The One You Feed - Why Anxiety is Good For You with Tracy Dennis-Tiwary

Episode Date: August 4, 2023

Tracy Dennis Tiwary is a renowned emotion scientist and clinical psychologist. Her expertise in emotions, particularly anxiety, gives us a refreshing perspective on how we perceive our fears and hopes. By breaking down the elements of anxiety and explaining its adaptive purpose, she provides effective strategies for managing stress and anxiety. As she explores the link between anxiety and hope, Tracy highlights the importance of emotional agility in prioritizing mental health and fostering resilience. In this episode, you’ll be able to: Uncover the unexpected advantages of embracing your stress Challenge the common misconceptions about success Discover tactics to navigate stressful situations and learn to cultivate resilience Identify and tackle the root causes of your stress and anxiety Understand the importance of fostering a culture that supports mental wellness Harness the hidden potential in stress and turn it into fuel for personal growth To learn more, click here!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Fear has nothing to do with the future. It has nothing to do with uncertainty as a functional emotion. It evolved to help us handle certain present danger. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our

actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to really no

really.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 tracy dennis tuari a scientist entrepreneur and author she's a professor of psychology and neuroscience director of the emotion regulation lab at hunter college the city university of new york and co-founder and cso of arcade therapeutics where she translates cutting-edge neuroscience research into gamified, clinically validated digital therapeutics for mental health. Tracy has been featured throughout the media, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, NPR, and many others.

Today, Eric, Ginny, and Tracy discuss her book, Future Tense, Why Anxiety is Good for You, Even Though It Feels Bad. But before we do, we'll start with the parable like we always do, and I'm going to let Ginny do it. Sure. All right. So the parable goes like this. There's a grandparent talking with their grandchild, and they say, In life, there are two wolves inside of us who are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And one is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear.

And the grandchild stops and thinks about it for a second, looks up at their grandparent and says, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to ask you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. For me, that parable, it's a really fascinating one because in the work I'm doing in mental health, in reconceptualizing how we think about anxiety, we're confronted with binaries all the time. I think a lot of us have come to think of mental health as the absence of emotional discomfort.

And similarly, anxiety, it is a disease or it's a character flaw, right? So we're very used to thinking in these binaries. And what do you do with a binary? One's good, one's bad. You somehow make the other one perfectly present in your life and you destroy the other. And the thing about that parable, what's salient to me is that both wolves are always there. So it's not like the job of the individuals to destroy the bad wolf per se, at least that's not what it speaks to me as saying. It's acknowledging that that bad wolf is there. And so what I think about and talk about a lot these days in reference to my book and sort

of getting out there and trying to talk to people about anxiety a bit differently than a lot of mental health professionals do. It's to say, you know, anxiety can be a disorder, but actually we're all born anxious. We all have anxiety. It's actually something we evolved to have that's an incredible ally. So to only treat it as an enemy, as the bad wolf, is actually setting us up to do more unhelpful things, things that aren't useful when it comes to actually living well with anxiety and learning to be anxious in the right way. You start the book off by quoting a philosopher who says,

whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate. Tell us a little bit more about that because it seems to point to there being a right way and a wrong way to be anxious. Yeah. In some ways, I think the wrong way is when we struggle with anxiety disorders. And so it's really important to start by making that distinction between what is anxiety and what is an anxiety disorder. So anxiety, you have to start and say it's an emotion. I'm a clinical psychologist by training. I do neuroscience research, but I'm also an emotion scientist. And all of us emotion scientists are Darwinians, essentially. There's something called functional emotion theory, where we're really drawing on Darwin's theory, a third of which

had to do with emotions. His third book in his theory was the expression of emotion in man and animals. And in that, Darwin and emotion scientists talk about, well, why do emotions exist? How do they help our survival? Why are they adaptive? And anxiety is an emotion that is apprehension about the uncertain future. A temporary set of thoughts and feelings are that experience of anguish or angst about the future. And that's important because we're starting out by saying that anxiety is temporary.

Right? So like every emotion, we have an emotion. It rises. It lasts for a while. It falls. It's of a certain intensity. They don't last forever. But when we're anxious, a lot of us fear that it's going to spiral out of control immediately because it feels really bad.

immediately because it feels really bad. And a lot of, I think, young people feel that way too, that as soon as that little twinge and the butterflies in your stomach starts, I think kids have learned to fear that it's going to go into a panic attack immediately. But we don't think that way about other emotions. Like when we're really happy, we don't think, oh boy, let's pump the brakes on this one because it might spiral into like overwhelming joy. So it's really important to know that anxiety is an emotion. It's temporary and it's all about the future. So it exists in the space between where we are now and where we want to be. So that when we're anxious, we become these mental time travelers where we're thinking

around the bend and there could be something bad that happens. So I'm anxious about doing a podcast interview with two wonderful people and I hope it goes well, but it might be a disaster. So you're thinking about this future with that negative possibility. But you also know when you're anxious that something good is still possible because otherwise you would be despair. You'd give up. But anxiety keeps you in it to win it.

So it's this emotion that's helping us look to this uncertain future and manage it so that we can thrive. And it spurs us like every emotion, not just to get that information about the future and think about it, but then to prepare for it. So it's not just fight flight. Maybe it prepares us to protect ourselves, but anxiety also prepares us to think outside the box, to persist, to be creative, to seek social connection so that we can find support. So anxiety is doing all of these things. When we lean into it, when we take it as information and preparation and gain skills to ride that wave of anxiety, that's being anxious in the right way.

And when we have times in our life when we're not so good at that, we're still being anxious in the right way. Anxiety can be really intense and really bad many days of our lives, but we only have an anxiety disorder, which is perhaps being anxious not in the right way when it's causing functional impairment, the ways we're coping with those feelings. So if we're socially anxious, we refuse to go on that podcast. We stop going to work. We cut off from our friends.

We're disrupting our life in these ways that limit our joy and our emotional repertoire and our ability to do what we need to do. So for me, almost all anxiety is a right emotion. And this life is to help us figure out how to use anxiety as an ally and negotiate it so that we can create that future we want. It's so skillful because, I mean, anxiety is a universal human experience. So if we make that the problem, then, you know, we're very often going to be faced with something that we're trying to get rid of, but we can never rid our life of. So that's quite the battle to engage in daily. It's impossible.

It's impossible. So this other stance of saying, well, what's its purpose? And, you know, how can I work with it skillfully is radical and really radically life-changing, I think. You know, you talked about anxiety is anxiety about an uncertain future. And it occurred to me when you said that, I was like, is that somewhat redundant? I mean, isn't the future fundamentally uncertain? Yes, exactly.

