The Only 12 Lessons Buried In Every Self-Help Book - Spencer Greenberg

Key Takeaway

When a negative emotion suddenly appears, pause immediately and ask: “What just happened, what did I think it meant, and what did I do next?” Use the ABC method—Activating event, Belief, Consequence—to capture the chain before it fades from memory. Do this for a few moments of irritation, anxiety, or avoidance today. Better diagnosis prevents you from applying a fashionable solution to the wrong underlying problem.

Episode Overview

Spencer Greenberg discusses how research across nearly 500 self-improvement techniques can be organized into 12 underlying psychological strategies rather than treated as a collection of miracle cures. He and Chris Williamson explore practical methods for diagnosing problems, building habits, facing fear, managing worry, aligning goals with values, and improving productivity without sacrificing what matters.

Full Transcript

Transcript of The Only 12 Lessons Buried In Every Self-Help Book - Spencer Greenberg from Modern Wisdom. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

You researched nearly 500 self-improvement strategies. What'd you learn? Yeah, so my co-author Jeremy and Stevenson and I, we had this crazy project where we're like, what if we could gather all the good stuff in self-improvement and try to cram it down into one book? But there's a big problem with that, which is there's so much stuff, how could you possibly make sense of it all? So our idea was, can we find the underlying psychological drivers behind each of the self-improvement techniques? So once we'd gone through over 100 self-improvement books and over 20 types of therapy and taken out every method that they had, we asked ourselves for each one, what is the psychological method behind it?

And much to our surprise, we were able to boil it down to just 12 levers, which is these 12 underlying psychological strategies, and that's the name of our book, 12 levers. Why do you think so many people have become so disillusioned with self-help? I think one of the problems is that they're taught that there's a silver bullet. You know, someone has some new cool idea and they say, this thing is gonna solve your problem. And often the author says, I used to be like you, I can relate to you, but look, I turned my life around and look how great I am now.

And the reality is there isn't one silver bullet that works for all people at all times. There are some really, really good methods, but even the best methods, they're contextual. You have to use them on the right person at the right time. And it may not be the first method you use that's actually gonna solve your problem. What's been interesting to me working with doctors and working on health and stuff like that since I moved to America, every single specialist has, and these are the teachers, right, even the students who are maybe even more fervent or ardent about like whatever the thing is that saved them, every single person, the sleep guy has a story about how someone started using CPAP and went from being a brain foggy mess into a superstar and he went on to become a millionaire and all of this great stuff happened to him.

Or the nutrition people will tell you about how someone was allergic to Blue 40 and peanut butter and seed oils and they cleaned their diet up and it totally transformed them and now they're an Olympian bodybuilder or something. For every single strategy, there is an outlier success story. And those people, if you went to them and you were to say, hey man, my health's not feeling too good or I wanna be a bit more productive, and they go, dude, I've got the strategy. And it's weird because those people, it's quite easy to accuse them of being like grifters or overzealous or overselling what the strategy can achieve.

But no, what you're doing by a process of selection, like by selection bias, self-selection bias, you are seeking out people that are hyper-responders to that particular strategy and they are telling you, sometimes they're lying, but a lot of the time, they're just telling you their real experience. This is actually what happened to me or this is exactly what happened for a client of mine. And then if you embark on this, but it's the wrong context, the wrong time, you don't apply it right, it's not right for your physiology or psychology or particular situation or whatever, you're like, well, this is bullshit.

You lied to me about what it does for you. And it's like, no, no, no, no. It is right for the right person at the right time applied in the right way. And the idiosyncratic nature of any intervention is why blanket coverage advice is probably bullshit. You know, if you look at lists of cognitive biases, you'll see there's over a hundred of them. But I've been thinking about recently, what are the ones that the smartest people fall for? And I think this is one that the smartest people fall for.

They find something that was genuinely life-changing, like truly life-changing and amazing. And then they just say, everyone's got to do this thing. And I know so many smart people have done this and I don't blame them for it, but it's a huge mistake. One of my friends, Gwendo Bogle's got this idea called the golden hammer. And he says that a public intellectual, usually one that's got famous for a small number of principles, sees that principle in everything. And then he's got in brackets afterward, every definition of this should come attached with a photo of Nassim Taleb, which is like, you know, someone who's got an amazing idea set, but is able to like retrofit lots of insights to this idea set.

And it's kind of the same as this. What's your problem? Oh, athlete's foot? Allow me to show you my CPAP machine. Like I fixed fucking athlete's foot with a CPAP machine. Like all of these things, and you're right. Like this golden hammer kind of approach seems to be a master cognitive bias that a lot of smart people, that are the kinds of people who have gone through lots of these spirals, that they're gonna fall for. Right, and there are methods that really don't work. Like they're genuine bullshit.

And then there are genuine grifters out there that are lying to you. But there's a lot of what's happening is that people genuinely found something really useful and they're just trying to apply it to everything. How much of the self-help industry is just old school psychological techniques repackaged with new terminology? Well, it's so funny because sometimes you're reading about some cool new technique and you realize it was discovered by the Buddha or something, and you're like, wow, this has been around well over a thousand years.

But that doesn't mean it's not useful. Like maybe it has a new twist on it. Maybe it's better adapted to a modern audience, right? We can't necessarily work with this thing that's thousands of years old. But I would say a lot of it rhymes, right? You're seeing the same thing again and again and again. And this is part of what set us down this journey of writing the book, The 12 Lovers, was that my co-author and I had both seen the same methods that come again and again and again, and it started to make us think, maybe there's a pattern here, right?

Maybe there's less behind it all than you might think at first when you look at hundreds of techniques. Why these 12? Like what was special about this particular bucket of 12? Was there one that was nearly 13, but that actually got fucked off? It was really that once we sat down with this list of almost 500 techniques, we went through each one, one by one, and said, what's the psychological principle? And just attached it. And then when we got to one where we didn't have a psychological principle, we had to add one.

And then sometimes we would go back and merge some. We're like, oh, that one's kind of the same as that one and merge them. And literally by the end, there were 12. All the techniques fit into 12, which was shocking. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. If self-help is already, for a lot of people, overcomplicated, is this not risking just being another complicated system? Like is this the last personal development book that I'll ever need? We give references to tons of really great books that can help you go deeper on any topic here.

So I think of this as a map. It lets you see the whole space of what are all the levers that you can pull to improve your life. And we give you really concrete steps that you can put them into action. But you may wanna go really deep on that specific lever that's helping you or the specific technique. And we have references to so many great books in here that can help you go follow that thread. What were some very well-known personal development strategies that had surprisingly little legitimacy in terms of effectiveness, science, et cetera?

Yeah, so one interesting one is cold exposure. And so we focus on psychology, right? Our book is about psychology. But we do talk about the intersection between the body and the mind. At the end of the day, we're minds attached to these biological robots. And what happens in our bodies just has a great impact on our psychology. So you kind of can't ignore that. And techniques like cold exposure really have an influence psychologically. And one thing that we did for our book is really go through the evidence, looking at what's known, what studies have been run, what's been tested in the psychological space and trying to navigate through an evidence-based lens while also bringing in our experience.

Jeremy Stevenson, my co-author, is a clinical psychologist who treats patients. I've built many, many tools for people on our website, clearthing.org, where we teach people psychological skills. So we also bring in our own experience from that. But if you look at something like cold exposure, many people report more alertness. Many people report feeling good doing it, and that's fantastic. But the evidence base for having long-term health benefits is actually much weaker than you might think. There's some suggestive evidence. There's a little bit of research. But we really need way more research, like looking at long-term, randomizing some people to do it for a year and some people not, and really looking at what changes about them.

I imagine that cold exposure is gonna be very difficult to do a double-blind placebo-controlled trial. Like, it's very hard to convince someone they've been in cold water when they actually haven't. So the point around cold exposure is not, it doesn't necessarily make people feel better, because it can, and it can improve their performance over the, like, from a state perspective. Right, short-term effects. But getting into a trait perspective, the evidence is much more wishy-washy. Yeah, yeah, and you just need much longer-term follow-up to really see what happens when people do it for a long time.

Now, that's a funny one also, because it traces back so long. Like, early humans were doing cold exposure, right? But it's obviously, some people get really good benefits out of it. And if you feel great doing it, that's awesome. That's good enough reason to do it. How should people go about diagnosing their actual problem then, so that they can actually choose the right technique? Yeah, so this is why we put this as literally the first love of our book. We call it Unravel the Causes. It's about figuring out the deeper, controllable causes of your life challenges.

And we put it at the beginning, because often, without really understanding your challenges, you can't have good solutions. Better understanding leads to better solutions. So one example you might think about, suppose you're having fights with your girlfriend regularly, and you might think, well, I know why we fight, right? Like, she wants one thing, I want another thing. And that's like one level of understanding. We call it level one causal understanding. But then you could ask yourself, huh, but I know other couples where they want different things, and yet they're not fighting about it all the time.

What's going on? And you start reflecting, and you realize, well, every time we try to have a discussion about it, we both start getting angry. So that's level two understanding. But there's an even deeper understanding of that. Well, why is it that you're both getting angry? What's bringing up that angry is it's some deep-seated resentment, and that could get you to level three understanding. So the idea is these tools that can help you figure out what are the deeper level causal structures. It's kind of like if you were trying to fix your car that won't start, and you just start fixing things at random, it's gonna take you a really long time to fix it.

