Mayim Bialik's Breakdown - Summer Edition - Best of Professional Breakers

Episode Date: July 12, 2022

Join us for another Summer Edition of Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown! This week, we’re scouring the archives to bring you the best of our Professional Breaker interviews, from reversing aging with David Sinclair and moving through grief paralysis with Nora McInerny, to spotting cults with Steve Hassan and setting familial boundaries with Kara Mayer Robinson. Join us as we break down key mental health topics with experts in the field! BialikBreakdown.com YouTube.com/mayimbialik Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi, I'm Myambiolic and welcome to my summer breakdown. It's my ambiolic's breakdown. She's going to break it down for you because you know she knows a thing or two. And now she's going to break down. Let's welcome David Sinclair. Maybe you can speak a little bit to what you see as some of the sort of mental health components of the way we approach aging, either as scientists or even just as a society. Well, aging definitely changes the brain. It changes our ability to not just remember things, but perceive the world. And the aging brain is quite an interesting thing to work on because the question is what is going on with age in the brain? What is causing it to malfunction? We take it for granted that aging happens, but just because it's common doesn't mean we understand it. And what we think goes on is that the brain is forgetting how. how to be a brain. And what we're working on is ways to slow that loss of identity of the cells

and even reverse it. So the cells in the brain wake up and remember how they're supposed to function. My point is not necessarily that I think everything should change. I mean, what you're proposing is a real paradigm shift. In that, I've spent most of my life just trying to be like, oh my gosh, I'm not going to live a long time. And like, I'm already on the end of what I'm here for how do you propose a reframe like was buddism wrong like is it all wrong david yes so i like to look back in time as well let's go back to just 200 years ago when people would not generally make it in a healthy way past about 60 and a lot of people died earlier than that from disease is that a better life?

Would you want to go back 200 years and live then? I don't think so. And so the same will be true in, possibly within our lifetime when people can live an extra 10 or 20 years in healthy way and they can play tennis when they're 90 or 100. Then that doesn't make life less worth living. I think it would give us even more excitement about being alive.

Let's say I can make you live a thousand years. I don't want to live that long, David. I'm so tired. No, I'll give you the energy as well, and you'll be healthy and you can have different careers. You want me to live a thousand. Nobody wants me to live a thousand years. I do. You got lots more to do. You're just getting started. But if you live a thousand years, why would you want to die tomorrow? Nobody who's healthy who has friends wants to die tomorrow. There's never been a case. I'm going to go ahead and answer that. I shouted at your book many times.

going to say it. So I hope you have a good sense of humor because this is what your book made me feel. This is what it made me feel. We don't have enough resources. And you cover this in your book. So I'm not saying that I stopped reading when I was shouting at it. As it is right now, we don't have enough resources. We are we are killing the planet. There's no better way to save trillions of dollars than to keep people healthy, unless you want to stop military spending, which I doubt is going to happen anytime soon. And the people on the street who need help, the reason they're not getting help is because there's not enough money to go around. Right, right. I would argue there's plenty of places I would like to take from celebrities and overpaid, you know, sports stars is one of them. I'm a biologist, so that's out of

my jurisdiction. But what I can do, and I'm hoping to do, is to save the U.S. 86 trillion dollars. We've calculated that just one of the medicines that we have at our disposal, it's actually already on the market known as metformin, would save the U.S. over a decade, $86 trillion. And if you do it for the entire lifespan of this generation, it would be $360 trillion. You can do a lot with that money. I don't know.

You're a biologist. You're talking like an economist right now. Well, I got friends for economists. That's where I come from. And they tell me this is a good thing for the planet. So we can save ourselves, and in doing so, save the planet as well. I always think that the solution to these problems is in part technology, to make things cheaper and more available.

In the same way that I love talking about London of the 1840s, where it was a city that no one would want to live in now. It was dirty and filthy and poverty and horse manure everywhere. And if someone had said, oh, we're just going to quadruple the population of London, and people would have said it's hell on earth. But in fact, London's a pretty good place to live in now, even though it's a little expensive. Once you pick feces up off the floor and you start vaccinating people,

it's amazing what happens. Yep. So I see a future that's brighter that these technologies that I'm helping develop will be cheap and available to everybody, including those who cannot afford expensive drugs. Welcome, Dr. Moutier. That phone, you know, You know, like that seems like, and I don't mean to like blame the internet, but it's all this kind

of like culture of the world gets so small and so big at the same time. Yeah. I mean, there's, there's so much there. And there is a whole research arena around the interaction and associated relationship between screen time and social media utilization. And of course, that is an extremely diverse issue right there. People use it in different ways. Their experience of it is, is different and also, by the way, influenced to some degree by their baseline traits. So if you already have some struggles with insecurity, anxiety, being exquisitely sensitive to rejection or missing out, that not only sets you up to experience those many slights as, you know, kind of more than perhaps for a kid without those vulnerabilities,

but it also might influence what they're putting out there in response. And so it is like real life for those of us with depression or anxiety. That, you know, there's that, it affects interpersonal relationships. So I think that's there. But like you said, it is so hypertrophied because you can't get away from it once the kid is feeling bullied, left out, or targeted. We also need systems in place, activities that help our, our brains with new patterns because we're all prone to our brains lying to us and those cognitive

