The One You Feed - Elisha Goldstein, Ph.D. on Mindfulness and Depression

Episode Date: April 10, 2019

Elisha Goldstein, Ph.D. is the co-founder of the Center for Mindful Living in West Los Angeles and is the creator of the 6-month Coaching and Mentorship Program: A Course in Mindful Living. He's a psychologist and international speaker and mindfulness educator. He's written many books and in this episode, he and Eric discuss his book, Uncovering Happiness: Overcoming Depression with Mindfulness and Self Compassion. There are so many practical approaches and new perspectives in this episode. We think you'll get a lot of useful information out of the conversation.Spiritual Habits connect you back to your deepest, truest self. Learn how to put personalized Spiritual Habits to work in your life in a special, one-time program with Eric and a small group of listeners. Learn more here: thespiritualhabit.comNeed help with completing your goals in 2019? The One You Feed Transformation Program can help you accomplish your goals this year.But wait – there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you!In This Interview, Elisha Goldstein and I Discuss…His book, Uncovering Happiness: Overcoming Depression with Mindfulness and Self CompassionThat what you practice and repeat is what you getDepression Triggers and Depression CuresThoughts, Emotions, Sensations, and BehaviorsThe triangle of awarenessProcedural memoryThe habit loop being like a traffic circle with 4 entry pointsThe way our brain associates thingsThe way our nervous system is overwhelmed when we’re experiencing depressionAvoidance and depressionHow naming something gives us a little space and perspectiveHow naming something actually changes the activity in our brainPerspective-making toolsThe way journaling objectifies your experiencesNatural anti-depressantsMindfulness: a state of engaged curiosityRelating to your experience differently through mindfulness, self-compassion, play, compassion, purpose, and masteryThe growth mindset and the fixed mindsetPracticing being curious in your daily life to cultivate a growth mindsetHow a learning mindset is related to a growth mindsetThe importance of playHow to discover what kind of play you might enjoy as an adultElisha Goldstein, Ph.D. Links:Mindful Living CollectiveFacebookTwitterYouTube ChannelSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A sense of purpose can also just be this action that I'm taking that is engaging something that's greater than myself. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how

other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, And does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to really know really.com and register to win $500 a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition sign.

Jason bobblehead. The really know really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Elisha Goldstein, co-founder of the Center for Mindful Living in West Los Angeles and creator of the six-month coaching and mentorship program, A Course in Mindful Living. Elisha is a psychologist, an international speaker, and mindfulness educator. His books include Uncovering Happiness and The Now Effect. His books include Uncovering Happiness and The Now Effect.

He's also co-author of a mindfulness-based stress reduction workbook and MBSR Every Day. Hi, Elisha. Welcome to the show. Oh, it's really great to be here. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to have you on. We're going to talk about your book, Uncovering Happiness, Overcoming Depression with Mindfulness and Self-Compcompassion, as well as some of the other projects that you're involved in shortly. But let's start like we always do with the parable.

There is a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second. And he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Well, to me, basically that parable says what you practice and repeat is what you get.

So in other words, if you practice listening to self-critical thoughts, negativity, or paying attention to those things over and over and over again, that's what you'll see. If you practice being aware of what's good, a sense of gratitude in life, some of the more positive psychology elements of life, you'll see more of that. And that's just a matter of memory. So in other words, when you are remembering something or having experiences of something, your brain stores that in short-term memory. And that's what's used to reference how you're going to perceive the next moment. So if you're feeding one wolf versus the other, you're creating more memories to be referenced to influence your perception of the moments to follow. That's really good. I really like the way you put that.

In the book, there was something I wanted to talk about because you really brought out an idea that I've been thinking a lot about lately. And you refer to them as either depression triggers or depression cures. And we'll get into that in a second. But I've really been thinking about this idea of how there are these, you break them into four things that seem to show up very often for us as one thing, one undifferentiated thing. And, and you're, you're breaking it into four categories. And those categories are thoughts, are thoughts, emotions, sensations, and behaviors. And I thought maybe we could start by talking about how those interact with each other, and also that idea of how if we're not being mindful, or if we're not aware, it's often those four things, at least for me, just show up as like one big glob. Yeah, and you know, this fits it back into the parable.

