Something You Should Know - How Your Brain Predicts Your Reality & How To Be Calm and Why Should Be

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Starting point is 00:00:27 Download June's Journey now on Android or iOS. Today on Something You Should Know, is it really a good idea to charge your cell phone overnight or leave it on 24 hours a day? Then the fascinating way your reality is shaped by your predictions. For example, if you predict that you're going to feel an intense pain, then the pain that you would otherwise judge to be just a medium pain is judged to be much stronger. And vice versa. I think this is why dentists always say to you, this will just be a tickle.

Starting point is 00:01:01 Also, if you wear flip-flops in the summer, there are some things you should be aware of and the benefits of being calm and staying calm. After looking at the research on this topic, I do think that calm is not just something we are or we're not. Calm is really a skill. The calmer we become, we become less of a victim to our own negative self-talk. All this today on Something You Should Know. This is an ad for better help. Welcome to the world. Please read your personal owner's manual thoroughly. In it, you'll find simple instructions for how to interact with your fellow human beings and how to find happiness and peace of mind. Thank you, and have a nice life. Unfortunately, life doesn't come with an owner's manual.

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Starting point is 00:02:10 Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hi, and welcome to Something You Should Know. I want to start today by talking about something you do every day, and that is charge your cell phone. Now, the technology for cell phone batteries has changed and improved over the years, but a lot of the old advice still lingers. So, to set the record straight, I want to talk about a few facts and myths of cell phone charging. You've probably heard somebody say, you shouldn't charge your phone overnight. Well, actually, there are no risks involved in charging your phone overnight. Your phone won't overcharge, the power won't kill your battery, destroy your charger, or start a fire.

Starting point is 00:02:55 You shouldn't use your cell phone while it's charging. Again, a myth. You can use your phone while it charges as long as you're using a manufacturer-approved or legitimate off-brand charger and battery. You should only charge your phone when it's completely dead. That's not true either. You can charge your phone as often as you want. But here's an essential piece of information. The lithium-ion batteries in cell phones have limited charging cycles. For an iPhone, it's typically around 500 cycles. A cycle is a full charge from 0 to 100 percent. So, if you only charge your phone when it is completely dead, you'll exhaust the charging cycle pretty quickly. This is why experts

Starting point is 00:03:40 recommend keeping the charge between 40 and 80 percent. You can charge your phone multiple times a day and get the most out of one cycle. The practice extends your battery life and increases performance. A lot of people think it's okay to leave your phone on 24-7, 365 days a year, and that is not okay. If you leave your phone on all the time, it causes a problem. While it's not the biggest problem in the world, it can affect the lifespan and performance of your battery over time. You don't have to turn off your phone every day, but once a week is fine. Rebooting your phone every now and again can improve the performance of the device, and that is something you should know. Okay, so this is one of those segments that is really interesting, but you kind of have to grasp the beginning explanation here. You have

Starting point is 00:04:35 to get your head in the game for this to make sense. The topic we're discussing is reality, your reality, and how your reality is comprised largely of your prediction of your reality, your reality, and how your reality is comprised largely of your prediction of your reality, which I know, I know, it sounds a little strange, but it's about to make sense. Meet Andy Clark. He is a professor at the University of Sussex. He is the author of six books, and his latest is The Experience Machine, How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality. Hi Andy, welcome to Something You Should Know. Hi Mike, it's wonderful to be here. Thanks for having me.

Starting point is 00:05:12 So if I understand this correctly, you're saying that my experience of my reality is guided by predictions my brain makes, which is kind of a hard concept to grasp. So give me an example that illustrates this. There's a lot of examples to choose from here. One that I kind of like, because I think everybody's had this experience near enough, is phantom phone vibrations, that feeling that you sometimes get that your cell phone is kind of going off in your pocket, but maybe it's not even in your pocket or it's not going off at all.

Starting point is 00:05:46 I think many of us experience that. Turns out that it's an effect which is rooted in a kind of chronic prediction of your phone ringing. And that prediction is kind of enhanced or maybe exacerbated is a word by stress and caffeine. And so doctors, for example, or maybe exacerbated is a word, by stress and caffeine. And so doctors, for example, feel these phantom phone vibrations quite a lot. So do students.