distortions that certainly come with depression and anxiety, but they also just come with being human and being insecure at times. And our brains really play tricks on us. So I mean, I think where the science is is we're still in a phase where kind of both things are happening. We're in the development phase of actually what are the interventions and what is the essence of those interventions that reduces suicide risk. So we know that cognitive behavioral therapy, dialectical behavior therapy, and several others clearly reduce not only attempts, but suicide risk. Is there a big five, you know, that we look to when we look at suicide rates like that? Yes and no. The risk factors are clear in a way there. The issue with suicide, maybe even a tad

more than depression, believe it or not, is that it's going to be a complicated interaction of multiple of them interplaying, escalating one another, and then acute risk happens at a moment in time. It's a very brief period of time, even if somebody has been suffering over a long period of time. And so, you know, among the mental health conditions that are known to elevate suicide risk, mood disorders are at the top of the list, in part because they are so much more common. And that one I get nervous to talk about because we want people to feel open to say, I'm bipolar, right? Or I suffer from depression or I'm schizoaffective. And we don't want people to associate that with, oh, you're a suicide risk, right? But it's important from a medical perspective

for us to understand both those associations and also potential correlations. Right, right. And the truth also being, by the way, that the vast majority of people with those mental health conditions don't attempt, let alone die by suicide. So that's, you know, I think it's, So it's sort of like an almost necessary but insufficient risk factor is the mental health, mental illness piece. And then you have a whole lot of other things like early childhood trauma. So that's very similar for depression, right? In particular, a history of sexual abuse, traumatic brain injury. A traumatic brain injury because of, say more, because of lifestyle changes, because traumatic brain injury can happen to many parts of the brain. It's not like I just want

make sure for those at home, we're not saying there's a part of the brain that you can have damaged and then you commit suicide. No, no, right. Not that at all. It's again, look at it as like a history of depression or even physical illness too. Honestly, if you look at heart disease, rheumatoid arthritis, diabetes, epilepsy, all of those also have higher rates of suicide, but not on their own. So you have to learn, it's like you have to learn to look for these patterns and connect all the dots up. If there's a history of a past suicide attempt, a history of depression, a family history of suicide, childhood adversity slash trauma, and now the person is experiencing a significant

stressor or loss, which, by the way, isn't always the case. There isn't always a precipitator for suicidal crisis. Many times there are people who it is so much part of their hard wiring in a way that they are working against that. And actually, the treatments that have been developed, I mean, the scientific area, you would love it, Ma'am, if you saw all of the studies that are just, the science is burgeoning with not only understanding these risk factors and how they interrelate, but also the development of interventions, both in the clinical setting, but also in the community setting, in the families, homes, school-based, workplaces, programs and interventions. So it's a time where I suspect that maybe, let's say, 10 years from now, we will have a lot more tools. And so all of the stigma reduction that's happening is a beautiful thing,

but is limited by the fact that it's hard to produce change when you don't have easy, sort of quick, you know, plug-and-play solutions and interventions. But they're... MyNBialx breakdown is supported by Superpower. We all know the feeling of leaving a doctor's office and kind of feeling like we didn't get anything out of the experience that was useful. Maybe they're like, you're fine. Drink more water.

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I really like one of my teachers said there are no enlightened beings. There's only inlined activity. And so I got to question, what is enlightened activity? And I believe it's when what the Gandhi said that happiness is when what you think, what you say and what you do are all in alignment, all in harmony. So inlined activity, I believe, is when you are congruent, where you're not creating any internal conflict that thereby creates this vicious loop of, you know, not being happy with yourself, not being able to sleep at night, whether we're talking about, you know, believing or saying one thing and doing another or cognitive dissonance where you're just making excuses for your behavior, whatever it is, I believe that I just looked at it

logically. I was not drawn to Buddhism or monastic living or anything of the sort by how holy or otherworldly it was, I simply made a very logical decision to not contribute to my own suffering. You know, all of Buddhism can really be summed down into pain is inevitable, suffering is optional. And so when I heard that, I thought optional. Like, you mean we choose to suffer? And it turns out we do unconsciously or habitually. And so I took a pause, a time out going, why am I choosing what I'm choosing? And it turned to this really interesting journey to not drop everything. Like, you know, I was working in the corporate world.

I was making good money. I had the condo, the sports car, the designer clothes, the furniture, the whole thing. And I realized I'm on this conveyor belt that everybody else is on and I know where it's going. And it's pitched to us as the path to happiness. but I haven't seen anyone who, you know, anyone I know who's happy has jumped off the conveyor belt and done something different. I realized that if I stayed on that treadmill, then that's where it would lead. It would lead to depression. It would lead to needing to mask my pain, my suffering with drug, sex, alcohol, all of that, which my 20s were filled with.

And I thought, what if I stop, as you call it, the God-shaped hole, stop trying to fill it with all these things and just take a closer look at it and go, What is, what is, what do I really value and I value time? And so the, the first big step, like you said, I had many beginnings. The first one was I moved from the Bay Area to Seattle and I took a 50% pay cut. And that's when I first realized how happy I am has nothing to do with how much money I'm making. You got to slow down a little bit. So you take a 50% pay cut. Now that to a lot of people, like that sounds, I mean, that sounds terrifying.

You said, let's scale back. scale down. No. So it was more of for so many years I followed, like I said, the recipe and I bought, you know, the stuff and thereby getting into debt, just like everybody else. And then one day, I was just so committed to getting out of debt. And one day I was writing my last check to the credit card company. And I thought to myself, well, gosh, I'm not going to send, you know, this credit card company, a thousand dollars next month like I do every month. What am I going to do with that extra thousand. And instead of starting to think of, oh, well, I can start a family or can buy a fancier car or a bigger place. I thought, well, I don't have to make that extra money.

