Why Trying to Change Your Partner Is the Source of Your Suffering | Shankar Vedantam

Key Takeaway

We know relationships are crucial for mental and physical health, yet we're rarely taught 'interpersonal hygiene.' This episode explores evidence-based strategies to improve all relationships—from romantic partnerships to fleeting interactions with strangers. The single most actionable insight: Stop trying to change your partner's core personality. Acceptance isn't resignation—it's removing self-inflicted suffering. When you accept your partner as they are, the conflict doesn't disappear, but the pain of fighting against reality does, creating space for actual solutions to emerge.

Episode Overview

Dan Harris interviews Shanker Vedantam, host of the Hidden Brain podcast, about his 'Love 2.0' series exploring evidence-based relationship strategies. The conversation focuses primarily on romantic partnerships but emphasizes that these skills scale to all human connections—friendships, work relationships, and even brief encounters with strangers. Key topics include the futility of trying to change your partner's personality, managing persistent conflicts, the practice of 'eating the blame,' externalizing problems, and understanding root causes of behavior. The discussion also touches on the broader landscape of human connection, including the surprising importance of micro-interactions with strangers.

Full Transcript

Transcript of Why Trying to Change Your Partner Is the Source of Your Suffering | Shankar Vedantam from 10% Happier. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello gang. As somebody whose career revolves around the study of human happiness and flourishing, I am continuously struck by this fact. We know from all the evidence that one of, if not the most important variables when it comes to mental health and physical health is the quality of your relationships. We know this. And yet, very few of us are actually taught any form of what I like to call interpersonal hygiene when it comes to our romantic relationships, our work relationships, our friendships, and beyond.

We're just kind of left to figure it out on our own, to muddle through. And so today we're going to talk to an excellent guest, a frequent flyer here, about some strategies from the psychological research, so some evidence-based strategies to improve your interpersonal hygiene. Shanker Vantum is the host of the hidden brain podcast. It's also a radio show. And on the show, he explores the hidden patterns that drive human behavior. Shunker is also the author of several books, including the hidden brain and useful delusions. He's also somebody I've met and talked to many times and I like a lot.

In this conversation, we talk about how to stop trying to change your romantic partners. Useful tools for dealing with conflict. The challenging practice of eating the blame, i.e. voluntarily taking responsibility in a conflict. This needs to be done judiciously, as you will hear Shunker describe. How to manage a breakup of any kind, romantic, friendship, work relationship. the real secret to finding closure, the value of micro interactions, fleeting daily interactions with strangers, and much more. Before we dive in, a heads up that today is the first day of a 5-day meditation challenge that we're running over on my new meditation app, 10% with Dan Harris.

The challenge is called Even You Can Meditate. And every day, it features a new guided meditation from the great teacher and my great friend, Seb Salassie. And then twice during the course of the five-day challenge, we're going to do live video sessions where you can ask me and Seb questions. This challenge is available exclusively over on the app. Again, 10% with Dan Harris. So, head to danharris.com to join us. Just to say, this challenge is designed in part to celebrate a new audio book, a so-called Audible original that Seb and I co-wrote and co-recorded.

That book is also called Even You Can Meditate. And if you want to check out the book, you can go to Audible. Last thing to say, then I'll shut up. If you want to meditate with me in person, I've got an event coming up at the 92nd Street Y in New York City on May 17th. I'll do some meditation, take your questions, talk about how this practice can help you stay sane in a world that feels on fire and out of control, etc., etc. I'll put a link in the show notes.

I'd love to see you there. Okay, we'll get started with Shanker Vantum right after this. Shanker Vodantum, welcome back to the show. show. show. Thank you so much, Dan. It's a pleasure to be here. It's great to have you back. Our last episode with you was a smash hit, so I I suspect this one will be as well. You've been running this series on your show. It's called Love 2.0. This is at a high level. What's it about and why are you doing it? Well, we ran this series a few months ago, Dan.

And I think the idea is that periodically we return to the topic of love and relationships. Not only because I think it's perennially interesting to our listeners, but also I think because there's always new wrinkles or new ideas or new insights from the world of the academy that I feel can be helpful to people's lives. And so we published this series really as a way of highlighting new research, new ideas that have come up in recent years, ideas that I thought were really relevant to people's lives.

I'm so interested in love and relationships and not just romantic relationships which we're going to spend a lot of time focusing on today but all human relationships from how we are with strangers to friends to colleagues and beyond children parents. I say this as somebody who I think is kind of a traditional man of a certain age who you know historically in my life did not have much interest in anything having to do with love or relationships. I would not have purchased a book on it or listened to an episode on it.

But I'm saying all this cuz I want to hear if you agree with where I'm going with this. Now I view it differently, which is that we evolved, as every TED talk reminds us, as social animals. And yet, we are not taught the basic skills of interpersonal hygiene. Therefore, I find, as somebody who's interested in happiness, relationships to be a really interesting sphere. Does any of that resonate with you? I love that, Dan. And I love the way you put that. I will also add one wrinkle which is I think when we think about relationships, we often tend to label the ones that are the big relationships.

