumination happen,
Speaker 2: I can notice it and flip it over into a
Speaker 2: reflective problem solving situation like this. Yeah, and so this is,
Speaker 2: like I said, this is traditionally, this is around a
Speaker 2: lot in Asian traditions, probably others. I really only know
Speaker 2: abou Buddhism.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so let's not let's talk about some of the
Speaker 3: differences between traditional, popularized Western mindfulness and the more traditional
Speaker 3: contemplative therapies.
Speaker 1: And I like the way you use that. I mean, I.
Speaker 3: Remember reading a lot and watching some stuff around the
Speaker 3: I think it's called the Mind and Life Conference.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, that Dalai Lama and I think it was.
Speaker 1: Richard E.
Speaker 3: Davidson was the original neuroscientist who got together looking at
Speaker 3: those contemplative therapies, particularly Tibetan Buddhism and the links to
Speaker 3: the neuroscience research, and you know that's been going on
Speaker 3: for many, many years and as you say, then brought
Speaker 3: a level of science to to Buddhism and particularly Tibetan Buddhism.
Speaker 3: So give our listeners a bit of an overview, and look,
Speaker 3: we can go deep on this one, right, but just
Speaker 3: some of the differences between our our Western mindfulness in
Speaker 3: brackets and those contemplative therapies, because anybody will know that
Speaker 3: yoga in the West is very different to yoga, traditional
Speaker 3: yoga that's practiced in India, right, we get a very.
Speaker 1: Tailored, sanitized version of that. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, it's a good example the yoga, the yoga sort
Speaker 2: of what's happened as it's come to the West. Plenty
Speaker 2: of benefit, you know, like there's not a lot to
Speaker 2: not really a lot to criticize, but also you do
Speaker 2: wonder what's been left behind. And so it's if you like,
Speaker 2: at some point in the past and you know, some
Speaker 2: some scientists somehow stumbled across contemplateds, you know, meditators, h
Speaker 2: and what what what essentially has happened, then they're just
Speaker 2: getting my opinion here, I can delve into some more
Speaker 2: objective facts later. But you know, well, when I look
Speaker 2: back at the history, I think, well, you know, there's
Speaker 2: these people. They said, wow, you seem to have your
Speaker 2: act together. You're really interesting people. What are you doing?
Speaker 2: And so maybe they say I'm following the sensations of
Speaker 2: my breath. They're like, well, I can replicate that, you know,
Speaker 2: in a lab, and I've got measures, and off they went,
Speaker 2: and they risked their careers to do it, you know,
Speaker 2: like it's very impressive. But what didn't necessarily come with
Speaker 2: them is thousands of years of discoveries of these people,
Speaker 2: Like they haven't just been sitting there following their breath.
Speaker 2: They've been investigating how the mind works, what causes suffering,
Speaker 2: what causes happiness? What what? What's the interaction between me
Speaker 2: and the rest of the world, what's the interaction with
Speaker 2: the self itself?
Speaker 1: Like what yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, there's a rabbit all right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right. And that whole massive body of work
Speaker 2: didn't come right across to the scientific They're like getting
Speaker 2: people to follow their breath because that's what they saw
Speaker 2: these people doing, so which is still like I say,
Speaker 2: I don't want to come across the bidder because it's impressive,
Speaker 2: and they risked their careers again and again because nobody
Speaker 2: wanted them researching this stuff. John cabot Zin people like this. Yes, yeah,
Speaker 2: so got to start there. But then, you know, I
Speaker 2: think now we're doubling, we're circling back now because there's
Speaker 2: what's been missing, is some of this this knowledge and
Speaker 2: what has been lacking. So a few times, I'm sure
Speaker 2: you've thought about it. When I consider it sort of
Speaker 2: just throwing the PhD in and doing something else. You know,
Speaker 2: I've come across some really heavyweight scholars in this mind
Speaker 2: and life field, and others like we'll like be Alan
Speaker 2: Wallace for examples.
Speaker 3: I'm like, oh, yes, yes, yes, I remember listening to him.
Speaker 1: She's thirty years ago.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well he's still going strong in the field, you know.
Speaker 2: So I mean Alan Wallace, Robert Thurman, John Dunn, these
Speaker 2: sorts of people saying, you know, we need contemplatively contemplative
Speaker 2: trained people getting involved in science.
Speaker 3: You know, I'm actually sorry, can I just jump in,
Speaker 3: Corey anybody who really wants to dig into contemplative therapy?
Speaker 1: So I think any books by Alan Wallace.
Speaker 3: You know, he really addresses this whenever I was reading
Speaker 3: his stuff like like nobody had at the time, right,
Speaker 3: I'm sure there no, But because he was a proper
Speaker 3: contemplative practitioner, wasn't.
Speaker 2: He months and months and months alone in in like
Speaker 2: up in the Humalayas in little Cabins, meditating with expert
Speaker 2: advice from other yogis and this sort of stuff.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, plus a science background. He is all this work
Speaker 2: in physics and stuff at at university and yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: so definitely. I mean it's, like I say, one of
Speaker 2: my teach main teachers and absolutely inspiration in the field.
Speaker 2: The Yeah. So this idea then that you bring, you
Speaker 2: can bring there's some knowledge here that we could bring over.
Speaker 2: But it's not just the knowledge in bringing the pedagogies itself.
Speaker 2: So the training methods themselves, they've been changed, you know,
Speaker 2: like unequivocally.
Speaker 1: And diluted for us, Right.
Speaker 2: I don't kind of but I don't. I don't like
Speaker 2: to call it diluted necessarily. So for the games are
Speaker 2: absolutely but you know, if like you think about John
Speaker 2: cabots In, he's got stressed out people, executives and so on,
Speaker 2: he's got people with pain management. He got started with
Speaker 2: this mindfulness training he's got people in front of him
Speaker 2: and he thinks he's got a way to help them,
Speaker 2: and he delivered it in a way that he thought
Speaker 2: they'd accepted. And it's genius, you know, like it's brilliant.
