The One You Feed - How to Break Free from Achiever Fever with Claire Booth

Episode Date: January 27, 2023

In this Episode, You'll Learn: What “achiever fever” is and the negative health effects that are linked to it How we often tie happiness and self worth to achieving and how to shift that perspective Why the inner critic often shows up and how we can learn to effectively deal with it How we can recognize our powerful default behaviors, learn to pay attention to how they distract us How to learn to worry less by accepting what we can’t change and practicing letting go To learn more about Claire Booth, click hereSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In case you're just recently joining us or however long you've been a listener of the show, you may not realize that we have years and years of incredible episodes in our archives. We've had so many wonderful guests that we've decided to handpick one of our favorites that may be new to you, but if not, it's definitely worth another listen. We hope you'll enjoy this episode with Claire Booth. When we put the achievement as the absolute pinnacle of who we are and thus our happiness and our self-worth, that's when we completely lose perspective. 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 reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed 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 Claire Booth, an entrepreneur, author, and speaker. She's the founder and CEO of market research firm Lux Insights, with two decades of experience serving some of the world's most recognized brands. Her book is The Achiever Fever Cure, How I Learned to Stop Striving Myself Crazy. Hi, Claire. Welcome to the show. Hi, Eric. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to have you on. Your book is called The Achiever Fever Cure, How I Learned to Stop Striving Myself Crazy. And we will get into all the details of that shortly,

but let's start like we always do with the parable. There is a grandmother who's talking to her grandson, and she 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 grandmother and he says, well, grandmother, which one wins? And the grandmother 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. So the first time I heard that parable was the first

time I heard your show. And I was listening to it while I was hiking, because I often listen to podcasts while I hike. And I remember hearing that parable and hearing the last line, and it literally stopped me in my tracks. Because only a couple of weeks previous had I started to become aware of this voice in my head, this really loud, negative, incessantly nagging voice in my head. And so when I heard the parable, that was my realization that it's not just me. There's other people that suffer from this as well. And in fact, here's a whole show about it. Here's a whole podcast about it. And so as you know, this podcast has been a huge part of my personal self-transformation. As you know, this podcast has been a huge part of my personal self-transformation. Once I became aware of this bad wolf, the first thing I wanted to do was just starve it out. I wanted to just watch it die, but I soon realized it doesn't work that way.

Having a good wolf necessarily means that we're going to have a bad wolf. You can't have one without the other. The concept of good needs the concept of bad. And so what I had to do was learn how to love my bad wolf, which was surprisingly easy because I started to realize how much that bad wolf and those feelings of fear and self-doubt and worry had brought me success to that point in my life. And it was only when I learned to start loving and finding the gratitude for my bad wolf that I was able to start developing a relationship with my good wolf. The bad wolf had been so dominant up until that point that I didn't really have a relationship

with my good wolf. So now my relationship with my good wolf basically means keeping my inner house clean. So for example, when the bad wolf gets fed, and as it will, I just watch the feeding. So I try to step back. I don't try to resist it. I don't try to stop it. I don't necessarily try to talk myself out of it. I just become aware that, oh, this is happening right now. And as I watch, I become more aware of the words, more aware of the thoughts. That brings me into presence. And once I'm in presence, those feelings of gratitude and love, that kind of higher elevated state starts to emerge from that.

Just to take the analogy a little further, I get regular reminders that I have overfed my bad wolf for so long because sometimes he just kind of barfs up his food, like when I least expect it. He just barfs it up. I don't think we've had that analogy before. So if I try to ignore that kind of pile that kind of pile of puke, right, and pretend it doesn't exist, then it really starts to smell awful. And I get myself into this emotional turmoil. And so now what I do is, again, try to bring myself into presence and give that bad wolf a bit of a compassionate pat on the head and say, oh, yeah, there you are. And either get present or inquire

into what prompted, for lack of a better word, the puke in the first place. That's great. That is a new analogy. I'll give you that. And it's a good one. So let's go back a little ways to what got you to the point that you wrote a book called The Achiever Fever Cure. It's one I certainly relate with. Achievement has been something that I have seen as both the good and the bad wolf in my own life. And so I'm very interested in how you did that. But let's set the stage about what brought you to the point that you sort of embarked on this new journey of even trying to not be an achiever all the time? Right. So being an achiever has been my identity for as long as I can possibly remember. And as a

