Modern Wisdom - #987 - Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett - The New Science Of Emotions, Anxiety & Brain Health

Episode Date: August 30, 2025

Lisa Feldman Barrett is a professor at Northeastern University, psychologist, and a neuroscientist. Why do we feel emotions? From happiness and joy to anger, anxiety, and sorrow, emotions shape how we experience life. But what purpose do they serve, and how can we learn to manage them more effectively? Expect to learn the unique way each of us experience emotions and if the emotions like anxiety, anger and joy feel the same as everyone else’s, why we have emotions at all and what their functions are, how much of our life is actually experienced versus anticipated, how often people are mistaking dehydration, low blood sugar, or lack of sleep for ’being in a bad mood, what actually happens in an anxious brain, how to rebuild your psychological function after a period of chronic stress, and much more… Sponsors: See me on tour in America: ⁠https://chriswilliamson.live⁠ See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D, and more from AG1 at https://ag1.info/modernwisdom Get the brand new Whoop 5.0 and your first month for free at https://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom Get 10% discount on all Gymshark’s products at https://gym.sh/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM10) Timestamps: (0:00) Are Our Emotional Experiences Unique? (5:19) What is the Role of Meaning in Emotion? (10:46) Lisa’s Views on Objective Perception (19:26) Our Emotional Experiences Shouldn’t Control Our Agency (23:16) The Relationship Between Our Internal Conversation and Our Emotions (30:21) Should We Be Looking Back or Investing in the Future ? (39:13) Can Memories Be Lost? (49:21) What Drives Anxiety? (01:05:56) What is the Impact of Toxic Relationships on Our Health? (01:10:54) What Does Chronic Stress Look Like? (01:16:17) How to Rebuild After a Period of Stress (01:20:39) What Can't We Control About Our Emotional State? (01:25:23) We are the Architects of Our Experiences (01:28:11) Find Out More About Lisa Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - 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

How unique is the way that we all experience emotions? Is your experience of anxiety or anger or joy the same as mine or different? Well, I think the proper question to start with is your experience of joy on one occasion exactly the same as your experience of joy on another occasion. And I think what we know is the answer is no, it isn't. That joy or anger or any other word for emotion really refers to a population of instances that are variable, not infinitely variable, but variable and tied to the situation that you're in. So sometimes anger is pleasant and sometimes it's unpleasant. Sometimes it's, you know, you're full of energy during anger and other times you're not. Sometimes your blood pressure goes up. Sometimes it goes down. Sometimes it stays the same,

depending on what actions you're taking. And your actions differ in anger, right? People scowl in anger about 35, percent of the time, which is more than chance. But that means 65 percent of the time people express anger in this culture, in Western cultures, actually I should say in urban cultures, because it's in the east and the west. This is meta-analytic evidence. Sixty-five percent of the time you're doing something else with your face in anger, you know, you might smile in anger, you might cry in anger, you might sit silently and plot the demise of your enemy in anger. And half the time when you scowl, you're not angry. You're feeling something else. So the point being that, you know, all this variation is not random, but it's not, you know, anger isn't one thing,

joy isn't one thing. So when you ask the question, is your experience of joy the same as mine, I think what you mean is to say is your vocabulary of joy the same as mine, is your distribution, of joy is your population of instance is the same as mine and probably not but there there has to be enough overlap that we can communicate about it or else we wouldn't be communicated right that suggests that the breadth of language that you have to be able to describe the things that you're feeling unlocks in some way or enables you to have a deeper or richer or emotional experience Yeah, I think the, you know, the focus on words on language is there, but it's language isn't really the point. The point is your ability to, your concepts or your knowledge. So that tends to be linked to words, but words aren't really necessary. I think this is a constant confusion that people have, that if you just label your experience differently, you know, you'll have a richer experience. and that's not true at all.

But it does tend to be the case that words are invitations to learn concepts. They're invitations for knowledge. That's how they work. And the larger your vocabulary is the more concepts you probably have, and that's what's going to lead to a richer emotional life. What's a better way to think about emotional richness beyond just the words? Well, really what's happening under the hood is that your brain is, receiving signals from the sensory surfaces of your body, from your eyes, from your ears, from

your nose, and all the surfaces inside your body for glucose and oxygen and, you know, the stretching of muscles or the contraction muscles and so on. So your brain is being flooded really with these signals, and it has to make sense of these signals. And the way that it does is by calling on instances or reinstating instances from the past that are similar to the present. A group of things which are similar to one another is called a category and a representation of a category is a concept. So basically, your brain is making meaning out of signals. Your brain doesn't know what an increase in heart rate means in some. There is no objective meaning psychologically speaking of a raise and of a increase in heart rate. Your brain has to

make sense of that. And the more varied experiences you have in the past, the more words or concepts that you, the more words you know, the more concepts you've learned gives you more flexibility for making meaning. So in the same way that, you know, a basket can be something to carry vegetables in, or it could be a weapon, or it could be a door prop, or, you know, you could use it as a chair if you needed to. That is the structure you could make meaning of it in a lot of different ways by acting on it in different situations to suit your goals. The same is true for an increase in heart rate, right? Or a flash of light or a loud sound. You don't have infinite flexibility, but you have some flexibility in how you create meaning. And that is ultimately what your emotional

life derives from what's the role of meaning here how how does that slot in in amongst sensation emotion story well you know well i think the the way to understand this is it's a little counterintuitive but basically your brain is trapped inside a dark silent box called your skull and it's receiving these sensory signals which are the outcomes or the effect of some set of causes in the world or in your own body but your brain doesn't have access to the causes it only has access to the outcomes to the effects this is what philosophers call an inverse problem you have to guess at what the what caused some outcome you only know what the outcome you only know what the is you don't know what the cause is. So, for example, you hear a loud bang. That loud bang

could be a door slamming, or it could be thunder, or it could be a gunshot. How you make sense of it is first and foremost by preparing an action. You'll do different things if it's windy, or if it's about to rain, or if there's, you know, somebody's firing a gun near you. your brain first makes a plan for action, and the literal copies of those signals become your brain's guesses for what you will hear next, what you will see next, what you will feel next. So sensation doesn't lead to action. Preparation for action leads to sensation. right you don't you don't react you don't detect things in the world and then react to them your brain is making a guess about what's going to happen next that guess begins as an action

as a preparation for motor movements in your body to support the movements of your skeletal motor system your arms your legs your eyes you know and the copies the electrical copies of those signals. Literally, neurons are going down to the body to bring motor signals and the cop and then collaterals off those axons. They are sent to the other different parts of your brain to prepare for those incoming signals from the body and from the sensory services of the body. So meaning it means is really about what you take. the signal scape that is around you to mean. What is it, what is it demand of you? Metabolically. What is it demand of you in terms of action? That's what determines your experience, your lived

experience of yourself in the world. Okay. So things happen. Black box detects what has occurred to us from those things that are happening. Well, your brain isn't a black box. It's in a dark box. brain is has intrinsic signaling going on all that time it's yeah brain inside of black box uh we have experiences from the past because of those experiences we use those to say hey this kind of thing happened previously therefore i can infer i can predict that looking forward it also means this thing the last time that that thing happened the last time that a big dog came up to me uh i got bit therefore this is the appropriate sort of response Yes, and you prepare. So you're predicting that the dog might bite you. So you prepare for a set of changes inside your body to support the movements of your body. And you also prepare. Your brain starts to prepare the experience that corresponded to those actions last time. Every action that you take, every experience that you have is a combination of what's in your head, the

remembered past, that we, you know, are prediction signals, basically, and the sensory present, the signals that are informing you about the state of your own body and the state of the world. Every experience is a combination of the remembered past and the sensory present. And in an instance, it could be a little more of one or a little more of the other or a lot of one or a lot of the other. But the point is, that the remembered past, what's happened to you in the past is fundamentally what your brain is using, your experiences from the past, to make sense of to predict the future, which will become your immediate present.