That was the shift. That was the, I can just work less and live more. That's what started kind of everything. And instead of thinking, how much money can I make is like, how little money do I really need to make? And it turns out, moving to Hawaii and living there for 10 years, making $7,000 a year and living my best life ever, I was like, I guess that's the magic number for me. And anything above that, I can just donate and give away because that's all I need. Paring everything down and simplifying to the very base of like, what do I need to survive can be wildly freeing. And I actually think that's an exercise that most people don't ever do. And if you do it, there's an enormous amount of freedom in it because it's like, you just get rid of everything. All our preconceived

ideas of the way that most people spend money are keeping them trapped and therefore they feel this endless pressure to keep up with it. Exactly. People might be like, but does Timber like get really mad and throw things? I don't think you do. I'm sure you feel feelings, but you are in a different place. For me, the big shift in that was understanding the difference between a feeling and an emotion. I feel everything everyone feels.

But the way I define the difference is that a feeling lasts 45 seconds to a minute. and a half and then it moves on to another feeling. That's the feeling. And they're all valid. They're all one. And we all experience all of them. But an emotion is oftentimes when we have the feeling, you know, somebody cuts us off in the freeway and we get upset.

But instead of moving on to the next feeling when our favorite song comes on the radio and we would typically be dancing in our seat and singing along, instead of doing that, we get stuck in that feeling of upsetness. And we create a narrative around what happened. And we say, oh, it's always those jerks and pickup trucks. People live their whole lives like this. The idea is not to create a. bubble where nobody pushes our buttons, but to get to a place where we don't have any buttons

that can be pushed. That's so hard for me. You know, mindfulness doesn't make people less irritating. It makes us less irritable. Let's pause there for a second. No, let's say that again. I want to say it again. Say it again. Mindfulness doesn't make people less irritating. It makes us less irritable. I remember asking some of the priests in one of the monasteries where I lived, you know, if our intention is to live a simple life, why would you get married and have children? And he said there's things you can't learn about yourself outside of a relationship that you can only learn when you're living with a mirror, so to speak, when all of your sharp edges are pointed out to you. And if you make a commitment to smooth those out, then a relationship is actually really beneficial on your journey,

not detrimental. That's beautiful. What was that, Jonathan? I just said, I said, he said, you're welcome, and I said that's beautiful. I was just helping her thank me for pointing out all the sharp edges that she's smoothing. Let's welcome Nora McInerney to the breakdown. We were together for a year and then he had a seizure at work and that night we found out it was a brain tumor and then four days later they took it out of his skull and a month later we were married and he had stage four brain cancer and then and then and then and I do remember standing in the hospital hallway.

before we knew, but you always kind of know, but we had like just that magical thinking where like we just joined this thing called Instagram and he was like, take a picture. Like take a picture. So I've got like my iPhone 4 and I'm like taking a picture as they're closing the doors to the MRI room. And I just thought like, okay, like this is one of those moments that's a before and after. Like whatever happens after this, like I know my life.

will be different. And it was. And you mentioned like everything is so personal. There is no like knowing exactly how someone feels. But I think in those moments, in those like first weeks after he had brain surgery and then got his diagnosis, like I felt simultaneously like I had been separated from the normal world. We were sitting in a hospital room for so long.

Like our world had just shrunk down. There was all this possibility. We're going to be together. We're going to get married and have babies and, you know, wear matching outfits and family photos and all of that stuff. And then we're just in this little room. But so is everyone else in this hospital. Like so is everyone else.

Like no one is here because they want to be except the people who work here and are being paid. Everyone else here is like here against their will because something terrible happened. And I felt so separated from the world. and also so connected to it in a way that I just hadn't had to before. Like I just, I had so much sympathy, like so much pity, I should say, for people who are going through hard things and almost no empathy because I just refused to imagine. I remember I'm whispering to me, like, you can't marry me now because I'm going to be sick.

And I was like, no, you won't. And also, like, no one tells me what to do except my dad. dad. And there's like the heart monitor light illuminating, like his beautiful profile. He had the best nose. And I remember telling him like, you're, we're going to get married. We're going to get married as soon as you're out of here. And like, that's that. And now we're engaged. So, like, I was like, okay, but you like, you really shouldn't. And I was like, well, I'm really going to. So there we go. So we went to the oncologist office and they told us that it was. stage four glioblastoma and we had said before no matter what. And I don't remember if Aaron said

this or I said it to the doctor, but we had talked about it beforehand. And we told them, like, we never want to know how much time there is, like ever. So even if right now you're saying, like he has four days to live, we don't want to know. Like, we just never, ever want to know. And that's that. And we never want you to even bring it up ever. And so they never did. But I googled that word once on my phone. And the first result, how you get like that little preview, it says expectancy three to five years. And I remember trying to close my phone so quickly, but he saw it and he saw me see it. And then we just pretended that neither of us had seen it.

So you, you did get married. We got married. We got married one month later at the same place where we met. Wow. when people say things like, well, we're all going to die eventually, which people said to Aaron when he had cancer, well, probably all get cancer. It's like, okay, then you get it right now. Right. Like if it's so easy. What could get hit by a bus tomorrow? Yeah, but you don't think you will. You know, that's why you get out of bed. Like, if you truly live believing like it could end at any

moment, you wouldn't get up. I want everyone to have like the gift of not knowing, like, of and of not anticipating and living with this, you're all, like when you're already living on that ledge, like on the knife's edge where like it could just end, like any, it could just truly end and you both know that. It really is a gift to like not be able to project that far into the future. I think that's what anxiety is. That's what worry is, like sort of trying on those feelings in advance.