Starting point is 00:06:14 I think that's a kind of example. The picture here is that this is how all experience is constructed all the time. But that experience of the phantom phone ringing, that's an experience that doesn't actually happen. The phone didn't actually ring, which is different than most of our experiences, which aren't phantom, they're real. So explain the difference here. Yeah, I mean the difference really is just that in the case of the phantoms, predictions are doing too much work. In the case where you properly experience the world, there's a balancing act between the prediction and the sensory information. So as you listen to me speak in these words, you're probably hearing gaps between the words.

Starting point is 00:07:02 But the gaps aren't real. The gaps are as much a phantom as the phantom phone vibrations were. They're just kind of added in because that's the way that your brain finds it easiest to predict the auditory stream is to insert the gaps where they belong in languages that you understand. And that, of course, is why languages that we don't understand tend to sound so quick when we listen to them for the first time. Yeah, well, I've had that experience of listening to someone speak fluently, speak a foreign language like French or German or Spanish. And I wonder, well, why are they talking so fast? How does anyone know when one word ends and the next one begins? But people who listen to me talk

Starting point is 00:07:43 in English who don't speak English probably wonder the same thing because the spaces between the words aren't really there. Our brain predicts where they're going to go and puts them there. This reminds me of, and you tell me if I'm on the right track here with this idea of tickling yourself. You can't tickle yourself, even if you're the most ticklish person in the world, because you predict, you already know what's going to happen. So, and tickling is somebody tickling, touching you in a way that you can't predict. And right, is that it? Yeah, that's a nice example, bringing action into the picture in that way. It turns out that actually you can tickle yourself if you launch the tickle through a tickle machine that in effect slightly randomizes the the tickle that

Starting point is 00:08:31 you have tried to give yourself so that just turns your tickling into something much more like somebody else's tickling of you but but yes it's a lovely example in general the reason we can't tickle ourselves is that we're too good at predicting what's gonna happen what we're too good at predicting what's going to happen, what we're going to feel at that moment. So we can't be surprised. So our ability to predict what's going to happen and pain might be a good example of this. If you predict that something is going to be painful, does that make it more painful or it just your prediction was right or your prediction was wrong,

Starting point is 00:09:06 but the pain is the pain? It really looks as if it makes it more painful. So if you predict that you're going to feel an intense pain, then the pain that you would otherwise judge to be just a medium pain is judged to be much stronger and vice versa. I think this is why dentists always say to you, this will just be a tickle. They're trying to dampen the way that you would otherwise experience this particular flow of sensory stuff because the sensory stuff is real. It's just that it never has an effect on its own. It only has an effect when you mix it with prediction. So alter the predictions and we alter our experience. And that's some handy wiggle room, I think. Yeah. Well, I also, I sometimes think about, you know, when you have

Starting point is 00:09:50 an itch, like if you're lying in bed and there's nothing else going on, there's no other outside stimulation, you might feel an itch fairly acutely that if you were out busy doing your stuff during the day, you would never notice. But because it's the only thing, your brain says, hey, pay attention to that. But if there was a lot of other things going on, it would fall way down the list and you wouldn't even notice. Yes, I think that's right as well. What happens very often if you're in a situation like that is you feel a little bit of an itch and you start to attend to it because you've got nothing else to do. Now, attention in these accounts actually ups the power of the prediction. And so the itch recruits a prediction that says I'm having an itch, you attend to it,

Starting point is 00:10:37 and the itch gets stronger. Conversely, if you can distract yourself, as you can do much more easily, as you say, if you're not in that dark room, then the attention waiting, if you like, goes somewhere else. And that means that the itch has to feel less. Going back to the pain prediction example that we were just talking about. predict that what's about to happen is going to hurt? You say it's probably going to hurt more because of your paying attention to that and predicting that. But can you see that coming and say, this isn't going to hurt at all, or just the fact that you're paying attention to it will make it hurt more? Right on all counts. Attending to it will make it hurt more unless you attend to it in a very special way, where you're not attending to the painfulness of it, but you're attending to the details of the feeling without framing them as pain. And that actually is a way of distracting

Starting point is 00:11:37 yourself. And so it feels a bit less safe. In general, you can't make yourself experience anything just by predicting it. Most of the predictions that are doing the work for constructing your experience are ones that your brain has learned to make in an unconscious way over all the years of your life. Some of them are evolutionarily very important, like responding to painful stimuli that are in effect saying, you better stop doing this or you'll hurt yourself some more. So because that's also deeply ingrained, there's a limit, quite a strong limit to what we can do at that very top level just by changing what I consciously say I predict.

