Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - The Neuroscience Of: Emotional Regulation, Relationships, Body Image, And Intuition | Emma Seppälä

Episode Date: May 8, 2024

A research-backed plan for getting your sh*t together in every possible sphere.We’re going to talk about some smart strategies today with Emma Seppälä, Ph.D. She is a psychologist and research scientist, with an expertise in the science of happiness, emotional intelligence, and social connection. She is the Science Director of Stanford University’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education and she also teaches executives at the Yale School of Management. She’s been on this show before, to discuss her best-selling book The Happiness Track. And today she’s back to discuss her new book, Sovereign: Reclaim Your Freedom, Energy, and Power in a Time of Distraction, Uncertainty, and Chaos. In this episode we talk about:What she means by that term, sovereignThe neuroscience of emotion regulationThe science of intuition – and how to work with it when you’re a critical thinkerHow our past can unconsciously bind us The impact of traumaThe latest evidence for the benefits of meditationAnd how to cultivate what scientists call Positive Relational EnergyRelated Episodes:Three Lessons from a Happiness Researcher | Emma SeppäläThe Scientific Case for Self-Compassion | Chris GermerCan You Really Trust Your Gut? | Amber TamblynSign up for Dan’s weekly newsletter hereFollow Dan on social: Instagram, TikTokTen Percent Happier online bookstoreSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelOur favorite playlists on: Anxiety, Sleep, Relationships, Most Popular EpisodesFull Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/tph/podcast-episode/emma-seppala-764Additional Resources:Download the Ten Percent Happier app today: https://10percenthappier.app.link/installSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

It's the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello everybody. How are we doing? My guest today argues quite convincingly in my opinion that most of us get about as much education on regulating our emotions as a five-year-old. The general message from the culture is that the best strategy is to stifle your emotions,

suppress them. But research shows that that move just makes the emotion stronger at the level of your brain. And then many of us turn to coping mechanisms such as doom scrolling, overeating, gambling, and booze. Again, we resort to this stuff because we are so rarely taught how to metabolize our emotions and self-soothe in a healthy way.

We're going to talk about some smart strategies for doing this today with Emma Sepulah, PhD. She's a psychologist and research scientist with an expertise in the science of happiness, emotional intelligence, and social connection. She's the science director at Stanford University's Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education. And she also teaches executives at the Yale School of Management. She's been on this show before to discuss her book, The Happiness Track. And today, she's back to discuss her new book which is called Sovereign

which is really a full and research-backed plan for, and these are my words not hers, getting your shit together in every possible sphere. In this conversation we talk about what she means by that term sovereign, we talk about the neuroscience of emotion regulation, the science of intuition and how to work with it when you're a critical thinker, how our past can unconsciously bind us, the impact of trauma, the latest evidence for the benefits of meditation, and how to cultivate what scientists now call positive relational energy. Amo sepula coming up. But first time for some BSP, Blatant Self-Promotion. There are still, I believe, a few more tickets available for the Meditation Party retreat

that I'm doing with Sabine A. Selassie and Jeff Warren at the Omega Institute, which is outside of New York City. We'll be doing a weekend filled with meditation and conversation. There's even a dance party. If you can't make the event, coming up in May, we've got another one coming up in October. Meanwhile, I also want to point out that May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and as we all know, meditation is a great way to improve your mental health, which is why I co-founded the 10% Happier Meditation app. I highly recommend it. You can start with a course that teaches

you the basics and then build from there. Download the app for free wherever you find your apps. I'm Afua Hirsch. I'm Peter Frankopan. And in our podcast Legacy, we explore the lives of some of the biggest characters in history. This season, we're exploring the life of Cleopatra. An iconic life full of romances, sieges and tragedy. But who was the real Cleopatra? It feels like her story has been told by others

with their own agenda for centuries. But her legacy is enduring. And so we're going to dive into how her story has evolved all the way up to today. I am so excited to talk about Cleopatra Peeta. Love Cleopatra. She is an icon. She's the most famous woman in antiquity.

It's gotta be up there with the most famous woman of all time. But I think there's a huge gap between how familiar people are with the idea of her compared to what they actually know about her life and character. So for Pyramids, Cleopatra and Cleopatra's Nose. Follow Legacy Now wherever you get your podcasts. Or you can binge entire seasons early and ad free on Wandery Plus. Hi, I'm Anna. And I'm Emily. And we're the hosts of Terribly Famous, the show that takes you inside the

lives of our biggest celebrities. And we are really excited about our latest season, because we are talking about someone very, very special. You're so sweet. A fashion icon. Actually, just put this on. A beautiful woman. Your words, very special. You're so sweet. A fashion icon. Actually, just put this on. A beautiful woman. Your words, not mine.

Someone who came out of Croydon and took the world by storm. Anna, don't tell them where I live. A muse, a mother, and a supermodel who defined the 90s. I don't remember doing the last one. Wow, Emily, not you. Obviously, I mean Kate Moss. Oh, I always get us confused. Because you're both so small., not you. Obviously, I mean Kate Moss. Oh, I always get us confused. Because you're both so small.

How dare you. We are going to dive back into Kate's 90s heyday and her insatiable desire to say yes to absolutely everything life has to offer. The parties, the Hollywood heartthrobs, the rock star bad boys. Have I said parties? You did mention the parties.

But saying yes to excess comes at a price as Kate spirals out of control and risks losing everything she's worked for. Follow Terribly Famous wherever you listen to podcasts or listen early and ad free on Wondery Plus on Apple podcasts or the Wondery app. Emma Sepulah, welcome back to the show. Thank you so much. It's so great to be back. It's great to have you back. Okay, your new book is called Sovereign.

What do you mean by sovereign? So in the teaching that I do with executives and students and in my own life, I became keenly aware that we engage in ways of thinking, doing, behaving, that keep us bound, that keep our potential restricted, that keep our wellbeing lower. And we don't even realize it. We're in a bound state and we're not even aware of it. Sovereignty is regaining awareness of the ways

in which we stand in our own way and getting out of that way and reclaiming our ability to live in the most life-supporting way so we can show up as our best self, as our strongest self, and be resilient in these times that are challenging and make our greatest offerings that we have to make in our lives, but also be happier and healthier. So sovereignty is synonymous with freedom, and it kind of sounds like a deep form of getting your shit together. I love that. It definitely is a deep form of getting your shit together, of self-agency. And, you know, so many people regret on their deathbeds that they didn't do what they wanted to do,

that they weren't able to show up in the ways that they wanted to show up. And my goal for this book is that everyone who reads it has the ability to really live the lives that they want to live in their greatest potential, because that's also the way that they're going to be able to contribute most to this planet, but also to themselves. In the book, you have these two terms you come back to a lot.

There's the bound state and then the sovereign state. It seems like you're trying to get us from one to the other. That's right. So as an example, in teaching executives, I noticed again and again that one of the greatest things standing in their way was their relationship with their own selves. It wasn't actually environmental factors as much as how they were relating to themselves. So you may have noticed this in the audiences that you've spoken to as well, is that if you ask an audience, how many of you are self-critical, almost everyone will raise their hand if not everyone. If you look from a psychological perspective, self-criticism is actually a form of self-loathing. And it's really shocking to think that people are walking around with self-loathing.

