The One You Feed - Robert Biswas-Diener

Episode Date: November 25, 2014

This week we talk to Robert Biswas-Diener about the upside of your dark side.Robert Biswas-Diener  is a psychologist, author and instructor at Portland State University. Biswas-Diener's research focuses on income and happiness, culture and happiness, and positive psychology.  Robert has written a number of books including Happiness: Unlocking The mysteries of Psychological Wealth and The Courage Quotient, and his latest book is called The Upside of Your Darkside:Why Being Your Whole Self, Not Just Your "good"Self -Drives Success and Fulfilment which was co-written with Todd Kashdan. In This Interview Robert and I Discuss...The One You Feed parable.Embracing both sides of our nature.The benefits of anger, guilt and other "negative" emotions.Thinking of emotions as a thermometer.How only having positive emotions is like breaking a thermometer.How we may not get as stuck in negative emotions as we think we do.The benefits of being emotionally agile or flexible.How avoidance and suppression is a bad approach.That suppression is a very blunt tool and you can't selectively suppress certain emotions.How avoidance is "the tectonic issue of our times"Comfort addiction- we have the ability to be more comfortable than any time in history.How comfort is not the same as happiness.Finding the middle ground between comfort and effort.Knowing is not the same as doing."Avoiding problems also means avoiding finding the solution to them".Emotional Time Travel Errors.Allowing ourselves to experience disappointment.How the ability to tolerate some degree of psychological discomfort is one of the key attributes to successful living.Robert Biswas Diener LinksRobert Biswas-Diener HomepageRobert Biswas -Diener Coaching Training ProgramRobert Biswas Diener on TwitterRobert Biswas-Diener TED Talk  Some of our most popular interviews that you might also enjoy:Kino MacGregorStrand of OaksMike Scott of the WaterboysTodd Henry- author of Die EmptyRandy Scott HydeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Suppression is a pretty blunt psychological instrument and what you get when you suppress negative feelings is you also suppress positive feelings. 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 no 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's in the museum of failure? And does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to really know really.com and register to win $500 a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition 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 today is Robert Biswas-Diener, a psychologist, author, and instructor at Portland State University. Biswas-Diener's research focuses on income and happiness, culture and happiness, and positive psychology. Robert has written a number of books, including his latest, The Upside of Your Dark Side, Why Being Your Whole Self, Not Just Your Good Self, Drives Success and Fulfillment. The book was co-written with Todd Cashton. Here's the interview. Hi, Robert. Welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. I am very excited to get you on the show. Your book is right up the alley of a lot of things that we talk about on the show. up the alley of a lot of things that we talk about on the show. One of our, I think our second interview ever was with a guy named Oliver Berkman, who wrote a book called The Antidote, Happiness for People Who Hate Positive Thinking. So we've explored a lot of the ideas in your book on the show before. So I'm looking at taking those to a different level. So our show is called The One You Feed, and it's based on the parable of two wolves, where there's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson, and he says, in life there are two wolves inside of us. 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 for a second, and he looks at his grandfather, and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, and he thinks for a second, and he looks at his grandfather, and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Sure. That's a fantastic way to open. I'm tickled by it, I have to tell you. And I think the overall interpretation of the parable hopefully is relatively straightforward. It speaks to people's internal worlds, all of their psychological states, their emotions, their attitudes, their values,

and so forth, as having a large impact in the world. That is, the world isn't just luck and circumstance, but it has to do with how you see things. And how you see things is largely the product of your own effort, your own attention, your own self-awareness, and so forth. And I would think that that's the one you feed is whichever one you put the effort or attention into. And I also like that it sort of dichotomizes things, you know, good and bad. You know, I know that there aren't just two types of people in the world, but I do sometimes see the utility in these kind of simplifications, not because they're somehow true, but because they're a great way to understand things. And I think that within all of us, we actually feed both wolves a tiny bit. I don't think anyone's totally just feeding one or the other.