So in any given moment, we're experiencing what's called in the field of mindfulness, this triangle of awareness, thoughts, emotions, and sensations. You could check it out right now, even as you're listening to this. You know, what you're experiencing right now is there's likely some thoughts, something interpreting what I'm saying or having a judgment about it. There's sensations in your body. Your body's having physical sensations. That's what that comes from your nerves. And there's also an emotional state you're having right now. It could be a comfortable, uncomfortable, or neutral one. What follows is some kind of action, and that's the behavior. So what the

brain does is it makes, we're wired to make things routine. So you practice and repeat something, just like we were talking about with the wolf parable. And that creates a thought, emotion, sensation, and then you follow with a behavior. And what that does is it makes it, what we do is we make that automatic. You practice and repeat something, it starts to become automatic. And that's called procedural memory. Our brain is memorizing procedures so it can handle more complex things. And so when something happens in your environment, you see something, it can handle more complex things. And so when something happens

in your environment, you see something, it brings it top of mind. So for example, if you, and this has been studied, if you're someone who likes McDonald's, it's not that you'll always be walking around thinking McDonald's all day long, but when you see a sign of the golden arches, you automatically will have a thought, maybe, hmm, that looks, maybe I'm hungry, a sensation, a rumbling in your belly, and an emotion such as excitement. And the behavior is, I want to go get it. Now, if you look at the neuroscience of that, what you'll see is dopamine, which is the chemical in our brain that's like, go get it, go get it, go get it. You'll see a surge of that happening just by the sight of the golden arches. So there's this conditioned reaction that happens over time as we practice and repeat something of thoughts, emotions, sensations, and behaviors, and it happens automatically. So we don't have to

think about it anymore. And that affects everything we do in life from our positive habits to our more unhealthy habits. And unless we can begin to name it, so what I call that in the book is the depression loop. But you can think of it as a stress loop, an anxiety loop, a habit loop. And the conditioned reaction of that, the unknown patterning of it that we all have in different areas of our lives, affects how we live our lives on a day-to-day basis. And this philosopher, and he was also a rabbi and a peace activist that marched with Martin Luther King, this guy Abraham Joshua Heschel said, life is routine, and routine is resistance to wonder. So as our brain is created to make things routine, we lose out and we miss out on all the wonders around us. And those wonders are feeding the, let's say, that one wolf.

If we could pay attention to more of those wonders and create more memories of those wonders, what impact might that have on our perceptions moment to moment and on our happiness, our level of happiness moment to moment? And our level of happiness, by the way, is completely correlated with our level of resiliency. Yeah, I love that Heschel quote. I think it is such a good one. Let's explore this a little bit more. So you're just referring to these as habit loops in general. And like you said, there could be a depressive habit loop, an anxiety habit loop. And you make the analogy with a habit loop that it's a lot like entering a traffic circle and that these loops have four entrance points that we just talked about. You can get into this

loop from a thought, from a feeling, from a sensation, or from a behavior. That's right. So it's a conditioned loop. I live in California, so we don't have as many traffic circles. So for some people who are more versed in them, like going up to traffic circles is no big deal. But for me, going up to a traffic circle, I'm like wondering like where do I enter exactly and where do I exit? And we're all cars around me.