We decided to have another baby, and it seems delusional now, part of it. You know, like it really does. But I wanted Ralph to have a sibling. I wanted him to have a sibling that was, you know, Aaron's child. Like Aaron, we had all this extra sperm. It felt like I didn't want to waste it. And what do you do? You know, like, is it moral to have a baby with a man who's not there anymore?

I don't know. And I wanted him to be there for it. I felt like Ralph had these magical powers and had like, kept Aaron alive. And so would two babies keep him double alive? I don't know. But I got pregnant and it felt miraculous and it felt amazing and it felt so sad to watch this disease progress and know that I was like growing a life while I was also watching like a life end. And it was obvious. Like it was obvious that like that tumor was growing and like clipping into other parts of his brain. So I lost that baby on October 3rd.

And then my dad died five days later. But then literally, approximately six weeks later, you lost Aaron. Yes. I didn't have like, I don't want to say I didn't have the safety, but kind of. Like I didn't have a place to just do that and feel that because I was afraid to show people who had known me for so long, like how much it hurt. And I thought if I showed them that, then that would be all they could see. And they would never see me any other way.

And they would just feel bad for me. And I didn't want anyone's pity. I didn't want to just be like this sad story, which I could kind of sense that like, it was just a sad story for people to repeat, you know. And I didn't want that. What has helped? because a lot of people get into a grief paralysis and it's very, very hard to get out of it or to move through it. Yeah. You know what I see more often is what you and I do, which is like this frenetic need

to try to alchemize it into something else, to try to use it for self-improvement. Oh, I'm going to help you. I'm going to do this thing. I'm going to do this thing. I tell everybody like, what if you didn't? Like, what if you didn't? You don't have to. You don't have to Every person who's lost like a child or a husband or a parent does some horrible disease is like, I need to start a thing to keep their memory alive out in the world forever. No, you don't. No, you don't. And people live inside of you.

They live in like the stories you tell. And I spent so much of that time. And I don't, I don't regret it, right? I don't regret the things like I did. I think they were like, until they weren't anymore. But I also look back at those years and I think, oh my gosh, that is a person who's just like, who's just too afraid to be with it. And the only thing that has helped is actually being with it and actually allowing myself to fall apart. I didn't also have

like the luxury of of being able to. And most people don't. Like most people have like no safety. net. And so I don't think that you're stuck if you are still sad years later. Like you do have this sacred responsibility to live fully. But living fully does not mean, you know, accomplishing and like performing and and trying to do things like living fully is so much smaller and quieter. And it, it for me, has meant that I got married and I blended a few. And I blended a few. family, but it is also meant that I try to actually enjoy my life, which for a long time, I think a lot of those things that I was doing was me trying to prove that, like, I still deserved to be alive because Aaron was so young.

He was 35 and he was so kind. And everybody loved him and I'm kind of an asshole. And I just wanted to like earn it, right? Like, I wanted to earn my survival over his. And you don't have to do that. It's extremely significant and important to acknowledge that while all grief has things in common, yeah, it's exceptionally specific. We cover cults with Steve Hassan. You were a part of this cult that was called The Moonies.

My girlfriend dumped me. I'm in the cafeteria waiting for my next class. and three women just flirted with me and started asking me questions, could they sit at my table? And I knew nothing about cults. They just kept love bombing me, which came to become a very famous term for effusive praise, unrelenting. How special you are, Jonathan, and my, oh, my goodness.

This is how I got on the podcast. I get in the van. We drive up to Tarrytown, New York, to a fireman. former Seagram's estate, multi-million dollar estate for, we're driving through the gates. And they say, oh, by the way, this weekend we're having a joint workshop with the Unification Church. And I went, whoa, no one said anything about a workshop. No one said anything about a church. I'm going home. Drive me back. And then they did the classic, turn it around on me. Steve, what's wrong?

Are you, do you have a problem with Christians? So all of a sudden, I was like Christians, wait a minute. And they disoriented me. Long story short, I said, I want to go back. Sorry, we're not going back. We'll drive you back in the morning. Just bring in your bags and stay the night. I was up all night.

The van wasn't there in the morning. And so, and this was way before. cell phones. This was 1974. And it became one extension to the next to the next. This is my best recollection of 47 years ago. So we've been listening to a lot of information this last few days, a lot of very interesting, profound things. But I'm wondering if part of your mom's, is wondering, maybe it's a bunch of rubbish. But on the other hand, what if, what if, they do it three times, what if it's true, could you walk away from the son of God?

How long were you in this cult total? 27 months. And I fell asleep at the wheel of a moment. Mooney fundraising van on the Baltimore Beltway April 23rd at 530 in the morning 1976 and it was that near fatal van crash that got me in the hospital away from the group for weeks that got me reconnecting in my heart with my sister the my closest relative closest person in the world who was the only one who didn't say I was an occult and I was brainwashed because that's a big no-no. If you tell someone in a cult,

they're in a cult and then you're, you know, you're persecuting them and all that. It was like being in a dark room and someone opens the Venetian blinds in midday and the light comes in and you're almost blinded because it's like, whoa. It was all of a sudden realization? Yep. The deprogramers were trying to connect profiles of Adolf Hitler and Sun Jung Moon and they were making a lot of points and my cult self was not happy and at what point I got really angry and I said I don't care if Moon is like Hitler I've chosen to follow him and I'll follow him to the end and then it got caught up to me and this chill went down my spine but I still wasn't out yet, right? But that was a big shift that I reacted that way.