It doesn't make any sense. And if you look at the data on self-criticism, it actually leads to anxiety, depression. You're less likely to learn and grow from your mistakes. You're less likely to want to try again. I mean, it's the opposite of resilience, basically. It doesn't make any sense. So that's what I'm calling the bound state is that so many of us are walking around with

self-loathing without realizing it, engaging in thoughts, feelings, behaviors that are destructive to ourselves. When that completely stops us from being able to access our fullest potential as well as our fullest joy and well-being. Most of us are unaware of it. It's so normal and so widespread. It's kind of like a virus and it's passed down. You'll notice probably that the generations above you had the same thing or struggling

with the same thing. And if we're not careful, our own children will struggle with the same thing. I had this one example of my personal life where after my second child was born, I had real intense postpartum. And I must have said something like, I just can't do this. I'm not good at this, something like that. And then a few weeks later, I heard my son say the same words about himself. And I realized, oh my God, the box got to stop like right here, right now. I'm not passing this suffering on. It makes no sense to have a self-destructive relationship with yourself.

And Dan, I know that you delve with this subject, and you talk about this and think about this as well, with regards to self-compassion and how having a more life-affirming, supportive relationship with yourself is really the only thing that makes sense. The irony here is I think most of us engage in self-criticism with a kernel of self-love, which is we think this is the way to be successful.

Somewhere in there, there's a twisted version of a life-affirming attitude toward ourselves. We're trying to get ourselves toward our goals. But all the data around self-compassion, the opposite of self-criticism, show that actually having a kind relationship to yourself, like a coaching relationship, that doesn't let you off the hook, but doesn't speak to you in unkind ways, that relationship is actually more likely

to get you to your goals. Absolutely, and I love how you said that, a coaching relationship, because people often mistake this idea that, oh, self-criticism leads to self-improvement, right? Shouldn't I be self-critical? No. Self-awareness is useful. Like, for example, I'm a research scientist, but my training in statistics was never where it should be. Self-awareness is knowing, okay, my stats aren't that great. I need to bring a statistician onto my research team when I conduct studies. But self-criticism would be beating yourself up for it. Oftentimes,

I'll ask people, what are the words you used towards yourself the last time you made a really embarrassing mistake? What did you say? And, you know, especially during the pandemic, when I would ask people to do this over chat on Zoom, the words that would come into the chat, one after the other, the self-destructive words, you know, I'm an idiot and worse. And it was like one after the other in the chat. And just reading that the words that people break their own hearts with are sickening to read. Wow, this is how people talk to themselves. It's kind of like having a terrorist in your own mind. And it triggers the sympathetic nervous system triggers stress and it's so self-defeating.

So that's one example of one of the aspects of sovereignty that I talk about in the book. And it's probably the core one, the fundamental one, is what is our relationship with our own selves? Is it life-supportive or is it self-defeating? So from a practical standpoint, what does a sovereign relationship to yourself look like? And what are the tools that, and we've talked about self-compassion, but what are the tools that can get us towards sovereignty?

I love this question because whenever I used to hear this term of like, self-love or self-compassion, it just felt so intellectual. And I had a hard time grasping what it meant. And so the way that I break it down is that it's a nurturing relationship with yourself, the way that you would have with a child, the way you would have with a newborn baby. How would you treat your child or your baby from moment to moment? What you're doing is you are seeing what their needs are. You're not criticizing them for who they are, hopefully, but you are checking in with what is it that they need.

And that's something that I really love the distinction that Chris Germer makes, which is, what do you say to yourself? So are you saying to yourself, am I good enough? How many times have we asked ourselves, am I good enough? Am I good enough to be a parent? Am I good enough to be in my profession? Am I good enough to be a romantic partner to so and so?

Am I a good enough child or whatever it is, right? How often have we asked ourselves that? And he flips it to asking, what's good for me? Which is a totally different question. So the next time, you know, something's going wrong instead of beating ourselves up asking, okay, what do I need right now? Okay, I just made that really embarrassing mistake.

I probably shouldn't make up for it if I need to or whatever, but what do I need? I need right now, what I would do for a friend, comfort them, give them a break, take them on a walk, give them some warm soup, whatever it is they need, right? So it's turning that relationship that you would have with your best friend or your child with yourself by asking yourself, what do I need right now?

What is good for me right now? So just to get into the habit, I think the way Chris Germer phrases the question is to get into the habit of, what do I need right now? That is the tool. It's not actually much more complicated than that. Can you get into the habit of asking yourself that question as frequently as possible? Exactly. And it goes completely counter to what we've learned, right? Which is to constantly be, okay, are you good enough? Are you fitting into the environment? Are you saying the thing

that's right? Do you look right? And then beating ourselves up when we don't? Because you would never say those words to your best friend. You would never treat your child in that manner. In the book, you talk about several areas where we can work towards sovereignty. We've just talked about the self, but you also talk about achieving sovereignty vis-a-vis emotions, your mind, relationships, intuition, and your body. So in each of these sections in the book, you basically start by describing the bound state, and then you talk about what the sovereign state might look like, and then you list a bunch of tools in order to get us there.

So in the emotions section of the book, you start by talking about your own personal relationship to food and your body. Are you comfortable talking about that here? Yeah. I just want to just start it off with this really interesting observation that I had, which was that no matter how educated someone is, how many MDs, PhDs, black belts, dishes they know how to cook, no matter how many skills they have, most people have as much formal education with what to do with their big bad negative emotions as a five-year-old, which is basically no education, no training.

We've never learned it. And every audience I speak to, no matter from where they are in the world, when I ask, what have you learned to do with your big bad negative emotions? What's the basic message that you get from society? It's suppression, right? Suck it up, buttercup, just push it down.

That's what we've learned. And what's really fascinating is that suppression doesn't work. Not only does it not work, but research shows it makes the emotion stronger at the level of the brain. Your emotion is more activated. And of course, all the things happen, which we know from our lives, which is either you explode inappropriately at some point, that leads people to wondering when you're due for your next psychiatric appointment, right? Or it comes out as passive aggression, or it comes out with stomach aches, migraines, the list goes on. Myself, when I was 18, I was in college and was having a hard time. All I knew was about suppression and what I was doing at that time was binge eating. And whenever I was feeling

down, I would binge eat. It was kind of this way to self-soothe. And I would do this. I would be in this pattern. And then one day I attended my very first meditation that I ever, ever did. It was, you know, meditation was not that popular on campus at the time. It was still like the mid nineties, but I had a crush on someone who I heard had was going to this event. And I was like, okay, I'm going to go. So I went and it turns out it was in Battelle Chapel Den where you spoke last time you came to Yale. It was this Korean Zen tradition that was very strict where you have to sort of sit, stare at the ground for an hour with no instruction and don't move. So it was actually a very intense experience. And I left