If you go get a diagnostic, now you can fix it right away. What is the best diagnostic tool, or your favorite one, the simplest one that you found? A simple one that's quite powerful is called the ABC technique. A stands for activating events. So that's, what is the event that occurs when the situation's happening? So maybe it would be your girlfriend sees dishes in the sink and says, I told you not to leave dishes in the sink. That's gonna be the activating event. B stands for beliefs, which also includes thoughts.

And so that would be, well, what do you think in your mind when your girlfriend says that? Maybe you have a thought, well, I just wanna be able to live in the peace. I don't wanna have to think about the dishes all the time. And then C stands for consequences, which could be behavioral, could be emotional. So maybe you start feeling annoyed. Maybe you start engaging in a certain behavior, like you raise your voice. And you can start tracking these situations where things are going badly for you with a simple ABC technique.

And as you map it out that way, you can begin to see things that you never noticed before. What happened? What was my belief about it? And what were the consequences that came of that? Why is that format, how can that be revealing? Like what happens to somebody's life if they start to investigate that more deeply? Well, fascinatingly, let me ask you a question. How many thoughts do you think you have in a day? Fuck, I remember, is it like 70,000 or something? I think estimates are 5,000, 7,000, something like that, but it's tough to estimate.

It's honestly tough to estimate, but it's a huge number. At the end of the day, if I asked you, how many do you remember? How many could you write down? Essentially zero. Essentially zero, like a few, right? And it's fascinating, that discrepancy. What it shows us is that we're not very aware of our mental life after the fact. But when it's happening, if someone were gonna ping you right in that moment and say, what did you just think like five seconds ago? You could tell me, right?

Yep, it's like a permanent forgetting. It's a permanent forgetting. So there's the technique that I developed called the inner why technique that helps with this. It also relates to the ABC technique. The inner why technique is very simple. It just says, notice when your emotion suddenly shifts negatively, and then ask yourself why. What was the thing that just happened? And if you can catch it in the moment, usually only one thing happened, and then you only had one thought, and you immediately know why your emotion shifted.

But if you wait 20 minutes, you might not be able to identify it. Now I'm just in a bad mood. Exactly. It's this big amorphous sort of like clouds that you're trying to move through after the fact. Exactly, even 20 minutes later, you may not be able to piece together what happened. So you can make a little game out of it. For the next few days, say, how many times can I catch my negative emotion suddenly starting and just ask why? And then that can start turning into the ABC technique where you're like, okay, now that I'm having more awareness of when this is happening, I can now break it down, activating of that belief, consequence, and I can start to understand their problem.

What did you learn about values? I think a lot of people with personal development really begin there every time that you sign up for some new personal development course or coaching or whatever, like the first place that they'll get you to start is their values. What did you learn about them? So values is a topic I've actually done a ton of research on. We try to make a categorization system of the entire set of human values. To start, we created a little training program that taught people about the distinction between intrinsic values and instrumental values.

Intrinsic values are things that you value for their own sake. You don't value them merely as a means to an end. Whereas instrumental values are things you value because they get you other things. So for example, a watch. You know, a watch is really nice to have. It's convenient and it helps you in a bunch of ways, but nobody values it intrinsically. You value it because it gets you stuff, right? Or cash, you value it because it gets you stuff. But happiness, you value it intrinsically.

If someone said, well, why do you care about being happy? You'd be like, you don't even know how to answer that because of course I care. Or connection with other human beings, you probably care about that intrinsically. But there are a lot of things that people care about intrinsically and we try to map them all out because these are at the core, at the root of everything else. These are the things we're fundamentally after, right? And what we found is 22 categories of intrinsic values, so it's quite a big set, includes everything from longevity, like living a long time, reducing suffering, not just for yourself, but it could be for everyone in the world or for all conscious beings.

People have different values. You could have values around nature or you could have values around spirituality, many different things. So it's really a diverse set, but almost everyone has multiple intrinsic values. Okay. Why is understanding your values so hard? I think a lot of the time people do their self-investigation. This one and this one seem in conflict with each other. I like connection, but I also like autonomy, perhaps. This one and this one kind of overlap, but they also feel distinct. And sometimes I have this and other times I have another.

Why is there so much conflict when it comes to understanding our own values? It's funny because the human brain seems to encode values directly, but not intrinsic values. If I showed you something, you could say whether you wanted it, whether you valued it, but to figure out whether it's an intrinsic value actually takes this extra cognitive effort to figure out, do I really like that for its own sake or am I just trying to get something out of that? There's something else I'm after. It's a tricky kind of thought experiment you have to do.

We developed a test called the. Intrinsic Values Test, it's totally free. It's on our website, clearerthinking.org. It's exactly for this purpose, to help figure out what their actual intrinsic values are and separate them from the instrumental. And it's kind of shocking, because sometimes people will go years and years or decades and confuse their instrumental values with their intrinsic values. I had a funny example of this, where a friend of mine was feeling very depressed, and she came to me and she said, you know, I can't really tell why I'm depressed.

I think it has to do with my boyfriend, but it's really confusing, because he's a really great guy. And I said, okay, interesting, tell me, why don't you write down his positive qualities? And she wrote them down, and I was like, yeah, he seems like a really awesome guy. All these great qualities. Now write down your values. And she wrote those down, zero overlap in the list. And I was like, wow, that's fascinating. And I had this idea, write down your parents' values. And she wrote them down, and it was a perfect match to her boyfriend.

And I was like, you're dating your parents' ideal person. Of course you're not happy, because that's not the person that you want to be with. And she broke up with him and was much happier after. So yeah, we can easily confuse these things. Is it your perspective, then, that people should focus on their intrinsic values? But presumably, we can't always get directly to happiness. I value happiness, right? Or I value adventure. We can't get directly to that. That means that I need to work or travel or spend time in the sun or whatever.

The proximate versus the ultimate in EP language. How much should I work on the first order thing? And how much should I work on the end result thing? There's a funny paradox where some things, when you try to do them too directly, it undermines it. What like? So in meditation, if you say to someone, okay, I want you to meditate as well as you can right now. Trying to meditate well actually tends to undermine your ability to meditate. Sleep is another one. Sleep, there's a really funny study where they had two groups.

And one group, they said, okay, we want you to try to sleep. And the other group, we said, we want you to try to stay awake even though you're in bed. And the group, they told her to try to stay awake, fell asleep faster. Hilarious. So happiness can be a thing like this where trying to be happy is not actually the way to be happy usually. To be happy, you focus on the things that generate happiness rather than trying to get it like straight on. I imagine human connection is not one of those though.

Human connection to me seems to be the sort of thing that you actively can seek directly. I am at the checkout counter in front of the lady and I'm gonna say something nice to her and ask how her day is going. That is the most direct way. Yeah, it's intrinsic. Like I'm using words to get connection, rah, rah, rah. But like, that's pretty direct. And I do think that that's one of those. So this begins to get a little complex now, which is, I guess, where the devil is in the details.

Yeah, and for some things, even with human connection, some people, as soon as they think, I wanna make more human connection, they're gonna know exactly how to do that. And other people are gonna be like, how the hell do you do that? And that's where tools start to come in, right? Okay, what is your advice for people about working out what they actually value in terms of stuff that's in conflict with each other? A lot of the time, their intention, this thing feels opposite. Yeah, so our values genuinely conflict.

And the reason that they conflict is because trying to get one thing often is at odds with getting another thing. If you're gonna put time into seeking adventure, that's gonna be less time for your family, right? There's a fundamental conflict there. Also, the world sometimes puts them into conflict. For example, suppose you go to your friend's play. They're really excited to have you there. Afterwards, they come up to you and they say, what did you think? Did you like it? And you actually hated it. You thought it was terrible.

Or you couldn't think of a single good thing to say about it. What do you do? And that's a genuine values conflict. And some people are gonna say, well, that's easy. You just say, oh, it was great. And other people are gonna say, well, no, I care about being truthful more than I care about protecting their feelings, right? And suppose here that they're not gonna learn a great lesson from you. They're just gonna feel bad, right? If you tell them it sucked. So yeah, the world puts our values in conflict and effort puts our values into conflict.

The only thing you can do, because they're your values, they're the things you care about, is you have to then carefully reflect and say, well, how much do I care about this thing versus this thing in this situation? And thought experiments can be really useful. Sometimes you can ask yourself, okay, suppose I knew that my friend was gonna cry for three days and be brokenhearted if I told them their play sucked. Would it still be worth it? And you can start to play with this to figure out the trade-off between your values, right?

Because you're figuring out your own trade-off curve. Essentially, it's a form of introspection. A quick aside, if you've wanted an eight sleep but can never quite justify the price, things just got very interesting. They've somehow managed to make it significantly better and cheaper at the same time. Introducing the brand new Pod 6. It's now 50% smaller, meaning it fits under most bed frames. And there are nine times more sensors built into it. Despite all of these upgrades, the Pod 6 now starts at just $1,999, the lowest starting price Eight Sleep has ever offered.