Speaker 2: But in doing so, there are some things that got
Speaker 2: changed that aren't necessarily in certainly not the Indo Tibetan tradition.
Speaker 2: And so this is going to shock some people who
Speaker 2: have background in mindfulness. But traditionally in this in this tradition,
Speaker 2: non judgmental is not in the definition of mindfulness. There
Speaker 2: never has been. This is a new you think that
Speaker 2: entered in the West because in actual fact, and if
Speaker 2: you go back to some classic uh, there's a there's
Speaker 2: a really classic text called The Suture King. Melinda by
Speaker 2: Nagasena is this Indian scholar, and he says, you know,
Speaker 2: the dull point of mindful and it's actually it's a
Speaker 2: paraphrase him. He says, it's exercising good judgment. It's like
Speaker 2: having impulse arise and knowing not to engage with it
Speaker 2: or to engage with it. This is what it is for.
Speaker 2: It's about exercising good judgment. The whole thing.
Speaker 3: She such that you know, what The parallels with stoicism
Speaker 3: are believable, right, yeah, there are. That is the fundamental
Speaker 3: approach of stoicism, is it. It's not what happens, but
Speaker 3: it's about our judgments that matters, and it's really about
Speaker 3: analyzing your judgments and changing your judgments of situations.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well this is sort of that's right. It's like, well,
Speaker 2: this is a good thing to do, and that relies
Speaker 2: on some some other things, you know, like what goals?
Speaker 2: Are you after?
Speaker 1: What?
Speaker 2: There's also of other things going on here, you know,
Speaker 2: are you and are you trying to be a better
Speaker 2: I don't know, husband, father, wife, sister? Are you trying
Speaker 2: to be a better executive or a boss or whatever,
Speaker 2: or are you, you know, trying to achieve enlightenment or liberation?
Speaker 2: Like this makes a big difference, but the practices are
Speaker 2: the same. It's like, whatever that goal is, you know
Speaker 2: what if you trace it backwards, well, what are the
Speaker 2: decisions I need to make as I go through? And
Speaker 2: how many? Of course, you can talk about it either way.
Speaker 2: You can flip to a site sort of perspective and
Speaker 2: say how much of my automated responses, you know, so
Speaker 2: emotional responses for example, Yes, but how much of my
Speaker 2: automated responses actually serve this long term goal and how
Speaker 2: many of them actually get in the way and serve
Speaker 2: a short term goal that popped up because I was emotional,
Speaker 2: and you know, I leave you to decide for yourselves. You know,
Speaker 2: I could say you from my perspective is a lot.
Speaker 2: And so it's being able to put these long make
Speaker 2: decisions even when you're under stress, that are in the
Speaker 2: service of these longer term goals that gets important. So
Speaker 2: the in actual fats and you can look, there's a
Speaker 2: great paper by George Drefus, who's like a brilliant Buddhist scholar,
Speaker 2: you know, and it's and he sort of says, it's
Speaker 2: not the evaluative aspect of cognition isn't the issue. It
Speaker 2: never has been. It's your reaction to it. And so
Speaker 2: of course in the West, when you say reactivity, people
Speaker 2: think physical reactivity or maybe verbal reactivity. But in Buddhism
Speaker 2: we have three types. Right, there's cognitive reactivity, and so
Speaker 2: physical reactivity is the easiest to restrain or inhibit. Verbal
Speaker 2: activity is a bit harder, you know, like I could
Speaker 2: be angry and I could not throw something at someone,
Speaker 2: but I could probably still say something mean, you know,
Speaker 2: it's a bit harder, right, And then of course there's
Speaker 2: the mental is now I noticed that I'm angry. Can
Speaker 2: I transform? That is way harder. And that's what they're
Speaker 2: all included when you're trying to dial down reactivity from
Speaker 2: this contemplative perspective. Yeah, you can do the physical. It's
Speaker 2: helpful and you should do it. Yeah, the verbal definitely
Speaker 2: really important, but the mentals where it comes from in
Speaker 2: the first place.
Speaker 3: So magic is right, And so to come back about
Speaker 3: just the judgments thing, and and I just wanted to
Speaker 3: ask because in Stoicism and one of the key things
Speaker 3: are the key virtue of the story step four cardinal
Speaker 3: virtues and and and their their primal one was about wisdom,
Speaker 3: which was about knowing how to act in a given situation, right,
Speaker 3: because you can have other virtues. So for instance, you
Speaker 3: know that there's the topic I think it was Donald
Speaker 3: Robertson talked about a suicide bomber, right, who is basically
Speaker 3: for his God, whatever God that might be, whether it's
Speaker 3: Christian or Muslim or or whatever. Hate that person actually
Speaker 3: thinks they're doing good, right, I think they're doing a
Speaker 3: good thing.
Speaker 1: For their religion, for.
Speaker 3: Their God, and the Stoics would say, what they don't
Speaker 3: have is they don't have wisdom.
Speaker 1: They didn't know who to listen to.
Speaker 3: So what does that actually come into it when you're
Speaker 3: looking at judgments and good judgments because you mentioned earlier
Speaker 3: on about good judgments or is it more goal orientated
Speaker 3: around is this judgment helping me towards a.
Speaker 1: Particular goal of being a particular person.
Speaker 2: So it can be both. So yeah, there's a big
Speaker 2: in especially in the Mahayana Buddhist tradition, which is the
Speaker 2: Indo Tibetan tradition. There's a lot of talk of compassion
Speaker 2: for example, you know, but there's and in terms of
Speaker 2: and if you accept your longer term goals as being
Speaker 2: liberation and enlightenment, these Buddhist goals, then you know that
Speaker 2: you need to develop high levels of compassion and what
Speaker 2: we call wisdom or understanding, and you need them both.
