WHOOP Podcast - Mental wellbeing and human nature: Dr. Bill von Hippel talks succeeding in the modern world

Episode Date: May 25, 2022

Leading evolutionary psychologist Dr. Bill von Hippel sits down for a discussion on what makes us tick as humans and how that plays a role in our mental health. Dr. von Hippel is the author of the book The Social Leap, and explains how the experience of our ancestors shaped the way our minds and bodies react to stressful situations, positive and negative emotions, and social settings. He joins WHOOP VP of Performance Kristen Holmes to talk about the beginnings of humanity (2:30), the pursuit of happiness (4:28), social comparisons (7:57), healthy motivation (12:02), stress (12:48), framing the right mindset (17:50), staying present (23:56), flow states (27:23), negative feelings and stress responses (29:07), self-control and willpower (32:29), our limitations as humans (37:27), and mindfulness practices (41:02).Support the showFollow WHOOP: www.whoop.com Trial WHOOP for Free Instagram TikTok YouTube X Facebook LinkedIn Follow Will Ahmed: Instagram X LinkedIn Follow Kristen Holmes: Instagram LinkedIn Follow Emily Capodilupo: LinkedIn

What's up, folks? Welcome back to the WOOP podcast, where we sit down with top athletes, scientists, experts, and more to learn what the best in the world are doing to perform at their peak and what you can do to unlock your own best performance. I'm your host, Will Amid, founder and CEO of Woop, and we are on a mission to unlock human performance. On this week's episode, we're continuing our series on mental health by going deep on the human nation. Woop VP of Performance, Kristen Holmes, sits down with leading evolutionary psychologist Dr. Bill von Hippel for a discussion on what makes us tick as humans and how that plays a role in our mental health. Dr. von Hippel is the author of the book The Social Leap and explains how the experience of our ancestors shaped the way our minds and bodies react to stressful situations, both positive

and negative emotions and social settings. Kristen and Dr. Von Hippel discuss the basic elements of human nature and how understanding ourselves can better prepare us for daily life, how the stress response systems our bodies developed millions of years ago can sometimes prove challenging in the modern world, social comparisons and the role they play in both happiness and unhappiness, self-control and willpower and the things you can do to set yourself up for success, and why we think about the future and how honing your ability to stay in the present can help you get into a flow state.

Really great episode. As a reminder, you can get 15% off in WOOP membership if you use the code Will. That's WI-L-L. Without further ado, here are Kristen Holmes and Dr. Bill Von Hipple. Dr. Von Hipple is a leading expert in the field of evolutionary psychology and the author of a beautiful book entitled The Social Leap. In this episode, Bill is going to help us explore the tension. that exists between our evolutionary history and a lot of our modern struggles. Bill, modernity creates a lot of noise. And I think evolutionary psychology and the insights it provides really give us an opportunity to kind of see, potentially see through this noise in a new way. And maybe with those insights actually become better problem solvers. And I think at a fundamental level, potentially adapt more functionally to the demands of the world. As a place to start,

I'd love for you to kind of take us back to the rainforest. What are some of the things that we learned in that transition, and how are those learnings relevant today? It's been about six million years since we left our chimpanzee cousins behind, and we left the rainforest for the savannah, and here we were the sort of chimp-like creature that's meant to live in the trees. We're the king of the canopy when we were chimps or chimp-like animals, and now suddenly we're thrust on the ground, and we're kind of anybody's meal.

We're slow and ungainly, and we don't have to be. a psychology that matches that new environment. You know, when we think of evolution, we typically think about body parts. But what we tend to forget about is that our psychology has to match our circumstances as well. And one of the biggest things that changed, and this is a big part of what I call the Social Leap, is our cooperativeness. So that world that we first evolved in demanded our cooperation in order to survive. We had to work together to escape the lions and leopards and even Sabreto tigers that roamed the Savannah at that time. The mismatch that we experienced today are very different. And they tend to center around the kind of ways that we lived in very small

communities then and the way that we live in very large communities now. So to just give you one of countless examples that you could imagine, one of the most important things for us was to find a niche, find a way that we could contribute to our group. Because if we're consuming more calories than we're bringing in, one day we're going to wake up and our group has left us behind. And that's a death sentence for a human. And so we look to ways that we can be the best. And now in a group of 30 people, I could be the best hunter? Maybe I couldn't. So if I realized, oh, that's not going to happen, maybe I could be the best arrow maker or the best medicine man or the best storyteller. I'll find something where I've got a good shot at it. Now imagine trying to be the best at anything in

today's world. You look at Facebook or Instagram or just a newspaper and you're going to see a bazillion humans who can do things incredibly well. And so that previous motivation that served us really well, it was hard to be happy unless you could stand out in some way, now serves us very poorly. Because if it's hard to be happy unless you're the best, well, hardly any humans are ever going to be happy. Is there any way that this dynamic actually can help us? You know, is there a way to kind of leverage it for good? We can leverage those things. And there's lots of little ways to do it. Again, to give you one example, part of the way that we try to stand out, you know, this idea being the best is also in today's world is to sort of have the most. Like if I can be a little bit

wealthier, if I can have more stuff than you do, then I can rise up in status. The problem is that as a world has gotten a lot better, we've gotten happier, but we haven't gotten nearly as happy as you might think. And part of the reason we haven't gotten nearly as happy as you might think, given how much easier and better our lives are compared to our ancestors, is that there's a massive zero-sum game built into humanity, and that's the search for status. For me to rise in status, the only way for that to happen is for you to drop in status, right? We can't both rise in status together, because it's a relative term. And so one of the ways that people seek status is by having stuff. Now, we know you can look at the United States over the last