What I find interesting is that your book is called The Upside of Your Dark Side. So you're really talking about how we do need to embrace both sides of ourselves as part of driving a life that has the most success and fulfillment in it. um because when you describe the traits of the bad wolf you know things like greed um those sound really awful you know they sort of sound seven deadly sins kind of uh stuff um and for most people i think they would say things like hatred rage greed i mean these these are just such terrible traits and and we would want to avoid them at all costs. And while I am mostly in agreement with that, I don't know that we always want to avoid every iteration of the dark side at all costs. And in fact, in certain instances, I think they're helpful. What are some of those instances where you think it's helpful?

So just to, you know, so that no one kills me, just to reiterate, I am a big fan of positivity. I do think it works for people. And I think it's where we should spend the majority of our time. And having said that, when I think about sort of the darker aspects of psychology, my co-author Todd and I divide them into three separate types. So you could have emotions, of course, thinking or cognition. And then we also talk about the social life and all the behaviors that go along with your social relationship. So let's just take the first of those because I think it's in many ways the easiest for people to understand. If you think about emotions and your feelings, there are a range of feelings, joy, enthusiasm, anticipation, love, that we think of as pleasant or positive.

And then a whole slew that we think of as negative. Those would be things like guilt, frustration, boredom, anger. And I think of emotions in general as being a thermometer basically emotions are we think of them as information they're just sort of taking the temperature of your day-to-day life you get that last parking spot you know close up to the store and your little emotional thermometer goes up you have this little burst of joy yay I got I got it. You get a flat tire, and oh no, you get this, you know, the thermometer goes down into the frigid regions where you're frustrated. I want everyone's thermometer to be working. And on the one hand, for the people who

take this idea of positivity too far, they say, you know, we should just always be positive all the time. We should never feel guilt. Anger is always toxic. It's essentially like saying, hey, let's break our thermometer so that it only measures half of the overall degrees. And I think that that's not a well thought through approach to living the full emotional life. Yeah, that's a really good analogy. One of the things that I ask people on the show a lot, one of our earlier guests mentioned in her book, but I'm always sort of asking myself, when is it positive thinking? And when is it sort of outright denial of things? And I always think that's such an interesting line to try and walk because I think you're

exactly right. I think if we ignore an entire emotional side of ourselves, that seems to always be problematic. And yet, how we think about things tends to affect also how we feel about things in a lot of cases. Oh, yeah. They're absolutely combined. And emotions in particular, part of our evolutionary birthright, I mean, the entire palette of emotions is there, is in existence to help us function. We didn't wind up with anger because, you know, it's just this sort of affective poison that exists within us that we have to tiptoe around. We ended up with anger because it has motivational consequences. It helps us defend ourselves.

It helps us take on challenges and rise to risky occasions, defend those we love. It actually can work for us. Guilt is the same way. Guilt is sort of a red flag waving, telling you that you violated your own ethics or values and that you need a course correction. While these are unpleasant, they are for good purpose. And I think that some of the prejudice against them has to do with a few misunderstandings about them. And one of them is that we're going to somehow get stuck in these emotions. You know, I think people especially feel like this about anger, that you're going to get carried away,

swept away, out of control. These are the types of phrases and language that people use around anger as if you're not you anymore. You become animalistic or that you're just going to just be, you know, the tsunami of emotion is going to carry you away and you won't have any control at all. And at the most extreme cases, that certainly could be true. But all of us, me, you, we all have a long history of being angry at things large and small. And we're not stuck there now. So at least at some point that those feelings eroded into other new feelings like joy or boredom or eagerness or what have you. I do these mini episodes where I just record myself talking.

They're clearly our least listened to episodes. Thanks all you guys out there. Anyway, I did one recently about rumination, right? This idea that this tendency to just circle around the same thing in our head over and over. So I'm somebody who certainly can get stuck. Now, we might, it sounds like what maybe you're saying is I'm not actually stuck in the feeling at that point so much as the thinking. Well, it could be and you're not, I think most importantly, you're not stuck permanently. I asked people today is just a little experiment on Facebook, I just posted,

when you get angry, normal anger, not absolutely enraged, the most angry you've ever been, and not just the tiniest amount of irritation, but whatever you perceive as normal anger, how long do you think it takes for you to recover? And some people wrote five minutes, some people wrote two to three days, which actually sounds like a long time to me. And a lot of people wrote sort of anywhere between one and four hours. And I think that that's actually pretty interesting. I don't know what the right answer is for you, but it might be interesting to keep track of your own angry episodes. Because if it's true that they only last two hours on average before you're sort of back to your calm, resting self,

it just may not be as bad as people believe. I mean, two hours of anger is not the end of the world. Right. It certainly isn't. I think that what I've wrestled with, and I think I agree, I think what you're talking about is people do get worried that they'll get stuck. And some people do have maybe a tendency to be maybe stuck isn't the right word. But you do certainly see people who are more perpetually in a certain emotion, perhaps than other than other people. I think we all know somebody who's kind of perpetually angry at most situations. And I'm sure that's not at all what you guys are driving at.

