Modern Wisdom - #725 - Seerut Chawla - The Problem With Taking Therapy Advice From Instagram

Episode Date: December 30, 2023

Seerut Chawla is a licensed psychotherapist and founder of The Trenches, an organisation focusing on mental health and social media dynamics. There is a trend of online influencers who can identify your trauma and diagnose your attachment problems over social media. Is this an important new frontier for discussing mental health? Or cod-psychology over the internet. Expect to learn the biggest problems with coddling how it enables victimhood, the difference between pain and trauma, why being triggered is your responsibility, what everyone gets wrong about self worth, why we spend so much time obsessing over emotion in the West, the biggest problems with self-healing and much more… Sponsors: Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with your first box at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Get over 37% discount on all products site-wide from MyProtein at https://bit.ly/proteinwisdom (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Get 10% discount on Marek Health’s comprehensive blood panels at https://marekhealth.com/modernwisdom (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ Buy my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What's happening people? Welcome back to the show what my guest today is Seerot Chavler. She's a licensed psychotherapist and founder of the trenches, an organisation focusing on mental health and social media dynamics. There is a trend of online influences who can identify your trauma and diagnose your attachment problems over social media. Is this an important new frontier for discussing mental health or cod psychology over the internet. Expect to learn the biggest problems with coddling and how it enables victimhood, the difference between pain and trauma, why being triggered is your responsibility.

What everyone gets wrong about self-worth, why we spend so much time obsessing over emotion in the West, the biggest problems with self-healing and much more. This episode is brought to you by Element. Stop having coffee first thing in the morning. Your adenosine system that caffeine acts on isn't even active for the first 90 minutes of the day, but your adrenal system is and salt acts on your adrenal system.

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fitness space. The issue is that it's incredibly individualized. For one person, it could be lifestyle HRT, T-RT, Sexual Health, medication, hair loss treatment, or anything else, Marik Health is the place to go. If you've not been performing in the gym or in the bedroom, in the way that you would like, this is a fantastic place to go. If you've not been performing in the gym or in the bedroom, in the way that you would like, this is a fantastic place to begin. Head to marichelth.com slash modern wisdom and use the code modern wisdom at checkout to get 10% off your blood tests. That's mairekhealth.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom. A checkout. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome, Seerot Chavla. What's your issue with Codland? I think there's a few different things and they're all sort of, they're all part of

the same sort of sticky web of dysfunction. So there's coddling, there's social media, there's therapy culture, the sort of pop psychology stuff that I criticize a lot. And they're all very related. So, coddling, you could almost look at coddling as safety culture for children, and which of course children need safety, but over protecting children, and too much safety, it seems to stunt development.

It seems to stunt development. It seems to stunt your ability to overcome obstacles, to mitigate your emotions, your aggression, your impulses, to have any sort of resilience when, you know, to the vicissitudes of life, which no one's immune to. And then, and the sort of extension of childhood, that cordled childhood, which is now extended, you know,

it used to be that you were an adult around 15 or 16, or 18, and now it seems to go on and on, you know, into the early 20s, if not further, you're 30 year olds saying, I'm adulting. If you're an adult, it's just baby, it's not adulting. And then I guess safety culture, which is like coddling for adults, it's like treating adults like infants, incapable infants who couldn't cope with a different opinion. And if they have the misfortune of coming into contact

with an opinion that makes them uncomfortable, then they need a safe space with puppies and coloring books. And what are the ways that this safety culture, coddling culture for adults, how does that manifest? What are the behaviors that we see? So you, I mean, you would see it everywhere. So, you'd see it probably the most obvious examples, I think come from university campuses.

So, you see when anybody who's not completely dialed into the sort of American flavor of social justice leftism. When they're invited onto college campuses to have a talk, the huge, in North America, the huge demonstrations that break out. People accuse them of personally victimizing them. Sometimes the people are scared for their safety,

they're worried they're gonna get attacked. because sometimes the people are scared for their safety, they're worried they're gonna get attacked. Safe spaces are often provided, there's trigger warnings. Within your actual academic work, there's trigger warnings. And the research shows that trigger warnings don't actually work, they make things worse because then there's that anticipatory anxiety about how I'm gonna get triggered.

then there's that anticipatory anxiety about, oh, I'm gonna get triggered. There's, you see it in this pop psychology stuff where everybody's traumatized and we can't say anything that might hurt anyone's feelings ever. The greatest crime anybody can, the greatest sin is causing the fence So they're all they're all quite closely linked I'd say but this this to me sounds a lot like the concern over

Over protectionism strategies especially on college campuses especially in liberal arts colleges and stuff around America And and maybe creeping into the UK as well But what does this have to do with America and maybe creeping into the UK as well. But what does this have to do with adult mental health? Like, how is this not just a culture war topic? Like, you have expertise. You're a practicing cycle. Yeah. Yeah. Who also knows a bit of like psychoanalysis, he's stuff to... That's kind of more my area. I'm sort of, I would say psychodynamic or psychoanalytic psychotherapist. Everyone knows what this is. It's the form of therapy that's derivative of what people think of when they think of Freud.

But it's an updated modern version of it and the sort of basic premise of this form of therapy is that the mind is divided against itself. So there's all these different forms of all these different conflicts or different parts of us that want different things, have different needs. And so we're constantly working at cross purposes with ourselves and that often happens

unconsciously. It looks at how the past is alive in the here and now. And then, you know, like a good example would be like the DSM thinking is that any mental health issue is a disease, sort of akin to akin to the way we think of physiological diseases. And in psychoanalytic, and of course there are, there are very, you know, mental illnesses, very real. But in psychoanalytic thinking, you would see something like depression or anxiety as sort of, sort of like a fever or like a symptom that's telling you there's an underlying infection that's causing this symptom. So you'd of course have, you know, your patient or client see a psychiatrist or get whatever they need, but at the same time, you would work on addressing the underlying infection.