You know, the relationship I had with my mother or the relationship I have with my partner or the relationship I have with my child. And as you point out, those are in fact important relationships, but those are not the only relationships in our lives. When we say that humans are a social species, we're not just talking about intimate relationships. We're talking about the range of relationships. And it turns out that range of relationships is actually very important to us. That we benefit not just from the deep meaningful relationships that we might have with partners and our children, but also with in some ways the more casual relationships we have, the more fleeting relationships we have, the person that we meet on the subway, the person we sit next to on a park bench.

All of these people end up changing our mental health and our mental well-being. Yes. And we're going to get to this target-rich environment of fleeting interactions. They're sometimes called micro interactions and how they can be really powerful lever when it comes to just feeling better or doing life better. But let's start with the focus of this recent love 2.0 series that you ran on your podcast, Hidden Brain. The first two episodes feature a really interesting expert, James Cordova. I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly. Yeah, it's Cordova.

James Cordova. Cordova. Thank you for the correction. So, James Cordova comes in to talk about how to fix your marriage. And I want to just signal to anybody listening, if you're not married or not in a long-term relationship, these are skills that are scalable beyond marriage. But how to fix your marriage is the way it's teed up on the show. And one of the things James talks about is this instinct many of us feel to try to change our partner and he says that's feutal. Can you tell me a little bit more about his and your view on on this natural instinct?

Of course. In many ways, I think it's natural and in some ways inevitable that when any two people are in a relationship with each other, especially if the relationship is a longlasting relationship, that they're going to be elements of disagreement and friction. That is just simply inevitable. Unless you're in a relationship with yourself, I can't imagine how you won't end up disagreeing with virtually everyone on the planet on at least something. Now, it turns out that many of those disagreements, in fact, are so trivial that we solve them relatively effortlessly.

So, let's say, for example, you've just gotten married and you discover that your partner likes brown eggs and you have no real preference when it comes to whether your eggs are white or brown. So the problem is solved going forward. Now you only buy brown eggs and you never speak about eggs again in the course of your relationship. Very easy problem. There's an intermediate level of problem which requires a certain amount of creativity to solve. So let's say your partner likes to go biking and is an avid cyclist, likes to bike 100 miles a weekend and you like to go biking too but you're able to manage about 5 miles and not 100 miles.

And so the problem becomes now your partner wants to go on a 100 mile bike ride, you want to go on a 5 mile bike ride. There can be friction. But here again, I think there are clever and creative solutions. So for example, you can get an electric bike and now you can basically bike for 5 miles while covering a 100 miles and you can keep up with your partner. So there are technical solutions in some ways for a set of problems that we have or your partner might want to live in the city, you might want to live in the suburbs and you compromise and say you know maybe we can find a part of the city that has a bit of a suburban field.

So there are what James Cordova calls these mezzanine level problems where it requires a certain amount of scale certain amount of compromise certain amount of communication the problem gets solved. A lot of his focus and where your question was coming from was about the persistent problems that remain in relationships long term that are often not amendable to this kind of compromise or creative solution. So for example, you come home from a long day's work and the only thing you really want to do is you want to take off your shoes and you want to sit on the couch and you want to eat some food and you want to watch Netflix.

and your partner has also just come back from work and has spent a week cooped up at the office and your partner says let's go out let's have fun let's go to a club and at some level the way you unwind is to be quiet and introspective and the way your partner unwinds is to be extroverted and gregarious now that's the kind of problem that is very difficult to solve in a creative kind of solution right because no matter what you do one person is going to become unhappy that's the kind of problem that James Cordova has spent sometimes studying and he argues that this is a kind of problem where the more we try and change our partners which we often try to do.

We say if only our partner was someone who likes to go out in the evening we could have a happy marriage. If only my partner was someone who liked to stay in in the evenings we could have a happy marriage. He argues that that's a futile way of thinking about the relationship. The only way forward is to actually accept your partner for who they are at a personality level. personality level. personality level. I want to talk about acceptance. But in this case where one person, this by the way is my marriage.

One person is an extrovert that's me and the other is an introvert and I many nights want to drag her out and she doesn't want to be dragged out and so that can be the source of conflict. What would you andor Cordova recommend as a way to reach an accommodation? accommodation? accommodation? Right. And in some ways I think the word accommodation I think is a mistake because you can reach an accommodation. You can say, for example, well, this weekend, uh, we're going to stay home and next weekend we'll go out and so you can take turns.

That would be what you would call an accommodation. But I think what Cordova is actually suggesting is something a little subtler. He's actually saying at some deep level, part of our misery and unhappiness comes from our desire to change our partners' personalities. personalities. personalities. And that pain and suffering at some level is self-inflicted. This almost sounds like Buddhism. Our desire to change the other person is the source of our own suffering, the source of our own pain. And when you start to accept that the other person is who they are, the problem doesn't go away, but some of the suffering goes away because you're no longer saying the reason I'm unhappy is because my partner refuses to change.

You're saying I'm stuck at home because my partner has a different personality than I do. Now, I'm not saying it solves the problem altogether, but doesn't it take a little sting out of the suffering that you experience, right? Because you're no longer in the brier patch of trying to coersse change that isn't going to happen anyway. Exactly. I mean, and if you think about your partner and you say, I'm not talking about your partner in particular, Dan, but I'm saying as one thinks about one's partner and you say, "What is it that drew me to this person in the first place?" It's possible that one of the odd things about relationships is that people with opposite personalities often attract one another.