result, it's brought me all sorts of success in my business and athletics. And so I never really thought to question it. What I didn't do was make the tie between being an achiever and these feelings of anxiety and depression, and for me, insomnia. And you experience that enough that finally, I started to see the pattern. And it got to the point where I was about five years into running my business. And everything was going the way I wanted it to go into running my business. And, you know, everything was going the way I wanted it to go. We were profitable. We were growing 20% a year. I was adding great new employees. We were adding clients each year. You know, everything in my life seemed good, but I was miserable because all of this was accompanied by this anxiety and beating myself up and this constant

worry and this needing to prove. And so five years in, I had experienced this pattern so many times that I thought I'm going to be at risk of being a liability to my own company. If I don't do something, my employees need a confident, you know, a confident, strong leader, they don't do something, my employees need a confident, strong leader. They don't need somebody that's constantly beating themselves up. And so there came a point where I just had to hold up my hand and say, enough. I cannot live my life like this anymore. I can't go days without sleep. There's got to be a better way.

Right. And your business is market research. That's kind of what you do. And one of the things you did as part of this book is you did some market research, quote unquote, on other high achievers. I did. And one of the things that you found was that this anxiety, depression, insomnia was certainly not limited to you.

Matter of fact, it was relatively prevalent in a lot of achievers. It was prevalent. Yeah. So I did a survey of hundreds of other self-reported achievers. And one of the questions I asked was, when was the last time you experienced insomnia, a really bad sleep? And over a third of the achievers that I spoke to or that did the survey, over a third said they had experienced insomnia that week alone. And then depression, 50% within the past six months and anxiety, 50% within the past couple of weeks. It was high. Yeah, and it's one of those things that I've noticed throughout my career that achievers don't want to talk about, right? You wrestle with this. If you're leading a company, right, you don't want to project anxiety about how the company is doing to your employees.

You know, there's been more writing in the last few years about the incidence of depression among entrepreneurs, how high it really is. among entrepreneurs, how high it really is. Because I think that part of what achievers get into, they are seen as achievers. And often, that's the image they feel like they need to project. So they don't acknowledge it to themselves, let alone anyone else. Right. We don't acknowledge it within ourselves, because it's so important to us for everyone to see us as strong and powerful and on top of things and in control of things. But the stats and my own experience show that that's not the case at all. So we almost double down on trying to prove ourselves. You know, 90% of my achievers say they are trying to always prove that they are the strong, confident,

powerful being. And the ability to make oneself vulnerable gets further and further pressed down. And we know based on Brene Brown and speakers and writers like that, how much strength there is in vulnerability. And this is starting to make its way into business circles now, but it's still, I mean, it's still pretty quiet in terms of people actually doing it. Right. Absolutely. I think it is still a thing there. So let's talk about Achiever Fever.

What is it? Because you didn't walk off and give up your business. You wrote a book. I mean, so you continued to achieve. What's the difference between achieving and achiever fever? It's a good question. So achiever fever is the dark side of achieving. There's nothing wrong with achieving.

There's nothing wrong with having goals and working hard and wanting to do your best. There's nothing wrong at all with that. Achiever fever is the dark side of achieving. that. Achiever fever is the dark side of achieving. It's when we tie our happiness, our sense of self-worth to our achievements and get away from seeing an achievement as just another point in time. So when we put the achievement as the absolute pinnacle of who we are, and that's our happiness and our self-worth, that's when we completely lose perspective. And we enter into this delusion, this spell of if I'm not working towards my achievement, then there's something very, very wrong with me.

And it means I'm lazy. It means I'm weak. It means I'm ordinary, average. It means I'm dying or going backwards. And it's a real kind of polarity in our thinking. So I continue to achieve in different aspects of my life, but I don't have the fever now like I used to. Yeah, there's so many things, I think, in what you said there. I think there's the tying of our self-worth to what we achieve, you know, this very fundamental, I am what I do, right? Right. When I achieve this, then I'll be happy. Everything up till then is just me getting to that point. And what most of us know, if we've had enough years on this earth, is that we get there and we're not really any happier. Maybe we are for a day, a week, depends, you know, three hours. Right. And then we just set the next goal. We just, here we go. Now it's the next thing and off we go. It's this perpetual, I'll be happy when kind of thing. And then the other thing that you sort of said in there and you allude to in the book that I'll bring up is that we can do this with anything. If we tend to be achievers, it doesn't tend to only be, oh, I'm an achiever at work, but