50 years, and you can look at the average level of happiness of American citizens. And it's been measured very well every year. And we can see that it's functionally flat. And if we look at the wealth of the United States over the last 50 years, we can see that it's dramatically increased. People have purchasing power today. It's three to four times what it was 50 years ago. So you'd think, well, if wealth makes you happy, America would be happier now, and it's not. But interestingly, if you look within Americans at any one time, the wealthier folks are happier than the less wealthy folks. And so it turns out that wealth seems to bring you happiness only when it allows you to rise above others, not when it just allows you to have more stuff, because if having a color TV made you happier,

every human would be happier than they were in 1950 when nobody had one, and we're not. And once you realize that, you realize, oh, well, maybe I shouldn't be trying to search out stuff. Maybe instead, when I'm spending my money, I should buy the stuff I need, and then I should spend my extra money on doing things. Because it turns out, in contrast to owning stuff, doing things actually does make you happy. And it makes you happy in a long-term way that's very counterintuitive. When you go on a vacation, you think, uh-oh, there I went. I just blew all my money and I'm back and the vacation's over and I have a tiny sunburn to show for it. Well, in truth, you don't. You have much more than that. You've the bonding experience that you have with your friends and the

people you met. You've got the memories that become part of you. And so we can use that kind of understanding of the mismatch to try to do the things that make us happier today that otherwise are just going to fail. If we spent that same money on a jaguar, well, very soon we lose interest in it because our neighbor buys a nicer car, and now ours just feels crudy. So let's talk a little bit about social comparisons. You mentioned that. And how have we evolved? You know, obviously there's always probably been social comparisons, right? But how has that evolution happened? And any insights there? Sure. So social comparisons are one of our most unfortunate features as far as human happiness is concerned. And they're unfortunately.

They do. They make us feel terrible. And they're very, very hard to turn off. And the reason they're so hard to turn off is that social comparisons were critical in what we call sexual selection. And that is the process where members of one sex kind of compete with each other in order to attract members of the other sex. And so if I am going to get a girl, if I'm going to get somebody interested in me in my group of 30 on the Savannah, I have to look around and say, well, what are my best prospects and say, well, you know, this guy here, he hunts better than I do, this guy here he's better arrowmaker. What's my chance of being best at something so I can maybe gets one of the women in my group to be interested in me. And so we all engage in social

comparison all the time. Now, fortunately, the one piece of good news is that we tend to aim our social comparisons at the most relevant others. And so when I'm trying to decide if I, if I'm doing okay in life, I don't compare myself to DiCaprio who won an Oscar or to LeBron, who, you know, is one of the greatest ballplayers of all time because they're not in my circle of friends and whoever's going out with them doesn't know me anyway. And so we have the advantage that we compare ourselves more closely rather than just. to the whole world. But we have the disadvantage that those comparisons are almost blind to the realities that people were comparing ourselves to. And let me give you an example of what I mean.

In my high school, the best athlete in my school, the girl who won all the track events, who won all the skiing events, who won every single sport all year long, she was always the state champion. She and I were sitting together, we're good friends, and we were sitting together at the end of our senior year chatting about our regrets. And I was a terrible athlete. And so I just always admired her. I put her on a pedestal in, and I said, well, what's your biggest regret about high school? And she said, oh, that I was such a poor athlete. I was like, whoa, what on earth that you're talking about? You know, you're the best to everything. And she goes, well, I never made it to an Olympic team. Now, that might seem silly, but three of her siblings had made it to the

Olympics. And so for her, her local comparison was so outrageously gifted that that's the standard she has to achieve in order to be happy. And so we can be sadly oblivious to the fact that, well, around the rest of the world, that they're not as talented as that you don't need to achieve that level. Now, of course, on the positive side, that's probably part of what pushed her to be such a wonderful athlete. On the negative side, she still wasn't happy with those extraordinary achievements. So what's that line between using social comparisons as motivation versus being exposed to social comparisons that, you know, kind of move you or push you into kind of the more anxiety and like depression and sadness? Because we're, you know, it's something that we have

to deal with. We must have a framework. And some of us have a great deal of difficulty turning that off and it's impossible to keep looking to the next person and saying, you know, as soon as I have a nicer car than my neighbor, I look at a neighbor farther away. Some of us just spend our life on what we call this hedonic treadmill of continually achieving, but it's not being enough and then ratcheting up. But the good thing about social comparisons, though, is that we also can use them to make ourselves feel better. And the fortunate truth is that we have a natural tendency to do that when things go wrong. So when things are going well, they mostly just make us nosy and jealous of our neighbors, which is bad. But when things go wrong, they allow us to

say things like, well, okay, so I've got this nasty cancer and I've got to get this horrible surgery. But in the unit that I was in, there were three women who are way worse off than me. And so it could have been a lot worse. The distinct example in my own mind, I had a ski accident a few months ago, and it ruined my trip. It was the first day of skiing, so I couldn't ski the rest of the week. And then we're supposed to, on the way home to Australia, we were supposed to spend a week in Fiji, and I couldn't fly. And so it just ruined this trip. But all I could think of was, gosh, it could have been a lot worse. I could have been paralyzed. I could have really hurt that person that I ran into so much, you know, he could have been hospitalized.