The gregarious extroverted person is often drawn to the quiet and introverted person because they feel different than all the other extroverted people that the extrovert knows. And the same with the introvert and opposites are sometimes drawn together. And so one question to ask is what is it that drew me to this person in the first place? What is it that I can get from this person's skill set in an area that I don't have that in fact could broaden out who I am becoming? And that's a different way of thinking about your partner.

You're no longer thinking about your partner as an obstacle, as a rock in your path that you need to blast out of the way with dynamite. You're not trying to push your partner. You're actually saying, "Let me accept my partner for where they are. and my partner if he or she accepts me for who I am. I will no longer feel now put upon to do what my partner wants every weekend. We might not always get to do what we want, but at least we'll understand where the other person's coming from.

coming from. coming from. Yes. I mean he talks about the paradox of acceptance that actually when you really accept your partner as they are then things can move because there's an eraser of this tension and there's a feeling of safety and that's the stuff out of which creative solutions can emerge whether there's an accommodation that is possible or not. I think it's similar in terms of how we relate to ourselves and I'm not the first to observe this that the paradox is that if you can accept yourself then you can start to change.

Just to bring this full circle you know on the introvert extrovert thing with my wife for example I don't often try to drag her to things I just go like last night I went out with my friends by myself and so both of us are happy. That's right. So one solution to the problem at a technical level is to expand our social repertoire to go beyond our one partner. In many ways the demands that we place on our intimate partners today are far far greater than the demands that people placed on their intimate partners even 50 years ago to say nothing of 500 or 5,000 years ago.

We expect this one person now to be our friend, our business partner, our lover, our confidant, our therapist. You know, this person has to play all these different roles. And this person might not be qualified to play all these different roles. This person, in fact, might be an introvert when you're an extrovert. And so one question to ask is, is it possible there are other people in my life who could help me fulfill some of my needs in these other departments? That if my partner needs to stay home and sort of unwind on a Friday evening and I need to go out on a Friday evening, is it possible that I find another friend who's also an extrovert and I go and hang out with my friend and my partner stays home for a couple of hours and enjoys the peace and quiet.

So there are solutions here. But I think the insight that you just mentioned a second ago is such a profound insight because when it comes to ourselves very often I think when we try and change ourselves we often see that starting from a position of blame or anger you know I'm really unhappy with the fact that I broke my resolution. I'm really unhappy with the fact that I broke my diet. I'm really unhappy that I stopped going to the gym. The more we beat ourselves up, the less likely we become to actually be the people we want to become.

And so much of meditation and yoga, these practices tell us accept where you are. This is not a race against anybody else. You know, when you're doing yoga, you're not competing against anybody else. You're just noticing and observing and acknowledging where you are. And suddenly when you do that, all kinds of looseness and flexibility suddenly start to emerge. And in exactly the same way as that happens with us in our individual lives, it also happens in our relationships. The less we try and push somebody else, the easier it becomes for them to say, "Hey, you know, it's been a long time since I went out.

Maybe I should go out with Dan and hey, it could be fun." Yes. Yes. Well said. Couple of other concepts from the aforementioned James Cordova. Cordova. Cordova. He has this idea uh he calls it the porcupine and the turtle dynamic. It's his way of describing a common conflict pattern where you know one partner deals with pain by attacking and the other withdraws. withdraws. withdraws. Can you say a little bit more about this? this? this? It's a very common dynamic in many relationships where one person basically is pursuing uh the other.

The other person is basically withdrawing and they're both doing it for perfectly good reasons. The person who is the porcupine is basically saying I'm not having my needs met. I need to have my needs met. and you're approaching the other person and saying, "Get my needs met." And the other person's saying, "I feel under attack. I feel like I'm vulnerable and this other person's coming after me. Let me crawl under my shell and hide until the storm passes." And the more one person approaches, the more the other person avoids.

And that's a very common pattern. Now that you can also have a problem where you have two porcupines, you know, and they're both sort of poking one another and they both want to be close, but unfortunately their quills get in the way of getting close because as they get close that quills are sort of poking one another. So these relationship dynamics where we're often in partnership with people who have different personality traits is a very very common thing. It's not necessarily a if this happens to you or this describes your relationship.

The correct answer is not to say, "Oh my god, what a tragedy." You really should say, "This is the human condition. This is what it means to be in relationship with other people where you're having these kinds of conflicts with one another." Here again, I would argue the power of acceptance is powerful. But with the caveat that I don't think James Cordova is saying that if you wanted to go out all the time and your wife wanted to stay in all the time and your wife was to let's say accept you Dan and say okay Dan wants to go out all the time and I need to accept Dan because that's what James Cordova is telling me and now she goes out with you every week even though she's miserable because at that point what you're doing is you're accepting the other person right you're taking their needs into account which is wonderful but you're not accepting yourself.

You're not taking your own needs into account. And in some ways, both those things have to be satisfied. You have to be true to yourself. You have to honor yourself. You have to have compassion and acceptance for yourself as well as respect and honor and compassion for the other person. Yes. The couple's counselor that my wife and I have seen for many years, eight years almost, always talks about the fact that there are kind of three entities in any long-term romantic partnership. I think this is true for long-term business partnerships, too.