Is there a way to sort of ensure that we're not getting close to one of those types of organizations or ways of thinking? Great question. So my stance is if it's legitimate, it will stand up to scrutiny. And if someone's trying to pressure you to a fast sell or to do something. Everybody needs an internal protector. And like, warning, warning. Remember Lost in Space, Miami? Warning, Will Robinson.

Danger, danger. People need to understand. Most people are nice and good. There's a small percentage of the population that are malignant narcissists that are con artists. There are people who have no empathy. there are people who read body language really well. Maybe they know covert hypnotic techniques too or whatever.

But if you're meeting someone or some group and it sounds too good to be true, take a time out. Go to your friends and family and say, hey, before I go further, what do you think of this thing? I mean, with deep fakes, with all kinds of auditory stuff where people can be made to say anything in anyone's voice. You just, we have to slow down. Remember, we're not digital.

We may be using technology, but we're not technology. And we shouldn't be servants to technology. Dr. Jenny, welcome to Mind Biel.LX breakdown. Can you just speak a little bit generally about maybe the spectrum, you know, of disordered eating and when it becomes something that either needs, you know, specific therapy or, you know, 12-step programs is a free solution, you know, that a lot of people use. But can you talk a little bit about the spectrum of severity and sort of the need for, for more care and how you know when that is? Perfect. And, you know, in terms of when people start, like,

on the continuum from struggling in a way that you think isn't, like, severe enough to merit care to the other end when you're wondering when you need a higher level of care, for people that, like, feel as though they might need some help, I really believe in preventative medicine and self-validation. Like, if you're struggling even a little bit, why not get yourself some help because you deserve it and you don't have to feel like you're going to get the same number of sessions or intensity of health that someone that's struggling with something much more severe will pursue?

But, you know, be kind to yourself, be a good friend to yourself. if you're engaged in a relationship with food that doesn't seem healthy to you, for sure, like do yourself a favor and start meet with a therapist. I'm going to interrupt you super quick because that's completely true, but I also know, and I know this from personal experience, a lot of people feel like I don't have the money, I don't have the time, I can manage it, it's not that big of a deal, and most people eat like this, which if you live in a large city, many people do.

So many people can't afford therapy, and there are really interesting, low-fee training programs. And I'm talking about like three sessions, not 37. So even if you can't necessarily afford the 37, maybe you could get a couple. And that takes a specific kind of therapist that's willing to kind of meet you where you're at and see what your needs are and, you know, do the least to have the most benefit. If you're feeling like this is not the level that I want to invest time to take away from work or limited resources, they're great books.

Overcoming binge eating is a really fabulous. book, I'm happy to recommend other evidence-based books that do have research behind them. You could definitely do, like, if you're willing to do the work, you're listening to this podcast, you're definitely growth-oriented, doing things like some self-help reading might be helpful. I think everywhere is becoming a lot more focused on body and body image and the internet's amazing, and we love it. But also it has brought, you know, a notion about appearance and sort of what you, quote,

should look like to a lot more people in a lot more ways. ways. And I think social media has also, you know, I don't mean to sound like the granny who's like, that's social media. But, you know, I have teenagers. And my older son is almost 16. And for sure, I'm seeing, you know, we look at the things that he looks at together. And I'm seeing that there's really one way that it is presented that a body should be, whether you're a boy or a girl. I mean, it's really, it's kind of gone beyond gender, beyond, you know, beyond a lot of things. And so I think that's also really important to acknowledge is that we do have a culture that increasingly is showing us different images and that can weigh differently on people. Yeah, so dialectical behavior therapy

is a treatment that teaches people who feel like they feel their feelings intensely, specific tools to regulate their emotions because a lot of, this is an evidence-based treatment for eating because a lot of people try to suppress their feelings and then use maladaptive coping, unhealthy coping strategies, like using food to self-soothe or overthink, you know, as a way to try to problem solve, which also backfires. And so DBT is a specific treatment that teaches how to manage your emotions, cope with crises, be more mindful, be more assertive. It includes individual therapy, skills, training where you literally like learn, like,

almost like you're in a class. And then coaching calls, which is contact with your therapist between sessions. That sounds like fun. It's honestly, like, again, to this generalizing point. Like, it's all, you know, great in theory if you're, you know, just talking when you're, you know, emotionally regulated. But then once emotions are high, it's, it's really hard to kind of take what you learn in the room or in a residential program and put it into practice. And so the coaching calls. And then it's also really important when I mentioned

DBT, like this is not something. I know I mentioned some self-help books. This is not something that is easy to learn on your own. It's really helpful to meet with a therapist that specializes in dialectical behavior therapy. So many people that struggle with fear of public speaking have this combination of rules for themselves and just backfires. So they have, you know, really perfectionistic standards. This has to be, they have to really impress people and also make them laugh. Then they have fear of their body reacting in a way that's not going to be helpful, like panicking or their mind going blank. And then the third thing that oftentimes people do when they fear public speaking is avoided at all costs. So you have this, you know, impossible trifecta of high expectations that creates your

body to react in a way that allows you to not be able to focus and then avoiding it at all cost. There's no way you'll ever feel more at ease. And so I really work with clients on changing their expectations. Like the goal is like their values. Like what is the reason behind, the meaning behind what they want to share and really focusing on like showing up rather than sounding perfect. You know, you only fail if you bail. And then exposure therapy.