Because, I mean, even if we think like, well, in just a minute, she's going to answer the question I just asked. Well, also, you could stand up in an unforeseen,foreseen fit of rage and storm out the door because I offended you. I mean, we never know really what's going to happen. So if the future is always uncertain and anxiety is an inevitability of life, then I think working with it, not it as the problem, but the way we might be interacting with it as quite the thing we can work with is smart. You said that anxiety is a fascinating emotion because it acts a lot like fear, but contains qualities of hope. As soon as I read that, I thought, oh, yes, yes, it does. There is positivity. You know, faced with uncertainty, we tend to think only of like certain doom and gloom and failure and awful things happening.

But actually, there's an element of good and hope for good that's there. Can you talk a little bit more about that connection between anxiety and hope? Yeah, that's one of my favorite parts of anxiety too, because it's in that space between where we are now and where we could be in that uncertain, redundant, uncertain future. What else exists there? Creativity, hope. You're in it to win it still when you're anxious. As painful and as overwhelming and terrible as it can be, you have not given up. And it's also important when we say it can look like fear to know that it's not quite the same as fear because fear has nothing to do with the future. It has nothing to do with uncertainty as a functional emotion. It evolved to help us

handle certain present danger. So fear is that snake crawling across the room right now about to bite me, which it's not for anyone who's listening to this. But if it were, I would have no doubts that there's a snake right there, you know, and it looks dangerous to me. And fear is that information of present danger, and it prepares me to fight, take flight, or freeze. That's the preparation. That's not anxiety. I'm anxious about a hike I might want to take next week where I heard there were sightings of snakes. And as I'm thinking about that, I'm thinking, oh, I love this hike, but there could be some dangerous snakes. So with that uncertainty, what does anxiety help me do? I think, well, I could not go or I could

prepare. I could maybe not go on the trails where it's not so sneaky. I could information seek. I could bring, I don't know, anti-venom, but it allows you to actually, hopefully work towards and build that future you want where you can thrive. So fear helps us deal with the fact that there's snakes in the world and anxiety helps us create a world in which we can have awesome hikes. So for me, I think this is an essential emotion. And when we reject it, we're just cutting off what evolution has handed us as perhaps the most powerful ally we have in navigating uncertainty, which is the human condition, which is the condition of every living thing on the planet. So that's why I think that you just have to hold the two together. Yeah, you say that what will happen next contains both positivity and peril.

It's both. I love that distinction too between fear is the present moment. When you're afraid, you're in the present moment. When you're anxious, you've time traveled. Yes. And it can also teach you a little bit about what you care about, what you wish for, what you want. When you listen to it. When you listen to it.

When you don't reject it out of hand. Yeah. And that's the key. Yeah. When you don't reject it out of hand. And that's the key. Yeah. orientation in life should be towards the future and building the future we want, part of our life experience is also very much about how we are feeling now. So how do you think about balancing that? Like, okay, I do want some degree of anxiety because it does help me prepare for the future wisely. But a lot of it, even if it doesn't become functionally impairing, an awful lot of it might

render the quality of my life. Even if the things on the outside are working out like, well, I got prepared for that interview and it went well, but I've been miserable for three days up till then. Right. So talk about that balance, because I think that's not what you're saying is like any amount of it that tortures you is fine as long as it produces good results. No, thank you. That is such a crucial point and question. Right. If we just say, well, if anxiety is going to take me into the future, I'm just going to be a type A hamster wheel, like, you know, diet 50, you know, from a heart attack kind of person.

And that's definitely not what I'm saying. Here's the thing. We have to be like emotional ninjas in our life, I think, to be healthy. I think that when we do think of mental health as the absence of emotional discomfort, but really it's the ability to work through, to struggle with, to do the messy work that it takes to be human, right? And to bear that suffering sometimes and that discomfort, right? That's what mental health is in my mind. We don't talk about it that way in this sort of mental health industrial complex kind of way. I think most of us don't intend to send that message, but I think that's the message we have. So when I'm thinking about what we need to do to both have a quality of life in the present,

but work through the inevitable anxiety in our life, I think that instead of going right to the letting go, right to the, let's just be in the present, or let's just, we actually have to build skills with anxiety so that we can do just as you're saying, not let it become this misery producer in our life. And I think actually, when we engage with anxiety, we will find more joy, more optionality, more creativity. So I sort of frame the approach we can take to shift our mindset about anxiety in this way as the three L's that you have to first build skills in listening to anxiety and then leveraging it, which is, as you say, the sort of future thinking and, but then always then letting go. And in that process of listening,

like what is anxiety telling me if it's waking me up at 4 a.m. and it's like woken me up at 4 a.m. every single morning this week? This is not a quality of life, right? But we can't just suppress it. Everything we suppress comes back stronger. We can't even necessarily ignore it or medicate it. You know, there's something that is not right in our life. And so to figure out if there is something to figure out, we first have to build skills in listening to it and saying, okay, I'm worrying at 4am. Let me breathe. And let me just see what is this telling me what's rising to the surface in this maybe what's a chaos of thinking. And this, by the way, happened to me three days ago. So I'm just gonna repeat to you what happened. And I thought, okay, I'm not tuning into what's going on. I'm not tuning into what's going on.

And when I just sat with that really ugly, uncomfortable feeling, what rose to the surface is that I had had a conversation with a coworker that I really didn't feel good about. And I'd been sort of sweeping it under the rug and thinking, oh, whatever, just it was, but it wasn't good. And I realized that this was something that was at least one of the things that was driving this discomfort. And when I was able to just listen to that, all of a sudden I was like, oh, this is what I need to do. And that's the leveraging. That's the second L. And again, sometimes anxiety won't reveal its message. But I think that most of the

time you're going to get something out of that that's actionable, that allows you to make your life better, to be a better human. If it's all about just achieving, achieving, and oh, I'm anxious because I need to make $5 million this year and I'm not making it, you're going to make plans to make $5 million and then you're going to wake up the next morning miserable too. So there's this way of saying, okay, I'm going to do some things. How do I let go and then come back to the present where I can be rejuvenated, where I can find flow, back to the present where I can be rejuvenated, where I can find flow, where I can connect to people, to place, to purpose, like when I can bring those things. If you're not agile like a ninja and able to move from the future to the present, to

the past and back again, that's not how we're going to achieve a quality of life. So I think we have to do more to engage in the future in this future tense way of thinking, like this productive, accepting way, like an ally you need to negotiate with. But we can't forget to build those skills to then come back and let go and be fully, you know, in the present as well. So it's this dance. well. So it's a stance. So I think what you're pointing to is an idea. I think I first learned from acceptance of commitment therapy and Stephen Hayes, which is to ask, is this emotion useful? Yes. Like for me, that seems to be sort of the litmus test of, is it useful? And oftentimes anxiety is to a point. Yes. And I think most of us know this experience of, all right, I'm anxious about something. I think about it like your coworker. And you realize like, okay, it's about my coworker. And okay, I know what I'm going to do now. Tomorrow, I'm just going to need to sit down with her and have a conversation. And here's what I'm going to say. And then that would be the point

at which continuing to think about it becomes unuseful, perhaps. Right, which is why that flexibility that we can practice day by day, little by little, with like definite steps backwards as well, that's going to allow us to dance with anxiety more effectively. Now, as you say, not all anxiety is useful. And it's hard to know the difference. But, you know, I've been a mental health professional for 20 years. useful. And it's hard to know the difference, but I've been a mental health professional for 20 years. And I actually defended my dissertation on September 11th, 2001. Wow. At nine in the morning.