Speaker 2: Because there's Lama Yeshi, who's one of the original Lamas
Speaker 2: who Tibetans who came to the West and set up
Speaker 2: a lot of these Buddhist centers all over Australia and
Speaker 2: the world. Used to call it idiot compassion sort of
Speaker 2: what you're talking about. It's like, you know, it's like
Speaker 2: I'm trying to help people, but really dumb about it,
Speaker 2: you know. So there's some virtue there probably you know
Speaker 2: it's okay, but no, it's you need these two wings
Speaker 2: of a bird sort of an analogy, you know, to
Speaker 2: get to where you're going. So there's this kind of both.
Speaker 2: There is very much buddhism't surprisingly goal oriented.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: Interesting, Yeah, you don't know that as you get involved, right,
Speaker 2: it's like, no, no, look, you're trying to achieve this
Speaker 2: and there are little way stations, you know, along the path,
Speaker 2: but that's what you're pushing for. And the reason there's
Speaker 2: it's not about the journey, none of this. Oh, it's
Speaker 2: all about the no, no, no no. The reason there's
Speaker 2: a path is to get you there as fast as possible.
Speaker 2: So they want you to understand where if, and you
Speaker 2: have to accept and decide whether or not you believe
Speaker 2: that destination is possible. And so this is where it
Speaker 2: comes back again. Well, if you're going to bring these
Speaker 2: practices to the West from Buddhism, you don't necessarily need
Speaker 2: to change the practices, right, you just change change what
Speaker 2: they're aimed at and see where you go from there.
Speaker 2: But that's not what happened. They came to the West
Speaker 2: and people, oh, I need to secularize it, which.
Speaker 1: Means change that. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there was that whole thing of because particularly when
Speaker 3: it first came into the West, there was a lot
Speaker 3: of resistance from Christians who said, this is a different religion.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and they.
Speaker 3: Tried to address that, as you said, bi secularizing it,
Speaker 3: which then you lose lose a chunk of it, right, yeah, you.
Speaker 2: Do, and you change, you even change the methodology. Now
Speaker 2: we have people John cabots In who who came up
Speaker 2: with this that the modern definition of mindfulness that most psychology,
Speaker 2: most people will hear about in the West will be
Speaker 2: something like non judgmental moment to moment awareness. This is
Speaker 2: what it'll be, something like this, which he considered an
Speaker 2: operational definition. He never meant it to be definitive. And
Speaker 2: I also had him on record cited in my thesis.
Speaker 2: And you know that it's not even non judgmental awareness
Speaker 2: probably isn't possible, right, but it's what's happened, is it
Speaker 2: has taken in the West, is.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's worthwhile pausing on that, right, because something happens,
Speaker 3: something bad happens, to have a non.
Speaker 1: Judgment about it, like no judgment whatsoever.
Speaker 3: Freaking hard to do because you're going to have an
Speaker 3: emotional response, right, we have these automatic, non conscious emotional
Speaker 3: responses which then drive thoughts and feelings in the brain.
Speaker 3: And to not have a judgment about it.
Speaker 1: Is really frigging hard.
Speaker 3: I mean again, this is the thing that I really
Speaker 3: struggle with with stoicism, is that just the judgments in
Speaker 3: changing your judgments or you know, it can be frigging
Speaker 3: hard when you're faced with a shit storm, right.
Speaker 2: Of course, of course. Yeah, And well that's sort of
Speaker 2: what if you look at a lot of the Buddhist
Speaker 2: approach in general. The a better way to think about meditation,
Speaker 2: certainly in the Indo Tibetan tradition maybe in the modern
Speaker 2: world to think about it is types of technology.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: So it's like the first and mindfulness is a part
Speaker 2: of the technology, but it's by no means the end.
Speaker 2: There's in Buddhism, it's not the be all and end,
Speaker 2: or you don't just mindful is a tool that you use. Actually,
Speaker 2: and so then a good analogy is it's a microscope
Speaker 2: or a telescope is maybe easier, like if you have
Speaker 2: if you're on a look and observe your own mind,
Speaker 2: it's very hard. The second I look at my mind
Speaker 2: and there's a memory, then I'm carried off into brooding,
Speaker 2: rumination or worry, you know. So you need to be
Speaker 2: able to develop a level of objectivity to be able
Speaker 2: to examine what's going on in there. And that's what
Speaker 2: mindfulness is for. It's like a telescope, you know, to
Speaker 2: try to get through this atmospheric distortion, you know, to
Speaker 2: actually try to be able to see through it and
Speaker 2: then more clearly see things without all this distortion that
Speaker 2: you get. And so from there that's where you develop
Speaker 2: this idea of wisdom, is this sense of now I
Speaker 2: get it actually why I'm reacting like this, and you
Speaker 2: want to undo the healthy ones and cultivate the healthy ones.
Speaker 2: This is sort of in a nutshell how it works.
Speaker 1: Interesting.
Speaker 3: So it's kind of like that exercise from acceptance commitment
Speaker 3: therapy of leaves on a stream that you kind of
Speaker 3: you observe your thoughts, but they're just leaves on a
Speaker 3: stream that are passing, or they're like clouds that are passing,
Speaker 3: and you don't get hooked by those thoughts, right, that's
Speaker 3: that I think there's with the judgment part comes in,
Speaker 3: or maybe with the non judgmental stuff. Is there that
Speaker 3: and actually talk about getting hooked and getting unhooked from
Speaker 3: thoughts that when they hook you, then you're in emotion
Speaker 3: having a judgment about it, and then you get into
Speaker 3: that whole brooding thing. So it's that observing going oh,
Speaker 3: there's that thought again, isn't that interesting?
Speaker 1: And then just kind of letting it go. Yes, how
Speaker 1: is that? How is that.
Speaker 3: Different to the traditional Tibetan Buddhist view.
Speaker 2: This just happened yesterday. I met a friend for coffee
Speaker 2: who's also PhD in a different feel and he was
Speaker 2: giving the same example. You know, he leaves in a stream.