My big, I want to do a public service announcement for exposure therapy, for people that have fear, there's no way that you're just automatically going to feel like I'm ready to do public speaking unless you systematically approach it. So, you know, you could make a list of least to greatest fears around public speaking. Is it speaking to people you know? Is it speaking to people you don't know?

Is it scripted, unscripted? And I just want to say that I actually personally hated public speaking. And I took classes, which are super helpful and actually super annoying, but like improv for executives, which, you know, which was so great. I did that like 10 years ago. And I more recently did now it's like my passion project is how to be a better communicator. Like if I want to spread hope, like that's. something to do. So I think, you know, anyone that wants to work on this certainly can. I, yeah, it's very helpful if you feel like your fear is getting in the way of your quality

of life to work with a therapist that could help you design exposures. But if you can't afford that, there are certainly, you know, groups like toastmasters. There's even like virtual reality. I've heard of them. Yeah. Yeah. There's even virtual reality goggles that can simulate speaking in front of an audience to help you practice. But yeah, yeah. If people Google that, there's, it's, it's not that expensive. I think it's like 25. to do like a VR experience for public speaking. Let's welcome my astro twin, Alan Gordon. I literally was at a point where I had not only back pain.

I had pain. This was after my father died. And, you know, I think we can all guess what kind of stress I was in. I had pain and still do get pain that moves around my body for which there is not a medical condition. there's there's there's nothing quote wrong it is not that I'm imagining the pain and Alan's going to talk to us about it it's that there are some systems that are wired to interpret sensation as pain you taught me the expression mind body syndrome which is one of the one of the things

that I feel is most helpful when people see that I'm in pain or debilitated and they try and tell me all the things I'm supposed to do saying to them I don't need suggestions. Thank you. This is actually an extension of mind-body syndrome. But it's also called neuroplastic pain. Is that? That's the term that we have settled on.

You know, there are so many different terms for this. There's tension myocitis syndrome, like you said, with Dr. Sarno. There's psychophysiologic disorders association. There's mind-body syndrome. You know, in the academic community, it's known as centralized pain, but that isn't really necessarily like user-friendly. So neuroplastic pain is essentially just a fancy way of saying learned pain. It's the brain's way of actually learning pain.

Pain is a danger signal. You know, if you put your hand on a hot stove, the pain is your brain's way of letting you know that you have to move your hand so you don't cause more damage. And that's necessary. We need that. Yeah, it's important for survival. I think there's actually like there's a disorder

where someone is actually born without the ability to feel. pain and there's like 17 of these people in the world and they have a really low survival rate but you know it's really amazing because pain is a survival mechanism that has the goal of protecting us from injuring ourselves worse like many danger signals it's there to help us but sometimes the brain can make a mistake and actually interpret danger where there is none and so we could actually feel pain even when there's nothing wrong with our bodies and even in these cases the pain is one

100% real. You know, there's no such thing as imaginary pain, but it's being caused by our brains and not our bodies. And the amazing thing is more and more studies are actually showing that the majority of chronic pain is neuroplastic pain as opposed to structurally caused. It's about turning down the volume on that interpretation of sensation as pain. That's exactly what it is. I remember. Literally, no, neuroscientifically, like you hit the nail on the, the head, there was actually a paper that just came out, I think in 2018, with some neuroscientists at Harvard, that actually they were able to identify the volume knob in the brain that actually,

you know, could increase those pain signals. And that's what's going on. So when you were having pain, when you were sitting, so Jonathan, you're sitting right now and you don't have back pain? Not like she does. Okay. Just say. Yeah, I mean. Not like she does. He doesn't like when I suffer and someone thinks he's not suffering as much. But that's a different story.

Got it. So one of the things that I didn't like about working with you. I love that this is like a pro, this is turning into like a pros and cons of Allen's therapy. This is actually just a Yelp review that we're doing in a podcast. She doesn't need help. She's faking the back injury just so that she could bring you on here. One of the things that was hard was that you made me slow down. Oh, she hates that.

It hit my shame button. It hit my shame button. Not because you were shaming me. You were very calmly pointing out that my voice is a mirror of what's going on inside my body, with which I speak. Oh, wow. Jonathan, for our listeners, Jonathan is holding up a sign like Wiley Coyote that says, slow down. And what you pointed out was that my voice, my cadence, the rapidness with which I speak, the volume with which I speak was a reflection of my internal state. And I remember that

was hard also because that's hard to hear as a woman, because women are often told to shut up. and I come from a very strong home where I was taught that women should speak up. And I did. Like it's part of my identity is my voice and how forceful I can be. And I remember it was really, really hard. And it was hard to be a grown adult and be told like something that you're doing is not working for you when I thought I was doing pretty well. you know, and it's like if I was doing that well, I probably wouldn't be sitting in your office. I was listening to you while you were describing that and you were describing it in such a calm, easy way.

Like you were doing such a, you know, jumping back in a therapist mode here. We have a tendency to talk really fast. And the reason that I pointed that out to you is I used to do the same thing where I would totally gallop and talk so fast. And, you know, what we do when we do that is we're neglecting our internal sense. state. So we're kind of abandoning ourselves by, you know, calming our system down, keeping ourselves regulated when we do that. Can you repeat that? Yeah. We're talking really fast and we're singularly focused on getting our point across or connecting with someone or doing something like that. We are simultaneously neglecting our internal state. We're not regulating our anxiety.