Yeah, that's right. And you're right. I mean, you know, there are people that seem, you know, perhaps because of genetic leanings that, you know, maybe are, you know, their needle is pointed a little bit grumpier than someone else's. So certainly you'll find individual differences. But you're right. We just want people to be able to be psychologically flexible, to be agile and flipping back and forth between the whole range of things. Because one of the things that people do around things like anxiety, stress, guilt, anger, boredom, is they try and avoid it because it feels unpleasant. And there are a few ways to avoid it. You can distract

yourself. You can have a beer. You can, in the case of boredom, whip out your smartphone. But one of the most common ways that people do it is they try and suppress it. That is, they tamp it down. And unfortunately, suppression is a pretty blunt psychological instrument. And what you get when you suppress negative feelings is you also suppress positive feelings. Suppression isn't a surgical knife. You can't suppress one without suppressing the other. And we find that people who suppress actually are more likely to become emotionally exhausted, they're more likely to quit their jobs, they're more likely to have health consequences as a result of kind

of trying to avoid these negative emotions. And we don't want people to dwell in anger or guilt, but we want people to be able to tolerate them, to feel them, and to acknowledge them as they come up, which happens to be the minority of the time. Hey, y'all. I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, host of Therapy for Black Girls. And I'm thrilled to invite you to our January Jumpstart series for the third year running. All January, I'll be joined by inspiring guests who will help you kickstart your personal growth with actionable ideas and real conversations. We're talking about topics like building community and creating an inner and outer glow. I always tell people that when you buy a handbag, it doesn't cover a

childhood scar. You know, when you buy a jacket, it doesn't reaffirm what you love about the hair you were told not to love. So when I think about beauty, it's so emotional because it starts to go back into the archives of who we were, how we want to see ourselves and who we know ourselves to be and who we can be. So a little bit of past, present and future, all in one idea, soothing something from the past. And it doesn't have to be always an insecurity. It can be something that you love. All to help you start 2025 feeling empowered and ready. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls starting on January 1st on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. use 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.

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$500, a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition sign Jason bobblehead. It's called really know really and you can find it on the I heart radio app on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. You said somewhere in the book that avoidance is the tectonic issue of our times. Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's something that's happening more and more. We call it comfort addiction. And the basic argument goes like this. Modern people are more able to achieve comfort than at any time in human history. And I know people, they get a little angry about this, and they say, oh, what are you talking about? Are, you know, living standards really going up? And, you know, we had this hard economic

time in 2008. And while all of that's true, I would point people to the year 1708 or the year 1008. And yes, we are far, far more comfortable than those people are. We have space-age foams that we can make beds with, we have microwave popcorn, we have cars that can take us huge distances, we have incredibly smart phones that can entertain us at a whim. We really do have a lot of physical and psychological comforts available to us. And as comfort becomes our new natural resting state, we become a little bit out of practice with discomfort. And you find this more and more with the idea, for example, of helicopter parenting and parents, you know, trying to take the burden or negotiate life for their children. And what it leads to maybe is

their kids continue to advance, but what their kids don't get to do is contend with disappointment, contend with frustration or confusion or boredom or all of these things that are really implicated in the learning process. I think that comfort thing is a big one. We talk often about that comfort is not the same thing as happiness or fulfillment. If comfort is the main thing that we're striving for, it's easy for, at least for me, my life can shrink really, really fast. There's less and less that I'm going to do because everywhere I go, I'm going to be more uncomfortable. And so my life just gets smaller and smaller. I'm going to be more uncomfortable. And so my life just gets smaller and smaller. One of the things that I think is so interesting about it and comfort addiction, I wrestle with it as much as anyone else. This isn't me just wagging my finger and saying, in the good old days, everything was wonderful and look at the kids now. When we want to relax, we really gravitate towards comfort. Think lying on the beach, to relax, we really gravitate towards comfort. Think lying on the beach, think a bubble bath, those types of things. But when we want to grow and learn, we knowingly take on discomfort. So

