Speaker 1: Based on your past experience. Your brain is creating concepts
Speaker 1: as guesses of what's going to happen next. Welcome to
Speaker 1: the one you feed throughout time. Great thinkers have recognized
Speaker 1: the importance of the thoughts we have, quotes like garbage in,
Speaker 1: garbage out, or you are what you think ring true.
Speaker 1: And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen
Speaker 1: or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy,
Speaker 1: or fear. We see what we don't have instead of
Speaker 1: what we do. We think things that hold us back
Speaker 1: and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking.
Speaker 1: Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort
Speaker 1: to make a life worth living. This podcast is about
Speaker 1: how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction,
Speaker 1: how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us.
Speaker 1: Our guest on this episode is Lisa Feldman Barrett, PhD.
Speaker 1: Lisa is a University Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northeastern
Speaker 1: University with appointments at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital.
Speaker 1: Dr Barrett has published over two hundred peer reviewed scientific
Speaker 1: papers appearing in Science, Nature, Neuroscience, and other top journals
Speaker 1: in psychology and cognitive neuroscience, as well as six academic
Speaker 1: volumes published by Guilford Press. Her new book is How
Speaker 1: Emotions Are Made The Secret Life of the Brain. If
Speaker 1: you're getting value out of the show, please go to
Speaker 1: one you feed dot Net slash Support and make a donation.
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Speaker 1: the archive will remain free and that the show is
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Speaker 1: that you can support us is if you're interested in
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Speaker 1: listeners of the show and get support in feeding your
Speaker 1: Good Wolf. Thanks again for listening, and here's the interview
Speaker 1: with Lisa Feldman, Barrett High Lisa, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 1: Thanks so much for having me on your show. Your
Speaker 1: book is called How Emotions Are Made The Secret Life
Speaker 1: of the Brain. I'm always interested in how the brain
Speaker 1: works and how emotions and the link between thinking and
Speaker 1: emotion and all of that. And I will say I
Speaker 1: was saying to you before the call, your book legitimately
Speaker 1: is a bunch of new ideas that I have not
Speaker 1: been exposed to before, and I'm excited to cover. I've
Speaker 1: been a little bit flummixed as to how I'm going
Speaker 1: to cover all the great stuff it's in the book
Speaker 1: in the time frame we have, but I will do
Speaker 1: my best. So let's start like we always do, with
Speaker 1: the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson.
Speaker 1: He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of
Speaker 1: us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf,
Speaker 1: which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and
Speaker 1: the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like
Speaker 1: greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and
Speaker 1: he thinks about it for a second and looks up
Speaker 1: at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one
Speaker 1: wins and the grandfather says the one you feed. So
Speaker 1: I'd like to start off by asking you what that
Speaker 1: parable means to you in your life and in the
Speaker 1: work that you do. Well. I think in the work
Speaker 1: that I do, the parable reminds me immediately of our
Speaker 1: theory of human nature, and that really comes from ancient Greece,
Speaker 1: so it comes from, you know, ancient Western civilization. Uh.
Speaker 1: The idea being that deep inside us we have appetites
Speaker 1: like hunger and thirst, the desire for sex and so on,
Speaker 1: we have emotions which Plato referred to as the passions,
Speaker 1: and he depicted these as two wild beasts, wild stallions
Speaker 1: that were controlled by our rationality, which he depicted as
Speaker 1: a human chariot driver who controlled these wild beasts. And
Speaker 1: throughout the last several thousand years, pretty much all of
Speaker 1: our ideas about the human mind, the human brain, human
Speaker 1: nature more generally, at least in this Western tradition, have
Speaker 1: been based on this idea that buried deep inside of us,
Speaker 1: we have these animalistic urges, instincts, emotions that often lead
Speaker 1: us to do very bad things. We have also, as humans,
Speaker 1: this virtuous rational ability, which uh, you know, at the
Speaker 1: best of times controls are inner beast and but sometimes
Speaker 1: fails to do so, and that's when we behave very badly.
Speaker 1: This idea is you can find it in US law.
Speaker 1: You know, the legal system is founded on this view
Speaker 1: of the human mind um and you can see it
Speaker 1: in neuro anatomy, for example. For many, many years, people
Speaker 1: believed that the neo cortex, what's called incorrectly actually the
Speaker 1: neo cortex, the cortex in the brain was the home
Speaker 1: or the seat of cognition or rationality and controlled emotion.
Speaker 1: So for many years it was believed that we had
Speaker 1: some kind of lizard brain this is where our instincts live,
Speaker 1: and surrounding that was a limbic system. It's called a
Speaker 1: limbic system, the amygdala and so on, which is where
Speaker 1: emotions live. And then surrounding that and controlling that was
Speaker 1: the cerebral cortex, which is the seat of rationality. And
Speaker 1: this idea that the human brain evolved in sedimentary layers
Speaker 1: and that that really the human mind is this battle
Speaker 1: between battleground between rationality and emotionality, with emotionality standing in
Speaker 1: for these animalistic emotional instincts which causes to do terrible things,
Speaker 1: and rationality, which is you know, virtuous. This idea was
Speaker 1: sort of tattooed on the brain as a theory of
Speaker 1: or a model of of human brain evolution, and it's
Speaker 1: actually completely incorrect. You know, the human brain didn't evolve
Speaker 1: in sedimentary layers. It's not organized in this kind of
Speaker 1: tiered way. Um. Nonetheless, this is a remains a really
Speaker 1: popular view of of how the brain works, um, both
Speaker 1: in the popular media and in industry and and so on.