Speaker 2: So yeah, in this approach, and there's different Buddhist approach.
Speaker 2: There's lots of different Buddhist approach, but in this approach,
Speaker 2: and I haven't quite fleshed this analogy out because we
Speaker 2: just had a strong coffee and we're talking. You know,
Speaker 2: but rather than sitting on the bank watching the leaves
Speaker 2: go by in the stream, it's more like you're Moses
Speaker 2: in the middle of the stream, parting the whole thing,
Speaker 2: like in the midst of the whole thing, and unaffected
Speaker 2: by it. And this is a lot more powerful. And
Speaker 2: it comes back again to well, what's the mechanism Why
Speaker 2: if I delve into my own thoughts and minds, what's
Speaker 2: the mechanism by which sometimes I'm just pulled away like
Speaker 2: non lucidly. I don't understand. I don't even know what's happening,
Speaker 2: or why might I be able to just sit here
Speaker 2: and observe them all unaffected coming at me? Is there
Speaker 2: is there a fundamental mechanism that drives this? This is
Speaker 2: the question in Buddhism, you know, we always go to sources,
Speaker 2: so well, is there something driving this? And can I
Speaker 2: do anything about it? So yes, that leaves on the
Speaker 2: streams a classic traditional lot of you know, I trained
Speaker 2: in this when I first got into Buddhism, of course too,
Speaker 2: and it's totally worthwhile. It gives you the objectivity and distance,
Speaker 2: but there is you can keep going from here, you know,
Speaker 2: you can really dive into this, and there's no reason
Speaker 2: we shouldn't be examining this in psychology, and in fact, slowly,
Speaker 2: slowly we are.
Speaker 3: M I want to talk about attention and attentional control
Speaker 3: because the more I kind of dig into that, I'm
Speaker 3: my wife as well, who she has a background in
Speaker 3: Japanese psychology and acceptance and commitment therapy and counseling, and
Speaker 3: so we have lots of conversations around attention. And as
Speaker 3: part of my PhD, I was involved in a Delphi
Speaker 3: study around cognitive fitness. Were my PhD supervisor. He basically
Speaker 3: put this study together and got a whole host of
Speaker 3: world experts around sports psychology, military psychology, business psychology. I
Speaker 3: kind of squeezed in there because I was his PhD student,
Speaker 3: as did It made a man Craig Harper, who was
Speaker 3: a PSD student of a colleague. But what we had
Speaker 3: to do was really interesting is that they had identified
Speaker 3: through neuroscience a number of trainable cognitive primaries in the
Speaker 3: brain that are important for performance under pressure. Right, so
Speaker 3: this is you know, it's the whole military figued about
Speaker 3: how do we have sustained performance under extreme pressure?
Speaker 1: And we had to read these cognitive.
Speaker 3: Such as performance monitoring, risal control, attentional control, and across
Speaker 3: all domains business, sport, military, and the number one thing
Speaker 3: voted on by everybody was.
Speaker 1: Attention and attention control.
Speaker 3: And then in Japanese psychology, I'm sure there's a similar
Speaker 3: line of thinking in Buddhism. Is they say that your
Speaker 3: life is based on your attention and ares a neuroscientist,
Speaker 3: I love that because whatever you pay attention to your
Speaker 3: briand commits sales to it. Right, the particular activating system
Speaker 3: in the Brian is off and you are committing sales
Speaker 3: to whatever that is.
Speaker 1: So how how's prevalent or strong is attention in Tibetan Buddhism?
Speaker 3: And is it is it called by attention or is
Speaker 3: it awareness or you know, does it does it even
Speaker 3: play a role at all?
Speaker 2: Yeah, it plays It plays a fundamental role. And even
Speaker 2: in eighteen ninety, you know William James sort of father,
Speaker 2: one of the fathers of psychology.
Speaker 1: You know, I could say, by the way, like some
Speaker 1: of his ship is just amazing. Does everybody should William James?
Speaker 1: That guy was just light years ahead of his time.
Speaker 2: And it's and it's like poetry, you know, yes, it's
Speaker 2: just well, well he said in eighteen ninety he said, oh,
Speaker 2: there's he's a little preamble, but he says, for the moment,
Speaker 2: what we attend to is reality. So if you don't
Speaker 2: attend to something, it doesn't exist for you, right, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: and so and then unfortunately the behaviors came along and
Speaker 2: just buggered psychology up for decades. But that's true, you know,
Speaker 2: Skinner and all these crazies. Yes, we've still got the
Speaker 2: poison in the veins from that stuff, you know. But
Speaker 2: you know, it's such a shame because you know, over
Speaker 2: one hundred and like thirty something years ago we were this,
Speaker 2: this was picking up, you know. So yeah, it's not
Speaker 2: like a crazy it's not a crazy idea in the
Speaker 2: there's more to it's not just the only sort of
Speaker 2: bone I pick with that is, it's not just what
Speaker 2: you pay attention to.
Speaker 1: But how ah yeah, yeah, good cop.
Speaker 2: And so this is again, you know, Buddhism. In the
Speaker 2: Tibetan system, there's a thing called well sem jung is
Speaker 2: the is the it's a study sort of unit, and
Speaker 2: it's called mind and mental factors, you know, and and
Speaker 2: it runs through this like how your awareness works. And
Speaker 2: it's not so important perhaps for our for our purposes,
Speaker 2: but yeah, it's it's when you are if I am,
Speaker 2: for example, I give you maybe a sort of if
Speaker 2: I have a person who's regularly kind of angry, and
Speaker 2: you know, and I deal with them a lot, I think,
Speaker 2: you know, because yeah, I meet someone I know this
Speaker 2: is how emotions work. Is part of my research too,
Speaker 2: you know. Angry people are an anger trigger. So I
Speaker 2: so I meet an angry person, how I get angry to?
Speaker 2: You know, I'm in the grip of an anger episode too.