Starting point is 00:12:17 Right, because if somebody is about to punch you in the mouth, your brain is going to predict this is going to hurt. And even if you could somehow say, brain is going to predict this is going to hurt. And even if you could somehow say, this is going to feel spectacular, it's never going to feel spectacular. You can't go that far. Yeah, I'm afraid not. You can't go that far. Although there are some dramatic cases, at least in the reverse direction, where people do seem to go that far. So one I'm thinking of here is a construction worker written up in the British Medical Journal that fell off some scaffolding and a very long nail went right through their foot. At least that's what they

Starting point is 00:12:56 thought. But when they got to hospital, they were in great pain, they were given fentanyl, and they slowly removed the nail which had passed harmlessly between the toes of course you couldn't see that because you're wearing a great big workman's boot that's a case where the prediction of intense pain made on the basis of good visual evidence really created intense pain I have no doubt that the construction worker was genuinely in agony and needed that fentanyl to take the edge off before they could even try to pull out the nail. So there are some dramatic cases, but normally there are pretty strong limits to what we can and can't control in these ways. And there are individual differences as well, which we could also talk about. So that example of the construction worker, that's phantom pain,

Starting point is 00:13:46 probably not unlike when people lose limbs and then feel pain in the limb that isn't there. Yes, that's right. I think phantom limb pain is constructed in a very similar way. The thing to notice, I think, about the construction worker case is that it is just one end of the spectrum, if you like, of pain construction that applies to all of us. So if you take chronic pain of almost any kind, the variation in the amount of pain that is being experienced often doesn't track the underlying sort of physical causes in any neat way. It varies from day to day. It varies from context to context. Very often, there's not a sufficient physical cause, at least none that's been detected so far.

Starting point is 00:14:30 So that suggests to me, at least, that all of our experiences are built out of this mixture of prediction and the evidence, and that chronic conditions are one of the cases where we might be able to intervene a bit. We're talking about reality and how your reality is shaped by your predictions. My guest is Andy Clark, author of the book The Experience Machine, How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality. Bumble knows it's hard to start conversations. Hey. No, too basic.

Starting point is 00:15:04 Hi there. Still no. What. No, too basic. Hi there. Still no. What about hello, handsome? Who knew you could give yourself the ick? That's why Bumble is changing how you start conversations. You can now make the first move or not. With opening moves, you simply choose a question to be automatically sent to your matches. Then sit back and let your matches start the chat. Download Bumble and try it for yourself. This winter, take a trip to Tampa on

Starting point is 00:15:31 Porter Airlines. Enjoy the warm Tampa Bay temperatures and warm Porter hospitality on your way there. All Porter fares include beer, wine, and snacks, and free fast-streaming Wi-Fi on planes with no middle seats. And your Tampa Bay vacation includes good times, relaxation, and great Gulf Coast weather. Visit flyporter.com and actually enjoy economy. So, Andy, so far we've been talking mostly about the sense of feeling, you know, pain and that kind of thing. But what about the other senses? Yes, the other senses work in just the same way. And in fact, they are the ones that were understood first.

Starting point is 00:16:14 So the sense of pain, for example, seems to have been understood later. And it's what you might call an inward-looking sense. It's looking at signals coming from your own body rather than signals coming at you from the external world that's what's going on in the case of sight sound in the case of sight a nice example of the the role of prediction there is that if you went out and purchased a joke shop mask you turned the concave side, the hollow side, if you like, towards you. You put a light behind that mask and you retire to about four foot away, it will look to you as if you're seeing a convex face. It will look as if the nose is sticking out and the face has a normal convex contour.

Starting point is 00:16:58 This is because the brain has learned that faces are nearly always in its experience more or less always convex and so those predictions of convexity actually trump a lot of the genuine visual information that would be otherwise telling your brain hey that's a concave that's a concave shape that you'll see in there so that's the case that's a case in vision in audition and we did mention one earlier where you hear the gaps between the words where those gaps aren't really there they're kind of inserted by the brain because that's the way it finds it easiest to predict the sensory stream you could also look at those things that you the cases you hear on the web I don't know if you call your readers and listeners have come across the green needle brainstorm sort of experiences. But if you put that into Google, you will get a little sound file where if you're looking at the words green needle, it will sound like green needle. And if you're looking at the words brainstorm, it will sound

Starting point is 00:18:05 exactly like brainstorm. And yet it's exactly the same sound file. All you're doing is you're changing the predictions. And this reveals in this case, the extent to which they're sculpting your experience. What about that case of, you know, that was on the internet of that dress, and some people saw it one color and other people saw it another color. Is that part of this? That falls into place very neatly too. And it falls into place with a nice little twist at the end. So the typical vision science kind of account there, which is right as far as it goes, is that the people that see it one way are making different assumptions about where the light is coming from than the people that see it the other way making different assumptions about where the light is coming from than the people that see it the other way.