Wow. Before the towers fell. And when I came out, the world had changed. Wow. And I knew more than ever that this was the work I needed to do in this world where mental health was going to be the public health crisis of our time. I was a New Yorker at the time and still am. So I put my head down and for 20 years, I did the work. And I know that we have great science around anxiety disorders. We have incredible treatments that are really, really helpful for a lot of people. We have medication that I do think is over-prescribed, but for a lot of people, allows them to get in that boxing ring so they can put on the boxing gloves and do that work. But the rates of anxiety disorders have continued to go up.

And there's some disconnect. And what I see is the disconnect is the bottleneck in another way is that our mindset about anxiety is always the enemy is actually blocking us from learning these skills from actually engaging with anxiety in ways that can make it our ally, that we can learn to know when it's useful and when it's not. If you never allow yourself to feel anxiety or you reject it, not only will you not build coping skills, but you'll never learn to tell the difference between a useful and a not useful experience of anxiety. So that's something that I'm very committed to saying, listen,

anxiety disorders exist. I have devoted my life to trying to help in that arena, to understand the anxious brain, to develop treatments. But when we treat all anxiety like a disease, we are literally, it's a recipe for doing the wrong things when it comes to coping with and living well with anxiety. I think in your book somewhere you say, I may not get your words exactly right, but that it's not so much we have a public health crisis of anxiety. It's a public health crisis of how we relate to anxiety. That's right. And how we cope with it. And that's really what the definition of an anxiety disorder is. Again, you can have lots of anxiety. It can feel really bad. And it does feel bad. It sucks. But you will not be diagnosed with an anxiety disorder unless

it's causing that functional impairment. And actually the tricky part about anxiety is it has to feel bad to do its job. It has to feel unpleasant. For as you were saying, Eric, because we're in the future when we're anxious and it takes a lot of resources to be in the future. And, you know, from thinking about prehistoric people, like imagine that they're sitting around the fire. They have a full belly. I always tell the stories like there's a saber tooth tiger somewhere. There's always in my mind. It must be too much like Flintstones or something. I don't know what it is. I was going to say, Darwinists always bring up the saber tooth tiger. It's never like a bear

or a wolf. It's always a saber tooth tiger. I know. But there it is. and it's in my mind's eye. And, you know, the fear helped you handle the saber-toothed tiger when you, like, ran into the cave, and there they were, and you had to run really fast, right? Yeah. But you're sitting around the fire, and if you didn't have anxiety, which feels so uncomfortable, making you think about, okay, the sun's going down. I need to find shelter. I just went into a cave, and there were saber-toothed tigers, and that's not going to work. Like, what do I do in this future that I'm not in now? Because I'm really comfortable with my full belly right now. But anxiety is telling you, oh, well, you have to

scout out new caves and you might even want to build a, oh, you can build your own shelter and, you know, fast forward, you know, 20,000 years and you have a civilization. Yeah. So I can think of anxiety. By its unpleasantness, forcing us to do the most amazing things to navigate the fundamental uncertainty of life. It's a civilization builder. A few minutes ago, you talked about a snake on the floor, right? And there's a lot of cords in here. Ah. So I've heard it in the Buddhist tradition. I don't know if the Buddha said it.

I don't know where it comes from exactly. But there's an idea that you step in somewhere in the dark and you think you see a snake and you're afraid. But it turns out it was just a cord. Yeah. So in what ways do we work with that sort of fundamental misunderstanding sometimes of what really is dangerous or what is really problematic. I've heard someone once say that our evolutionary heritage was great for survival, but not great for being happy. And so I'm kind of curious what you think about that statement. I kind of asked you two questions. There's that statement and there's the when we see danger when there isn't really danger necessarily. So the solution to both of those human challenges is to engage anxiety.

There's no way you can tell the difference between a snake and a cord if you haven't danced with those feelings. There's just no way around it. You have to go through. have to go through. I think when you see Buddhist thinkers, Hindu thinkers, any spiritual tradition, really Western traditions as well, there's this idea that to know the fullness of your humanity, you have to engage with those darkest parts. And again, back to the parable, that wolf isn't going anywhere. We're not destroying the wolf. It's impossible. We all have two wolves. So I really strongly believe that no matter where you are on the spectrum of anxiety, we're all on the spectrum.

We're all born anxious. Right. And so when someone says, I have anxiety, you're like, me too. Now, like, what do we do with it? That's how my mind works around it. But when we acknowledge that we're all on that spectrum, we can start to have more discrimination and more understanding and wisdom about how to tell that difference. We can only do that by practicing and failing and then getting back up again and

trying again. And happiness, and I think the Buddhists might agree with me on this, is not the absence of emotional discomfort. But we Americans especially tend to think of it that way. And we mental health professionals have convinced people of that, that unless you check off 20, or rather 200 boxes on the happiness checklist, 200 out of 200, you're failing at happiness. And it's just the worst possible mindset to have when it comes to mental health. I think we need to start talking about happiness as the struggle. I think we need to talk about happiness as the full range of emotion and knowing that in those darkest moments, do I have the capacity and the great blessing of having community to help me? Do I have purpose? Do I fail at purpose and then find it again?

So I just think we need to change the whole story. 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.

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One of the things I loved about your book is how you take this big tangled ball of yarn called anxiety, and you start to help us untangle it by getting specific with language. Like you just said a minute ago, which is fear is this, anxiety is this. Here's a difference. Let's get specific because I think it really helps us to have precise language for our feelings. To be able to name it, we get a little space and clarity and we can be a little more skillful. So the other differentiation that you made that I found so interesting and helpful was anxiety versus worry, right? I mean, maybe prior to reading your book, I would have said they were very similar, if not the same, or you worry when you're anxious, but it's all kind of tangled up.

How do you think about those two words? I love that you love my distinction making, because it is true when you name it, you tame it and making this book. I found that powerful. You and I both, I've discovered, have classical music backgrounds. So we are. Yes, we love the refining of things. But I do think for everyone, whether or not that's your tendency. I think when it comes to worry and anxiety, and by the way, stress and anxiety too is a nice distinction to make.

