Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - The Truth About Modern Anxiety, A Surprising Way To Find Joy and Meaning & How To Transform Your Relationships with Alain de Botton #495

Episode Date: November 20, 2024

Have you ever wondered why, despite all our modern comforts, so many of us still struggle with unhappiness and anxiety? What if a more fulfilling life isn't about constant positivity but rather a form of ‘cheerful pessimism’?   Today's guest is Alain de Botton. Alain is the founder of The School of Life, a hugely popular education and wellness organisation that provides guidance on how to achieve happiness and fulfilment. He is also an internationally renowned philosopher and the author of multiple books including his very latest: A Therapeutic Journey: Lessons From The School of Life.   In this conversation, we delve deep into the complexities of modern life and the importance of love, empathy and tolerance in addressing societal problems. Alain introduces the concept of ‘attuned care’ in childhood and explains why a lack of it can show up in our adult behaviours and relationships.   Alain also explains a concept that he calls ‘cheerful pessimism’ which challenges what he describes as the modern obsession with happiness and introduces the idea that a more melancholic outlook to life, might actually lead to greater fulfilment.   We also discuss the value of inner reflection, the truth about modern anxiety and the importance of effective communication. Throughout this conversation, Alain shares practical tools that we can immediately apply into our lives – such as specific journaling exercises, ‘the 2 chair’ technique he has borrowed from Gestalt therapy and simple strategies to help us become better listeners and more effective communicators.   This conversation is an invitation to reassess what truly matters in life. Alain’s message of hope and understanding about the shared human experience of suffering and complexity is both comforting and inspiring and his thoughtful and practical strategies offer a roadmap for anyone seeking a more authentic and meaningful life.   Support the podcast and enjoy Ad-Free episodes. Try FREE for 7 days on Apple Podcasts https://apple.co/feelbetterlivemore. For other podcast platforms go to https://fblm.supercast.com.   Thanks to our sponsors: https://drinkag1.com/livemore https://www.essilor.com https://calm.com/livemore https://airbnb.co.uk/host   Show notes https://drchatterjee.com/495   DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or qualified healthcare provider. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website. 

Many of the things that go wrong in people's lives are not external. They are people behaving in ways that are contrary to their own interests, for reasons that they don't really understand, but that often have something to do with their past. Hey guys, how you doing? Hope you're having a good week so far. My name is Dr. Rangan Chatterjee, and this is my podcast, Feel Better, Live More.

Chatterjee, and this is my podcast, Feel Better, Live More. Have you ever wondered why, despite all of our modern comforts, so many of us still struggle with unhappiness and anxiety? Well, what if a more fulfilling life isn't about constant positivity, but rather a form of cheerful pessimism? Today's guest is Alain de Botton. Alain is the founder of the School of Life, a hugely popular education and wellness organisation that provides guidance on how to achieve happiness and fulfilment. He's also an internationally renowned philosopher and the author of multiple books, including his very latest, A Therapeutic Journey, Lessons from the School of Life. In our conversation, we delve deep into the complexities of modern life and the importance of love, empathy and tolerance in addressing societal problems. in addressing societal problems.

Allat introduces the concept of attuned care in childhood and explains why a lack of it can show up in our adult behaviours and relationships. He also explains a concept that he calls cheerful pessimism, which challenges what he describes as the modern obsession with happiness and introduces the idea that a more melancholic outlook to life might actually lead to greater fulfillment. We also discuss the value of inner reflection, the truth about modern anxiety, and the importance of effective communication. And throughout this conversation, Alan shares a huge amount of practical tools that we can immediately apply into our lives. From specific journaling exercises, to the two chair technique that he has borrowed from Gestalt therapy,

to simple strategies to help us become better listeners and more effective communicators. This conversation is an invitation to reassess what truly matters in life. Alain's message of hope and understanding about the shared human experience of suffering and complexity is both comforting and inspiring. And his thoughtful and practical strategies

offer a roadmap for anyone seeking a more authentic and meaningful life. I've heard you say that if we look around us, a lot of the problems in society individually and collectively can be boiled down to the fact that we have a shortfall of love. What does that mean? Well, you know, the word love is one that we tend to associate nowadays strictly with romantic love, sexual love. But, you know, religions, especially philosophies, have tended to operate with a broader conception of love, which I think is really useful.

It's good to go back to it. And really what's meant, I think, is a mixture of tolerance, forgiveness, empathy, a willingness to enter into the mindset of people precisely who do not appeal to you, who might appall you, and to try and see what might make them work. These are all attitudes that belong to love. I think we're very interested nowadays in justice, in righteousness, in being correct, in doing the right thing. But I think love is a more expansive emotion. Love, you know, goes beyond mere justice. It goes beyond merely an eye for an eye. It looks at the attenuating circumstances that might operate beneath behaviour that we personally might not like, etc. So it's really the wellspring of a more tolerant society and families and couples as well.

society and families and couples as well. Given what you just said and given the state of the world that many people come across, do you think, look, the state of people's mental wellbeing is not fantastic these days, certainly in a country like the UK. And I'm interested by this idea that a lack of love may be at the root cause of us feeling lost, us feeling unhappy, us having addictions. And when you talk about love and you talk about this variety of different emotions and, I guess, actions, you could say, you know, being curious is an action, being empathetic is an action. Are we going the wrong way in society? Look, I think it's extremely difficult because it's implausible that so much should depend on this idea of love. It's in a way an insult to some of our higher faculties, our more rational faculties. We think, why do we bother with this? You see, particularly in the upbringing of children. I mean, let's remember that, you know,

when we're talking about love and its importance, really the key area where this operates and is at its sort of maximal, you know, critical value is in relation to the upbringing of children. And I think we can say that anyone who broadly feels well in themselves, who is able to trust, who is able to have faith in the future, who is able to tolerate themselves, not just their successes, but that's difficult too sometimes, but also their failures. We can say that this person will somewhere in the background have been the recipient of love, that somewhere in their upbringing they will have loved. Just as we can be absolutely sure that if someone is ruthless, if someone is intolerant, if someone is unable to forgive, if someone is determined to feel that it's always somebody else's fault. All of these are symptoms,

similarly, of a shortfall of love somewhere along the way. That doesn't ally the issue of responsibility. I mean, one can be responsible and have been the victim of a shortfall of love. So, you know, some people get hung up on this. So I'm not excusing behaviour, but we can say, I think, that an early experience of love is not merely pleasant, it is life-giving. John Bowlby, the inventor of, the discoverer, together with Mary Ainsworth, of attachment theory, famously said in one of his books that love was to be considered, along with vitamins, one of the great discoveries of the 20th century in terms of, you know, what is essential for good human development. And it is as essential as vitamins. In other words, that we will suffer

from rickets and other things, mental rickets, as it were, if we don't get enough of it. Now, we might say, well, what do we mean by love, you know, in childhood? And to just, in on a phrase, attuned care. In other words, to love a child is to allow them for periods to be the centre of their own world and to get down to their level and see the world through their eyes. Many parents think they're loving but can't really do this. They can't enter imaginatively into somebody else's experience because no one did it for them. So they'll constantly talk over a child, minimise a child's feelings. The child will come back from school going, I hate the teacher. I want to burn down the school. And the parent will say, don't be so silly. Really what

they should do is be thinking, okay, something's going on for the child. Let me try and listen. Obviously, they're not going to burn down the school, so let's not panic. But they're trying to express some anger, some rage, some disappointment, some humiliation. Something's happened. And the role is to try and listen. So, you know, we're very bad at listening because no one listens to us. So we repeat, you know, we do to others what unfortunately we suffered from at the hands of others. And so there is a shortfall of love in the area of upbringing. And as I say, all mental illness, you know, if you study mental illness, even, you know, severe mental illness, always you come back to the same thing. Someone did not deliver attuned care or love to this person.

love to this person. Yeah. I really love that viewpoint. I've been thinking over the last couple of years that I think everything in life ultimately comes down to the energy of love or the energy of fear. And I'm yet to find a situation where that doesn't hold true. Like if you go all the way up to the root, it's either love or fear. And, you know, as a doctor, one of the things I've had to deal with or try and help patients manage for a number of years is how do you help them change their behaviors? If we accept that much of what afflicts us these days is in some way related to our collective modern lifestyles, not implying blame in any way, but the way we are collectively living. I figured out, well, a huge part of my role then is to see if I can connect with that patient and help them understand how they can start to change those behaviors. And I used to think, Alan, that knowledge was enough, but it isn't.

That's right. I think this is one of the besetting sins of our age, that we operate with a model, essentially, that knowledge will solve the main problems. It's not. I believe that it's habit. We have to construct habits, because essentially we're creatures of emotion emotion and emotions are governed by habits, not by information.

What do you mean emotions are governed by habits? Well, okay. So the standard view is, you know, let's say somebody drinks too much or gets angry too much. So the modern view, I mean, I'm caricaturing it deliberately. The modern view is let's try and show this person why this doesn't make sense, why it's counterproductive. And then, once they know, once the information has been divulged to them, they will stop. in honouring their insights. Because most of the time, we're stuck in what the ancient Greeks called situations of akrasia. Akrasia is translated as weakness of will from the ancient Greek. And the Greeks were fascinated by how often we know, but we don't do what we know. And the reason, they thought, is we suffer from a weakness of will. Now, that's slightly an old-fashioned idea, but it's onto something. Now, the institutions that used to know all about our

weakness of will, bear with me, sounds slightly strange, are religions. Religions are giant machines designed to help people to cope with the weakness of their impulses to do what they think is right, but lose sight of at critical moments. Now, you don't need to believe in religion or have any interest in religion to take something from this. You see, if you look at how religions operate, they're machines for repeating things. You look at Islam, you're praying multiple times a day. If you look at Judaism, you are rereading the Torah many times a year. You're just going back across a text. If you look at Christianity, you are using things like architecture, music, art, fashion, design, the visual realm to instill a message which might drain away if you merely put it in an intellectual way. So religions are alive to the kind of

sensory nature of human beings. We take in information not just in a cold, rational way, but through our senses. Now, the people who understand this best nowadays are advertisers. The power of a message is hugely influenced by how beguiling it is, how seductive it's been made to be. And if you look at society, the merchants of seduction are working for chocolate manufacturers and trainer manufacturers, etc. Space for chocolate and trainers, maybe. But the philosophers, the psychotherapists, etc., they're operating in a stone age. Their capacity for messaging is, you know, pathetic, lamentable compared to, you know, think of, I don't know, the philosophy department at London University. You know, you've got some people there who reach

an audience of hundreds, whereas their message might be, you know, worthy of millions, billions even. So we've got this disjuncture because the modern world has forgotten the debt that the senses and more broadly, our emotional functioning, that this needs to be integrated within any intellectual messaging. Yeah. As you were talking there, I was thinking of Nike's big logo, Just Do It. And they're not even selling you how technically good their shoe may or may not be. They're selling an emotion. Who am I going to be when I put on my Nike? Apple do the same thing, right? They're not telling you

necessarily what it is. It's technical spec and it's not necessarily giving you the knowledge. It's telling you how you're going to feel or how you think you're going to feel when you acquire that. It's seducing you through your senses, basically. And, you know, at different points in history, people have understood this. I mean, think of the phenomenon known as the Renaissance. So in Italy, starting in the 14th century, there was an incredible flowering of the arts and architecture. Now, the reason for this is that a group of people rediscovered Plato. And Plato's great insight is, if you are trying to convince people of wisdom, you may need to lean on beauty. That beauty should be in the service of wisdom. Now, by beauty, I mean everything from, you know, the Apple presentation, the Nike presentation, to, you know, more standard paintings in a museum.