Speaker 2: So what can I do about this? Well, I can
Speaker 2: try to suppress the anger. It won't work, It'll make
Speaker 2: it worse. We know this, you know. I can be
Speaker 2: and try to be in control and what I say
Speaker 2: and do. Yeah, yeah, okay. But can I cognitively mentally
Speaker 2: reframe it? And you can? So you have to think
Speaker 2: what it is the person in front of me. Do
Speaker 2: they look like they're enjoying themselves, you know, or do
Speaker 2: they look like maybe they're in some kind of distress
Speaker 2: so they're angry? Are they happy? And so will rather
Speaker 2: than so I'm sure I'm presented with it with this person,
Speaker 2: and I interpret them as an angry person. But what
Speaker 2: if I just reinterpret them as a distressed person. It's
Speaker 2: totally it's not delusional. It's actually probably better. And then
Speaker 2: what that does now is it brings forth all the
Speaker 2: way I attend to this person changes.
Speaker 3: Now because I'm starting to have compassion exactly, rather than
Speaker 3: being pissed off.
Speaker 2: You'll at least have empathy maybe a bit of compassion.
Speaker 2: But the compassion can be trained. So that's right, And
Speaker 2: then you start and it might you might turn out
Speaker 2: that the most compassionate thing you can do is just
Speaker 2: shut up for a bit, you know, so out of
Speaker 2: actual presented with an angry person, just completely motivated by compassion,
Speaker 2: I can just stay quiet for a bit, you know,
Speaker 2: and then come in and try to say something smart,
Speaker 2: skillful as we go. But yeah, so there's these things
Speaker 2: start to play. And if you pull this apart, and
Speaker 2: that's what I was talking about before, the mindfulness training
Speaker 2: will give you the it'll dial down the reactivity. As
Speaker 2: I mentioned, you know, is paper from that's the reactivity
Speaker 2: is the issue. So if I can do the mindfulness
Speaker 2: training that dials down the reactivity, then when I'm presented
Speaker 2: with these difficult situations, I can sidestep the automated responses, right,
Speaker 2: and then I can pull up these other ones that
Speaker 2: I think are more helpful, and over time, the more
Speaker 2: my percentage goes up the constructive responses become the automated
Speaker 2: responses because it only happens through repetition anyway. And so
Speaker 2: I can do that in real life, and I can
Speaker 2: support it by practice, I do, you know, on the
Speaker 2: cushion or something too, like gym work, you know, to
Speaker 2: make sure I can bring that out into the rest
Speaker 2: of my life.
Speaker 1: Interestingly, anger thing.
Speaker 3: I wanted to talk about a kind of a meta
Speaker 3: cognitive approach to it from the Stoics and and and
Speaker 3: again it was I think it was a podcast I
Speaker 3: was doing with Donald Robertson and he said the Stoic
Speaker 3: philosophers their approach to anger. I think I can't remember
Speaker 3: whether it was Seneca or a dictators or who it was,
Speaker 3: but but called it temporary insanity. Yeah, and that really
Speaker 3: clicked with me. And there was there was an incident.
Speaker 3: I just think it was maybe a year ago. So
Speaker 3: I have an eighteen year old daughter and we are
Speaker 3: very very similar, right, So we clash for we have
Speaker 3: this love and it's not a here, but we have
Speaker 3: a love clash relationship, always have done. It does my
Speaker 3: wife's heading, but she's very skilled at pushing my buttons
Speaker 3: when she wants to be right and there was fun
Speaker 3: day we were in the kitchen and she was pushing
Speaker 3: my buttons and I just I felt the red mist
Speaker 3: descending and I was just about to have a verbal
Speaker 3: outburst at her, and this little voice in my head
Speaker 3: just come up and went, you're about to go temporarily
Speaker 3: and seeing, And it.
Speaker 1: Actually made me stop and think.
Speaker 3: And I actually said to her, because we talked about it,
Speaker 3: I'm about to go temporarily and seeing.
Speaker 1: And it made us both laugh and disfuse the situation.
Speaker 3: Right, But there had to be that that metacognitive or
Speaker 3: that self awareness of the emotion, and then the judgment
Speaker 3: of the emotion came from that little oh, it's actually
Speaker 3: temporary insanity, which which kind of changed the emotional response
Speaker 3: that I was actually having.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And if you like Paul Ekman, who's
Speaker 2: so a lot.
Speaker 1: Of ah, Paul, Yeah, brilliant, so great.
Speaker 2: So I run an intervention. In fact, the intervention we
Speaker 2: used use some of his work. He's got an intervention
Speaker 2: called Cultivating Emotional Balance that he designed with Alan Wallace
Speaker 2: as a result of the Mind and Life Project, so
Speaker 2: that I'm quite heavily involved in that, and it's we
Speaker 2: used part of that from my research too, and so
Speaker 2: he's he really objects to the idea of negative and
Speaker 2: positive emotions. He says, there's no such thing. I really
Speaker 2: like this. There's no negative emotions, right. There is negative affect,
Speaker 2: of course, there's unpleasant you know, negative sensation, but the
Speaker 2: emotion itself isn't negative. So if it were like if
Speaker 2: the if anger was negative, then we should get rid
Speaker 2: of the emotion, right, Like, there's no argument to this.
Speaker 2: If it's negative, you get rid of it. So then,
Speaker 2: you know, how do you end social injustice? How do
Speaker 2: you fix the climate prices? How do you get women
Speaker 2: the vote or end slavery? People got to get angry,
Speaker 2: but they have to do something smart. The same with fear.
Speaker 2: You know, fear will save your life again and again
Speaker 2: every time.
Speaker 3: There's a reason for these emotions, right, that's right.
Speaker 1: Sorry.
Speaker 3: Ekman was the first to show that emotions are cross cultural.
Speaker 1: Right. He did all this research.