So anxiety starts to build just kind of knowing this traffic circle is in front of me. So what happens is once you have that conditioned reaction of the thoughts, emotions, sensations, and behaviors around whatever you are. So let's use this as an example. Let's use depression as an example or anxiety. They go together oftentimes. But you have the thought of, yeah, I don't want to get out of bed today. You have this sensation of heaviness in your body. The emotion is maybe fear, and the behavior is staying in bed. Once that happens, once the feeling of depression or anxiety is so averse, it's such an uncomfortable feeling in a lot of ways, that the very idea that it might come on again is something our brain wants to stay away from. Let's say a panic attack as another example. So all we need is one of those things, a thought, emotion, sensation,

or behavior that's associated with that, let's say panic, to come up, such as a rapid heart rate. And so our body gets a rapid heart rate and our brain says, oh no, this is associated, so our body gets a rapid heart rate and our brain says, oh no, this is associated, our brain is a bunch of associations, this is associated with panic. So I might have a panic attack, which makes us catastrophize and worry, which gets our nervous system pumped up, and all of a sudden it creates the self-fulfilling prophecy of a panic attack. So all we need is one of these, a thought, emotion, sensation, and behavior to alert our brain that this thing might be coming, and inevitably it creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. Yeah, I really relate a lot with that, how

any one of those things can set it off. In thinking about this with myself and looking back at my own struggles with depression, I think that heaviness or tired feeling doesn't do it now so much, but it used to be just the beginning of that would make me think, oh no, here it comes. Exactly. And we, we wonder sometimes like, why do people wake up in the middle of the night with panic attacks? And people always wonder that, like, why do I wake up in the middle of the night with a panic attack? I wasn't even doing anything. Um, and it's just because you might've been having a dream where it was raising your heart rate.

Raised heart rate was associated with panic. And so your mind started really worrying about that. And that upped your nervous system. And all of a sudden, it made you more nervous and you had a panic attack. Same thing with depression, as you were mentioning. Yeah, that heaviness. That worry from the heaviness is layering stress onto your current circumstance and depression is the epitome of a completely overwhelmed nervous system. And the typical, or not always, but typical behavior

that comes with depression is avoidance. And we're avoiding naturally because the world seems overwhelming in that moment. And so we move towards avoidance. Unfortunately, that avoidance only goes on to give fuel to the depression. I do some coaching work with people where avoidance has been coming up lately. And I've just been thinking about how damaging avoidance really is. I mean, it's psychologically damaging because we reinforce the fear of the thing we're avoiding. And then it's just damaging in our lives because we're not doing the things that matter to us.

So we start to feel worse. And it's talk about that idea of a spiral, right? It's a downward spiral. Avoidance can really feed a downward spiral. Yeah. I mean, I love this book, The War of Art, by Steven Pressfield. Not The Art of War, but The War of Art, where the whole book is about resistance. And what's magical to me about that is he really talks, he kind of threw his idea of resistance to writing in particular, was his situation. He wrote the book, The Legends of Bagger Vance, and eventually became a movie. And it was this idea of naming the resistance allowed me to get space from it so that I can then choose how I want to respond in that situation. So in other words, when we're

in the avoidance, we're wearing the contact lenses of avoidance. That's what we see. But the moment we're able to name it, ah, this is avoidance, I've gotten a little bit of space from it. And space gives us perspective and allows us to open up to the potential choices that are around us. So with the loop that we were, just to bring this back to the loop that we were talking about, the conditioned reaction, what's been so powerful for so many people about understanding how that loop works of thoughts, emotions, sensations, and behaviors, and being

able to map out whatever routine or pattern they're trying to break, to be able to map out the various thoughts, emotions, sensations, and behaviors associated with that pattern, whether that's eating in an unhealthy way or depression or anxiety or whatever it might be, allows them to be able to name it in that moment. What happens when you name something is you bring blood flow to your prefrontal cortex, which is involved with emotion regulation and perspective. And you're not so flooded within the amygdala, which is the emotional center of the brain, which is just reacting from your emotions, you know, in that moment. So you get a little more perspective. And that was a study that came out in, I think, 2007 now by Matthew Lieberman at the University, at UCLA, where he put people in front of some images of a man and a woman. And the woman had this like really fearful

face and the man had this really angry face. And underneath their pictures, it said Dick and Jane. They were hooked up to brain scanning machines at the time. And what you saw was you saw a lot of activity in the amygdala, the emotional center of the brain. And then you saw the same two pictures. And this time it didn't have anything underneath, any names underneath. And the researchers asked them, what are they feeling? And people said, oh, she's feeling fear and he's feeling anger.