at least for me, it's always been, well, oh, I'm an achiever at work, but at least for me, it's always been, well, yes, I'm an achiever here. And then if I'm going to start playing tennis, I have to be really, really good at tennis. And, you know, if I'm going to meditate, I've really got to be good at meditating. And it just, everything gets swept up. When I'm at my, let's say, less evolved mindset, it sucks everything in for me. Well, what tends to happen, I find, at least in my experience and the people that I talk to, is that we tend to gravitate to things that we are good at so that we can achieve in them. Because you're right, it's not just work, it's not just sports, it's anything else that I put

my mind to. I want to, I need to achieve at it. So, so much of what was interesting to me previous, but I didn't think I'd be very good at, you know, I let it fall by the wayside. Right. And just getting back to what you were talking about earlier, this need to set the next goal, because you're right, that the elation that comes from achievement can last anywhere from 10 seconds to 30 seconds. Throw a bottle of wine in there, it can last an evening. But the next day, it's not just setting the next goal. The goal's got to be a little bit bigger or a little bit faster or a little bit better because now we're trying to prove ourselves at the next level.

And it brings us into this cycle of craving, right? Like we crave these achievements because we're convinced that that's what's going to make us happy and you know that when we get into that craving mindset we'll never be happy you know it's it's we will never get to where we think we can be and it's such a limiting mindset so when you embarked on this journey you engaged a guy who was a climbing coach of yours to kind of help you through this journey, you engaged a guy who was a climbing coach of yours to kind of help you through this journey. And you had a line in there, I can't resist reading, which is, this is your husband would think I hired the dreaded life coach code for you can't

get your shit together. So pay a bunch of money to someone else who can't get their shit together, which I thought was really funny. And I guess in a way, I'm a life coach. So I read it and laughed because I've always disliked that word because I think it has that connotation. But you now use coaches for a lot of your leaders in your business. I do. Every leader in my business now has their own personal coach. And I know that those conversations that happen between senior staff and coaches are probably just as much personal as they are business. In fact, they're probably more personal than they are business. And back when I was really suffering with Achiever Fever, the idea of having a coach,

the idea of having someone to help me hold my hand was something I resisted so strongly, because I thought, how do I need somebody to show me how to live my life? Like, surely I'm better than that. And now I see the absolute importance of a coach, you know, any professional for that matter, because we limit ourselves in the questions that we ask ourselves, the stories that we're in. And if we don't have a coach, you know, to question us or to poke holes into our stories or show us that we're believing our own stories, you know, we hold ourselves back. So yeah, bring on the coaching. We could all use the occasional nudge, a little wake up from the autopilot we fall into in our

day-to-day routine. That's why we send brief text reminders to listeners of the show for free. The texts help you stay on track with what you're learning from the podcast episodes we release on Tuesdays and Fridays. They periodically prompt you to pause for a second and become more present and mindful and encourage you to engage with the week's podcast topics in a bite-sized, short, and simple manner. We've heard from listeners that these texts help them take a moment to reconnect with what's important amidst the busyness of daily life. Someone said, it feels like a little bit of wisdom is being whispered into my psyche, which I thought was cool. So if you'd like to hear from us a few times a week via text, go to oneufeed.net slash text and sign up for free. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really Know 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. 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 let's talk about some of what you started to do to deal with your Achiever Fever. And I feel like one of the first things was you recognized the inner critic, or you also called it the judge. The judge, yeah. the inner critic, or you also called it the judge.

The judge, yeah. And that was one of the first things that my coach helped me to do, was to become aware of this voice that I just accepted on autopilot for so long. I thought of the voice the same way I thought of any appendage on my body. It was just part of me. In fact, it was me. The voice was me. I could not imagine ever uncoupling those things. The voice was me. I could not imagine ever uncoupling those things. And so once my coach had drawn my attention to how loud and dominant this voice was, the first thing that I did was name it. And for me, the judge was, it just kind of fell out of my mouth. I didn't even have to think too hard about it. And then the next thing I did was actually find an image that described it. And for me, it was just like this gnarled, blackened tree stump, this, you know, something that had been in a forest fire or something. It was just bleak and dead. And once I had a name and an image,