There's me, you, and us, and all three need to be tended. I love that idea. And I think one of the powerful ideas there is that when we are in conflict with another person, we often imagine that it's me against the other person. If only my partner would change, we could be happy. If only my partner didn't behave this way, we could be happy. When you start to think about the relationship from the point of view of the us as opposed from the point of view of the me, then you start to ask a different question.

You sort of say, all right, this is an obstacle in our relationship. We're not happy. The relationship is not happy. How can we basically address this problem together? And now it's both of you, you and your partner against the problem rather than you against your partner. Along those lines, Cordova has this idea of externalizing the conflict. Like basically, if there's a dynamic that keeps coming up, introvert, extrovert, or spender, saver, whatever, you should give the [clears throat] dynamic a name, right? right? right? Label it as an it as a way to make it more tractable.

And in some ways that speaks to exactly what you were raising a second ago, which is that when you start to think about the Wii, you can collectively then look at the problems in the relationship. You can give them each of those problems a name, a personality, and say, "Oh, here's that personality. Here's the evil monster surfacing once again in our conversation where, you know, I'm coming home on a Friday evening and you're coming home on a Friday evening and I want to go out and you don't want to go out and we're in loggerheads with each other." And now you say, "Ah, here's the introvert, extrovert monster that has reared its head again in our relationship." And now it's you and your partner hopefully against the monster rather than you against your partner.

It's so helpful. But there's more because this guy is just like a font of useful stuff. What I'm about to say is to some ears going to sound a little challenging. And I should say that Cordova, you I believe kind of nodded at this earlier, Shunker, but Cordova basically says you need you can take acceptance too far. You know, obviously this is not like this is for personality quirks and even meaningful differences, but not for abusive behaviors or anything that you know diminishes the other person fundamentally.

So with that caveat stated, Cordova talks about this concept of eating the blame that you can sometimes just say I'm sorry even if you don't really think it was your fault. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know who said it, but it was a wise person who said you can either be right or you can be married. married. married. Those are the options. And if you want to be happily married and any happy kind of relationship, they're going to be points where each party genuinely genuinely and sincerely feels that they are the ones who have been wronged.

You can see this in interpersonal settings where two people are at loggerheads with each other and each genuinely feels that the other is responsible for whatever has gone wrong. You can see this in international conflicts where each person says there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that I am the victim here. The other person is the perpetrator and all I have to do is defend myself and the other person feels exactly the same. Now we can explore the psychology of how and why that is and why it is that two groups can each believe that they are the victim or two people can each believe that they are the ones who are being put upon.

But I think the question is what do we do in those situations? It is, I think, probably one of the most difficult things that Cordova is suggesting because he's suggesting that in that moment, do you prioritize your sense of injustice, your sense of self-righteousness, your sense of I need to defend myself against this threat, or do you prioritize the relationship? And of course, I think all of us understandably, we're human. We often prioritize defending ourselves. You know, if I feel under attack, I have these bodyguards who will come out to defend me.

These bodyguards are my capacity for anger, my capacity for defensiveness, my capacity for reactance, my capacity to fight back, to hurl an insult, to minimize the other person, to diminish the other person. These are all my bodyguards and they've come out to say Shanker is under attack and I better come out and defend him. And so they stand in front of me to say with their armor up, no one's going to come after Shankar while we are here. Now the problem of course is if my bodyguards are talking to my partner's bodyguards, there's going to be a fight because that's what bodyguards know how to do.

They know how to fight one another. And again, you might win the fight or you might lose the fight, but almost certainly you're not going to be in a happy relationship. And I think what Cartiva is suggesting here is I think almost a spiritual practice of actually asking are there moments when we can actually say I accept that I am the one who's at fault here. Can you forgive me and can we move forward? And of course that is just excruciatingly difficult for people to do because very often you're asked to do this at precisely the point where you say I need to be understood.

Amends need to be made to me. And James Carter is now saying, "I need to make amends to somebody else." That's unthinkable. But really, that's why I think it really is a spiritual practice. It's not just a relationship practice, but it's a spiritual practice spiritual practice spiritual practice because it's asking you, are you able to do this extraordinarily difficult thing? As I was talking to Cordova, I was reminded of this prayer. You know, I went to a Jesuit school growing up, Dan, and I learned the prayer of St.

Francis, and you know, I just I learned the prayer as a boy. It didn't seem very meaningful to me. But over the years, I've realized that prayer is in fact incredibly potent in describing almost everything we've talked about the last 25 or 30 minutes. Because St. Francis says, "Ask not to be consoled as much as to console. Ask not to be understood as to understand. Ask not to be loved as much as to love." And the more that we can turn our attention outward, our compassion outward, our love outward, as opposed to demanding it inward, the better we are going to be at having successful and happy relationships.

Coming up, Shanker talks about how to get to the root cause of challenges in a relationship, the concept of useful delusions, how to manage a breakup of any kind, and the real secret to finding closure. Your business identity is everything that makes your business legitimate and professional. From phone records and compliance to your website, email, and phone number. With Northwest Registered agent, you don't just form a business. You start with a complete foundation built for privacy, credibility, and growth. I love being an entrepreneur. It's so cool to come up with a big idea, take a big swing, and muscle it into reality.