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That's E-I-G-H-T sleep.com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. I think when people think about personal development, self-growth, self-help, habit-building, habit-setting is maybe at the top, certainly be in the top three. You tested a bunch of habit-building techniques. What'd you learn? We ran a giant study on habit formation. It was kind of like a horse race, pitting the techniques against each other. Were you the one that was trying to embed the habits? No, we ran it on hundreds of people. So we took 20 different habit formation techniques.

We randomized people. So each person in our study got five out of the 20 and picked at random, plus there was a control group. And we tracked them for a month to see who stuck with their habits better. And the fascinating thing was that almost none of the techniques worked, first of all. But we did find some things that worked. The things that were most promising, we actually ended up doing a follow-up study with the things that most worked. We bundled them together into a package that you can use.

We actually call it Daily Ritual. It's also available for free on our website, clearthing.org. But you can use this habit packet that worked. But the things that worked were, one, the ridiculously stupid method of writing on a piece of paper and sticking it somewhere in your office or your home that just says, here's my habit. It actually increased people's sticking to their habits. What was there a particular category of habits that that worked more effectively for or less effectively for? It tends to work for people that tend to be more forgetful because some people, they just are gonna remember.

Memory is not even gonna be an issue. But for people like myself, I'm kind of forgetful. That actually probably would help me. Just remind it every time I walk by, oh yeah, I have an intention to do that. So that was one that worked a little bit silly. A second one that worked is kind of a famous technique sometimes called tiny habits or similar names is you make a version of your habit for days when you can't do the whole habit. And the idea is you never miss your habit because this tiny version, you're allowed to do instead and there's no excuse ever to not do the tiny version.

You didn't get to the gym, you do 10 squats on a day that you don't go to the gym. Exactly, there's no excuse not to do 10 squats. You should be able to hit it every time. And what's really cool about that is it helps not break the cycle. So the mental machinery of forming the habit never gets broken, which makes it stickier. And you might think, well, aren't people just gonna start cheating, right? And just do that instead. But in our study, they actually didn't.

They actually were more successful with the big habit, even though they had the option of doing the tiny habit, which is kind of fascinating. What are some of the best habits that you found the tiny habits intervention effective for? Well, I think it tends to be good for things where life really will get in the way sometimes of doing it. And you're just like, look, today's just too crazy. I cannot go to the gym for 30 minutes. Like, it's just not gonna happen. And yeah, just having that thought.

Meditation for one minute. Exactly. Reading a single page, half a page, a fucking poem, whatever. Exactly. So you're never gonna miss it. But I'll tell you the most effective technique we found, the most promising one in our study, was one that we call habit reflection. And the way it works is you first think about a habit you succeeded at in the past. Then, and I recommend you write it down. You write down, what did you do to help you succeed? Did you tell your friend that you were gonna try to do it?

Did you pre-plan it in advance so it was easy to do every day? What did you do that helped? Then the final step is you write down, how can you apply what you learned from doing that past habit to this new habit? So that was sort of the one standout technique from our study. What do you think's going on there? It's self-adapting. Many habit techniques, they assume you have a certain challenge, right? Tiny habits is great, but it assumes that your problem is that you kind of don't have time to do it some days.

Or, you know, so every technique sort of has a certain group that it works with. You know, putting a little notepad with your habit, that's great if you're the sort of person that tends to forget. But if you don't forget, then it's not useful. What's cool about this, it's self-adapting. You're just remembering to use whatever it is you learned. Yeah, it's like survival of the fittest, survival of the most effective, within yourself. You are the system, you are the testing ground. You've AB'd whatever happened in the past.

Shock, horror, if it worked for you previously, it'll probably work for you in the future. But it also shows that people, like, somehow are not applying that knowledge, right? Even though they succeed in the past. I have evidence that this worked before, and for some reason I've discarded it now, and I'm trying to do the new thing, the new sexy thing. No, I guess that's a question. You talked about biases before. How much of what you found, is people already knowing what they should do, or having an insight, but just not applying it, or being seduced by something that's more recent, that's a little bit more available to them?

Well, knowing what you should do is a tricky thing, right? So you could say, well, everyone knows they should exercise a whole bunch, right? But maybe that's not the most useful way to think about what they should do. Because maybe what they should do is find a form of exercise that's incredibly easy for them, that they really enjoy doing, rather than trying to do the right form of exercise. So sometimes what they should do is something that's actually super customized to them, rather than the best thing.

And maybe we can get lured into wanting to do the best thing, even if it's not working for us. What do people get wrong about setting goals? Because habits and goals, typically, a habit is a daily or hourly, weekly engagement to move somebody toward an outcome. And goals feel slightly different to values. Sort of instrumental, like I have this value, there's this goal, which is like a physical thing that's typically gonna get me towards something that I value, but habits also aren't goals, and values aren't goals.

So does goals deserve its own set here? Absolutely. Actually, I'll tell you about one of the biggest disagreements me and my co-author, Jeremy Stevenson, had when writing the book, which is that he doesn't find thinking about values that useful, which I think I find it incredibly useful, and I know many other people that do. So we kind of had this, well, what do we do about that? Because he's like, I don't know. I don't know if it's that useful. So I was like, well, how do you do it?

And so through this discussion, we realized there's this broader set of things that we call your guiding foundations. Your intrinsic values is part of it, but also your principles, which are essentially the rules you decide to live by to help implement your values. So you might have a principle like always tell the truth, or a principle like family comes first. It's essentially pre-deciding on how you're gonna make your decisions so that you live by your values. And then the last one is priorities. These are the areas that you're deciding to focus on.

So you can say, I'm gonna prioritize health in the next three months. I'm gonna prioritize family in the next three months, whatever it is. So that's your guiding foundations. And the thing about guiding foundations is you never complete them. They're ongoing processes. You just keep going and going and going for the rest of your life. Goals then relate to those, but are distinct because goals, they end. You achieve a goal. You're done with the goal. But my view is what people often get wrong is they don't build them on their guiding foundations.

Your goals should be built out of your guiding foundations. They should be reflective of your deepest values. Fuck, it's complex. It is. It feels like very, it doesn't surprise me that you had to do what, 450 different techniques in order to refine them down and bucket them into 12. And yeah, that doesn't surprise me. Why is focusing on fear important? You know, I know some people that don't feel afraid ever, but much, much more common is that people are limited by fear. And it's just such a big problem that I would say many people could benefit from not letting fear stop them from the things they find most valuable.

And I'm a perfect example of this. I'm someone who was always anxious my whole life from childhood. And in particular, there were certain situations that were devastating to me. If I had to go up to a stranger at a party, my heart would be pounding in my chest. My brain was like predicting that I was gonna die. Now, obviously that's ridiculous. It's totally silly. There's an educated, rational person who knows how the world works. Yeah, and I didn't believe, you know, on a reasoning level, of course I knew it was safe, but my brain did not perceive it as safe.

And if you've ever had a phobia of anything, whether it's snakes or spiders or flying, you know what it's like. Your brain is like, I know that's safe, but your body is completely freaking out as though it's the end of the world. And finally, when I was in my early 20s, I said, I have to do something about this. This is ridiculous. So I went to find a therapist and I found a specialist who works on anxiety. And he said, you know, Spencer, I can help you, but you're not gonna like it, how am I gonna do it?

And I said, well, how are we gonna do this? He said, you're gonna have homework to go to a bar every weekend alone, and you're gonna talk to five strangers. And for me, this was, oh my God, I can't do that. It's insane. But we started small. We built what's called a fear hierarchy. The bottom of the fear hierarchy is something that's stressful to you, but bearable. So a one. For me, that was go up to people and simply ask what time it was. And I was quite afraid doing this, but I could handle it.

It wasn't too much fear. And then when that got easy, we took it to the next level, which was going up to people and saying, excuse me, what is that you're drinking? That looks good. And we worked our way up. All the way at the very top, it got really crazy. The final culmination of this is I went up to people at bars, and this was in Manhattan, and I said to men, excuse me, would you give me a hug? And- Fuck me. That's brilliant. Literally, I thought I was gonna die.

Like I thought that, but amazingly, not only did I not get punched in the face, like the worst reaction I had was like people laughing or being like, no. And it was shocking. It totally transformed me. How many hugs did you get? I definitely got a few hugs. Oh, that's nice. Yeah. Maybe I wouldn't work everywhere. I don't condone doing that, depending on where you live. But my social anxiety fell dramatically. And I certainly still have social anxiety sometimes today, but it's shockingly less than it was, and it all took place over.

maybe six months. And there's some situations today where I'm sitting in a room of people and I'm like, I think I'm less socially anxious than the other people here. This is amazing. What is the principle that's underlying that? Is it basically the same thing as exposure therapy, typically for phobias? Yes, so it is this idea of exposure. Basically, the way fear typically works is that when we're exposed to really frightening things, we start associating that with frightening things and pattern match. So it extends beyond that initial thing that made us afraid.

So let's say you got assaulted while you were walking down the street one day, that whole neighborhood might be frightening to you, even if rationally you know the chance of you getting assaulted again is incredibly unlikely. And unfortunately, fear can tend to propagate, especially when we engage in avoidance. So suppose that you always avoid that neighborhood, you just never will go near it. Now maybe you'll start avoiding even the areas around it and the areas around that, and it can be pernicious, it starts spreading. And this is why fear can be such a big problem for so many people, because it starts carving these boundaries around what you're willing to do, and you start avoiding all these valuable things.