But what happened in Italy was that the best artists and the best craftspeople and the best architects were employed in the name of the best ideas. So you had a conjunction of great ideas and the great selling of those ideas. So if you look at the art of Botticelli or the craftsmanship of Bellini, all of these people are working in the name of an ideology that they want to hit you in the heart with. You know, they don't just want to reach your brain. They want to hit your heart because they know that only if it hits your heart are you going to take notice of it. And we operate in the modern world with a strict separation. There are the beauty sellers in one area. You know, we even talk of the beauty industry or the fashion industry.

And then we talk of the intellectual industry, the psychotherapy industry, whatever. It used to be one at the best moments. Think of Zen Buddhists in Japan. Think of the unbelievable monasteries of Kyoto, say. What's going on there? There's a conjunction of, if you go to Kyoto, fantastic gardens. So gardeners are being asked to support a philosophy of life of Buddhism. So Buddhism and gardening comes together. In the 16th

century, Buddhism and gardening comes together. What a charming idea. Nowadays, you think gardeners are in one corner, they do the pretty gardening. And then, you know, the thinkers are in another corner. No, put them together. Try and make a garden that is simultaneously a realm of ideas and a beautiful spectacle. Because if you do that, it's going to hit the mind and the soul. Okay, so if philosophy and ideas need better marketing and better PR, and if we follow that thread and say that many people these days are struggling with their mental well-being, you write a lot about this, your new book, A Therapeutic Journey, where you cover this in quite a beautiful way. What are some of the ideas that we need to emotionally get across to people for them to adequately connect and take steps to start improving

their mental well-being? I think one of the things we learn is it can't just be an individual choice. We need to have collective systems. We need to have rituals. We need to have institutions that embed certain disciplines. We were talking just before we began about smartphones and their role. If you leave an individual to make all their choices, it's placing an enormous burden on them to be the sole, you know, actor who controls themselves. You know, self-control is extremely hard. So we need a bit of help at a societal level. We need disincentives and incentives. We're terribly worried collectively about what gets called the nanny state or a dictatorial state. The idea has been for at least 300 years that it's always better to increase individual freedom. The more freedom everybody has, the better their choices will be. The more freedom everybody has, the better their choices will be. And this is one of those tricky ideas, because at a certain point, an increase in freedom does not necessarily lead to an increase in good choices. It's paralyzing. But of course, we are all far closer to the state of children than we like to think. So we know that to allow a six-year-old to control its diet is not really kind to the

six-year-old. That if you say to the child, what do you want to eat? The child will not necessarily come up with the best answers. Now we think, oh, that's because that's a child. And once you're post-18, that no longer applies. I'm not so sure. I think we all know from our own experience that, look, the world wouldn't be as complicated as it was if we were the rational actors we keep assuming we are. And it's in the interests of chocolate manufacturers and others to exaggerate our level of rational control, because it's then also in their interest that we lose control. it's then also in their interest that we lose control.

You brought up religion. Is it a coincidence, do you think, that as many societies have become less religious and more secular, that mental and physical well-being, frankly, have started to decline? Is there a relationship there? I think we need to be careful. I'm a secular person, so I don't believe that the answer is to, as it were, go back to religion. But I do think there are a huge number of lessons to be learned from how religions function, and that these lessons need to be absorbed by modern society. The great tragedy has been that, you know, in the 19th century, when en masse people stopped believing in religion, it was a really shortfall in Europe and in other, you know, whenever a country develops economically, there tends to be a decline in religiosity, apart from in America. But that tends to be the pattern. happen was that as people became secular, they decided, because I no longer believe in God, everything associated with the religious way of life is now nonsense. So gathering once a week

to have a meal with strangers, which used to be a feature of many religions, then goes out the window. Why would you need to do that? Because God is dead. Well, there might be very strong reasons. Or why might we need to rehearse certain lessons continually? It might be the wrong lessons if you're no longer religious, but the idea of rehearsal might be very important. The idea of festivals, the idea of special days that are marked out in the calendar to mark certain psychological evolutions. The idea, as I say, of using buildings and making very special buildings that ennoble and lend importance to particular emotions. You know, people often, secular people often go to cathedrals, mosques, temples, etc. And they're moved, right? They go,

God, it's so beautiful. Why don't we do stuff like this? And the reason why we don't do stuff like this is because we're very confused about what a building should be. We've got a material view of a building. So, you know, we understand that there's a gym and we understand that there's a, you know, a shop and we understand there's a school. But what we don't understand is a building, you know, what is, let's say, a mosque or a temple or a church, a cathedral, other than, in some cases, a building designed to make the person in it feel small within a wider context, which is awe-inspiring, transcendental, and reminds the person of their small scale in the wider scheme of the universe. Not in order to humiliate or crush

them, but in order to bring peace to them, because they see themselves as existing within a broader context. Now, if you said to an architect, please go and do that for me. Well, nowadays, most architects would be extremely puzzled. They just go, I don't know what this is. But with sufficient imagination, we can go, that would be a fascinating mission for a building. A building to inspire feelings of transcendence. Let's go for it. You know, we've got buildings for everything else. Why not that? In other words, buildings whose specific purpose, or, you know, other buildings. If you take, again, certain monastic buildings, what are they other than machines to try and foster a feeling of community? Here is the main dining room. It's got a long table. You will eat here. You will look at

the ceiling. It will look noble and interesting, et cetera. Your fellow human beings will seem like people you want to interact with. These are missions that architecture could fulfill, but they're really psychological missions. Yeah. This whole relationship between, I guess, religious societies and well-being is fascinating. I agree it's not necessarily that we need to go back. And I think the research, or some of the research suggests that it's not religious people who necessarily do better. It's people who adopt religious practices, which kind of makes sense. You know, you gather together, you do things. You know,

the Jewish faith, they have a Sabbath once a week, you know, we're struggling with stress, overload, burnout. Well, inbuilt into their religion is one day where you stop. And obviously it depends on how strictly you follow. But there's a lot of these practices that are incredibly beneficial that we have lost. I think either in this book or one of your videos I was watching yesterday, you said that actually many societies now

are living in a world where there is nothing at its centre that is non-human. That really speaks to what you just said, right? I think that is a major source of stress and difficulty. And that's why, you know, very anecdotally, people will say, the things I love are nature, my dog, and my child. Now, let's look at nature, dogs, and children. They've got one thing in common. They de-center the adult human. They recalibrate the importance of adult, purposeful life as we define it in the modern world. Your dog doesn't care if you were promoted. Your child's not interested in, you know, if you've just made it to the C-suite. They care about other things. Can you throw a ball? Are you into, have you got any jokes? Are you fun to be around?

Are you around? Are you around? Are you around? Are you around? Are you nice? Are you nice? Similarly, when you go out into nature, you know, the forest isn't interested in your recent reversal. The cliff face doesn't care that, you know, you didn't, you know, get what you wanted in the office promotional race. There is a kind of impassivity to human destiny in the natural world, which it could look like it's going to humiliate us. Like, you know, look, there are many ways of feeling small. If you go to a grand hotel and you say, you know, I'd like a cup of tea, you may be made to, in inverted commas, feel small by the people at the desk.

And no one likes that. And we think, you know, my ego has not been respected. So constantly, the human ego is looking to be respected by other human egos. And this is a terrible sort of, you know, zero-sum game in which everybody is competing for a limited amount of attention for the recognition of their own self. The wonderful thing about nature is that it takes us out of that and introduces us to an older, grander, slower, different dimension, which rather than crushing us, actually helps us. We are longing to be made to feel small and insignificant. It's delightful to be made to feel insignificant because what we suffer from is our foiled desire for significance in a world which will never be able to accord everyone the significance that they crave.

It will only be accorded a very narrow elite, and even them, it will not satisfy them. You know, Alan, when I first started to really think about where religious teachings may have been profoundly useful is, I don't know, maybe a decade ago, I was in my GP surgery at the time and there was a young couple who came in. I don't think I'd seen them before, but essentially their baby had died very, very young. I can't remember even a month. It was one of those things that, you know, is incredibly tragic tragic upsetting and and i didn't have as much life experience as i have today and you know being able to sit with people who've gone through that and not bring your own baggage in it's not that easy you know you mentioned about the skill of

listening but now to just sit there and be present it is it's something that i think we can all learn to get better at but one thing I remember them saying to me, they were of the Islamic faith, and they said something to the effect of, this is Allah's will. And I remember hearing it, and I couldn't stop thinking about that for the next few weeks, thinking, wow, they seemed to be able to cope better with some of the tragic circumstances that happen in

life because of this strong belief that there was a greater reason. Now, I know some people may think that's just ridiculous. There's no greater reason. That's a tragedy. I get all that. I'm not here to say how someone should or shouldn't think. I'm saying that for that couple, I am convinced that having that belief in something much bigger than them helped them cope with something that frankly would break so many of us. And I think, you know, for people who are not religious, we have an associated concept, which is the idea of necessity, that there are things that human beings cannot alter. The modern world was based on the idea that the human mind can manipulate nature and can turn necessity into opportunity. And this has worked brilliantly in so many areas. We can now do so much that we couldn't do before.