Well, if our brain is constantly predicting, how much of our life is actually experienced versus just anticipated? Well, you're making a distinction. I'll sort of pick at the promise of your question there, which is that there's a distinction between anticipating and experiencing, and all experience is partly anticipation. That's a good. Okay, maybe I could put it a different way. Is there any such thing as sort of true objective perception then?

Do we, or are we always seeing things? Well, you really get right to the point, you know, like that's like, usually people, you know, they ease into that. That's a big metaphysical question. They kind of ease into it, right? so um well are you asking me for my opinion or are you asking me for what i think the brain what neuroscience says or do you want me to lay out the whole metaphysical like landscape for you no your your opinion we i think i think that the obvious place that people arrive at at the

moment is wow i i really sort of molest the present moment a lot between it happening and then me, it being a part of me, I thought that I saw things the way they were. I thought that I felt things that were appropriate given the situation that I'm in. And this doctor lady has said that doesn't seem to really be the case. So I wouldn't know if I think I think people definitely feel things that are appropriate to the situation that they're in. But the assumption therefore is that you're making or that somebody might make maybe not you, but you're just, you know, you're the you're the message right yeah um the assumption that therefore it's there's some objective accuracy i think that's where things break down so in the history of philosophy and also pundits and i don't know people

who consider themselves to be you know public intellectuals there's a debate you know that's gone on for really thousands of years like is reality out there objective separate from you and you just perceive it and react to it or is reality like all in your head You know, this is called idealism, the other view is what I would call a traditional, traditional realism, that, you know, there's an objective reality out there. And that's been the debate for thousands of years. And I think that when a debate goes on for thousands of years, it's probably somebody's asking the wrong question. And so the way I think of it is the following. Reality is relational, meaning there is a reality, but the reality is partly you're involved in creating

that reality, right? So, you know, this object is solid because we have the kind of bodies that we have. And if we were subatomic creatures, this would not be solid. It would be mostly empty space. And there are other, I think, more compelling. That one's a hard one to kind of rep your head around. Like, are you telling me that the world, you know, that like a desk isn't solid? Well, it is solid. It's solid for you and for other, you know, animals like you that have the kind of body that you have. But there conceivably could be other sorts of animals or other organisms or creatures that don't have those features, and therefore, their reality would be different. And so, again, it doesn't mean that, well, I'm saying, is there a reality out there

separate from you? No. Does objectivity exist in that way? Not as far as I can tell. That's not what the neuroscience would suggest. But does it mean it's all in your head? No, because you need those sensory signals to wire your brain in the first place, they just don't have an inherent meaning. So what this means for you in, I mean, there are some really fun things that it could mean, which we could talk about, but in the practical sense, what does it mean? It means that when somebody scowls at you, you aren't reading anger. You're guessing that that is an expression of anger, but that movement could have multiple meanings. And the meaning is not inherent in the signal. It's relational, right? I think that's that. So here's the example, I think that's the best

that sort of really usually communicates the point well. So I don't know. Let's hope. Usually, you know, your retina has different kinds of receptors in it, in your eye, different kinds of receptors in it. and there are, you need three kinds of receptors in order to, for a wavelength of light, which will hit your retina and travel, the wavelength of light gets translated into electrical signals and it goes up to your brain. You need three kinds of receptors in your eye in order for you to experience a wavelength of light around 620 nanometers as red. Most humans neurotypically have three neurotrans have three cones, three types of receptors. So we say that light at that wavelength is red.

The rose is red. The sports car is red. The lipstick is red. The shoes are red. But red is not really a property of an object. It's not in the wavelength of light. red is a property of the relation between that wavelength and what's in your eye and what's in your brain. We say, well, somebody who only has two cones, they can't, they don't see that wavelength of light as red.

They see it as kind of a greenish brown. So we say, oh, that person is colorblind because it implies that the light is objectively red. But that's only because humans have three cones, three receptors, neurotypically. There are humans who have four cones, four types of receptors, and they don't see that light as red either. They see it as a different color. And if all humans had four cones, then objectively, that wavelength of light would not be red. It would be some other color. And those of us with three cones would be colorblind to that color.

So the point being that what we call objective is really we are elevating a human consent. We're elevating certain experiences of certain humans as to be objective and other people's to be something else. And so we're prioritizing our own ourselves, our own biology essentially, and we're calling it objective. And that's pretty much what we do on a large scale. like as humans. Yeah, I think functionally we need some way. If it was, there's a scowl over there. Well, that could mean one of 50,000 different things.

It would take a long time to get through my day. But it doesn't, but it doesn't. That's the amazing thing about the brain. This is the business problem. The business problem is there's a lot of variation and your brain has to make sense of it. Your brain has to figure out which signals mean something, which signals are noise, can be ignored. And your brain isn't just taking in a scowl.

It's taking an entire ensemble of signals, and it's making sense of those based on patterns from the past. So the really amazing thing is that we are equipped to deal with that kind of variation. And it's just that we categorize so automatically, we make meaning so automatically that we think the meaning is inherent in the world, that the categories are in the world, but they're not in the world. They're also not only in our heads. They are relationally real.

And no matter how confident you are, like, you know, I'm, I am also someone who's pretty confident about my, you know, I'm, but I am tempered by the fact that the neuroscience is very clear. We don't read people. Movements aren't, you know, can't be read. the emotional meaning of them can't be read like words on a page. No matter how confident you are, your feeling of confidence is not an indicator of the validity of your perception. Yeah, that's great. It's a really lovely way to sort of bring that into land, I think.

It means a couple of things, at least to me. One would be, wow, I can, I really have a good bit of agency over how I see the world, what things mean to me, the way that an experience can be interpreted and encoded by myself. The way that signals can be experienced. It's not that you're interpreting your experience. I mean, we may do that also. But the formation of experience out of these signals that we,

that we're constantly processing. The other thing it makes me think is how often are people who are in a bad mood mistaking their bad mood for mistaking dehydration or low blood sugar or a lack of sleep or I remember you saying some story about you, you got a stomach bug on a first date and like butterflies for something else. that was happening in your stomach. And I wish that were not true. I wish I just made that story up.