And so it just felt like, oh, that's okay. And so it resurrects the bad in a nice way, but it also fails to allow us to appreciate the good. And so it squishes us toward the middle. You know, it's interesting. On the boot platform, we obviously have this opportunity to be on teams and to compare our data. So there is, I think, that aspect of social comparison. But having the mindset that, you know, you're using it for good and understanding when to turn stuff off and how to, you know, kind of move around in the world. So you are not victim to, you know, the social comparisons I think is really important. Like for me, like I really very rarely work out in a gym because I know it's a place for me where I end up just getting injured

because I like can't not lift the most and go the farthest. Yeah, like I literally can't help myself. So I just, I work out at home and by myself. I'm a lone wolf when it comes to working out. But I think that's the thing. You figure out what works for you and what your little triggers are and creative framework. No. And Socrates would be proud of you for knowing thyself. And it's also the case that that these social comparisons can be highly motivating. And so here's a case and point. There's a perfect example. You work out at home so you don't see the person next to you lifting more weight and forcing you to put more weight on the bar than you really should. But you're also a member of a team and you look at what the other members of the team are doing. And that, and that motivates you to try a little

harder and to do a little better. And so the key is that what we try to advise is look at other people to motivate you when you're looking at mutable traits, when you're looking at something that you can change. And so in my own case, my HRV is never going to be as good as yours. Well, not unless I can somehow get younger again. It's just not going to happen. My best day is probably your worst day if I look at my actual heart rate variability. But if I look at my recovery, maybe I can beat you one day or if I look at other aspects of what the team is telling me. And so we need to choose those traits that are And we need to push hard on those and look to others to motivate us and to inspire us. But when we reach our limits, we need to be good about saying, okay, well, that one's not going

to change anymore. Let me just take this out of my social comparison box and let me look at my whoop device and look for other kinds of ways that I can try to achieve. Ah, that's perfect advice. I love that. All right. Well, let's talk a little bit about stress. Another thing that we think a whole lot about on our platform is stress and how we adapt

from it. You know, I think in, you know, modern times we're exposed. we just have an unprecedented access, you know, to all sorts of, you know, information, resources, technology. And, you know, how has that kind of changed our response to stress potentially and our ability to therefore adapt? Yeah, that's a great question. So there's really two sides to this picture. The first side is what is a stress response and why did it evolve to be the way that it is? And that's part of the story is kind of going back to the saber tooths. So there we are on the Savannah and we're being chased by a saber tooth tiger. Now, what does your body want to do? All it

wants to do is get to that tree before the saber tooth gets to you. And so it's going to shut down systems that are not necessary because they're just wasting metabolic energy and it's going to shunt its energy to systems that are. So do you need to be digesting that sandwich that you ate earlier that day? No, digestion is enormously metabolically costly. Don't waste your energy on it now. Do you need to be producing immune cells because two weeks from now they're going to be coursing through your veins and maybe curing that cold that you had contracted? No. You don't need more immune cells in your system right now you've got plenty and you can make more tomorrow and so things that are secondary to survival in the moment tend to shut down or be massively dampened and things that are

critical tend to be cranked up which is basically your muscular system because that's what the threats were there were things trying to eat us or kill us so stress responses are super well adapted to that you can shut down your digestion you can shut down your immune system and you can make it to that tree if you're lucky you got there right before the saber tooth and now you pass on that tendency to do exactly that to your offspring. The problem is that most of today's stressors don't involve running and fighting as hard as we can. They don't involve use of our muscular system in order to survive. The second problem is that once we ran from the Sabretooth Tiger and we're sitting safely in the tree, well, now we don't care about that thing anymore. It's irrelevant to our

lives and we can happily break out that sandwich or whatever it was it we're doing, wait until the thing goes away, wait until our group shows up and clubs it and turns it into a nice fireplace rug. Now, though, we face these stressors like you have to get your job done. And every day you're falling further and further behind. You have people in the office who are challenging to deal with because they're demanding too much of you or taking credit for your work or whatever the case might be. You can't hit any of those people. You can't run away from them.

And so the systems that work really well haven't evolved to deal with it. And more importantly, think about the long-term cost of keeping shutting down your digestion system every day, of continually shutting down your immune system every day. These things become titrated with your mood. So your body understands, oh, I should be shutting down digestion and immune system when he's sad or when he's afraid. Well, what if I'm sad and afraid for a good chunk of the day? It starts to make me very unhealthy. And so this system that made perfect sense then makes very little sense now.