The problem is there are still many areas that we don't control. And so it's very hard to live in a society where we're constantly introduced to amazing things we can control, and then also butting up against many things that we can't control and calibrating that. You know, this is the problem of medicine. The problem of medicine is that every day doctors do miraculous interventions, or not miraculous, but amazing interventions that save lives. But also every day, they have to tell people that they can't help them. And the collective view of medicine, as you will know, is that medicine can do everything. That's what we've bought into collectively, which is why the death

sentence, and let's remember, we are all under a death sentence. We're all dying just slightly faster or slightly more slowly, but we are all dying right now. And this is not something that we like to keep in view. When people say, you know, death has become a bit of a taboo. Well, of course it has, but it's not just death that's become a taboo. It's the inability to change our destiny that's become a taboo. We are convinced that we must be able to change our destiny because we have been so able to do so in some areas. And so the trick is to have sufficient number of reminders of some things that we cannot change. And this is why death traditionally has been so important. I mean, you know, a traditional piece of interior decoration in the Middle Ages,

if you were a well-to-do person on your desk, you would put a skull. And the idea of a skull is not that it teaches you that nothing has any purpose and everything's hopeless. Rather, it teaches you that you are operating within a world of necessity. And the chief one of which is time. You do not control the amount of time you have. And your time will almost certainly outstrip, understrip the fantasies and the power of your own imagination to imagine what you would like to do. You will run out of time. We will all run out of time. Again, the modern world is not so happy to tell us this. But this could all sound very grim, but, you know, I noticed you smiling a little bit.

This could all sound very grim, but, you know, I noticed you smiling a little bit. Just taking a quick break to give a shout out to AG1, one of the sponsors of today's show. Now, if you're looking for something at this time of year to kickstart your health, I'd highly recommend that you consider AG1. AG1 has been in my own life for over five years now. It's a science-driven daily health drink with over 70 essential nutrients to support your overall health. It contains vitamin C and zinc, which helps support a healthy immune system, something that is really important, especially at this time of year. It also contains prebiotics and digestive enzymes that help support your gut

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The reason why we laugh is we think, thank goodness. Yes, I am going to die. Also, you know, if you tell people, for example, you know, they say, I'm not so happy. And you go, well, welcome to misery. I mean, one of my favourite quotes is by the Stoic philosopher Seneca. He says, what need is there to weep over parts of life? He says, the whole of it calls for tears. Dark idea. But it's cheering. It's cheering because a lot of what makes us miserable is not the darkness. It's the hope. It's the hope that kills us. Whereas if somebody says, you know, you're going to get married. I mean, think of the average marriage ceremony. At the School of Life, this organization that I run, we wrote a marriage service. We rewrote the marriage

service. And we did it. We did it in order to help marrying couples. Many people have now been married with our retooled marriage service. And basically, it's a very depressing document that is at the same time funny and really helpful. Because it basically says, you know, no one will marry someone who they won't at some point in the marriage feel is the cause of the ruin of their life. That at some point, this person that you're marrying, you will look at them and you will think, you have destroyed my life. And at that moment, you will sort of be right because no one comes into close proximity with another person without causing them serious difficulty. You can be the most well-intentioned person, but to live in close proximity to another human being is to introduce them to a lot of

complexities. If you really love somebody, you probably shouldn't marry them. Let them be free. Because if you really want the best for them, don't go too near them because you'll bring trouble into their life. Let somebody else do that. So these are some of the dark truths that our society, be it in love, in work, notion of work-life balance. We torture ourselves. No life is going to be able to achieve balance. Everything worth doing will unbalance your life. Speak to a parent who's a devoted parent. Can you have work-life balance? Of course you can't. Speak to somebody who really cares about their career. You've got work-life balance? Of course

you can't. Everything worth doing unbalances your life. It's not a truth that we want to take on board. So sentimentality is, you know, the great error of our times. One of the things I wanted to explore with you today was pessimism versus optimism. And before we get there, though, can we, you know, you write a lot about mental well-being. You've helped so many people with their mental well-being. I'd love you to sort of try and explain what mental well-being is, or how do you see it? And there's this just beautiful section at the start of A Therapeutic Journey where you kind of define what is a mind in a healthy state, which I find really interesting because a lot of

the time we don't really talk about a healthy mind. We just talk about these are the things that go wrong. But what is it we might be searching for or aspiring for when it comes to our minds? It's a very good point. We talk so much about mental illness without quite knowing what it is, and we're alluding, by definition, to mental health without quite focusing on it. So let's start with one thing, quite focusing on it. So let's start with one thing, compartmentalization. To compartmentalize actually belongs to health. If you look at people who are in severe mental distress, certain issues have run riot through their mind. They are unable to put a stop to certain concerns. So they'll go, I've done something wrong at work. And you go,

fine, maybe, but maybe we can put it right. Or it's Saturday evening, so we don't need to think about it till Monday, etc. That person will be unable to. The worry will cascade through every area of their life. It's a set of dominoes. They won't be able to put a pause between their thoughts. So the ability to make compartments of worries, to go, that belongs in one area. I'm not going to let it infect every area. That's a feature of health. It's a gift of health, if you like.

And there are others. I mean, the capacity to resist catastrophic thinking, the ability to go, you know, there are many steps between where I am now and the catastrophe that I can imagine. For a mind under pressure, there is no gap. You are immediately... An ambiguous look from someone is automatically a sign that they've become your sworn enemy. A missing email, an ambiguous, uncertain situation is automatically proof of the worst scenario. So that inability to tolerate ambiguity and to give ambiguity, you know, it's due. So these are all ways in which minds understand. I sometimes think also of it as an idea of speed, that a mind under pressure doesn't know how to slow down. Everything is happening extremely

fast. And thoughts that we all have when we're mentally well, you know, if you look at the thoughts of a person under mental strain and the thoughts of a so-called normal person, the thoughts are often quite similar. It's the speed at which they're reverberating. thoughts are often quite similar. It's the speed at which they're reverberating. It's the inability to control them that marks out the mind that's under stress. For example, a person under mental stress will say, I'm the worst person in the world. Now, many of us have moments where we think, no, I'm not great. I'm not so happy with what I did. The question is, at what velocity is that thought reverberating through the mind? And a mind under pressure, there is no limit. It is going to take you all the way, you know, to the most tragic ends. That idea of compartmentalization is

fascinating. I've never really thought about mental well-being through that lens before. And I guess we all hear these things that go to our own life and our own relationships. And I guess I would say that I am pretty good at compartmentalizing. In fact, I would submit that maybe my wife would say, how can you just compartmentalize and like, you know, that issue not affect you here? Or for example, again, we're not saying good or bad, just different. And I think it really also speaks to this idea you brought up right at the start, when we're talking about love, about the importance of empathy and compassion. This idea that just because we might find compartmentalizing easy and straightforward, not everyone does. And so I guess the follow-on question is,

if you don't have that ability, yet that is one of the characteristics of a healthy mind, is it something that you can learn and get better at? I mean, there are so many things that we can learn and get better at. And of course, the physical health is the model here, but we don't pay enough attention to it. All of us reach adulthood through a long process of education, not just formal education, schools, government buildings, et cetera, but education at home. We develop certain attitudes. We haven't noticed that we've developed them. You know, the acquisition of an emotional temperament follows the same model as language. Do you remember when you learned English? No, you know, we don't remember. We were just, we were sitting in the kitchen, we were doing, you know, we were doing our drawings or doing

handstands, et cetera, and we were hearing words and we were learning them. None of us can remember when we learned language, and yet we learned it because we now speak it. Now, the same is true for our emotional functioning. We learn certain things about, you know, how much panic is in order, how much we should trust, what the world is, what men and women are, etc. We learned as it were an emotional language. And we did it in the same way as we learned the more grammatical language without knowing it. It just happened all around us. You'll also learn, this is a chilling thing, how long does it take to learn a new language? You know, if you set out to learn as an english speaker how long how long are you going to need to do it to speak it well

you probably need to practice six hours a week something like that you know more for over four five years something like that you know and then you'll be you won't be fluent but you know you'll be just about getting there right very very difficult but that gives us actually though it's you know rather challenging as a piece of information, it gives us a measure of what we might need to do to change some of our impulses. So if we're prone to lose our tempers, well, how long might it take to learn greater equanimity in the face of challenges? Well, it might take four years. Sometimes people say things like, you know, because psychotherapy has huge, this book is partly about psychotherapy.

Psychotherapy has huge prestige in the modern world. When people are unwell, they go, you know, often people suggest therapy, therapists. But very often, you know, it's on a fairly pasty scale. People go, oh, okay, so I'll go and have six sessions of therapy and then I'll solve my anger problem or I'll get my relationship better. You want to go, okay, you know those muscles you're trying to build up. How much time are you giving that? Oh, well, I'm doing it three times a week. Okay. And how long are you doing it? Four or five years. Okay. All right. Good starting point. Because that gives us a sense of how long we might need to work at it. So can we change our emotional habits? Yes. Is it going to be any

easier than building up our muscles or our fluency in Korean? No. You mentioned a phrase there, change our impulses. And it really stood out to me because I believe that a lot of people will go, what do you mean change our impulses? Our impulses are just things that are our automatic responses to things. But you've just said change our impulses. Now, that are our automatic responses to things. But you've just said change our impulses. Now, I completely agree that you can change what you consider your default response to be, but it does take time and it takes effort and it takes practice and it takes a reminder. Oh, yeah, I wanted to respond like this, but I fell back into my old patterns. Why

was that? Oh, you know, next time, perhaps, I can choose a different response. So can you just sort of unpick that term, change your impulse? I mean, you know, philosophers have been interested in this since, you know, since the start. If you look at ancient Rome, ancient Roman philosophers were really interested in anger and the toll that anger takes, because they could see that anger leads to beheadings, furies, emperors like Nero and Caligula, etc. So this wasn't just a sort of cosmetic problem. Getting people to calm down was a key priority of philosophy. If you look at the Stoic philosophers, they do a fascinating analysis of anger. Their argument is that behind every angry outburst lies, rather surprisingly,

optimism. We may think of angry people as rather pessimistic, dark people who are losing their temper, but no. Their view was, Stoic philosophy, is that scratch the surface of any angry person and you will find a demented optimist. Take rain. Imagine we're recording in the UK. It's raining again today. I don't think anybody's angry about the rain. And the reason is that it rains almost every day in this country. So you would not get angry about rain because it's – now, are you happy about the rain?