think, for example, if you're privileged enough to be able to take an overseas trip, you do that knowing that there's a lot of uncertainty there, that you're going to have to contend with novelty and unpredictability, that you might get lost, that you'll be confused. And you assume that through that challenge, you'll find it a very rewarding kind of self-growth experience. So even there, I like to guide people to be agile and flip back and forth. There's nothing wrong with comfort, but comfort and sort of novelty slash challenge act like a seesaw, and you can kind of go back and forth between them. Yeah, I did an interview a couple weeks ago, we haven't released it yet, but where the guest talked about something called cotton candy comfort, that the way we, very similar to what you described described that when we are trying to

uh you know comfort ourselves in some ways we tend to do things that are um they you know sort of like cotton candy right very sweet at first but no real lasting effect and you usually don't feel a lot better afterwards i can't wait to listen to that interview it sounds it sounds good although i wouldn't throw out all comfort because I think there is a time and a place to lay on the beach or to take a bubble bath. And we expect those to have short-term effects. You don't expect the bubble bath you took last year to make you feel relaxed this year. So I think those are okay. I don't think we only have to be steeped in meaning and growth all the time without ever letting our hair down.

But I also wouldn't want to go the other way where we're only relaxed and never facing hardship or challenge or growing. that middle ground that makes sense, that being too far on either of those extremes with that or with indulging or suppressing emotions or all that stuff, that there's a place that sits in the middle. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, kind of an interesting, if I could just kind of pull back the curtain on, you know, show you the inner workings of this book as it came about, a few people have reacted to the book sort of like, oh, well, of course, what you're making, what you're saying makes sense. But, you know, like, it has a so what effect, like, well, of course, you should sometimes feel bad and sometimes feel good. Of course, you should sometimes relax and sometimes grow. But I usually respond by saying, well, you know, in the creation of this book, we came across not one person or dozens of people, but literally hundreds of people that strongly prefer one way or the other.

We wrote this book in part to address a real-world phenomenon. And that phenomenon is that there are people that that truly believe anger is never appropriate there are people who truly believe that comfort is never appropriate just as there are people who who believe that comfort is always appropriate so right so it's kind of it's you know these are real these are real people out in the real world you know so I do think it there this does matter and it's maybe less obvious to some people as it may at first. Oh, I think 100%.

I often think that knowing something is fine, right? It's great, I know it, but can I actually live it? And that's a whole other jump of complexity and effort. And so, yeah, it's obvious. Yes, we should try not to go to extremes in either of those things. But, boy, day to day, that is a lot more challenging. Yeah, that's I'm so glad you brought that up. And in fact, because, you know, I'm as guilty of that as absolutely anyone.

And one of the places that I've really noticed this popping up in my own life is just as a parent. And there have been times when, for example, my son has been bored or where I have to disappoint my son, something that he desperately wants to do. And my wife and I just have to say no to him. In the past, I think before writing this book, I had a really hard time with that. And now I almost take a sort of absurd glee in it. You're like, oh, you're bored. That's so great. What an amazing opportunity for you, which drives him crazy, of course. But I really have noticed that in the creation of this book, it has changed my attitude about occasional negative feelings. Yeah, one of the things that you said about avoidance, and I have a classic avoidance streak in me, give me an opportunity to avoid, and if I'm sort of on autopilot, I will avoid. But you had a line in there that really struck me, which said that unfortunately, avoiding problems also means avoiding finding the solutions to them, which I thought was really profound. Well, absolutely. I mean, use the kind of just a modern classic example of someone who has a huge amount of credit card debt. And the way that often people who are burdened with this

fiscal and psychological weight, what they do is they just don't think about it. They don't make minimum payments. They don't make larger than minimum payments. They don't make any payments. They just kind of wish it would go away. And that avoidant strategy turns out not to be very good. First of all, because you can't avoid what's inside you, which is the feeling.