Starting point is 00:18:48 That seems to be true. What a team at New York University went on to show is that this correlates rather well with whether you're a lark or an owl, with whether you are one of those people that sees an awful lot of things in the morning versus people that see a lot of things under artificial light at night. And so your individual life history there has kind of set you up to make different assumptions about the lighting that then show through in such a dramatic way in the case of the dress. But my bet is that these differences are there in all kinds of experiences too. And it's just every now and again, we get then it seems like that will fulfill itself.

Starting point is 00:19:47 Then you won't be able to draw as well as the other people in the room because you don't expect it. You're not predicting that you can draw it well, so you don't draw it well. Yes, exactly. And there's a lot of self-fulfilling prophecies in these predictive processing accounts. Motor control action is actually all about self-fulfilling prophecy. You predict the way that it's going to feel as you perform the action. You get rid of the errors with respect to that. And oddly enough, that's the way of your brain controlling the action. And I think that's why sports science, nowadays at least, focuses an awful

Starting point is 00:20:25 lot on getting you to know what it feels like if you're doing it right, rather than just telling you, oh, you need to move this bit this way and this other bit this other way. So other than this being really interesting, is there any lesson here or any advice or anything you can, knowing what you know, you can do differently than other people or is this just a fascinating area of research and clearly it is but it's it's not much more than that I actually think it's got lots of applications and those applications include cases where you can take action so you know the the take-home message would be, be careful what you predict, because your predictions will help structure your own experiences. Just be aware

Starting point is 00:21:11 that what your brain has come to expect over its lifetime is actually playing a big role in what you get as far as experience is concerned. But in the case of your very first example of the phantom phone ringing in your pocket, you say that perhaps that's stress. I've always thought that if you're expecting someone to text you or call you, that it seems more likely to happen, but that's just my guess and my experience, that if I'm not expecting somebody, then it seems like it doesn't happen. But it does happen.

Starting point is 00:21:43 You're right that if you're expecting a call particularly if you're expecting an important call then that will make a big difference to the extent to which you get these phantom effects because you're then attending in a sort of gentle way all the time and that means that you're up in the value of what might be otherwise totally innocent little ordinary fluctuations in how your body's feeling. But because you're upping the value of everything like that, you turn those from whole cloth, if you like, into the feeling of a phone going off in your pocket. So something else has to be going on here, because when you get a phantom phone ring,

Starting point is 00:22:23 it's not because you're thinking about getting a phantom phone ring. It happens while you're not thinking about it. If you try to predict, you try to make your phone ring, phantom ring like magic, you can't. You can't predict it consciously. It has to be subconsciously. Yeah, this is probably because the predictions involved are occurring at all these different levels. And they're not all conscious. In fact, the conscious predictions are just a little tiny bit of this big iceberg. And because you can't alter all those other ones

Starting point is 00:22:57 by trying, then trying will often actually make things go wrong. You can't systematically alter them, but you can kind of mess them around a bit like people do when they're attending really hard, when they're trying to make a part on the golf course. And what they do then is they just mess up everything that their brain already knew about how to generate a good part. What else about this that we haven't talked about,

Starting point is 00:23:23 what else do you find fascinating? Because like I said at the beginning, it's a little hard to get your head around this, so it's kind of hard to know what to ask you. So I'll just ask you, what else is real interesting about this? in here is the way that perception and action now follow the same broad principles. That's to say they're just trying to get rid of prediction errors as we go about our business. So if you imagine a tennis player on the court, they're making all kinds of predictions about their brains making all these predictions about where the ball is going to be served to, how much force they're going to exert when they swing their arm. All of these things are coming together to enable us to behave in the very world that we perceive. And I think that's a bit of a payoff. It shows how perception and action get into these lovely little cycles together where they each help the other one do its work. This is one of those topics that falls under the category of, I didn't even know this was

Starting point is 00:24:30 a topic, that this was something that people studied and talked about, about how our predictions impact our reality. But when you start to dig into it, it's really fascinating. I've been talking with Andy Clark. He is a professor at the University of Sussex, the author of six books, and his latest is called The Experience Machine, How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality. And you can read that book in your reality if you'd like to. There's a link to it at Amazon in the show notes. Thank you for coming on, Andy. Fantastic. Thank you.