No. Almost everybody in England is unhappy about the rain, but no one gets angry about rain because it's, now, are you happy about the rain? No, almost everybody in England is unhappy about the rain, but no one gets angry about the rain. Now, the Stoic philosophers would be clapping at this point. They'd be really excited about this because this shows exactly where they're trying to get us to across a range of areas. It's not that the sun will always shine, but there are greater and worse, you know, better and worse responses to reality. And what the Stoic philosophers are trying to get us to do is meet reality without rage, because we've got a richer sense of what reality is actually made of. So they counsel a fascinating exercise called in Latin a premeditatio, a premeditation. And Stoic philosophers recommend

that every morning before you get up, you should lie in bed and premeditate. In other words, look ahead at the whole day that you're going to face and you should tell yourself. And they wrote some beautiful meditations on what you should tell yourself. And there's one from Seneca, where he basically says, expect everything, be certain of nothing. And in the day, you may witness everything from, you know, your plans being foiled, your enemies gossiping about you, your reputation destroyed, all the way to you and your children dying. Now, this is the worst, you know, you might think, oh my goodness,

this guy's advocating that you should think every day that you and your children might die, and their reputation might blow up, and you might lose all your money. You know, that's cheerful. Well, these guys think, and I don't think they're entirely wrong, and they may be very right, in fact, that this kind of scoping of the darkest possibilities belongs to health and belongs to calm, because it widens our sense of possibility. It also, incidentally, makes us a huge lot more grateful, because if these things don't happen, then we'll be focused on the upside. Every day's a great day, because that didn't happen. Because that didn't happen. And I don't think this is a delusion. I mean, we live extremely,

as you know, prone to accident, all of us. And the number one thing is, we don't expect it. I mean, who has a car crash thinking, oh, today I might've had a car crash. We don't, we don't expect this. Is it pessimism v optimism, or is it more the difference between reality and expectation? And the rain is really interesting because I, you know, like everyone here, like if you're going to get disappointed and angry,

not disappointed, you can be disappointed. If you're going to get disappointed and angry, you can be disappointed, if you're going to get angry every time it rains, you're going to struggle living in the UK. Right. But if you expect every day to be sunny and you wake up and it's raining, that's where the disappointment is, isn't it? Because you thought it was going to be sunny. That's where the disappointment is, isn't it? Because you thought it was going to be sunny. I believe I'm an optimist, but I don't think optimism means that I'm optimistic that tomorrow it's going to be really, really sunny. When I think of what being an optimist means for me, it's really this belief that most, if not all, situations in life are neutral. And really the optimist in me is that I get to put the story on that situation and the story I choose to put on it will ultimately

determine its outcome on me. I didn't used to have that mindset. It's something that has intentionally been cultivated. And yeah, so for me, that's an optimistic mindset, but it's based on a realistic expectation. Does that make sense? Yes. I mean, absolutely. You know, one can be, I mean, the thing we're not mentioning here, but it's coming up in your face, is humour. I think that the collision between hope and reality is always the moment when there is possibility of a smile. There's also a possibility of a tear. But if we can make it, angle it towards smiling. I mean, look, the area where people experience, in very commas, reign most regularly is their relationships. I mean, if we're talking about an area of hope,

we live in a romantic age that promises people that they will all find a soul mate who will understand them perfectly, who will completely combine a sexual existence and a psychologically rich existence. This will go on throughout a lifetime and that you'll know from the first moment, et cetera. Now, these expectations are responsible for more unhappiness than almost any other feature of the modern world. Because people constantly feel that they have done personally something wrong, rather than their existing within an ideology, which is incredibly complicated. And so the moment you say to people, no one's perfect, that means your partner and you will not be perfect, immediately the temperature

goes down. Ah, okay. You know, at the School of Life, we have this, we give people advice on relationships at various points. And we say right at the beginning of relationships, a really useful thing for two people who are meeting for the first time to do is to go, I don't mean this pejoratively, how are you crazy? Two people to go, how are you crazy? To ask somebody on a date, how are you crazy? Well, they go, that's a bit rude. What does that mean, how are you crazy? Well, the assumption is we're all crazy. So if you're not answering that question, you're really crazy because you're in denial of your possibility of your crazy nature. So already it's a real win if you're able to go, the ways in which I'm crazy are this, that, and the other. So the acknowledgement of

one's imperfection plays a vital role in accommodating oneself to reality. We don't need people to be perfect. We need people to have a sense of their varied imperfections and to be able on a good day to either warn us of them or at least apologize for them once they've had a run around. But that's already asking a lot and most of us are not ready for that. One of the things you write about in this book is perfectionism. And perfectionism, we know, has been going up dramatically since the 1980s um i don't know what it was doing up until then but i've certainly seen research showing that since the 1980s it has been going up it's tempting to say it's down to social media but i believe it was already going

up dramatically even before social media came about in relation to what you just said about relationships and this idea that we're all imperfect, why do you think so many of us are struggling with perfectionism? Okay, I'll tell you the reason. Because we put humans on the moon. If you put humans on the moon and then tell people oh humans are a bit silly and they're not really that impressive you want to go have you seen the apollo space program of course it's impressive right once we've done keyhole heart surgery you're really going to tell people that human beings are a bit pathetic once we've you know managed to send data across the atlantic in one second millisecond are? Are you really going to

expect that everything goes wrong in a human life? No wonder we've got runaway perfectionism. Let's be generous towards perfectionism. It's really hard to think about our imperfections in a world where we are daily reminded of extraordinary, beautiful, amazing things that human beings do? How can we reconcile human greatness with human folly? It's something that exists. It's a problem that we have, as it were, at a collective level and an individual level. How do we? By reminding ourselves that we really are, you know, both angels and beasts, that we are both wonderful and appalling, and the two are true. The two go together. And we have too much pride. We can't quite acknowledge this. It's very hard, as I say, individually and collectively. I mean, let's go back to religions,

right? What's the number one dictum of Buddhism? Life is suffering. These guys start with the dictum, life is suffering. Life is not a penthouse in Monaco and a jet, et cetera. It is suffering. And it's not just for you or for me, it's for everybody. Everybody, life is suffering. What's the central dictum of Catholicism? Central dictum is we are all sinners. So life is suffering, we're all sinners. Now you might suffering we're all sinners i mean michael that's a bit mean but we're all sinners oh i'm not i'm i'm nice you know life is suffering maybe for you but i'm intended to have a nice life well imagine if we started somewhere more in that zone not necessarily exactly in that zone but more in that zone think how much i mean again let's go

back to dating right imagine you've got two people. Let's caricature Californians, bless Californians, but they are some of the most optimistic people in the world, right? So you're meeting a Californian for the first, you're on a date with a Californian. So how are you? You know, great, terrific. You know, what's your character like? Well, I really believe in myself, my potential, and I'm advancing ever further towards, you know, achieving my goals. Wow, it's amazing. You know, do you have any flaws? Well, I'm ironing them all out and, you know, both physically and mentally, I'm, you know, on top of things. This is, you know, it could sound like an amazing person,

but might one also detect a certain brittleness? Might one detect a perfectionism that might have a curdled side? Maybe. How much more relaxing to meet someone who goes, I'm a bit broken, actually. I'm not a perfect human. I mess up. My life's been suffering in lots of areas. You think, oh, this person might be a little bit more livable. I'm advocating a philosophy of cheerful pessimism. Another word for it, and it's a word I really like, is melancholy. If we look at what's the UK contributed to world civilisation, not much, food's lousy, etc. But one area that the UK really excels at is melancholy. Now, melancholy is an interesting thing because melancholy is not depression, it's not despair, but nor is it

cheerfulness. It somehow hovers between the two. It's like a kind of wry acceptance that life's kind of difficult at many points, but it's always quite beautiful too. You could be a very cheerful person and quite melancholic. So melancholy is tragedy well handled. It might be an emblematic word for what it means to be mature. That's really what maturity is. It's hard to imagine good maturity without an element of melancholy. How can you look at the facts of life without an element of melancholy? What do you think of happiness? It's a coercive concept.

Of course we all want it. Of course it's lovely. But it's a dangerous thing to wield around. I think we need to whisper that word rather than shout it from the rooftops. Because whenever someone sets out to be happy, the gods laugh, the spirits laugh, the hubris. I mean, let's go back to our friends, the ancient Greeks, right? They were really fascinated by overreach, by human overreach. All their stories in one way or another, all their legends, all their myths are about people who have forgotten that human beings

come below the gods and in different ways. Think of the famous story of Daedalus and Icarus, right? Icarus rides too close to the sun, falls in sea. That's the emblematic ancient Greek story. And, you know, we think of it, oh, it's an old story, doesn't have much to teach us. Oh, boy, oh boy, does it have a lot to teach us. You know, we're all Icarus in different ways. In different ways, we're all Icarus. And so it doesn't mean an end to ambition. It doesn't mean an end to hope after all the ancient Greeks. I mean, they contributed hugely to civilization and progress in all sorts of areas but they never forgot the the dangers of overreach and the moment when the human mind forgets its limitations yeah it's fascinating so i i do like the term happiness um but i but i also believe that it can be i believe it can be misinterpreted.

I think also we have to be careful what do we mean by happiness because I think you could say the word happiness to 10 different people and they may understand it in 10 different ways. So some people may believe that happiness is that state where you wake up every day with a smile on your face and everything is fantastic all the time. I don't believe that's happiness. Can I tell you another word? Please, please. Fulfillment. I like the word fulfillment because it's very possible to imagine a fulfilled life that actually has a lot of pain in it. You could stop someone who

is a busy doctor and you go, are you happy today? No, not really. Are you fulfilled today? Yes. let's say a busy doctor and you go, are you happy today? Oh no, not really. Are you fulfilled today? Yes. Yes. So do you see what I mean? It allows one to encompass pain, which I mean, there are lots of ways of defining the word happiness, but for me, it's hard to imagine too much pain in a happy state. Whereas in a fulfilled state, you could be quite grumpy. You could be having quite a difficult, tetchy day, but basically still feeling you're leading the right life. Yeah. It's an interesting concept, one that I think about a lot. I mean, my last book was on happiness, and I think many people mistake certain short-term pleasures for deep happiness, what I call core happiness, or I call that junk happiness.