Speaker 3: He went to I think it was Pappi in New
Speaker 3: Guinea and went into the tribes and Pappi New Guinea
Speaker 3: who had never seen white people, and they were having
Speaker 3: this They had the same emotions that we have.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he took photos of their faces and took them
Speaker 2: back to San Francisco and had his students identify six emotions. Anyway,
Speaker 2: there are more, you know, he's not saying there aren't
Speaker 2: more emotions, but there was six or seven you could
Speaker 2: consistently recognize. And so yeah, oh it's fascinating research. There's
Speaker 2: no one's not. Everyone's on board with all of it.
Speaker 2: Of course, because we're our really individualistic society. We all
Speaker 2: like to think, No, I'm special in my emotion different.
Speaker 2: But I don't really like this. I think it's pretty solid.
Speaker 2: There's a lot of evidence for what for that position.
Speaker 2: But I like this idea of what he says, that
Speaker 2: the function of emotions is to let you know that
Speaker 2: something you think important is happening. It's a sign post, right,
Speaker 2: and so like yeah, yeah or not right. So like
Speaker 2: in this case, it's like, oh, something important is happening,
Speaker 2: and I want to do this, but you have the
Speaker 2: wherewithal of go. But it's better that I don't do that,
Speaker 2: I do nothing or or something else, you know. And
Speaker 2: so that's this idea. If he rather than get caught
Speaker 2: up in your negative emotions because or positive emotions for
Speaker 2: that matter, if there's no negative emotions, there's no positive emotions.
Speaker 2: Either what you've got is sign posts telling you that
Speaker 2: something you think important is happening, and then you can
Speaker 2: have a whole series of like questioning and checking in
Speaker 2: to see is it important, and all these sorts of
Speaker 2: things that you can train to do within like you know,
Speaker 2: half a second, you know, to check on how you
Speaker 2: going to react or reframe or something like this. So
Speaker 2: your example is a good one because it's like, yeah,
Speaker 2: there's all this stuff going on and you're like wait,
Speaker 2: you know, it's sort of like am is this beneficial?
Speaker 2: Is just further in collaboration, we sometimes say in emotions research,
Speaker 2: is it or not? You know, and when it's not,
Speaker 2: then you can diffuse it, and if you have tools
Speaker 2: to defusing it, then that's really good. One that I
Speaker 2: know one of the people I worked with for a while,
Speaker 2: couple having arguments and they decided that they when they argued,
Speaker 2: they would argue in the bathroom and so completely completely
Speaker 2: agree anyway, so they told me that. So it's all
Speaker 2: blowing up and they're about to go in like off right,
Speaker 2: and they go into the bathroom. They look at each
Speaker 2: other and start of laughing, you know, because that's go
Speaker 2: isn't brilliant, and it's just like completely derailed the whole
Speaker 2: thing because you get set up all these we're just
Speaker 2: so amazing as human beings. It's not only it's the
Speaker 2: person who's in front of me, and so what they're saying,
Speaker 2: and it's how I'm responding. It's all so the location
Speaker 2: is happening in if you argue in the same place,
Speaker 2: we know this, how you get set up to argue
Speaker 2: this all. There's so much going on beyond our conscious awareness,
Speaker 2: right that psychology. This is why I love this combination
Speaker 2: of psychology and Buddhism, because psychologists got a lot to
Speaker 2: say and a lot to help Buddhists with their everyday
Speaker 2: life if there was look up for a moment. But
Speaker 2: actually there's all these deeper wisdom too that maybe psychology
Speaker 2: should pay some attention to. And there's a lot of
Speaker 2: scopia for overlap that could push us a long way
Speaker 2: to discovering maybe causes, but certainly fundamental drivers of mental
Speaker 2: illness and this kind of and happiness for that matter.
Speaker 3: You know, I just was thinking as you were talking there,
Speaker 3: just about emotions, and you know that we know that
Speaker 3: there are non conscious I did some stuff with Evan
Speaker 3: Gordon from the Brillant Resources Institute a guide doctor Royce Sugarman,
Speaker 3: and they had this integrate model in the briand and
Speaker 3: said that emotions arise in response to significant situations around
Speaker 3: you within so already to fifty million seconds in the
Speaker 3: brain way before thinking and feeling. And it just kind
Speaker 3: of struck me that maybe emotions are nature's way of
Speaker 3: grabbing your attention because there's something important around that's happening.
Speaker 2: So let's have a look because one of the and
Speaker 2: so I'll have one of the things you can be
Speaker 2: almost certain of if you're in an emotional If I'm
Speaker 2: in an emotional episode, we say, you know, if I'm
Speaker 2: in the grip of an emotion, almost certainly my attention
Speaker 2: has been captured. So, if you want to break it down,
Speaker 2: is that oversimplification, but it works for our purposes. Two
Speaker 2: types of attention controlled and captured, right, so we know,
Speaker 2: and they're different neurological systems, exogenous and endogenous systems in
Speaker 2: the brain, you know. And so even flipping from an
Speaker 2: endogenous controlled attention to captured, whether it's in the auditory
Speaker 2: domain or the visual because there's different sensory input, you
Speaker 2: know that it really sets up these HPA access so
Speaker 2: you get cause al adrenaline released, you know, just from
Speaker 2: the attention switch, right, which makes sense. If you're a
Speaker 2: hunter gatherer and you're doing your thing and there's a
Speaker 2: rustle in the grass, you know, I mean apologies and
Speaker 2: he rustles listening. But if there's a sort of a
Speaker 2: rustle in the grass and your attentions pulled away, this
Speaker 2: arousal happens, and it's a saber tooth tiger or it's
Speaker 2: the wind, you know, and either way you're prepared. There's
Speaker 2: no there's no net loss really, so that that attentional.
Speaker 1: And that's a captured attention.
Speaker 3: Can you just see it go into a little bit
Speaker 3: of detail or I think I get what you're saying,
Speaker 3: but just explore for us the controlled and captured attention.
Speaker 1: So is controlled attention thevo litional stuff.