But unfortunately, I didn't. It actually happened. I was surprised. And I thought, well, I must be really lusting after this person when really what I had was the beginnings of the flu. But yeah, we are at the mercy of the signals, right? both internal and external and in some, not at the mercy?

Well, yes and no. I think this is why I think it's really useful to know something about how brains work. Listen, when I'm at the end of the day and I have no spoons left and I'm exhausted and to me it feels like the world is ending and it really does happen sometimes where I feel like the world is ending.

Like I just can't deal with one more thing. and everything is awful. I just have to grab a hold of myself and say, okay, you're metabolically depleted. Go to bed, get some sleep. Tomorrow will be a better day. But it doesn't feel like that. It's not like I can, I mean, I feel like, you know,

everything is horrible. And, but I, I'm aware of the evidence, right? The evidence is, That everything that you experience is partly, the way that you experience the outside world is partly due to what's going on in your body as it is relayed to your brain. And so because I'm aware of that, I do have more agency than I would otherwise. It still automatically happens that I will feel like shit sometimes. more often than I would like to admit maybe.

But I'm also aware, the agency, I think, looks different than what we imagine agency to be like. You know, getting control over your experience doesn't look exactly the way we imagine it to. It's much harder to do than we would like. It takes a lot longer, a lot more practice than anybody would want. wish. Some people have more options than others, but everybody has the opportunity for a little more agency. That begins with understanding a little bit about what's happening under the hood. How do you come to think about that relationship between the experiencing self and the one that steps in? How do you think about the difference between apocalyptic, Lisa, at the end of the day?

and gently reassuring Lisa saying you probably just need to have a cup of tea and go to bed. What is that relationship? What is it about tea that is so simple? Well, I'm British. No, but I'm, well, I'm Canadian, and so maybe that we have tea in common, but I do actually find a cup of tea just, I don't know what it is about tea, but it could just be the whole mythology around tea, like in all the, all of the, the paraphernalia of tea.

Yeah, I don't know. But there is, yeah, I mean, I'm tempted to say there is something objective about tea, but maybe it's only in relation to, you know, into our, based on our experience. Bificate that away from the sacred ritual of making the tea and smelling it brew. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and pulling out your favorite mug and whatever, yeah. So, but what I would say is you don't have multiple selves, you know, you have one brain. and your brain in conversation constantly with your body and the sick you know i mean we like to say with the world too but you only know the world through the sensory surfaces of your body so your brain

is really modeling your body that constant conversation which is informing the brain also on the conditions of the world that is your mind that's that is the manifestation of that is your mind so we, you know, we have a, like I use a Cartesian crutch, you know, like Descartes, famously was a philosopher who famously bifurcated, you know, the body and the mind and, you know, the physical and the mental as if they're separate things and they're really not separate things. Every feeling you have, every perception, every, every mental thing that occurs has some physical basis. but it's a useful device linguistically to talk about the things that your brain does automatically as happening in your brain and the things that your brain does with volition as happening in your mind. So I will sometimes say, well, your brain does this versus you have control. But really, it's all your brain. So why does your brain make itself aware of some

things and not others, nobody knows the answer to that question. And there are lots of ideas. Like, how is it that this automatic stuff can go on? But yet, sometimes we can sometimes use attention to kind of shift the signaling. Nobody understands, they might understand a little bit about how it happens, but nobody understands why it's happening that way. So it's not like, I have an apocalyptic self and my husband sometimes will, when I'm, you know, I'll just be like, I need to complain to you. I need to complain about this. Or sometimes I won't even ask, I'll just start to complain. And he'll be like, are there any other dwarves visiting you? Like you've got sleepy and grumpy and, you know, hungry and, you know, chilly, you know, just like, is there any, are there any other dwarves visiting you? You know, the thing is, it's all you. In, in the same way, that, you know, right now, you know, Chris, I can focus on your face or I can focus on that pink light that's kind of in the background or I can focus on, I can hear the air conditioning blowing a little bit in the background here. That is, I'm foreground with attention. I'm foregrounding certain

features and I'm backgrounding other features. And so at any given moment, you can do that. You can practice doing that. And for a human, those features aren't always in the moment. They can also be features that you predict will be occurring later, right? So I may feel exhausted now and it may feel like the world is ending now or that everything is terrible now, but I'm aware of the fact, I can focus on the fact that probably tomorrow morning, based on my long history of experience, if I just can get some sleep, have a hot bath, have a nice cup of tea, get some sleep, I won't feel this way in the morning. And I think the thing that's really, to me, profound about this is I know this to be true.

I mean, I know this. As a neuroscientist, I know that my experience in the moment is a combination of what's in here and, you know, what's out here. But that doesn't change my experience of everything feeling like the world, like the world is closing in. on me. And it really does feel that way. And it requires, I can pretty automatically now remember that it's just, you know, this is a construction of the sensory present and the remembered past and that there are other possible experiences in the moment that I could be having. And that's why I think, like, I can't remember the person who said this, but it's, this is not my quote. It's actually in my, I think, in the footer of my email, but my email signature,

but like hope is a practice, you know, hope is a practice. What does that mean? It means that if meaning ultimately is grounded in metabolism and movement, you always begin a prediction. The brain begins with predicting a set of behaviors, a set of actions that then gives rise to your lived experience, then you can practice, you can deliberately engage in experiences, you can deliberately cultivate experiences for yourself in the present with effort that if you do it frequently enough, become automatic and available, they become available automatically for your brain to use as predictions in the future. Uh-huh. So if you want to change your, if you want to change your, if you

want to change who you are. You can't, you can't really go back into the past and change what happened. You can try. That's what therapy is for in part. But, but what you can do is change the present, which will equip the brain, your brain, to predict differently in the future. And as a consequence, you will do different things and experience yourself differently in the world and that's where the real agency is I think which do you think is a more powerful practice between the two going back to try and change your retrospective story meaning of the past revisiting things that have occurred or creating this new investment to then be paid down a memory dividend for you to withdraw from in future by changing what you're doing right now

Well, maybe every therapist will hate me for saying this, but I think that there's varied success with going back into your past and trying to change the meaning of what's happened. It's not futile, but it's, I think, much harder than investing in the present. you know, it's like exercise. You, your exercise, you invest, literally invest energy in the present. Sometimes you make yourself really uncomfortable in the present in order to equip yourself to be better in the future. You know, you're building a better, healthier, you know, future you. And that's a little bit like what I'm saying. You can do it not just with, you know, building bigger muscles or, you know, a more robust cardiovascular system. But you can also do it. It also works with the brain that you can. So I think that probably both are useful, but investing in experiences

now, changing your situation, for example, you can literally get up and move, go for a walk, like literally move your body that will change your lived experience but you can also um just change what you're focusing on in you cannot even move a muscle and stay put in the present room um but um but change what features you're focusing on and that can that is functionally like a change in environment that can change your experience um and so what is useful, I think, is the flexibility to equip yourself with the flexibility to have a choice later about how you experience things. So I don't think one is necessarily better than the other, but I think they're both probably have a role to play. But I think the utility, I think we,