And I sort of created this model where I said, you don't work on happiness directly. The three ingredients, as it were, are alignment, contentment, and a sense of control. And I spoke about the things that you can do to work on your alignment, your contentment, your sense of control. And I was sort of trying to make the case that the more you do those things, the more often you're able to, you'll just end up finding that the side effect is that you are happier more of the time. But it's an interesting concept. I do like the term fulfilment. Yeah. I mean, look, part of the problem is that we don't, at a societal level, admit the difficulties involved in many worthwhile tasks. We can't quite bear it. And so people who then engage in those tasks will panic too early. Think of writing. I remember a major discovery for me was,

you know, when I started off as a writer, I thought, God, this is hard. And the fact it's so hard means that it can't be going right because it's going so hard. And then I was in a museum in Paris and I looked at the manuscripts of Proust, French writer Marcel Proust, who'd spent years trying to get a novel off the ground. And you look at the manuscripts and you think, oh my God, this guy can't write one sentence without crossing it out and having to start again. And I thought, that's what I have to go through. But he became Proust. And I thought, oh, okay, that's a cheerful story. In other words, the fact that I'm in pain and the fact it's all going wrong is not a conclusive proof that the whole system is, that the whole enterprise is going wrong. But in lots of areas, we don't admit to the difficulties actually entail in being a writer and being an entrepreneur and being a doctor and being whatever it is.

And so people who start down that road will panic too soon. So I'm only selling rain again. It's knowing how much rain is likely to fall and has to fall so that we don't panic when we meet it. Last night, I came across one of your TED Talks. This one was from, I think, 15 years ago. And in it, you said, it's easier now to make a good living, but harder than ever before to stay calm and be free from career anxiety. I found that really an interesting phrase. You said that 15 years ago on the TED stage. Do you still stand by that today?

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This episode is brought to you by Airbnb. But just two weeks ago, I had a wonderful half-term break abroad with my family, where we stayed in the most wonderful Airbnb in Egypt. And we just love staying in an Airbnb whenever we go away for so many reasons. Having the entire place to ourselves, for us, really makes a difference. ourselves, for us, really makes a difference. In Egypt, we could sit, chat, and play cards together in the comfort of our own space, which really got me thinking hosting your home is a great way to earn some extra money, especially for those of you who already have the space or are away for extended periods of time. But as much as I love the idea, I think I would benefit from a bit of extra help to manage things whilst I'm away.

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a co-host could make it even easier. Find a co-host at airbnb.co.uk forward slash host. I mean, perhaps even more so, you know, it's, it's, I mean, I was calling it in those days, I mean, I wrote a book on this called Status Anxiety, which is really, it's a feature of what we call the modern world, which the modern world has existed for 200 years in the West. You know, what we call the modern world, which is, you know, a world where people are defined primarily by their activities, by their jobs.

You know, nowadays, if you meet somebody for the first time, you say to them, what do you do? And according to how you answer that question, people will either be really pleased to see you or they'll kind of leave you aside and think of you as, you know, that quintessential punitive modern word, a loser. And the thing about the modern world is that it accords status according to a race, a professional race, which by definition, not everybody can win. I mean, that's the whole point. It's a race and there can only be a selective number of winners. This is an incredibly punitive system. Furthermore, we insist, particularly we find this in America, but really all over the world, on the idea that everybody has an equal chance to get to the top.

And if you listen to politicians, right, left, all sides of the political spectrum, they're always trying to build a world which is meritocratic. In other words, where those who get to the top deserve their success. There's a nasty sting in the tail of that argument, because if you really believe that those who are at the top deserve their success, you have to believe that those who are at the bottom deserve their failure. So in other words, the modern world adds to poverty and low status a condemnation, an implicit condemnation that you have failed because of your own deficiencies rather than, you know, because of the system. I mean,

you know, in the Middle Ages, let's say, in Britain, a poor person, the poorest were known as unfortunates, right? That's a really fascinating word, unfortunate. You unpack that word, unfortunate. It literally, there's the word fortune in there. In other words, these people have not been blessed by fortune. And fortune was originally a Roman goddess. And she was believed to determine people's careers. So if you ended up with a really high-flying position in the Roman world, at least you acknowledge that at least half of your success was down to fortune. Nowadays, it's a very odd concept.

You know, if I said to you, oh, I've been doing really well lately, you know, great business, etc. But I said, oh, it's not me. It's just I've been blessed by fortune. You'd go, that's an odd guy. Is he oddly modest? Is he arrogantly modest? It'd be odd. Similarly, if I said to you, well, things are really actually not going so well for me. I've been sacked. My income's dropped, etc. But it's not my fault. It's fortune turned against me. You think, hey, you're making an excuse here. We hold people incredibly tightly to their own biographies,

which is why at its most tragic, and this is a feature of the modern world which we have a hard time with, rates of suicide increase as a society gets more modern. As communal structures dissipate and as religious explanations for people's destinies fade, what you find is that people are held so responsible for what happens to them that it becomes unbearable. You know, you're talking about one of your patients a while ago. It is not Allah's will that I lost my job.

It's my fault. And if it's only your fault, at some point, you know, people will break. And that's why we've moved from that term unfortunate now to that much more punitive term loser. You know, if you think somebody's failed or, you know, lost in their jobs, And that's why we've moved from that term unfortunate now to that much more punitive term loser. You know, if you think somebody's failed or lost in their jobs, you might call them, especially in America, a loser. Why is that word particularly used in the United States? Because the United States is the most meritocratic society which believes that people's destinies are in their hands.

And there's upsides to that as well, though. A hundred percent. But there's also serious downsides. Like most things. And so we need to keep a handle on those downsides. Yeah. You talk a lot about how our childhoods influence our adult lives, how we show up in relationships, how we feel about ourselves. And I think whether it's in terms of our mental well-being or our physical health,

it's undeniable that childhoods are crucially important. And if you think about it on a sort of more public health scale, I really feel culture more and more, society more and more really should be prioritizing those early years, whether it be in terms of taking stress off parents, they can be and, you know, and actually pay attention to their children. The nutrition we give at that age, all these things, you know, and actually pay attention to their children, the nutrition we give at that age, all these things, you know, what happens in those early years are so influential. I mean, it's deeply insulting. I don't want to believe this. You know, we all have heavy incentives not to believe this story, because who wants to show up age 30, 40, 50, 60, and be told

that their first 10 years are determining their life? I mean, this is one of those awful stories that we've discovered. That doesn't mean to say it's not true, unfortunately. You know, in the same way that, you know, you could hold a glass of water for ages. People didn't understand that there could be enough bacteria in one glass of water to kill a city. You know, and microbiologists were saying, no, no, it's possible. It happens. You know, there are minute life forms that can destroy millions of people's lives. And it sounds implausible. It doesn't mean to say it's not true. And, you know, look, if you look at anybody, if you look at any adult

who is doing strange stuff, let's imagine someone who's sabotaging their life. Every time that they get near to success, oddly, they blow themselves up. Or every time a relationship is working well, they sabotage it in some way, you know, and they go relationship, relationship after relationship. What's going on? Why are we doing this? Almost certainly you've got to look backwards. You have to look backwards. And this is what psychotherapy teaches us. So let's take this slowly because it's a little bit odd. Most things that adults are doing that is counterproductive, that is not in their interests and the interests of those around them, most of those things have a logic, a certain logic,

a twisted logic, you might say, that dates back to their early childhood, where that behavior made a certain sort of sense. And they keep doing it because they're unaware that it once made sense, and they're also unaware that it now made sense. And they're also unaware that it now absolutely doesn't make sense. Let me give you an example. So let's imagine that you're a child growing up in a familial war zone. Mum and dad don't get on. They're throwing things at each other. There's violence, et cetera. One of the things that you might do as a child is disassociate. You cut yourself off from your emotions. So you're in a high intensity emotional arena and you just cut yourself off. You just go off and you fantasize, you disappear. This is

brilliant. If you are five years old, you can't disappear. You can't get rid of your parents. You will. You come up with this fantastic way of dealing with it. You disassociate. Fantastic. Scroll forward 20 years and that person's in a relationship. And suddenly things are quite intense. And what's that person doing? Disassociating. This is maddening for everyone around. They don't know they're doing it. Their partner might not be able to explain it to them. They feel it, but they don't know the words, the vocabulary, etc. And you can go through four divorces before you work out, I'm doing this thing that made sense. And so the lesson of psychotherapy is to say, thank you very much to that very clever five-year-old that worked out that in order to survive there to dissociate, thank you for this, but now it's enough. Now we're

going to move on because this is no longer helpful. And, you know, there are many versions of this. Take the person who can't stop making jokes. You know, we all know people who are a bit too lighthearted for their own good. It seems like they can't approach pain. They're all the time cracking jokes and there's a life of the party, but there's something plastic about their mood, we feel. If you scroll back, there are often people who've had to deal with depressed parents, where there couldn't be an acknowledgement of pain because the parent was sinking. So the child had to cheer up their parents. No child should have to cheer up their parents, but it happens a lot. And that person then ends up being manically cheerful. Quite contrary to their own interests, they can't touch their own pain,

because that would have been too hard when they were six, seven, and eight. But they may now be 42. So super important to understand the pattern and correct it. And that's what we mean by psychotherapy. Psychotherapy is a chance to observe your patterns. You know, people go through life projecting. You know that word projecting? In other words, they take an emotional response that is based on a situation that they knew in their past, and they layer it on to a situation in the present, which might not be warranted. So someone might think, all men get very angry with me. And when I make a mistake, they can't forgive me, which is why I will try not to do anything in case I get it wrong. Now, that might be an implicit projection that you're layering onto your boss, to your friends, to your child, to your spouse, et cetera. Terribly unhelpful. It probably has its origins in your relationship with your dad, let's imagine. But that was you and your dad. But you're carrying

that story into an arena where it really doesn't belong anymore. So a lot of what psychotherapy is, is repatriating stories and making sure that we're not operating with patterns that don't belong in the situation where we're putting them into action. Yeah. I mean, your book is called A Therapeutic Journey, right? By going on that journey, us as individuals can empower ourselves to change. Hugely. I mean, look, I think one of the great adventures that we can be on individually and collectively is self-knowledge. Again, come back to the ancient Greeks, they thought that knowing yourself was the imperative of every human. And, you know, therapy, self-exploration, reading, friendship, etc. You know, one of the

things that we should always be looking for is to understand ourselves better. Because being ignorant of ourselves is behind so many of our problems. It's because we don't know who we are that we marry the wrong people, go to the wrong jobs, respond in inadequate ways to situations, et cetera. We're not in command of our own minds. And one of the great insights of psychoanalysis of Freud originally is that the conscious mind is a tiny part of the mind as a whole. And we know that our minds are planning how to walk and digest food and run various physiological processes without any conscious inquiry or knowledge. But that holds true also

for our emotional lives, that most of our emotional life is unconscious. And, you know, I sometimes imagine it's like, we're like a sort of person with a tiny flashlight in a vast, dark chamber, and we can illuminate just a tiny portion of our lives. And most of us, we will all die strangers to ourselves. We will all die with much of who we are still mired in darkness. We won't know who we have been. I mean, this is one of the great sort of tragedies of existence. We inhabit a self which we only partially understand. But I think one of the greatest and most fun things to do is to expand the boundaries of knowledge.