Now, technology can make that better, but it can also make it worse. And so if I get access to technology that tells me what I ought to be eating or when I ought to be exercising and how much exercise is too much and things like that, that's really beneficial to me because one of the things we know, for example, is that exercise does a great job in removing these kinds of stressors, possibly in part because it links back to what we were meant to do when we were stressed, you know, exercise, right? But for other good reasons as well. And so technology can be really helpful in that regard. But of course, for some people, technology can also be intimidating if they see news that they otherwise wouldn't see and the news isn't good, or if they

start to get completely obsessed by 10 million different metrics because there are 10 million different metrics you can have now. And so the key for us is understanding that old stress system, finding a ways to avoid it whenever possible. And I know that's super hard. There are huge individual differences in the tendency to worry about whatever just happened. And so when I start doing thing A, thing B isn't even on my mind anymore. But for lots of humans, my wife in particular, thing B is still there and so is thing C. And it's hard to put those out of your mind. And that's not easy for anybody to do. There's just big individual differences. But you can, you can find your own strategies. You can find distractors at work. You can find ways to reappraise the problem, to turn it

from a threat into a challenge. You can do these kinds of things that allow us to sort of short-circuit the negatives of this ancestral stress system. And that's really the whole, the overarching concept is kind of going from a state where you feel unsafe. You perceive the situation to be unsafe so you activate the stress response. So you need to get yourself back into a situation where you feel safe and that it feels challenging but not beyond your capacity, not too easy so you're complacent. So you kind of get yourself into that zone of arousal that's like optimal where everything is working efficiently. So you mentioned appraisal as a way to kind of get you there. Could you talk just briefly about, you know, what that actually would entail, like how a person

actually would reappraise a situation? Like, what does that narrative look like? Sure. And so let's say that I go to the gym and you had, for whatever reason, you didn't have your weight set at home or you're traveling and you're at the same gym with me. And now you're doing 10 million times better than I am. You're running faster. You're lifting more. And I'm like, oh my God, you know, this person is so intimidating. But I can think to myself, okay, well, yeah, this person is intimidating, but this person is probably a different class of athlete than I am, and this person could be a role model for me rather than somebody that I'm striving to compete with or to do better then. And so almost no matter what we encounter, we can think about the glass being half

empty or the glass being half full. Now, some threats are almost impossible to reappraise. And interestingly, it seems like a small one, but one of the ones that bothers humans the most is if the demands of their job or their family life or the combination are loading more things onto their plate than they feel they can take off in any one day. And so if every day I'm asked to do seven things and I can only do six, well, I'm only going to fall further and further behind every single day. And that's a surprisingly stressful thing for most people. And so then the question is sometimes there's nothing you can do about it.

That's just the nature. You've got little kids. You've got this very demanding job, et cetera. of. And so when there's nothing that you can do about it, that's the hardest possible situation. And so then it becomes less a task of saying, well, somehow I can pull challenge out of this to say, all right, okay, now it's time to prioritize. But that actually, that same process works across a lot of domains where you can say, well, how important is it that these 12 things almost happen? Because the truth of the matter is it's never the case that we have to do everything.

You know, we're not, we're not trauma surgeons, hopefully. If we are, those of you are listening, I can't help you, but at least not why you're in the OR. But the rest of us, you know, we can start to step back and say, okay, what here is truly important, what here truly has to happen, what's life-threatening, and what's just things that would be nice. And you just need to get, when you're overwhelmed, you need to get rid of the would-be-nice, and you just need to do things that are absolutely important. The problem is that when we're so close to it, it's really difficult to do that.

It's difficult to step away and need to reappraise and say, well, what are these things are, I can handle in other kinds of ways versus what of these things are mission critical and just need to be done today. And that stepping back process, the downside of it is that, again, it's an important part of our evolutionary history book. But humans evolve to be really good at deliberating, trying to decide. And then once they're done deliberating, they evolve to be really good at implementing and just diving right in. But the problem is that once you're implementing, we've evolved not to go back to the deliberation stage. Because if I decide, let's make me a cheat in this example. When you watch cheetahs in those wonderful nature films, they'll pick a gazelle,

and then they go after it. And sometimes they're running right by another one. And it's running as fast as it can, and it looks up and it goes, ah, cheated next to me, and it just peels off. The cheetah completely ignores it. And the reason they ignores it, if it keeps changing its target, it'll never catch any of them. And humans are the same. Once we've made a decision and we're trying to implement it, if we keep changing our goals and our strategies, we'll never achieve any of them. And so that makes it really hard when we're in the midst of it to step back and say, well, I need to re-deliberate and re-chuse a path. But of course, that's mission-critical. Stress narrows our focus of attention, just like that cheetah who's chasing the gazelle, right? And so we need to

stop or say, hold on, I'm overwhelmed. Let me just take 10 minutes here or however long. I'm going to sit down with a cup of coffee and I'm going to reprioritize everything. Maybe it means writing down everything that's being demanding and go, oh, heck, I don't need to do that. Sorry, Kristen, that becomes your problem, you know, that sort of thing, rather than mindlessly chasing all these things that we just can't do. I guess I wonder or I question how often folks really go through that process of deliberation and really reassessing, okay, is this actually the right path? You know, there's a subset of folks who are more on the contemplative side or, you know, but I think technology in some way has evolved to really prevent that exercise of deliberateness

and kind of that interior work. You know, we just have so many other things that we can distract ourselves with that kind of pull us away from ourselves. Yeah. that deliberative work can be really hard to stare into the abyss of your soul can be intimidating, especially if you don't like everything that you see there. But one of the most important things is to come to accept the things that you don't like that you see there. And so in my own case, I desperately wanted to be a great tennis player.