We're not attending to ourselves. We're abandoning ourselves. So I wasn't telling you to slow down. And what I was telling you was care about yourself as much as I care about you. You know, let's help you attend to your internal state and take care of your system. I'll keep your nervous system calm and regulated so that you can feel more okay in the moment. How many of us live our whole lives with that kind of tension? And we think we're relaxing, but we're not. And so then for a brain like mine that is really like the volume is, like the volume is, very, very, it's tuned up really, really high. Like, I'm ready to pick up anything and call it pain.

Anything. Sorry. That, that kind of tension over time, it accumulates. And that's science. Like, every time you're clenching a muscle, it is sending a message. Like, that's how the nervous system works. So often when we're in a stressful situation, what the stressful component is, is that we stop attending to our breath. We stop regulating our anxiety. And, you know, we often think that it's like the external stress that's making us feel bad. But what it really is is it's the fact that we are so wrapped up in what's going on. Let's welcome Vishin Lakiani to the podcast. Welcome. What does that mean to be unfuck with a bowl? So let's let's first cover the first point, right? feeling you're enough. It simply means you don't feel like you need to prove yourself or prove that

you matter to anyone. So one of the people who influenced this thought in me is the late Morty Lefco. So Morty Lefco and his wife, Shelley Lefcoe, they were psychologists living in California. They developed something called the Lefco method. And it's a methodology of raising kids with powerful self-belief. kids who don't create meaning about the world, meaning that hold them back. Mordy and Shelley's pieces is that the most important job of a parent is to protect the beliefs of their children, to raise children who are not so poked with holes that say that they are not worthy or they are not pretty enough or they are not smart enough or they are not tall enough, that they have to compensate somehow as an adult. So the idea of being whole, of feeling that you are enough, this comes from the work of this psychologist, Mordi Lepko.

So that's the first piece. Let's talk about that piece. I don't know how to have that piece. Meaning, you know, my organizing principles are such that I constantly, I mean, I think many of us have that. I constantly, like everything I do, it feels like I need to, like, prove, to offend. Like, how, I'm going to ask a very complicated question in a very simple way. How do I fix that? So, so there are many, many, many different ways, right?

There are so many, so many methodologies, so many theories. When I think about that, feeling enough, there's a book that comes to mind. It's by a former U.S. military guy by the name of Kamal Rabikhan. The book is called Love Yourself, like your life depended on it. And so I know what you're talking about because I felt that. And in the book, he suggests us a number of really interesting exercises that actually generate self-love. So so many of us, we need to patch these holes by getting someone else to love us, to fall in love with us. And one of the most interesting exercises in the book, I don't want to give away the book because

it's like 83 pages. You can read it in an hour. But there was this one exercise that I started doing. And it's so bizarre. I just want your audience to have an open mind. when I'm brushing my teeth. So when I was going through this, this low in my life and I just felt unworthy, I would do this exercise I learned from Ravi Khan. While I'm brushing my teeth in the morning, I would look at myself in the mirror, look at one eye, just one eyeball. I'd stare at my own eyeball in the mirror and I'd say, I love you.

I love you. I would just repeat that to myself. It was interesting because in seven days, I pulled myself out of that funk. And every time I feel low, a quick repetition of that gets me up again. Now, there is some signs for theirs. There's studies that have been done that show that when you look at another person at the up, you stare at another person's eyeball for an extended amount of time. I think it's like a minute or so.

You generate a strong amount of compassion and love for that person, even if it's a stranger. And I wonder if this could be the same thing when we are staring at our own eye in a mirror. Creating your life as a unique masterpiece. What does that mean? Okay. So have you guys heard of Don Miguel Ruiz? He wrote this remarkable book called Mastery of Love. And then he wrote another book called The Four Agreements. So he's a Toltec writer. Toltec is a, is a, is a, is an, a form of Mexican wisdom. So he said something really interesting. He said, Vision, Toltec means artist. The Toltec's were artists. Toltec wisdom essentially means this. You have one life to live. Think of your life as your art, as a masterpiece. It doesn't matter what anybody else thinks. You decide where the blue is going to go. You decide that you want to put a splash of red there. You decide that you want a yellow border. Nobody else gets to judge it. Your life is

your life. You decide to live it the way you want to live it. So let's extrapolate that. So many of us as we step into the world as young adults, we don't call it. We don't call it. create our own painting. We don't create our masterpiece. Rather, we are coming out, we are choosing to come out as photocopies. We have photocopies of our parents' life, photocopies of our great-grandparents, like photocopies of what our religion, our culture, society, our media, our politicians, tell us to be, rather than truly create our own life. I was a photocopy. I grew up in an Indian family where education was considered paramount. My grandfather told me to become an engineer, so I did. I studied engineering at the University of Michigan. I got a job.

at Microsoft and 11 weeks into Microsoft. I quit because I was miserable. For five years, I'd been chasing a dream that was not my own. I was chasing my grandfather's dream, and he had died. He had died seven years before. I was a photocopy. When I decided to live my own life, I went against the grain. Again, I decided to paint and create my own masterpiece.

Now, I believe that when you take that path, it's going to get tough in the beginning. because you're not painting within the lines. You're not coloring by numbers. You've got to figure everything out on your own. But when it clicks, I believe you can be healthier, wealthier, more successful than people who come out of the human photocopy machine. Our guest today is Karam-Mayer Robinson. Just because someone wants to have a conversation doesn't mean you have to have it.

