The One You Feed - Guy Winch on Emotional First Aid

Episode Date: October 29, 2021

Guy Winch, Ph.D., is a licensed psychologist, keynote and TED Talk speaker, and author whose books have been translated into twenty languages. In this episode, Eric and Guy discuss his book Emotional First Aid: Healing Rejection, Guilt, Failure, and Other Everyday Hurts.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, Guy Winch and I Discuss Emotional First Aid and …His book, Emotional First Aid: Healing Rejection, Guilt, Failure, and Other Everyday HurtsUnderstanding that we need to tend to our emotional wounds just as we would physical woundsBuilding emotional resiliency by addressing these small woundsHow to treat the emotional wound of rejectionIdentifying exactly what the hurt feelings areHow the brain registers physical and emotional pain in the same wayLearning to improve low self-esteemWriting exercises to help deal with rejection and failureHow ruminating can easily become a habit and lead to depressionThe dangers of rumination: stewing vs. doingHow rumination is vulnerable to distraction, engage your mind somewhere elseWhat works and doesn’t work in building self-esteemBuilding self-compassionThe detective mindset vs. a harmful and self-critical mindsetGuy Winch Links:Guy’s WebsiteTwitterFacebookInstagramIf you enjoyed this conversation with Guy Winch, you might also enjoy these other episodes:Jonathan Rottenberg on DepressionTasha Eurich on Growing Self AwarenessSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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but if it's not, it's definitely worth another listen. We hope you'll enjoy this episode with Guy Winch. When you have a physical injury, you have to tend it. You have to cover the cut with a bandage. It doesn't even register when we sustain psychological wounds that there's an action that we need to take. 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, 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 reallyknoworeally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead.

The Really No 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 Guy Winch, a licensed psychologist, keynote and TED Talk speaker, and an author whose books have been translated into 20 languages. His most recent book is Emotional First Aid, Healing Rejection, Guilt, Failure, and Other Everyday Hurts. Hi, Guy. Welcome to the show. Thank you very much for having me. I'm happy to have you on. I first came across your work on Paul Gilmartin's show, where you kind of came on and talked about some different approaches to handling emotional wounds.

So I really enjoyed you there. I've read your book since, and I'm excited to dig into some of these things with you. Oh, great. So let's start like we normally do with the parable. There's 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 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, 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, I mean, it's a very good parable for

what actually happens to us psychologically in the day to day, in the minute to minute of our existence. You know, we have different drives, we have different needs, we have different instincts. And some of them send us down the wrong path or down a very damaging path. And some of them send us down a good path. Now, sometimes the ones that, you know, the evil or the wolf that, you know, is battling on the side of anger and jealousy and greed and resentment, that actually feels very true, that actually feels and resentment, that actually feels very true, that actually feels very compelling, that actually feels very, very urgent. And so the good wolf in that sense, the one that would be about humility or hope or gratitude, feels much more disconnected and much more distant and much weaker.

That's when we have to literally assert one over the other. For example, the issue of rumination, when we tend to kind of chew over distressing and angering things that happen to us, by replaying these kinds of events in our minds, we're actually getting ourselves more angry and more upset and more resentful and more bitter. But it feels extraordinarily compelling to kind of replay those scenes over and over again. It's much harder to actually, you know, try and assert acceptance and gratitude and perspective and the good things.

So I do think that's the kind of battle that we face in the day-to-day. I think it has major implications for our emotional health and for our general kind of sense of well-being. But I think it's something that we all face on a daily basis. Yeah, your book, most recent book, is called Emotional First Aid, Healing Rejection, Guilt, Failure, and Other Everyday Hurts. And the basic idea behind it is that we all know how to do basic first aid on our bodies, you know, from a very young age. But very few of us know at all how to, or could certainly not teach our children, how to do first aid on the emotional wounds that we all suffer in the course

of going about our day-to-day lives. And I think it's actually even more, I think it's even worse. I think it's worse because it's not just that we know to do one and we don't know how to do the other. We don't know that there's a possibility to do the other. We don't know that we should do the other. I mean, we're aware on the most basic level that when you have a physical injury, you have to tend it. You have to evaluate whether it needs professional care. And if not, you have to do something to it. You have to cover the cut with a bandage. You have to put an ice pack on the sprain. You have to take some kind of action. It doesn't even register when we sustain emotional and psychological wounds that there's an action that we need to take.