But I love making a distinction between worry and anxiety because you can feel anxious and not be worried. You have free-floating, yucky anxiety, and it's just so inchoate and like a horrible fog. And sometimes those are the days that I just like, I'm just taking a nap or, you know what? I'm going to call it a night. I'm going to get up in the morning and see, you know, and I'm going to do my checklist of, you know, they say in the recovery field, the halt, like hungry, angry, lonely, tired. I'm like, I'm going to just check that everything is like, you know, those are like, sometimes you just got to say, no information yet.

I'll check back with you. But it's a smoke alarm, right? Like a smoke alarm goes off. You don't run out of the house or put in earplugs. You're like, you do check around. Yeah. Or you come back later and make sure your batteries are, you know, in the smoke alarms, right? So I'm not saying disengage, but sometimes it's just, okay, so you put the brake.

But worry is the thinking part of anxiety that's directed. It's about something. It's very cognitive. It's our attempt to control the future because we're running the what if simulations when we worry. And it's useful. But for so many of us, myself included, worry can start to spiral. It can become self-reinforcing because you feel like you're doing something. That feels really good.

Right. You feel like I got some control. Yes. And that feels really good. Right. You feel like, I got some control. Yes. And, you know, there are certain anxiety disorders that really have at their core worry, like generalized anxiety disorder.

And that's a situation in which those worries really are getting in the way. So I want to say, listen, worries are not all good. We can see them get in the way. But when we think of worry as this sort of cognitive about, like, problem- problem solving part of anxiety, it gives us different solutions. So, you know, there are some useful things we can do about worries. We can give them words. So when they're vague, not least helpful. So the first thing you need to do is contain worries by giving them language, by getting specific. I like to schedule worry times or like have a worry box where you like write everything down, put it in the worry, or you say, I'm going to worry and write it all on paper for 20 minutes and no one's going to stop me. But after 20 minutes, I have to stop.

And what you often find is you can't even worry that long, which is a nice feeling, right? Because it kind of has an end to it. But you contain it and then you give it really clear language. What exactly am I worried about? What's the worst case and what's the best case? You know, and so giving it that specificity, you're anchoring it. And so you're taking it from this yucky feeling perspective and you're owning it in a way. It's kind of like that ally you need to negotiate with.

You have to have a very specific document you're drawing up, right? And then once you have it more specific, you can start to prioritize and say, okay, I have a lot of worries right now in my life. Here's what's uncontrollable, but here's what I can control. Here's what I can do something about. Wow, that feels actually exciting that there's this opportunity I didn't think of. But it's only by making it concrete and owning it instead of sweeping it under the rug that we can even begin to build those skills. And you're not going to be good at it the first time. You may not even be good at it the 10th time. But we can get better at it. That's why I like to make that distinction with anxiety and worry. You just made a connection for me that is totally unrelated to what we're

talking about. My favorite kind. You are both classical musicians. Ginny was an opera singer. And you mentioned that need for precision. And I was a punk rocker, which is a very imprecise thing. And I just never thought about that between you and me, that that is a fundamental sort of difference in level of precision. Yeah, I've not made that connection before. So that is interesting. I've noticed this, let me just say that there's something else I wanted to follow up on what you just said. I'm going to put a pin in that. I'm going to name it so I don't forget and come back to what you just said, which is in general, I tend to be the anxious warrior and the detail oriented, except when it comes

to sound and podcast recording. That is incredible. That is all you. But like, you know, and you tend to be the more diffuse gestalt, like bigger picture. Anxiety doesn't show up in your life as frequently, I think, for you as it does for me. Would you agree with that? Probably.

Probably. I mean, I'm not saying you never get anxious, but just as a general trend. The other thing is like, you say actually that anxiety narrows focus and positive emotions broaden. So I think back to this other team of like, I even heard that through our eyesight, if we have sort of this pinpoint vision

of seeing just like myopically versus looking at the horizon, like a big diffuse, that there's a connection there between how we can notice maybe like how we can even cultivate calm by looking at taking a more diffuse fraud, you know, and you tend to see again, the gestalt of things. And I tend to see like the little lint on your, you know, your sweater or whatever. And so it's just very interesting to see how patterns can show up in different areas of life, all connected back to some of our feelings. It's interesting what I was thinking of. First of all, I do want to get back to punk rock. Okay.

But what I was thinking of as you were speaking is sort of the lens focus in and out, in and out. Because I am a very precise person. But I also started life as an artist. And I hated science. I hated everything about science, which is all that I do right now. That's fascinating. I hated math. I really preferred poetry to prose.

And I mean, I could go on and on. But yet I was a classical musician who knew that you play Bach one way and you play Mozart another way and you play Rachmaninoff another way, you know, and that's important. And you master those tools so that you can transcend them. Yeah. So I think there's also something about anxiety that if you don't have that skill to go in deep, though, I think there's a loss as well. Because remember, if anxiety has shown up in evolution to help us navigate uncertainty, you need that detection to be precise sometimes. uncertainty, you need that detection to be precise sometimes. And that when you get good at that, it's just easier to then practice the pattern recognition pulling out.

So I think it all, now punk rock, I don't think it's imprecise. I'm a bit of a punk rock fan. And I'm a bit of a, like, as a classical musician, I actually love all sorts of popular music. And I was growing up in the 80s and 90s. My favorite band growing up was Joy Division. And the thing I loved about those recordings before they remastered the crunch out of them is they all sounded like Ian Curtis was singing in a toilet. And I loved it. It was so beautiful. It was completely different from everything. But then if we're talking about

punk, we can talk about the bass player, Watt, and the Minutemen. And when you talk about the kind of music that they make, I would not characterize that as imprecise. So I'm thinking about, but they could also completely pull out as well. So there's this dance that I see in all the kinds of music I love, whether it's Bach, which I'm a big Baroque music fan, in all the kinds of music I love, whether it's Bach, which I'm a big Baroque music fan, that I think transcended everything to any sort of music that someone might say is loose. You know what I mean? But I'd love you to comment on that, Eric.

Well, the Minutemen are certainly not loose. They're pretty precise. And even Joy Division is not. I mean, they turned into New Order, which sounds like a machine, right? So I should say that I should be more broad and say that not all punk rock is that way. However, I tended to be more drawn towards the shambolic sort of, it just sounds like it's about to fall apart. But partially that's because that's what I was capable of doing. And it's an interesting point because that inability to get very precise did limit me as a musician because I just did what I could. And it was that next level of like, instead of going, I can't quite play that. So I'll work on

it so that I can. I just went, eh, who cares? Right. What an interesting insight, Eric. Which has a certain panache to it, I suppose, but also is limiting. When the anxiety of I don't know how to play that came, I didn't embrace it. But in real, yeah. I went, who cares? That's so interesting. Only sellouts care about playing precisely, right? Like, you know, a bunch of. I'm very sympathetic to that perspective, though.