I don't know. I'm hesitant. as you can see, to say that trying to tell a different story about your past is not useful, because I do think it has a, it does have a role to play, I think. Are you being diplomatic, which I think is fair, I have to assume, because we'll have a recency bias, everybody's got on, the experiences that you had, oh, this gets an interesting question, attachment theory, the way that your nervous system has encoded what this means, to be close to someone or far away, for them to, this person to approach you in a dark alley or not, for you to be in a closed space or whatever, I would have assumed that newer

experiences would have overwritten older experiences, that this thing that we've done a couple of times most recently, I've been in a small space and it was okay. Why does that not get rid of claustrophobia, let's say, that I had previous. Yeah, so surprisingly, that's not how it works. and the evidence suggests that the original meaning and the new meaning are both there, but you never lose the old meaning. And it can be reinstated really easily. So the only way to get rid of an old meaning is to lose the neurons that manifest it. You know, there's an interesting scientific, I think that's an interesting scientific kind of story about this that a number of years ago, like decades, maybe, I don't know, 40, 50 years ago, maybe more now, some guy in Rockefeller University in New York was studying why it is that songbirds, the size of the clusters of neurons,

in their brains called the song nuclei. So a nucleus is just like a clump of neurons that work together. In songbirds, these nuclei grow in size. They like new neurons are there at some parts of the year and then they get smaller to other parts of the year. And this scientist was like super interested and like how is, what is this, what is this about?

This was the birth of the science of plasticity. He discovered that brains can birth new neurons. And then it was discovered that other animals can do it, and even humans can do it. But humans can only do it in some parts of the brain in exactly, I think, one part. There's some evidence maybe two, but one part of the brain called the hippocampus can birth new neurons. And then people start asking the question, well, why, how would this happen that, you know, the hippocampus can, can, can birth new neurons, but they were asking the wrong question. Because it turns out that in vertebrate brains, most animals, most vertebrates, can, they, they burst new neurons all over the brain. Humans have

lost that capacity. We've only retained it in one part of the brain, but it's been lost everywhere else. And like, why would that be? And the one potential answer that scientists think about is that we are long lived. And when, if you replace one neuron with another neuron, you've lost the memories that that neuron participated in. Or you lose part of the memory that the neuron participates. What is a memory? A memory isn't like a file. It's a pattern of electrical and chemical and maybe magnetic, we don't know, but definitely electrical and chemical activity that is re-manifesting itself. So memories aren't, you know, retrieved, even though that's the word we use. They're not really retrieved like you would retrieve a file from a file drawer. They are

reconstituted, re-implemented. They are constructed, reconstructed patterns of electrical activity with electrochemical activity. And if you lose the neurons that are part of the I mean, a given memory doesn't just have one neuron. It doesn't just have one, you know, one assembly of neurons. There are neurons that are constantly switching out to maintain the memory. You know, like, I don't know, like players on a baseball team or something. You know, like they're constantly switching out. But if you lose some of those, the memory is lost. so we don't lose our memories. We remember things for 50, 60, 70, 80, 90 years, right? So we, and we have a limited capacity for memory, meaning at some point, and this is something that, you know, scientists now talk about, like maybe our inability to remember things as we get much older is because like we're getting filled up because we don't have new neurons. There's no place for those memories to go, essentially. There's no new neurons that are like freed up. So one neuron doesn't participate

in one memory. It can participate in hundreds or thousands of memory because it's in a larger ensemble that create the memory. But the limited nature of our memories or, well, let's put this way. The expansive nature of our memories comes from the fact that we keep our neurons for a really long time and we don't birth new ones in most places in the brain. But that also puts a limit on what we can remember as we age. I remember seeing something written a while ago about there is no such thing as sort of getting rid of myelin sheets that have been laid down. You can simply lay down ones that are more easy to access, more commonly accessed over the top. So basically, there's no such thing as not driving a habit.

There is simply choosing between which habit you want to drive here or which one you want to encode. Yeah. How much truth is in that? Well, yeah, I mean, there is some truth in what you're saying, but it's the devil's in the details, right? So first of all, a myelin sheath is the fatty sheath that goes around. around the axon. It's not responsible for content of your experience. It's responsible for

transmission speed. So if you have an axon that is well wrapped, so an axon, does everyone who, I mean, you don't know what everyone who listens to this knows, but, you know, an axon is a, is like a protrusion from the cell body of a nerve. that carries an electrical signal that is part of how neurons talk to each other and create your movements and your lived experience. The speed with which the electrical signal moves down the axon is directly related to the thickness of the neuron and the amount of myelin on the neuron that wraps it for like conductive purposes. It's also, there are other things which affect transmission speed too that aren't the myelin like there are glial cells other cells

that wrap themselves around the junctures between where neurons talk to each other called a synapse and that also affects the transmission speed of signaling but the point being that you can you can lose myelin there that happens for example in intractable depression you, your, the myelin starts to, to, in certain tracks in your brain, certain, certain groups of axons, lose some of their myelination. And when you do deep brain stimulation, that grows the myelan back. That's partly why that treatment is really useful. But, um... But it is the case that once you have a memory, if you've consolidated that memory, which means that your neurons have grown new little receptors that are important for making an ensemble of signals that is the memory.

if you've consolidated that memory you will have a hard time unremembering it unless there is physical change to your neurons what would that be dementia like you lose you lose neurons spike through the head

spike through the head yeah however if you can prevent research suggestions I think that's accurate what I just said I'm pretty sure that's accurate it. I don't know of any other way that you would. I guess you might have a hard time remembering something, you know, like you have tip of the tongue or something like that. If you get, if you're getting old like me or you haven't used the memory in a while, then some of the, there could be, you know. But there's no sort of real pruning going on or like atrophy to this sort of stuff.

Well, there is pruning, but I don't think, I mean, pruning if you don't use it, you lose it. I mean, for sure. Pruning happens very intensely in children's brains. It happens also in adult brains, but slower. Everything happens slower. You know, all the tuning and pruning happens much more slowly in adult brains, and much slower the older you get. But I don't. think that there's pruning for really intense memories or memories that have, we would call them stressful maybe or threatening or what have you, but I would say, you know, that have a strong metabolic demand that they require, you know, that they are, they have a strong impact on your metabolic state. Those memories typically are not pruned as far as I know. What can be done, though, is certain chemicals you can take certain drugs that will prevent you from consolidating the memory in the first place.