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If your partner has irritating, even infuriating habits, try to see like what's the root cause to find like the understandable reasons behind them. Can you say a little bit more about that? I mean, it's so interesting when we watch a movie, part of the reason we enjoy a movie, let's say we're watching a movie about a comedy about a couple that's in conflict with one another. You know there lots of comedies like this and you watch the couple and you can laugh at both of them laugh and you can laugh at both of them because you understand very clearly not just what they're saying but what's underneath the surface and where they're coming from.

That is so difficult to do when we ourselves are in the scene or when we ourselves are in the movie. Right? And really what it speaks to is that when you are able to get a little bit of distance from your problem, you're able to see the problem at some remove. It allows you now to look at it with curiosity as opposed to looking at it with judgment. And it's interesting as we're talking here, so many of these ideas are tied up with the practice of mindfulness.

The practice of basically saying, can I observe without judgment? When my partner does this, is my first response to judge and then to be defensive and then to attack? Or is my first response to observe and then to say, "Let me peel a layer and see what's one layer underneath the surface and let me peel another layer to see what's one layer under the surface." So when my friends come to me with problems, it's invariably easy for me to sort of think about them and think about their problems with curiosity.

Interesting psychological technique. And this goes all the way back to you know the ancient stoics is to actually try and do the same thing with ourselves. Not just with our partners but with ourselves to actually look at ourselves from some remove to ask what advice would I give to myself if I was coming to a friend and the friend was giving me advice what advice would I give to myself as a friend and when you do that when you look at the problem from a friend's perspective the friend wants to help you the friend cares about you the friend loves you the friend is not enshed in the problem like you are enshed in the problem all of a sudden solutions pop up that become come really easy.

We talked a second ago about the challenge of eating the blame and how difficult it is to extend an olive branch at the precisely at the point when you feel like you are under siege. But of course, when you think about many many of the conflicts that people have in their relationships and you ask people, you know, you had this big blowout fight 2 and 1/2 months ago, do you remember what the fight was about? And most people would say, I have no idea. I know that we had a fight.

I know it was painful, but I actually don't know what we were fighting about. And what it tells you is that many of the things that cause conflict in relationships at some level are trivial. And this might be Cordova's ultimate point, which is that the reason you should prioritize your relationship more than the conflict is ultimately the relationship is many orders of magnitude more important. more important. more important. Indeed. Indeed. Indeed. Before I move on from How to Fix Your Marriage, Eleanor Vasil, who's producing this episode, sent me an article you wrote in 2021 in the Los Angeles Times about your parents and your dad's attempted to call it a strategy, but it doesn't seem like it was actually a conscious strategy.

He basically was of the view that your mom was always right. Can you just say a little bit more about this dynamic? this dynamic? this dynamic? It's interesting. I think in many relationships, part of the reason they work at some level is that we have fictitious beliefs about the other person. Now, sometimes those fictitious beliefs run in the negative direction. In fact, very often they run in the negative direction where you believe your partner's out to get you, your partner doesn't like you, your partner's not supportive of you.

But you can also have fictitious beliefs in the positive direction where you believe that your partner is a better person than he or she is or your partner in general is right or has figured out things correctly. And I don't know whether this was conscious or unconscious, but my dad in fact did have this belief about my mom. And he generally believed that my mom in some ways was the oracle that what my mom [snorts] said ultimately was correct. I'm almost certain that as a matter of journalistic fact that was an untrue belief.

My my mom was not right about everything. about everything. about everything. But from the point of view of a relationship, you can see the value that this has. The value of basically saying, I understand what my partner is doing. I might not necessarily get it, but I believe that my partner is coming from a good place. I believe that my partner is able to see something that I cannot see. In some ways, it was almost it's almost childlike, right? When you think about small children and the relationship they have with their parents, you know, when your child is 3 or 4 years old, your child genuinely believes that you make the sun come up in the morning, that the earth spins because of you.

And of course, it's not true. You don't make the sun come up in the morning and the earth doesn't spin because of you. But your child believes that. And the belief that your child has in you is part of what strengthens the bond between you. I wrote a book a few years ago called Useful Delusions. And this is one of the central ideas of useful delusions, which is that we often valorize and believe that the truth and right information is always the priority. And of course, from a journalistic perspective, I'm a journalist.

I believe that that's true. At an interpersonal level, however, I don't think it's true. I think there are many, many beliefs that we have that in fact are obviously and provably false that can actually be good for us. Is there a way for us to, you know, for those of us who don't believe our spouses are the oracles to adopt some other useful delusion in our marriage? Like and truly a useful delusion. Yeah. At some level for it to be a delusion I think you have to believe it, right?

So I think this is the trick. I mean you're asking how do I actually make myself believe a delusion but I think it's a delusion. For it to actually be a delusion, you have to believe at some level that it's real. I often talk about how, you know, the connections that parents have with children, I think, is shot through with useful delusions. You know, parents believe that children are special beyond compare. You know, when my own daughter was born, I not only thought she was the most special child in the universe, I thought she was the most special child in the history of the universe.