I was able to move that inner voice from the back of my head to right between my eyes, where I couldn't not see it. And my awareness of it grew and grew and grew until I learned how to start disrupting it and questioning it. And that was the game changer for me was realizing that that inner voice lied to me, not through any fault of its own. You know, it's evolved to keep us safe and to protect us. And so it fills us with fear and worry and self-doubt. And so I would just believe whatever that inner critic told me to do on autopilot and learning that it lied was the game changer for me and learning how to question it. A couple different things there that leads me into a concept you discuss in the book that I'm

always so interested in, which is what is this voice that is talking to us all the time? Because most of us, if we stop, we notice like it's just going on, on and on. I was on a silent retreat recently and I just, you know, nothing to do but hear the, hear the damn thing. Right. And I, you know, I walk away just always sort of astounded like if i had a friend who talked to me not only that negatively but just that boringly and repetitively and inanely i'd be like i would i wouldn't like four hours later i would be like i am never hanging out with that person again but that's it's what we have going on in our head. So let's talk about what that thing is. You name it the left brain interpreter. Tell us a little bit more

about what is this narrative that's happening? Right. So that's not my name. That's a name that comes from cognitive psychology, the left brain interpreter. And it's the name for that inner narrator that, as you said, just goes on repeat. And I love the way that you explain it. Like years to keep us safe. And it is constantly looking for threats. And we live in a world where there's not really a lot of threats anymore. Like, yeah, there's some environmental wackiness going on and maybe some political wackiness going on. But in terms of real threats, there's not much out there. So our left brain interpreter tends to make them up. And if it can't identify any obvious threats, it will find those threats within ourselves or with other people. So we start to look at other people as threats. And if we can't find another people, we'll find it in ourselves. There's science that explains how the left brain interpreter works and a science experiment that actually proves that this left brain interpreter will tell us lies because it just bases itself off the thoughts that we have.

And when we say things like, oh, I'm, you know, I'm so depressed today. Everything's just kind of crappy. It just will narrate our lives back to us with that same theme. So we're stuck in that vicious circle. Yeah, it's amazing because the studies that you're referring to, among many other, are the famous split-brain experiments. And what it sort of shows is that the science more and more and a lot of spiritual traditions tend to say that, you know what, there's not this one self in there. There's actually, there's a lot of things going on in our brain, consciously, subconsciously, you know, it's almost to think of it as a bunch of

different processes, right? And one of those processes is this left brain narrator who tries to explain everything. That's its primary job. I've also heard it referred to as the press secretary, right? It's trying to explain everything. And what some of these split brain studies show and people who have had their brain essentially split in half to stop them from having seizures is that one half of the brain will decide to do something. The other half of the brain that is the left brain interpreter has no idea why that side of the brain decided to do it, but it just immediately makes up some crazy reason. Right. Yeah. That it is completely unaware of. Right.

And so it's such an interesting thing to me that that brain is just going along trying to explain lots of stuff that it simply can't explain. It doesn't know, but it has to make a coherent story out of it. It has to. Like, for example, I remember going into my hotel room and I told my team, look, don't call me, don't text me. I want to have this private weekend with my partner. look, don't call me, don't text me. I want to have this private weekend with my partner. And just let me know if there's an absolute emergency. And I remember getting into my hotel room and looking across the room and seeing the red light on the hotel room phone lit up. And my first thought was like, oh shit, something's happened. there's a cash flow thing, like a client has freaked out, something really bad has happened. And my whole body was consumed with that thought, right? It was totally true in that moment. My stomach seized, my hands clenched, my jaw clenched.

And I walked over to the desk feeling that stress, you know, grow and grow and heighten and heighten. And I leaned over the desk and I saw that that red light indicated that the phone was charging. That was it. Nobody had called. But had I not gone over to factually ascertain why that red light was on, I would have stayed in that heightened, you know, fearful state. And so often in our lives, we are in that state, and we don't think to actually check factually whether what we believe is actually true. Right. And when you said earlier, that left brain interpreter will say, I'm so depressed, right? And then off will trigger these things. And I have started to really notice that phenomenon in me. It will say, I'm so depressed or another one that happens. My back hurts so bad. And then from there,

it'd be like, I don't know if I can take it. I, how long can I, everything hurts. I mean, it's just, and if I stop and go, well, hang on a second, like, how do I know I'm depressed? Right. How do I actually know I'm depressed? Or how do I know my back hurts? What does my back feel like? I almost suddenly realized, particularly with the back, that it doesn't hurt that bad. That there was this automatic sensation that arises. And then all of a sudden, that left brain interpreter takes off, right? My back hurts so bad, poor me. I can't stake. Everything hurts. What am I going to do? I just am like, whoa, hold on. I'm like,