Speaker 1: So the parable is a beautiful illustration of that, I think,
Speaker 1: and I think I probably have perpetuated that myth a
Speaker 1: little bit because of other people we've had on the
Speaker 1: show who share that idea of you've got this animal brain,
Speaker 1: the lizard brain. The amygdala's you know, blamed for all
Speaker 1: kinds of things. Right, And a key part of what
Speaker 1: you're saying in the book is that emotions don't live
Speaker 1: anywhere in the brain. Emotions are well, we'll talk about
Speaker 1: what emotions are, but but more generally, that the whole
Speaker 1: brain is involved in nearly everything that happens, and that
Speaker 1: neurons are multi purpose, We use them for lots of
Speaker 1: different things. You use the term degeneracy, which is not
Speaker 1: uh will use it degenerate youth. That's not what you
Speaker 1: mean in this case. What in this case, what do
Speaker 1: you mean by degeneras Yeah, so let me just say
Speaker 1: a couple of things. First of all, the idea that
Speaker 1: that we have some kind of lurking inner beast which
Speaker 1: is controlled by ration. Reality, that model of the brain
Speaker 1: has been disproved, i would say, in the last hundred years.
Speaker 1: In the study of evolutionary biology and neuro anatomy. People
Speaker 1: have known for really long time the brain is not
Speaker 1: organized that way. So this is not just hearsay. This
Speaker 1: is backed up by a tremendous amount of evidence. An
Speaker 1: individual neuron doesn't do everything, but it certainly does more
Speaker 1: than one thing. Um. And this is important for as
Speaker 1: you say, the concept of degeneracy, which I think is
Speaker 1: it's a super unfortunate name. I didn't take up this name.
Speaker 1: This is an idea that has existed in biology for
Speaker 1: a number of years, and it's the idea that any
Speaker 1: function that is performed in your body or in your
Speaker 1: brain can be performed in more than one way. So
Speaker 1: you might say, it's kind of like there's more than
Speaker 1: one way to skin a cat, you know, um, or
Speaker 1: you know there are substitutions that can be made in
Speaker 1: recipes to make sure that the recipe proceeds as planned.
Speaker 1: And where there's like fifteen different ways to get to
Speaker 1: your house, there's there's the roads that you take, but
Speaker 1: there are so many others that will get you to
Speaker 1: the same place exactly. And so degeneracy is not the
Speaker 1: same as redundancy. Redundancy is where the same solution, the
Speaker 1: same mechanism is built in in lots of different ways, um.
Speaker 1: But degeneracy is the idea that there's more than one
Speaker 1: way to create a behavior, or a feeling or a thought.
Speaker 1: So here's an example. In neuroscience, sometimes scientists will breed
Speaker 1: animals like rats, for example, that are missing a gene.
Speaker 1: They knock the gene out, and that so that the
Speaker 1: animal doesn't have that gene, so they can study what
Speaker 1: happens to behavior when the gene is missing. And in
Speaker 1: about of laboratory animals that have a gene knocked out,
Speaker 1: the characteristic that is supposed to be dependent on that
Speaker 1: gene still appears, which means that there's more than one
Speaker 1: set of genes for every characteristic. And this is why
Speaker 1: you know in genetics, the study of genetics is really
Speaker 1: complicated because you can have a characteristic like height or weight,
Speaker 1: or some personality characteristically being really gregarious or really introverted.
Speaker 1: These characteristics can be highly heridable, meaning they have a
Speaker 1: strong genetic component, but no one knows what the genes are,
Speaker 1: because first of all, there are groups of genes that
Speaker 1: will cause a characteristic, not a single gene. And second
Speaker 1: of all, there are different groups of genes that can
Speaker 1: cause the same characteristic. That's the idea of degenerous e
Speaker 1: And it turns out that every biological system that's ever
Speaker 1: been studied, from your immune system to your genes, to
Speaker 1: your behavior and so on, all have degenerate causes, meaning
Speaker 1: there's more than one cause for any physical or mental
Speaker 1: characteristic that you have. I'm always struck by this idea
Speaker 1: of nature versus nurture, and how obvious it is that
Speaker 1: it's both. And what you're saying is taking that several
Speaker 1: steps beyond that very simple idea. And and it seems
Speaker 1: to me that all these things that we characterize very
Speaker 1: easily as two things I suffer from depression and addiction, right,
Speaker 1: we characterize them as if they're this thing, and they
Speaker 1: seem so complex to me, And there's so many causes
Speaker 1: and reasons and and factors, and everything that you're saying
Speaker 1: in the book really speaks to that at an even
Speaker 1: more fundamental level, that not just a problem like depression
Speaker 1: or addiction, but down to our very emotions themselves are
Speaker 1: not this simple little thing. So if emotions aren't what
Speaker 1: we think they are, they live at a place in
Speaker 1: the brain, and they are this very specific thing, then
Speaker 1: what are emotions in your mind? Well, it's not just
Speaker 1: in my mind. Let me rephrase that. In your studies.
Speaker 1: What what have you found from emotion? Yeah, I think
Speaker 1: the important thing it's a scientific theory, which means not
Speaker 1: that it's a set of ideas, but that it's a
Speaker 1: set of ideas that are backed up by a tremendous
Speaker 1: amount of scientific evidence. The general description goes like this,
Speaker 1: Your brain contains a set of networks that you can
Speaker 1: think about them like they are all all purpose ingredients.