Certainly not that there's one that we could take, and certainly not what that might be. tended to these small wounds when they're a small wound, we would probably have less exacerbation of these things into full-blown mental illness-type problems. And I think that's true in many different ways. In the first way, yes, things can, in the same way that physical wounds can become, you know, infected, quote-unquote, there can be this ripple effect that happens even with small emotional wounds. Just, you know, as an example, you know, somebody's on a dating website and they reached out to someone and that person, you know, rejected them or rebuffed them and their feelings got hurt and

they decided, and I hear this all the time, I'm not making this example up, well, you know, I'm going to stay off that dating website for, you know, for a few weeks or maybe a couple of months because, you know, it's annoying, quote unquote, is what they'll say to themselves, as opposed to saying, yeah, rejection hurts. So I got rejected. Let me think about what I should do about it. And so they stay off the dating website, but they also stay away from dating because they don't want to get rejected again. And the more they do that, the less confident they are and the more anxious they are about the next date they have, whenever that would be. And so they approach the next date, you know, full of dread and anxiety.

They're not the best selves and, you know, and then they end up inviting the very rejection they were fearful of. And then now they're really not dating and now years are passing. In other words, you can just see how things can grow and can snowball from small psychological injuries. Not that that happens every time, but it does happen, number one. And number two, there's a certain emotional resiliency that you can build by actually tackling these kinds of emotional wounds and addressing them. Because it actually makes you feel better when you do and then it makes you more confident about, okay, I might get rejected on a date, but I know how to handle that now. I know what steps I can take to make myself feel better or

yes, I'll risk this endeavor that I'm afraid that I might fail at, but if I do, I know how to deal with failure. I know how to figure it out and how to, you know, work around it and kind of tackle things with a renewed vigor the next time. So it builds emotional resiliency to kind of tend these wounds. And so I think it's helpful in quite a variety of ways. Yeah. So why don't we just jump into some of the wounds that you talk about? And I'd like to spend, you know, really the remainder of the program talking about some of the basic things that people can do to treat some of these wounds. So why don't we just start with rejection? The interesting thing about all these wounds, and I think it's an important component, is before you can start treating it, you really

need to have an understanding of in what way you're injured. You know, if you wipe out on a skateboard, and I can assure you it's been a while since I've been on a skateboard or wiped out on one, but if you do, the first instinct you have is let me check myself to see that I'm not hurt, right? You're lying on the ground, you're like, ooh, let me check this, let me flex my legs and arms to make sure nothing's broken. So, you know, we have this instinct to, oh, let me see if something, I'm hurt somewhere, and we have a tendency to know where to look for the injury that we might sustain. When it comes to tater rejection, well, what are you looking for? So yes, you have hurt feelings. That's a very universal thing. Your feelings are hurt. But A, what does that really mean? And B, where are the actual injuries emotionally, you know, as it were? And so it's very important.

And in my book, I actually divide every chapter into two parts. One part is discussing what the wounds are, and the second part is what the treatments are for those wounds. And I think they're both very important. But we're talking about rejection. So there are several things that happen to us when we get rejected. And the first thing is it hurts. us when we get rejected. And the first thing is it hurts. And this expression hurt feelings is one that exists in almost every language I think that we know. In other words, when you describe feelings in different languages, they don't always translate. This thing about hurt feelings

related to rejection is very, very consistent. And why that is is because it actually does hurt. They did studies with functional MRIs. I'm just going to mention one. I just think it's really interesting. I hope that's okay. But they asked for volunteers. Actually, they paid them. They asked for people to volunteer for the study and get paid for it

who had just experienced a recent heartbreak. And then they had them lie in a functional fMRI machine and look at the picture. I hope they paid them well. You know, that's the first thing I looked up when I read that study. I quickly skipped to the method. How much did these people get paid? Because this is what they had to do. They had to stare at the picture of the person who broke their heart and relive the breakup while, and if anyone's been in an MRI,