And I think there is research going on that attempts to prevent certain memories from really taking hold physically, for certain experiences taking hold physically. in the brain. Is this like the equivalent of taking Narcan for an overdose on a traumatic experience? A little bit, a little bit. Yeah, a little bit. You've had something bad happen to you. Let's hit you with this whatever like anticholinergic or some something. Right. I mean, the thing is it's a very complex process, right? That involves like hundreds of chemicals. And so if you knock out a couple of the chemicals, you know, the likelihood is that you'll have a harder time consolidating the memory. and therefore you won't you won't be able to remember.

That's so fascinating. But I don't, but yeah, sorry, go ahead. Just that you could have an acute intervention for something that happens. I've heard that women post-childbirth are given a flood of hormones or a flood of neurochemicals that give them a sort of retrospective pain amnesia about the discomfort that they went through. That is such, that is like a myth. Oh, my friend Daniel Sloss put it in his stand-up special. I'm going to have to tell him. That is a myth. I can, listen, I can remember. Scientific myth or personal myth? Well, I'm telling you that I can remember how painful it was.

And my husband can confirm that I can remember how painful it was. But, but what I would say is, um, what's interesting about pain, right, is that if I said to you, Chris, I want you to keep your eyes open, and in your mind's eye, I want you to imagine a red McIntosh apple of the sort that you would eat. Can you see the ghost of a red apple in your mind's eye? Kind of. Yeah, right? Or if I asked you to, are you, you know, if I ask you, what's your, what's your favorite band? like your favorite musical band? Sleep token.

Oh gosh, I don't even know them. Yeah, well. That's how old I am. Try and be. Okay. Well, can you hear one of their songs in your head? Mm-hmm. Right?

Pretty vividly, probably, right? Yep. Yeah, okay. But if I said, what's the most painful thing that ever happened to you? Mm-hmm. Pick a painful thing that's happened to you. Now, try to actually embole.

body that pain like imagine it can you kind of not really though with difficulty yeah you have an awareness that you were in pain yes but you aren't feeling the pain the way that you're hearing the song that's correct that's correct yeah so that's a really interesting thing about what we would call interoceptive signaling signaling from the can the sensory conditions of the body We can't exactly simulate it. We can't, the predictions that our brains are making don't reinstate the experience in the same way that it will with vision or with hearing or sometimes with taste, which is interesting. And I, you know, don't know that anyone knows why that. the case, but it does seem to be the case. So, I mean, a lot of really funky things do happen

in pregnancy and in childbirth, hormonally speaking. I mean, when I was pregnant with my daughter right before I delivered her, my husband could open a box of Cheerios in the kitchen, and I could be four rooms away, and I could smell it. I could, I mean, I could tell the difference between Cheerios and Rice Krispies or whatever. You know, like, my sense of smell was really quite alarmingly and interestingly intense. But I don't know about, I think the most women I know completely remember how painful childbirth was.

I'll have to inform my friend who pushed fake news to theaters of people around the United States. Well, it's probably a funny. It's probably a funny joke. It's a very funny joke. It might just be a useful, a useful dramatic tool. I want to talk about anxiety, sort of emotion du jour of the modern world, it seems. What do you wish more people knew about anxiety and how it works? Well, I don't think there's one cause of anxiety exactly, but I do think that, you know, your brain is making sense of signals. And there are other ways to make sense of those signals. So, Anxiety usually is a, you know, it's usually occurring in situations where there's a lot of uncertainty and there's a lot of arousal, meaning there's a lot of chemicals, there's a more, a higher concentration of chemicals that are involved in your brain attempting to learn that has taken new, it taken signals because it's not predicting particularly well. There's a lot of that's what it means when there's a lot of uncertainty. Your brain can't prepare one motor, plan, it's preparing many and it doesn't know which one is the right one to choose. Such a great definition. That's such a lovely way to think about it, especially what we've said previously about the importance of prediction for future events.

Yeah. So the go-to meaning doesn't have to be anxiety. If you experience heightened arousal as uncertainty, you do different things than if you experience it as anxiety. And you're not just labeling it's not labeling it's you're embodying a different meaning and um you know what do you do when you're uncertain about something you you forage for for for information you get curious you could be interested yeah yeah um what do you do you know when you're anxious you usually withdraw um and sometimes there's probably utility in in experiencing a high-arousal, unpleasant state as uncertainty. There's research, not my research, but research by a guy named Jeremy Jameson,

who trained people to recategorize or make meaning of their high-arousal states as determination. And he was able to, in these studies, train people to overcome their test anxiety by dissolving it, basically. Their high arousal states remained high, but they experienced it differently because they made a different meaning of it. And there's great utility to getting rid of test anxiety. It can be the difference between, mean the difference between hundreds of thousands of dollars over your lifetime in earning capacity. My personal example that I love that I've used in my book and I talk about sometimes because I love this example. It's an example of my daughter when she was 12. When my daughter was 12, she was barely

five feet tall and she was testing for her black belt and karate. Her sense was a 10th degree black belt. So this guy, you know, could break a board by looking at it, right? He was just like really massively strong guy. And she had to spar these like 15, 16, 17-year-old boys who were like a foot taller than her in order to, over two days, to achieve this black belt. And her sense, you know, kind of saunter's up to her. And he just says, get your butterflies flying in formation. And I was like, oh, my God.

that is amazing. He didn't say calm down little girl because actually calming down would be the wrong thing to do. When you are in a motivated performance situation, you don't want to be calm. You want that arousal. But if you experience it as anxiety, the motor plans that come with that are very different than if you experience it as determination or as getting your butterflies in formation. And I personally have used that particular concept multiple times in my life when I've been faced in a motive, like before I gave my TED talk, you know, before I give my TED talk in front of a thousand people, I could feel my heartbeats in my fingertips. Like, that's how much arousal was in my body. I was like, if somebody brought a flame near me, I probably would have

combusted. Like, I was just wired. But, you know, I just, and I had to say to myself, like, out loud, you know, this is not anxiety. Get your butterflies flying in formation. Because under those circumstances, what comes to you is the really, is the thing that has been ingrained in you, the most automatic thing. And in our culture, the most automatic thing is to make sense of those experiences as anxiety. But you do have choices, you know, you do have choices. I'm thinking about that uncertainty and ambiguity point. I'm wondering what it is about the modern world, which is providing us with such potent fuel for anxiety to come through. you mean such potent fuel for uncertain yeah so i would say what is what i would say there's a lot of

uncertainty and um well there's a lot of anxiety where is the where is the uncertainty ambiguity how is that being borne through if that's one of the key drivers of that emotion yeah so what i would say is there's a lot of uncertainty and there's a lot of metabolic demand. There's a lot of, well, I mean, we haven't talked about, you know, your brain's most important job is regulating your body and all of that. But, you know, people are walking around basically metabolically encumbered all the time and partly that's the case because there's so much uncertainty. Uncertainty is very expensive for a nervous system to manage. And as a consequence, there's a lot of arousal and people are the go-to kind of knee-jerk way of making sense of that and experiencing it is anxiety.