it's really interesting. So let's talk about a big piece for you that you said of dealing with the inner critic. The judge would start to question those thoughts because noticing them is very important, right? Not resisting them is very important. Yeah, which is tough sometimes, but critical. And so is checking them for veracity, right? Like actually checking them to see if they are true. You know, I often think it's, you know, it makes sense to like allow the thought, the emotion to be not, not forcing it away, but then actually take a look at it pretty closely. So talk to me about how that worked for you. Well, I think the first thing is to actually understand that you are believing a thought. You

got to identify what that thought is. And the way that I do that is it'll creep up in my body. that thought is. And the way that I do that is it'll creep up in my body, something will go tight, and I will fall out of that ease state. And that's my cue to know that, okay, I'm believing something, I'm caught with this thought. And often what I used to do is whenever I felt in that state, I thought, you know, well, this is uncomfortable, and I want to be comfortable. So let's go and eat something, or let's go and drink something, or's go and drink something or let's fall asleep or watch something on Netflix, anything to have to deal with this thought, which of course never worked at all. Because I would just take that thought into the eating, the drinking, the Netflix, and then it would be doubly bad. So by identifying it and writing it down, what I then learned to do was inquire into it. And the way that I learned

to do that was through this woman, Byron Katie. And she has this system of self-inquiry called The Work. And you can find that online, thework.com. She's very free and open with it. Yeah. There's also a previous episode of us with Byron Katie, listeners, if you want to look for that, where I interviewed her. So it's another way. I couldn't encourage listeners to do, yeah, go and find that episode for sure. I had the privilege of going to the nine-day school, the school for the work, which is where I learned how to do the work. And just quickly to paraphrase how it works is it's taking that stressful thought, asking ourselves, is that true? And usually that first response would be, yeah, yeah, of course that's true,

because it's just a natural kind of habit. Like, yeah, of course I believe what I say. But then we say, is that absolutely true? And I add to that, in a court of law, can I 100% say that that is true? And usually in that question, I can find something, just a sliver of a doubt. And that is enough to start shedding some, like to let some light in. I think of that Leonard Cohen line, there's a crack in everything that's how the light gets in. We have to find that crack. And that question alone helps us identify that crack. And then the third question is, how do you react? What happens when you believe the thought? Which is a really easy question to answer, right? Like if I'm believing the thought that I've done a bad job on a presentation, I'll think, oh, well, I feel like I didn't try hard enough. And I feel like I'm being judged.

And I feel like I'm going to lose that client. And I feel like really angry with myself. And it's really easy to answer that question. And then the next question is, who would you be without that thought? And that can be a very difficult question to answer because you're so hooked onto that thought. And if it's really difficult to answer, it just shows you how in that thought you are. And when you're in that thought, you can't see anything else.

You are completely blinded. So then you answer that question and you realize as you answer it, how at peace and happy and full of joy you could be if you weren't believing that thought. Now, you can't magically let that thought go. There's no kind of magic that allows you to do that. And so Byron Katie gives us these three turnarounds where we take that thought and flip it to the opposite, to the other. And once we start working that thought through different lenses, usually we get to a place where it's like, that thought is like a complete lie. What

was I thinking? And there has been nothing that I've done the work on thus far that I wasn't able to find some kind of crack in. And Byron Katie argues there's really nothing out there that won't completely dissipate once you do the work on it. 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 two? 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. You were doing interviews for your book, and I think you asked me, what do you think of Byron Katie?

And I said, I actually think it's a very useful framework. It's sort of like cognitive behavioral therapy in certain ways. It's a structured method of behavioral therapy in certain ways. It's a structured method of inquiring into our thoughts. My question for you is sometimes it seems that thought causes emotion. And if it's a thought that's driving it, it's nice to unwind the thought. But a lot of other times it seems like emotion just springs out of, you know, out of something that you can't really identify. Do you have a method of working with when or does that even happen for you where it's like, well, I'm feeling this and I can't, I'm not even sure I can find a thought for it or I can see the thought and I know it's not true and I still feel terrible. That is something that I'm continuing to learn to do, which is to drop into my body to feel that emotion as opposed to staying up in my head and trying to tackle it through,