it's incredibly noisy, bang, bang, bang, while that's going on around you. So yes, the first thing I did is I really helped, and they paid them decently, actually, for an experiment, actually, that was pretty good. But what they found and what was really compelling was that when they looked at the slides of the slices of the brain and what's happening in the brain in that moment, they were indistinguishable from what you see when people experience physical pain. In other words, rejection literally activates the same pathways in our brain as does physical pain. That's why we have that expression, hurt feelings. We really hurt. It actually hurts. And as a proof of concept, they did a follow-up study, which is really more cute than anything else. I'm not suggesting this is actually a remedy

for people. But they put two groups of people through a rejection experiment. And they gave half of them, one group they gave like sugar pills, and the other group they gave Tylenol, acetaminophen. And then they had them report on the emotional pain they experienced, and the group, and the group didn't know what they were getting, but the group who received the Tylenol reported less emotional pain after the rejection. Yeah, that's really amazing. Now, I am not suggesting people go on dates pecking Tylenol, because it's very pessimistic, really. It's kind of hard on the liver.

Maybe Advil would be better. It's hard on the liver, and it's a little pessimistic, I think, is the worst thing. You know, you're like, just say the word and I'll swallow the pills. But it is an interesting proof of concept. And so this knowing that your feelings are hurting for

a reason is very important and here's the next important thing about rejection when they put people through the experiments in which they it's a fake rejection but the people don't know it's fake they're getting rejected in a scenario these participants and then they tell them okay so look here's the thing those people who seemingly rejected you, they were our research assistants. There actually was no rejection happening. And then they ask people, well, how are you feeling now? Well, their feelings still hurt. In other words, the amazing thing about rejection is even once you find out it's not real,

it actually still hurts. So certainly if it is real and certainly if it's significant, it's not real, it actually still hurts. So certainly if it is real, and certainly if it's significant, it's going to hurt a lot. And that's important to know, because when you don't know that, and your feelings get hurt because someone you don't even care that much about rejected you, or someone you weren't that invested in, let alone someone you were, then your natural inclination is going to think, wow, I must be some kind of major loser that this is really bothering me this much. What's wrong with me? How desperate am I that this is bothering me this much?

It's bothering you because your brain is wired for it to really, really bother you, not because of any reflection on you or your emotional fortitude, your constitution, your appealability, none of that. But if you don't know that, then you're going to go down a very wrong path of the wrong wolf and go to feeling really bad and really angry and really resentful. And if you do know that, then you can steer yourself down a better path. 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 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 tonight. 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 reallyn, really. Yeah. 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 I heart radio

app on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. What would that better path for rejection look like? What are a couple of things that if you're feeling that sting, that pain, that you can do to treat it? I'm going to give you one example. Now, unfortunately with rejection, what happens is our self-esteem gets damaged because it's just not good for anyone's self-esteem to be rejected, even in fake rejection. Your feelings get hurt and your self-esteem takes a hit. Now, the thing about the self-esteem taking a hit is that the rejection usually causes 10 to 20% of the hit your self-esteem takes. What causes the rest of the 80 or 90% is you. Because then we go into this very negative internal voice and start, you know, if it was

in a romantic scenario, we look in the mirror and we start going through every single possible physical flaw we have, or, you know, I'm not tall enough, or I'm not rich enough, or I'm not blonde enough, or this isn't big enough, or that's too big, or this isn't wide enough, or that's too wide, or whatever it is, you know, we go through the litany, you know, with the assumption of if we were only better, then that wouldn't have happened. But in preparing the grounds for if we were only better, then that wouldn't have happened. But in preparing the grounds for if we were only better, we actually go through every possible way in which we're not adequate, whether we're adequate or not. Now, that's what does most of the damage to our self-esteem.