Speaker 1: So if you go into your kitchen, you can find
Speaker 1: flour and water and salt, and you can make lots
Speaker 1: of recipes with flour and water and salt. You can
Speaker 1: even make some things that aren't food, like glue, with
Speaker 1: flour and water and salt. In the same way, your
Speaker 1: brain has these multipurpose networks that you can think of
Speaker 1: as basic ingredients for making all mental states, not just emotions,
Speaker 1: but also thoughts and perceptions and beliefs and memories and
Speaker 1: so on. And part of what these networks do is
Speaker 1: they don't react to the world. They actually anticipate or
Speaker 1: predict what's going to happen in each moment. And the
Speaker 1: reason why this is the case is that your your
Speaker 1: brain is actually predicting. It's predicting every sight and sound
Speaker 1: and smell and and internal feeling from your body. It's
Speaker 1: making these predictions. They're kind of like guesses. It's using
Speaker 1: your past experience to guess at what's going to happen
Speaker 1: in the next immediate moment, and then it uses the
Speaker 1: information from the world and from your body to confirm
Speaker 1: those guesses, and then they become your experience or to
Speaker 1: correct those guesses. Sometimes, when the evidence from the world
Speaker 1: doesn't match your guests, you even just ignore the evidence
Speaker 1: and you just go with your guests and your belief
Speaker 1: becomes your experience. And some of these guesses are emotions.
Speaker 1: This is how emotions are made. Basically, some of these
Speaker 1: guesses are emotions. When the brain makes a guess. It's
Speaker 1: not making a single guess, it's making a whole slew
Speaker 1: of guesses about what particular sensations might arise in the
Speaker 1: next moment, and what they mean, where they come from,
Speaker 1: what you should do about them. In science, we call
Speaker 1: these guesses concepts. So based on your past experience, your
Speaker 1: brain is creating concepts as guesses of what's going to
Speaker 1: happen next. And fundamentally, your brain is trying to make
Speaker 1: sense of sensations in your body and from the world
Speaker 1: with these guesses. And it's doing this mainly because it's
Speaker 1: far faster and it keeps us safer, and it is
Speaker 1: far cheaper metabolically, absolutely so. One of the major constraints
Speaker 1: on our health actually and the functioning of the brain,
Speaker 1: the evolution of the brain and so on, is metabolic efficiency.
Speaker 1: Our brains are super expensive organs, but it's the most
Speaker 1: expensive organ in our whole body, takes up about our
Speaker 1: total metabolic budget, and it's really really important that the
Speaker 1: brain function efficiently and also regulate the body efficiently. It's
Speaker 1: just much more efficient to guess in advance and correct
Speaker 1: that guess than it is to react to the world.
Speaker 1: Engineers know this. This is partly. For example, Netflix works
Speaker 1: like this, streaming video works like this. MP three's work
Speaker 1: like this. UM it's just much more efficient to predict
Speaker 1: and correct than it is to react. And the main
Speaker 1: thing your brain is trying to do is trying to
Speaker 1: keep your bodies budget in balance, your body's energy use
Speaker 1: in balance, and it does this predictively. What this looks
Speaker 1: like then, to some extent, means that what's coming in
Speaker 1: through my senses, if it meets my predictions and simulations,
Speaker 1: I may not process it any further than that. So
Speaker 1: to a certain extent, we're really not seeing the world
Speaker 1: as it is. We are seeing it, to a certain extent,
Speaker 1: as we expect it to be. Now again, new information
Speaker 1: can come through, and we can we can do things differently.
Speaker 1: But this strikes me so much like the Buddhist or
Speaker 1: Zen concept of how we never really see anything all
Speaker 1: we're seeing our concepts of things, and that if you
Speaker 1: could actually pierce through that to see the moment freshly,
Speaker 1: it would be a very different experience. Absolutely. If there's
Speaker 1: one thing that we can say that we pretty much
Speaker 1: know for sure at this point from a neuroscientific standpoint,
Speaker 1: it's that we see the world as we believe it
Speaker 1: to be, and oftentimes our beliefs correspond well enough to
Speaker 1: what's out there in the real world. But we can't
Speaker 1: just pull back the curtains and see the world the
Speaker 1: way that it is without our concepts. If we have
Speaker 1: no concepts for something, if we can't make a concept
Speaker 1: on the fly, then we're experientially blind um to that input. So,
Speaker 1: for example, there are people who are born either congenitally
Speaker 1: they have cataracts, or they have some kind of congenital
Speaker 1: problems with their corneas for example, so no light enters
Speaker 1: the retina and can't make it to the brain. So
Speaker 1: these people are functionally blind for their whole lives. And
Speaker 1: then as adults they have borneal transplants or they have
Speaker 1: their cataracts for moves and so for the first time
Speaker 1: light enters the retina makes its way from the optic
Speaker 1: nerve to the brain. And yeah, so you would imagine
Speaker 1: that they be able to just see right they see
Speaker 1: objects they'd see, but that's actually not what happens. What
Speaker 1: happens is they are experienceially blind. They see flashes of light,
Speaker 1: they don't know what the flashes of light mean, and
Speaker 1: as a consequence, they have to learn to see. And
Speaker 1: one fellow that I spoke to who has had this
Speaker 1: experience talked about it as learning a second language in
Speaker 1: a sense. So you know, all of his senses other
Speaker 1: than vision, so smell, smell, and hearing and touch and
Speaker 1: even the feelings from his body are all integrated into
Speaker 1: a unified whole, and then vision stands apart, like a
Speaker 1: second language. So you can think of it like literally
Speaker 1: learning a second language in a sense. When you hear
Speaker 1: a language that you've never had experienced with before, it
Speaker 1: just sounds like noise to you. You don't even know
Speaker 1: where the word breaks are. You have to learn that.