Starting point is 00:25:07 Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast. And I tell people, if you like something you should know, you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show. Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest. Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests, but Jordan does it better than most. Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman who was recruited and radicalized by ISIS and went to prison for three years. She now works to raise awareness on this issue. It's a great conversation. And he spoke with Dr. Sarah Hill about how taking birth control not only prevents pregnancy, it can influence a woman's partner preferences, career choices, and overall behavior

Starting point is 00:25:53 due to the hormonal changes it causes. Apple named The Jordan Harbinger Show one of the best podcasts a few years back. And in a nutshell, the show is aimed at making you a better, more informed, critical thinker. Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show. There's so much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. People who listen to Something You Should Know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives.

Starting point is 00:26:30 So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives, and one I've started listening to called Intelligence Squared. It's the podcast where great minds meet. Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more. A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology. That's pretty cool. And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker John Ronson, discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars.

Starting point is 00:27:06 Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today. Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for. Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts. You hear the word calm a lot, as in calm down, let's all be calm, remain calm, don't panic. Because we all know at some level there's something very good about calmness. But what is so good about being calm?

Starting point is 00:27:39 Can you really calm yourself down in the moment? What are the benefits of being calm? What does it actually mean to be calm? Here to talk about all this is Chris Bailey. Chris has written for the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, GQ, Huffington Post, and he is author of a book called How to Calm Your Mind. Hey, Chris, welcome to Something You Should Know. Mike, how you doing? Good, good thanks. So you know what's interesting about being calm is I don't really know if my mind is calm because I don't have anything to compare it to. I can make myself calmer than I was before, but I might not still be as calm as you because there's no real objective standard of what

Starting point is 00:28:26 calm is. So what is calm? This is one of the surprising things that I discovered over the research journey I've been on in assembling the ideas on calm and looking at the research is that researchers themselves don't really have a picture of what calm is and how we should be understanding it. But the best research that I found on this topic suggests that calm is on a spectrum with another idea that is on its opposite end. And the opposite of calm, as defined by the research, is anxiety. And so, when we're anxious, you know, when we're anxious,

Starting point is 00:29:06 we're mentally highly aroused and we have this accompanying, you know, just emotional reactivity, whereas calm is this subjectively positive state with a low level of mental arousal. So, it is tough to get a handle on just how calm our mind is. We we all know having an anxious mind is probably not good, but besides that, what are the benefits of calm? The big one is just how anxiety affects our performance, our day-to-day performance. And this is kind of a bias I have in looking at the research on different topics. I come to this topic from a productivity background. So I've always been a huge nerd about productivity stuff. I've read all the books, interviewed all the experts.

Starting point is 00:30:13 I've written a couple of books on this topic too. And so in my opinion, whether it's productivity, whether it's allowing us to make back time, whether it's an enjoyment or happiness, these topics like calm really do need that tangible payoff. And calm is an interesting one in this regard because of just how less productive an anxious mind makes us. And it goes back to the first question that you asked, how do we know if we're calm or we're anxious? When we're caught up in, how does the fish know they're in water? When we're caught up in this state, it just becomes a part of how we perceive the world, and it's the only thing that we know. But a simple contrast to kind of illustrate

Starting point is 00:30:57 just how much calm can affect our cognitive performance is giving a speech, for an example. So, if you had to give a speech in front of a few thousand people, and I asked you, you know, 15 minutes before you have to go up on stage, you're probably, you know, fretting in your mind over what you're going to say and how you're going to open and what if this happens, what if that happens. If I ask you to read a report or a research paper, you probably won't have a lot of focus, a lot of attention to give to that in the moment, because you're in this kind of threat finding mentality. You know, your mind is going to be just in this state where you have less attention to give to it. And anxiety has a comparable effect on our cognitive performance, but in a less severe way than having to give a speech in front of a couple thousand people and all day long. So we're always feeling the world around us. It's been shown to shrink our cognitive performance in general.