Now, of course, from a journalistic standpoint, I know that that's not true. But from a functional standpoint, it is extraordinarily valuable because parenting is hard. It's difficult. It's expensive. There's a tremendous effort and frustration involved. But I felt like everything that I gave my daughter was because my god, I'm helping and caring for what is clearly the most special person in the history of the universe. And you can see why a belief like that over time has been enormously functional for the species. So I think for the delusion to work as a delusion, you know, I'm not sure you can actually manufacture it.

You can't tell yourself, I'm going to make myself believe that my partner is the oracle. Maybe you can try it. I'd be interested if you ran the experiment and reported back what you find. Dan, I personally don't think I could make that work. So your point is well taken. I do want to just signpost to the listener that Chunker's book on useful delusions that was the subject of a whole discussion that we had here on the show several years ago and I will post that episode or I'll put a link to it in the show notes.

Okay. So, in your series on your show Hidden Brain, in the series that you ran a few months ago, Love 2.0, you also talk about breakups, which can be incredibly painful and debilitating. And you talked to a guy named Antonio Pascal Leon and he had a lot of really practical strategies for, you know, just how to manage your mind in the wake of a breakup. I think his advice could apply to romantic breakups, but also breakdown in friendships or work relationships or getting fired, any kind of breakup really.

And he talks about the strategy of differentiating distress that often in the wake of a breakup, we're dealing with like a kind of undifferentiated ball of emotions. I think that's actually the exact phrase he used, the ball of emotions. According to this psychologist, Antonio Pascal Leon, that we might want to make a list of the good things we lost, the bad things that you no longer have to tolerate, and then also like a list of hopes and dreams that have been lost, too. Can you just say a little bit more about this strategy?

strategy? strategy? In some ways, I think it's actually along the lines of what we've been talking about in different ways in this conversation, Dan, because I think it's basically asking, you know, let's say you've been fired from a job or let's say you have a breakup or let's say you you lose someone you love who passes away. You're going to be hit with a whole bunch of different kinds of emotions. And some of those emotions might be sadness because you basically are upset that you were fired or that you got divorced.

Some of it might be relief because there were aspects of the relationship that in fact were not working well and that were a source of unhappiness. You might have had dreams together that you hope to pursue. You hope to do something at this job together, at this company together, or in this marriage together that you're not going to get to do going forward. And in some ways I think demarcating them into different categories is just useful as almost like an accounting exercise to basically say I'm feeling sad.

Let me make a list of all the things that I am grieving about. And just make a list 1 to 10 of all the things that you have lost in this relationship and the things that you're going to miss. And then make a second list of all the things that you are so grateful that you are no longer going to have to deal with. Because every relationship, whether it's a work relationship or a personal relationship, involves frictions. And you know, hallelujah, you're not going to deal with any of those frictions with this person anymore because you're not in a relationship with them anymore.

And then the third list, and this I thought was unusual. I hadn't thought of this, was he was saying, make a list of all the things, the shared dreams that you had with this other person that now are no longer going to happen. So in a relationship that could be I thought I was going to have children with this person and that's not going to happen. Or if I was in this workplace with this other person, I thought we would work on these projects together or we would build a company that would turn out this way or that way.

So these are lost dreams that in some ways are also not going to happen. And in some ways demarcating them allows us to sort of look at them with a certain amount of distance but also ask ourselves going forward now with the next relationship. What are the things that I really need? What are the things that I could really do without? What are the dreams that I have to accomplish that I want to make sure the next relationship accomplishes? And so in some ways by categorizing and counting and being deliberate it allows us to proceed to move forward in our lives in a way that is more more mindful.

mindful. mindful. I like it a lot. There was something else that Antonio said in this series that I found quite bracing. As you and I were discussing before we recorded and what I'm about to say will probably not be new to many people who listen to this show regularly. I went through a what was for me a quite traumatic business breakup, a business divorce that ended last year after several years of twoing and throwing. And Antonio says that one of the problems we can encounter after a breakup of any variety is telling the same old story over and over.

That there's something about the way you tell the story of a breakup. again, a romantic relationship, a friendship, a business partnership that can pound into your neurons a sense of victimhood. And that was a real wakeup call for me cuz I I think I've been doing that. It's really not that helpful. And honestly, in my case, it's also just not that true. I just would love to hear you say more about this. this. this. Yeah. So, Antonio Pascaliano is someone who actually helps and trains other therapists.

And in some ways, I think this is almost advice for somebody who's playing a therapy role, which is that when someone tells you a problem that they're having and you ask them, you're you're in contact with this person and they're coming back and they're talking about this problem over and over again over a period of weeks or months or years. Notice if they change how they tell you about the problem. If they're basically sticking to the same script, if they come up with the same themes, if they're doing it over and over again, in some ways it tells you where their minds are.

It tells you what the tripping points are, the trip wires inside their heads are because they keep coming back to those same trip wires over and over again. Now, it might be a point of hurt. It might be a point of this really distressed me. I can't get this out of my head. But really, what he's saying is pay attention to the narrative that people are crafting. We had another guest on Hidden Brain some years ago who had a wonderful, wonderful insight. He said, you know, as you think about any life, all lives have ups and downs.