I'm a Gen Xer, so I believe that people can be sellouts. But then you think about all those garage bands that, yeah, maybe they never got. But you know what? That's consciousness transforming. It doesn't matter. I don't want the precision. So there's a place for all of it. There is totally a place for all of it.

I didn't want to call you on punk rock things, but I am a music lover. And I'm really glad we had that conversation. Yes, me too. But it does speak to your point earlier of like having a dualistic, either this or that, that's right and this is wrong. I mean, it's just, I think having the ability to do a range of things on a spectrum of ability and oftentimes what you're encouraging us to do once we've sort of leaned in with skill is to correct for the imbalance.

You know, if we are too like this, could we counter that with zooming out a bit? You know, if we're too zoomed out and it's too generalized, can we get a bit more specific and concrete? What I was going to say before this is what I remember. There was a point in my life of peak anxiety. I had one really bad panic attack and I just moved to New Jersey from Nashville. It was my first promotion at work into the training department. I'm sorry. Here we go. I'm getting very excited about the story I'm about to tell. Sorry, listeners.

You just beat me to the gesticulations. That's all. I'll be shortly behind you. Yeah, yeah. Okay, good. And I had this panic attack that, you know, just was debilitating. And so I ended up in a psychologist office who practiced REBT therapy. And I was just so general with my anxiety.

I can remember him continuing to invite me to put language to it. What specifically are you worried about? And I would say, well, what if this happens? Well, what if that happens? What if this happens? And so then the next thing he did, which I found incredibly calming, and now I realize it's because I was able to gain some sense of control is he said, you know, you're missing the other half of the sentence, which is, what if you need the well, then, you know, you need the what are you going to do about that? Or what, you know,

finish that thought. And I found that so helpful. It at least in the moment calmed me, but then it also helped me realize that I had some capability to handle things that were to come. I love that so much. And I think it's really at the crux of what's wrong with the mental health care and just the wellness industry right now is that people don't believe that that's possible. And we're convincing people unintentionally, I think most of the time, that they're fragile and that there's not any then well. And that actually these are such destructive and dangerous experiences that it's really all or none. And so we're setting ourselves up to not engage in change. And what happens is we maybe finally get there if we are lucky enough to receive therapy, which is so hard to access for so many people.

But no matter where our anxiety is on that spectrum, we can use those tools way before we get to the therapist's office. So everything I'm talking about with anxiety is literally just chapter and verse what a therapist tells us once we're debilitated by it. So why don't we get in front of things? Now, the whole healthcare industry, of course, is backwards. Mental health is health. And it's the same, right? So whether it's physical health or not, you know, we're always waiting to the fires. It's such huge conflagrations that we're just dealing with cleanup, with symptoms. We have so few resources and so little energy to get to any of these causal early factors. And I just think what we need to do more than anything is, yes, we need to increase access to mental health.

Yes, we need to have more conversations. We need to support our kids who are in crisis. But before any of that's going to help, we need to change the story that we're telling about anxiety, about mental health broadly, but anxiety in particular. And that when we talk about mental health, we only think illness. We don't actually think about a positive state of health. Right. And when we think mental health, we think serious mental illness, things like schizophrenia, things like bipolar disorder that are actually quite distinct as mental health

conditions compared to things like addiction and depression and anxiety disorders and things like that. There are different kinds of determinants. And things like schizophrenia, I think those are better thought of as disease states, whereas something like an anxiety disorder or major depressive disorder, I think when we label it as a disease, we start doing a lot of the wrong things. We feel like it's over and it's like we're broken. And that's what sets us up to not believe in the change you're talking about. Yeah. Well, it also points to those things being sort of a distinct thing when they're really much more of a syndrome or, you know, there's so many factors at work.

And they appear so differently for everyone. Yeah. A hundred percent. Right. A disease, And they appear so differently for everyone. Yeah. 100%. Right? A disease, even though diseases appear differently for everyone, too, by some token, we like to create these little categories. And we're just trying to understand. I mean, psychology still suffers from a serious chip on our shoulder. Because we remember, like, 150 years ago that we were in the philosophy departments of universities. Before, we were, like, at science.

And so we took on the language of medical science to give ourselves validity and honestly to claw the resources to help people with mental health struggles, which is very valuable. And that's why we developed the DSM, the diagnostic manual. But I think that that metaphor, the disease metaphor is starting to, and I'm going to say this, it's actually starting to cause more harm than good possibly in some cases. I think you're right. It makes me think of, I'm a recovering alcoholic and addict, right? And the disease model of alcoholism, I think was a useful step from it being a moral failing. Yes.

But I also don't think it's accurate enough that I think we are moving beyond it at this point, or we need to continue to move beyond it. I think similar things there. I was going to ask you about your opinion on the DSM as a whole, because there's a lot more talk these days about maybe these diagnoses are not as distinct and clear as the DSM makes it out to be, and that trying to do it that way is becoming problematic. I'm curious what you think. So I'm a clinical psychologist, but I've never had a private practice. So I'm a clinical researcher. And my bread and butter is getting grants to do that research. And I get grants from the NIMH,

the National Institute of Mental Health. And I can tell you about 10 to 15 years ago, there were several movements and discussions, much like what you're talking about, that really called into question whether these disorders that we've identified are useful and if they should drive the science of what we're trying to do, which is to understand mechanisms underlying the cause and treatment and course of mental health distress. And so it used to be that you could easily get a grant, not easily, everything's like, if you can, I think the funding rate is anything between like 5% and 12% of grants submitted. But anyway, you could get a grant studying something like social

anxiety disorder as a disease category, and you still can under certain circumstances. But it's much harder because what we know is that social anxiety disorder 50% of the time is comorbid with major depressive disorder. It's also comorbid with lots of other anxiety disorders and addiction. And so we know that humans don't fit into these boxes as much as it's helped us advance our understanding of what some of the causes and effective treatments of these conditions are. So as a field, as a scientist, we're much less interested in discrete disorders as spectra.

Right. As, you know, a lot of people, you know, really for a long time, not just the past 10 years, but for 20, 30 and more years have talked about, should we study anxiety and depression separately? Right. Or should we study some of the anxiety disorders as distress related? That is actually combined with depression. And that there are some more fear-based anxiety disorders like a phobia.