that meditation thinking, okay, that was really hard. I feel more peaceful, but I'm never ever doing that again. And the next day when I was in my dorm room, there was a leftover pizza lying there and I was feeling down as I often was those days. And I saw that pizza and I thought, oh, great, I can just binge even though it had meat on it and stuff. And I was vegetarian, I was like, I didn't care. But all of a sudden a light bulb went off in my head. It was like, Oh, you know, you always cry after you binge. Why don't you cry first this time and then you can binge all you want. So I thought, okay, why not? So I did, I went on my bed and I cried my tears out. And when I was done, I didn't need to binge anymore. It was so fascinating that this one meditation practice had opened up this

awareness of, okay, this is what you're doing with your emotions. Now, what happens if you actually just let yourself feel the emotions instead of trying to stuff them down with whatever food or whatever it is and see what happens and what happens is freedom is sovereignty. And one of the things I go into in this chapter is just this idea that we don't want to feel bad ever. No one does, especially in the US. We just want to feel happy all the time. And when we suppress our emotions, then we can use so many modalities. There's so much out there, Dan, to tempt us, right? Whether it's scrolling or working or overeating or drinking, whatever it is, there's so many things at our disposal and so many of us engage in them because we don't know how else to self soothe. We have this idea that we can self soothe. We have an

idea that there has to be an answer and we don't know what it is. So we use all these things. And at the end of the day, they make us feel worse and even more beat up by whatever our drug of choice was. This is the state of bondage. We suppress, we're in our emotions, we get into these addictive behaviors and loops. And if we're honest with ourselves, I mean, most of us have these, right? Then this idea of sovereignty, how can we be sovereign with regards to our emotions? Well, one of the ways is to feel our emotions. I know sometimes when I've written about this, I've received feedback like F off from people. And I get it. It's hard. And yet the only way out is through. And there are some tools. So there are some tools I go into as well.

I see there are seven tools. I have them in front of me if you don't and I have them in front of you so I can cue you if you'd prefer. I don't have all of them in front of me. So if you want to cue me, go ahead. Sure. Technique number one is feel the damn emotion. Yeah. Feel the damn emotion. Like I just said, it's something we don't want to do because we don't want to feel uncomfortable. Just give me the Novocaine. Give me the ibuprofen, like let me just not feel. And I get it, for physical pain, but emotional pain, numbing it with any drug of choice, or any activity of choice, could look really saintly, like oh, I volunteer 50 hours a week,

or I am an ultra marathon runner and I do one every week. It can look oh so healthy, and yet the emotion is still waiting for you, sitting on the throne of your life, until you're ready to address it, unfortunately. So it requires some courage. And yet, if you look at a kid, when they have their emotion, it's really 100%.

They are really upset. And then three minutes later, they're not upset. Not that we have to have a tantrum on the grocery store floor, because they don't have our favorite cereal. But feeling the emotion is a lot about what you talk, what you talk about, Dan, and I know work on yourself, just like whether it is in meditation or in any other activity where you allow yourself to experience the emotion, because emotion is energy in motion. It moves through your body, just like it moves through your child.

And if you allow it, then it also moves through you. Amen. Technique number two, realize you're bigger than your feelings. Yeah. When we experience difficult emotions, it feels like they're going to crucify us. They just feel so intense, especially if it's big anger, big grief, you know, big anxiety. It feels like it's bigger than us. And that's what makes it so painful. And yet, especially for anyone who's meditated even once and I know most of your listeners have meditated many more times than that

there is a part of us that can observe the feeling right the difference between a child is that a child is in the emotion they don't know they're anything other than anger and they're going to beat up their brother you know with that emotion but as an adult we can observe the emotion. And when we observe the emotion, we realize we are not the slave of the emotion. We can be with it, we can observe it, or we can like Thich Nhat Hanh, you know, recommend it, hug it, whatever it is we want to do with it. But if we give it space to be and sit at the table, we give it room to move.

So realizing that emotion is not bigger than us, not stronger than us. Technique number three is reappraisal. So I was in a lab at Stanford where we looked at suppression and reappraisal. That was our field of research. And that's where we saw that suppression leads to greater emotional activation, greater activation in the emotional centers of the brain. And reappraisal is basically looking at the situation from a different perspective. So anyone who's done cognitive behavioral therapy

or cognitive therapy has done this. And actually everyone has done this, right? You get a parking ticket and you can reappraise it by saying, okay, this sucks, but okay, I got home faster and got out of the rain faster. I got my errand accomplished and all right, I'm just gonna consider this a donation to the city, right? That's reappraising. It's looking at a situation from a different perspective. You spend three months of your life completely focused on a job application,

you're a runner up, and then you get the call that you didn't get the job. Okay, reappraising is, okay, you know what? I learned a lot in these three months. And there's a lot of research showing that helps calm down your strong emotions. At the level of the brain, you see things start to settle down more. To me, reappraisal, and please correct me if I'm wrong, but to me, this seems like an application of self-compassion. Part of self-compassion is talking to yourself the way you would talk to a good friend. And reappraisal is essentially talking yourself off the ledge. I love that. Absolutely. It's supplying self-compassion.

It's applying wisdom. Sometimes it just means taking a bigger perspective. Oh, you know, things seem difficult, but really in the grand scheme of things, they're okay. And in the grand scheme of things, you're okay. You're going to be fine. Exactly. Like you said, I love that. Self-compassion, wisdom, yeah.

Technique number four is breathe. You've come on the show to talk about breathing exercises before, so I'm eager to hear more about this one. Absolutely. So when I was in the lab at Stanford, the reappraisal lab, part of me kept having a problem with this idea of reappraisal as the only solution to emotion regulation because I kept wondering, when my emotion's really big, when anybody's emotion is really big, it's really hard to talk yourself out of that.

How would you talk yourself out of that? And it kept striking me as there's gotta be another way. Because when you feel really big anger or you feel really big fear, there's no talking your way out of anything. Or think about, you know, when you're really anxious before you have to do something like a presentation or grow up on stage and someone comes up to you and they're like, hey, you should just calm down,

right? It doesn't help. And so I kept wondering, this has got to be something else. I love to share the story of my husband's friend Jake, who was in an IED in Afghanistan. His Humvee drove over an improvised explosive device. And in that moment, it was extreme pain and his legs were extremely damaged. And in those moment, it was extreme pain, his legs were extremely damaged. And in those moments, usually would fall right into shock, fall unconscious, because you're not able to think clearly in any moments of big emotion, big physical trauma, psychological trauma, right? But in that moment, he remembered a tool he had learned in a book for this kind of situation as a breathing exercise. And because he started to breathe in that way, he was able to maintain his presence of mind and was able to do his first act of duty, which

is to give orders to call for help and to check on the other service members in his vehicle and then also gave him the presence of mind to tourniquet his own legs to prop them upward. And later he was told he saved his own life. He would not have survived that day and he lost both his legs, but he's alive. He has a family. He's living in the U.S. And he lost both his legs, but he's alive. He has a family, he's living in the US because he knew how to breathe.

What's interesting about it is that what we know that the reason that we can't reappraise when we have a big emotion is because we have loss of prefrontal regulation. So what that means is the prefrontal cortex is not able to function as well when we have a big emotion, which is why you can't talk your way out of a big emotion of fear or anger.