Yeah, I had a Jonathan Shedler on the show a little while ago. And he's a see. Yeah, he was phenomenal. And that was the first time that I really started to see a bit of the psychoanelidical, psychodynamic, key stuff. I'm still largely, I'm like an EP boy through and through like I know my evolution. And then all the rest of this stuff is like yeah again outside of my area of expertise But yeah, so again just round this out for me you are mental health expert work with clients one-on-one

sort of very well qualified but draw this line between What kind of sounds a little bit like what Ben Shapiro might talk about a lot and mental health like how do your expertise give you an insight of what is happening in these environments that's impacting your world and the people that enter your world? Okay, well first I just want to say I don't see myself as an expert and I'm barely a debt about a decade into my career and then in the people all the people I

admire have had like 40 years under their belts and they're fucking amazing. But anyway, the line I would draw is that when you prevent children and it's not always because parents are doing the wrong thing, it's also the environment wherein everything's on screens, children, younger and younger are getting on social media. There's a level of disconnection, there's far less rough and tumble play which children need to develop. Play isn't a fun treat, it's actually a developmental necessity. And when you look at the coddling and the over protection, you think of sort of like colloquially you might call it a helicopter parent. So parents always

having a hovering around and far too closely. So you don't give the child one the space to actually develop. And they're often removing obstacles from a child's path, obstacles they need. So if you prevent a child from experiencing anything difficult, you stop any form of conflict or difficulty with other children, you don't give them age-appropriate responsibility. Essentially, stunting their ability to have those skills as an adult. And you're also stunting their ability to learn how to go through something difficult

and manage your emotions around it. You know, we see these like vast groups of adults that just can't manage their emotions when something difficult comes up. They can't take their punches standing up. Every single time they're flattened. And that would be the line. So Jonathan Hate who has done some incredible work in his incredible book. The example he always gives is of the immune system, and which ties into Nassim Talib's idea of anti-affirjility. And the immune system for us to develop immunity, we have to come into contact with pathogens,

we have to come into contact with things that threaten the immune system and stress it out. And it's only by coming into contact with those difficult things that the immune system sort of learns to fight them. Can you see that children who live in a household that's got a dishwasher have doubled the rates of asthma and children who live in households that have a dog have half the rates of asthma and children who live in households that have a dog have half the rates of asthma. So you've fought. No, that makes perfect sense because the the the num peanut allergies, the rate of peanut

allergies is also skyrocketed, you know, because there's, you know, again, the safety culture, there's so much protectiveness about some child in this class might have a peanut allergy, so there's nothing, no nut. Right, and we have almost a... There's a mirror scenario going on here between what happens biologically in terms of the immune system and what happens psychologically in terms of our ability to be robust. It's absolutely. What do you think, you know, victimhood, victimhood culture, being a victim,

again, very popular term that's been thrown around a lot? What do you think most of the conversations around victimhood miss? Like most things on social media, everything turns into a very reductive binary. So you have one side that is wallowing in victimhood. And it's just ludicrous things. And you just think, good, go ahead and get a life.

This shouldn't flatten you. And collecting, I call it wound collecting, all these different things that add to their, you know, victimhood matrix that means they're more special and more important somehow. And then on the other side, you have people that seem to have absolutely no basic human empathy. And, you know, just sort of shame and castigate anybody who might be having a hard time

will then through difficult things. And I think the new one to get lost is that there's a big difference between actually having been victimized and identifying as a victim. And what I'm criticizing is always the latter. So there are people who've been victimized and in my anecdotal experience and in my clinical experience,

I find that people who've been victimized and in my anecdotal experience and in my clinical experience, I find that people who've really been through horrible horrific things often do not want to see themselves as a victim because that adds to the retraumatization feelings of having their agency taken away from them. They're often people who had no choice but to find the resources to survive who are still suffering the impacts of what they went through. And it's more the people who have a certain degree of anxiety and neuroticism and low mood and great difficulty regulating their affect or their emotions that identify as that really sort of hone in on this on this victimhood stuff because it gives them a really helpful convenient framework that explains what's going on for them while also giving you social currency and

and you're much less likely to be demonized and attacked if you're a victim What's the difference between pain and trauma? Pain is but pain is just a reality of life. We all have pain. Every single one of us has has Has pain that that's just you know the human condition trauma is pain that that's just, you know, the human condition. Trauma is, well, the word trauma as well, it's so flattened is difficult to sometimes pass it out, but traumatic exposure is going through something that, like, having lived through war or being physically abused or sexually assaulted, you know, any of those sorts of things that completely overloads your capacity to cope,

to the point that you might not even be able to form memories of what happened to you or what you went through. And then it leaves an injury and it's an injury that's neurobiological. So it actually changes the structure of the brain. It changes and it's also psychological injury. And people have symptoms like the stereotypical things that you see in films,

which is flashbacks and reliving what you went through and nightmares, but also things like insomnia and intrusive thoughts and pervasive, overwhelming feelings of shame, whether you're a bad person, complete damage to your capacity to attach to other people, because your trust has been so badly broken. It's one of those things that's so alive in your every day, that it's almost as though you're always responding to the traumatic thing you went through. And there's also a difference between going through something like that, something traumatic and developing PTSD, because not everybody goes through something traumatic and develops PTSD. And the protective factors there seem to be meaningful relationships and support. If you have that before, during and after, it can help mitigate the impacts of the traumatic experience.

And then people who do develop it often don't have support and also sometimes have a have a history of some form of abuse or mental health difficulties or yeah, and temperament individual temperament. One of the quotes from you that I love is being impacted by what happened to you isn't victimhood, it's human. Making an identity out of it is victimhood. Yeah. Yeah. And it's that sort of degree of attachment, right? There's sort of romanticization of pathologization.

That's such a good way to put it. Yeah. There's... When you have been victimized, you might make an identity out of victimhood or you might always feel like a victim. And that's not the same again as what I'm, what I'm criticizing, but it's something you have to work on. You, you really do. Because when your agency is taken away, um, and when I say your agency is taken away, and when I say your agency is taken away,

what I mean is that something is done to you against your will and there was nothing you could do to prevent it. It's an incredibly powerless, paralyzing feeling. And again, it's part of the injury that's left on you, especially if it happens in early life. So anything that happens to us when we're developing, because you know forms the fabric of who we are. So you might then go on to always feel as though you don't have agency, because you never, you've never felt that you did. You might, you might,

you know, it's something that you've never really, even occurred to you that you could tap into or use. And you might live in the world as somebody who has no agency, who things just happen to. And it's directly related to having your agency previously taken away. So, again, those people need help. They need help integrating what happened to them, forming a cohesive narrative around it, and learning how to take that agency back or learning how to tap into it. And then the other group, and it really frustrates me, because it's like you're making a mountain for yourself when you need it. If you knew what people suffer, when a living nightmare, it is to actually live with the after-effects of being traumatized,

you wouldn't want to claim that for yourself. Trust me, you wouldn't survive a day of it. So, you know, beating the drum of life so victimized, I'm so offended. I deserve special treatment. I have no agency so everybody has to do things for me. That would be the difference between the two groups, I'd say. Yeah, it's interesting. I kind of made an analogous point between these TikToks of girls that had said, this guy glanced over three times in 90 seconds while I was videoing myself doing glute bridges in a gym. Therefore, this is toxic male gaze and it's the patriarchy and you should be worried because men are predators. What that does if it's responded to positively and if the internet says yes, you were in the right.