Speaker 1: You know, you're you're developing concepts, and this is something
Speaker 1: that I explained in the book, that concepts are necessary
Speaker 1: for our normal experience of the world. Let's talk about
Speaker 1: the concept of introception. Did I say that correctly? You did? Yeah? This,
Speaker 1: more than anything else in the book, is probably what
Speaker 1: blew my mind more than anything, because the thought that
Speaker 1: emotions maybe don't live in one place and they're constructed
Speaker 1: in their complex is certainly interesting and it doesn't strike
Speaker 1: me as completely out of left field. But the way
Speaker 1: that intro reception works and the role that that plays
Speaker 1: in how we actually feel was one of the most
Speaker 1: interesting parts of the book to me. So could you
Speaker 1: explain that process? I can. I think this is one
Speaker 1: of the most important aspects of the book in the
Speaker 1: sense that you talked about depression and addiction. And there
Speaker 1: are a number of experiences are phenomena that we have
Speaker 1: every day in human life that are intimately tied to
Speaker 1: inter reception. So here's the way to think about it.
Speaker 1: So one set of ingredients. Let's say that your network
Speaker 1: brain networks make are our concepts that you're important for
Speaker 1: making emotions and actually making every experience that you have.
Speaker 1: The other thing, though, that those networks do, is they
Speaker 1: control the systems in your body. So you have an
Speaker 1: immune system, You had an autonomic nervous system, which controls
Speaker 1: you know, your cardiovascular system, your respiratory system, and so on.
Speaker 1: You have a neural endocrine system, so this is hormones
Speaker 1: that control metabolism and all sorts of other things. And
Speaker 1: these systems are also controlled predictively by your brain. So
Speaker 1: for example, if your brain is going to stand you up,
Speaker 1: before it does that, it raises your blood pressure so
Speaker 1: that oxygen can get to your brain um If it
Speaker 1: doesn't raise your blood pressure in advance of standing, you
Speaker 1: up your faint, which would be very costly to you.
Speaker 1: So the way to think about it is that your
Speaker 1: brain is trying to anticipate what your body needs and
Speaker 1: meet those needs before they arise. Now, when your brain
Speaker 1: is keeping your bodies systems in balance, it also has
Speaker 1: to track how well it's doing this, and so your
Speaker 1: body sends sensory information to your brain. This is what
Speaker 1: we call in terror reception. So scientists make a distinction
Speaker 1: between sensations that come from the world, which they call
Speaker 1: x ter reception like external to you, and the sensations
Speaker 1: that come from your body, which they call in ter reception. Now,
Speaker 1: if you look around the room or wherever your listeners are,
Speaker 1: they look around, they can see things in very high dimension.
Speaker 1: You know, they can see lots of detail color, sharp
Speaker 1: edges and so on and so forth, shadows, bright light,
Speaker 1: et cetera. But your brain is not wired for you
Speaker 1: to feel the sensations from your body in very high detail.
Speaker 1: If you felt every sensation that came from every movement
Speaker 1: of every artery and nerve and muscle and um sell
Speaker 1: you know that symphony of feeling would never allow you
Speaker 1: to pay attention to anything else in the world. Philosophers
Speaker 1: sometimes call this tragic embodiment. It's what all of us
Speaker 1: feel every time we have an upset stomach or you know,
Speaker 1: a problem with our g I tract. You know, all
Speaker 1: your attention goes, you know, to the place that hurts,
Speaker 1: and you pay attention to nothing else in the world.
Speaker 1: It's a great concept. As a consequence, most of the
Speaker 1: time you don't feel sensations from your body in a
Speaker 1: very precise way. You sometimes can, like if you run
Speaker 1: up the stairs, for example, you might feel your heart beating,
Speaker 1: but the interesting thing is that you're not. Actually, that's
Speaker 1: not so much an inter reception because the reason why
Speaker 1: you feel it is that your heart is beating against
Speaker 1: your chest. So you're not feeling the heartbeat itself, but
Speaker 1: you're feeling the feeling of when your heart is slamming
Speaker 1: against your chest. Wall um. So. But most of the
Speaker 1: time we experience the sensations from our bodies as simple
Speaker 1: feelings of feeling pleasant or feeling unpleasant, feeling comfortable or
Speaker 1: feeling distressed, feeling worked up or feeling calm, and scientists
Speaker 1: call this affect. So these simple feelings of affect. When
Speaker 1: they're very strong, when they're very intense, we typically use
Speaker 1: that as an ingredient to make emotion. But when they're
Speaker 1: less intense, they are ingredients usually in other experiences, like
Speaker 1: thoughts or perceptions. So, for example, I should say sometimes
Speaker 1: even intense affect is a perception. So when someone cuts
Speaker 1: you off on the highway and you, you know your
Speaker 1: experiences that guy is a total asshole, that's a perception
Speaker 1: of the world that is infused with very strong affect.
Speaker 1: The interesting thing is that most of the time we
Speaker 1: don't experience affect on its own. We experience it as
Speaker 1: a part of an emotion or a part of a thought,
Speaker 1: or a part of a perception of the world, perceptions
Speaker 1: of other people, perceptions of food, and many of the
Speaker 1: illnesses that we have that we suffer from, our illnesses
Speaker 1: of our body systems being imbalanced and therefore us feeling
Speaker 1: a lot of distress, a lot of discomfort, and that
Speaker 1: discomfort can be experienced as depression or anxiety or other
Speaker 1: types of mood disorders. Yeah, I found that idea very interesting.