In those moments, it's just like when you're trying to talk a kid out of tantrum. It's just not gonna work. But our brains are working in the same way as a kid having a tantrum because we're not able to think clearly. So what do we do then? Well, what breathing does like it did for Jake is it starts to calm the nervous system down

and trigger your parasympath the nervous system down and trigger your parasympathetic nervous system, your calming response. In so doing, you regain the ability to think clearly. So despite his massive injuries, fear, trauma, shock, Jake was able to start to think clearly again and to do what he had to do. Since then, we've run a number of studies on breathing and actually it's become much more popular now and we're hearing about it more and more. It is probably in a time when things are moving fast and people are really busy and we need things that work well and work fast.

Breathing is definitely the way to go. Yeah, I was just going to say, please give us one way to do this. A very simple way to do this is to breathe out for a time and a half or twice as long as you breathe in. So if you were to breathe in, one, two, three, four, and then breathe out for one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. So you're breathing out for twice as long as you breathe in.

Now, if you're doing this with your eyes closed or even with your eyes open, if you're needing this with your eyes closed or even with your eyes open, if you're needing to calm yourself down while you're driving, for example, it's something that's going to start to trigger the parasympathetic nervous system and you're going to be able to start to think clearly, more clearly about a situation.

You can see a result in just a few minutes of doing this. This is just one example. Coming up, Emma Sepulah talks about how our past can unconsciously bind us. She talks about ways to deprogram our negative imprints. Positive relational energy, which sounds a little hippie-ish but is actually a scientific term. I'm Alice Levine.

And I'm Matt Ford. And we're the presenters of British Scandal. And in our latest series, Hitler's Angel, we tell the story of scandalous beauty Diana Mosley, British aristocrat, Mitford sister and fascist sympathiser. Like so many great British stories, it starts at a lavish garden party. Diana meets the dashing fascist Oswald Mosley. She's captivated by his politics but also by his very good looks. It's not a classic rom-com story but when she falls in love with Mosley she's on a collision course with her

family, her friends and her whole country. There is some romance though. The couple tied the knot in a ceremony organized by a great uncelebrated wedding planner, Adolf Hitler. So it's less Notting Hill, more Nuremberg. When Britain took on the Nazis, Diana had to choose between love or betrayal. This is the story of Diana Mosley on her journey from glamorous socialite to political prisoner. Listen to British Scandal on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. Have you ever felt like escaping to your own desert island?

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There are several techniques that you list here for becoming sovereign vis-a-vis your emotions. I have my eye on the clock, however, and there are a bunch of other topics I want to get to. So I'll just list them so people are aware of them and I'll recommend you go buy the book to learn more. But technique number five is self awareness and radical honesty. Technique number six is creative expression. Technique number seven is moving and grounding. So having said that, go check out the book. Let's move on to the sovereign mind. What do you mean when you talk about the sovereign mind?

We are constantly taking in messages from the world, right? So I start this chapter with a story of Star, one of the executives that came through one of our programs at Yale. And she was talking about how she had, as an African American woman, she felt like she was constantly managing safety and that she was keeping herself in a job that she had far outgrown. And she knew she had bigger dreams for herself, but she was keeping herself in this job out of fear. And after going through our program, she decided that she was going to let go of, I'm going to call it imprint, which is basically a message that we've taken in from the world, right?

She had this message that she needed to always stay safe. And she worked through that and decided to move on and actually pursue her dreams. And then she got this big job at one of the biggest companies in the world and is doing amazing. But what I mean by imprint is the messaging that we have taken in either through social conditioning or through our media or through any of the different ways that we receive information. And so these imprints, we can have positive imprints, negative imprints, neutral imprints, the negative ones are the ones that keep us feeling stuck, that keep us feeling unhappy, that keep us in a space of fear or anger.

I'll take another example, and I know you've worked so many years in the media, but if you look at newspapers, for example. So I lived in China for a couple of years after college, and we would laugh at the headlines because the headlines in the South China Morning Post, at least at that time, were always positive. Everything was just peachy all the time. And we would laugh at these headlines. And then I came back to the US and I looked at our headlines in a whole new light. Wow.

All the headlines are negative. And the terrible things that are happening are described down to the smallest detail of horror. And it's interesting when you think about it, because you're like, wow, you know, the media that we consume, and in fact, any message that we consume, is a spotlight that shines on a certain aspect that's being highlighted.

And these imprints, we could take them in through our media, we could take them in through our social conditioning, through our parenting, through our, you know, like, started through her culture, her community. And when they are harming us and keeping us small, they bind us. Does that make sense? Yes, so we get these ideas from our parents,

from our friends, from the media, and you're calling them imprints, and there can be positive ones, but the negative ones keep us bound. They keep our lives small. Absolutely. And I mean, this idea that we were talking about earlier of self criticism is one example of an imprint was like, oh, yeah, like, I'm self critical, everyone's self

critical, that's normal. And that's good. Gaining sovereignty over our imprints is first and foremost, being aware, what is keeping me small? What are the imprints that I have that are keeping me small? And this is sort of bleeding into the relationship chapter that I'm going to talk about next. But oftentimes it's our relationships that help highlight our imprints, right? If you're in a relationship to someone or multiple

people and you keep feeling like you're say, not good enough, or you keep feeling like you're being attacked or you're not safe or you are a target. For example, those are examples of imprints. Relationships will always highlight those for us because they will keep coming up again and again until you realize, oh, it's not actually the relationship. It's me and my imprint.

But awareness is the first key. And of course, meditation here is such a huge awareness builder like it did earlier when I was talking about the eating disorder. I never, by the way, binged again after that one day of that one first meditation I ever did, which is kind of crazy when you think about it, but it's really highlights what happens when you gain awareness.

Once you shine light on something, it doesn't have power over you anymore. Just like for Star, once she shone light on that fear that she was holding, that was holding her back, it didn't have any more power. And she even talks about it. She's like, you gotta stare that thing down, you know, it's like a staring contest and you're going to win. So sovereignty involves both the awareness and then through practices like meditation.

I mean, that's essential because right now we're in a lifestyle where many people will just roll over first thing, open their eyes and grab their phone, right? Taking in messaging all day, you know, walking around, head down, consuming, consuming, consuming, doesn't leave much room for growing awareness and then also having discernment. What am I taking in? What is it doing to my mind? I had a colleague at Yale who couldn't sleep and I said, well, what do you do before I sleep? He's like, well, I watched the 11pm news. Okay. Well, if you're going to watch a lot of messages that are, you know, the scary stuff that's happening, of course you're not going to sleep. And you're going to remember that first thing in the morning

when you wake up too, because whatever we look at before we go to sleep is more imprinted in our mind, we know from neuroscience research. So that's one aspect. But the other thing that I talk about is there are positive imprints that we can use to nourish our minds. For example, engaging, taking in information that's life supportive, like wisdom. I talk about wisdom because it's so not a sexy thing in our society. Why is it that we value taking in entertainment and a lot of garbage social media, which doesn't nourish us, but we don't talk about wisdom? There's wisdom from every society, every culture in the world over the millennia that humans have existed. It's like, why aren't we talking about that?