And I gave them basketball a long ago because I'm tiny, but I thought, well, I've got a shot at tennis. And I practiced every single day after school. And I worked at it like crazy. And then I realized at the end of this years of doing this, you know, I'm barely making the team. I'm the last guy who maybe gets to play and maybe doesn't get to play. This is not a good use of my time. And it was not a comfortable moment staring in the abyss of my soul. And what prompted it was my little brother, four years younger, started to get a lot better than I was.

And I realized, this is just not for me. It's super hard to say things aren't for you, especially when you've invested a lot of time and energy in them. And it could be relationships. This person's not for me. It doesn't mean they're a bad person. It just means you're not a good match. Of course, it could be a horrible person, but you need to face that too. It could be that this job is not for me, this city.

is not for me. What I'm struggling with, I wanted to be a doctor. This is not where my talents lie. There's a million things that it's very hard to confront those things because they require a massive redirect. But I would say that if you find yourself not happy and you think, oh, I just need to do X and then you've got X and you're still not happy, you know, that's the time to start, put hit pause and step back and try to reassess everything. And sometimes there are the things that are closest to us that we just don't notice. You know, this is sort of standard aphorism. The fish doesn't know it's in the water, right? You're surrounded by it. You don't feel it anymore. And those can be the hardest things to reappraise, but they're often the most important ones. So we hear a ton that, you know,

kind of staying in the present is really important, you know, for ruminating and thinking a ton about the past or the future, like that's when anxiety can creep in. But that's not always the best advice. I heard you say this one time, and I'd love for you to elaborate on that. You know, when is that good advice and when is it not? And the evolutionary story is very interesting on how we can actually think about the future and how important that actually is. It's a great case in point because our capacity to simulate the future is one of the greatest gifts that evolution gave us. And to the best of our knowledge, there's no other animal that can do this. And so, for example, my colleagues, John Redshaw and Thomas Sundorf invented this really cute experiment where they

drop a candy or a fruit in a tube that splits at the bottom into two directions. And it can will randomly come out either side. And once a kid gets to be, you know, three, four years old, they always just put both hands out because, of course, they want whatever's being dropped down the tube and they know it might come out one side, but it might come out the other, right? A chimpanzee can never learn that. It constantly just puts one hand out. Now, it doesn't seem like rocket science, right? How could you not see that half the time when you put one out and it came out the other side? And interestingly, every once in a while they put out two hands and then they stopped doing it. It's like they didn't figure out why they were doing that. And so,

it turns out that no other animal, to the best of our knowledge, maybe there's something out there in the deep sea somewhere, but no other animal has the capacity to envision mutually contradictory futures. We're the only ones that can do that. And that's an enormously valuable skill, because it allows us to start planning for a future, depending, we can make these contingency plans. If Kristen does X, I'll do Y, but if she does Y, I'll do Z, that kind of thing, right? And so what that means is that unlike all other animals, if we have something complicated that we need to do, we can achieve that in a way, even if it took months of planning, we can achieve that in a way that nothing else can, because they have to enact it

and give it a go. And so we know that as long ago is probably homorectus. So almost two million years ago is when we probably started hunting animals that were way larger, way stronger than we were, because we could plan and they couldn't. And so you can bring down a mastodon if you can scare it into going over the cliff on accident or doing those kinds of things, right? And so it's one of the greatest gifts evolution gave us. It gave us this massive front to our head and it took away all of our big muscles and claws and fangs because this works way better than that other stuff does. Well, the problem with all that is therefore that what that means is that we tend to live our lives in the future and not just the future. We link the past to the future because whenever I do

something wrong, now I need to make sure I don't do it again. So I think a lot about the past and the mistake I made and I think about how I'm not going to do it again in the future. So Bill living in the present is a chimpanzee. Bill living in the past and in the future simultaneously and constantly back and forth, well, that's a planning machine who's going to be a big success. Now, the problem, though, of course, is that you can fail to notice all sorts of wonderful things when you're living in the future of the past. And so, you know, imagine that your favorite dessert is a Snickers bar and you give yourself one every once in a while. Well, the moment you started eating it, you should be as in the present as you possibly can. So you can appreciate this treat.

that you don't usually give yourself. Well, if you're anything like me, your mind wanders to something you've got to do tomorrow and you might as well be eating sawdust at that point. You're not noticing it anymore. And so being in the present is super important for appreciating the things that happen. And sometimes the unexpected things. There's lots of great examples of people's inability to appreciate the unexpected because their mind had ratcheted forward to the future. The problem is that it's incredibly difficult to turn that off. And so what I always advise is don't try to turn it off writ large. You can't go through your life. living in the present because evolution prepared us to not do that.

It gave us too much of a gift. Exactly. A hugely important one. Instead, make times where you know that you're going to do something that's really important to you and then you want to be as focused about being in the present as possible. You put everything else out of your mind, no past, no future, you're engaging with your small children, you're having this delicious meal, you're doing some sport you really love. I mean, that's one of the things that we talk about when you're in a flow state.