What happens is many other girls use that as their new bar for what isn't is not acceptable behavior for men. And the bar continues to just move lower and lower and lower. That what would have previously been innocuous is now something that should warrant anxiety inside of yourself. It's almost like the concept creep of interpersonal interactions. That it continues to just get more and more and more sensitive.

I think employees at Netflix are only allowed to stare at the opposite sex for no more than five seconds. There was posters on the London Underground telling men that they weren't supposed to look at women for more than a particular amount of time, the toxic male gaze again. But going back to something you mentioned earlier on, you spoke about people might struggle attaching,

they might have intrusive thoughts, they might be down and depressed and blah, blah, blah. Like, everyone has that, right? Everybody has that. And there is a spectrum upon which everyone exists from having absolutely none of it, and there's one out of a hundred maybe that's there, and having it it all the time and there's maybe one out of a hundred that's there and then there's this sort of lovely little balkov in the middle of that and this is again something else

I learned from you. The difference between the worried well and people with genuine mental illness and again it's this romanticization of pathologization or the sort of weaponization of feelings in a way, because the victim is what's being pedestalized. There is a type of odd type of status that comes from being at the bottom of the pile in some way, even if you're only at the bottom of the pile because you've identified that you are. And, you know, it's the people who have been through absolute hell that seem to be the most robust and there's a paradox that the ones that are the most privileged are the people

who are the most fragile. But my point being that because everybody has this, everyone has a degree of legitimacy to claiming, well, I am that. I do have intrusive thoughts. I do get down and sad. I do have all the rest of it. Also our inner experience is completely opaque to everybody else. So God knows exactly what's going on here.

But yeah, this desire, this desire from people who don't have a, you know, a real mental illness issue to use the label because it gives them some sort of power. And I don't think it's all to do with this desired overreach for status by being a victim. I think a good chunk of it as well is by pathologizing whatever the problem is, it gives you a sense of control over what's happening, right? That it's not just, wow, the world is random

and sometimes I end up on the receiving end of bullshit. It's, I know this is because of a name, it's got a name to it, right? That helps me to kind of box it into a particular type of issue and it gives me some sense of order, right, outside of the chaos. But yeah, the difference between people who are genuinely mentally ill have struggling with issues, and then, yeah, this other concern, this, the worried well, as you call it. Well, the thing about Netflix is hilarious.

And what it sounds like, it sounds like something between like a cross between an SNL sketch, our sketch, and like the handmade tale. It just sounds so stupid. Like, you can only look at people for five seconds. But what happens if you look at someone for six, you get fired. Not good, not good. There's an alarm. Is there a quota you have to look for five, like if you look at four, for only four, it's rude. And it reminds me of when Jordan Peterson was writing his second book and Akira, which the publisher was,

and they announced it and all the employees started crying. Thank you, and random hands. And you just, it's ridiculous. That is ridiculous. And the same with London Transport. Does it work the other way? Or women also only allowed to look at men for five seconds or whatever it is? I'm sure it does.

I think that there would be a campaign for men for women to look at them for longer. You can only look at me for a minimum of 10 seconds, but longer if you can. But yeah, this really seems to be the worried well and the genuinely traumatized, the genuinely sort of mentally upset. They seem to be the two. One group is lapping as the other,

wishing that they could be. And this group be the, you know, the two one group is larping as the other wishing that they could be. And this group is looking at that one going, why would you wish any of the things that I'm currently struggling with? I wish that I could get rid of them. Yeah. Or they just go very quiet. I've received a look because I make a fair amount of posts distinguishing actual trauma from social media trauma. And every time I do, I get this day loose of emails from people with actual PTSD, you say thank you for saying that. I don't talk about, you know, what I've been through anymore because I live with this that and the other. It's like it's like having a disability. And my friend

who just had a breakup is saying that we were suffering from the same thing. So I just don't talk about it anymore. The worried well, I mean, really that's just another way of sort of neorocism, I guess, which is being susceptible to negative feelings. And I think the level of information online that's shared under the guise of psycho education really doesn't help because it's completely decontextualized knowledge. You know, like in the UK therapist, psychotherapists are not allowed to diagnose. You have to do quite a lot of additional training and you have to be a clinical psychologist

or a psychiatrist and it takes time to learn, you know, how to discern what something is. It's not there aren't necessarily the same kind of bright lines in, you know, psychopathology that they are in with physical illnesses. And, you know, like you know, psychopathology that they are in with physical illnesses. And you know, like you said, I think everything, well, it's called medical students disease. So when you're training to be a doctor or therapist or something, you, everything you read, you think, oh, my God, I must have this. And it's, um, and, and we're just doing that to everybody. We're just doing, it's just unleashing that on the public. The difference is that you continue your training and then you understand, you understand why it all resonates,

you understand that no, I don't have every single, diagnosis in the DSM, but the lay, public don't have that. They just get the five signs you have anxiety or six signs that you've got OCD and it's all human behavior like you said so things will resonate with you but there's also a difference you know like what one person might call an intrusive thought might be, oh just a random thought popped into my head. What somebody with OCD or PTSD might, well, what they, what is an intrusive thought

for them is suddenly I had this awful flash that I'm going to, you know, is image in my head of stabbing my mother. And I'm really scared I'm going to lose control and do it. Yeah, I suppose the fact that you need to communicate this and especially when it's done online on Instagram captions or whatever, that it's done in a manner that is still largely open to interpretation. And maybe is even designed to be done so kind of the same way that a medium or an astrology card is purposefully vague and uses language that's so woolly that it could be interpreted by anyone like the astrology of psychology that we've got going back in here. Yeah. Allow it to be interpreted. Oh, that's me. This post, this post is so me, or this post is my spirit animal, right? Like that, that feeling of being seen. You can't say