And you saw more activity going on in the prefrontal cortex. And so that showed us that when you name something, and so this is what neuroscience does, it's really interesting. What neuroscience does, it's really interesting. All it does is tell us things we already know to some extent, which is when you name something, you step outside of it and you get perspective. When you get space from anything, you get perspective. When we're on a plane thousands of feet above the air, we have perspective of the land. When you get away from a painting, you get perspective of the painting. When you're able to create space from your loop that you're in, your depression loop, your anxious loop, your habit loop, when you're able to get space from it and name it, you're actually changing the activity in your brain. You're shifting the activity in your brain to give you more perspective and the wherewithal to regulate your emotions and be able to choose a healthier response. What are some ways to gather that perspective? What are some perspective-making tools? So I would say that if we take that loop as an example, and again, just people who kind

of read about that loop, just have this huge aha, and to be able to kind of ask yourself the question, okay, what am I trying to change in my life? What kind of pattern? What pattern do I see as unhealthy, let's say? And let me ask myself, what thoughts are correlated with that? What emotions do I feel with that? What sensations go on in my body? And maybe that's a little harder for some people because we're, depending on what your age is, for most of us, we didn't grow up with much emotional, like with any training in emotional intelligence. Nowadays in elementary schools, it's starting to shift a little bit in certain areas of the country. But we didn't grow up knowing our bodies, especially what we were really trained in is just

staying in our heads and prizing thinking over this barometer that we have called a body. That's really telling us how we're feeling moment to moment and giving us insight. So, um, so it takes a little bit to kind of map out noticing sensations. So for some people who really have a hard time feeling their bodies, which are actually quite a number of people,

I often recommend doing a body scan meditation practice. And you can find one on my website for absolutely free under the video section of elishagoldstein.com if you just need something to practice with. Because it's really kind of training your mind to be aware of sensations. And emotions are sensations, so you can be able to name emotions better and get more perspective. So you map out thoughts, emotions, sensations, and what are the behaviors that typically follow? What journaling that does typically is it objectifies your experience. So let's say as an example, one of the, let's use depression as example since we're on that topic. Let's say I'm able to map out my depression loop and then I can ask myself the question, okay, so when I notice this happening, tiredness in my body, and my mind says, oh my god, am I falling, am I getting depressed right now, is this happening?

It's almost like you're allowing your mind to plan for it. And you're seeing what your cues are. And you're able to kind of name it to get space. Then in that space, you're kind of also asking yourself, what is it that I really need right now? So I'm kind of caught in this loop. I'm not feeling well. It happens so automatically. It's not that you can kind of catch, oh, there goes a thought. And there goes an emotion.

And I almost got it. There's a sensation. It just kind of all happens at once because it's so fast. And so you can just say like, I'm in that loop right now. I'm caught in that. By naming it, you can also ask yourself, what do I need right now? Okay, so it's like I got a little bit of a cold right now, sort of an emotional cold. It's not quite a full-blown flu yet, but I'm kind of here. What am I needing? I'm really needing to rest. flu yet, but I'm kind of here. What am I needing? I'm really needing to rest. I'm needing to write in my journal. I'm going to go outside and let sunshine splash my face. I really need to call a friend right now. There's all these kind of little remedies, natural antidepressant remedies

that you kind of build in so that you can begin to engage those things once you've noticed the loop before it's gone too far. And that's how you begin to learn to get better and better at shifting sooner and become more resilient around things like anxiety, depression, unhealthy eating, getting caught into unhealthy habits, by mapping out that loop first and coming up with the remedies that are gonna support you

and what you're needing to pay attention to once you're able to step into that space between stimulus and response where your perspective and choice lies. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like... Why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal?

The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you. And the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's gonna drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend.

Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com.