What that means is you're lost in the present. you don't feel yourself at all anymore. And so it's when the world demands your attention, when it's a challenge but not a threat, that's our best chance of living in the present. You know, I think a lot of the conversation is really around trying to, you know, unoculate ourselves from stress. You know, as you've outlined, you know, stress isn't necessarily a bad thing, right? We have this opportunity to reframe it and put it into a context where we can use, you know, productively. But I think there's moments where, you know, that stress, if we can understand it, we can leverage that as energy and tackle some of the things in our lives

that we might otherwise kind of procrastinate around. Because I think that's kind of a newer phenomenon. You know, if I had to run from a tiger that, you know, obviously I create a lot of energy. If I have to go hunt, I create energy. If I'm anxious about not having food, I create energy and that gets me out and moving. You know, I think today sometimes because these threats aren't as obvious, we tend to try to mute or subdue that stress response, you know, with all sorts of things that we have access to, whether it's scrolling through our Instagram or going to the fridge and having, you know, another, whatever it is that I like to eat. Maybe just talk a little bit about that dynamic and how people can think about those stress

responses in just, I think, a healthier way. And really thinking twice before, you know, they're kind of choosing one of these fixes that, you know, aren't actually going to be serving them in the long run. Yeah, that's a great question. And in my mind, there's two significant sources of these kinds of stressors. And again, they're uniquely human. And so if we come back to the discussion we just had, our capacity to simulate the future also means that we have a capacity to imagine how it might go. And so our dogs don't worry about tomorrow because they can't even, they're not capable of thinking about it. But we worry about tomorrow because we know that it's going to happen. And we know that these six things could go wrong. And so it allows us to prepare for

those six things, which is super important. And evolution really wants us to do that, right? That's what enables us to survive. But it also can make us really upset and stressed and worried. And then we have the added double whammy, so to speak, that lots of bad things that are going to happen, whether we prepare for them or not. And so, for example, we will all eventually die. And there's all sorts of things that are there for potential stressors that are just unavoidable. And then that's half the problem. And that's a pretty big half. So we're unique in that we're faced with that problem. But then we're also, our capacity to reflect back on the past is a significant source of stress. And it's a source of stress, again, that other animals can't do. But again, it's also an advantage.

And let's imagine that you and I are at a party and I say something really mean to you on accident. I didn't know that that was true about you or I just said something rude because it just came out. I'm going to feel incredibly guilty. And I'm going to go, God, I can't believe I said that. What's wrong with me? What kind of a person am I? She looks so upset when I said it. And as a consequence of that, I'm going to keep stewing over it over and over again. It's going to keep coming back to my mind. It's going to keep upsetting me. But that's actually a good thing.

And the reason that's a good thing is now I can learn from that one experience in a way that no other animal can. And so if all that happened was I said something mean, you've got a sad look on your face. And both of us went on because I wasn't capable of reflecting on it. It would be very hard for me to learn not to do it again. But humans can turn one experience into a thousand experiences by continually go back and reflecting on them and thinking, how can I do better next time? And so some of these kinds of stressors, we shouldn't be trying to avoid. When we beat ourselves up because we do the wrong thing, well, a little beating up isn't

such a bad idea. It only becomes a bad idea when it becomes a lot of beating up. And so from my perspective, if you're feeling bad about something you've done, well, good. You shouldn't have done it. But if you're feeling like it's inescapably bad or that that suggests you're not a great person and therefore it changes your entire understanding yourself, well, then not good. what you always want to do is separate the actor from the act. And so I did a terrible thing.

I must not do terrible thing again, but not I did a terrible thing, ergo I'm a terrible person because that's what leads these kinds of stressors to have these really big negative consequences. And so if we go through our lives continually being critical of our performance and trying to make them better, that's great. So long as we then don't become critical of ourselves and think, oh, I'm not deserving. I'm not, you know, I shouldn't be a happy person, et cetera. And so.

It's kind of separator. our self-worth from like yeah exactly yeah we can harness these kinds of negative feelings and we can use them to do a better job if we can deflect them away from our core self which is super important and if we can't then that's something you need to talk to people about you need to find a way to use your stressors to just increase your performance without feeling bad about yourself i mean the folks who don't have bad feelings they're psychopaths they're psychopaths yeah they're not functioning in society very well so bad feelings are okay let's talk about self-control you know it's obviously one of the biggest predictors i think of success in the modern world

what was it like back then and how is it now and what are your insights there sure so yeah self-control super important it was it was right balmeister who was in 30 40 years ago working on self-esteem because i thought it was super important and it turns that it doesn't predict much except how happy you are with yourself self-control on the other hand predicts how life goes people with good self-control become a success people with poor self-control don't almost always and so the question then is is why is it so important? Well, the world we live in now is very different from the world that we used to live in before. And so our ancestors never had to engage in the kinds of self-control that we engage in today. They weren't farmers. Every single day, whatever you killed today was what

you ate today because you don't have a refrigerator. And so if you kill a giraffe, we all feast like crazy. If you kill a wombat, well, we're all going to have a little snack, right? And so you don't worry about tomorrow in your physical life in the same way that we do today, where we've got retirement plans and where we've got diets and we've got all of these things you know when our ancestors encountered fat, salt or sugar they ate it as fast as they could because there was never enough of it and so we've evolved to not have breaks on that desire we've evolved to only want to consume and not want to stop and so suddenly we are in a world where our ancestors never they never once you self-control to say no I don't have I won't have seconds thank you that just didn't happen those words never

