The Peter Attia Drive - Qualy #116 - Dealing with anger in spots where you know it’s coming

Episode Date: February 21, 2020

Today's episode of The Qualys is from podcast #34 – Sam Harris, Ph.D.: The transformative power of mindfulness.   The Qualys is a subscriber-exclusive podcast, released Tuesday through Friday, and published exclusively on our private, subscriber-only podcast feed. Qualys is short-hand for “qualifying round,” which are typically the fastest laps driven in a race car—done before the race to determine starting position on the grid for race day. The Qualys are short (i.e., “fast”), typically less than ten minutes, and highlight the best questions, topics, and tactics discussed on The Drive. Occasionally, we will also release an episode on the main podcast feed for non-subscribers, which is what you are listening to now. Learn more: https://peterattiamd.com/podcast/qualys/   Subscribe to receive access to all episodes of The Qualys (and other exclusive subscriber-only content): https://peterattiamd.com/subscribe/  Connect with Peter on Facebook.com/PeterAttiaMD | Twitter.com/PeterAttiaMD | Instagram.com/PeterAttiaMD 

Welcome to a special bonus episode of the Peter Atia Qualies, a member exclusive podcast. The Qualies is just a shorthand slang for Qualification Round, which is something you do prior to the race, just much quicker. The Qualies highlight the best of the questions, topics and tactics that are discussed in previous episodes of the drive. So if you enjoy the quality, you can access dozens more of them through our membership program. Without further delay, I hope you enjoy today's quality. I think it was in one of your lessons, but it might have been in a podcast where you talk about

imagine you're playing a video game and it's the same video game every time and you always get killed by the same monster at the same part of the maze or whatever it is. And I think about that a lot every time I falter at predictably, you know, known understood things that get under my skin. And it's very discouraging, right? It's sort of like, there are like a dozen things that I just know if they happen. So, I mean, one of them is, there's certain types of questions

that if I'm asked really, Erkmy, you know, when people ask questions that are to which the answer is very complicated, but they ask through the lens of just give me the one word answer, that just irks me. Like, I don't know why, it just bugs the shit out of me. And I know that. And yet over and over again, I find myself getting upset when that happens.

And I feel like the guy that you're describing here, you're losing the boss fight at the same place every time. Every single time, I know where the boogie man is, I know what weapon he's going to use to kill me. And I just walk over there and out comes the machete and I'm dead. And then I'm back to the starting block again and I'm one fewer lives in the game, right?

What? But you can recover faster each time you lose. Get an angry is not the measure of having lost. Obviously, you can aspire to a time where you never get angry again, or you never get angry in certain circumstances again. But the real practice is to notice as early as possible what's happening and to let go of it.

The difference between being angry for 10 minutes and 10 seconds and one second, those factors of 10 are enormous, right? And I have the same thing going on, where it's an anger is something that I very frequently feel. And I also noticed that it totally contaminates the experience of people around me.

So I have my wife and my daughters, and my anger for them is clearly toxic, and I have this commitment to letting go of it the moment I can let go of it. And it's, again, it's not that anger is never warranted. The energy of anger can be useful. Someone's attacking you on the sidewalk, you're in a self-defense situation. That's not the moment where I would say, get rid of all your anger as quickly as possible, right?

I mean, there's situations where you want to use that energy, but for the most part, you want to let go of it very, very quickly. And then be in a position to decide what's what and whether or not it's appropriate to take some kind of confrontational path, whatever it is by email or say the thing that would convey your displeasure or whatever. But now I have my wife and my daughters as a kind of feedback mechanism

for me because they know my commitment, they know I can let go of anger on demand and they know I want to and they don't like my anger, right? And they detected in the subtlest way. So like, I mean, it's not, it's not even anger where a normal person would classically think he was. They don't have to wait till you raise your voice. They can see the mannerisms in the way you might move or the way your answers become shorter or something. Yeah, yeah. Even mild frustration gets scored as a kind of crazy level

of anger, right? So like if I say, wait a minute, I thought the plumber was coming today. That's like, that's a four alarm fire, right? So one of my daughters will say, ooh, dad, he's getting angry, right? And they'll say that's so early now. And it's fantastic because it's, I just let go of it way earlier than I used to. But if you can't be mindful, you actually have no choice.

You know, you just, you will be angry as long as you're angry, and the people around you who don't like it just have to figure out somehow to put up with you. It's not that there's no other hacks. There are many other hacks, and sometimes it's important to have a hack that is more global than simply being relentlessly mindful of everything that's coming up for you. Like a different understanding of a situation can offer some kind of firmware update to the

whole operating system. And then you just simply don't go there anymore. So for instance, I mean, so you're driving in traffic. There are many hacks for that, but one hack is just you discover that you've got 400 hours of podcasts you want to listen to and you're listening to a great one and you're just happy to be listening and the fact that you're delayed an extra half-hour or whatever is fine, you know, and that's a totally useful hack, right? It

modulates your state, you're just discovering the silver line into something that would otherwise be negative. I'll share with you another one because I agree with that completely. That's a great one. The other one that I've taken on in the past year that has had surprising efficacy is any customer service experience you have that is profoundly negative. And if you fly as much as I do, you're pretty much guaranteed one of those a week. My friend Jay Walker, who knows a lot about the aviation industry, said one out of six experiences with USA Aviation as a customer service failure. Right. So anyone who flies would agree with that. But so the next time like the flight

attendance rude to you or the TSA person is sweating you or being obnoxious or whatever. If you instead take a view of empathy, which is, God, this is a really hard job, you know, I mean, I have the privilege of getting to be, you know, intellectually engaged and doing all of these things and boom, boom, boom. But this a really hard job. I mean, most of the people that they're encountering are on some level dissatisfied. They're showing up to to their world happy. So, like simply taking that posture completely changes the way you interact with that system. Yeah. That's really interesting. And it's interesting because it doesn't even really require a huge mindfulness insight. It's just sort of a, but it's a condition

you wanna walk in the situation with, right? You wanna be able to walk in with that in your mind. Yeah, it's a framing effect. Yeah. And it doesn't entail mindfulness at all. You could get the benefit of that new framing without ever having heard of mindfulness. So if you do get angry, you'll be as angry

as you ever were, but- Right, so the combination of these is- You have a different way of thinking about it., but the combination of ways of thinking about it. The combination of these is powerful. Hope you enjoyed today's special bonus episode of the quality. New episodes of the qualities are released Tuesday through Friday each week and are published exclusively on our private member-only podcast feed. If you're interested in hearing more, as well as receiving all of the other member-exclusive benefits, you can visit peteratiamd.com forward slash subscribe.

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