Now, it's quite a weird ambition. I mean, if you said to somebody, you know, if somebody said, you know, what are you doing for your holidays? And you go, well, I'm just furthering self-knowledge because that's my great adventure. Look at you, so you're highly strange. You know, the moment when you understand a little bit better who you are, why you do the things you do, why you respond, this is always a joyful day. And it makes you so much more of a safe person

to be around because people who are able to flag up their behaviour to others are a blessing. Yeah. When I think about what I said before to you about helping patients change their behaviours, the idea that knowledge is not enough, it's the self-knowledge that we need, the deeper awareness. This is where I really feel we go wrong with our public health advice, or it doesn't work as well as it could work. It doesn't.

A psychoanalyst looking at it would go, you guys have forgotten there's an unconscious. There's an unconscious mind. And the unconscious mind does weird stuff. I mean, we're talking about self-sabotage, right? Many of the things that go wrong in people's lives are not external. They are people behaving in ways that are contrary to their own interests for reasons that they don't really understand, but that often have something to do with their past. I mean, so imagine somebody who, every time they get close to success, blows it up. Imagine that this person had an envious parent. It's going to sound really weird.

Who's got an envious parent? Well, many of us do. Parents, sad truth, can be envious of their own children. In other words, they can be threatened by a child's talent, beauty, et cetera. And though on the one hand, they want their child to be happy, on the other hand, not any happier than they've been. This is, you know, and children pick up on this. And so there can be a guilt sometimes to be able to bear, to have a better life than your parents

is a real psychological achievement. It's not natural. I mean, it's not a given. It may be something that you need to work at. So just a small example of, you know, somebody may feel that in order to feel balanced, they have to feel guilty, that guilt is an important part of their sort of mental economy.

And again, this may come back to a feeling from childhood that they were only safe if they felt that they'd done something wrong and if they knew, if they'd been made to feel bad. So then the feeling of being bad accompanies them through life as a protective mechanism. Very unnecessary, huge cost to themselves, but it can happen. who's listening to that, Alan, someone who just heard that and has just had the self-awareness that they may be an envious parent, okay? Because no one wants to be that envious parent. The person who just had that insight doesn't want to be that person, but is again acting on their own childhood and their own experiences, right? What advice would you give to that person? So, look, in the early days of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, the feeling was, if somebody knows this, they'll stop immediately. Oh, I'm an avid parent. Great,

I'll stop tonight. Similarly, you know, let's say in a relationship, somebody becomes aware that every time someone's nice to them, they hold it against them. They can only tolerate people who are nasty to them. And you point this out, oh my God, that's me. And then it will stop. The truth is trickier. So what psychotherapy, what psychotherapy has realised is that insight is part of the solution, but you also need to have a corrective experience. And this is what therapists spend time doing. When therapists are in a room with a client, they know that the client will probably play out with them patterns that they will also be playing out somewhere else. So the envious parent might start to say to the therapist, did those curtains cost a lot? Or is that your car outside? They'll probably be bringing

their envy to the therapist. And that the best way to solve this is in that room with a therapist, that you can explore that issue live in a relationship, in a relationship that's unfolding in the here and now, rather than simply bringing it in from the outside. And that if you correct it there, you'd have a good chance of correcting it in life more broadly. So the classic one in therapy is that the person, let's say, who's always worried about other people at the expense of their own well-being. This is something that happens, of course, to, you know, if you've had a certain sort of childhood and you haven't been able to worry about yourself, but other people have been going off the rails, one tendency is that you'll grow up

into somebody who's always worrying about other people, always putting other people first, et cetera, at your own detriment. And this might play out with a therapist. You might say to the therapist something like, are you tired? Or I'm so sorry for bothering you. And you might've had this as a doctor.

Some people who are sort of worried that they're bothering you if I'm coming to see you. And you want to go, and a doctor, some people who are sort of worried that they're bothering you if I'm coming to see you. And you want to go, and the solution will be to say, why are you so worried about how much sleep I've had? Is this right? You know, I noticed that every time you come and visit me, you're worried that I might be inconvenienced by your presence. I'm not.

Why do you think that is? And so by holding a mirror up to somebody and tracking their behaviour, not just once, but over time. Remember what we were saying about the analogy with physical exercise. It's not going to be just once. Lifting up one weight one time

isn't going to solve your muscle problem. Similarly, emotionally, you might need to work at a dynamic within a relationship over time. Do you think everyone needs therapy? Let me say one caveat, which could sound rather unpopular, maybe unpopular among some people. There are many bad therapists out there. You know, therapy is an incredibly complicated calling. Medical training, as you know, produces doctors who, on the whole, should be interchangeable.

Most doctors should tell you roughly the same thing if you go and see them. But you'll know, through a dark thought, that some doctors are better than others. It's a horrible thought. It's true. But it's very painful. Very painful. People are often less willing to, if they go and see a therapist and the therapist is not good, they'll go, I hate therapy. So I guess I'm trying to give hope to people

who maybe have had an experience with a therapist, didn't go well. And maybe it's to do with the therapist, not them. And so it just prepares you for thinking, okay, you might need to shop around. It's like books. You know that you can love books. You go into the average bookshop,

you pick up a book, you're probably not going to like it. Most books are quite lousy, but some books are great. And it might take you quite a while to find the great book, the book that's working for you. And I think the same,

therapy is much closer to an art than a science. And a good therapist is a balance of all sorts of forces. You can't mass manufacture this character. And that's why most people have quite a bad time in therapy many people many people many i have so many thoughts uh therapy is more of an art than a science it's interesting i was at i was speaking at a trauma conference in oxford a couple of weeks ago uh the masters conference i think you were there last year actually from recollection and i was on this panel discussion and I can't remember what the question was,

but at one point I ended up saying something I don't think I'd said before, which was, I believe that my ability to help a patient for most of the conditions I've seen throughout my career is more art than science. I really do believe that because- What did you mean by that? What I mean by that is I'm not talking about acute illness, which often presents to the hospital, a heart attack, a broken bone, something that... Acute problems generally respond very well to modern medicine. Where I think we struggle in medicine today is that most of our training is given to us

through the acute problem model. So we try and apply that kind of thinking to complex multifactorial issues that are driven by our collective modern lifestyles, mental wellbeing being one of them, you know, where people are struggling. You can't just come and see the doctor for 10 minutes, have a quick chat. We run a series of tests. Yes. So you have depression. Let me give you this. It will be gone in two weeks. You can do that with a chest infection,

right? But you can't do that with something like depression because it's multifactorial. And so I believe that my ability to be a good doctor relies on my ability to pay attention, to listen, to read the things that the patient is not saying. What is the body language? What is the message behind the words? I mean, it's very common. You may have spoken to doctors who've told you this before, but often in a classical sort of 10 to 15 minute, usually 10 minute GP appointment, often a patient will come in with something

and you deal with it. You spend the first nine and a half minutes on that thing. And as they're walking out, hand on the door, oh, hey, doctor. Yeah, by the way, I just thought I mentioned this thing about whatever it might be. So what was really on their mind only comes out as they're walking out. I basically feel that my role for much of my career has, although I'm certainly not trained in therapy, I wouldn't want to put it out in any way that I am, but my ability to apply psychology and good listening skills, I think has been absolutely crucial in my ability to help people. So I think what we're talking about is trying to give space for the mysteries of the mind,

for the perplexities of the mind to emerge. Now, if you think of early psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, Freud used to lie people down on a couch and ask them to free associate. Now, he called it the fundamental rule. And the fundamental rule is that you should say whatever comes into your mind at the moment it comes out without any trying not to restrain yourself, just saying whatever it is on your mind, however silly, passing, etc. He compared it to being in a railway carriage, where you just sit and you just tell the person in the railway carriage what you're seeing out the window, the window of consciousness. And his view was, if you allow people to do this for 50

minutes, they'll tend to come out with something interesting. You know, they'll start off going, I want to talk about this, that and the other. But if you just lie to them and say, just say whatever comes out of your mind, probably somewhere along the lines, it will emerge. And, you know, there are various, a lot of psychology and psychotherapy since has been all about trying to get the mind out of its standard operations, where we tend to think in quite conventional ways. And the things that we can admit to in quite conventional ways and the things that we can admit to are quite conventional. All of us are quite frightened of how strange we are. And so when we present ourselves to ourselves and to others, we minimise our oddities. So people go, how are you? I'm fine. We don't say that we've been sobbing on the bathroom floor all weekend

or whatever, because it just doesn't fit into our notion of normality. And we do this not just with strangers, but with other people as well, with ourselves as well, that we curtail our understanding of ourselves because it threatens, you know, that we might both love someone and hate them, that we might both try to be good, but also have aggressive impulses. We can't compute this, and so we shove it aside. But that can lead to those twin demons of the mind, anxiety and depression. What is anxiety often other than a worry that we haven't been able to focus on? Possibly because that worry didn't fit our model of what we're allowed to be worried about. Or depression, what is depression other than often sadness, grief, that hasn't been able to understand itself? Why? Because maybe it runs contrary to our model of what we're allowed

to be sad about. You know, very often people are in mourning for things that they don't think that they're allowed to be in mourning about, and it goes underground. You know, they might say, actually, I'm in mourning because I lost a friend five years ago. But that sounds so odd because you're not supposed to mourn your friends very much. And five years is a long time. But it may be true. So we're a lot odder than we give ourselves credit for when we allow ourselves. And the task of the therapeutic often is to give ourselves a context in which our true complexity can emerge.