But regardless, there are wisdom keepers out there, many of them, and from every faith and tradition. And can we perhaps select something that works for us and let those imprints nourish our minds so we can live our life with greater sovereignty and perspective, which I know, Dan, is what you're also trying to help people do through your work. Yeah. Thank you. I'll take the plug. What are some other ways that we can, you use the term, deprogramming.

What are some other ways we can deprogram our imprints? You talk in the book about something called x-ray scanning. Yeah, x-ray scanning your media. So this is fascinating, right? something called x-ray scanning? Yeah, x-ray scanning your media. So this is fascinating, right? In high school, we learned to discern the message of the writer when we were reading essays. But then as adults, we no longer do that.

So I actually had this fascinating conversation with a colonel in the military whose job it was to create messaging for the enemy, right? For the Taliban at the time. And so he was creating messaging that was then getting communicated via locals to the Taliban. So he was in the business of creating imprints, creating manipulative imprints with a certain goal in mind.

I asked this person, I was like, so when you consume information, he's like, yeah, I am discerning messages all the time. I said, well, what do you do for your kids? How do you do it? He's like, well, when we're in the supermarket and my child wants the unhealthy cereal, I'll say, okay, why do you want that?

And the child will be like, oh, because it's got all these colors and it's so cute. And then the Colonel was like, okay, he tells his child, why do you think they put those colors and those cute things on there? And the child's like, because it's fun. Okay, so why do you think they put those colors and those cute things on there? And the child's like, because it's fun. Okay, so why do you think they made it fun? Because kids might like it. That's right. So why do you think they did that?

See that? I love that conversation because we can all do that. When we're taking in information, what's the end goal of the person who's created this for it? And is it a positive end goal? For example, with the work that you're putting out there. And in some cases, it may not be something we want to let come into our lives and let color our minds and the way we think and interpret the world. You know, I've been thinking about this a lot recently.

I see, even among my quite wise friends, smart and wise friends, a real despair about where the world is heading. And just to be clear, I'm not like blindly optimistic. I think we have major problems, climate change, political polarization, inequality, bigotry, there's war, plenty of things to worry about. And yet if you look at the data, they pretty clearly show that the species has never been better off than we are right now. We've never been safer. We've never been safer. We've never been healthier. We've never had higher levels of education. I often like to challenge people, think about who's trying to get you into this state of

despair and what's their agenda. And my old industry, the news media, you know, why do we scare the shit out of you on the regular? Because it keeps you coming back. And why do the algorithms at these major social media companies scare the shit out of you and put you in a state of FOMO and insufficiency because it keeps you coming back and it keeps you wanting to purchase in order to self-soothe. And so again, I'm not trying to tell people everything's hunky-dory,

but I am saying it's probably not as bad as you think it is, and the people trying to get you to think that way have their own agenda and don't be suckered. Amen. Dan, that's a sovereignty message right there. Totally on board with that. Exactly. So just inviting people to open their eyes and then make their own decisions,

but don't let others decide how you're going to feel. You mentioned meditation in terms of deprogramming Imprints and and in the book you talk about meditation you talk about breathing you talk about silence How are these sort of contemplative methods? I think I know the answer but I'm gonna hear from you Well, how are these contemplative methods helpful in getting us to unhook from these memes these imprints that others are trying to implant in our minds. Because they grow the space of awareness in you. I personally, every two or three months, I try to do a three-day silent meditation retreat.

And what I notice whenever I'm coming out of a three-day, there is so much awareness. Awareness has grown so much, as has the inner joy, for no reason. And that takes up more room than the avalanche of imprints. But the more that we grow that awareness, the more powerful it is. And the less powerful these negative imprints. And I love that you talked about your friends who you say are so wise and yet so overcome is that we don't

want to be overcome because we will show up as our best. We will show up as our most useful to the planet, to everyone around us. If we have sovereignty over our mind and are not overcome with negativity because that only wears us down and depletes us. That's where meditation and silence and contemplation, it allows your awareness, your internal awareness, your internal compass, your discernment to grow so you can show up with so much greater potential

in our calm perspective, humor. You know, I noticed that I never laugh quite as loud and as hard as after a couple of days of silence because you'll get back in touch with who you really are without being overcome by the world. So, and the more we practice, I think the more that happens. And Dan, you and I have met some really amazing contemplatives and monks and so forth. They have an incredible sense of humor and they're able to smile and uplift others despite

being keenly aware of the suffering that's going on. And that's me a sovereignty. Yes. Yes. The next category of sovereignty that you hit in your book is relationships. You want to tee that one up for us? Yeah. So there's so much to say here. And I hinted a little bit at it earlier when I was talking about relationships are great ways to see what your imprints are, right? Because we can often blame others for them doing certain things to us or whatever, but we have to be really aware of what am I bringing? What are my imprints? Am I bringing the imprint that I'm always victimized by a situation? Am I bringing the imprint that I'm not enough, et cetera? And then in that relationship,

I become aware of my imprint. Of course, I'm not making excuses for when someone's abusive or anything like that. That's obviously a different situation and doesn't apply here. But I want to share some of the science that I'm pointing out here that's kind of novel and really fascinating. So I'll start with sharing the story of my college friend, Itelle. She was a human rights activist and environmental activist, and she was in Africa in a country where she was doing some activism against a rubber company that was leading to a lot of deforestation. Now, the governor of this country were in cahoots with the rubber company. Okay. They were getting

kickbacks. So suddenly, Attelle found herself without a car in the middle of the jungle and being firmly told she needed to get into this other vehicle in order to go back to the airport. Now this other vehicle had two muscle strapped men in military apparel in. So it was pretty obvious what the intention was here to do away with her. And she had to get in that vehicle. And in the span of three hours, she turned those would be hit men into her protectors. They escorted her safely to the border. And she got confirmation that they received orders to do away with her at the end when they told her, please don't ever come back here. You are not safe. But if you do come back, come over a land border and under our protection

and stay with us. So what happened? How did she do this? It tell us something that I'll call positive relational energy. And this is something based on the research that's been conducted at the university of Michigan, raw school of business and other places, looking at organizations as a whole. So looking at organizations, these management professors saw that there were these groups of people in companies that were super productive, like massively productive, what was going on here? They were so far exceeding what other people

were doing. And what they noticed is that in the center of each of these groups was one person. And I remember my colleague, Kim Cameron, who did some of this research, say, Emma, it was embarrassing to talk about it in these terms, but the only word we could use to describe these people is that they had this positive energy or positive relational energy. What did he mean by that? Is that they were able to engage with others in this sort of life-affirming way. And in so doing, they were creating massive amounts of productivity and also well-being around them. So going back to Itell's story, she is someone who interacts with people in that way. Just being around her is extremely uplifting. And what she did was she got in the car and she started to talk to these men

and start to connect with them in a way that they started to share some of their personal story with her and sharing how in their villages there was all this pollution and their water was getting impacted and all these problems. And she was unable to share, yeah, that's why I'm here. That's why I'm trying to get this rubber company out because of what they're doing is actually impacting your lives and destroying your land. This idea of positive relational energy, we've never just like emotions, we've never received a handbook for how to be in relationships with others that are successful. And it's really fascinating when you look at the data on this, what Kim Cameron and his colleagues found was that people who