So I think that we've, you know, engineered for ourselves like the perfect environment, basically, to bankrupt a human nervous system. And I think that I wrote about this in my book, and I continue to think that this is the case, You know, that if you think about all of the moments where in all of the things that could be potentially demanding, you know, making it hard for you to predict well, you could just start to enumerate them, you know. I mean, most people don't get a sufficient amount of sleep. We actually, now, you know, there's a lot of. discussion now about getting enough sleep, but still we have modern life is not designed really for sleeping well. We have computers. We have phones. We have a lot of screens. Those screens have

light in them that stimulates our ganglion cells in our retina that screws up our circadian rhythm. That's not trivial, actually. That's a really substantially important thing. We, you know, we, we eat pseudo food that isn't really, you know, like, isn't necessarily really healthy and can really screw up your predictions. You know, if you're eating something with or drinking soda or eating things with like artificial sweeteners, the taste no longer is a good predictor of the, of the glucose concentration, you know, we have. social media where, I mean, human, the biggest, one of the biggest sources of uncertainty for humans is other humans. You know, the best thing for your nervous system is another human. The worst thing for your nervous system is also another human. And we, you know, our ways of interacting with each other now, you know, are also somewhat uncertain, you know, like somebody

walks up to you and goes, hey, bitch. like, well, is that high, nice to see you? Or is that, you know, like somebody calling you a not nice name? Like, but, you know. And then there's also economic uncertainty. There's climate change. And you wouldn't think climate change, you know, you wouldn't think that that really necessarily, I mean, it doesn't matter whether you believe in climate change or not. The thing is that climate change, climate change is happening. And you cannot believe it, but the impact of the change will still. still impact your nervous system, whether you believe it or not. Climate change means that one of the consequences is that there are small changes in carbon dioxide concentrations in the air. And very, very small changes in carbon dioxide concentrations actually have a profound impact on vertebrate nervous systems. Actually, I think it may also impact a non-vertebrate nervous systems too. Okay, so you're saying that the parts per million

increase is maybe as much of a concern for our emotional system as our climate system. Well, you don't have an emotional system, but I would say it's as much of a, no, well, you know, our mental system, should we say. No, for your brain, for your brain's ability to control your body. And, you know, you may think of that as, that distinction as kind of like splitting hairs, but you invited me on your program. Hey, you're the, you're the specialist and you're here for a reason. And keeping me in line is one of them. This is very important for today. But yes, it turns out that very small changes in carbon dioxide actually has an impact on a measurable impact on nervous systems. And so, you know, I mean, and then in the United States, there are also other issues, you know, like there are school shootings, there are, you know, which happened at alarming frequencies, right? And then you also have like political uncertainty and doesn't really matter whether you're on the left or on the right, you know, whether you're a liberal or conservative. There's a lot of uncertainty for everybody.

So these, your nervous system doesn't, your brain doesn't really like parse these things and go, well, this is one kind of uncertainty and that's another kind. And no, it just, it just, they compound each other. They just make it harder for your brain to do. job. And the result is increases in chemicals that you will experience as arousal and you will make sense of as anxiety, all other things being equal. It's kind of inescapable. It seems like a pretty sort of perfect cocktail to create an environment that this would be a common experience for a lot of people in. Well, I think it is a common experience for a lot of people, but they make sense of it as

you know, like, oh, my fight and flight circuits are like overworked or whatever, but you don't have fighter flight circuits. There are no fighter flight circuits in your brain. And I think people do things to try to reduce their discomfort, some of which are, this is just my speculation now, but there's no evidence that this is the case. But basically, we know, here's what we, do know. We know that from mathematical modeling using intelligent agents, it seems to be the case

that if you, the evidence suggests that if I make myself predictable to you, you will be more predictable to me. And that's a benefit to both of our nervous systems. We'll like each other more. And if we like each other more, we'll be influenced by each other more. so if you wanted to reduce uncertainty in your like or not even if you wanted to you don't even have to know this right like if you just if you feel better when you're around people who are like who are similar to you who you can predict better you're going to be around them more because it feels better the suggestion here is as well that if you want them to regulate you more behaving in a consistent and predictable manner yourself is going to influence them which will

influence you which will right exactly exactly and um i think that this might be one of the reasons why people are in their own little echo chambers right now where they're out of all of the out of all the information that people and experiences people can expose themselves to what we see is this, you know, self-selection into information bubbles and social bubbles that are where viewpoints are being, the diversity of viewpoints is decreasing. Unchallenged, largely. And I think it, it's my speculation, right, is that it might be because, people are really encumbered.

They're really encumbered. I mean, we haven't even talked about the fact that, you know, like I said, okay, well, you know, you're eating pseudo food and, you know, you might wonder, well, what is that? Why does that matter? Well, it matters because what you eat, how much you sleep, these things actually matter to your brain's ability to properly metabolically regulate your body in an efficient way. and if you know you if that if the inability to do so happens in a given moment nothing bad's going to happen to you but you'll pay maybe a little tax right like evidence suggests for example that if you're engaged if you have if you're exposed to social stress that means a stressful situation involving another person within two hours

of eating, your metabolism becomes less efficient to the tune of 104 calories. So it's like you ate 104 more calories than you actually ate. If you add that up over a year of meals, that's 11 pounds. It's almost exactly a pound a month, yeah. Yeah. So that means that you could eat the exact same thing. You can even be eating like super healthy. But if you're exposed within two hours, the research suggests. That's, you know, 11 pounds in a year. So the point is that these like little metabolic efficiencies that, inefficiencies that happen from these little moments of uncertainty or little moments of stress, they add up over time and they leave you vulnerable to metabolic illnesses. Well, what are metabolic illnesses?

Metabolic illnesses are, well, we know, diabetes, heart disease, depression, anxiety. These are illnesses that have a very strong metabolic basis. And so my point is that there isn't one cause of anxiety. There are all these little nudges. Enough little nudges in the same direction produce a big shove. It seems to me, it's an interesting point to bring up how other people can impact us. There's a lot of conversation at the moment about the impact of loneliness, too much, it's not even necessarily solitude, it's people feeling like they don't have anyone around them.