And the basic idea of exposure therapy is you expose yourself to the things you fear, but, and here's something that almost everyone misses, you have to avoid engaging in safety behaviors. So safety behaviors are things we do to make ourselves feel better in those situations, but they cause our brain to learn the wrong rule. Can you give me an example? Yeah, so I have a friend who is extremely afraid of flying, but he flies regularly. Isn't that strange? How could he be afraid? Like, wouldn't he be doing exposure therapy by flying regularly?

By flying so much, he should have dissolved his fear. Exactly, but here's the issue. Right before he flies, he's constantly obsessively checking the weather reports to make sure that the weather is perfect, and he cancels his flight if it has bad weather. So his brain doesn't learn flying is safe, his brain learns flying is safe if the weather is perfect, and I carefully check the weather report every time. So it essentially prevents his brain from learning the rule that the thing is actually safe to do.

Yeah, it's a fragility. You're programming a kind of anti-robustness into your system by doing that. What are some other, can you give me another example of safety behavior that people might do? Yes, so in social anxiety, you might do a safety behavior of leaving an event early. Like say, it's like, oh, I go to parties, I'm socially anxious when I go to parties, why doesn't it work? But maybe halfway through the party, you're like, okay, I'm getting stressed out, now I'm gonna leave, right? Or maybe during conversations with people when you're feeling socially anxious, you start laughing at all their jokes and being overly friendly, and that's your safety behavior because you think, oh, if I don't do that, they're gonna hate me.

Yeah, that's interesting. What about, the fear thing is fascinating because it really does feel to me like if you haven't worked out fears in at least a good chunk of them in most areas of your life, they are like a speed governor on your system. There are certain things that you are going to be unable to get, like the territory idea is great. There's certain bits of the map that are just going to be inexplorable to you. The cognitive map, the world map. I'm terrified of intimacy.

Okay, well, that means that the world of intimacy is not going to be open to you, and then the world of stuff downstream from intimacy, maybe that means that you can't have a family. Maybe that means that you're not gonna be able to get a dog. Maybe that means da-da-da-da-da-da, like all of these things. I have to assume that thinking about fear reinforces the fear, or talking about fears to some degree, obsessing over them, as your friend would have done. He's now got this weird rain dance ritual that he has to do before he gets onto a plane.

How do people work through their fears without obsessing over them so much that they reinforce them and then become completely obsessive about that? We're talking about something non-dangerous because you shouldn't do exposure therapy if you're feeling truly dangerous. Don't do exposure therapy for swimming with dangerous sharks. This doesn't make any sense. But if we're talking about something non-dangerous, the first thing is to make sure that you really are on board intellectually that it's not dangerous. That's where I would start, right? Because if you are convinced that flying is actually incredibly dangerous, well, of course you're afraid.

That makes perfect sense. So the first thing is to work on the cognitions and try to understand, well, how dangerous is this thing really? Do I intellectually buy into this being safe? Once you've intellectually bought in to it actually being safe, and now it's just an emotional thing, there, it's not really about doing lots of additional thinking about it. It's really about exposing yourself in a controlled way and letting yourself sit with the fear. A really crazy example, but it actually is, it fits the theory, and I'm pretty sure it actually would work, is imagine someone is terribly afraid of snakes and they fall into a pit of harmless snakes, right?

The snakes don't hurt them, right? They're in the pit of snakes. How many hours do you think it'll be until they're bored? Fuck. 12? Eventually, the thing is, they will be bored. Like eventually, they're gonna be like, oh fuck, I can't wait to get out of this pit, right? I'm bored of these snakes. I wish they would bite me, Jesus Christ. Like your brain just cannot freak out indefinitely. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. A quick aside, you've probably heard me talk about element before, and that's because I've started every single morning the same way for the last five years now, which is a cold glass of water with elements in it.

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But I guess some people might choose to be like, all right, I could step my way up to this thing, or I could just ask a bunch of people for a hug. I suppose the high-risk side effect of this is that if you get a rejection on asking for the hug, you've now taken steps back. So that's why you begin with the exposure therapy, so you learn, okay, this is safety. And even if I fall back, I fall back to now a higher baseline because the rejection did hurt, but I have some degree of momentum which is moving me forward.

This incredible psychologist who actually was one of the people that popularized cognitive behavioral therapy for the general public, his name is David Burns, and I had him on my podcast, Clear Thinking. And he, I'll try to do this from memory, but he tells these crazy stories where he uses these one-shot exposures, sometimes it's called flooding. And if I recall correctly, it was a patient who was terribly afraid of contamination. And he brings her in the bathroom, he's like, okay, we're gonna lick the toilet seats. We're just gonna- I've heard about this.

I've heard about this guy. He's like, I'll do it first. I'll do it if you do it, right? And so he has these incredible stories, but it's generally not recommended. Obviously, when you're with an expert, that's one thing. Like you can decide with the expert together. But it's generally not recommended because people often freak out and run out of the situation and that can reinforce their fear. So you really have to stay with it. What about mental states? How do people control the state that they're in to control their performance?

You mean if you're feeling like emotionally dysregulated? Yeah. Yeah, so it's interesting. When people are really highly emotionally dysregulated, often kind of grounding outside of the body is really, really helpful. So there's a very simple technique where you simply look at three things, notice three different things outside of yourself. You notice three things that you can hear and then you notice three things in your body and kind of you switch between these and it kind of grounds you outside of your mind because when you're feeling really emotionally dysregulated, often there's sort of chaos going on in your mind and you actually have to get out of there to temporarily feel better.

I'm gonna focus on that outside of me. I'm gonna focus on this that's on me and then I'm gonna focus on this that's in me. Yeah, and then if that doesn't work, there are more intensive techniques. Like you can kind of shock yourself. And so, not with electricity, but with, for example, you could do it with cold water. So just splash yourself with super cold water briefly actually can suddenly shock you out of a kind of emotional disruption. That's interesting. Is that mammalian dive reflex adjacent stuff?

That's interesting. You know, it may be because I think the mammalian dive reflex, which triggers when you're in cold water, does lower your respiratory rate, as I understand it. So it might be related to that. But this was a technique that it was developed, as far as I understand it, for people with borderline personality disorder because people with that disorder tend to be very emotionally dysregulated easily. And so they had to figure out techniques. Like what do you do? Because you can't like have a conversation and reason when a person is in such a dysregulated state.

So you need to give them something to do. Throw water at them. Well, you teach them to do it for themselves. And then you throw the bucket at them. I don't know, I think that would probably make them more upset. But you teach them to do it for themselves so they can use it to kind of come out of that state. How many self-help books do you think should have just said, move your body and go outside? Well, you know, it depends on the person. It depends on your goals.

Yes, there are so many people that would benefit from just like move your body, go outside. 100%. But if you're depressed, is that gonna solve your problems? Maybe it'll help a little bit. But why are you depressed? You know, what's really going on? Is it because you think you're ultimately worthless and unlovable? Well, okay, you may feel a little better moving your body and going outside, but it's probably not gonna solve the underlying issue. So my view is that there are a number of kind of powerful techniques.

And we need to know the right one, the right time for the right person. What did you learn about the relationship, body, mind? Yeah, so there's so many ways that our mind and body can affect each other and interact. And a really fascinating one is that when we're anxious or stressed, we tend to tense our muscles. And presumably this is because tensing your muscles prepares you to fight, prepares you to run. But you then find that people who have chronic anxiety will have neck pain, shoulder pain, lower back pain, right?

So because it's actually this chronic anxiety impinging on the body. And they might go out and spend years trying to solve their back pain with surgery or something like that, only to discover, oh shit, it's like literally muscle tension from chronic anxiety, right? Not always, obviously, but sometimes it is. It's just kind of remarkable. But it can also go the other way too, which is fascinating. So there's a method called progressive muscle relaxation where you alternately tense and relax different muscle groups. After each one, tensing and relaxing, you kind of feel into the relaxation of it.

And it works in reverse. By relaxing your physical body, it actually starts to relax your mind, just the way a tense mind tends to produce a tense physical body. I think a lot of NSDR is similar to that, right? Yoga nidra, body scan type things. And you're realizing just how much tension is held in your eyebrows, right? Or in your lower back or something, despite the fact that you're laid on the ground. If you do, classically as an entrance into a meditation sit, okay, so I'm gonna scan through my body.

And there are weird places that you go, huh, I had loads of tension in my right forearm for no reason. And it's just like ambiently sat there. And until you pay attention to it, you don't really notice it. A technique I just started exploring just the other day, out of curiosity, it was one where you find the part of your body that has the most tension, you try to relax it. And then you're trying to find the next point that has the most tension, you relax it.

You kind of work your way through it. It's kind of interesting. That's fun. I imagine that a lot of the people who are into this sort of stuff, one of the biggest afflictions that they need to get past is overthinking. That overcomplication, intrusive thoughts, rumination. What did you learn about how to combat overthinking itself? So there's an interesting bifurcation here. There's strategies that try to combat thinking with thinking. For some people with overthinking, that can be a problem. Like people with obsessive compulsive disorder, trying to go that route of combating thinking with thinking can be problematic.