have positive relational energy are deeply grounded in their values. They're compassionate, kind, honest, have integrity, forgiving, all of the virtues that you may have learned about in preschool or in a religious setting or in a philosophical setting. This idea of what are these human values? These human values are something that positive relational energizers exude. And if you think about how do you feel around someone who has a lot of honesty or integrity? You feel safe, right? Or someone with a lot of compassion. You feel seen, you feel heard, valued, appreciated. The deepest needs that we have after food and shelter and feelings of safety are to be seen, heard, valued and appreciated, right? Being able to operate with those kind of values, but also it doesn't mean that they are doormats or don't have boundaries. They still have

really good boundaries because it's balanced with a really life supportive relationship with their own selves. So both compassion outward, but also inward. And that makes for such a powerful and resilient presence that's very life-affirming for others. And organizations creates this massive amount of productivity around people. But also, another easy way to think about it, and this is also how the scientists looked at it, is they would go into organizations and ask people, okay, how do you feel after you interact with each of the people in your network? On the one hand of the spectrum was very, very energized. And on the other hand of the spectrum is very depleted and de-energized.

And they made these maps of people who are energizing versus de-energizing. But in your own life, you can think, are there certain people that when you leave their presence, you're kind of depleted and down? And then there's other people when you leave their presence, you're feeling really uplifted. What's the difference? It's their ability to have this life-affirming relationship with others. I can't help but do this, and I suspect others listening are doing this too. They're trying to figure out like, am I a positive energy person in my relationships? And as I think about this, I'm struck by the main variable that you listed from Kim's work of positive relational energy,

which is that they're grounded in their values and they make other people feel safe. As I kind of interpolate back to my own life, because I do think a decent amount about whether I'm making people feel safe, especially people on my work team. For me, I am least effective when I am feeling unsafe. You know, if I'm anxious, if I'm worried about something, I think that I am least able to be positive in my energy distribution in my relationships. Does that make sense? Absolutely, and that's why in order to have that positive relational energy, it's so important that it's grounded in that really life-affirming relationship with yourself, which is why we started this whole conversation on the self-chapter.

If in those moments of anxiety, you have the time, a few minutes even, to check in, what do I need right now? And have that nurturing moment or even maybe delay the meeting with the team, for example, to make sure that you are checking in and taking care of your own self. Then you're able to come out and relate to others. And you say it so beautifully in your TED talk, how when you started having more self-compassion and doing loving kindness meditation, so forth, how others around you started to really notice. And it was really about building that beautiful relationship with yourself.

Yeah. And I can get knocked off center. I just feel it today, actually. Yeah. I mean, that happens to all of us. And we won't be positively energizing all the time, but we can hope to not be negatively energizing. And again, it goes back to that awareness, you know, and even being aware and saying, hey, you know what, I'm anxious today, so please don't take what I say personally.

Anybody else in the same boat? Okay, then, you know, take what I say with a grain of salt because it's only too normal for us to go through all of those emotions. Are there other tools beyond self-compassion that you would recommend if people are interested in getting better at relational sovereignty? Well, it's really interesting if you look at the research on self-compassion, is that one of the things that it does is it predicts better relationships with other people. So it's fascinating to me that when you have a better relationship

with yourself, you're going to have a better relationship with others. And oftentimes, if you are highly self-critical with yourself, you're also going to be really critical with the people you love the most and want to hurt the least. That's the painful truth of it. And the imperative of reprogramming the self-destructive relationship that we've learned from social conditioning in order to improve all of our relationships. And it is very fundamental. Coming up, among other things, Emma's going to talk about the science of intuition and how to work with intuition if you're skeptical about the whole concept.

Hello, I'm Hannah. And I'm Saruti. And we are the hosts of Red Handed, a weekly true crime podcast. Every week on Red Handed, we get stuck into the most talked about cases. From Idaho student killings, the Delphi murders, and our recent rundown of the Murdoch saga. Last year, we also started a second weekly show, Shorthand, which is just an excuse for us to talk about anything we find interesting because it's our show

and we can do what we like. We've covered the death of Princess Diana, an unholy Quran written in Saddam Hussein's blood, the gruesome history of European witch hunting, and the very uncomfortable phenomenon of genetic sexual attraction. Whatever the case, we want to know what pushes people to the extremes of human behavior.

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I'm Shimon Liayi, and I have a new podcast called The Competition. Every year, 50 high school senior girls compete in a massive scholarship competition. I wouldn't say I have an ego problem, but I'm extremely competitive. All of the competitors are used to being the best and the brightest, and they're all vying for a huge cash prize.

This will probably be the most intense thing you've ever gone through in your life. I remember that feeling, because I was one of them. I lost. But now I'm coming back as a judge, and also a kind of teen girl anthropologist. Because if you want to understand what it's like to be a young woman in America today, the competition's not a bad place to start. Hopefully no one will die on station night. From Pineapple Street Studios and Wondry, this is The Competition.

Follow The Competition on the Wondry app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to the competition early and ad free right now by joining Wondry Plus. One of the areas you talk about in the book as it pertains to sovereignty is intuition, which might be surprising to some people given your background in science. Just tell us a little bit more why you chose this topic. We are taught in schools. We are conditioned to always think rationally and intellectually and logically and to poo poo anything else. And yet, there are so many instances that we have used our gut feeling and it has served us well.

For example, my friend Kushal was in the second twin tower when his building was hit and he was given the instruction to stay inside and his gut told him go. And he left the building, I think he was one of the only ones who did, and he ran out of there and saved his own life. As parents, I think we often have gut feelings about our children. We know something that perhaps their teachers or their doctors or anything might not have picked up, but we have that gut feeling. So I wanted to really look into this. And interestingly, the military has looked into this for decades, because they found that there's over 50% chance that the gut feelings tend to be accurate. And there was a movie made making fun of this military research called Men with Steric Goats. I sort of dismissed for a while.

But then guess what? They've started a new research program because there are so many soldiers that came back from Iraq and Afghanistan with stories of, I didn't go down that road because I felt like I shouldn't and they evaded a bomb there. And there were so many accounts of that, that they're studying it again. And I talk about some of that data and about some of the ways that they train soldiers in intuition. There is research out there by one of my former grad school colleagues, Joseph Michaels, who is looking at intuition in complex decision making. and he's found that when a decision is really

complex, going with your feeling is going to lead to a better decision than trying to deliberate it. So when things are really, really complicated, go with your gut is the bottom line. And he's a neuroscientist. He's looking at this at the level of the brain. So they could think of intuition in several different ways. So on one side, it's this total awareness of your surroundings, or you could think of it as complete mindfulness, where you're just completely aware of everything that's going around you so that you can notice anything that deviates from the norm. But then you can also think of it on the flip side as Joseph Michaels is studying it as a feeling. It's a feeling and it's not logical.

And I really loved my conversation with Joe because I asked him, what do you do when you have to make a decision? And he said, you know, I think about it logically, but I always make sure to consult my feeling. And I love that, you know, rather than dismissing it the way we have been conditioned to do it. Sometimes if you say, I just had a feeling I should do this, people might say, that's crazy. Why would you do that?