Starting point is 00:32:05 It makes us more distractible. The calmer we become as we move on this spectrum, we become less of a victim to our own negative self-talk. We become more engaged and more focused and less threat finding. We look out for fewer threats around us, so we fall victim to threatening distraction less often too. So, it's a simple idea. And it's one that we don't often think of, but calm is what allows us to build our capacity for not just work. You know, work is the thing that I've come at this from, but also the rest of our lives. We're able to enjoy things more and savor things as they come up. You use the phrase invest in a calm mind or invest in calmness. What does that mean?

Starting point is 00:32:55 How do you invest in this? There are practical, tactical things that we can do each and every day in order to calm our mind. We can, for example, we can take on a dopamine fast where, you know, the idea of a dopamine fast is a bit of a misnomer. We can't really fast from this essential neurochemical in our lives, but we can remove the most stimulating sources of distraction from our life. We can spend more time in the analog world. We can practice the skill of savoring our lives, which is the process of converting positive experiences into positive emotions. I do think that calm, after looking at the research on this topic, I do think that calm is not just something we are or we're not. Calm is really a skill that we can invest in

Starting point is 00:33:47 over time to bring this capacity, this capacity for presence, for engagement with whatever it is in front of us in the moment. It's really, you know, quite a beautiful thing when you really jump into it. So those things you mentioned a few moments ago about there are some things you can do, can you please explain those in more detail? Like how do you do them? If I said to you, okay, I'm going to do those things, how do I do them? One of the most fascinating research fields I have, I think, ever encountered is this idea of savoring. And savoring is actually a science. And so, there is a science to enjoying experiences more deeply. And researchers, Fred Bryant is perhaps the world's

Starting point is 00:34:36 foremost researcher on the subject of savoring. And he defines it as the process of converting positive experiences into positive emotions. And so, let's deconstruct that for a sec. Because just because you experience something positive does not mean that you will enjoy it or that you'll derive any satisfaction from it. So, I'm drinking a delicious jasmine green tea right here. It's my drink of choice. And if I'm kind of chatting with you, Mike, and the listeners out there, and not really focused on the tea, I'm not savoring that cup of tea, even if it's the best cup of jasmine tea in the world. But if I step back after the interview, I won't do it now because we're chatting, and just kind of take a sip and really appreciate it completely, I get far more enjoyment out of this cup of tea that's in front of me right here.

Starting point is 00:35:34 And that's all savoring is. It's bringing our full presence to a positive experience so that we can derive more satisfaction from it. And we have a different level of ability to savor our lives. Women find it easier than men to savor experiences. I'm not sure why. The research does not point to an idea for that. Wealthier people find it more difficult to savor things than people who are not considered well-off. Because this constant, you know, this acquisition mentality that acquiring more often puts us into, it's rooted around dopamine, but it also pulls us out of that present moment.

Starting point is 00:36:20 So, I think people often find themselves anxious and don't know why, that it just kind of creeps up on them. And so it panic attack on stage. It was precisely for that reason, because this anxiety was, it was in my life, but I was that fish in water, wasn't really aware that it was until it was too late, until I found myself on stage with what felt like a dozen marbles in my mouth that I was trying to talk around with these beads of sweat forming on the back of my neck and just wanting to run off the stage and not really look back. And that was kind of the wake-up call for me because I had been investing in self-care strategies up to that point. I was meditating pretty much every day. I thought meditation would be an ultimate cure for anxiety. I was going to the spa with my wife. We were getting pedicures, manicures, let me tell you,

Starting point is 00:37:37 is actually more enjoyable than I thought it would be. And just doing simple things like this for investing in myself. But I found that still with investing in all these strategies that the stress, the dopamine, this craving of more had the chance to metastasize into this anxiety episode. And it got me to step back and really untangle the different factors of many of which stem from our modern world that we find ourselves in that leads us to this idea of anxiety. But there are things, I'm sure you could rattle off a few, things that we like that are very tempting and seemingly very satisfying that are part of our modern world that really messes this up, that really makes our mind not calm, but still feel satisfying in the moment? A lot of what we tend to are super stimuli throughout the day.