you know, what is the thought, doing the work on it, doing that kind of surgical precise thinking on it. Learning to identify an emotion requires an ability to just kind of drop down into one's body. And often we think we've identified that emotion, only to find that there is another emotion behind it. And for me, whenever I, the way that I know I'm in an emotional state is I'll feel it in my body, right? I've learned to understand the difference between mechanical pain, so pain that's come through, you know, if I've worked out too hard that day or if I haven't eaten properly or, you know, that kind of mechanical pain, most of the pain I feel is emotional. So when my toes curl up when I'm in traffic or, you know, my lower back starts to hurt if I think that somebody's not listening to me or

whatever the case is. And I'll drop into that and really just kind of be with that pain and see what emotion comes up in my chest. And I've learned not to take that first emotion. You know, I'll be able to identify it, but I've come to understand there's usually an emotion underneath that. And for me, the emotion underneath that tends to be fear. And once I've identified that as fear, then I can say, well, what is it that I'm fearful of? And then I can do the work on it. As you learned the work, you also learned about cognitive biases. And there was, we've talked on the show a bunch about them,

but there's one I don't know that we've talked about before, so I wanted to touch it. And it was the power of the default. Tell me what that is. So the power of the default, the way that I know cognitive biases is through my work in market research. You know, 20 years, like the past two decades of my career is trying to understand human behavior which is really ironic when you think about it because here I am with two decades of experience and I can't understand my own behavior but anyway I can now at least but remembering that 95 percent of people's brain activity is not based on rational thought. It's based on all sorts of weird filters and norms and, and, and cognitive biases. And so this particular bias, and there's hundreds of them,

but this particular bias, the power of the default is when we default back to behavior or habits that are just so ingrained, we don't think to question them. So for example, my default thought was wine will take my pain away. Wine at the end of the day, after a long day of work is gonna make me feel better. That's its job in life. And so getting home and grabbing that glass of wine, which would have been fine if it had just been one glass, but often, you know, you have dinner and that glass of wine, which would have been fine if it had just been one glass. But often, you know, you have dinner and that becomes two glasses. And then, oh, well, we may as well finish this bottle off so it doesn't go bad and whatever else you want to tell yourself. That was just, that was my routine. And once I started to understand the power of the

default, I looked at different aspects of my life and thought, what behavior am I defaulting to that don't really work for me anymore? And back then, I didn't see wine as something that was distracting me from dealing with painful thoughts. I saw it as something that was giving me extra calories. So that was the key reason, you know, a few years ago, why I identified wine as a default behavior that I wanted to change. And so rather than rip all the wine out of my fridge and force myself to drink tap water when I got home, I put new beverages into the fridge. So, you know, kombucha or diet sodas or, you know, stevia based type stuff, so that I knew that my natural bias was to put my hand into the fridge, because it was usually white wine that I drank, put my hand in the fridge. But this time,

I just grabbed something else other than wine. But it wasn't until I understood the power of the default that I was able to see that that was just default behavior. It wasn't truth. And now, I don't drink at all, actually, actually now I stopped in December which is just kind of a new interesting practice for me and one I'm still learning about um but I realize now that not drinking is helping keep me in that awareness you know like just just taking myself out of the awareness for the simple you know for, for the hangover that it often leads to or saying something really stupid to somebody. It's just not worth it. I'll take the awareness. Thanks. So it's just something I'm playing with. I don't know if it's a forever

thing, but it's working for me right now. So it's been about seven months then. So that's not a, it's not a short period of time to do it by any stretch. No, it's not. It's funny. I noticed the other day, there's a book called sober curious because it's not just me. Yeah, no, it's not. It's not.

Yeah. Yeah. I know more and more. I'm not a millennial. I'm gen X, but I know more and more millennials. I think the numbers among millennials are, um,

uh, you know, not, not drinking or wanting to see what life is like without alcohol. It's it's becoming a thing. I think we've grown up with a narrative that says like, well, if you're alcoholic, you need to stop. But if you're not alcoholic, so what? Right. And I think that that this speaks to a growing awareness, which is a good awareness that there are certainly stages along the way. And we've had Catherine Gray on a couple times,

and she wrote a book. I cannot remember the name of it. The Surprising Joy of Being Sober, perhaps? Something like that. You should read it. You would love it. But she says, here's a simple question. Would your life be better if you weren't drinking?