crossed their lips and so we but because fat salt and sugar everywhere we have to use self-control to stop ourselves from over-consuming. Similarly, we've evolved all men and women evolved a preference for sexual variety because if you put all your eggs in one genetic basket, maybe the world changes a little bit and the offspring you've created aren't going to be as resilient to that new world. And so both men and women, particularly men, but both, have a little bit of a roving eye. Well, that's okay in a world of 30 people, right? There's just not going to be that often where somebody new comes into your group that you're going to be attracted to. But now you open your door and all that you see is novelty, right? And so it takes,

for a lot of people, maintain relationships, it takes a lot of self-control. And the problem is that our self-control system did not evolve to handle this. It only evolved to handle little arguments with your partner and your kids and don't smack them and things like that. It didn't evolve all these long-term curbs in our behavior. And so it turns out that that's just, it's too much for us. So we cannot resist temptation in that way. So it turns out that when we look at people are really good at self-control and what they actually do. They don't have more willpower than the rest of us. They're better planners. They create a world in which they don't have to exert their willpower. So the chocolate cake is never in the fridge. Or they're not at the bar at 2 a.m.

Or they're not, you know, they don't do the things that are their own personal problems. That's me. Right. And so if you organize your life so you don't have to exert willpower, well, then you're going to be a success. If you organize your your life so you need to exert willpower, well, unless you're one in a thousand, you're going to be a failure. How would you, reconcile like just that tension to really maximize kind of our health and our well-being and yeah what are your thoughts? These things are super hard and there's kind of two answers. One is being forgiving because human beings did not evolve to have the kind of self-control

in the immediate circumstances. Our ancestors who had ironwills who didn't eat more and who didn't run off with the new person in their group and sneak off away from their partner, well, they left fewer progeny behind and so those traits kind of disappeared. we didn't evolve to have an iron will. We evolved to have really good planning. And so I can avoid temptation really well. I resisted very, very poorly. And if you know that about yourself, you can be self-forgiving when you do the wrong thing. And so as a rule, I won't order dessert because I'm going to eat it. If Courtney, my wife makes brownies and they're sitting there, I'm going to eat them.

It doesn't even matter if I'm hungry. And so I just don't want them in the house. But then that makes me super forgiving if I go out and you order brownies and then I hoover half of it up. I'm like, so it goes. You know, I didn't have control over the presentation of that option and I can't resist it when they're there. And you need, if you understand that about yourself and you understand that's what human nature is for 99.9% of us. There's that 0.1% who has iron will who can sit there with all the temptations of the world and do nothing, some kind of acetic monk or something. But the rest of us just can't do that. We didn't evolve to be able to do that. It's not, it's not relevant to our lives. And so instead, you design your life so that you avoid your temptations rather than

resist them. And then when you can't resist them, because you failed to avoid them. When things didn't go as planned, then you just have to be very self-forgiving. And if that keeps happening, you need to reorient your life. Say, well, all right, let me take that TV and throw it out the door. No one's allowed to bring brownies into the house anywhere. You know, whatever the rule is, you just change it if it's not working. But you change it in a self-understanding and self-forgiving way because it is absolutely not your fault. We did not evolve to be able to do this. Okay. Well, this is a good segue then. Like, what is actually like a fair ask of humans? What are we actually capable of? What are we not capable of? Yeah. So that's a great question. One of the things that we're not capable of is is not feeling jealousy and envy and these kinds of corrosive emotions. They're, they evolved there for reason, prevents us from letting our spouse stray. It makes us motivated when we see across the street. They've got better things than we do. But they're unpleasant feelings. And nobody even, you don't like them and yourself. You don't.

like them in others. We just don't like those feelings. We can't escape them. We can try to minimize them. But at the same time, we also evolved pride, these self-conscious emotions like pride on the positive side, which motivates us to redo the good things, and then shame and guilt on the negative side. They're there for a good reason. Again, we talked about this earlier. It's only psychopaths who can't experience shame and guilt, right? So you need to have those systems. But the key is how can you try to minimize asks of yourselves that are too large? And so sometimes you just have to let things go. And yes, I really wanted to be that the tennis player on the team. And I was always that last maybe guy who got to play, maybe didn't. And I eventually decided, well, that's just not

going to be self-defining anymore. I'm going to let that go. And so you need to be honest with yourself and say, where do I have good prospects? Which are the things that are going to work out? Who should I be setting my sights to? If I set my sights on you and say, I'm going to be as good of athletes, Kristen, I'm going to be a sad person every single day for the rest of my life. But if I set my sights on that kind of slumpy guy in the gym next to me, you know, maybe I can outperform him. And so we just have to try to be super honest, super self-forgiving and always be setting our sides a little higher than where we are, but not unrealistically. Not, you know, Tiger Woods can put Jack Nicholas's record on his bed and contemplate it every day because he's so