But really, we shouldn't be glomming all these things together. And so I think that that's what you're pointing out is a very important movement. I think it should be the future of mental health treatment. I think, you know, there's some really smart and not even like young people per se, but even like very established researchers who started to say, you know, if we really wanted to help people, what we would do is we'd get them into exercise. And these are mental health professionals. First, we get them to exercise. And we get them to strengthen social connections and see what's going on in their lives. And we take care of that. We'd help people. We get in front of the problem. And then after we get that established, we'd see what was left over. And we would develop boutique treatments that would target specific struggles in mental health. And that we devote our resources that way. If we actually wanted to help people. Right. But there's a lot of economic forces that work against us doing that. We all know that good habits are ways that we bring what we value into the world.

And we each have our own list of what matters to us. Maybe you want to feel more energetic, improve your relationships, have a tidier home, cook more instead of eating out four nights a week. Whatever habit you want to build, it's entirely possible to make it happen. But if you feel under-equipped and overwhelmed to make real sustainable change, you are not alone. And that's why I've made my free masterclass open to everyone and available to watch anytime now. It's called Habits That Stick, How to Be Remarkably Consistent No Matter What Goal You Set. You can grab it at oneufeed.net slash habits. Again, it's free and you can watch

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It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A couple things there about that comorbidity. It's that idea of, well, you get diagnosed with depression. Then you get diagnosed with anxiety. Then you get diagnosed with ADD and alcoholism. And you're like, well, is one person so unfortunate that they got like all five of those? Like what you just said about general wellness, exercise, eating well, getting enough sleep, general wellness being the first thing that we should do. I think that makes a ton of sense. One of the things I'm interested in as somebody who's worked with people on behavior for a long time is that sometimes our mental distress makes it such that it's very difficult to do a lot of those behaviors.

100%. Is that in your mind partially because we just didn't intervene early enough so that now, to your point, we've got a big fire and, you know, a gallon of water would put out a very small fire, but it's not going to put out a house on fire. Yeah, it's such a great point. You know, I'm sort of optimist to a fault. I have had a path in life where I have struggled with mental health and I've been lucky enough to come across certain practices like meditation. You know, I'm a practicing Hindu and I really discovered that tradition when I was 17 or 18. And it just allowed me to believe that there was a technology of consciousness

and you could afford yourself. You could avail yourself of this technology. And it allowed me to do things like go from being a musician to thinking with incredible arrogance that I could become a scientist. But I think if it hadn't been for that, I wouldn't have been able to do anything. You know, that's my sense of the role of that. So I'm a very internally focused person. But you know, life is really hard. Yep. And a lot of people aren't as privileged as I am, and didn't have as much luck as I had

along the way. And I think all of us can speak to different things like that. And so I think there are certain conditions in which just saying eat better and exercise is a really heavy lift to your point. And I really want to just respect and acknowledge that. At the same time, you know, we often say these people can do if we're from a point of privilege. And no, you're not saying that at all. But I see that dialogue happening like, oh, this is a single mom or someone from a point of privilege. And no, you're not saying that at all. But I see that dialogue happening. Like, oh, this is a single mom

or someone from an under-resourced community. And so because of these systemic problems, we need to fix that. But I don't really, I buy into we need to fix that. But I don't buy into we have to disempower people from making changes that can actually have a positive impact. So I want to acknowledge that it's going to be

very hard for many people because of all the barriers in their life. They're not going to have a positive impact. So I want to acknowledge that it's going to be very hard for many people because of all the barriers in their life. You know, they're not going to become a yoga mom. They're not going to be, you know, necessarily, maybe they will. They're not going to be able to afford the kinds of nutritional food, perhaps. But what we have to do as a society is start to help people believe that those are solutions that can help. Yes. That mental health is health. And then when we do as a society, we'll start to put dollars as a Yes. blaming the person or saying it's all on you, lift yourself up by your own bootstraps, which I don't believe in. I do think we have to have a dialogue where we have to take this holistic approach. When things have gone far, understanding what are the smart and targeted interventions that have the biggest impact. So I believe in what are called wise interventions. These are these

micro interventions, and a lot of them are behavioral, that are relatively simple, but have a big exponential positive impact. And we see these around diet, we see these around habits of addiction, we see these, you know, these can make big impacts. I see this as, you know, mindset research, you know, a lot of what I'm doing in my book is just trying to press a reset button on our mindset about mental health as being that, oh, we're either broken and have a disease if we're struggling with anxiety or it's a character flaw, that that mindset is blocking us. Yeah. So that we know and there's wonderful research showing that mindset interventions can have an immediate and long-term positive impact and they're cheap and brief and scalable. And there's an abundance of research out there, especially in the past 10 years. And there's an abundance of research out there, especially in the past 10 years. So I believe in getting smart, but having to work under the assumption that mental health is health and that we have to get more into a preventive and early intervention focus. Oh, gosh, there are a couple of places that I'm tempted to go here.

Do it. Practicing Hindu, not being the least among them. I know, exactly. I mean, so many. I wonder if briefly it would be be nice to touch on as you're talking about mindset. The other thing that I found incredibly compelling was the TSS. Oh, the TSST. TSST. Thank you. And then the 2013 Harvard study that was done looking at what would happen if we tweaked this in our mindset about these things. I feel like it's evidence

that really shows that this is not just all like positive thinking, but that it actually can have a meaningful difference. Do you mind just walking people? You can explain this far better than I can. No, well, I'm sure you would do an amazing job. I do love this study, though. So thank you for handing the mic over to me. So this study you're talking about, it was Jameson and colleagues, 2013.

And it was a group out of Harvard, so a collaborative group. And it was oneon and colleagues 2013. And it was a group out of Harvard, so collaborative group. And it was one of the earlier studies, and it's since been replicated, and it's even been applied to work with teens. And there was a beautiful paper that came out in nature last year that showed that the same kind of interventions in teens who are struggling with anxiety, even kids who are really an at risk communities, they can have massive shifts in school performance and anxiety and biological indices. So this is like a large body, but this is one of the earliest. And so Jameson and colleagues, they use this really mean experimental paradigm called the Trier social stress test

that's been used a lot to study stress, but it's really about anxiety. Because what you do is you have someone come in and you're under performance pressure. So you either give a public speech in front of a very judgmental panel of judges with no time for preparation on a very contentious topic like the death penalty or abortion rights. And so you're asked, you're just like, oh, here, you have three minutes to prepare, then go, you know, and people measure their biology when they're nervous and doing this, they measure their performance, right? And then there's also difficult math problems that you'll have to do in front of these same panel of judges. I'm feeling like I'm starting to get itchy. My throat is choking too. I'm getting itchy.