Speaker 1: To go back to Buddhism again, it really struck me.
Speaker 1: If you look at Buddhist psychology, there's this concept of
Speaker 1: there's sort of a core underlying feeling feelings, probably not
Speaker 1: even the right word, but it's kind of pleasant or
Speaker 1: unpleasant or neutral. And that's exactly what you're talking about.
Speaker 1: That are terror I can't say it right, say it
Speaker 1: for me, then inter reception. Inter Reception is sending us
Speaker 1: these basic feelings of generally pleasant unpleasant, and when they
Speaker 1: get a lot stronger than we start to construct emotion.
Speaker 1: But a lot of what you're saying is we get
Speaker 1: these feelings and then we interpret them. So if I've
Speaker 1: got a stomach ache, I have to try and figure
Speaker 1: out why I have a stomach ache. So I'm gonna
Speaker 1: make some guesses. I'm going to try and figure out
Speaker 1: what it is. I'm going to compare that against previous experiences.
Speaker 1: I'm going to make a prediction that my stomach hurts
Speaker 1: because I'm hungry, or my stomach hurts because every time
Speaker 1: I have to do an interview, I get nervous, or
Speaker 1: whatever the various things are. And I just find that
Speaker 1: fascinating that we are taking very basic bodily sensation and
Speaker 1: those are the cause of a lot of what we
Speaker 1: think and feel. Absolutely So the basic message here is
Speaker 1: that emotions don't happen to you. Your brain makes them.
Speaker 1: Emotions aren't your reactions to the world. It's your brain
Speaker 1: making sense of your body in the world. Your brain
Speaker 1: has to guess at what's going on inside your body,
Speaker 1: just like it has to guess at what's going on
Speaker 1: outside the world. It makes those guesses slightly in advance,
Speaker 1: and then it's either corrected or confirmed those guesses, and
Speaker 1: they become your experience. Those guesses, those concepts. Their job
Speaker 1: really is to make sense of sensation so that you
Speaker 1: know what caused them and what to do about them.
Speaker 1: So it's exactly the way that you described it. You
Speaker 1: have a dull ache in your stomach. That dull ache
Speaker 1: could be an indication that you're getting the flu. It
Speaker 1: could mean that you're hungry, It could mean that you're tired.
Speaker 1: It could mean that you feel disgusted by something. It
Speaker 1: could mean that you feel anxious. It could mean that
Speaker 1: you feel longing for someone. Your brain is able to
Speaker 1: make a prediction using concepts about what that ache in
Speaker 1: your stomach means in this situation that you find yourself in,
Speaker 1: because you've had years and years and years of experience
Speaker 1: where that ache has occurred in different situations, and so
Speaker 1: it's able to use that knowledge in order to make
Speaker 1: a prediction about what is the cause of the ache
Speaker 1: in this situation, and that allows your brain to plan
Speaker 1: your behavior in an efficient, effective way so that you
Speaker 1: solve the ache and get your body systems back into balance.
Speaker 1: I'd like to kind of shift direction here to talk
Speaker 1: about some of the practical applications of this, but before
Speaker 1: I do that, I just want to encourage listeners, like,
Speaker 1: we have really skimmed over a lot of really fascinating concepts,
Speaker 1: a lot of really strong science that most of us
Speaker 1: just aren't exposed to. So if you're interested in this
Speaker 1: sort of thing, I strongly encourage you to get the
Speaker 1: book because we have really really skimmed. The number of
Speaker 1: pages and notes I have is staggering for this. So
Speaker 1: but I do want to turn some of this to like, Okay,
Speaker 1: well what do I do with this? So we're gonna
Speaker 1: kind of cut this part a little bit short, but
Speaker 1: it's all in the book. I encourage people to to
Speaker 1: take a look and kind of talk about what does
Speaker 1: this mean for us? Because emotions for us at the
Speaker 1: end of the day we're very interested in controlling our
Speaker 1: emotions or adjusting our emotions. And I want to start
Speaker 1: with what we were just talking about, which is that
Speaker 1: how much of this is physical? And it a couple
Speaker 1: of things. I think back to to recovery in a
Speaker 1: A and there's a phrase in a halt don't get
Speaker 1: too hungry, angry, lonely, or tired. And certainly two of
Speaker 1: those symptoms, hunger and tired are completely physical symptoms, and
Speaker 1: yet they manifest themselves as you know, emotion, or they
Speaker 1: can manifest themselves as emotion very strongly. I know, like
Speaker 1: if I'm somewhere and I suddenly feel like I really
Speaker 1: want to drink, it's most often that I'm either thirsty
Speaker 1: or hungry. That's exactly right. And the way that I
Speaker 1: would say it, I would elaborate on what you've said
Speaker 1: is is something like this, that every waking moment of
Speaker 1: your life is simultaneously physical and mental. Every experience that
Speaker 1: you have has a mental component and a physical opponent.
Speaker 1: And once you learn that the boundary between the mental
Speaker 1: and physical is porous, you can play around with it.
Speaker 1: You can have some control over how you experience things.