And then there's trying to combat thinking with not thinking. And so if we're taking that route, there's methods known as diffusion, where you're trying to take the thought, diffuse from it. So you're noticing you're having a thought, you're diffusing from it, like separating yourself from it and viewing it from an outside perspective. So an example is, suppose you have the thought, I suck, I can't believe I did that. You can notice, oh, I just had this thought. That's not reality, that's just a thought about a thing.

A thought is not always true. A thought is a process in my mind. It's not the reality of the situation. And then once you've stepped outside of it, you can do things with it. You can let it go. You can imagine it drifting away on the clouds. You can make fun of it. There's literally one of the most ridiculous techniques that we talk about in our book, The 12 Lovers, is you can literally sing the Happy Birthday song to your thought, or do a silly Daffy Duck voice to your thought, because the idea is just finding separation, saying, yeah, I have the thought that I suck, but it doesn't mean I suck.

That is literally just a thought. And some people actually find this really useful, especially people who are overthinking and trying to engage in thinking with thinking, maybe it's part of the problem. That is interesting. I guess a good bit of the problem with overthinking is thinking that overthinking is useful. Believing that if I do this more, some sort of outcome will, some beneficial outcome, desirable outcome will happen on the other side. The same with worry. I'm gonna worry, and that's gonna give me some degree of maybe control or a sense of ownership or sovereignty about the future, reduce uncertainty or whatever.

So yeah, it become, even if it never actually becomes effective, it can feel effective during the moment. People with a lot of anxiety tend to have these beliefs about anxiety that are counterproductive. For example, they tend to believe that anxiety and worry is urgent. If you're having the worry, you have to worry about it now. They also tend to believe that they can't do anything other than worry about it, like literally I'm not capable of not worrying. And they tend to believe it's really useful. Like, oh, it's really valuable that I'm worrying.

If I didn't worry, something bad would happen. And there's this technique that is really not well-known, but that I love, that's sometimes called the worry time. And the way it works is you pick a time of day, let's say 5 p.m., you don't wanna pick before bed. That's important, say 5 p.m. And throughout your whole day, every time you have a worry, you write that worry down. down if you haven't yet written it down. So let's say you have the worry, oh no, I don't know if my project's gonna go well tomorrow.

You haven't had that yet, so you write it down. The next time you have that worry, you don't write it down, right? You're just gonna write it once per day. And then the idea is you're not allowed to worry about it. You have to wait till 5 p.m. So you're essentially batch processing. You're saying, I have to defer my worry until 5 p.m. And if it keeps coming back, you just say, nope, I need to wait till 5 p.m. And then when 5 p.m. rolls around, you worry as much as possible about all those things you wrote down.

High-intensity worry training. Yeah, and the really funny thing that happens is that first of all, people start to realize, huh, I seem to have more control over my worry than I thought. Yes, my worry might keep coming back, but I can keep just redirecting and say, I'm gonna worry about it at 5 p.m. Second, when they get to the worry time and they sit down and try to really worry about all this stuff, they often are like, this is not that useful. What am I doing here?

This is ridiculous. It kind of calls it out as not that helpful. And then when you finish worrying for 15 or 20 minutes, you can then transition to the problem solving and say, well, what am I gonna do about this stuff? Let me pick one of these worries and actually create an action plan to try to improve it. And so it can be a shocking intervention for people that have worried their whole life. One of the interesting insights from CBT is worries and fears are often like bullies on the playground, that they want to come up to you when you're not ready for it.

But if you go to the bully and you're saying, okay, now's the time, it's like, no, no, it's not. I want to jump scare you as you're walking around a corner. You go, no, no, no, no, I'm choosing the time. And I think that there's something about that volitional versus surprised relationship between you and a fear or you and a concern that is from my time in CBT is like one of the best things. Okay, I'm going to go and find the bully, whatever it is I'm concerned about, I'm gonna go in when I want, and I'm going to make it start, I'm gonna start the fight now.

It never wants to engage. And yet when you're trying to do something else, that's when it wants to come over. So yeah, the flipping of that power is interesting. Yeah, and it's also funny that when we're worrying, we often feel like we're doing something. But then when you switch to problem solving, you're like, well, what was I doing there? Like I was just cycling on the same thought over and over again. It's almost like worries often don't complete. You don't think, so you think, oh no, what if my project is bad tomorrow?

And then you're like, you know, thinking about that and you're stressed about that. But like often it doesn't turn into the useful thing of, okay, like what can I do right now that's actually gonna help tomorrow go well? Are intelligent people particularly vulnerable to worry and overthinking? I don't think, I know there's a perception that they are, but I don't think it's actually very linked to worry per se. Overthinking probably more so. There are cognitive traits around enjoying thinking, thinking more often, and I think more intelligent people tend to have those traits, but not necessarily- Overthinking comes along for the ride with enjoying thinking generally.

I would guess so, yeah. But I don't think worry does. That's interesting. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of people who believe that basically if they're anxious about work and their work, that they're being responsible. They almost sort of feel like it's their duty to worry. Is that actually true or is that sort of one of the biggest myths about anxiety, that it's dutiful to do it? Yeah, definitely some people have that attitude. For example, parents often feel, if I'm not worried about my kids, I'm not a good parent, right?

Not a responsible parent, yep. But being a responsible parent is not really actually about the worry. It's about- Making sure your kid's not safe. Make sure your kid is safe and not dead, yeah. Exactly, and if the worry about your kid is damaging your relationship with them, for example, or driving them crazy, well, then maybe it's not actually helping you be a better parent. But yeah, sometimes people think their worry really is important. Religious people sometimes worry that they're not following God's laws well enough, and they might think that's part of being a good religious person is worrying about that.

I wonder whether overthinking is partly an addiction to feeling like you're solving something. It's like, there has to be a problem. I have a particular demand for problems, and I will broaden the category for what I determine a problem to be until the supply reaches my demand, if that makes sense. Yeah, I mean, I think sometimes people think the more they think about something, the better solution they're gonna have, or the more they're gonna be able to handle it. But after a certain point, we not only hit diminishing marginal returns, but often actually make things less clear.

If you've spent three hours thinking about the thing, and you're no clearer than you were before, you're probably thinking it's not the next thing to do. Maybe you need to take action. Maybe you just need to take a step back from it for a little while. And so I think it's important to track, well, how much progress did you make in the last 10 minutes of thinking about it, or 20 minutes of thinking about it, and calibrate that way. That is how you would tell the difference between productive thinking and rumination.

Yeah, now, of course, it's always possible that you're gonna have some breakthrough after three hours, but I think it's a good indicator if you stop making progress. What's cognitive restructuring? Cognitive restructuring is this idea that you can learn to actually change the thoughts that you have over time. Now, of course, you often can't change the first thought, right, if someone jumps out, you might have a thought, and you're not in control of that necessarily, but you can often change the second thought, the response thought, and that can make a tremendous difference.

So for example, let's go back to an example of fighting with your girlfriend a lot, right? And let's say when your girlfriend asks you, oh, why did you leave the dishes in the sink? You know, I don't like that. Your first thought might be, well, I just wanna do things my way, right? I wanna feel comfort in my home, right? Maybe you don't control that thought, but you can learn to have a different thought after that, and you can ask yourself, well, is that the most helpful thought to have right now?

And what would a more helpful thought that's at least as true, so not a self-delusion, but at least as true be, and you can actually learn and practice to have that be your response thought. So maybe a more helpful thought that's at least as true is, well, this is her home too, and we need to find a balance, right? And so after you have that first thought, you can train yourself to have that second thought, and then that can set you up in a better position for success.

Similarly, I learned about parts work when I went to a meditation retreat recently. Why did that make it into the book? Well, there are a lot of people that find that thinking of themselves as having parts gives them self-insight. And so we included it just because there are a lot of people out there that particularly like this set of techniques. It's most famously associated with internal family systems, but it's actually used in other therapies. For example, I believe it's used in schema therapy, which actually has surprisingly more evidence for its efficacy than internal family systems.

So I think it actually does work for some people. The basic concept, as I think about it, is we're not literally different parts, right? We have one brain, but we have sort of activation patterns of emotions, beliefs, motivations, drives that get activated together. And when you have these things get activated together, it's almost like you're a different person temporarily. Like maybe there's a child part of you that never got enough love. And sometimes in certain situations in adulthood, that gets activated. And suddenly it's almost like you're back there being that child that didn't get enough love, and you're being really needy, and you're having certain fears come up, et cetera.

And so the idea of parts work is you can learn to try to communicate with these metaphorical parts, try to really understand where they're coming from, what they're trying to do, validate what their needs are, try to help their needs be met, and really approach them from a place of deep compassion and understanding. And some people find that really unlocks insights for them. I wonder how much of that strategy is to do with the same principle around fears and worry, that in the fighting with it is the reinforcement of it, that you're not pushing it away, you're sort of bringing this thing in.

Oh, there I am again, worrying about being perfectionistic. Oh, well, that's the part of me that wanted to get a lot of love as a kid and felt like love was gonna be predicated on performance. Oh, well, like if I saw that version of me now, I'd pick him up and give him a hug. Wouldn't that be nice for him? Oh, well, that's like, there's compassion. I'm no longer in tension with that thing. I am that thing, and it is a part of me, and I'm trying to offer it some care.