There are exercises like journaling. If you journal and you allow yourself to write whatever comes into your mind, just the technique of automatic writing, where you just say, for two minutes, I'm just going to write. I'm going to keep writing. I'm not going to stop. I'm not going to take my pen off the paper, but I'm going to keep writing. It doesn't matter if it's complete gibberish, but I'm just going to see what is in my mind. I challenge your listeners. I mean, literally do it. If you're listening to this and you're tempted by it, take two minutes, get a piece of paper and a pen and write and just force yourself to write for two minutes about whatever's on your mind, anything. And I would hazard,

I would bet that probably at the end, you will have learned something about yourself, hazard, I would bet that probably at the end, you will have learned something about yourself, that there will be something about what you've written that you weren't in conscious command of. It might be that you're much angrier about something than you've allowed for, or you're much more loving, you're much more tender, or you're more full of regret or whatever it is, but something to the left or to the right of your standard vision of yourself. And, you know, welcome to the unconscious workings of the mind. I mean, this is what we're talking about. The mind, we have a hard time understanding ourselves because we don't allow, we don't create mechanisms where we can unspool the tightly bound truths about who we are. This idea that we need time to allow the inner workings of our mind to emerge,

I think is fascinating. I'm immediately drawn to something I say quite a lot, which is, I believe the most important practice for our health and happiness is solitude. Like I really, really believe it's very hard to live that contented, fulfilled, even healthy life without solitude. And one of the things I believe that solitude gives us, whether it be journaling or meditation or yoga, whatever it might be, or a walk, is time for things to emerge. And I feel one of the things that is really possibly one of the most worrying and toxic things out there is

to constantly be consuming. So you wake up, you pick up that phone, and you're consuming. It doesn't matter what it is, but let's say it's news or social media stuff and whatever it might be, emails, right? Because it's external information from the outside constantly coming in. But if you don't have any space in your life, this is my view, where you stop that and allow the inner stuff to come out, you're going to find yourself living a life that you don't know who you are or what you're doing. I mean, how do you look at that? Yes, I would agree. We're really talking

about communion with yourself, allowing you to talk to you, allow you to know you. You say that solitude is important, and I agree that it can be, and very often is, a vital feature. Though I also want to allow for the fact that sometimes that communion with yourself, it is possible for that to happen with another person. For sure, yes. Quite deeply. But you might say, well, how? Well, that's if the other person is quite disciplined. And this is what, in Therapy 101 early training, the therapist, I mean, therapists, you know, one of the blessed things they do is they don't talk too much about themselves. They don't talk about themselves at all. Not because they're trying to withhold information, they're trying to allow you to speak to you. And so they're another person who is both

extremely interested in you, and yet they're not going to rush in and go, well, that's funny, because it reminds me of something that I said, you know, and they are putting their own ego aside in the name of listening to you. And that can be even more helpful to the journey of self-discovery than being on your own. Because when you're on your own, it's quite hard to sustain your curiosity about you. Whereas somebody else's curiosity, somebody who goes, just listens very peacefully very quietly and says something very encouraging like just go on there or i'm interested in what you were just saying about that say a bit more that can give us the encouragement to keep up the exploration of ourselves that we sometimes lose faith in when we are simply alone so one question i was going to

ask you before really really fits nicely here which is this idea that if we assume that therapy can be helpful for everyone, most people... Therapy that goes well. Therapy in the hands of a good therapist. Okay. And then we acknowledge the reality, which is that many people, for a variety of reasons, is that many people, for a variety of reasons, maybe cost or access, you know, they don't have access to a therapist, basically. I was going to ask you, could spending prolonged periods of time with a close friend who has exquisite listening skills provide some of the benefits that a good therapist can? In theory, yes. Let's think about exquisite listening skills. some of the benefits that a good therapist can? In theory, yes. Let's think about exquisite listening skills. I think I define them in the book. So what is a listening skill? It's going to have something to do with allowing the other

person space. And we're really not good at this. I mean, we're really terrible at allowing other people to actually speak. We think that an interaction with somebody always means that we have to say something about ourselves. So the typical encounter is, I tell you an anecdote, you tell me an anecdote. And it's a sort of dialogue of the deaf. Neither side is really listening to the other one. They're just meeting in order to continue a monologue, an interrupted monologue. It's two monologues threaded together. And that's obviously no good. True listening involves allowing, I mean, so one of the things that Therapy 101 teaches you is paraphrase. True listening involves paraphrase. So somebody says, you know, I went to work, I'm really annoyed with my boss, you know, they're not listening to me, etc.

Normally, someone else would come in and go, oh, funny, because I don't get on with my boss either, and then, you know, go like this. If you're really listening, you might say something like, okay, I'm hearing that today didn't go well, and that it's got something to do with your boss and that it's something to do with the fact that he doesn't seem to respect you or whatever it may be. That summary, that concise summary of what the person's just said is a fantastic way of showing that you have listened. It's the biggest proof. And you should do this with your children. I started doing this with my kids. So they're teenagers.

And I remember because I did a therapy training and I thought, I'm going to give this a go at home. So my youngest son came back and he said, oh, I really hate school. I just, you know, they're just the teachers, this, that, and the other. And it went on and on like this. And normally I would have come back

with something optimistic. I'd have said, oh, it's not so bad and it will soon be over and you can do it and all the rest of it. And he would have thought, and gone upstairs and, you know, it would have been total impasse. I thought, right, let me try something else.

So he went, and I say, okay, I'm hearing that today's not been good. And I'm hearing that you're kind of sad and upset. So that gave him the encouragement to think, okay, for the first time, dad's actually listening. All right, so it's a good step. And then the more I just paraphrase, he would speak, I'd paraphrase, he would speak, I'd paraphrase. That starts to deepen the conversation and give someone the confidence to think, I'm in the hand. One of the great mysteries of social interaction is we don't feel that we have equal amounts to say to all people. There are some people around whom we feel

incredibly chatty, incredibly curious about our own minds. We go here, we go there. And other people who may be perfectly polite, perfectly civil, we just kind of forget. We feel boring. We may call them boring, but we probably don't call them boring. We just think, oh, I had a bit of a dry old lunch and I didn't have much to say for myself. When you feel that you don't have much to say for yourself, it's almost always because your interlocutor is essentially sending unconscious signals that they don't have space for you.

And because they don't have space for you, you don't have space for yourself. You lose the sense of what you want to say because you don't feel understood. The more someone understands, the more you understand yourself and what you have to say. And so, you know, I think the goal of social existence should not be to be thought of as a marvelously witty person, but to be thought of as someone who makes you feel interesting.

Yeah. Because that's a sign that you've allowed somebody to enter into their own experience. Yeah, I love that. It's interesting what you said about what you might say to your children at the end of one of their school days when they express a certain, let's say, discontentment. It made me also think about some of the kind of common phrases we often use when our children go off to school in the morning, such as, have a good day. And as she was saying that, I thought, is that a good thing to say? Is that a helpful thing to say? Or, you know, it's an optimistic thing to say, but if we say that every day to our child, have a good day, have a good day, have a good day, are we in some sort of danger of perhaps

kind of prejudging that day and making them feel if they don't have a good day that this is a problem? Absolutely. So let's try and improve on that. Okay. Because after all, if somebody said to you, have a good day, you wouldn't be that. I mean.

On the face of it, it's fine. It's just once you start questioning everything, you start to go, is there a better way? So what's a better way? Yeah. I mean, okay. So every day is going to bring challenges. So one of the things we might want to hear is that the other person understands that today is going to have its difficulties, but also that you hope that it's going to be okay.

I mean, so you wouldn't necessarily say, but something along the lines of, you know, I hope you meet the challenges of the day in a reasonable way. I hope it's okay for you. I hope the challenges are okay. day in a reasonable way. I hope it's okay for you. I hope the challenges are okay. I mean, let's remember that when you've got a very angry person on your hands, when someone's very angry, what's the number one thing that they want to know? They want to know that you understand that they are angry, which is why, you know, it's a cliche, but it's a very good cliche. To say, I hear you is enormously important. If somebody's raging, right, and they go, the fridge has been left open again

and the milk is, right? If you come back with, well, that's the way it is because I've been so busy all day. You're just going to escalate the argument, right? Whereas if you go, I hear you. You're upset, aren't you? You've been upset, haven't you? Immediately they'll calm down.

Or they might say, yes, of course I'm upset. You can see that I'm upset. Here I'm going to be that i'm upset here i'm going to be the optimist here i'm going to be optimist i think they'll i think i agree with you i think we're hugely improved because they'll think you know we don't need life to be perfect but we we it helps hugely if we're understood for our pain at the deep imperfections of life raging from you know ranging from our death to the milk being off yeah it's connecting, isn't it? It's going, hey, listen, I'm hearing what you're saying here. You're annoyed, you're frustrated.

But of course, that sort of response requires you not to be in a reactive state, right? So if you're feeling stressed out, burnt out, you're knackered and come home from work and then your partner says that to you, you might be less inclined to go, I hear you. You might be much more reactive. Which is why, you know, we need humour. And we also, you know, we're capable of repair. You know, the therapists talk about the idea of rupture and repair, that ruptures are okay.

But what we need to flex is our ability to repair properly and and to know that a relationship will always we'll always be playing catch-up in many ways um but that the more we can build in moments you know parents of young children will know the idea of the date night but what are you supposed to do on a date night when you go out with your partner and you've been maybe stressed with them all the time um you know very useful very useful thing to always advocate is that, you know, if you say to the person, what are you angry with me about? Because there's a lot of anger that builds up. You know, most couples get very frustrated with one another. And so to say to your partner, how have I frustrated you? Because you will have frustrated them. Of course you will,

because everyone frustrates everyone. But to give someone a chance to say, just tell me, I'm not going to respond in a defensive way. Just tell me how I've managed to upset you, because I have. I mean, people end up not having sex, broadly speaking, because people are furious with one another, but they've forgotten what they were furious about. But after a certain amount of fury and frustration, you don't want anyone touching you because you're furious with them. And so to unwind and unspool that built-up anger. Similarly, to be quite candid and say, what do you want to be forgiven for? Because you've done something. You know that there's stuff that you've done that's not optimal. What do you want to be forgiven for? And so to say, what are you angry with me about?