Speaker 3: Where it's captured is you've been grabbed by your emotion
Speaker 3: and your articular activating system is just diverted.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, And so and that's the key of a
Speaker 2: of an emotional reaction is your attention is captured and
Speaker 2: you want what under attentional capture tends to be. You know,
Speaker 2: we talk about these as if they're they're more like
Speaker 2: ends of the spectrum, right, They're not like it's easy
Speaker 2: to talk about them as a WILB. But the the
Speaker 2: captured attention is non lucid. It's it's easy to have
Speaker 2: your attention pulled away for extended periods of time and
Speaker 2: not know that it's happened. And if you've ever tried
Speaker 2: to meditate your.
Speaker 1: Boom scrolling, doom scrolling, doom.
Speaker 2: Frolling, of course, I mean that's and that's really up
Speaker 2: against it because people with post grad degrees have designed
Speaker 2: that to make sure your attention.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, But if ever you've tried just meditating, you know,
Speaker 2: just spend two minutes and try to sort of follow
Speaker 2: the sensations of your breath NonStop, see what happens. You know,
Speaker 2: probably find at some point you can start writing a
Speaker 2: shopping list or you know, planning a revenge on your
Speaker 2: neighbor or something without really knowing, you know, and so
Speaker 2: so the it's quite a long time before you know.
Speaker 2: And so the parallels here are really critical because if
Speaker 2: you think about a mindfulness training session, certainly you know
Speaker 2: in the system that I use and TEA that's essentially
Speaker 2: in the beginning is what you're doing. You're sitting, you're resting,
Speaker 2: You pick a focal object, let's say it's sensations in
Speaker 2: the body. You know, you pick that and you try
Speaker 2: to attend to it, and at some point you've got
Speaker 2: to notice that you're distracted. And when you notice, so, actually,
Speaker 2: what you're really doing is getting a sense of the
Speaker 2: difference between the experience, that this qualitative difference between captured
Speaker 2: and controlled the tension.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, gotcha, okay.
Speaker 2: And over time you'll find with experienced meditator, like at
Speaker 2: the moment they all overlap and you sort of don't
Speaker 2: keep getting pulled away and you don't know, but experienced
Speaker 2: meditators know. They're really obvious and so that and part
Speaker 2: of that is to do with the lucidity of your
Speaker 2: own thinking. So I'm there and I'm aware of the
Speaker 2: thoughts and things that are going on, and so whereas
Speaker 2: once the tensions captured, are not necessarily so aware. This
Speaker 2: is a direct transition straight up into an emotion. If
Speaker 2: you think the anatomy of a distraction I often call
Speaker 2: it is the same as the anatomy of an emotion,
Speaker 2: is that your attention's pulled away. You'll losecidity decreases, your
Speaker 2: automaticity increases. Right, And just as you can sit here
Speaker 2: and sort of in a meditation session be thinking of
Speaker 2: all these things and not know it, now you can
Speaker 2: be saying and doing things and you don't really know
Speaker 2: because the emotions are it's a very coarse version of
Speaker 2: a distraction. So you can start to see. Now if
Speaker 2: you train, and if you use a training pedagogy that's
Speaker 2: designed to interrupt this, which is what the buddhistuff is for,
Speaker 2: then you do this on the cushion fifteen twenty minutes
Speaker 2: a day, even it doesn't have to be radical. You'll
Speaker 2: get these interruptions of emotional reactions for free. And this
Speaker 2: is where you start to come back. You're saying this
Speaker 2: project cultivating emotional balance. You know that that's what we're
Speaker 2: trying to do. You first get your attention under your control,
Speaker 2: like notice, when it's captured, so you can bring it back.
Speaker 2: Then we can do the psycho education component where we
Speaker 2: teach how emotions work and what they're for, and different
Speaker 2: types of emotions and all these things the physiology, so
Speaker 2: you recognize them sooner and you can start to get
Speaker 2: people in these feedback loops where even emotional reactions happen
Speaker 2: and you get pulled away, and because of the meditation training,
Speaker 2: you notice and you relax and you bring it back.
Speaker 2: That emotionality actually helps you with your attention, like you
Speaker 2: can if you leave it alone. It's a feedback, it's
Speaker 2: a downward spiral. My attention keeps getting pulled away and captured.
Speaker 2: It actually makes me more emotionally reactive, which degrades my
Speaker 2: attention capacity and so on. If but the reverse is true,
Speaker 2: if you keep interrupting the attentional capture and interrupting the emotionality,
Speaker 2: you get less emotional reactivity, more controlled attention, which dials
Speaker 2: down your reactivity which increases, and you can set up
Speaker 2: a feedback. Your attention increases as the emotional reactivity decreases.
Speaker 2: And this is when you're in a sweet spot now,
Speaker 2: because you really in control of what you say and
Speaker 2: do when you're emotional, which is sort of the to
Speaker 2: me when I work with people, it's like, this is
Speaker 2: the first step we're look working on. Imagine being in
Speaker 2: control of everything you say and do, no matter how
Speaker 2: emotional you are. And this is only the first step.
Speaker 2: This isn't even this isn't even advanced you know, and
Speaker 2: that only requires attention and some what we call emotional skills,
Speaker 2: which is what my research was. We only taught. We
Speaker 2: only gave emotion skills training and mindfulness training. We didn't
Speaker 2: do any of the compassion training or insight all this
Speaker 2: other stuff, just straight up and in doing so, then
Speaker 2: we're trying to dig down and see what happens, you know,
Speaker 2: in terms of what sort of mechanisms are at play
Speaker 2: when people are becoming emotional and when those emotions turn
Speaker 2: into symptomology, which is basically what happens. You know, what
Speaker 2: mechanisms are driving it, and why does mindfulness training seem
Speaker 2: to dampen it? This is sort of our real our area.
Speaker 3: Bloody interesting, any specific brillant changes or differences.
Speaker 1: So I know that generally.
Speaker 3: Meditators have reduced activity in the paraet's a lobe.