spirit animal. There's highly problematic. What spirit animal problem? I believe it. It's problematic because you are culturally appropriating a native American idea. I see. So, nothing can be if capitalism anymore. If the native Americans come for me, I will apologize appropriately after they've chopped me, chopped my head up. Yeah, this almost purposefully woolly language. And there is, again, I don't want it to seem like anybody that's going through, I've been through mental health struggles myself throughout all of my 20s. Like I really, really want people to understand that there is a conversation and understand that there are resources and there is help and all the rest of the things that you can

do. So I don't want it to be like us lambasting it, but the main reason is that people feel like their emotions are a personal curse on them, right? I'm never, no matter how good friends me in you become, I'm never going to know the texture of your own mind. I'm never going to know what it feels like to be seerate, right? I'm not going to know. When you say sad,

do you mean what I mean when I say sad? When you say that you couldn't sleep because you were overthinking last night, do you, are you overthinking at the same sort of pace that I am or just how visceral is the emotion? Are you sweating? Am I, do you know what I mean? This desire for us to feel seen, right, in a world that's very atomized and individualized, where the self is upheld more highly than everything else and we're obsessed with our own emotions. In this world, someone that posts something that makes us feel like we're not, this isn't some individual, individual custom drug

that's been pumped into our veins to make us suffer. Oh, it's just a part of the human experience. That's me. So I understand the compulsion to pathologize and put a label on the things that we're feeling because it makes us feel less objectified by our own emotions, less of a victim of our own issues. It's, oh, I'm just, you know, it's what,

it's every, look at 20,000 likes on this Instagram post. Like all of those people are too. Some of those accounts are very clever about how they do it. And they put things in a way that will resonate or will cast the wider net possible? Because it benefits them. There's a couple of things there. So one, absolutely, when if you're struggling with something and you find out that, you know, this is this is something other people from suffer from to there's a

name for it, it changes your relationship with the thing that you're suffering from. So imagine, for example, having the symptoms of anxiety and your heart races and you've always got butterflies in your tummy and your hands have a tremor and you're always worried and some of those feelings and you don't know what it is and you don't know if anybody else feels that way. I think it would be absolutely horrific. And then you find out something called anxiety. And then you find out, you know, why does anxiety form? What's the evolutionary purpose of having feelings like anxiety?

And it can change your relationship to it. It can change the way you regulate and manage and respond to those feelings of anxiety. And I guess the other side of the coin is taking every normal little human emotion and attempting to, I guess, label it and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, have you ever seen the color blue? You have trauma. So it's sort of, I think what you said was really insightful because it's true. We don't like uncertainty, we don't like feeling, we're not very good at tolerating uncertainty or feeling that we don't have control over something. And so if you combine that, having this emotional experience that is quite difficult and turbulent and you don't have, you know, a lot of control over it, you don't know if it's ever going

to end, you're not good at managing it, with having been coddled and protected to the point that you don't have the skills to cope or manage and probably led to some of those feelings that you're feeling. And then you add to it this pop psychology culture that's telling you, oh, this is a legitimate diagnosis and nobody should ever make you uncomfortable. And no one should ever, you know, criticize you or suggest that you have to take responsibility or you have a role to play in learning how to how to deal with this or navigate this. It's it's formal, convenient to say, I have trauma or I have this diagnosis or that diagnosis or the other. And it doesn't always lead to changing your

relationship. Sometimes it leads to it becoming a bit of a crutch or it becoming your defining characteristic, you know, like my whole personality is having ADHD. Well, that's not, is then nothing else interesting about you? Is that it? So, yeah, there's a few different things there. What do you mean when you talk about therapy culture? Is that a culture of people getting therapy? No. It's a cult. It sort of, it seems to be this overarching thing that's enveloped society and even down to the way we speak. So therapy culture is this, you hear your friends, they will have a small disagreement and then they start having this whole struggle session, like a therapy session,

and you know, like you triggered triggered my, in a child, and when you didn't show up to this thing, or people setting boundaries with each other, but they're not really setting boundaries, they're sort of making demands on other people, or, you know, it's, the way people speak has shifted and changed. Instead of necessarily developing

any real understanding of mental health, we've developed this sort of codification of fragility that I guess become its own language. I'm triggered when often they mean I'm offended. It's the whole, I guess, pop psychology, instotherapy stuff beginning to dominate the mainstream understanding of mental health. So talk to me about the difference. You've used that a couple of times today, pop psychology. What's the difference between that and mental health

and why is it an issue that it's masquerading? Is it? Because it's not related to psychology or psychotherapy often. Which speaking of psychotherapy, something you just said was suggesting maybe you're a natural psychotherapist. When you're talking about how I don't know what sad means to you. And that's something again in an analytic therapy that you would do.

So if you said, I feel sad, well, I would ask you what that means to you. You take anything that's abstract and you make it as specific as possible. But yeah, a bit of an aside. The difference is that actual mental health is rarely spoken about in any real way, apart from maybe anxiety and depression, and when they talk about mental health awareness. It's almost always, it's like Instagram therapists have become modern day clergy or something, or like pastoral counselors, telling people how to behave. So giving people scripts for life. Watering down important concepts like trauma and PTSD. Lowering the bar like you said for, you know, like no, being someone pinching your bum is not nice if it's unwanted,

but it's not the same as actually being assaulted and conflating the two things is absurd. So it's all of those things kind of creating this blanket around people, this coddling blanket that ensures that you won't necessarily be really rambling. And I think I've like, you know, when you start sentencing, you're like, I really hope I find my way. I hope I can land the plane. You're making sense to me. I've got, I've got some of one of my favorite posts from you.

Some ways pop psychology lies to you. Everyone you dislike is not an narcissist. Every unpleasant experience is not trauma. Having needs does not make you codependent. Disagreement is not gaslighting. Conflict is not abuse. Taking offense is not being triggered. Everything does not need to be normalized.