So we need to do two things. We need to shut off that voice. We need to shut down that wolf. And then we need to actually do the reverse. We need to actually find ways to revive our self-esteem. So I'm going to give people one example, you know, that I suggest usually about rejection. And that is, if you want to revive your self-esteem after a rejection, the best way to do that is to remind yourself very clearly what you actually do bring to the table, what you do have to offer in terms of a date, a relationship, you know, a significant other, what have you. And that means, you know, make a list of qualities that you think you have that are meaningful, that are important.

You might be, you know, funny and emotionally available, loyal and supportive. You might be great at backgrubs. You know, you might be, you know, very entertaining. You might be great with in-laws. Whatever it is, write down qualities that you think really matter in relationships that you know you have, and then choose one of them, and write a brief essay, you know, a paragraph or two, brief, but a paragraph or two about why that's important to people, how you've manifested it in the past, or how you'll do that in the future, and why the person you'll be with will benefit from it. Now, it's important to write.

People often tell me, oh, I did it in my head. And it doesn't work that well in your head. You know, I say to people, it's like, you know, if you look in the fridge and you're hungry and you go, I'm going to imagine eating all of that, you're still going to be hungry. You actually have to do the exercise, not do it in your head. Write it down. The writing actually co-opts very different areas of your brain into the task, and so it's a much more meaningful and deeper exercise when you write.

So write those two paragraphs, and that will actually make you feel better because you're focusing. And actually, these are all the things I do have to offer. The next person will be able to see these as to focusing on what you don't have. And so that's one exercise I really recommend people do if they sustain a rejection. What I like about that, and you talk about it in a couple different places in the book,

is that a lot of people turn to positive affirmation in situations like that, whether around rejection or failure or self-esteem. And it's these things that are like, I'm beautiful and I'm capable. And what you talk about is that that doesn't necessarily work in a lot of cases, and in some cases can make things worse. But what you're talking about is actually looking at the reality of, let me find things about myself that I really do believe are good,

and let me put my attention on those instead of trying to convince myself I'm good in something that I don't think I'm good in. Right. And that's exactly why the positive affirmations don't work, because by positive affirmations, usually, I mean, I mean the general kind of statements of, you know, I'm worthy or I'm going to find success or I'm going to find great love, you know, the kinds of things you'll see, you know, in refrigerator magnets and daily calendars. But why they don't work is because reciting to yourself in the moment, I'm beautiful and wonderful, in the very moment you're feeling very unbeautiful and unwonderful is not compelling. In fact, it flies in the face of what your feelings are telling you. And in those moments, we are much more likely to reject that statement consciously or unconsciously and feel worse because of it. So the research actually says that people who use positive affirmations when their self-esteem is

low are more likely to feel worse as a result. And the irony is that these positive affirmations are most useful for people who already feel great about themselves, which is when you don't need them. The other thing that I'm suggesting is more of a self-affirmation, because you're not affirming some general, generic positive quality. You're affirming specific, knowable things about yourself that you know are true. So they don't rub the wrong way against your belief system. They jive with your belief system. You don't reject them.

You can accept them. And therein lies a very critical difference. Right, and it's just a matter of you can choose to look at the things that you do well and you're good at or the positive qualities you have or focus only on the ones that you perceive to be negative. And this is just sort of a shifting of that focus in those moments. Yeah, I do want to say one thing, because it's back to the parallel for me, because that's why I really like the parallel,

is because the more compelling urge, by far, is to focus on all the shortcomings. By far. So I'm not suggesting that, oh, just do the other thing instead, and that's easy. I'm suggesting do the other thing instead. It's actually difficult, but it's really worthwhile. And I'll tell you something, when you put ointment on a cut, that stings too. So it's not easy to do that either. Or when you rip a bandaid off a hairy hand, you know, arm, whatever I'm just saying. But it feels compelling to go down the dark path. It's just going to make you feel much, much worse. It's difficult to go down the correct path, it's just going to make you feel much, much worse. It's difficult to go down the correct path,

but once you know it is the correct path, once you know that will actually make you feel better, people feel more able to, you know, get themselves down that path. And especially once you've done it a few times and you know, I do feel better, then it becomes easier to do. Excellent. Well, let's now talk about one of my former best friends who I try and stay on a less good relationship with these days, which is rumination. So first of all, what it is, is when something upsetting or distressing happens, you know, your boss yells at you in a meeting or, you know, a friend, you know, jokes, makes a joke at your expense and the friends and everyone laughs and you just can't