I've made people suffer through these things for research purposes, I promise. So what Jameson and colleagues did is they brought in a group of people diagnosed with social anxiety disorder. And social anxiety disorder, the key symptom is fear of public humiliation and judgment. So this is kryptonite for these folks. I mean, it's really painful. It's painful for all of us. It's very painful for them. And so when they were informed that they'd have to do this, like give this public speech, people, of course, naturally started to feel a sense of panic. And what they did is this was an experiment. So with half of the group, they literally were,

they threw them in the deep end and, you know, they did the experiment. But the other half of the group, they did this fascinating thing. They essentially did a mindset reset. And in just 20 minutes or so, they said, okay, you're going to start feeling terrible. You're probably feeling like you might want to throw up. Maybe butterflies in your stomach, your heart's racing. That's not you getting ready to fall apart, actually. That's actually you getting ready to perform at your peak. And here's some science that shows why perform at your peak. And here's some

science that shows why that's the case. And here's a little Darwin throating because we love Darwin, right? Sabertooth tiger. Definitely a picture of the saber-toothed tiger on the handout. And here's some experts talking about it. And essentially, you know, when your heart's racing, your heart's pumping oxygen to your brain so you can think and you can plan and you can be at your best. And those butterflies in your stomach, well, that's good old adrenaline because you need to be able to bring it, you know? So your body is like preparing and blood's going to your muscles. And they just kind of talked them through it and normalized their experience for about

20 minutes or so. And then they threw them in. And when you compare those two groups, those who had the mindset reset and those who didn't, the ones who were clinically anxious, I mean, struggling with social anxiety disorder, maybe for years in many cases, they performed better. So they were more confident. They had a better argument. There were fewer ums and ahs.

They had lower heart rates compared to the other group and lower blood pressure such that actually their biological response looked like someone who was sort of like facing a challenge, engaged in something hard, not like someone who's having a panic attack. It's incredible. It's incredible. And so we can do this in just 20 minutes with the right kind of information. That doesn't mean it solves everything. But what it means is that one day at a time, little by little, we can realize, wait a second, I can build skills in working with this.

And wait a second, I can build skills in working with this. And wait a second, I can start to actually harness this. If anxiety is a wave that usually drowns me, I can learn to swim. I can learn to surf. I can learn to sail. Like I can do this. So that's what I feel like is the incredible power of mindset interventions. And I just think we need to integrate this into the future of all psychotherapy that we afford people. I totally agree. And I think your book does, like I said earlier, just such a fabulous job of that. It just helping us make some mindset resets. What is the word? Mindset reset? Mind shift. Okay. You're helping us do that all along the way. And it's just a little tweak, you know, it's not Herculean. Here's one that I really like. This idea of anti-fragility was really good. Okay, so let me take you back.

Here's what it's rooted in for me. So I, too, am a recovering addict to prescription stimulants to deal with all kinds of issues that it turns out now I can have some skillfulness in my life without prescriptions. I can actually do this without medicine. But anyway, I had about a seven or eight year decline towards, you know, my particular low point. I burned my life just up in flames. And it didn't start at this point, but it was very close to the beginning. And it was when I said to myself, oh, I have an idea. So like, life is hard, right? Like, why don't I just orient around making my life easier? Like, why don't I just make my life like all the things that I think just suck? Why don't I just avoid them all? Like, why am I I just make my life like all the things that I think just suck? Why

don't I just avoid them all? Like, why am I giving myself any more pain and struggle, right? So I can just tell you as an N of one as an experiment on myself over there, it doesn't lead to a life that is strong and thriving and feels good. So it turns out that stress or challenge leaning into those things, it's actually how we grow, how we get stronger. And so this idea of anti-fragility, can you talk about that through the lens of anxiety? I think it's one of the most powerful concepts of mental health that we can have as a listener to your podcast. I feel like there's a lot of conversations about this in what you're talking about because discomfort is at the root of so many of these unhealthy choices we make and our intolerance of that.

Yes. And that seeking of what's going to feel, you know, I just need to feel better or feel good. So anti-fragility, I think it's important for parenting, too, which I can go off on that tangent if we want. Sure. Let me just focus on anti-fragility. So it's a word that was coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb when he wrote his book called Anti-Fragility, oh, maybe 15 years ago now. And his tagline was, and I am paraphrasing because now I'm forgetting if this is accurate, things that gain from disorder. And it's this idea that, you know, we talk a lot about resilience in mental health, this kind of ability to bounce

back. But really what a lot of biological systems are, psychological symptoms, like societies, economics, what we actually see in addition to resilience is the state of growing stronger because of adversity and challenge and things not going your way and the bumps in the road. Not despite it. Resilience is like you bounce back like a phoenix rising from the ashes. Anti-fragility is being the hydra. You cut off one head and two grow in its place. And the immune system is anti-fragile. Because if you don't throw germs at it, we will be the boy in the plastic bubble.

If you grew up when we did. Does anyone talk about the boy in the plastic bubble? Not much, but I know what you're referencing. We understand fully. Yeah, that makes sense. But your immune system will not really function at its optimal. Yeah. This is why I seek out germs and you avoid them.

Maybe this is a lesson. Well, I'm taking notes. Okay. Okay. All right. Within reason. Okay. Within reason.

Like growing up, I like my kids to play in country dirt, but not city dirt. Like you got that land. That is good. That is good. Okay. That's how I think about it. Emotions are anti-fragile. Yeah.

Because if we don't actually learn to feel those bad feelings, we can never feel good. Yeah. Muscles are anti-fragile. You have to strain them and work them for them to grow strong. So we have ceased to treat ourselves and our emotional lives as being anti-fragile. We really believe in our fragility right now. And in all these great new conversations we're having about mental health, what I fear is that we're having too many of the conversations

about fragility, that it's a little too okay not to be okay. Not that it's, of course it's okay not to be okay, but that there's something we're always talking about our brokenness and not enough about our strength, not enough about that. You know what? It is messy being human. And that's how we become our greatest. Yeah. By going through, not around. And so anti-fragility is this belief that if we actually prepare for life rather than protect ourselves from it, we will actually be at our best.

And the same for parenting. If we're protecting our kids from every bump in the road, we are not preparing them. Like actually with a lot of parents being very feeling like they need to be protective and I'm a parent. We have both a fear of the uncertain future for our kids. We have scarcity mindset because it's really hard to know how to help kids today. And a lot of kids are struggling. Yeah. But if we do not allow them to struggle, like the greatest gift we can give them is actually allowing them

to deal with uncertainty and figure it out. Yeah, that will be the killer app of the future. If we and just to think like, say we have type A parents, we just want our kids to succeed and like crush it at every point. Still, the answer, whether you just want them to be happy, which you know, we all do. Or if you want them to crush it and like go to all the IVs and then do this and then do that. The answer is still the same. You have to let kids struggle with uncertainty and allow them to be anti-fragile knowing that they will not break, that they will grow stronger if you support them, if you scaffold them. Yeah. You are confident they can grow stronger by allowing them to in a, you know, in a supportive way, obviously.