Speaker 1: Sometimes when people talk about the connection between the mind
Speaker 1: and the body. They're talking about it in a mystical
Speaker 1: sort of spiritual way. In the book, I'm talking about
Speaker 1: this in a very biologically real way. I've explained what
Speaker 1: the relationship is biologically between the mind and the body,
Speaker 1: just in the same way that I talk about not
Speaker 1: that um everything is a combination of nature and nurture,
Speaker 1: but that nature can influence nurture, and nurture can change
Speaker 1: nature in a very very concrete, fundamental way. So, for example,
Speaker 1: if it's the case that your brain is trying to
Speaker 1: keep all of your systems in the body imbalance. You know,
Speaker 1: you mentioned body budget, and in the book I talk
Speaker 1: about how you know your brain. You can think about
Speaker 1: your brain sort of like the um financial office of
Speaker 1: a company. So just like in a company, there are
Speaker 1: lots of branches and you have to keep them fiscally sound.
Speaker 1: So a financial office will be shifting around resources to
Speaker 1: keep every everything imbalance and keep all the expenditures and
Speaker 1: the revenues kind of imbalance. This is also what your
Speaker 1: brain does with your body systems. And when your body
Speaker 1: budget is out of balance, you will feel distressed, You'll
Speaker 1: feel uncomfortable if it's unbalanced. For long enough, you'll really
Speaker 1: feel very distressed. This is what stress is actually. Now,
Speaker 1: you may experience this in many ways. Um, you don't
Speaker 1: just experience the disruption of your body budget. You experience
Speaker 1: distress and your brain is making sense of what this
Speaker 1: distress is. And you have control over how your brain
Speaker 1: makes sense of this. So a simple example is many
Speaker 1: people when they're preparing for a test or or a
Speaker 1: podcast or something where they're going to be evaluated it,
Speaker 1: they'll have some body budget disruption and they will feel
Speaker 1: activated jittery. This is actually really normal feeling, and it
Speaker 1: means that your brain is actually preparing your body to
Speaker 1: do something kind of kind of challenging, and it can
Speaker 1: be a good thing. But most of the time people
Speaker 1: experience this is anxiety. That's their automatic way that their
Speaker 1: brain makes sense of this jittery feeling is anxiety. But
Speaker 1: you can teach people to use a borrow a phrase
Speaker 1: from my daughter's karate teacher. Um, you can teach people
Speaker 1: that to experience this as getting your butterflies to fly
Speaker 1: in formation. You know you are preparing for something tough,
Speaker 1: and this is a good This is a good sign
Speaker 1: that you're that your body is preparing for something tough.
Speaker 1: And in fact, this kind of reconceptualization of this jittery
Speaker 1: feeling helps people with test anxiety. Um, it helps them
Speaker 1: pass exams, It improves their scores on standardized tests in
Speaker 1: certain cases, and even allows them to finish college when
Speaker 1: they otherwise would have difficulty doing so. And um, this
Speaker 1: makes a huge difference in their lives. Here's another example.
Speaker 1: People who suffer from chronic pain often become addicted to opiates.
Speaker 1: But if they're trained using mindfulness meditation to decompose that
Speaker 1: painful feeling deconstructed into discomfort and distress, they can learn
Speaker 1: to manage their distress differently without taking the opiates, and
Speaker 1: they can stop their dependence on on opiates. Because opiates, really,
Speaker 1: in terms of pain, what they are, what the opiates
Speaker 1: help you with is the distress part of pain, not
Speaker 1: so much that the actual physical discomfort of pain. Yes,
Speaker 1: and hence the highly addictive nature to something. I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm a former opiate addict, so I'm very familiar with
Speaker 1: the phenomenon. But we've talked about that before on the show.
Speaker 1: This idea of that pain is really a couple of
Speaker 1: different things are happening there. There's the actual physical sensation,
Speaker 1: and then there is everything else that you're calling distress
Speaker 1: that we sort of layer on top of it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we make the distinction of pain versus suffering, right, Like
Speaker 1: pain is kind of inevitable, but the suffering can be.
Speaker 1: You could work with the suffering. So the other main
Speaker 1: thing that this leads to, and it's the thing you
Speaker 1: lead off first with, like, Okay, I want to feel better.
Speaker 1: What do I do is take care of yourself your
Speaker 1: body then, and and like you say, it's kind of boring,
Speaker 1: and it's you know, it's not not very exciting, and
Speaker 1: it's hard, right, It's like, Okay, I gotta eat, right,
Speaker 1: I gotta sleep, I've got to exercise, and and those
Speaker 1: aren't It's much more fun to to read a book
Speaker 1: than it is to do those things. Where it's much
Speaker 1: more fun to to take a pill than to do
Speaker 1: those things. And I've just found out, through years of
Speaker 1: trial and error that those very things for me are
Speaker 1: what moderate my depression more than anything else. If I
Speaker 1: do those things, I'm relatively in good shape. And when
Speaker 1: I stop doing them, you know, I just start to
Speaker 1: fall apart. I mean I just mentally become miserable, absolutely,
Speaker 1: and and in the book, I explain why this is
Speaker 1: the case. If it's the case that your brain is
Speaker 1: managing your body system, so it's managing your body's budget.
Speaker 1: And if your budget becomes unbalanced, you maybe make too
Speaker 1: much of a withdrawal, you start to feel a lot
Speaker 1: of distress. That's actually really hard to manage. It's but
Speaker 1: your brain. It's you're making it harder for your brain
Speaker 1: to manage your emotions. So I know it sounds really
Speaker 1: as you say, it sounds really boring. I sound like
Speaker 1: a mother really rather than a neuroscientist. But the neuroscience
Speaker 1: here is very clear. If you want to control your
Speaker 1: emotions better, if you want to be more of an
Speaker 1: architect of your own experience, then the first thing that
Speaker 1: you must do is you must get enough sleep, you
Speaker 1: must get enough exercise, and you must eat properly in
Speaker 1: a nutritious way. I'm not saying, Look, you know, I
Speaker 1: love French fries and I totally love chocolate. Um, I
Speaker 1: have a heart. I would have a hard time turning
Speaker 1: down a piece of chocolate if somebody offered it to me. Um.