get it out of your mind or it's a breakup sometimes conversation and you just keep replaying it in your head over and over again. And again, natural tendency, you know, we, our natural inclination is to want to understand our experience, is to want to have, you know, like order what happens to us in our head so that we have a clear understanding of it. So it has this illusion by replaying it that we're trying to figure it out. But there's a very critical difference between trying to figure something out and replaying it. And when you're trying to figure something out, you're literally trying to figure something out and replaying it. And when you're trying to figure something out, you're literally trying to figure it out. You're not just replaying

it. You're trying to see it from different perspectives. You're trying to understand, well, why did the friend make a joke at my expense for no reason? Maybe I had done something to them, or maybe the boss yelled at me in the meeting because I actually disagreed with him in the meeting before, and therefore I can conclude I shouldn't disagree with the boss. Or, you know, maybe that, you know, I'm replaying the breakup because I just can't believe that that happened, but I can't believe it because my perceptions of the person are idealized and I need to adjust who that person actually is, and then it'll seem actually rather believable. That's when you're trying to figure it out.

And the thing that happens when you try and figure it out is you gain insight. You have conclusions. You see things from a different perspective. You start understanding things. Things fall into place. When you're just replaying, there's nothing falling into place. You're just getting annoyed and upset all over again. So the idea is to use self-reflection in a way that's adaptive and useful

and avoid it when it's not. But when it's not, and that's what rumination is, the word comes from how cows chew. Cows are considered, you know, it's ruminating when cows, because they chew over and over and over again. And then they regurgitate from their stomachs and it's disgusting. And then they chew again. And that's what we do. You know, like we think about the bad thing that happened. We swallow it, and we regurgitate it, and we think about it some more. I mean, if you think about it in physical terms, it's nauseating. But we do it, and all the time.

So the problem with it is that that can easily become a habit, because the more you're chewing over that incident, the more you're deepening the groove, and the more the needle, I'm using analogies of the 1970s, but still, the more the needle is likely to go into that groove. And it's going to appear in your head more often. You're going to think about it more often. The urge to think about it is going to be more compelling. And again, you're going to think about it in just the same repetitive way without any new insight. And what that does is that every time you go there, you're increasing the stress hormones in your body. You are putting your body in a state of fight or flight. And when that becomes habit and you spend days doing this, and people spend days

and weeks and months doing this, then over time you are literally, people with a tendency to ruminate have a significantly elevated likelihood of cardiovascular disease than people who do not. It literally impacts you that strongly. And the other thing that it does is when you're distressed, all your thinking capacities are lowered. Your ability to focus, to concentrate, to problem solve, to be creative, all are impaired. And you're doing that to yourself.

And the other thing you're doing to yourself is you're really increasing the likelihood of becoming depressed. Because you're spending so much time focused on everything that's wrong. Everything in the way, all the ways in which you're victimized or upset or marginalized, that you're painting a world picture that's very inaccurate. That becomes your world. You just spend 10 hours a day thinking of that incident, even though your world wasn't one of dark gloom and resentment and rejection or people yelling at you. In your head, it was.

And so people have a tendency to become depressed much more easily because they're ruminating so much. And again, we don't ruminate about the good stuff, unfortunately. We don't spend 10 hours thinking about, oh, I remember I told that joke and that was so funny. We'll think about that once or twice. But the joke somebody told at our expense, we'll think about for weeks. So it's a real problem. And it also sets us up. When you spend so much time, you know, stewing, instead of doing, then we start to become more passive. And there was one piece of research, I tend, I think I used it in the book, but it was just really compelling to me is that when they looked at women who had a tendency to research, they found that on average, women who had a tendency to research and found a lump in their breast