And you could be a king or you could be a popper, but your life is going to have ups and it's going to have downs. Now, when you tell the story of your life, where do you start your chapters and where do you end your chapters? And it turns out that where you put the chapter breaks is a very powerful predictor of what your life is going to be, of how well your life is going to turn out. And he argues, this was Jonathan Adler, he argues that when you tell stories that begin with challenge and obstacle and difficulty and they end with success and redemption.

redemption. redemption. Telling stories that way is much healthier than starting your chapters with success and victory and triumph and then something goes wrong and then it's a story of contamination and regret and decline. Now, if you think about a life going up and down almost like a wave, the truth is you could tell any number of chapters that start on a low point and end on a high point or that start at a high point and end in a low point. You're just deciding where to put the chapter breaks as you tell the very same story.

But how you tell that story ends up making a difference. So I don't pretend to be a therapist Dan, but as you think about the story of your own experience with the business, I think what Jonathan Adler would say is how do you tell the story in a way that basically says this difficult and painful thing happened, but as a result of this difficult and painful thing happening, this other thing happened, this other door opened, this other window opened for me in a way that allowed me to become or do something that would not have been possible otherwise.

That's a story of redemption as opposed to a story of I started out this great dream and I had this big ambition and then things didn't go the way I want and we had all this conflict and that's a story of decline and contamination. contamination. contamination. I mean you say you're not a therapist but like a you've got a very soothing voice and b that was extremely good advice. advice. advice. Thank you Dan. A couple of other things to say about breakups. breakups. breakups. There's this idea that Antonio articulated on your show that after a breakup, we instinctively want some sort of closure.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And there can be an desire to look to the other person for the closure, but it can actually be an individual project. That's right. I think this was actually one of the most important and interesting insights that I gleaned from that episode myself because he pointed out wisely that the relationship involves two people. Your relationship with your former business partner was a a relationship that involved two people. Your relationship with a spouse involves you and another person. How you deal with a separation, how do you deal with a breakup?

That is not a joint project. I mean it could be a joint project and I think many of us want it to be a joint project right so many of us say what I really want the thing that will help me get over this breakup this divorce this business collapse is to have the person who broke up with me sit down across a table from me and tell me you know I am so sorry for everything that I did to you I know that what I did was wrong it was shameful I am filled and consumed with regret and self-loathing you were right in everything and I am so grateful for the opportunity that I had to work with you and I'm so sorry for all the pain that I caused you.

That's what we want to hear, right? Y right? Y right? Y the other person at the other end of the relationship very often wants us to be saying the same things. Mhm. Mhm. Mhm. What are the odds that you're going to sit down and tell your ex business partner those things? Very, very small. Right. And so all of us know that we're not going to be the ones who sit down and tell somebody who clearly has wronged us about all the ways in which we are sorry for what we did to them.

And so many of us then spend years or months agonizing about I just want to have one last conversation with this person. I want to talk with this person one last time. Look them in the eye and get them to see that they did this thing that was really wrong. They should acknowledge that what they did was really shameful. And if they did that, I would then be free of this relationship and I could move forward with my life. When you do that, in some ways, you're giving the other party, the party that you're no longer in a relationship with now, enormous power, right?

Because now you no longer can move forward because you're chained to the other person. And that's where his insight comes from, which is that the relationship is a joint project. The divorce, the separation, the breakup is not a joint project. And the more you can think about it as a solo project, the easier it becomes to move forward. Now there are different techniques that you can use. One of the very powerful techniques he uses is a technique which he calls the empty chair where he basically says you know imagine this other person is in fact sitting in this empty chair next to you.

What would you tell this person? And if the person could hear everything that you are saying, I want you now to put yourself in the shoes of the other person and sit in the empty chair and respond back to you. And he finds that when he does this, many people experience an enormous feeling of relief cuz in some ways they're acting out the end of this relationship on a solo basis, but it feels as if the other party has been, you know, at least in the room with them.

with them. with them. Much more with Shanker Vantum coming up. I think a lot about sleep. And I'll be honest, my sleep game has been dramatically elevated in recent months in part because of one of our sponsors today, Function. I did a bunch of lab tests through function and one of the things I saw is that uh I had low markers on feritin and then I started iron supplementation and a few other medications in in consultation with my physicians. It had a near miraculous impact on my longunning and undiagnosed uh restless leg syndrome which was preventing me from sleeping and making me a jerk in all sorts of ways.

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warbyarker.com/happier. warbyarker.com/happier. That's 15% off when you buy two pairs of glasses at wbbyarker.com/happier. After you purchase, they will ask you where you heard about them. Please, and this is actually quite a big deal. Please support our show and tell them that we sent you. Okay, Shanker, you're doing great. I want to point out to the audience that uh he's playing hurt today. He's getting over a bug and coming through with flying colors. There's one last episode I want to ask you about before I let you go.

And this one comes from a prior series that you ran on Hidden Brain. So, we've been talking about the series you ran a few months ago called Love 2.0. But many, many months before that, you ran a series called Relationships 2.0. And in that series, you did an episode where you talked to a woman named Jillian Sandstöm about the value of peripheral connections, which we were talking about at the start of this episode. Let's just start at a high level. Can you say a little bit about the value of what are sometimes called micro interactions with people we don't really know?

really know? really know? Yeah, I think this is something that many of us underestimate because I think when we think about our relationships, we're usually thinking about the big ones. We're thinking about who we are married to or who we are in a long-term relationship with or who we're in love with or a child or a parent or a co-orker even whom we see every day at work. And those relationships obviously are very important. They play a huge role in our mental well-being. But there's also all of the smaller relationships that many of us have.