Speaker 1: But so I'm not saying don't have any fun. I'm
Speaker 1: saying that you have to keep your body budget and balance.
Speaker 1: You have to make sure that that you're not running
Speaker 1: a deficit. People ask me, what's the one If there's
Speaker 1: one thing that I could do to control my emotions better,
Speaker 1: what would it be. My answer is, get enough sleep.
Speaker 1: That's just the evidence is just overwhelmingly clear on this point.
Speaker 1: That being said, you know, there are still going to
Speaker 1: be times where the sensations from your body are going
Speaker 1: to make strong affective feelings that are challenging to manage.
Speaker 1: And there are other strategies that that you can that
Speaker 1: you can use that I talk about in the book.
Speaker 1: I think the main thing to realize is that it's
Speaker 1: never going to be the case that you can snap
Speaker 1: your fingers and feel differently. We're just not wired like that.
Speaker 1: That being said, the horizon of control over your emotions
Speaker 1: is much order than you might imagine. There are many
Speaker 1: many more options that you have then you might imagine,
Speaker 1: and the book talks about many of those options. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you've got a line that I love, and you're talking
Speaker 1: about you know, you've got to keep your you've got
Speaker 1: to keep your body budget in line, so to speak.
Speaker 1: And you say, if they aren't and your body budget
Speaker 1: gets out of whack, then you're gonna feel crappy no
Speaker 1: matter what self help tips you follow. It's just a
Speaker 1: matter of which flavor of crap, and that flavor of crap,
Speaker 1: to a certain extent, is what we are predicting. Correct.
Speaker 1: We're getting these sense sensations from our body that say,
Speaker 1: I feel like crap, and then our brain interprets what
Speaker 1: that means absolutely, and it does this very automatically and
Speaker 1: with no effort whatsoever. It's doing it really without your awareness.
Speaker 1: So one thing that you can do to improve the
Speaker 1: control of your emotions is to invest a little bit
Speaker 1: of effort in the moment to cultivate new experiences. If
Speaker 1: it is really the case that your brain is using
Speaker 1: the past to make predictions about the immediate future, which
Speaker 1: become your present experience, then if you cultivate experiences new
Speaker 1: experiences in the present, it's like seating your brain to
Speaker 1: make new concepts or new experiences very automatically in the future.
Speaker 1: So that's one thing that you can do. That's a strategy.
Speaker 1: Another one that you mentioned that I'd like you to
Speaker 1: explain why it's important is that understanding emotion and being
Speaker 1: more granular, being able to describe how we feel in
Speaker 1: more granular terms versus just bad, maybe into being able
Speaker 1: to deconstruct sad or angry and deconstruct even further. You say, helps,
Speaker 1: Why is that useful? Well, you've mentioned a couple of
Speaker 1: things here that are subsumed under the idea of being
Speaker 1: granular or precise about how you feel, so creating very
Speaker 1: precise concepts um as explanations. And here's why this is important.
Speaker 1: And I should say, there's a lot of evidence that
Speaker 1: when you're very precise about your feelings, it's very very beneficial.
Speaker 1: UM people are less aggressive, they drink less, they um
Speaker 1: are better able to manage their behavior. And that's because
Speaker 1: when your brain is making a prediction about what is
Speaker 1: going on in your body, what that's going to feel like,
Speaker 1: and what the causes of those sensations, it's also making
Speaker 1: a prediction about what you need to do about it.
Speaker 1: So if you're if all you can feel is bad,
Speaker 1: what does that tell you about what you should do? Nothing?
Speaker 1: I mean, you don't know really. However, if your brain
Speaker 1: is able to make a concept of sadness or maybe
Speaker 1: even distinguish between sadness and disappointment and dissatisfaction um, and
Speaker 1: that you do something different in each of these cases. Um,
Speaker 1: then you're able to precisely act in a way that
Speaker 1: is going to be most beneficial to you in that situation.
Speaker 1: And sometimes you don't want to construct an emotion out
Speaker 1: of a set of sensation. So when the discomfort that
Speaker 1: you're feeling is because you're hungry, you probably should eat something.
Speaker 1: It's not helpful to you if you construct a different
Speaker 1: experience out of those sensations. If you construct, say, disgust,
Speaker 1: or if you construct anger, or if you construct anxiety,
Speaker 1: those are not those are not helpful guides to your
Speaker 1: behavior because they're not going to reduce. They're not going
Speaker 1: to reduce, let me say it differently, they're not going
Speaker 1: to lead you to do the action that would reduce
Speaker 1: the distress, that would replenish your body budget. And you
Speaker 1: talk about that idea of assigning meaning to physical sensations,
Speaker 1: and it's obviously something we do automatically. I'm curious about
Speaker 1: your thought as someone who who does suffer from depression
Speaker 1: and and does try and treat it a variety of
Speaker 1: different ways. One thing that I've done is i've gotten older,
Speaker 1: is I've just started to treat it sometimes like the
Speaker 1: emotional flu like, I'm just like, this happens to me,
Speaker 1: and I'm not going to cause a big fuss about
Speaker 1: I'm gonna take care of myself like I would if
Speaker 1: I was sick, but I'm not going to reevaluate the
Speaker 1: entire course of my life at this moment. I'm just
Speaker 1: going to assume that something is physically happening to me,
Speaker 1: which to me feels like depression. It feels very physical,
Speaker 1: and I'm just going to do the best I can
Speaker 1: with it. But I'm not going to read too much
Speaker 1: into it or make too much of a fuss about it.