waited on average two months longer to make an appointment with their doctor than women who found a lump in their breast and did not have a tendency to ruminate. And that's really dramatic. And it just goes to show that, and I'm sure those women were not spending two months not calling the doctor, they were spending two months talking to everyone and worrying about it and obsessing about it, but actually just not taking action, because that's what rumination does. It makes you passive, and a miserable passive. So what are some ways to work with rumination? You know, I've got a couple of my own favorites,

but I'm interested in what you've got. In the book, I actually get into some more complex and detailed things because sometimes it's a real strong urge and you need some deeper stuff to undo it, to dislodge it. But here's a very simple one, actually, that anyone can do. Illumination is vulnerable to distraction. It's a train of thought. Derail the train. And if you derail the train,

usually the research shows for roughly around a couple of minutes, it's enough for that train to actually not get back on the track necessarily. Now, it might jump back on the track 10 minutes later. It'll pop into your head. You have to derail it again. But the more you derail, the less frequently that will happen. And to derail the train, it's not adequate to close your eyes, squint, and try not to think about it because actually we know that has a rebound effect.

When we try not to think about something, we're going to start thinking about that even more. So it's not about, oh, don't think about that, don't think about that. It's literally get absorbed in something else. And what that something else is, is completely arbitrary. Whatever works for you. If it's playing a game on your phone, go at it. If it's starting to look through photo albums and get absorbed by that, go at it. If it's blasting a game on your phone, go at it. If it's starting to look through photo albums and get absorbed by that, go at it. If it's blasting a song and you're singing along with it, not one that reminds you of the incident, but engage your mind. And the mind has to be engaged somewhere else. And even two minutes will reduce that urge to obsess about the thing that's not useful to obsess about.

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 cranson is with us how are you 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 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.

I'm a recovering alcoholic and addict. It reminds me a little bit of dealing with cravings in the early day. My approach was always just sort of change the channel completely, and it'll pass if you can distract yourself for five minutes or ten minutes. It passes. It's exactly the same, in fact, because I think most cravings are the same. The craving can be for alcohol. The craving can be for other substances. The craving can be for alcohol. The craving can be for other substances.

The craving can be to indulge a negative and unuseful thought. It's a strong urge. And so, yeah, with any kind of craving, a distraction is usually a good thing. And, yeah, two, three, four minutes, but even two sometimes can do the trick. But you mentioned you had a couple of favorites. I'm just curious about what one of those might be. Sure. One of them is where you start with the letter A and you try and think of something

you're grateful for or that you appreciate, and then you go to the letter B. Oh, I love that one. Yeah, I mean, the gratitude part is almost like the gravy on top, right? No, it's the two-for-one. It's definitely a two-for-one. It's the puzzle. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I do the same thing sometimes with songs. Like, all right, think of a song that I like that starts with the letter A and then try and hear the melody in my head. Those are compelling enough that my brain remains occupied.

Yes, that's a great example of one. And actually, I really like the two-four because you're actually doing something really, you know, that is a 180-degree different track. Rather than think about everything I'm annoyed about, here's something I'm grateful for is great. So I like that game a lot. Yeah, it certainly has been a big help to me. As I said, Rumination and I used to be really close friends. Now we only talk once in a while. Great. And look, it's a habit.

So like any habit, you can change it. But you have to be mindful of the fact that it's important to change it and that it actually takes effort to change. Like any habit formation, it actually takes a period of intense, you know, you have to like really be on it for a while until you, you know, actually change it completely. But very, very worthwhile. Yeah, I think that's such an important thing to remember with a lot of the stuff that we were talking about, what you just said there, which is that I think a lot of people, and I, you know, I certainly have at times had a tendency to try something one time, and when it doesn't have miraculous results, then just go, well, that doesn't work. Versus recognizing that

these aren't magic pills, but they are things that if done consistently and over time and on a regular basis can make a real difference, but they don't, you know, it takes multiple effort on a lot of these things. You know, that's a good point. Let me just make this point so people can be very clear about it. So let's say you try to derail the train, and you try to distract yourself, and you got maybe through A and B of the alphabet gratitude game, and then went right back to it. So what do you look at as a failure or as a success?