And speaking like an HR memo is not self-awareness. Are these sort of the, whatever it is, nine horsemen of pot psychology are these sort of the most common culprits? These are definitely some of them. So yeah, thank you for bringing that up because that helps. And it's stuff like the dialogue around narcissism. It's creating this strange, you know, fanfiction version of narcissism that only lives on the internet. And anybody you don't like is a narcissist. Any form of abuse or poor treatment is a narcissism. Again, words

mean things, especially when there is clinical language. And we've taken this therapy speak, which is a part of therapy culture, and you use it to inflate every little thing. So, yeah, you're not just offended or you don't like something or you're uncomfortable, you've been triggered. When triggered means the involuntary, you know, immersion into a past traumatic experience, you haven't been triggered. You don't like this or it's caused cognitive dissonance. Anything difficult is trauma. It can't be pain, it can't be bad luck. It can't be, it's a foregone conclusion. There's no, it just closes the door on any other possibilities, any explanation that might not be this very convenient bow to wrap around your experience. Yeah, any, any disagreement is gaslighting any

conflict, is abuse. Yeah, you know, so someone disagreeing with you, what a convenient way to shut down the conversation, demonize them, make yourself the victim, and not have to self-reflect, just say they're gaslighting you. You don't have to learn how to argue properly or defend your ideas. You can just say everyone's a gas lighter. How convenient. And this kind of, I get policed a lot on how I speak because I'm quite straightforward and I just, I resent having to put tons of fluff around my words because you know, someone can't handle just being spoken to like an adult and I don't want to do

it. And I guess this is what they call tone policing. So I get a lot of comments in DMs from people saying, you know, your message is good, but the way you come across is really harsh. And I just think it really isn't. If you try and read it, neutrally, it's just stating a simple fact or opinion most of the time. And if you heard me say it in my tone to your face, I don't think you take it the same way.

And there's this sort of, I think a tone people bring to things. And again, it's so similar to what I wrote in that post. I see a lot of that just in some of the responses I get. Even in this last week, I've had just this steady stream of abuse to do with anything I've said about Israel and Palestine. And mostly my position has been, um, don't bomb children. Like, I don't, you know, I don't, I don't know what's, I'm not, I'm not arrogant enough to pretend. I know what the answer to the solution is. And I think anybody who thinks it's simple is an idiot.

You know, you're just very, very stupid because, you know, it goes back a very long time. There's so many factors to consider here anyway. And I'd say I don't know what the right answer is, but I do know that you don't just indiscriminately kill children. And people read things that you haven't written and they attack you for them. So you know, like your your Jew-hater or your Islamophobic or you're not taking enough of a stand or something else. But then the other thing they do is they begin to use this therapy language to analyse you. And then you get that in some of the DMs. I think you're in some diagnosis or you're gaslighting everybody or you're, and you know, it's, again, it's weaponizing this language.

And I think that's one of my big problems with it is that it gets used as a cudgel against people. Yeah. huddle against people. Yeah, so weaponizing this language, you know, inhibiting any sort of actual self-reflection, finding a way to always land in the victim position, abdicate responsibility. Is there any argument to be made that this normalizes the conversation around mental health, which overall is a net benefit. We've got people maybe misappropriating language, using it inaccurately, imprecisely.

But this is a conversation now where people are opening up about the way that they experience feels. This is a move in the right direction. What's your, how do the scales balance in your world? It's really difficult actually because I often don't think we are even talking about mental health when we say we're talking about mental health, but I think you're right.

I think it's good that there's a more receptive atmosphere to people being able to say, actually, my mental health is suffering at the moment. And there's a decent chunk of people who won't turn away or turn against you, who will be understanding and incredibly empathetic. And that probably is incredibly different to, you know, our parents' generation, for example. And I think, yeah, that is a net positive. That's really good.

What would a what would an actual conversation around mental health look like? Being an actual conversation around mental health would look like discussing actual mental health issues. What it would it's like to suffer from them, identifying you know, some of the signs that maybe this isn't normal distress or normal hard time. There's something a bit deeper going on. Helping people's learn how to manage their mental health. Similar to how a diabetic has to watch their sugar intake and take insulin when you have

an ongoing mental health issue, You need to manage it. I've kind of got it in my head that there's this, it's kind of like a global wide concept creep or an over-tune window of what we've considered within the realm of the conversation about mental health. As we've identified, by DSM criteria, many people who say or use particular sort of pathological language to identify whatever it is that they got going on might not meet the criteria if they were to be assessed using that. But they've got something going on, right? They are sad or they are depressed or they are down or they feel anxious or they whatever or they feel depressed like they are not depressed right yeah so I think that yeah, maybe you could say I'm using the

Sort of psychoanalytic Treatment style language is not really helping and it's pathologizing and it's causing issues But all that you do really there is kick the can down the road. Right? Okay, so we're not going to use that language anymore, but we still now need a huge new bucket within which people who are feeling a little bit sad, people who are feeling a little bit agitated, a little bit frustrated, they're a little bit wistful, they're a little bit whatever. They're now needs to be an entire new bucket within which we put those people.

And maybe it's not mental health. Maybe mental health should be held for a different, an entire different lexicon, entire different sort of world. But the people who aren't lying about it and aren't completely making it up, which is a good chunk of them, the people who are genuinely feeling something

that isn't meeting the medical criteria, but is still doing something that disrupts the quality of life, that group of people. You know, like that, I would guess, the last group of people. But if that's not mental health, we now need to think about it. I think what's happened is it's become conflated, right? Like the acute, acute, but mild distress has been moved into this much more sort of aggressive medical language,

but we still need to treat those people and we still need to have a conversation around whatever those feelings are and whatever the name is that we give those things that they're feeling. Why can't we just say sadness or wishfulness or loneliness or why does it need a whole new set of words? That's that's again it's the you know it's the human experience and I think this is

one of the things that we've lost along the way with the whole like follow your bliss and people thinking Hollywood films are what life is going to be like life is fucking difficult. You know, you're feeling sometimes I'm incredibly hard to manage. Things happen all the time. You know, you never know what's around the corner. Life is incredibly unpredictable. And I think there's this idea that it should be easy in some way. Or that you, you know, if you're not happy or blissfully

happy all the time that there's something wrong, and there isn't, and that's your complete blithering idiot, who's happy all the time? Like I don't know anyone, everyone has, you know, ups and downs and differences and changes in mood and their own personal difficulties. And I think maybe, you know maybe using a word that I've come to load, maybe that's what we need to normalize, is that this is what being a person is. And you have to find, you can't change that, but you can change is making yourself stronger and more resilient and to know how to respond when these things happen. You might not be able to control about self sadness or whistfulness or agitation,

but you can learn that when you're in a hole to stop digging, you can learn that. You can learn how to climb out. You can learn how to avoid that hole sometimes. What do you go to, if let's say that you're going through a bit of a tough time yourself for whatever reason, where do you go to in your mind, what are the things that you rely on? It seems like people are relying on labels and medical language.