The most common answer to the question, how many friends can you call on an emergency a zero? It's not the mean, but it is the most caught. It said, blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm interested in what the impact is of toxic relationships on our health, that, as you said, the best thing for our nervous system isn't the human, but the worst thing for our nervous system is that too. What is the impact of toxic relationships on a health? Well, I think, you know, the evidence, I think, um, on loneliness and feeling alone and so on, I think the evidence is clearer there, um, just probably because more research has been done on that topic. But I mean,

all things being equal, you will live years, you will lose years off your life if you are really alone. Not if you're by yourself and you're fine being by yourself, but if you're lonely, if you don't have a connected social, you know, you don't even have one person that you can call on, that you feel that you could rely on. I think it's important to understand that we are, we are social animals. And what that means is we don't, just, we are the caretakers of each other's nervous systems, whether we like it or not. Doesn't matter, again, what your politics are. It's irrelevant what you believe. The fact is that we aren't built, we didn't evolve as creatures to regulate our own nervous systems by

ourselves. We need help. We need other people to do, to help to bear that burden. The problem, I think, is that, as I said before, that other people are also the largest source of uncertainty in our lives. And, you know, I think there's pretty good evidence to suggest that, well, there's definitely evidence to suggest that if you're in a relationship that is physically harmful to you or sexually harmful to you, where adverse events are happening, that will take a tool on not just your emotional health, but your physical health. And if you're a child or an adolescent and this is happening, it will actually, there's almost a

parametric relationship between your experience of those events and the likelihood that you will develop metabolic illness of some sort in adulthood or middle age. So it's really pernicious. That being said, there is also evidence that, but I don't think this is not really evidence about a toxic relationship. So there's evidence that if adverse circumstances happen to you, like a big one shot thing, your way of making meaning of that can have a really big big effect on how it impacts your biology. It's very different to a chronic stress situation, though. Yes, it is. And I think we would probably think of a toxic relationship more like a chronic stress situation.

I mean, stress is just the definition of stress, really, in our lab, the way we think about it is stress is your brain predicting the need for a big metabolic outlay. And that could be for any number of reasons. But if it happens chronically, and you're mispredicting it all, then what happens is the mechanisms, the healthy mechanisms that occur, that are engaged to prepare for that metabolic outlay become dysregulated, and then, you know, you're basically you have this pervasive metabolic dysregulation that occurs. And that's the problem with chronic stress. The problem is that, you know, you're basically, you've drained your gas tank and kind of damaged the mechanisms in the process kind of thing. But I think probably there's research on. on the effects of longer term adverse relationships. I'm just not, I don't know that literature super well.

What are the mechanisms that are turned on in chronic stress? You mentioned certain things get damaged. Certain things are sort of always on. You can't switch them off. Gas tank is empty. What does chronic stress look like metabolically? What does it do to the brain? Well, what happens in, so if we think about stress,

as just any time your brain is predicting a big metabolic outlay. So when you drag your ass out of bed in the morning, your brain, before, as you're waking up, your brain is, you know, signaling the need for cortisol because cortisol is not a stress hormone. It's a hormone that gets glucose in, you know, it basically makes your, it allows your cells to metabolize glucose more easily, basically. And so standing up is metabolically costly. Like the most expensive thing that your brain can do is move your body, learn something new, deal with persistent uncertainty, and deal with an immune system that is chronically active, meaning that you have some metabolic, some immune dysfunction, like an auto. you know, which would lead to, like, say, an autoimmune illness or something.

So, like, elevated. Persistent infection. Right. Yeah, exactly. So when you wake up, if you go to exercise, you have a cortisol surge because your brain is predicting a big metabolic outlay. But what happens often, like, let's say, when you're sitting in a boardroom at a business meeting, or you're, you know, you have to talk to your friend of me, or you're worried about, you know, get. into a fight with your girlfriend or whatever it is, your brain is preparing for big metabolic outlay. And then you don't need that, you don't need that, so you're flushed with glucose

and you don't need the extra glucose. That's like a false alarm. If that happens frequently enough, your cells become insensitive to cortisol, which means that they can't utilize that signal anymore when you actually need it. So cortisol dysregulation is an example of what happens in chronic stress. But that sounds good. Oh, I'm not so sensitive to cortisol anymore. I can handle the cortisol more effectively. What it means is that your cells won't, when cortisol is in the blood, the cells can't utilize it anymore. They ignore it because it's a signal

that doesn't have any meaning anymore. It's always there. So when you go to drag your ass at a bed in the morning, there's a cortisol increase, but your cells can't utilize it. And so how do you feel? You feel exhausted like you can't move. Right?

Or, you know, when you have to prepare for a big meeting and you need that cortisol to, you need your cells to be able to utilize that cortisol. Well, now it can't. So how do you feel? Well, you feel fuzzy-headed. Cortisol is one chemical of thousands of chemicals that work like this, right? So what happens is there's a dysregulation of the normal mechanisms for regulating the body.

and eventually this results in vulnerability to illness. Not the first time, not the 10th time, but eventually. And what's interesting about this is that research shows that a single interaction that is socially unpleasant, like where somebody yells at you or especially if you're a kid or an adolescent, but even in adulthood where somebody's rude to you or, or whatever, you see an effect. Now, that effect isn't going to persist necessarily, because it's just once, right?

These are like little effects that take a long time to add up until they become a problem. But eventually, they will become a problem. How does chronic stress impact memory, our ability to encode things, recall them? Well, it's a complicated relationship. Um, the evidence suggests that, um, there's an optimum level. If something doesn't matter to you at all,

like it has no, your brain is predicting it will have no metabolic impact. You won't even pay attention to it. Like you won't remember it. It's like noise. It's just like you won't remember it. If your stress level is too high, meaning that there's, um, that there's too much demand on the system, you also probably won't remember well. There's an optimum level of stress, actually. It's like an inverted U. That's what the research suggests. How would you advise someone to rebuild their function after a period of prolonged stress? Someone's had a rough period. They've been sort of getting through it and they think, wow, that sort of tired but wide thing, that really sounds like me or I wake up on a morning and I feel sluggish and that does actually correlate with a period where I was

kind of eating it a little bit emotionally and that thing had to deal with mom and had to deal with work and had to deal with the what is a good way for that person to bring themselves back into a state of normality? Well, I would say a state of optimal metabolism or optimal optimal energy efficiency, I would say, first of all, your mood is a pretty good clue to, you know, like a very simple summary or like a very simple barometer of your metabolic state. So if you're feeling okay, if you have enough energy, you know, you perceive enough energy, you feel pretty good, probably everything is going pretty well, metabolically speaking. And if you're feeling really distressed or really dragged out, probably there's some metabolic demand. And I would say

the most, I mean, it's so boring, Chris, what I have to say about this is like, here she goes, she's going to be a mother. Eat healthfully, get enough sleep, whatever that means for you. Like, eight hours isn't for everybody. You just have to get enough sleep that you eventually will wake up feeling rested. And even, even just resting, like, I learned. this. I couldn't believe this, actually. I, um, I, I, I, you know, used to do yoga quite a bit. I had back surgery a couple of years ago and so it's curbed my ability to do yoga a little bit, but I used to do yoga every, like a lot, like three times a week. And, and, but shavasana was always like the hardest thing for me, like where you're laying flat, you know, and some yoga tees, you know, and some,