Starting point is 00:38:33 So, a super stimulus is anything that our ancient mind finds very novel. So, instead of romantic time with a partner, it's some video on the internet that releases more dopamine than that intimacy. Instead of a nice home-cooked meal, it's that Uber Eats delivery that has a ton of salt, sugar, and fat inside of it that's highly processed. Instead of connecting with somebody over a cup of coffee or over breakfast is my favorite meal to eat out with people, like brunch, it's the best. And instead of a nice brunch with somebody, we trade dopamine hits with them over some app. So, dopamine and super stimuli are another factor. And also, the third one that I found really helpful to disentangle is our tendency to strive for more at all costs. So, we have this mindset of more,

Starting point is 00:39:33 which is this set of attitudes that drives us to strive for more, regardless of the context. And it's interesting that when we focus on extrinsic success, the more successful we become, the less success we feel. And also the more stress that is usually in our life, that also leads to greater anxiety. or the other end of the scale, how anxious you are. Do you think that people are pretty good judges for themselves of where they are on that scale of just how calm they are? Or is it hard to judge yourself? That's a really, really good question. I don't think we're as cognizant of our level of anxiety as we should be. You know, not only because we could feel so much better in our own mind by appreciating everyday experiences more, but also because we're leaving a lot of life on the table. The more anxious anxiety pulls us out of experiencing

Starting point is 00:40:39 something. And so, we can be having a moment with a loved one. And because of our anxious mind, you know, that pulls us out of this conversation that we're having with a cherished member of our family, we might not really be there, you know, even though our body is, our mind isn't. And so, I think, you know, one simple heuristic for, you know, understanding how anxious we are is how, what kind of capacity for presence do you have? So, in any one moment, if you're having a conversation with somebody, if you're writing a report at work, if you're playing an instrument, to if you're spending time with your kids, to if you're playing with your cat or your dog, whatever experience you're trying to get into, how much of a challenge is it for you to become immersed in that experience?

Starting point is 00:41:37 The more of the challenge it is for you, chances are there are things that are pulling you out of that moment, which anxiety tends to do. Anxiety is that kind of squirrel finding, threat finding mode of our mind where we're highly emotional react. We have this high level and this want to seek out something that is not what we're currently doing or what we ought to be doing. So, I would look to how much of a capacity for presence do you have? How emotionally reactive do you find yourself? Do you find yourself living and working a lot on autopilot mode? That's another cue for anxiety, just that we're being responsive to what comes our way. I think we need contrast in this regard. you go back to this anxious state of mind, you'll notice that and you'll want calm again. But you're so right in that we tend to become immersed in the natural state of our mind,

Starting point is 00:42:50 not realizing how good things can be and how much capacity for presence, for productivity, just for being with our life and enjoying our life, we're leaving on the table. What's another indicator that maybe you're moving too close to the anxious side of the scale and not the calm side of the scale? Yeah, so burnout is another interesting phenomenon that I think is really worth looking at. So burnout is the ultimate manifestation of chronic stress. And it's traditionally defined as a workplace phenomenon, as defined by Christina Maslach and the World Health Organization. But of course, when we have enough stress in our personal life, that contributes to this burnout phenomenon as well. And burnout

Starting point is 00:43:40 was another fascinating area that I found really interesting to explore that I encountered a lot of counterintuitive notions from. And there are three attributes that burnout is comprised of. And so, we think of burnout as exhaustion, and it is. But exhaustion is only a third of the burnout equation. We actually need three characteristics. Exhaustion is the first one. The second of which is cynicism, where we just want to, we feel as though, you know, what's the point of doing what we're doing? And the third attribute of burnout is inefficacy. And so, the less productive we feel, the more likely we are to be burnt out. And we do need all three of those attributes to be qualified as technically burnt out. So,

Starting point is 00:44:33 exhaustion, cynicism, and inefficacy. And the fascinating thing about these attributes, though, is each of them serves as a sort of tripwire that we're on our way to a full burnout phenomenon. They're kind of stepping stones that are on the way to burnout. There are six things in our work that tends to lead to this phenomenon. The first is our workload. So, how much work we have on our plate and how much control we have over it. The second is a lack of control with how we do our work, when we do our work, and just the methods through which we work on what's on our plate. The third is insufficient rewards. So this goes everything from money, so our salary, our bonuses, our stock options, to social rewards. So getting recognized for the contributions we make and intrinsic rewards.