That's insane. But you had that feeling. But in some cases, that's crazy, why would you do that? That's insane, but you had that feeling. But in some cases, that feeling is absolutely right, right? So what's the ideal is, yeah, be rational, but also consult your feelings. Be rational, but also consult your feelings. That makes sense, because the thing I often get hung up on is even though I'm somewhat dogmatic

in my Western scientific materialism, I definitely buy the science around intuition and how many neurons we have in our actual gut. I think there's a good reason why we have expressions like in your bones, in your gut, feeling something in your body, in your molecules. I buy it, and I'm also aware on the other hand that my intuition is informed

by some of these cultural imprints that bias me against certain people and etc. etc. And so it's the balance that seems very important. I love that you bring that up, Dan, because I bring that up also at the end of the chapter that you want to make sure you're not working out of your imprints, out of your fears. And that's why I talk about the mind before this chapter, because we have to be aware of what our imprints are to make sure that our gut feelings really are coming from a place of knowing as opposed to a place of like you said prejudice or anything else. And I think that's where meditation also really helps because

meditation by calming the imprints and growing your awareness allows you to be more in touch with your intuition. I can think of times myself where I've been deliberating on a problem and I go into the science of this as well and I go into meditation and boom all of a sudden there's the solution. I don't know if you've had that done a million times. Yeah and so where does that solution come from? So you could think of it in several ways but we know that when our brain is in alpha wave mode which is when it's in a meditative state of mind it's not so relaxed that you're about to go to sleep and it's not highly focused like when you're you you know, staring at your phone or your computer or something like that. That's when you're most likely to come up with your aha insights.

We know that from creativity research. So meditation actually puts you in that place, which you can think of as the brain being an active problem solving mode. So when we're being quote unquote, idle, or you know, sometimes people say, Oh, meditation, you're just doing nothing or whatever, your brain is an active problem solving mode, you know, and that's when you can get those insights that you're looking for. And that are so critical because there are some problems in our life that, you know, we can think our way in circles around. And yet the solution comes when we're actually relaxed. Other than meditation and mindfulness, are there other ways to hone our intuition? Yes, I would say activities in which you're not highly focused.

And again, because of our technology and our constantly focused attention on our phone or on our distraction or entertainment or whatever, we have stopped having moments in our life like we used to have when we would just sit in a bus and stare out the window, you know, or sit around and not do much of anything. And yet those are the moments when you're in that alpha wave mode. So Einstein used to go and play music, play Mozart. And he has several quotes that I actually write about in the book where he says that it comes from intuition and prioritizing intuition in terms of his creative insights. I've talked He has several quotes that I actually write about in the book where he says that it comes

from intuition and prioritizing intuition in terms of his creative insights. I've talked to Nobel Prize winners, for example, Myron Scholes, he's a Nobel Prize winner in economics. And he said his insights came to him like that on the golf course or meditating. And we live in a time when we're not busy. We think we should be doing something, at least in the US. That's very much out there as a norm. You got to busy, we think we should be doing something, at least in the US, that's very much out there as a norm. You gotta be busy, you gotta be doing something,

and yet when you're constantly living like that, you're stopping yourself from accessing your greatest creative potential. Yes, and it's also, it's twisty because if we wanna be productive, we need to not work all the time. Exactly. It's right. And I think that's also the beauty of being around children or pets or something, right? They're in the moment constantly and they're the most creative people on our planet.

Are the kids pulling the cardboard out of the recycling to make a boat out of it or something, you know? They're constantly in that mindset. And as adults, when we can spend time with them or spend time with kids or in nature, being in nature, if you go out into nature for three days completely unplugged, guess how much your creativity grows by how many percentiles?

50%. 50%. I mean, it's amazing. See, that was my intuition. Did you know that? No, that was my intuition. See? Think about all those companies.

They want innovation amongst their employees and they're making them sit and sweat in front of the computer for 10 hours a day. They'd be better off sending them out into nature without their phones. And so I think of creativity as one form of intuition as well. That's why I write about both of these together, because both intuition and creativity are accessed in that same mind space. The final area that you talk about in terms of developing sovereignty, freedom, control over our lives is the body.

Can you say a little bit about that? Yeah, so just as we have often an antagonistic relationship with ourselves, we do with our body, right? We feel like we have to whip it into shape and tame it and exercise it. And we sort of have this relationship where we're not part of the body, but it's this thing we have to control. And then oftentimes we abuse it. We don't give it the right kinds of foods.

We keep it up too late. We work it too hard. We overwork it. We overexercise it. We hate on it. We hate on its looks and so forth and so on. And when you think about it, it doesn't make any sense because it's our home. It's our only permanent home while we're alive. It's the shell in which we dwell.

Why are we conditioned to hate on it? The consequence is that we don't take responsibility for it. I mean, one example I share is of this obese barbecue chef who had so many health issues and was taking so many medications for so many things that he had going on. And he went to many different doctors and they just kept giving him more medical advice. And one of the last ones said to him, you got to stop living like a 30 year old and start living like a 40 year old and handed him seven more prescriptions. And it wasn't until his mom said, Hey, why don't you look into what you can do with diet

or something else that he started to do that. And he turned himself into a vegetarian and then vegan and became a vegan chef and completely flipped his own health around. Now, this is an extreme example, but it's so interesting that he never even had the thought, and it wasn't even encouraged for him to take responsibility for his own body. He gained sovereignty over his own health by doing that. So that's a brief example. I go into a number of other things as well.

For example, that my own children both have very strong sensitivities to chemicals in our environment, chemicals in food. They respond not just with physical rashes, but psychologically. And we went through a really intense journey with that. And then when we realized what it was, we're able to gain sovereignty over it by trying to live a cleaner lifestyle with regard to chemicals, both in food and environment. But I often think how many of their classmates are medicated and suffering from the same things without realizing the impact that we know from research that these chemicals have on our psychological well-being on children's developing brains.

One other example is that one key to mental health that we don't hear about, actually two keys to mental health that we don't hear about much is one diet. And we're not told this message, but when you look at the data, if you eat more fruits and vegetables, not only is your physical health better, which we already know, but it actually improves your mental health. So if you go from eating almost no fruits and vegetables to eating eight or more servings, you go from the same levels of happiness to someone who's unemployed to employed. I mean, it's like a huge leap.

And so these are just, you know, some little tidbits that you can, some tools like, oh, okay, I can do this. I can take responsibility or try to bolster my wellbeing, especially in these times that are chaotic and crazy and things are challenging. Oh, then here's one thing I can do. Another thing that we don't really get marketed to, because again, there's not a lot of money behind marketing. This is exposure to nature

in any way improves your wellbeing, decreases anxiety, depression, not just creativity, like I was talking about earlier. It has a huge impact. And if you live in the city and you don't have time to go out in nature, then just going to your neighborhood park has an impact. And if you don't have a neighborhood park, which sadly in some urban deserts and food deserts and also nature deserts, that's not there. Even just having plants in your home has an impact. And if you don't even have a window for that,

having screensavers or posters of nature has an impact. That's just how profoundly we're impacted. So just some tools there for sovereignty with regard to our body and our mental health, because that's so connected. Let me hone in on something you said earlier at the beginning of this discussion about sovereignty vis-a-vis the body, which is that we're hating on our own bodies a lot. We're comparing ourselves to people we might see on Instagram or whatever. Are there tools or techniques that could specifically help with that? Because

it seems foundational to me. So foundational. Well, I think the first thing is just becoming aware of that, that it makes no sense. It is our home, it's our house, it's where we live. And as you know, Tibetan Buddhists, they had this idea that it was crazy, self-hatred or anything like that. It doesn't make any sense because you're so lucky from their perspective. Heck, you could have been born a worm, right? You're so lucky to be in a human body.