When I first heard that phrase, it was a revelation because I was raised where whatever you threw at me, I was going to, you know, I had to bat it back. And we had to have an elaborate conversation if you wanted to. Also, as a child, your parents often have conversations with you that you don't always want to be part of. But when you become an adult, you have the ability to say, I don't, I'm not available for that conversation. And learning that sentence, especially when with family who may not agree with your parenting choices, they may not agree with your breastfeeding choices, they may not agree with who you're dating or who you're voting for, whatever it is, the notion of being able to say to someone, I'm not available for this conversation and to say it lovingly. And then the next part is that you have to follow through. meaning if someone does not respect that boundary, it is on you to leave the conversation. And that sometimes means making everyone very uncomfortable.

So you said a word that I was already thinking as soon as you started saying this, it's boundaries, right? So this is a boundaries issue. There is no question that boundaries are a good thing, that healthy boundaries are a good thing. And that is one of the things that can get in the way of family, especially. is if one person doesn't set a certain boundary, then nobody's going to respect it because it's not even there. You know what I mean? So if you want your family, parents, sibling, whoever it is, in-law, whatever, you need to set that boundary for them. And so if there's nothing there,

they're probably going to try to go wherever they want to go, and it's unproductive for everybody. So that's a boundaries issue. It's a good thing to set them. It can be awkward, especially if you're people pleaser and you just want to give whoever's talking about something, you want to give them what they're looking for. So you really have to like consciously step back and say, this is not a good idea and I'm not going to engage in this. And then you have to figure out like how to say it in a way that's not going to create more of a problem for anybody involved.

So you just say something like, I totally appreciate where you're coming from, but I'm going to take a pass on this conversation. I'm going to take a pass on this topic. And just as simple as that, don't talk about it. It is up to you to set the boundaries, but also lots of times when other people are responding to you, it's not even about you. It's about them. It's about something they're going through or some issue they have that is just showing itself on you. So sometimes it helps to step back also and realize that, okay, you know what, this isn't even about me. This is their own issue and I'm not going to engage in that. So that's kind of a more advanced technique, I guess, almost to get to the point where you can be like, oh, okay, you know what, this is your problem,

not mine. It's not always easy to spot that. But once you realize it, it can make things a lot easier, especially with family. That's detachment. Am I right? Like detaching? Yeah, that is. Because other people may be projecting, right? They may be projecting their own issues on you. And it's on you then to detach and say, it's not mine. One of the things to do is to prepare yourself mentally in advance. So, like, you have to know what your patterns are with your family. Like, okay, this is what happens all the time. And don't predict it just so that you can get all tied up and knots about it, but really try to, like, step back and say, what do we do? Like, what happens with my family all the time? What is, what do we always end up fighting about? Or why do I always feel a certain way? Do I feel

like a child again or whatever it is that you know is going to upset you. You can kind of plan ahead for that. And so if you know, like I say in therapy, that insight is half the battle. So once you get that insight into your own behavior or other people's behavior, it's like suddenly things become clearer and then you can manage it a lot better. So what I would do is before a family gathering, like sit down and say to yourself, okay, what is probably going to happen here and how am I going to handle it? So you can go in and there are a bunch of strategies you can use that you can go into that gathering with. Journaling is a good thing. If you aren't in therapy, you can do this at home by yourself before you go wherever you're going to go and say,

okay, what happened the last time I was with my family? What upset me? What was the thing that made me storm off? What was the thing that got really my skin crawling? Like, what was it? And then you, those are triggers, like you're saying before. That's how you recognize your triggers. So figuring out what your triggers are is really a good step to take before you're in that situation because you can head it off before it happens. At the same time, you do know, if you can predict, like I was saying before, what your family is going to do that's going to trigger you, they're probably going to do it. So you do want to be prepared with, well, how am I going to handle it? So sometimes you may just be able to talk about it or whatever.

whatever it is, but other times you'll want to, like I said before, take a pass. And the kind of line for that would be like, I appreciate what you're talking about. I understand. But sometimes I feel upset if I talk about it. So I'd rather not talk about it today. And so the key there also is to use eye statements they're called. So you talk about things that you personally are feeling or experiencing rather than saying, you make me mad when or I can't stand it. Well, this is really an I statement, but it's not, I can't stand it when you, blah, blah, blah, blah. So you don't want to be you, you, you, it's not going to be productive. So not only isn't, I'm not good for that person, but that's not why I'm giving this advice. It's for you. You're only going to get yourself

in a worse situation if you have like a combative beginning to it. So take that eye and use those eye statements. I'm afraid if we talk about this, I'm afraid I'm going to feel upset and feel like I need to leave. And I don't want to do that. I'd rather just stay here. and, you know, enjoy the day. All right. That was one of our summer editions of Myambiolic's breakdown. Jonathan, these are fun.

It's fun having summertime together. You know why it's so much fun? Why? Because if you have a very short attention span, you just get right in. You get a really good line and you get up. I could watch these all day long. But we don't want people to get used to this.

We're going to go back to our normal, boring, long episodes, as you seem to think they are. They're so long. You have to follow them. You have to listen. People don't just cut to the chase. I just want the sound bites.

In the meantime, be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel. Check out our Instagram at Bialik Breakdown. Help us keep building our community there. We're doing really good. Let's have a good summer push from our summer breakdown to the one we hope you never have. Jonathan, we'll see you next time. It's my Beialics Breakdown. She's going to break it down for you.

She's got a neuroscience PhD or two. One, fiction. And now she's going to break a break. Break it down.