It's often recommended that you give these parts names because it kind of makes it easier to talk about them, like the scared part or the perfectionist part or whatever it is. And it's often also recommended you not give them mean names. Yeah, the idiot. Yeah, the idiot or that guy who's ruining my life or whatever. And the reason for that is that the parts of you are trying to do something, right? They're trying to achieve something, and it's useful to think about that. They're trying to protect you.

Even if they drive you crazy, they're trying to protect you. And it's a useful reframe to say, hey, that thing that's beating me up, it's because it's scared that I'm not gonna achieve enough if it doesn't do that. And holy shit, maybe I can explain it. I can achieve my goals in other ways, so it doesn't have to beat me up so much. Tell me if this sounds familiar. You train regularly, you eat reasonably well, you feel fine, but you're just kind of going off vibes.

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Well, I'm a mathematician, I don't know if you know that. And so I was so tickled when I realized I could create an equation for productivity. It's literally an equation, it's true. And it's that productivity equals time times efficiency times importance. And I'll break that down. Productivity is the amount of value you produce each week based on what you fundamentally value. And that's what I like to call healthy productivity, where it's based on everything you value, not just producing one type of output. If you focus on productivity on just one type of output, like how much can you create at just your job, the problem with that is it can often come at the expense of the other things that you fundamentally care about, like your family life, your relationships, your hobbies, et cetera.

So that's the first part. Productivity is the value you create each week based on what you fundamentally value. Then we can break down the equation. It's time, which is the number of hours you work, times efficiency, which is the fraction of your project you complete with each hour, times importance, which is the total value based on what you care about of completing your project. And having this equation, we can then start to think about how do you tune it. For some people, you're gonna tune it by saying, well, if you're not working very many hours on the things you care about, you're gonna wanna get up time.

But if you're already working 70 hours a week, that's a trap, trying to push up time, you're not gonna get much out of that. Those last few hours are gonna cost a lot and they're not gonna give you very much. Okay, well, what else? You can work on efficiency. There's a whole bunch of techniques you can use for efficiency. But often, one of the most overlooked ones is importance. You can't work 100 times more than another person. It's literally impossible. There's 24 hours in a day.

But sometimes you can find something 100 times more valuable for yourself. You can get sometimes incredible gains in thinking about the importance part of what's actually truly valuable to you and what do you wanna work on. How long you work, how well you work, and what you're working on. Basically, yeah. Right, yeah, that's cool. That is cool, and you're right, that work done is time times intensity. But that work done can be in service of a thing that you don't really care about. And you're saying you're being productive, I suppose.

You have produced things. You have certainly produced something. But whether that is salient or valuable to you in your life, or even the thing that is being given to you, that sometimes you don't get to always choose what it is that you need to work on. Someone might not want to work on their taxes, but I would imagine that you can link that to a deeper value, something that you do care about, and then you go, okay, how efficient can I be at filling in the spreadsheet, and how much time are we gonna spend doing it?

Yeah, exactly. And when you take that broader view of productivity, you realize that some things are just not worth it. Imagine a truck driver who's trying to get valuable merchandise from point A to point B. Well, if all they care about is getting the merchandise there, they can drive over the speed limit, they can not sleep the entire trip. But clearly that's not worth it. Why is it not worth it? Maybe the merchandise would get there faster on average, but they're gonna put people's lives at risk, they're gonna be absolutely miserable, et cetera, right?

So they're gonna burn the things they care about to produce this sort of narrow view of productivity. Yeah, most productivity advice, then, is focused on efficiency. Very little of it is just work longer. It'd be an incredibly short book. Well, there are some interesting techniques around time as well. Okay, what like? So one thing we talk about in our book, The 12 Lovers, is doing a time audit. And if you have the same schedule every single day, you can just do it for one day, but you could also do it for a few days if your schedule tends to vary.

And it's just looking for how do you actually spend your hours? So every time you transition activities for a few days, just simply write in a notepad, what were you doing and for how long? And when people do this, they're often shocked to discover what they're actually spending their time doing. Oftentimes, people spend way more time scrolling their phones than they realize. Like they often underestimate by literal hours sometimes. They think that they're working more than they're actually working. So a time audit can then help you look back and say, maybe I do have an extra hour or two more than I thought.

And then you can start being strategic. So obviously, you can't make time out of nowhere, but you can make time out of time that you just think is not a good use of time. Yeah, I think that's the number one realization that people get from wearing a sleep tracker, like a Whoop or using an Eight Sleep or something, which is just, dude, you are sleeping less than you think you are. Like you're not sleeping that much. Yeah, man, I was like, I got eight hours. That's what happened to me when I started wearing one.

No, you were in bed for 7.15 and after it took you a little while to get to sleep and then you woke up a couple of times for a piss. It's like, you got six hours and you thought you got eight. And there's a big difference in that. What about efficiency? What were the best ways for people to improve efficiency? Yeah, so in terms of efficiency, we talk about, first of all, coming prepared. And there's different versions of coming prepared to work. One is, I know so many people that like.

type a lot as part of their job, and some of them are really slow typers. And it's fascinating to me because it's like, you type so much part of your job, maybe you type a lot on your phone, but you actually kind of suck at typing. If you just spend like five hours improving your typing, that's gonna give gains for the rest of your life. So that's one version of coming prepared. Another version is when you sit down to your desk, is everything there, ready to go?

You know, chefs have this idea of having everything laid out in the perfect position, all ready to go, so you can just focus on cooking. So we can take that to heart with many different types of work, and it could be just clearing away all the fricking windows on your computer, so you can focus on what you're doing, right? So coming prepared. The second thing is avoiding distractions. So this is a big one. When people start getting into their work, things often pull them away. And you know, there's a bunch of things you can do, whether it's, you know, silencing notifications, changing your work environment, using noise-canceling headphones, whatever distracts you in figuring out how do you remove that, so it's not gonna be a problem.

I love the idea of the component skills. I totally didn't think about if you're writing anything ever, which almost everybody is, hey, dude, how good are you at writing? How many errors? How quick can people become better at typing shit? Five hours of training? That's a good question. So I was working on improving my typing speed on my phone, and I felt like I got significant benefits after like five hours of practice. But I mean, you know, not that I'm amazing. Is there a website where you can go to like, you can literally get a game that's like a game where you have to blow things up by typing.

Like, there's so many different apps and all kinds of stuff that you can just practice. Has that stuck about, your typing? I think I have, yeah, I think it's stuck. I mean, look, I'm not the fastest typist on my phone, but I'm faster than I used to be. Right, my girlfriend's a freak. Like, she is able to get stuff out quicker than I can think it. Like, what the fuck is going on? Watching, is that watching Daredevil, not Daredevil? Who's the guy, The Flash. It's like watching The Flash on the phone, anyway.

Well, that's an interesting insight your voice, especially now, chat GPT, voice commands and stuff. I wonder what additional efficiency gains will be able to be made by people that are using voice as opposed to having to, and then we go to Neuralink and we start to speed these things up. But that will change some of the input restrictions that people have in terms of that being the rate limiter, the skill of being able to do that into, okay, well, how often are you being distracted? Okay, well, how are you prioritizing the sequence?

Are you becoming prepared in terms of making sure that you actually have everything that you need before you begin that task? A lot of stuff like that. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, technology, I think, is gonna be huge for efficiency. I mean, I'm just going crazy trying to figure out all the ways to use AI to make my life more efficient. And I think there's tremendous opportunities there. What does the research say about scheduling fun? Like, a lot of what we've talked about so far is kind of grind set, grind set adjacent.

I'm making things happen. I'm dealing with my problems and I'm expediting my goals and stuff. But presumably, fun is good in and of itself and also a strategy for a more fulfilling life and presumably a more effective life too. Sometimes I worry about saying things that are too obvious, but then what I came to realize over time is if you say something obvious that someone hasn't heard before, it can actually be really valuable because they just immediately get it. They're like, oh shit, you're right, because it's obvious, right?

And we were worried about this with one section of our book. We call it glad-you-did-it activities. And the idea of a glad-you-did-it activity is very simple. It's just an activity where afterwards, you're glad you did it. You're like, yeah, hell yeah, I'm glad that I did that thing. Very often we do non-glad-you-did-it activities, right? We scroll on our phones or we watch too much TV or whatever it is. And I think sometimes people make the mistake of thinking, oh, I should be replacing all my downtime with something productive, right?

But that's a denial of your own needs. When you get home from work and you're tired, you need to relax, yeah, that's why you sit and scroll on your phone. It makes sense. To just replace it with work is to deny those needs and it's not a very healthy thing to do. But you can be smart about it and you can say, well, how do I replace that with a glad-you-did-it activity? Because you probably aren't glad afterwards that you scrolled on your phone. And for me, for example, I love watching documentaries and there's so many I haven't seen that I wanna see.

So a simple thing I can do is be like, instead of doing whatever bullshit to relax, hope a documentary I've wanted to see and watch that. And I'm like, it feels like a meaningful use of time. I'll remember having watched that for years and be able to discuss it with people. And so it's about finding ways to meet your existing needs that give you more benefit in the long-term. It's such a good switch. That's really good. I think that's probably my favorite one from the book.