What do you want to be forgiven for? I guess one of the benefits of those questions is that it's happening in a defined time. So a lot of the conflicts that comes in relationships, certainly from what I've seen and what I've heard from patients over the years, is when someone tries to bring something up deep when the other person is not ready to receive that. This is the problem. We're all, a vital life skill is to be a good teacher, right? All of us are in education, whether we're formally, you know, employed by a school or not. All of us, by virtue of being human, are educators, are teachers. And the thing that mostly we have to teach other people about is oneself and who one is.

And most of us are lousy teachers, partly because we never thought that we have to teach other people about is oneself and who one is. And most of us are lousy teachers, partly because we never thought that we have to teach. We've never seen teaching as something that we have to take on board, but we do. And so the question is, what is a good teacher? And we can make a list. In fact, I have made a list here and other books, etc. A good teacher, so you were mentioning it, a good teacher doesn't try to teach all the time. You should not be trying to deliver important lessons after 9pm. After 9pm, you go to bed. You know, you are not trying to get important information. Is it a good idea to try and teach someone something and be sarcastic to them? No. Is it good to try and humiliate them and make them feel like they're absolute idiots? No. No one ever learns under such circumstances, right?

feel like they're absolute idiots. No one ever learns under such circumstances, right? A good teacher is cheerful. A good teacher is non-defensive. A good teacher picks their moments. You know, you don't try and teach someone a vital thing in the midst of a crisis. You wait until the crisis has passed. So many of the most awkward moments of relationships are really failed teaching attempts, failed attempts to teach. And, you know, divorces are caused by people who have not been good teachers. Of course, there is a responsibility on us also to be good pupils, to be good students, you know, to listen. But I think it's important to rediscover and recover, as it were, the dignity of this teaching-learning basis, that relationships are ultimately classrooms it's

gonna sound very unromantic by the way every time you hear something being called unromantic it's normally a good sign um because romanticism is a lot to answer for in the problems of relationships so so if i if i say you know uh love is a classroom you might say that's unromantic but that's a good thing because a classroom is a place where important information should be divulged. And that's what love is really. Love is people exchanging, romantic relationship, people exchanging really important information, ideally, optimally, rather than in fury or in haste or in despair. Yeah, I love that. Okay, in terms of practical guidance for people then, you've mentioned journaling so far.

You've mentioned that kind of free form journaling exercise where you just write continuously for two minutes, maybe even five minutes, you know, just see what comes out. You mentioned the stoic practice of where at the start of the day, whilst you're lying in bed, you could imagine all the things that possibly could happen and the worst of things

that could happen. These are all options for people. You mentioned that if you are in a relationship with someone, on date night, you could start off, or at some point, when you're both feeling calm and non-defensive, you could ask the question, you know, you know, what would you like to be forgiven for? And what was the other one? What are you angry about? What are you angry about? Or I think you've said- Have I frustrated you?

Yeah, or I think I've once heard you say it as, what have I done recently that's been annoying to you? Or something like that, which are really actually quite lovely questions because it will, you know, really thinking about the conscious and the unconscious, you're allowing stuff

that is probably there that's been bubbling away because the fridge door is never about the fridge door, right? Sometimes it is. Sometimes it is, but, you know,

I think in most cases, that's the straw that broke the camel's back, right? And so, these kind of, you know, I think in most cases, that's the straw that broke the camel's back, right? And so these kind of, you know, that theme of being with a therapist and having the time and the space that allows the innermost workings of you to emerge. I love that word, emerge.

I think it also applies to our relationships, right? So those questions are beautiful ways of allowing the inner self to emerge in a non-defensive sort of, well, yes, in a kind of very open, non-judgmental way where we've said and we've made a commitment that we're not going to be defensive.

We'd like to hear what the other party has to say. Broadly speaking speaking you've written so many books alan on all kinds of things but but many relating to our mental well-being and how we can navigate the experience of being human better what other practical uh bits of advice or strategies might you have for people that's going to help them? Well, there are so many. And I know there's a lot of these in the book, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. There are so many, so many.

I mean, one that comes to mind, it's one drawn from gestalt therapy, known as the chair, the two-chair exercise, where you sit in a chair and you put an empty chair in front of you. And in the presence of a therapist, but, you know, you could also do it at home you could do it with a friend I don't know you know different views on this but you talk to someone that you have been meaning to say something to but you haven't maybe because they're dead maybe because they're dead, maybe because they're unavailable, but you've not allowed yourself to fully have a conversation with them. And the chance to say, right, if my ex were here, what would I tell them? And to actually say it, right, this is what I want to tell you,

and to actually speak it in the room, out loud, oddly focuses our thoughts and very often brings enormous calm to us. We start to see, okay, that's really what I want to say. And you didn't know before you started speaking. But as you speak, you start to assemble your thoughts. And as I say, it could be to your dead father. It could be to an ex. It could be to a colleague you haven't seen in 10 years, whatever it is. Unspoken conversations weigh heavy on us. I think we all have them. In our hearts, we have conversations that we've not been able to have because social life prevents us often from speaking. You know, there are things I need to say to my mother, but my mother died five years ago, or whenever I try and speak to her, she gets very upset or whatever it is. So there's a conversation that you've not had, and maybe you can't have it in front of them, but it helps to try and have, as it were, your side of it.

Because you often, you know, sometimes people advocate writing a letter and then not sending it. It's, you know, being heard for saying something is one part of the equation, but it's not all of the equation. It's only one part. And there's a tremendous value in simply having your say, even if that say is only heard by you as the audience. Yeah, that's a wonderfully novel perspective on conversation. I think many of us think a conversation is a two-way dialogue. And of course, there are benefits to having a two-way dialogue. But as you say, if you're not able to, for whatever reason,

well, you can still say your side of it. And that has incredible value. And I know I've experienced this and many people have, whereby WhatsApp voice messages, I know it's not the same thing, but I've got a very close friend who we exchange WhatsApp voice messages very regularly. And there could be

five, 10 minutes sometimes. And, you know, we're both happy to receive them and send them. But you find that, you know, often I'm out for a walk and I'm leaving this message and it's incredible how therapeutic it is because you're kind of working through stuff as you're saying it. It has real, real power. And more poignantly, you know, sometimes people who've had difficult upbringings, different difficult childhoods, will, after a period away from their parents, think, right, I'm going to go and meet my parents, and I'm going to tell them how things really are for me. And sometimes those conversations go well, and sometimes, I would say perhaps more often than not, they go really badly wrong, in that the parent is not ready to listen. You know, if the

parent had been able to listen, there probably wouldn't have been problems in the first place. I'm not discounting that sometimes there are wonderful conversations, but sometimes there really aren't. And one ends up thinking, I'm not sure I've advanced the cause. That doesn't mean to say you don't need to have that conversation with someone, but it could be, as we've been saying, with an empty chair, with a pen and paper, with a letter you're not sending. So that it means that when you do meet your parents, let's say, maybe the pressure to speak isn't as great because you've actually had your say. And you've been listened to by actually ultimately the person who really needed to listen, which is you. You've actually listened to you.

You've understood what you had to say. And therefore the pressure on them needing to understand is lessened. What do you think of meditation? You know, people do different things under the title of meditation. I mean, at its loosest, it can just be a period of time when you are thinking about something, you know, you are meditating. So in that loose way, that's one I feel very close to. There are then more disciplined things, especially from Eastern disciplines and traditions, Buddhism and others, where meditation

is more structured. There might be a set text, etc. And that's not something I've had too much experience of. But to be in a meditative frame of mind, I think is enormously valuable. As we were saying, to allow moments when you don't know what you might want to say to yourself, but you're allowing for a range of opportunities. And there's an odd way, as I've observed, in which some places are more conducive to this than others. A train carriage that's fairly empty and a long train journey is tremendously conducive, I think, to a conversation with yourself. Why is that? I think it combines just the right level of distraction and the right level of motion to keep your mind, as it were, from getting stuck and frightened of itself.

Because the mind does get frightened of itself. Like, oh my God, if I open that door, I'm going to get stuck in a cul-de-sac where I realise that, you know, I'm in the wrong relationship. My job's awful. It's helpful to have movement. So the passing of those pylons outside and the quiet in the carriage are assisting your mind to lose fright of itself. And you might find that, you know, at the end of two and a half hours, you haven't just gone to Manchester, you've gone into parts of yourself that you hadn't explored. Yeah. It's been such a pleasure speaking to you. I think once again, I mean, you've written so many books. There's another fabulous book that's going to help people with their wellbeing. I think it's going to help them understand themselves better and their journey on earth as a human and what it really means.

For someone who has heard our conversation and they feel like they're struggling in their life, they're lost, they feel unhappy, they don't have fulfillment, but they feel inspired by a couple of things that they've heard and they feel, wow, there may be hope here. What would your final words of them be? You know, welcome to the suffering spirit in which, you know, we all share that we are all far more lonely than we need to be because we buy into the self-presentation of others.

than we need to be because we buy into the self-presentation of others. No one wants to present themselves in the way they do. We're just forced. We collectively keep lying to each other about what it means to be human. And I think what we've been discussing is what is it actually like to be human? And the reality is that we are far more silly, far more hopeful, far more desperate, far more sad, far more beautiful than we admit to ourselves and to others. And if we just allow ourselves a broader sense of what it means to be human, our spirits will lift. Alan, thanks for making time to come on the podcast. I look forward to our next conversation. Thank you. Really hope you enjoyed that conversation. Do think about one thing that you can take away

and apply into your own life. And also have a think about one thing from this conversation that you can teach to somebody else. Remember, when you teach someone, it not only helps them, it also helps you learn and retain the information. Now before you go, just wanted to let you know about Friday Five. It's my free weekly email containing five simple ideas to improve your health and happiness. In that email, I share exclusive insights that I do not share anywhere else, including health advice, how to manage your time better, interesting articles or videos that I'd be consuming, and quotes that have caused me to stop and reflect. And I have to say, in a world of endless emails, it really is delightful that many of you tell me it is one of the only weekly

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