And sometimes all it takes done is when we lose somebody that we love, when we see someone dying or when we see a baby being born. And we realize just how incredible it is to be alive, to have life, to have this human life and how precious our body is, which again, we often don't realize until we get sick, until we're too weak to get out of bed. And then we realize how valuable our health is and what a precious opportunity it is and privilege to be alive. Just to put a fine point on that,

you talk about making gratitude and contemplating finitude or mortality as real tools that can be useful to deprogram these noxious memes that push us towards self-hatred. That's right. It's so easy for us to focus on the negative. We know bad is stronger than good with regard to the brain. I think most people have heard about that research by now.

And yet we still focus on the negative. We still get down about what's going wrong. We forget all the things that are going right. And honestly, if we're able to listen to this podcast, we have means. We probably have had meals. And we are in a home and in a hopefully safe environment. There's a lot that's going right. And research shows three times more positive

things than negative happen to us every day. And so part of sovereignty is being able to see things from that perspective and really understand just how lucky we are, because it's a lifeboat. Like gratitude is a lifeboat. And so is finitude. Like you said, you know, we know from research that when people are close to the end of their lives, suddenly their mind frame switches, their mindset switches, and they start to focus more on the positive because they see the end in sight. And truly our end is in sight. We never know when our end will come. And so every single moment is an opportunity to celebrate, to be grateful, and to really take it all in. The question that comes up in my mind after having listened to you walk us through these various aspects of sovereignty is what has the

impact on all of this been on you? You know, I wrote my first book on the science of happiness and practicing all those tools. And yet I found myself in a state of physical health and mental health challenges that were really intense. And I had to go through a couple of years of that and suddenly realizing, wow, like you can do all the practices. But if you're still engaging in thought patterns, behaviors, where you're in a bound state as opposed to sovereign state,

it doesn't matter how much you do. I mean, it keeps you afloat, certainly. And so I had to really question for myself. Like I know that I went through intense awareness of the self-loathing patterns and how destructive they were for me on a personal level. And having to reprogram that and build my awareness around how I was managing my emotions,

build my awareness around the mental imprints I was taking in and questioning those. I'm still questioning those. I'm still on that sovereignty journey. And that's why I could write out this invitation. I feel like the book to me is both a love letter, because it's a love letter coming from a place of like, I know how much this hurt. You know, I teach hundreds and hundreds of people,

highly qualified people, and I see them all going through the same kinds of conditioning. I'm saying, this has got to stop. And so this book is a love letter from that place of like building awareness around where we're bound and how we can claim our sovereignty. So I'm in a much, much better place than I was. And I wanted to share the science also of all this. And I'm also on my own sovereignty journey. I continue to learn and grow on this path. Matthew 28 So you can write a whole book about happiness and a the work is never really done. There's no

final arrival unless perhaps you believe in enlightenment and b you may have missed a few tools in that first book that achieved greater salience the more you lived. Definitely and I think during the pandemic too there was just this sense and since the pandemic it's been such a hard time for everyone. The environment is already hard enough. What's happening is hard enough. Let's not also stand in our own way. And let's gain some awareness of where we are standing in our own way and at least get that challenge out of the way so we can show up with greater strength. You know, I always think, how do we want to show up to the battlefield of our life? You know, limping because we kind of kicked our way there or in brand spanking

new armor, cause we loved our way there. I think about this a lot as somebody who's also written a book about happiness and also continues to be a fuck up. Well, I don't want to say also, I'm not saying you're a fuck up, but I certainly am and I've made plenty of mistakes and still struggle with lots of things. And I can see how that might be disheartening to hear if I'm listening to this conversation. I actually think it should be heartening that this is just a work in progress.

There's always new stuff to learn. You can always get better. And that's just the way it is. Absolutely. And I think in a way, you can't really pass on a message unless you've gone through it yourself. It's really when you've gone through something yourself that you can most authentically share and share tools that work and are not just sort of something that you heard works. So we're all in this together. You know, I love that quote by Ram Dass, we're all just walking each other home.

Emma, was there something you were hoping to get to in this conversation that we didn't get to? You know, I was just thinking back on the relationships question when you asked me, oh, was there something else? And I didn't talk about that. And I feel like I should. One very obvious example of an imprint is trauma. So if you have trauma from something, then it's an imprint that lingers in your mind.

So if you have some extreme trauma, like you have post-traumatic stress, then you can be right here right now in a safe environment and still feeling a lot of fear because you have flashbacks or memories of things that happened to you in the past. You could be in a new relationship and yet you're terrorized because of what happened to you in a relationship in the past.

When you wanna gain sovereignty over your imprints, then being able to address that trauma will be a part of the journey. And that's the case for most of us. Most of us have some level of trauma. We have conducted research with veterans as you know, Dan, and we used breathing practices for them with regards to helping them release those imprints. And what they would tell us afterward is, oh, I'm able to move on with my life now. Like I still remember what happened, but it's no longer stopping me from sleeping,

stopping me from going out of the house, stopping me from doing what I want to do. So are we able to release those imprints? Meditation is one way. And when there's a lot of trauma or a lot of anxiety, then breathing practices, and we researched a breathing practice trauma, a lot of anxiety, then breathing practices, and we researched a breathing practice called sky breath meditation in particular, can be very

useful, especially when that trauma is at the level of the body, as we know is often the case when it's, you know, really intense trauma. So I just wanted to point that out. I'm glad you did. And I'm glad you came on the show today. Before I let you go, finally, can you just remind everybody of the name of the book and your website where we can go to learn more about you, perhaps your past book as well? Definitely. Thank you, Dan, so much for having me. The book is called Sovereign. Reclaim your

freedom, energy, and power in a time of distraction, uncertainty, and chaos. And the website for that is I am solve I am so v.com. And my first book was called the happiness track. Thank you again for coming on. Dan, thank you so much for the really generous and kind conversation. I really appreciated it. Pleasure. Thanks again to Emma. We will drop some links in the show notes if you want to hear her previous appearances on this show.

And also we'll drop a link to a whole episode we did with Amber Tamblyn on the subject of intuition. Before I go, I also want to thank everybody who worked so hard on this show. Our producers are Lauren Smith and Tara Anderson, and we get additional production support from Colin Lester Fleming, Isabelle Hibbard, Carolyn Keenan, and Wanbo Wu. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer, Kevin O'Connell is our director of audio and post-production, DJ Cashmere is our managing producer, and Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.

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