Speaker 1: Does that align with with what you're talking about here?
Speaker 1: One you have intuited. I think one of the most
Speaker 1: important implications of understanding the brain in this way, and
Speaker 1: that is that when you are depressed or when you're anxious,
Speaker 1: that just stress is not helpful when you personalize it.
Speaker 1: I guess it's the way that I would say it
Speaker 1: that you know. For example, my daughter Um suffered from
Speaker 1: depression for some time, and one of the things that
Speaker 1: was most helpful to her was to understand that, you know,
Speaker 1: when you feel fatigued and dragged out and miserable when
Speaker 1: you have the flu. Actually, I did use the flu
Speaker 1: as the example. Um, you don't burate yourself, you don't
Speaker 1: wonder what's wrong with your life, you don't think that
Speaker 1: you're a horrible person. You take yourself to bed, you
Speaker 1: you sleep, you take care of yourself. And I think
Speaker 1: it's very important for people who suffer from mood disorders
Speaker 1: to think in a similar way that the distress that
Speaker 1: you're feeling is it is very much physical. There is
Speaker 1: very much a physical component to every mental you know,
Speaker 1: what's called mental disorder. Every mental disorder that that exists
Speaker 1: has some kind of very basic physical components. So, for example,
Speaker 1: in depression, depression is is many things for many people.
Speaker 1: There's it's an immune disorder for almost everybody. It's also
Speaker 1: a metabolic there's a metabolic aspect to it. Right, There's
Speaker 1: something that's gone awry in your brain's ability to manage
Speaker 1: your body's budget, and as a consequence, you will feel
Speaker 1: tremendous distress and you might feel tremendous fatigue. And it's
Speaker 1: it's very clear that even though psychiatrists and physicians don't
Speaker 1: often think about depression in this way, although that certainly
Speaker 1: researchers are coming to think of it this way. UM,
Speaker 1: it's very clear that that there's a metabolic component, and
Speaker 1: if you can attempt to address that just in the
Speaker 1: way that you would with the flu, you might not
Speaker 1: always be able to avoid the suffering, but you can
Speaker 1: certainly shorten it. Yeah. I've come to start to think
Speaker 1: of it as once I'm kind of in it, the
Speaker 1: best I can do is sort of except that I'm
Speaker 1: there and take care of myself. But I can be
Speaker 1: very preventative. You can't all the things that we've just
Speaker 1: talked about help me to before I slip into it.
Speaker 1: And once I'm kind of into it is kind of
Speaker 1: when I adopt that, like, all right, I'm gonna take
Speaker 1: care of myself the best I can, and I'm just
Speaker 1: going to accept that this is going to be here
Speaker 1: and also remind myself over and over like it's going
Speaker 1: to pass. Yeah. I think that, you know, most of
Speaker 1: us can be very compassionate with ourselves when we catch
Speaker 1: the cold, catch a cold, or catch the flu. UM,
Speaker 1: We're not so compassionate with ourselves when we feel depressed,
Speaker 1: when we feel anxious, when we feel apathy, UM, when
Speaker 1: we feel super angry about something. UM. Those are the
Speaker 1: moments when our distress becomes very personal. You know, it
Speaker 1: becomes about us and UM, you know, in much the
Speaker 1: same way that a virus doesn't really care who you are.
Speaker 1: All it really cares is that you have you know,
Speaker 1: a good, you know, wet set of lungs. UM. Your
Speaker 1: body's budget doesn't really care who you are. UM, it
Speaker 1: really cares a lot about whether it's getting what it needs.
Speaker 1: UM in a physical sense. Well, Lisa, thank you so much.
Speaker 1: We are at the end of time, but I could
Speaker 1: probably ask you a thousand more questions, and maybe we
Speaker 1: will another time. But I love the book. Again. All
Speaker 1: encouraged readers will have links in the show notes and
Speaker 1: all that. This book is definitely worth a read. It's
Speaker 1: it's very fascinating. It's uh, it's not easy going in
Speaker 1: certain places, but the analogies you make make it so
Speaker 1: much easier to understand some of the things. You've got
Speaker 1: lots of great analogies and and I just found it
Speaker 1: very stimulating. And I found it very nice for me
Speaker 1: to get some scientific validation of, like you said, a
Speaker 1: lot of the things I think I've sort of intuited
Speaker 1: or I've been taught through recovery or Buddhism or different areas.
Speaker 1: You know, a lot of those things are sort of
Speaker 1: there's a reason now why those things work. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: thank you so much. And I'll just point out that
Speaker 1: I also on my website I have videos that explain
Speaker 1: some of the more scientifically complex ideas. I also have
Speaker 1: blog posts that try hard to handle some of those
Speaker 1: ideas as well. So, um, there are resources available to people,
Speaker 1: and also people can just email me if they have
Speaker 1: questions to ye and like I said, we'll have links
Speaker 1: to your book, well, have links to your website all
Speaker 1: that stuff. So thank you so much, Lisa, I really
Speaker 1: enjoyed the conversation. Oh it's my pleasure. Thank you so much.
Speaker 1: All right, take care. Thanks. If what you just heard
Speaker 1: was helpful to you, please consider making a donation to
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