So they end up really continuing to feel bad, even while not paying. And then of course, the problem lingers. So really, it's not a great way to head towards a solution in the long term. Yeah, it is a seductive one, at least for me. But I think that's part of, like you said, writing the book for you made you aware of a lot of those things. And that's the, that's part of, like you said, right in the book for you, made you aware of a lot of those things. And that's, that's what this show does for me is it keeps me aware of these things so that I just don't sort of drift into my habitual patterns or at least try to have that happen. Hey y'all, I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, host of Therapy for Black Girls. And I'm thrilled to invite you to our January Jumpstart series for the third year running.

All January, I'll be joined by inspiring guests who will help you kickstart your personal growth with actionable ideas and real conversations. We're talking about topics like building community and creating an inner and outer glow. I always tell people that when you buy a handbag, it doesn't cover a childhood scar. You know, when you buy a jacket, it doesn't reaffirm what you love about the hair you were told not to love. So when I think about beauty, it's so emotional because it starts to go back into the archives of who we were, how we want to see ourselves, and who we know ourselves to be and who we can be. It's a little bit of past, present, and future, all in one idea, soothing something from the past.

And it doesn't have to be always an insecurity. It can be something that you love. All to help you start 2025 feeling empowered and ready. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls starting on January 1st on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You talk in the book about something else that I'm always very intrigued by. I describe it as sort of not really knowing what's going to make us happy, but you've got a different term for it called emotional time travel errors. Can you talk a little bit more about where you see that fitting into this?

Sure. So, you know, I didn't create that myself. You know, I want to give credit where credit's due. But it turns out that on the one hand, happiness is wonderful. If you feel positive emotions, you're more likely to get good customer evaluations, better supervisor evaluations, you'll live longer, you'll make more money, I mean, all sorts of benefits. But then there are also a whole bunch of problems with happiness too. And one of these is we've spent a lot of our time making decisions based on predicted future happiness. I'm going to purchase a relatively expensive ticket to Hawaii based on the idea that a vacation there will yield some kind of happiness dividend for me, that I would enjoy the beach, that

I'll have good food, that I'll enjoy my time with my family, it'll be relaxing, and so forth. But some of those predictions turn out to be wrong. Not entirely wrong. I mean, it doesn't turn out that Hawaii is just awful. I mean, it's pretty great. But we tend to think that the happiness payout will last longer than we expect and that it will be more intense. But it turns out, you know, you take that trip to Hawaii, just using this example, and really you get a mild of happiness, and it's mixed in with a whole bunch other stuff. Maybe they lose your luggage on the airline. Maybe you have a bout of food poisoning. Maybe it rains two of the days you're there. So it's not just perfect bliss, but it's pretty good, and overall, you like it. And then you come back to work following your one-week vacation,

And then you come back to work following your one-week vacation, and it sort of doesn't linger. You kind of expected it to make you happy for the next two months, and it basically paid out happiness for about two days afterwards. So I think that's an interesting thing, because people are making real-world decisions about which job should I take, which person should I marry, where should I retire, based on these kinds of assumptions. Yeah, that is a very tricky one, understanding what will make us happy. I've certainly often found that I think it's this thing, I have a tendency to be like, it's this thing out there, and then when it occurs, I don't really feel all that different. And it can be sort of startling. One of the things as you were talking, I was thinking about, you mentioned the weather on the vacation. And I've been working on creating a short course for some of the listeners on a book that I love, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. And the first part of that book is about being proactive. And it starts to border on that

controlling your emotion state to some degree. The way he describes it is that a proactive person sort of carries their weather inside of them. And so if it's a day they plan to go outside and it's raining, they're able to still find a way to make that a positive experience. And I'm curious how you guys describe, how do you move from, all right, I want to feel what I genuinely feel in my emotions, and yet I don't sort of want to be on the roller coaster of what the outside world's throwing at me? Yeah, it's a great question. If I had a perfectly bottled, you know, magical answer for you, I would probably be the smartest person in the world. And then, you know, people would be studying me 2000 years from now. So I'll give you a more feeble answer with my apologies. I think that