And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So you just led us into another area I wanted to cover and you brought up the term natural antidepressants. So many of us think of the antidepressants that are the medicine you take. And, you know, listeners will know that I've certainly shared how those have been very helpful to me. And I know that you are a believer where necessary that those are helpful. But let's talk about natural antidepressants. What are some of the things that you've found are natural antidepressants that can help us with this? You know, what led me to, let's say, even writing this book was looking at some of the neuroscience

around depression, because I was curious about like, what happens in the brain when we're experiencing chronic depression over time, or just depression in general. Because if we can see what's happening in the brain, maybe we can learn about what actions we can take that shift activity in the brain or alter activity in the brain that seems to do a 180 and kind of move it towards what a brain looks like when it's in a more balanced, healthier state. What we found was that in a brain that's been depressed over time or has had chronic depression over time, there's an area behind our foreheads that's called the prefrontal cortex, which I

mentioned earlier, that's involved again with emotion regulation and having a sense of perspective and a lot more. But there's a left and a right side to it. And the left side of the prefrontal cortex, which lies, again, right behind your forehead, is involved with positive emotions and approaching things in life. You see that area light up when you're experiencing positive emotions and when you're experiencing a sense of approaching things in life. And so the right side is more associated with what I'll call negative emotions. They don't, doesn't mean they're negative. Sometimes they're uncomfortable. It's really hard. The English language isn't the best at describing, you know, emotions always. And so I just use those. So we have a general

agreement on what we're talking about here, but with uncomfortable feelings, pretty much. You'll see a right side activation of the prefrontal area, and then also with avoiding things in life. So that's one thing we found out about the experience of depression. So another area of the brain that I mentioned earlier, which was the amygdala, which a lot of people consider to be sort of the emotional center of the brain, you see a really active amygdala, or you see actually an enlarged amygdala. And so that just means that, wow, that part of the brain gets a lot of activity or has a lot of strength. And then an area that's right kind of beneath that is this hippocampus, which is involved with learning memory and putting

things in context, which you see a lot of attrition in that part of the brain, which means that you see the dendrites sort of retracting. And what's important about that is that when you look at the brain of people who have experienced post-traumatic stress disorder, which is just like an extremely high level of stress over time, you see the exact same conditions. And so what's interesting about that to me is that said, okay, well, that is why the experience of depression is a trauma. The brain perceives depression as a trauma. So then I thought, is there anything we can do to create right, left prefrontal activation? Can there, are there things we can do to kind of calm the amygdala to train that? And are there things we can do to impact the hippocampus in a positive way.

And so this is where I came up with the idea of natural antidepressants, because what we found in the literature and in our experience is that the experience of mindfulness, as an example, let's say, mindfulness just meaning kind of awareness or intentionally attending to something with a sense of engaged curiosity. Really kind of the opposite of what we experience in depression, which is kind of disengaged apathy. So an engaged curiosity. So you're practicing this. Remember, what we practice and repeat is what we get. It goes back to that wolf parable that we started.

And so what we found with mindfulness is that mindfulness actually does a lot of this stuff, which is you see left prefrontal activation, sorry, with mindfulness, with practice of mindfulness. You see a reduction of activity in the amygdala. And that we found with mindfulness also is that you can sort of repair or regrow neural connections in the hippocampus. And again, that's not to say it's a panacea. It's certainly for somebody who is in the throes of depression, mindfulness is actually typically the wrong approach. But this is when there's already some level of ability. And that's where you were talking about how maybe Western medication can be helpful sometimes in allowing someone to even do these types of practices. But then we found other and also in compassion practices, which is the

connecting to your heart and wishing yourself well or wishing other people well or, you know, recognizing the difficulty or struggle of somebody else with the inclination to want to support them or recognizing your own suffering with the inclination to want to support yourself, otherwise known as self-compassion. With compassion practices, we also see that left prefrontal activation. I can list a whole lot of other neurobiology around this, but I think that we won't go necessarily too deep. We can go as we go. But I found that to be really fascinating. So I wondered if we can begin to integrate mindfulness and self-compassion practices as a beginning, can that have a natural antidepressant effect? And so I was teaching at the time this eight-week program

called Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy. Very popular program all over the world now, created by Zendel Siegel and Mark Williamson and John Teasdale. And that was a program that was created to help relapse prevention and depression. What I found was in teaching that program, which was around using mindfulness to help people relate to their experience differently. And in other words, what they end up doing is it's just like pain. Depression is like pain. We turn the volume down of our self-critical thinking. Is that what to me was missing was the direct teaching around self-compassion. Because when you look at the research studies of depression, the rate of self-compassion is inversely correlated with the experience of depression,

meaning the more depressed somebody is, the less self-compassion they have. So I began to kind of integrate that myself, direct self-compassion in these classes and also the direct experience of play. So play is engaged, flexible. It's spontaneous. It's nonjudgmental. It's spontaneous. It's nonjudgmental. When you look at two kids playing or you're playing around anything yourself as an adult, you experience these traits, which are, again, exactly the opposite thing of depression. create really healthy, some healthy neuroplasticity, positive neuroplasticity in the brain and improve cognitive processing, meaning even enlarge our cortex, which is involved with cognitive processing. But that was done with mice, but mice actually have brains

that are similar to ours, as it turns out. So mindfulness, self-compassion, play, and compassion, I decided to kind of work with people more directly on to see are these natural antidepressants. And my experience showed in my own life and in other people's life that they are, and the neuroscience seems to correlate with it. That's wonderful. So that's three out of five natural antidepressants you list. So you mentioned mindfulness, self-compassion, and play. There's two others that are in your list, and maybe we could just hit those two real quick before we maybe go deeper on any individual one. And those were purpose and mastery. Right.

So purpose is another way of saying purpose to me is really around compassion. Purpose is the recognition of me engaging life in concert with something greater than myself, which typically with the act of compassion, we have that type of experience because we're going outside of ourselves or recognizing something outside of ourselves that's struggling with the inclination to want to support them, to support that person or that group or something like that. So the action of compassion helps create a sense of purpose. But a sense of purpose can also just be this action that I'm taking that is engaging something

that's greater than myself. And that gives us a sense of maybe our common humanity, the collective of humanity. And I often talk about how understanding maybe what our gifts are, our talents, or what resources we come into this world with can be something that we can begin to utilize. Let's say, whether I have money, or whether I'm naturally gifted empath, or whether I am somebody who knows a lot of people, something like that. You know, these are all just different gifts or talents that we have, resources that we can begin to utilize to do something that makes this world a better place, that gives us a sense of purpose. Or maybe if it's connected with a higher power or being in line with the values of my religion or something like that or spiritual tradition, that could give a sense of purpose. or spiritual tradition. That could give a sense of purpose. So mastery is, the other one is also a natural antidepressant as when we're feeling depression, we tend to have a mindset that's more telling us what we can and can't do. And Carol Dweck talks about this quite a bit. It says we

have kind of two mindsets here. We have a growth mindset and we have a fixed mindset. And only one of them leads to mastery. And so the fixed mindset says, whatever I do, if I fall short, that's just reinforcement of what I can't do and what's not possible for me. The growth mindset says that I can practice and repeat things over time and just learn to get better and better at them. So if I fail at something, I can learn from it and I can build upon it. And what we found is with people who have depression over time, we tend to have more fixed mindsets. And so if we can begin to build in this what I call maybe a learning mindset,

which is that life is about learning, there's definitely always going to be obstacles along the path. And when I run into an obstacle, I can make sure I pick something up when I fall down. You know, it's something that's been talked about over time. It's almost like, it's almost not new, but looking at it as a natural antidepressant, this idea of a growth mindset, you know, helps us understand the kind of way we want to be thinking that goes against the stream and flow of the way our brain works when we're feeling depressed. I'm Jason Alexander.

And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you

and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir.

Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, no, really. Yeah, really. No, really. Go to reallynoreally.com.

And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really, No, Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The fixture growth mindset is such an important piece we've had Carol on the show. It's something I find myself coming back to over and over again. In the book, you list some ways that we might be able to get ourselves into more of a growth mindset. Can you give us some strategies? Because sometimes it's easy to understand like, yes, I should have more of a growth mindset, but boy, I just don't feel that way right now. So what are some ways to get ourselves perhaps closer to the growth mindset than the fixed mindset? One of the key attitudes we want to begin practicing

and adopting is curiosity. It's at the epicenter of mindfulness. Mindfulness, again, the definition that I use anyways, is you're engaged with something in the moment with a sense of curiosity. That's kind of what it is. And with a growth mindset is, you know, one of the ways to kind of get into that is just to be practicing, practice being curious in your life. Again, it's the same. If we go back to the parable at the beginning of our time together, which wolf am I going to feed? The one that is curious, I want to feed that one. Because if I can learn to get better and better at being curious, then even at the moments I fall, it's not – what implicitly arises doesn't have to be that, see, I knew I couldn't do it.

I never could do this. No one can help me and I can't help myself. And nothing's ever going to change. It can be like, oh, look what I did and look what didn't work. Let me look at this obstacle and be curious about it and see what I might do differently next time. I might spend a little bit more time on it. So to me, one of the core ways, if I'm to look at from a list, really one of the core

ways to really grow a growth mindset is to practice being curious in your life. And, again, I'll say that, you know, the way our brain works is with practice and repetition, it creates automaticity, which makes it implicit, automatic. The same reason we can type on a keyboard. If I said to you, type, I am home, and you typed, I am home, and I said, how difficult was that? And you'd say, that was pretty easy to do. And I said, well, now recite to me the middle row of the keyboard. And you'd say, I don't really know it. Most people, there's always like some people who know it, but we don't know.

But it's interesting that our hands know exactly where to go. It's embodied. It's a habit. It's interesting that our hands know exactly where to go. It's embodied. It's a habit. But our brain doesn't – I wouldn't say our brain, but to be able to recall that factual memory, that explicit memory, is harder to do. So we want to make that more automatic for us so that when we fall, when we come across the obstacle that's there, we have

more of an automatic learning-based mindset, otherwise known as a growth mindset, to naturally fall into that. Yeah, I love how you're correlating a learning mindset with a growth mindset. I think that's such a great connection. And that idea of curiosity of really the question I work so often with people on is ask yourself, what could you have done differently, but in a completely non judgmental and totally curious way, like, really, truly, what could you have done differently, like Like to really engage that question is so powerful if it's done in a curious, nonjudgmental way that there's so much that can come from that. Another way of getting us into that mode is by imagining we're a scientist, or if we're a group,

we're a team of scientists coming together to study our experience. And the scientist is more interested in the kind of objective facts, like what happened here, what happened there, we're kind of mapping it out. And so, let's say when we go astray in some way, we might be curious about, as a scientist, like how did we get astray, what was the steps to getting astray, or falling down, or whatever we might want to say? What was the obstacle? And then what might we have implemented? What are some ideas of what we might have implemented to kind of go in a different direction? And so it's like we're not looking for a specific outcome necessarily. We're just curious about what might lead to this or that.

So I think that automatically arouses that learning-based mindset. That is a great idea. So we're nearing the end of our time here. You and I are going to have a post-show conversation where we're going to talk about a few more strategies that we can use to deal with depression. Listeners, you can get access to that by going to whenyoufeed.net support. But before we start that post-show conversation, I wanted to ask you to maybe say a little bit more about play. This is one that I have found myself really only in the last year, sort of, it sounds funny to say, getting serious about play, which I have to watch for turning playing into something else that I

have to do. But I've really recognized how like, I need to do something just because it's fun. So talk to me about the importance of play and some things that you found are good for adults. If you look at the body language of somebody who's experiencing anxiety or depression, you look at the body language in an animal or a human being who's playing, You look at the body language in an animal or a human being who's playing, it looks like the opposite. Yeah. And again, when you look at some of the neuroscience around it, you see some really important shifts in the brain that look like they're the opposite of what's happening with depression. And so with play, and I teach this all, you know, it's interesting. When I began to integrate this into my programs with groups of people who are experiencing depression, it was almost like there was this depth of thirst that was there for this experience of just being more flexible, open, spontaneous in the moment, kind of more using improv almost at times.