For me, you can even switch screen for screen, I guess, if you count a Kindle as being a screen. But I'm obsessed with this. I'm wearing my new Dungeon Crawler Carl T-shirt today. Shout out to the people that know my T-shirt collection is ever expanding. And it's a eight book series, at least at the moment. And there's probably gonna be like 18 or something when Matt Dinniman finishes up. And I'm like, well, I'm already on my phone. If I just do, that device goes down and this device, or I guess even like a paper book comes up.

My felt sense of, and this is interesting as well. Glad you did activities. Aren't just things that you enjoy doing in the moment, but even longer than that is the story that you tell yourself about what you did and about being the sort of person that does that sort of thing. And then the identity that is built up by being the sort of person that tells yourself the sort of story about being the kind of person that does that sort of thing. Like it is so recursive.

And just what the fuck you do with your time is kind of the pebble at the top of the avalanche. And then downstream from all of this are habits, fears, story, narrative, identity. All of this shit sort of falls downstream from just like this one switch or going for a walk with the dog instead of lying on the couch and vegging out or whatever. There's this interesting word that most people haven't heard of, which is choice points. The idea is that we make many micro decisions where we can move towards our values or away from them throughout every single day, right?

Your mom calls you, do you pick up the phone? What do you decide to buy at the grocery store? And there's these tiny little decisions add up. Are you moving towards your values or away from them? And I think it's empowering to realize that because you don't have to transform your life with giant bold actions. You can also do it through tiny micro decisions. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Other than for you documentaries, what are some of the most commonly rated glad you did it activities that people can do easy switches for?

If you have a pet, spend time with your pet, right? That's relaxing, it's fun, and typically more meaningful than a lot of the things that people do for relaxation. Obviously, if you're not in Gen Z, you can call a friend. I don't know if Gen Z does that anymore. You can take a walk outside. A lot of people, like being in nature, often people feel good about having done that. Do a call and a walk at the same time. Oh, it's great. And how, this is the problem.

What I guess when you distill things down, they end up being so cliche or trite or like seemingly obvious, like shock, horror. You've got to be an hour and 10 minutes into a podcast to find out that going for a walk and calling a friend is something good for you. And it's like, all right, dude, if you're so fucking smart, why aren't you doing it? It's the same thing. Every time that I sit down with Huberman, Andrew Huberman's on the show this week, I'm like, he'll go cold, dark, quiet for sleep.

Like that's the thing. And people want the recency bias, the new novel insight. What's the cutting edge tool? It's like, bro, if you're so bored of the basics, why aren't you doing them? Why are you not doing them? And that is such a great question. And it's like, well, that is actually maybe the next step they need to take. Why are they not doing it? That's the thing to dive into, right? Rather than, oh, try to do the next technique. It's like, well, why aren't you doing, because there's a reason.

There's a psychological explanation for that that they may not understand yet. Yeah, which is the investigation, the reflection. That's kind of important. Did you look at discipline? Because discipline, willpower, resilience, motivation, it's second after maybe habits and productivity, sort of the buzziest of buzzwords coming out of this kind of world. So there was a lot of research on what they called ego depletion, which is the idea that your willpower is kind of like a muscle and it gets tired out after you use it. So there were a whole bunch of studies where they would do things like, give people like cookies, but then have them not eat them.

So they'd be like exerting willpower and then they would test them afterwards and find that they had less willpower after that. So it kind of would get depleted and it built this whole beautiful theory around it. And then researchers tried to replicate it and it did not replicate. Like they could not replicate like a bunch of the basic findings. Now, does that mean willpower doesn't exist? No, willpower, but clearly there's a thing, willpower. But unfortunately, our scientific understanding of it kind of collapsed when due to the replication crisis.

Roy Barmeister has been on the show and I've like harassed him a bunch of times. And each time he comes out with a new weapon, he's like a guy that's going through a rotating door and every time that you throw him in, he's like, now I've got a mace, now I've got a lance, now I've got a flamethrower. So that battle is kind of gonna be fascinating to unfold. I think like, what does ego depletion tell us? Because they're constantly iterating, at least, sorry for interrupting.

Yeah, but what I would say is that one of the things that people do too much is they try to use willpower to solve their problems. And the problem with willpower, yes, there are savants who are like willpower savants. They're just gonna, they're gonna like use it to do everything. I know someone like this who's a ultra runner and nothing's gonna stop her. She can just use willpower to solve her problems. The rest of us though, willpower is usually not the best solution. And the reason is because, well, you might be really psyched up today and be able to push through, but will you be able to do it tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that?

As soon as your motivation flags, you're in trouble. So I prefer easier methods that require less willpower. So for example, if I encounter someone who doesn't exercise at all and they say, I really want to exercise. And I say to them, what kind of exercise do you most love? What's the most fun type of exercise that require the least willpower possible? And if they say, I hate all, I hate all exercise, it all sucks. They say, have you heard of temptation bundling? So this is a phrase coined by Katie Milkman, the psychology researcher.

The idea is pairing something that we don't like, but that's good for us with something we really do like. So you hate exercise? Well, go run on your treadmill and play video games, right? Combine the thing you really like with something you don't like to do the healthy thing. Let's say that you didn't enjoy walking, call a friend. Yeah, exactly. Walk when you call a friend. Find a way to make it enjoyable, make it good enough that it's no longer- Or if you hated calling a friend, you could walk at the same time if you enjoy walking.

Yeah. That'd be fun. There you go. I don't want to talk to mom. Mom's ringing. Fuck, I don't want to answer it. I do enjoy walking. I'll go for a walk. All right, I'll go for a walk and I'll pick it up. The supplement industry is full of products making claims that they can't back, which is why I'm such a massive fan of Momentus. Their co-founder, Jeff Beyers, played in the NFL and saw firsthand just how wildly the quality of supplements can vary. So he built Momentus around a higher standard.

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That's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S.com slash modernwisdom, and modernwisdom at checkout. How does positive thinking factor into all of this, the framing that we place around it, optimism, resilience, stoicism, stuff like that? Positive thinking is often talked about like, oh, you know, if someone's depressed, they should think positively. That is probably the most annoying thing you can say to a depressed person is think positively, and I think in general, people are confused about it because they think, well, when I have positive thoughts, I feel good, so then what I should try to be doing is having positive thoughts, but I think that's actually not the most healthy way to think about it.

I think in terms of, so strangely, oftentimes positive thinking follows our behavior rather than something we generate from nothing. There was a really crazy study done on depression. It kind of blew everyone's minds, where they had one group that was getting kind of standard cognitive behavioral therapy, very well proven to help with depression, and they had another group that was getting, basically they were saying, okay, just find things you really enjoy doing, and you're gonna schedule them, and you're gonna go do them regularly, right? And the researcher talks about how they kind of felt bad for that group that was randomized to that because nobody thought that was gonna be very effective, and shockingly, it worked really well, and now there's a whole therapy around it called behavioral activation, and the strange thing about it is you think, you take a depressed person, and they have all these negative thoughts, and you think, well, if they're having all these negative thoughts, surely just getting them- The problem is the thoughts.

Exactly, but fascinatingly, just getting them to do more positive activities that they really enjoy actually tends to produce more positive thoughts, which is kind of mind-blowing. What do you make of this battle between sort of bottom-up and top-down for behavior change, for mood change especially as well? It seems to me, I don't know, very seductive to a lot of people. Maybe it's the, look at how smart I am. I'm gonna think my way out of this problem. Presumably, there is a limit to how much we can just bottom-up create the state.

If people could do that, they would be by split-testing the evolution of their own life strategy, constantly going for a walk, or playing pickleball, or dancing with a friend, or whatever it is that they're supposed to do. How do you come to think about the top-down versus bottom-up for mood approach? Well, have you heard of the Jhanas? That's the meditation retreat that I went to. Oh, great. I went to Journey. Oh, you went to Journey. So I had the founder of Journey on my podcast, Clear Thinking, the other day, yeah.

Yeah, he's great. Yeah, so interesting. It's funny, because you really can learn to generate positive feelings. From nothing. From nothing. Actually, part of my morning routine is I spend one minute trying to generate the most positive feelings I can. Okay. Just do it. Have you ever managed to hit any of the Jhanas in a minute? No, I can't hit them in a minute, but I have had a couple experiences with Jhanas, which was pretty exciting. Cool, what have you got, J1, J2? Well, my crazy- You strike me as a J3, J4 kind of guy.

Oh, well, to be honest, I haven't spent that much time exploring that, but my crazy meditation experience was trying to generate feelings of pleasure and eventually getting to the point where everything went white. I couldn't see, and I was like, I remember having the thought, holy shit, this is- Better than orgasm. Oh my god. That's that was that was that sounds like j1. That could be that could be pretty good for j1 J2, uh, it's so I mean we're deep in the weeds here, but fuck it.

I went I spent a week silent, right? I'm allowed to indulge. Um Kind of fascinating one of the things that I realized from a jana perspective that I spoke to the guys about that, too Basically for the people at home we're talking about different levels to a type of progressive meditation and you go from j1 to j8 and j8 is Disillusion of the self and everything in time and space and all the rest of it But going down to j1, which is like very exciting. It's kind of like going to a rave a little bit.