you acknowledge your emotional state. So if you're really looking forward to a long walk on the beach and it happens to be pouring rain, which discounts what you had chosen, it's okay that you feel disappointed. You don't need to kind of in an inauthentic way say, oh my goodness, I'm absolutely so thrilled that this happened because it gives me the opportunity to take up jigsaw puzzles at home. Much in the same way that you find this around self-growth experiences that follow traumas. While many people grow from traumas, you would never wish a trauma on someone just for the growth they might experience as a result. So I think that that's a bit disingenuine to just say, oh, these are the

best opportunities ever. It doesn't sit well with me anyway. But I also don't think you need to be mired in the emotional experience. That disappointment need not linger for four or five hours because it's a relatively minor emotion. So I think there's something about the duration of the emotion. That is, you acknowledge the emotion and its legitimacy. I'm disappointed that I didn't get to do what I wanted. I'm going to kind of feel that.

I'm not going to try and hide that. I might even complain openly about it. That's an OK thing to do. And then, after experiencing it for some small amount of time, I'm going to move on past it. I don't need to get rid of it or anything. I'm just going to continue my day with new activities, indoor activities, using our example. I think that's, I had an example very similar to that exact thing today. Something happened. I was disappointed. My initial reaction was to be like, oh no, it's fine. It's fine. And then I went, all right, you know what? I'm just going to, okay, yep. I'm disappointed by this.

And I did even, I expressed it and then kind of got back to it. I think, and you write, you talk about this in the book. I don't, I don't have the words exactly, but it's, I think it's the thoughts that we add to that so often. Like, it's always my luck. It rains when I go to the beach. I mean, I have the worst luck. You know, those stories that then are driving that emotion home in some way that are not necessarily really based on reality at all. That's right.

That's right. And in all honesty, this comes right back to which But do you fuel the fires? Do you stoke them? Or do you let the coals, you know, kind of burn down and go out on their own, leaving room for new emotional experiences? Yeah, I think that's a great way to put it. We are getting near the end of the time. But before we do, I wanted to ask a question about something that you guys reference in the book. And I've just heard about it a few times now recently, but I don't know what it is, and it's acceptance and commitment therapy? Sure, yeah. We briefly reference it. It's a form of therapy, and I want to preface this by saying, although I do have a graduate degree in clinical psychology, I don't work as a therapist, so I'm not going to talk too in-depth about it. But it's a relatively new form of therapy, and it's part of a whole bunch of therapies that are known

largely as mindfulness-based therapies. That is, they have at their core some degree of mindfulness or meditative meditation type training where you can acknowledge your emotional experience. It's sort of like watching it up on stage saying, yes, there it is. But that stage play I'm looking at in front of me, it doesn't need to define me or the the totality of my experience and and skilled act or skilled acceptance and commitment therapists have a variety of tools for helping people to tolerate unpleasant states and largely through through meditation through acceptance and so forth yeah that's one of the very things you guys start with and in the beginning of the book and talk a lot about

is that idea that one of the biggest indicators of success in test after test in different areas of life is the ability to tolerate some degree of psychological discomfort. Yeah, absolutely. And that's what I would kind of wish for your listeners. I mean, I don't want people to go out and have to suffer in a truly large way. But I don't mind if your listeners can't find a parking spot for a little bit or if they get stuck in traffic. I don't mind if they're bored while they wait for the bus. to tolerate those kind of small stakes, negative circumstances, I think that's a great way to kind

of build up your psychological muscles so that when the bigger stuff does come around, and it inevitably will, you're better prepared for it. Great. Well, I think that is a really good spot to wrap up. So thanks so much for being on the show. This has been a really enjoyable talk, and I'll have links on the site to your book. And thanks for taking the time to talk with us. It was absolutely my honor. Thank you so much. All right. Take care. Bye. Bye-bye. you can learn more about robert biswas deaner you can learn more about robert biswas deaner at one you feed.net slash robert biswas slash Robert Biswostein. They're like,

fucking like I'm going to remember that. You can learn more about Robert Biswostein. Giggly. You can learn more about Robert Biswostein. I don't even honestly know what to say because Robert, I think, has been used, right? I don't think so. No?

Okay. I don't know. All right. You can learn more about Robert Biswostiner at oneufeed.net slash Robert.