What about you, given that you're a practitioner of this and have been at the front lines for a decade, what are the things that you rely on practitioner of this and have been at the front lines for a decade? What are the things that you rely on to help improve your mood or to give you some perspective when you're kind of caught in the world pool that is the machinations of the human mind? So I okay, so I've had a kind of eventual life and been through some really, really tough stuff, becoming basically homeless, assault, just, you know, I won't go into all of it, but difficult things or sometimes, there are things that I think would be really difficult

for somebody you didn't have those experiences that don't always even register with me because I guess that threshold has been expanded to the point where it's different and I'm sure other people who've got that kind of history can relate but then it also I think because I've had that and I've been in the complete depth like drowning and had to had to find a way, the hard way to deal with those emotions that I'm not scared of them and not only am I not scared of them, not scared of other people's either. So if something happens like anxiety, which sometimes, you know anxiety, feeling is a depression. I lost my mom two years ago, so it's been a lot of grief.

Even rage, jealousy, all the feelings that people feel. I let myself feel them. I let them exist. I don't necessarily even have to, you don't necessarily even have to participate. You just let them be, let them exist, let them run their course, not panic about it, not necessarily think that it's a problem to solve as I feel there's a feeling. If you're so inclined, you could figure out, and with practice, you can get very good at this. Figure out what caused it, what is it coming from? Oh, I had that thought. Oh, shit, that's what that's what just deflated my mood. Or that lady I ran into in the supermarket today, she reminded me

of the way my mum billitled me and that's why I've been so sad and anxious ever since. So you can trace it back, you can figure that out. And also just knowing that like you've survived every single tough thing, bad day, bad mood up to this point, you're gonna survive this one too. Why is there so many different? And the thing about not being scared of it is, like anxiety can be incredibly frightening. And I've been through the experience of being very frightened by panic and thinking,

something really awful was gonna happen. And then my dad taught me this because he struggles with some anxiety to do. And he said, when, when, when, I think I remember, 17 or 18 in a panic attack, when my dad said, just, anxiety can't do anything to you. And when it comes up, look it right in the eye and tell it do your worst. You can't do anything to me. And I think that's kind of my attitude to a lot of things. That seems based on what I know about you, that's the top brand. Yeah. But it can help.

And knowing that, knowing that the meta cognition, watching your thoughts, thinking about your thoughts, knowing that right now I'm panicking and I think I'm going to have a heart attack and die, but I know that's the anxiety and the panic. It's not going to happen. And I said, wait, this out, white knuckle it if you have to. And then the other thing is with anxiety and panic, especially move metabolise that chemistry, like burn it off quickly, just run down the street like crazy person, it'll go away. And yeah, and so it does depend, but you also have to develop some form of mental health hygiene around it. Just made a course for, I have this little online community and I make courses for them. This made a course for I have this little online community and I make courses for them. This made a course on mental health hygiene and you know how to actually look

after your mental health and the factors that contribute to you being well. Where should people go if they want to check that out? There's a link in my bio and Instagram and on Twitter or you can connect to it through my website. What's the website? It's myname.com, cdhavlo.com. And for looking after yourself and for feeling well, you need certain things and then non-negotiable, like purpose. If you don't have a reason to wake up in the morning,

of course, you're going to become depressed and anxious. If you don't go outside ever, which I struggle with sometimes to work from home and sometimes to absolutely everything delivered, so you have to force yourself. You have to have meaningful social interactions. Internet doesn't count. Social media's made us so connected

and yet so isolated from actual real human beings. You need to, we evolved in nature. We didn't evolve in these concrete boxes. You have to, once in a while, go and look at a tree for God's sake. If you live in the city or whatever, but there are certain things you need. And the way that our environment is now, of course, everybody is struggling with something. And it's not only the coddling and the, you know, safety culture and the whatever else.

It's your stuck-on devices, you're looking at social media, which is, you know, we know that's a threat to mental health. We know that it's a contributing factor to depression and anxiety. We know the impact that it has on young people and teenagers, sometimes to a really tragic conclusion. And then your indoors all day, and your sedentary, which is going to make you incredibly depressed if you're not moving. We weren't designed to just sit on our bombs all day, we were designed to move. And I found that, like I've gotten really into working out since last December. And it's gotten to the point now where it, you know, so I finished work and as soon as I finished I just get on the

treadmill. Sometimes I finished quite late. So that's just my transition. And it's almost, even if I'm tired, even if I don't want to do it, as soon as I start, it's that feeling of like, you know, when you sink into a warm bath and it's that kind of whole body, like, that's better. It's that's the feeling. And, you know, there's, I'm sure a really good reason for that, for why it feels that good, for why you, you know, there's so much that we need to be

well, that isn't a natural part of our environment anymore, even staying up late and looking at the blue light in our phones. There's so much that actively contributes, us being disconnected, sedentary, eating food that doesn't give us the nutrition that we actually need, the synthesize some of those, you know, some of that neurochemistry. You're dealing with this onslaught of the most horrific devastating things happening all around the world all the time which we're not wired to handle, you know, we can't cope with that. Like before, you know, I think that the figure is something like, you would only know the bad news of your area and only maximum in your whole life, no by 150 people, in the kind of radius of the village or town wherever you live.