It's like a high energy state But what was interesting and I thought was really telling not everybody enters into the janas at j1 Even though they kind of are sequential and the first three or first four are embodied in the second four are sort of disembodied Uh that I found I was much closer to like j3 j4 adjacent because for me one and two were way Too energetic. It's like holy fuck like every time I glanced off the side of them It was like, uh, I don't know like holding onto an electrical cable or something I was like, oh, that's just too much and there were a bunch of other people including some of the facilitators who said the same and the long Realization I had around that is basically what a lot of how we framed the beginning of this conversation Which is even a singular technique which works for you Works in an idiosyncratic kind of way like you're entering into this ladder that other people have been there but the way that they got to the location that you got to you just entered straight in at j3 or j4 and Everybody else had to ladder up from one to two to three to four And you can't go back down like you would actually struggle to go back to where they came from it's like that whole thing the idiosyncratic nature of Ourselves following the same practice with the same wet wear and you know largely like constructed from the same stuff like is completely different Having run over 100 studies on human psychology My biggest takeaway about human nature is that we humans are way more different from each other than we realize there we we don't think about it because we just have one mind to go off of right you only have access to your own mind and You kind of assume other people must have a similar thing going on But also social norms tend to compress behavior tremendously So, you know, you imagine going to a wedding like people are, you know, dancing on the dance floor.

They're having a cocktail They're sitting eating dinner. Nobody's like dressed in alligator costume like leaping onto the table right into the wrong weddings. Yeah, exactly That's my problem. But uh social norms make people behave so similarly that we think oh what's going on their minds must be similar but it's really really not and so as I've studied people i've really come to discover like What's going on is so different so it's not all surprising to me that the way people enter the genres is really different that's such a good point i've tried to say that in the past less elegantly than that, um that We're never going to experience anybody else's mind Even if you're born with a twin The closest that you're ever going to get to them is by having some theory of mind of how you think and then like porting It on to them and from the outside because we only get to see this tiny aperture of the things that people Think and then hit consciousness from subconsciousness and then choose to Share or act out in front of us that we are there to interpret And then we feed it through our own lens and finally come up with a theory about what it was that they were thinking Based on their thoughts or actions.

I bet their words are actions. Sorry like that is the You know galaxy sized input to grain of sand output Like aperture that everything gets squeezed through and then you look at this person and you go Yeah, that's a rational agent. They seem kind of like similar to me and we do the same sort of things It's like no you behave in the same sorts of ways because Cultural and societal norms kind of expect you to do that and you're right you go to a wedding and people are largely behaving In the same way despite the fact that the galaxy of bullshit that's behind each of them could be Universes apart but like you don't want to be that weird and non-fungible At a wedding because like you will be the story You're the headline of the fucking wedding there or you're the headline of the office or whatever it might be This is how it's kind of crazy that we can be so different as humans and yet like civilization just Takes along and people stay in their lane when they're driving the car and like people don't just shriek most people don't just shriek random things on the street and like They wait in a queue when they're going for food and then they put the knives and forks away once they're finished up and they Don't stab someone with it on the way out or like throw all the cookies on the floor or whatever Like start eating all the salt like people behave in relatively predictable ways that are relatively Normalized and yet all of us it gives the impression That we're kind of similar whilst being like wildly different very well said.

Yeah Yeah, and it may be part of why humans survived because we have so many different types of people, you know There's the adventurer that's going to go find that next area that has the great berries Nobody's found and then there's the worrier who's going to make sure that you know The tribe has everything they need but is never going to go adventuring and and so many other distinct You know types psychopath that'll go and invade linda's farm and come back with a bunch of gold and some new insights or the yeah, yeah, so when you're sort of Thinking about this as a whole how much of the fundamental strategies of self-growth personal development are just Where you focus your attention?

That's where your life goes. There's this famous piece of advice. We newtonic this company we've got a formula 3 racing team at the moment aix and There's this famous piece of advice from racing which is don't look at the wall Like where you put your eyes is where the car goes. Don't look at the fucking wall If you're in monaco, we were in monza last week We're monaco don't look at the fucking wall because there's walls everywhere how much of this is Where you focus your attention, that's where your life ends up where you when you look at the wall That's kind of where you're driving the car Well, this goes back to the idea I mentioned before Which I call the unsaid obvious the things they're so obvious, but you usually don't think about Everything you experience is where your attention goes like that literally is your life what you're paying attention to And when you realize that you're like, oh shit What I pay attention to matters a lot If you're walking down the street and you're the person that notices the beautiful flower beds Rather than the person that knows the dog shit near the flower beds That's going to have a big difference in your life.

Of course, you need to make sure you don't accidentally step in the dog shit but that is really a profound difference between people and you can learn to begin to control your attention and Pay more attention to things you want to more to the things that that bring good things to you that make life happy Was there anything that you struggled to categorize or is there anything that's important when it comes to people framing the way that they should Think about a psychological toolkit for improving their life that isn't in the book or that you struggle to communicate You know, we thought a lot about how do you communicate which tool is right for which person because it is a difficult challenge We wanted to catalog all the best tools, but then you still have the question of okay You've got a bunch of tools.

Which do you use? We tried to map it out and we actually at the back of our book We have a decision tree to help you a little map to help you figure out which tool but I think it is really hard to capture When is the tool going to be right and you know, maybe the first thing is what tool resonates with you But there's probably a more nuanced way to kind of get to the really core of like who's going to benefit from what?

What do you think people are going to overlook the most? Well, what's the least sexy but high impact? Strategy that probably more people should pay attention to The least sexy highest impact thing is that you can't just learn techniques you have to literally sit down and make time and do them like and it's It's so stupid and obvious but many people read self-improvement books and they do nothing differently afterwards It will not change your life until you actually put into action And we like I don't know how to say it more emphatically then you have to do something Yeah, so it would probably be better to read one chapter and then go away or to have a single strategy I suppose this is Probably one of the advantages of a book like let's say atomic habits or tiny habits bj fog And you go, okay There is a I'm aware there's varieties of interventions and you sort of it There's this lattice work that you're building your understanding of how habits happen But it's like you're still doing a thing it is a singular track you're sort of following along with this as opposed to having uh, like much more disparate Like for instance human human's new book protocols.

It's a fucking tome It's like 500 pages and there's all of this stuff in there, but there really should be I don't know like a way that you can register that you went away and did a thing for long enough time for it to actually impact you because Reading the thing is not doing the thing and unfortunately until you do the thing It's not going to have the impact on your life and then reading Sometimes or learning about something can give you a simulacrum of the progress that doing the thing would have given you so Like the consumption of more knowledge about it feels like progress Whilst actually taking away from the time that could have been spent acting in a way that could have given you real progress You know, this reminds me some people in this world of ai they're like, well, why write a book?

why not just like You know talk to cpt about it or something like this and I think I think the best argument for a book is it? A book isn't just a packet of information Ideally a book is an experience. Yes, and the hope is that from the beginning of that experience to the end You've written the words of certain order for certain purpose to change a person, right? So that's the ideal is the process of reading the book create some kind of change in them.

I completely agree I also think part of the socratic dialectic Relationship that you have when speaking with an llm or now with using voice and you know Chad gpt's got like this live thing where it can just sit and like it'll only pipe up when you want to speak to It's pretty fucking cool but it there is something about the uh optionality which Can I think take you out of the experience of what you're doing? It's like a choose your own adventure book a little bit as opposed to just reading something that is a linear path Where an expert who has spent fucking ages crafting this thing to make it into an arc that brings you into land at a place that they have pre-defined as useful to you from a place that they have predefined is probably the like normative starting point for most people and This is where we go as opposed to you kind of ripping yourself around all over the map And sometimes you have insights and sometimes you get bored And sometimes you're not sure if you should stop and sometimes you should maybe change to another Like the optionality that is baked into that.

Um, choose your own adventure with llms I it's a Blessing in some ways, but on average for this kind of stuff. I actually think it's I think it's just less effective Yeah, it's really fascinating now having written a book for the first time of like how much effort you put into The order of the words and exact words I don't think i've ever had that much care before in the words that i've written in a certain order And you know, I love podcasts. I think podcasts have a ton of value But it's almost like the opposite end of the spectrum where like a podcast is an unstructured conversation You don't know where it's going to go.

You know, what's going to happen? And a book is like no you're gonna read this exact thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's so curated so carefully put together Dude, you're the best. I I love everything that you do. I think clearer thinking podcasts and website are great I keep on sending people back to our iq and astrology episode from a couple of years ago Uh, where should people go to keep up to date with everything? Oh, thanks so much It's been so fun to chat with you.

Um, yeah, so I actually have a new youtube channel So search spencer greenberg on youtube just had my first video had a million views. So I was really excited I was looking at it the other day. Very good Um, and uh, yeah our website clearer thinking.org if you're interested in the book go to 12 lovers book.com We've got three cool free bonuses You can get when you get the book including a little ai bot that will help you apply what's in the book So that's awesome, dude.

You're the best appreciate you fantastic This episode is brought to you by born in roma fragrances by valentino beauty the iconic fragrance duo Donna born in roma eau de parfum is a feminine fragrance featuring juicy black currant central jasmine woody cashmere and warm vanilla Its masculine counterpart guomo born in roma eau de toilette has notes of fresh violet leaf aromatic sage Green vetiver spicy ginger and mineral salt shop at macy's.com

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