That's there. So when I ask people, a typical practice that I ask people to do is to go back into their childhood and just think about what some of the ways that they played were. And it's always with a caveat of if you think you didn't experience any play in your childhood, because that's certainly some people's narrative, that you just fast forward to some experience in the future that was your earliest recognition of any kind of play in your life. And the intention of that, of asking them to do that, is to just begin to warm the coals that are there. We always have thoughts in our minds or memories in our minds, but they're just not top of mind. And marketers know this very well, that they try to put advertising out there all the time

to help just bring top of mind something so that you buy it. It's there always, but bring it top of mind. So in this way, this is kind of bringing it top of mind. And then I asked them, and typically people have experiences where I asked them to just really kind of focus on the qualities. Like, were you outside? Were you inside? Were you playing with other kids? Were you by yourself? Were you using your imagination? You know, what were you doing? And then being able, the next step was to help people understand, you know, maybe how these qualities that they're doing, the qualities, not that you were playing, you know, on your BMX as a kid, and now you're, you know, on a BMX as an adult or

something, you know, something like that. So, but it's more like I was outside and I was active. I was on a bike, you know, maybe that kind of thing. So how does that, how do those qualities translate to you as an adult today? And what's interesting is a couple things happen in that beginning of that exercise, which is there's always a fraction of people who recognize that they always thought their childhood was so terrible, but now they realize that there was actually quite a bit of play in their childhood, and it immediately switches their narrative. Literally about 15% to 20%, every single time I do this, no matter how large the group is that I'm working with, there's this immediate shift of narrative within a small percentage of people, which I'm always in awe at and think is so incredibly powerful to be able to shift that narrative. and think is so incredibly powerful to be able to shift that narrative. For everyone else, what we're asking is, what we start to do is recognize that actually there are some things that I'm doing right now that I'm not even labeling as play.

But what happens when I do label it as play? So when I was a kid, I was outside and taking walks out in nature. Nowadays, I go on a hike, but I kind of do it for exercise. What would happen if, for me, in my experience, what would happen if I began to go outside and be in nature, but just say, you know, this is me playing? How does that shift my perception in that moment? How does that shift my experience in that moment?

For a lot of people, including myself, it immediately makes it a little bit lighter. There's more value in the experience that's there. And we're probably, if I'm, you know, who knows? No one's doing this type of neuroscience. We might be activating more of the left prefrontal cortex, which is more associated with positive emotion. You know, that's there, not just the endorphins from doing the walk, but a sense of playing, right? Then we kind of move on to say, okay, why don't you make a list of things that you're not doing right now that you might consider to be play that correlate with these qualities that you did as a kid? And so we start making

a list of other activities that are there. And so then we start looking at our lives and we start saying, where can I either name something as play that I wasn't naming before as play, or where can I begin to integrate some of these other things that I haven't been allowing myself to do? Because play, again, is the complete opposite. When we're playing, it's completely opposite of the experience we have when we're feeling really anxious or depressed. And so the experience is it's a natural antidepressant, both physiologically, neurologically, and psychologically.

Yeah, I think that's great. And I've been exploring more of it myself, as I mentioned, for sure. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come on. As I mentioned, you and I will talk a little bit more in the post-show conversation, but it's been such a pleasure having you on, and I've really enjoyed this. Thank you, Eric. This has been wonderful. All right. Bye. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a donation to the One You Feed podcast. Head over to oneyoufeed.net slash support. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show.

I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast,

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