extraordinarily gifted. It's possible. But if I do that, I'm just going to be one unhappy organism. How does social media play into all of that? The social media, unfortunately, tends to make it all worse. Now, the problem's already there because we already live in a world with so many humans that we go to high school and we see people who are more talented than we are most of us do every day. It's just that's the probabilities. And our ancestors didn't have that problem. Remember, they're in very small groups. Social media turns your high school into the biggest thing you possibly can. And to make matters worse, they tend to be very heavily curated. And so when I look at the pictures of my friends' dinners or vacations or whatever, they don't include the lost luggage. They don't include

the burnt toast. Everyone's lives seem better than our own and they're just not. Those those experiences are the rare ones that are worth putting on those accounts. And so if you can look at that and think, oh, God, what a delicious breakfast. I'll try to do that someday and make you happy. Great. But most of us can't. Most of us when look at that, go, or my breakfast wasn't as good as that or my vacation isn't as good as that. Just don't get on. I don't look at those things. That's like not having a TV or not buying a chocolate cake. We know that social media tends to make you happier when you use it right. And using it right means you use it to supplement your in-person relationships, not to replace them. And using it right means you avoid those platforms that only tend to upset you and tend to

make you feel bad about yourself or where you're going in life. The average person is by definition average. And so there's going to be lots of people out there doing better than we are in lots of different domains. And you have to learn to ignore those or to let those go. What would you say is kind of a practice that will make us better at recognizing the value, for example, of bad feelings and understanding that there are limitations to self-control and being forgiving and understanding what we're capable of, what we're not capable of. Is there any practice that you think can kind of help us, our framework that can kind of help us be better at those list of things that really do impact our overall mental health? Yeah, there's just two answers. And the first

answer is meditation is a great way of achieving self-acceptance. Not for everybody. It works well for some and it doesn't work well for others. But that's one of the reasons why meditation is such a good, mindful meditation is such a good practice for so many people. I can't control my mind. I can't quiet the cricket in the temple of my soul. And so I don't try. So it's not for everybody. But the second thing is that what you also need to do is you need to be really honest with yourself about what's making you be better and perform better and what's just making you unhappy. If I get on social media and I see all the other athletes or movie stars or whatever whatever my thing is, whatever I'm trying to do. And if I see them and it motivates me and

excites me and I get happy as I get closer to their performance, I can see myself achieving my goals, well, then by all means, keep getting online and looking at those people who are better than you are and trying to motivate yourself. But if you get off social media and all you feel is envious about their vacation and their dinner and all the other things, the wonderful date they had that you didn't have, well, don't get back on it and look at that stuff. Because that's not helping you. And so negative emotions are super important. Remember, we've talked about that. When I was rude to you, I want that to just percolate in there so that I make sure I never do that again. But you had a better vacation than I did. What difference? That doesn't teach me

anything, right? And so I shouldn't be getting on my social media account and looking, I shouldn't allow those bad feelings. I should wallow in the bad feelings of the bad things I've done until I solve them and forgive myself and move on and then stop wallowing by all means. But I should, I should not wallow in my envy over your vacation and your meal and all those things. And so if I find my, if that's all social media is doing, if I, if I get on it and I go, and it makes me swile when I see Kristen having a great time. And, and I go, oh, I haven't seen someone so since high school and that makes me happy. Great. But if I get on and all I feel is sad and envious when I'm done, don't get back on. It's harder than it sounds, you know.

But I think we just have to kind of keep reminding ourselves and not being shy about reflecting on how things make us feel. And how important those things are. Yeah. Like they're really, they do accumulate and in lots of ways that we can't necessarily perceive. And I think that's where you start to feel the stress and it becomes, you know, it's becomes chronic and, you know, like you just start getting into a rut. Yes. And that kind of thing is really difficult to avoid. It's, it happens slowly. It's the frog in the boiling water. He starts out at room temperature and you slowly raise it. It will never live because it can't. And we've evolved to do that. We've evolved to accommodate to our reality. And that's why our ancestors could be happy in a

world that we would be totally unhappy in, right? Because we're always worried about tomorrow's food. It's totally boring. There's no TV, et cetera, et cetera. But we've accommodated to this entirely different world. And it's hard to say, all right, what aspects of these world should I not be accommodating to? What aspects of these world are intolerable and I need to end them versus what aspects are just things I've got to deal with and I should be ignoring it or addressing it or just moving on and living with it. Well, Bill, this has been such an interesting conversation. I just appreciate you so much. And just thank you for sharing all your wisdom and insight today. Where's the best place for folks to find you? The best place to find me really is

on the web. You can see all the work that I actually have done. So research gate and Google scholar and plus has all my academic articles. And then we've got, you know, the social leap is available wherever a person might want it. If they want to read the more public facing version of all that. And of course, people are always welcome to contact me if they have questions. And I'm, as the advantage and disadvantage of my last name is it's weird enough that there's only one of me and so I'm very easily found just by Googling it's a real honor to chat with you today so thank you again talk soon you're a total sweetie my pleasure thank you to dr bill von hipple for coming on the wooop podcast if you enjoyed this episode please leave us a rating or a review subscribe to

the whoop podcast check us out on social at whoop at will Ahmed and you can get 15% off a WOOP membership if you use the code will. With that, I wish you all a very great week. We'll be back next week. Stay in the green.