So to me, success. Because you're trying something new, you got through A and B, terrific. To me, the failure would be be I should do the gratitude game. Nah, let me think more about how that person annoyed me. That would be a failure. So, you know, you really have to, and let's say you got to E now for two weeks in a row, and now you slide back and only got to B once. That's how habits happen. You know, sometimes you slide, but there's a general trend towards a new habit.

So, you know, the idea is be compassionate with yourself and, you know, be encouraging. Focus on your successes. And don't be too harsh on yourself if you're not changing all at once. No one does. Yeah, it's very much like meditation in that way, right? My brain goes off of what that thing, I'm back into ruminating, and then I just go, oh, wait a minute, I was supposed to be doing this, bring my brain back, and, you know, that goes back and forth. Exactly. With mindfulness meditation, you never judge the fact that you have to bring your brain back, you just do.

Exactly. So in the book, you talk about self-esteem, you know, wounds to our self-esteem, and you say a few things in there that I thought were particularly interesting before we get into more detail. One was was you talked about how, you know, incredibly high self-esteem is not necessarily the goal, right? That too much self-esteem turns into narcissism. So there's a, there's a healthy level. And then the other thing that I thought was interesting is you talk about these wounds to self-esteem, but you said that, you know, most programs to improve self-esteem simply don't work. Yes. Well, that's a very unfortunate thing,

but it's kind of true. So what happens is that when people participate in, you know, self-esteem workshops or weekends or what have you, and they ask them to rate at the end of the workshop, well, you know, did this help? Most people will say, yeah, I feel better. But when they actually do research and they have people fill out actual questionnaires before and after, it turns out you fill out the questionnaire exactly in the same way. So it didn't help. But what you're distorting is you're remembering yourself as being in a much worse frame of mind before. So now I feel like this, I must have improved. But here's why most self-esteem programs don't work. They don't work because for self-esteem, two things need to happen.

First of all, a program that's a general thing is, in the same way with the positive affirmations, the generalities don't necessarily stick with you. The way to build self-esteem is to become two things. A, more aware about what your actual qualities and good stuff is because it has to be specific. And on the flip side, not demolishing your self-esteem with an internal self-punitive, you know, internal voice. The self-talk that we do tends to be so negative on the balance. You know, in other words, you know, there's so few attaboys going on in our head, it's more like the whip and the stick and very little carrot. the stick and very little carrot. And so to improve self-esteem, you have to, A, cut out the whips and the sticks and increase the carrots. And so you have to cut out the negative stuff,

but you have to build. And what I talk about in the book is self-compassion. In other words, a very easy guideline for people, but it's an exercise you actually have to do is, what would you say to your friend in that scenario? And if a friend was upset about something, you would try and say things, and they were a friend, and you were a decent person, you would try and be kind, encouraging, and supportive. Now, you wouldn't say to your unattractive friend, no, but you're beautiful, because your unattractive friend would look at you like, I don't think I'm beautiful, and it wouldn't fly. But what you would say to your unattractive friend would look at you like, I don't think I'm beautiful. And it wouldn't fly.

But what you would say to that unattractive friend is, you have a lot to offer. It's about finding the right person. It's like, you know, or whatever the encouraging, supportive thing is. Now, what you would say to a friend is really what you should say to yourself. There's absolutely no reason. is really what you should say to yourself. There's absolutely no reason. You shouldn't be as supportive and loving and caring and understanding to yourself as you would be to a friend.

But we have a horrific double standard in which we think, well, I can dish it out to myself and really beat myself into a pulp for some obscure reason. And by the way, I ask people all the time in my private practice, well, why do you think it's useful to be so self-critical? And they'll say, well, because, you know, it'll give me the right expectation. And I, no, it'll demolish any expectation you have. It'll make you feel hopeless and it'll zap your self-esteem so you're much more nervous next time.