And to hear the bad news from this happened to the neighbor, this happened to the next town, and that's kind of it. Now we're hearing everything that happens everywhere all the time at the same time. And you can't cope with it. Yeah. Given that there's so much there that you've gone through which is, you know, outside

of the self, the way that we move, the things that we eat, the amount of sunlight we're exposed to, the friends that we have, the purpose that we use to propel us through life, why do you think we've spent so much time obsessing about the self and our emotions in the West? Because life's too easy. Where nobody, human beings aren't wired to just sit back on their laurels and enjoy the fucking sunshine. Like that's not what we were wired to do, or wired to overcome obstacles and challenges and keep moving forward in some way. And when you remove all the challenges

and make life too comfortable, it's like people start malfunctioning. And, you know, when there's, and I think there'll be a lot of people who absolutely bulk at this and say, how dare you say life is easy in the West. And then I just think, go and live somewhere else for a little bit

and then you'll understand how good you actually have it. Like from every little thing like you know you're not gonna have a power cut every day you can rely on the electricity all the sort of public services you might find them too bureaucratic or annoying but they work like Swiss watch compared to some of the other places in the world. You're relatively safe. You've got free education and free health care in this country. You know, like the dogs in this country that have better lives than people in other places. And when there's nothing external to necessarily struggle against, and then you have had these, you know, quaddling helicopter overprotective parents, moving any obstacle from your path,

what's that phrase, you know, prepared the child for the road, not the road for the child. And you end up with, sorry, I looked away for a second and I completely lost my training of thought. Well, I've got something, I've got what I, like something really interesting just came there, which is it seems like victimhood culture has arisen because the human systems demand for challenges in life has outstripped the modern world's ability to supply them. Yeah, I think that's one factor and those really well said, but I think the other factors also that because things have been so good, people have an unrealistic idea of what life should be like. So there should never be anything difficult. No one should ever be offended.

You should be protected from your feelings ever being hurt. And this sort of very unrealistic, camelot-like idea for how a person should feel. You should, you know, you see some of some of these posts on Instagram, like you deserve this and you are worthy. And I don't know about you, but I didn't get that messaging as a kid. And I'm really grateful. And the messaging I got was, yeah, you can do anything you want, but get off your button on it. I'm glad, and if you're good enough, it wasn't you deserve it because you think you do. Who are you? None of us, none of us go through your schooling system

and uni, if you go to uni, then you're just going to meet someone, your soulmate, fall in love, then you're going to find your perfect career, which is going to be rewarding and pay you what you want. And then you'll somehow magically have a really nice house in a car and kids if you want them. And then they actually, you know, reach adulthood and they're in for such a rude shock because it doesn't necessarily go that way. Instead you kind of, you struggle and you realize, no, there's no dream job in soulmate that's gonna fall in your lap.

There's, you know, you have to make things happen. You have to take responsibility. And, you know, combined with this self-esteem parenting that tells children constantly how special they are, how clever they are, how clever they are, how talented they are. And then they grow up and find out that the world doesn't reflect that back to them because maybe they aren't that talented and amazing. And become incredibly depressed and nihilistic. What do you think it seems like self-worth or the interpretation of our own self-worth is kind of an important element here?

What do you think people get wrong about self-worth and where it comes from? I think what they get wrong about it is that self-worth it does not come from other people inflating you or, you know, blown smoke up your ass, that doesn't do anything. That doesn't like, that doesn't hit the core view. It's this whole like validation, you know how it's so important. You have you validated me like, so fucking what? Like you're an adult. And I think it doesn't touch the sides and the thing it does is make people constantly dependent on more from those around them, which is why it's so crucial to have everybody validate

your feelings and your viewpoint and tell you how wonderful you are. But actual self-worth is hard one and it's owned through surviving things and you know setting a challenge for yourself and actually accomplishing it. Keeping your word to yourself, you know how fun and difficult that is and how few people can do it. And I struggle with it all the time, it's a constant battle but don't stop ever trying. Keeping your word to yourself will change your relationship with your sense of self-worth, develop competence in something, you know. Have a purpose that makes you excited to be alive. All those things will not only take your focus off, you know, this idea that having self-esteem, self-worth and warm and fuzzy feelings inside is the be-all

and end-all of life. But it'll give you that grounded sense of self-assuredness, assuredness, I don't know, that changes how you feel in the world. I think you've just described probably the large, the big changes that I made over the last decade. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely keeping my word to myself, being able to build up trust that if I said I was going to do a thing, that I was going to do a thing, creating a competency in something that I genuinely

felt proud of myself about, having a purpose that gave me a reason to get up in the morning. These have been the big movers for me. And you know, that's wrapped in better sleep and wake and more of a focus on like holistic health and fitness and not just looking jacked and having people around me that seem to care about me and integrating not just on the internet and all the rest of those things, right?

But like the big movers, the big movers largely have been my sense of self, which was born out of making promises to myself and keeping them. And I remember the first episode that I did with Jordan Peterson three years ago now, maybe more, was he's got this little line. People can go back and listen to it and you just like throws it away toward the end of the episode and he says, if you want a true adventure in life, if you want an exciting adventure in life, tell the truth. Like, tell the truth and see how big of an adventure that is. He's like, boy, that's an adventure.

And it's true. Like, if you want to, one of the most difficult, scary, terrifying things to do is to regularly just keep telling the truth over and over again, to not people please, to not be bitter or resentful posture, to try and inflate what it is that you've achieved or downplay it to just say what it is, which is really the path of least resistance because you don't need to create this big fucking mirage of stuff that's all hiding what's actually going on, and yet for some reason that seems to be just, it's very, very difficult to do. It's very difficult to do.

Yeah. And telling the truth to yourself, I think that can't be stated enough, because the ways in which you pull the will over our eyes is brilliant. But you know there's a completely agree and like the truth is one of my you know like it's a really important value to me. And a lot of people really hate Sam Harris but I like him for this is because he doesn't try to pander to any tribe especially the sort of like a woke and anti-woke Binary and he just says what he actually thinks and feels about things so everybody seems to hate him, but he's he's I'm sure his mind is organized in a different way

In a movie I agree. I mean I had him on the show I got a lot of stick for having him on the show three months ago and it was Sam Harris's world embarrassment tour, people commenting. And I thought to myself, I had so much fun, I did three and a half hours with him and I had so much fun sat down, opposite and talking and I understand that people don't like him because of his view on this or, you know, this just shows that you're not going to hold someone's feet to the fire about this that or the other. And I was like, dude, there are people out there that I know for a fine fact, are way less trustworthy, but just said the right things. They made the right mouth noises at the time when you wanted to about the issue that you

care about. And you wouldn't much sooner have a lying, but complicit ally as opposed to a honest but antagonistic adversary. And for me, like, I'm not saying that I'm going to, like, I don't agree with tons of the stuff that Sam said, but I fucking believe that he believes it. And the fact that I believe that he believes it gives me a lot of faith that in the future when he says a thing that I can believe it to. And given the fact that truth and being able to actually have faith in someone's words is really important. And maybe there's stuff that he said that contradicts him.