But it's like, you can do this. Let's work through it. Yeah. And our anxiety about our kids anxiety often blocks us from being able to do that. And I tell a lot of my own parenting fail stories. Yeah. Well, it's interesting. I was interested in this idea as it's connected to perfectionism and excellenceism and little girls. Because this just really hit home for me. We think about youthful fragility. You say, you know, once puberty hits, girls are twice as likely as boys to be diagnosed with an anxiety disorder, like little Miss Perfect. Right.

So you have this idea that, like, she's strong, but she's a lady. She doesn't speak out out of turn, but she, you know, we have these mixed messages. Right. And I am someone who is just continually like recovering from perfectionism. Again, you say the scope and intensity of these demanding and mixed messages put women squarely into the crosshairs of perfectionism, constantly on the precipice of failure, because who can live up to them, you know, and that failure would destroy our self worth. I mean, it's just so excellence ism and anti fragility being really powerful mindset shifts here. I mean, it's sort of what feminism has meant for many people is the whole lean in

fat, which I think is a fallacy. And I think there's been some corrections on that idea of, you know, lean in this idea that we have to play like the boys play and lean in and, and prioritize having dinner with our kids, like one hour a night or doing whatever. But we're still playing by the boys' rules. So is there actually health care support for us during, you know, is there maternity leave and paternity leave? Is there child care? It's like we have to be amazing women, whatever that might mean to us.

And we have to be super successful. And we have to be the perfect mother. And that's the feminist ideal. As my friend, Rishma Sojani says, who does a lot of incredible work in this space, especially with her mom's first movement, she says, you know, having it all means that we just have to do it all. And that is what puts us in. I think that's part of it. Now, I wouldn't give up any of those things that I want to be as a woman, but it's about fit. It's about person environment. What is the environment doing for us? What have you done for me lately in terms of allowing me to do all these things? So there's that reality. But having said that, also a recovering perfectionist, I think because we get so

rewarded for being as awesome as we are as women on all these fronts, and we start to aspire to this absolutely unattainable standard, right? And we know from research and intuition, but also research, that it's like a loser's game to be a perfectionist. You can never meet that standard of flawlessness. What happens very quickly over time is you actually get less perfect because you never know when good enough is good enough. You're inefficient. Research shows that productivity is actually less among perfectionists. Quality of work is less over time from perfectionists. And you have higher rates of anxiety disorders, major depressive disorder, addiction, and suicidality. So it's really,

there's no upside, right? But there's this idea of excellence-ism that I love, and that's what I aspire to be. And I've actually gotten, I think, kind of good at it with a lot of practice. It's a term that Patrick Gaudreau, who's a Canadian psychologist coined. It's a little bit of a mouthful. So I'd love a better term and sense of like something that's easier to say, but props to Gaudreau for this. So excellence ism is this idea that you can be excellent, but that on the way to excellence, you have to fail. You have to learn from mistakes. And there's really no perfect because you're really good at knowing when good enough is good enough. So that you have people like Thomas Edison, one of his famous quotes is, I haven't

failed a thousand times. I've just found a thousand ways that don't work yet. He was an excellentist, you know. It's this idea that, you know, on the way to being really awesome and excellent, you know, we can spend whole years being pretty darn good. You know, and we can practice it. Like, literally, I think we need to practice letting go of perfectionism because perfectionism is just a way of dealing with anxiety. Right. Because when you're perfect, you can't hate yourself. No one can hate you. No one can critique you.

You know, and so it's this really a way of avoiding all the messiness. And control. Like it has to be this way. Yeah. It has to be that way. We have to hit that mark or else it's. Yeah. And of course, avoidance is a linchpin in all problematic anxiety. It's going around rather than through, right? So excellence is, you know, I have exercises I've used over time and have talked about that you can practice. You know, a lot of it is just identifying where you're perfectionistic and then very mindfully letting go of just one or two things. So if it's writing, knowing that, you know what, I can't write perfectly out of the gate. I have to maybe not have a perfect draft that I give to my editor for the first time.

I was very blessed on writing Personal Zen to work with the most amazing editor, Bill Tonelli, you know, also Italian-American. He's like every great, like, uncle consigliere, like, father confessor, genius editor, brilliant writer. And when I wrote Future Tense and I had to throw everything out and start fresh, I started working with Bill. And Bill, who is, you know, a brilliant person, he started very humbly. He said, Tracy, he's like, I know nothing about this topic. And I'm moderately intelligent, of course, both of which are farthest from me. But he's like, explain it to me. And I had to have a beginner's mind.

I had to let go of the perfectionism of having it perfectly thought out in the ways that I've already thought about for like two years. And I started with a blank page. We had three weeks per chapter to meet our deadline. And so I'd write 12 pages and it was a mess, but I had to be like, you know what? I have to give this to Bill. So he could tell me, I don't understand this. And this is twice as long and that, I don't know what that's about. And, and then, and then he'd hand it back with like the broad strokes. And then I'd say, okay, he wants me to tell a story here. What's the story? Oh, there's this story. And then I would dig in again. And then I'd send it in again. And for the first chapter, it was like six or seven backs and forth. Yeah. Right. And then he'd finally like be

able to say, okay, I'm gonna copy edit this for you. But here's what you know. But by the ninth chapter, I have never learned so much in my life about writing as going through this painful process of excellence-ism and having to be really wrong a lot of the time and knowing that I had to let go of that perfect first draft. But then observing what happens when I let go of it. Oh, my God, I discovered things I never knew because I had to explain stuff because Bill, quote unquote, knows nothing. because I had to explain stuff. Because Bill, quote unquote, knows nothing. And I had to dig deep. I had to do these things. I mean, and I'd written for 20 years as a scientist. It doesn't prepare you to write a book.

So, you know, shout out to Bill. And shout out to Excellenzism and knowing that you can fall down and fall down and fall down. And if you have the right community and the right support and just a modicum of belief in yourself, you can do things you never thought you could do. Yeah. Failure is not proof that you have no self-worth, right? Like you have to almost reinterpret, you know, failure, what it is and what it means and its value. And we can teach our kids to do that. And we can start to question what our definitions of success are. And I think a lot of when we think about kids' fears about their future and our fears for them,

like the first place to start, I think, is also what does success mean to us? Does it mean going to a certain school or getting a certain job? Like how can we expand that conversation? Just as we expand our conversation about what's failure, we can do the same with success. Well, I think that is a perfect place to wrap up. Thank you so much, Tracy. It's been such a pleasure to talk with you. We both enjoyed the book so much and love talking with you and wish the timer had not hit zero, but here we are. Thank you guys so much. What a gift to be speaking with you. Thank you so much. I feel the same way. Thank you. Thank you. If what you just heard was helpful to you,

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