But, you know, why not just have real expectations? You know, realistic. You don't need to sabotage, you know, to be self-critical, to be realistic. So the idea is, if you're, you know, if you have this negative self-talk, this negative self-punitive internal voice, that really needs to be abolished. And I mean literally abolished. None of it. There's like a zero tolerance for it because it's not useful. Now, you want to look over what mistakes you might have made, what were your wrong moves, you know, where did you screw up by all means. But the mindset for that is detective mindset, just the facts. Yeah. I love that idea of talking to yourself like you

would a good friend, because I think it touches on two things. One is, like you said, there's the kindness, you know, a friend would be would be kind. And yet a good friend who is trying to support you would also tell you the truth. They might, you know, hold you to be accountable to certain things. It's the right balance. It's the right balance of being too hard on yourself. And on the other end, some of us are, you know, often too indulgent with ourselves. And I feel like if you think of it through that lens, it gives the proper balance of those things. You know, I agree that people who are like, oh, it's never me, that's not good either. I mean, you want to give it a couple of passes to make sure what part you had in it

and what you need to do to address those parts. Again, with the mindset of not I'm such an idiot for doing this or what kind of, you know, terrible person am I for doing that, but like, okay, that was not cool or not good and that's something I should address and be mindful about next time or do whatever you need to do for the due diligence. But the mindset, I say the detective mindset, because detectives are, theoretically at least, emotionally uninvolved. They're going through the crime scene just looking at evidence and collecting evidence and proof. They're not emotionally like,

can you imagine that broken piece of glass and the blood splatter? They're just, they're just looking at it, you know? So it's that, that same mindset. Yeah. Yeah. That's a really good, good way to think of it. We're nearing the end of time. I'd like to end with one question, which is that, you know, you obviously do a lot of scientific research. You pull this stuff together. I'm curious, what research have you been learning about lately that sort of has you the most excited? Well I'm actually working on a new book so that's absolutely top secret I can't literally talk about that yet but I'll give you an example of one. There is this field in psychology it's a relatively new field it's called embodied cognition and what that refers to is the ways in which our minds are

picking up on sensory cues without our being aware. And that there's a much bigger connection between mind and body in certain ways than we expected in some ways, but not in others. So for example, the idea of, you know, when people are lonely, for example, they feel rejected, right? So they feel excluded. And the association and the terminology we have for it is, oh, they left me out in the cold, right? Like as a holdover from our hunter-gatherer days when the tribe was around the hearth and the excluded person was left out in the cold. half of the excluded person was left out in the cold. So they did experiments in which they measured the temperature at the finger of people who were put through a rejection experience.

And there was a significant, a small, but a significant statistically drop in temperature that happens when people experience rejection. We actually get a little bit colder. Interesting. Yeah, that ties a lot with that idea of it registering the same parts of the brain as physical pain. Right. And they did, you know, similar things. For example, I talk about guilt in one of the chapters of the book. So they did a similar experiment, you know, with guilt. They had people recall a time in which they did something that made them feel guilty. And then they had them estimate the weight of certain things.

And people who felt guilty tended to feel everything was heavier. So that's something that, you know, I mean, that's research that's still going on today and in many different ways. But it's, oh, there's just to give you one last one, and this is the study that actually started this field. They, unrelated to my work, but they gave, they brought people from an experiment, and the experimenter was waiting in an elevator and handed them a cup of coffee while they clicked off their name on their checklist. And half the people got a hot cup of coffee, half the people got a cold cup of coffee. They held it for a moment. Then they went into an experiment and were given a paragraph

about a person. Everyone got the same paragraph. And they were asked to describe that person. And people who held a hot cup of coffee described that same person as being warmer, friendlier, kinder. And people who held a cold cup of coffee described them as being colder, more distant, less emotional, and then completely unconscious. And so to me, that field of how our small physical sensations are impacting our behavior and our decisions and our thinking in all kinds of very unconscious but interesting ways, I find fascinating. Yeah, it is really a fascinating area of what all is happening, the processing that we're doing that we're just not aware of. Well, Guy, thanks so much for being on the show. It's been a pleasure talking with you. I really enjoy the book and I recommend it to people often. So thanks so much for coming on.

It's been a real pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. Okay. You too. Bye. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now, we are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted. To learn more, make a donation at any level, and become a member of the One You Feed community, go to oneyoufeed.net slash join. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely

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