yoga teacher's always like, oh, this is my favorite part. And I'd be like, this is a living hell for me to lie here, like, for six minutes, whatever. it turns out there's actually evidence that it's really good for you to just lie down and have a rest for a minute. Oh, interesting question on that. What does it mean then that there's good evidence lying down having a rest for a minute is good for you, but your experience of it was one of stress? Well, it wasn't good for me. I mean, like, you have to actually tune out the, you know, I've got to, you know, like tune out the, you know, like tune out the, you know, your inner troll. Like, oh, I've got to do this. I've got to do that. And I've got it the minute I, as soon as I'm allowed to get out of here, I've got you know, no, you have to actually rest. Rest means, you know, your mind isn't racing at a hundred miles an hour. So, but I mean, rest is good. Eating healthfully, exercising, even if it means just

going for a walk, even if it's just a walk around the block, it's a start, you know. So these things actually are like 50% of the, I don't know if it's 50, but it's like a lot of the equation here. And I would say, you know, be a little gentler with yourself. If you're recovering from an illness or you've lived in a really, you're just coming out of a really stressful period, you have to remember that you're just not as resilient. And you are not, you just, you're not as resilient as you will be once you're, so you just have to really, I think, take care to get a, enough rest and really do your best to not make more out of it than that, right? If you have the flu, what do you do? You lie down, you watch TV, you drink chicken soup, you take, you know, maybe, you know, Tylenol or whatever. You don't berate yourself for being a horrible person.

You have the flu. The symptoms of prolonged stress are very similar to the flu. Maybe no nausea. but definitely, you know, the fatigue and the, you know, and so you just have to be a little more patient and gentle with yourself as you recover. You've said today our brains are pretty flexible. We have more of a control over our emotional state than we might think that we were able to step in. What's the limit? What can't we rewire ourselves to do?

What's the upper bound of our ability to step into our own brains? Well, I think it's different for different people. It depends on a lot of different factors. But, I mean, you can't snap your fingers and change your mood, for example. If you feel like shit, you can change the flavor of the shit that you're experiencing. But you can't actually turn it off the way you would flip off a light switch. it just doesn't work like that you have to tolerate it you have might you might tell yourself this is noise you know you might experience it as not relevant um you know kind of like chatter in a way

I mean normally when we feel unpleasant about something the first thing we do is look to the world like what's wrong with the world you know this is a clue and or we might look to ourselves and what's wrong with me but it could just be that you you're metabolically kind of like depleted. And so I think how you make sense of things matters to a point. But you can't, if you're feeling distress or fatigue, you can't just, you know, do a couple of Jedi mind tricks and talk yourself out of it.

It doesn't work like that. And if you're really ruminating, meaning that you have intrusive thoughts or thoughts that are, you're going over and over and over, you know, that are just turning around, turning around in your mind, it's very hard to turn those off. I mean, you need to try. It's really not healthy for you. But you're just, you're just giving those thoughts, essentially. You're sort of juicing them up to be more easily reinstated later. But it's very hard to do that. And sometimes, you know, you have to literally change your context in order, you have to think of them like mental habits in a sense. And the way to change a habit, is not willpower. The way to change a habit is to change your context, because a habit is nothing more than automatic behavior that is governed by predictions which are influenced, shaped by the

context that you're in. If you change your context, you make it easier to shift into a different set of predictions. What would context consist of in the rumination example? What would that look like? it depends on it depends i mean i can't give you a specific recipe because the conditions of human life are so varied but it could literally mean go out for a walk immerse yourself in something get outside your head um you know for me honestly one thing that helps me a lot it's not going to help everybody but it helps me i do neuro anatomy I, oh, I'll crack open a neuroanatomy book. And, you know, there are a couple of anatomical problems I've been working on for a while.

And I'll just read some neuroanatomy. It absorbs me. Slightly niche solution. Yeah. Yeah. But I also could do something like I might watch television or watch a movie. Well, I don't really watch television, but like I might watch a movie or a cereal or something and knit. Right.

Or I might go for a walk and I might birdwatch. or I might work in the garden. Seems like you're trying to engage yourself. You're trying to engage your brain in a different set of automatic predictions. Willpower, like the kind of willpower that you might use, that we understand,

we understand this, you know, like, I really want to eat that second piece of juggling cake and I have to tell myself not to eat it. That's what we think of as control. That kind of control, rarely works

and it's infrequent compared to the other sources of control that are automatically going on

inside your brain and you just have to figure out how to harness those. So find something that you find immersive

and that isn't about you. And that's a good recipe for trying to control

these things that are really, you know, really kind of hard to control, actually. The thing that's, I guess, interesting, reassuring, and a little bit daunting that I've taken away from this, is the amount of responsibility that we all can take over sort of what's happening to us, although it's very disempowering to think, well, you know, these emotions are just happening and I'm along for the ride. It's not that. It doesn't feel particularly great. But in some ways, it kind of relinquishes you of any of the responsibility of having to step in and why there's

nothing I can do there's nothing I can do about my anxiety there's nothing that I can do about my chronic stress there's nothing I can do about my rumination well welcome to the quandary of modern life I mean I think the idea that you're not responsible for your emotions and and or better said that you're not responsible for your behavior when you're under the influence of an emotion And that, you've just described a large part of Western legal theory. You know, I mean, so, but I think that you've put your, you put your finger on exactly the quandary. You know, the very thing that gives a lot of people hope is the thing that is the thing that means, what it means is that you, you know, you have. more responsibility for how you act and how you feel than you might think you do. And I think the

important thing, and I'm really, you know, this is an important thing to say, sometimes we're responsible for things, not because we're to blame for them, but because we're the only ones who can change them. So you just have to figure out what you want in your life and how hard you're willing to work for it. And everybody always need, everyone needs a little help sometimes. That help can be another person. That help could be a medication. That help could be, um, it could come in many different forms. It doesn't necessarily mean that you have to do everything yourself, but you are the architect of your life. Not everybody has the same options. It's a lot harder, as I said before, to sort of to take the reins, you know, than we would like, it's not as, it's harder, it takes

more time. It's not always as effective as we would like. But everybody can have more control over their experience and their actions than they think they can. And that means everybody has a little more responsibility than they might realize. And that's pressure. There is a degree of pressure, but there's also a kind of liberation that comes along with it. So it's a, it's an interesting blend. Dr. Lisa Feldman-Barratt, ladies and gentlemen. You're fantastic, Lisa. I think you're wonderful. I really enjoy your work. Where should people go? They're going to want to check out everything you've got going on. Lisafeldmanbarrett.com. Easy as that. Two books that everybody should read, including one that's like the perfect holiday. I don't want to just do true crime, romance,

fiction stuff and is an easy read and then something else which is deeper to. Lisa, I appreciate you very much. Thank you. Thank you so much. Congratulations. You made it to the end of the episode. And if you want more, well, why don't you press right here? Come on. I get asked all the time for book suggestions. People want to get into reading fiction or nonfiction or real life stories. And that's why I made a list of 100 of the most interesting and impactful books that I've ever read. These are the most life-changing reads that I've ever found. descriptions about why I like them and links to go and buy them, and it's completely free,

and you can get it right now by going to chriswillx.com slash books. That's chriswillex.com slash books.