Starting point is 00:45:28 So how rewarding we find our work. The fourth thing that leads to burnout is a lack of community. And so when we don't have deep relationships with the people that we work with, the fifth is fairness. And so how fairly we feel we're treated and rewarded at work and recognized for our contributions. And the sixth is values. And so, when we feel like we're manifesting what we most deeply value as we work, as we live our life, when we feel like we can manifest those values through our actions, that's the process through

Starting point is 00:46:05 which meaning is made. And so, if you value kindness and you volunteer for an organization, you're going to feel as if that experience is very meaningful to you because you're manifesting that value through action. And these are the six areas that burnout tends to metastasize in our work. Well, I know you talk about and you write about the connection between dopamine and novelty and how that figures into this whole idea of being calm. So talk about novelty and dopamine. The more novel something is, the more of a dopamine spike it releases in our mind. And you mentioned the modern world. One of my favorite little examples of this are our social media feeds. We used to have a chronologically arranged timeline just of people

Starting point is 00:46:59 that we followed. But now, there are updates from people who are not people that we follow, that we find uniquely interesting and uniquely novel to us. And also, things aren't sorted chronologically anymore. They're sorted with the most delicious morsels of novel content listed first in this list of updates that we keep coming back for more of because we have that dopamine rush. We have that hell yeah feeling inside of our mind that really is just an intense form of anticipation because we never feel as though we truly arrive. And the fascinating thing with dopamine is the more dopamine we get, the more dopamine we want, the more dopamine we want, and the more dopamine we get accustomed to the release of in our mind. And so, we crave more distraction. We crave more of accomplishment. We crave more novelty. And we find it difficult to focus. We find it difficult

Starting point is 00:47:59 to come down because in the moment, we don't want to., but overall we need to, right? That's what makes life worth living is presence. Well, as I said in the beginning, we all have that sense that there's something very good about calm, that being calm is better than not being calm. And it's interesting to hear the research behind why that clearly is true. I've been speaking with Chris Bailey. The name of his book is Calm Your Mind. And if you'd like to check that book out, there's a link to it at Amazon in the show notes. This was fun, Chris. Thanks.

Starting point is 00:48:33 Thank you, Mike. That was fun. A few years ago, a document was released called the National Foot Health Assessment. And it said that 78% of us are suffering a document was released called the National Foot Health Assessment. And it said that 78% of us are suffering flip-flop inflicted injuries. Now, the wounds range from the inevitable stubbed toe when you're wearing flip-flops to blisters, cuts, and punctures. Wearing flip-flops can also lead to misalignment in your stance, causing pain in your knees, hip, and back.

Starting point is 00:49:07 And there's also the occasional flip-flop tumble, twisted ankle, or broken bone. What should you wear instead of flip-flops? Well, one podiatrist says the best everyday footwear for anyone is a good athletic shoe, something that laces up along with padded acrylic blend socks. And that is something you should know. One thing I enjoy is reading the reviews that people take the time to write about this podcast. And I would love it if you would do the same. We read every single one, and we take them to heart, and it's really appreciated.

Starting point is 00:49:41 So wherever you listen, whether it's Apple Podcasts, CastBox, wherever you listen, please leave a rating and review. I'm Micah Ruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Welcome to the small town of Chinook, where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper. In this new thriller, religion and crime collide

Starting point is 00:50:01 when a gruesome murder rocks the isolated Montana community. Everyone is quick to point their fingers at a drug-addicted teenager, but local deputy Ruth Vogel isn't convinced. She suspects connections to a powerful religious group. Enter federal agent V.B. Loro, who has been investigating a local church for possible criminal activity. The pair form an unlikely partnership to catch the killer, unearthing secrets that leave Ruth torn between her duty to the law, her religious convictions,

Starting point is 00:50:30 and her very own family. But something more sinister than murder is afoot, and someone is watching Ruth. Chinook, starring Kelly Marie Tran and Sanaa Lathan. Listen to Chinook wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, this is Rob Benedict. And I am Richard Spate. We were both on a little show you might know

Starting point is 00:50:54 called Supernatural. It had a pretty good run. 15 seasons, 327 episodes. And though we have seen, of course, every episode many times, we figured, hey, now that we're wrapped, let's watch it all again. And we can't do that alone.

Starting point is 00:51:09 So we're inviting the cast and crew that made the show along for the ride. We've got writers, producers, composers, directors, and we'll of course have some actors on as well, including some certain guys that played some certain pretty iconic brothers. It was kind of a little bit of a left field choice in the best way possible. The note from Kripke was, he's great, we love him, but we're looking for like a really intelligent Duchovny type. With 15 seasons to explore, it's going to be the road trip of several lifetimes.

Starting point is 00:51:40 So please join us and subscribe to Supernatural then and now.

Something You Should Know - How Your Brain Predicts Your Reality & How To Be Calm and Why Should Be

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