That's it. You don't have to get into, do I have a problem? Am I drinking too much? Would your life be better if you weren't? Am I drinking too much? Would your life be better if you weren't? And I thought that was such a powerful way of just sort of looking at that thing very simply without any of the cultural baggage that comes with addiction and sobriety and abstinence and all of that stuff. Yeah, that seems a very useful question. I was just talking about

it this weekend with friends of mine, and we were talking about how drinking and talking is just default adult behavior when you get together. Like, what else do you do besides have a glass of wine in your hand and talk? Like, we never did that as kids. Can you imagine kids sitting around with a glass of Kool-Aid and just shooting the shit? Like, no. And so what would we be doing if we didn't have alcohol in our hands? What would these social occasions look like? It's just an interesting thought experiment. Well, as somebody who doesn't drink for very important reasons, I'm happy to see more adults not drinking because it is sort of the default behavior. And you just, you know, sometimes you

feel like I'm just the odd person out here all the time. But and that's why finding people that are also sober is really helpful if you're trying not to drink all the time. Anyway, that was a slight distraction. So I want to get back to the concept of worry. And I'm just going to read something you wrote because I thought this was so good. And I just experienced it. This feeling of worry had been my normal for so long that I would even worry about worrying. On vacations, I would worry about how much time I had left, anxious to make the remaining days worry-free. Then I would recognize that being consumed by the worry, I wouldn't enjoy the actual vacation. Then I would worry about not enjoying it and then worry about worrying about not enjoying it, which makes me laugh. I was recently on vacation. I get

myself into the like, how many days left? How many days left? How soon? You know, it's the same thing. I'm like, oh, the vacation's half over. So I start worrying about the vacation being half. I mean, that's no good. I just had a wonderful vacation. Anyway, I just thought that was so instructive of the way worry works. It just consumes us. It consumed me. And so that was not something that happened on every second vacation. That was something that happened on every vacation. You know, I'd left the house and within two hours, you know, my first thought was like, did I turn the stove off?

Did I turn the stove off? Oh, great. I'm worrying already about this vacation. Oh, I thought this is going to be a different vacation. And then I, you know, kind of go down into that vicious spiral. And then I'd wake up and I'd be happy because I was on vacation. And then I would search my mind for like, oh, wait a second. I'm missing something. There's something I should be worrying. Right. That. Yes. I only have four more days left. And then it would kick back in. And

yeah, it was exhausting. What are some of your tools then for working with worry? Worry, I think of all the things that I've learned to do, not worrying is a big one. And I mean, if I added up all the hours of my life that I used to worry, who knows how many it would be. It's like way too many to even look at. Who knows how many it would be? It's like way too many to even look at. And worry is something that I have let go of because, and I don't mean 100%, but let's say if I was a worrier 100% of the time, I'm a worrier maybe 5% of the time now. It's pretty good. It is.

It's quite an achievement. Wait a second. Couldn't resist. And this isn't, this is something that's kind of developed itself because I'm used to pulling myself back to being present. And I have a number of ways of doing that. And whenever I catch myself veering into that worry stage, my first thought is, there's nothing I can do about that because I don't have any control over any of that. what is how I react to what's in front of me right here, right now. And that thought is enough for me to let the worry go. So it's no longer, and it's hours of my life, hours of my life that I get back, both when I'm asleep or trying to get to sleep and during my day, that I can now pour into things that I find really fulfilling and inspiring and engaging. So when people ask me if I lose my Achiever Fever, does that mean I won't perform anymore? Does that mean I'll lose my competitive spirit? And the only thing that we lose when we lose our Achiever Fever is worry, self-doubt,

and fear. And losing that worry has allowed me to gain so much more. Yep. That's wonderful. Well, we are at time here all of a sudden. So you and I are going to continue a conversation in the post-show conversation. I think we'll talk about some more of the practices that you did, and we'll explore a line that I loved, which is, I could see these things as irritating, or I could see them as practice. And that's a wonderful line. So we're going to explore that in the post-show conversation.

Listeners, if you are interested in getting those, as well as a weekly mini episode and other bonuses, go to oneufeed.net slash support. Well, Claire, thank you so much for coming on the show. It was a pleasure. It was a pleasure to have you on and talk to you. I really enjoyed the book. I got to give a blurb for it, which was kind of fun. So I'm happy to have, uh, happy to have gotten us to finally have this conversation.

So thank you. Thank you. 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?

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