Speaker 1: They tend to have a more suppressed or less active.
Speaker 3: Normal sort of what's the what's the word that I'm
Speaker 3: looking for?
Speaker 1: The Oh Jesus, it's just slipped out of my brilliant editor.
Speaker 3: When when the neuroscientist told the diala lama about it,
Speaker 3: he said, ah, you mean monkey mind yabah yaha, yaba,
Speaker 3: the default mode network, right, which is the resting brillin state,
Speaker 3: which is higher in anxious people. Any specific that either
Speaker 3: in your research or looking at research differences in brillant
Speaker 3: activity patterns between experienced meditators and non experienced people.
Speaker 2: So there are it's not my feel, you know, like
Speaker 2: the neurosciences, I'm so going to the subjective responses, but
Speaker 2: of course I come across it. You know, the most
Speaker 2: interesting one is probably the thicker grade matter and connectivity
Speaker 2: between prefrontal cortex and the amiga.
Speaker 3: You know, yes, and that is all about their emotional regulation.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right, because that sets off the limbic system,
Speaker 2: which is sort of the emotional kind of driver. I
Speaker 2: really want neuroscience to keep going full speed ahead, but
Speaker 2: I'm also not sure it's not. I don't know always
Speaker 2: the benefit for somebody trying to get their anger under control,
Speaker 2: telling them you can't tell them dial down. You're amigndal.
Speaker 2: It means nothing, you know, and you only know that
Speaker 2: it's active. You can infer that it might be active
Speaker 2: based on your subjective experience. So I'm still I'm interested
Speaker 2: in people's subjective experience a bit more. I don't want
Speaker 2: to get in the way of the neuroscientists because they're
Speaker 2: going to hit gold at some point. But in the meantime,
Speaker 2: knowing that that's happening isn't having a really big effect
Speaker 2: on treatment so much as yet.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it's not.
Speaker 2: Really my field. One field person to look into is
Speaker 2: anihi Jar, who's also done work with military post deployment
Speaker 2: in terms of stress and brilliant research.
Speaker 1: What's what's what's your name?
Speaker 2: Amishi A M I S H I J J h A.
Speaker 3: Okay, this has been bloody fascinating. What can people go
Speaker 3: to find more about you? And what sort of things
Speaker 3: do you do for people?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 3: Haven't done a pH d in this area? I'm sure
Speaker 3: you just haven't left it and off you go. So
Speaker 3: what sort of things do you do? Do you work
Speaker 3: one on ones with people, to work on groups?
Speaker 1: Tell us more people can find out more.
Speaker 2: Yeah, sure I I At the moment, I run an
Speaker 2: online community space this is and so we meet once
Speaker 2: a week and meditate together. And I have an online
Speaker 2: course in there a few online courses, so that's kind
Speaker 2: of the primary place to connect with me at the moment. Yes,
Speaker 2: I do work one on one I'm building that more
Speaker 2: and more now that the PhD is over and I
Speaker 2: have several things coming up in person, this Cultivating Emotional
Speaker 2: Balance project that I'm so excited about with a full
Speaker 2: course here in Brisbane starting in May.
Speaker 1: Oh cool.
Speaker 2: But yeah, the best place is just to get in
Speaker 2: touch and see if maybe there's I have some content
Speaker 2: online that helped you, or we can talk and and
Speaker 2: so on. I've like, I've only really just looked up
Speaker 2: for my PhD to think about what to do next.
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, I get you, I get you and people.
Speaker 3: Is it your website Corey Jackson dot com, dot you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's yeah, it's so old, I haven't updated it,
Speaker 2: but that's the that's the place to go and get
Speaker 2: the contact that you can get to me through Facebook
Speaker 2: Linkedins as well, you know.
Speaker 1: And what are we signed here? Where we find your
Speaker 1: online programs?
Speaker 2: They're in this space, so that is I'll put the link,
Speaker 2: I'll send the link through. But it's it's members dot
Speaker 2: Corey Jackson dot com, dot you and that yeah cool
Speaker 2: has free and paid stuff so you can have a.
Speaker 1: Little all right, brilliant man, excellent.
Speaker 3: What a freakin fascinating conversation from a random email from
Speaker 3: saying that somebody randomly said on the podcast, I love
Speaker 3: this stuff and I love the the organic nature of
Speaker 3: the of the conversation.
Speaker 1: Right, it was just like, let's just see what happens
Speaker 1: when we started talking. Pretty cool stuff, mate.
Speaker 3: I'll tell you about that cultivating emotional balance. You need
Speaker 3: to create a version of that for schools. The gear
Speaker 3: that shut up.
Speaker 2: The initial study that was a really comprehensive study with
Speaker 2: Paul Ekman and Alan Wallace and these other Richard Davidson
Speaker 2: and so on did it all together, you know, and
Speaker 2: they did it on school teachers, which was interesting. And
Speaker 2: the next the next generation of mindfulness research needs to
Speaker 2: do this third person stuff, So let's train teachers and
Speaker 2: measure the effect on their students or trained parents and
Speaker 2: this sort of stuff. So, yeah, this is really in
Speaker 2: our radar. We didn't touch on it, but the next
Speaker 2: I have post traumatic stress some projects coming out that
Speaker 2: we're looking into that because again, this idea of what
Speaker 2: makes your thoughts sticky and drive emotional reactions is at
Speaker 2: the core of have so much mental health. So I
Speaker 2: got some other projects on the go.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, go.
Speaker 3: Once you get into the emotional space, it's a it's wow,
Speaker 3: it's a Pandora's box. Eh yeah yeah, yeah great, This
Speaker 3: has been awesome. Thanks for your time and and and
Speaker 3: your insights for people, and so take yourself off to
Speaker 3: Cody Jackson dot com. DODA you sign up to some
Speaker 3: online courses and let's get better emotional balance because.
Speaker 2: Who doesn't need that ship? Yeah absolutely, thanks, thanks for
Speaker 2: thanks