I'm sure that there is all the rest of it. Caviac, caveat, caveat for the internet. But yeah, like, I believe that he believes the things that he says, and I don't think that that can be said for an awful lot of people. So that was why I was super excited to sit down with him. And I will do it again. And, you know, like, fuck the internet.

For like, I had so much fun talking to him. I thought it was really, really interesting. I learned a lot. And, you know, if people have got an issue with the way that he comes across with things, then, you know, I guess he's not for you anymore. And the felt sense, one of the things I've reflected on this a lot, one of the things I think people have an issue with is they thought

Sam was their guy and Sam was their guy for a little while. And now Sam feels like he's not their guy. And one of the big emotions that seems to be driving this is kind of like a group thing tribalism thing and People try and pretend they're above it none of us are really you kind of have to mitigate your impulses And I think I think that's what it is like these very tribal groups online that dominate, you know discourse of everything The their more punishing of heretics and dissidents, then they are of like actual adversaries, I think. If you, if you change your mind and you, you speak out against the group and you absolutely should,

you absolutely should, you shouldn't, you shouldn't because there's a real price to it. It's not nice. And I've had a lot of it, I guess I said this last week, a lot of attacks and losing followers and all that like fun stuff. But but I think there's a bigger price to pay to just assimilate with the group and and sacrifice what do you actually think go against your conscience and not tell the truth which is why I respect Sam Harris. I don't agree with anything or not with everything he says. I don't agree with everything anyone says but what I can respect about him is that he seems to have integrity. He has the courage to tell the truth as best as he can see it. And he tries to think things through. And like you said, I don't think there's that many people

like that out there. Instead, you have this like legion of parrots with huge platforms. They just, all say the same thing, but it's slightly differently. Or they say things that thing, word, it's like differently. Or they say things that, you know, on purpose to inflame, you know, inflame their own audience against another group of people. I mean, this is like my rule of whether a creator is or is not acting in good faith is, is their audience mostly bound together over the mutual hatred of an outgroup or the mutual love of an ingroup?

That's one of the easiest rubrics to use. Okay, like, do they bond together by identifying the other and then saying, we are not that, or is it this is a community of people? Because shared hatreds are much more powerful than shared loves, right? Way more powerful. War time, right? Way more powerful. War time, fucking patriotism versus peacetime patriotism, you kidding me? But one of your other

posts that I really loved was sometimes we are the toxic ones. And no one wants to admit that. No one wants to actually point the finger at themselves, you know, whether it's fundamental attribution error or, you know, whether it's fundamental attribution, error, or, you know, whatever type of motivated reasoning to wiggle your way out of being culpable for the things like, everybody is a prick, lots of the time, right? Me included, and, you know, just accepting the fact that we can be like that, and to kind of round out that same thing, I've been feeling a bit recently, we're deep into the episode now,

which means that all of the people who don't actually usually listen to this aren't listening anymore, so I can talk more openly. I've been feeling it a bit recently because the channel's grown so much. It's like tripled this year, I think, maybe more, by the end of this year,

it'll have more than tripled. And an awful lot of, like increasing levels of scrutiny and then you kind of become, you become a thing. You're no longer a person, you're a representation of ideas and there's expectations and there's not judgment, but there's a rhythm to how people expect you to show up and you're kind of put into this particular box, you're like, Chris used to be X or Chris is a part of Y. And I feel in myself these

dynamics moving below the surface and this kind of engine begin to tune up, which is precisely the one that Sam is kind of feeling the other side of at the moment, which is like we thought that you were on our side with X or Y or Z. And if you seem to be an unreliable ally, if you seem to do something that goes against what the main group was supposed to do, I mean, some, I had an interesting conversation with Constantine Kissin. I know you've been untraging on the tree. I had this conversation with him about how people on the right say you shouldn't judge people by one interaction, but Bud Light had had a pretty stellar career of making watery beer for Americans, and then they did the

Dillamilvany thing, and now the entire company was thrown at the bus. And I was like, that's, I know, it's just a thought experiment. Like, it's an interesting, should this maybe, you know, maybe it could be a different perspective, and we could think about it in this kind of a way. But people are so incapable of seeing any idea or any discussion as anything shy of a hill that someone's prepared to die on, that they immediately come back with that same sort of energy. And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, this is this channel is evidently not for fucking you, right? If I can't play about with ideas on here, but again, you know, I see this dynamic, the one that we're talking about with Sam and maybe the one that he is on the other end

of where you go, well, it's way easier for me to just not play about with those ideas anymore. You know, this month, like 20 million people have seen the channel. And it's way easier for me to not ever say to just feed red meat to the mob, to not say anything that's like interesting or adventurous or playing around with ideas or exploratory, because I know that if I do do that, and I'm imprecise or I'm off that day, or it's just a fucking shit idea, which I have all the time, like I know that ultimately that's going to come back to bite me in the ass. So why should I do that? And again, like that dynamic is one of the reasons why I think the people that are deciding, yeah, I'm going to, even if it's unpopular, even if it's, and the same goes for you, you know, like you could continue to sort of spout cotton candy for the soul at people,

but to say something which is going to get you as many haters as it does, lovers, is a more difficult path. Yeah, I love it. I really appreciate your contrarian, slightly prickly, but very, very honest approach to all of this stuff. I think that it's a very important redress to the sort of cod psychology stuff that we do see on the internet and it validates people in a much more honest way. Like it is still validation, it's just not the kind of sort of cotton candy for the soul validation that everyone's looking for. So let's say that someone's loved what they've heard today, where should they go to find out more of the posts that you've got and everything else that you do. You can find me on Instagram and on Twitter and my handle in both places is my full name, Cedet K. Javla, my website is the same, my name.com and that links to this online community that I run with courses and so on, that interests people. So yeah,

that's where you can find me online. Don't try and find me in person, please. Oh yeah, I really appreciate you. Thank you. Thank you so much.