You know, we greet the same hot dog person at the stand on our way to work every day. We see somebody pass, you know, who's a stranger, you know, sit across from us in a subway car every day. We meet somebody who is selling flowers on a street as we commute to work every day. These are small interactions. We might not know who those people are. And I think especially, you know, the aftermath of the covid pandemic when many people started working from home, you started to prioritize in many ways only the important relationships.

And when I say the important relationships, I mean the ones that are close. you actually talked with your co-workers. I remember when I was actually going into a workplace, one of the joys of going down to the cafeteria for lunch was that you would meet 25 people, some of whom you knew, some of whom you knew only slightly, and some of whom you didn't know. You would exchange a glance with them. You would say hello to them. You would make a joke with them. And Jillian Sandstöm's work has really suggested that, you know, we underestimate to our own peril the importance of these weak ties.

There was a sociologist many years ago who talked about the strength of weak ties that you know Mark Granoveter said that when people were looking for jobs he found that they were more likely to find jobs as a result of their weak ties. In other words, it wasn't just their moms and dads or their best friends who pointed them to a new job that was a great fit for them. It was somebody who was a casual connection and he termed this idea the strength of weak ties paper back in the '7s I believe very very influential paper in sociology.

But what Julian Sandstrom is talking about is really at an emotional level many of us underestimate the strength of weak ties. We underestimate how important it is these small quotidian relationships are. And then when we lose them for example during a pandemic we still have the main relationships in our lives. We still are talking to our friends and lovers and partners and parents and children and co-workers, but we're no longer seeing the person in the subway car who was a stranger. Something important is lost in our lives.

And I think I need to remember this lesson more often because I am someone who works from home these days. days. days. And I'm so busy that I often tend to focus so much on what I'm doing that I forget what it was like to actually be out in the world interacting with many people and enjoying those weeks. I have the same problem also in my case is the additional problem of just being wired as I often joke as a frosty New Englander. But I want to get into some of the barriers to taking advantage of these so-called peripheral connections.

But just to add one point of amplification to what you were saying about the power of the spontaneous interactions we can have with people we don't know that well like the mythical hot dog vendor. And according to Jillian Sandstrom, who's again who's done some incredible research on this, one of the sources of the power is novelty and surprise, which we often do not get from our close relationships because, you know, we know each other so well. That's exactly right. I think, you know, that's such an underestimated part of what we could get from others because as you make a catalog of all the things in your life and you sort of know where you can get those needs met, we sort of list the important things in our lives.

But of course, what you're not getting at is all the surprising things that strangers know that strangers could share with you if you were actually in communication with them. with them. with them. Now, I have to say that this is not easy to do. There's been a lot of interesting work by Nick Epley at the University of Chicago who's shown that when people are in some ways encouraged to have conversations with strangers on the train, you know, people dread these conversations. They dread being in conversation with somebody who what if this other person turns out to be a cook?

What if this person turns out to be a serial killer? You know, what if this turns out to be a awful conversation? And we come up with all these reasons why we should bury our noses in our phones and put on big headphones on our ears to block out the outside world. But he and others find repeatedly that the more people make these connections, reach out to the stranger, talk to the person sitting next to them on the train, the happier they are. It's difficult advice to follow, but I think there is some real truth to it.

in your episode with Jillian Sandstrom, there are some strategies that she recommends. Well, I'll just throw out a couple of them and and let you comment on whichever ones you think bear amplification. One of them is to use what she calls the triangulation method, like to break the ice by commenting on like a third thing, which creates a triangle between you and the stranger. So, it could be like the weather or sports. The other is to just use a simple question that indicates curiosity like what are you doing but not in a accusatory way.

Third is to know going in that there's a that you have a phrase in your back pocket that can extricate you. Something simple like I'm going to move on now. Yeah. I I love those ideas. And in some ways one of the things that we all have with these strangers that we meet is that when we bump into one of these strangers, we are in a particular context. You've met this person sitting on a train. You've met this person sitting on a plane. You're sitting next to somebody on a park bench.

And what the context gives you, as you just pointed out, uh, Dan, is the context gives you something that you have in common with the other person. And so you can talk about the weather in the park or how unseasonably hot it's been or how unseasonably cold it's been. And so these give you in some ways an avenue into the conversation that feels non-threatening. And it allows you also to feel out the other person. You know, maybe the other person's going through a very intense emotional period in their lives and maybe they want to talk or maybe they don't want to talk.

You're putting out a feeler by basically talking about the weather with the stranger sitting next to you on the park bench. And how that person responds to your feeler tells you a lot about whether they want to talk some more or they don't want to talk. If they respond, you know, monoselabically and they don't really make eye contact, that might tell you this person has things going on in their heads and want to be left alone. And on the other hand, if they respond uh gregariously and make a joke or extend the conversation, that tells you this person really wants to talk.

So, it's really a gambit, if you will, that allows you to basically open the conversation. But I think the main concern that many people have with talking to strangers is what happens if this conversation goes wrong? How do I get out of it? How do I extricate myself? One of the things I've noticed whenever I fly on a plane is I'll notice that people will sit next to each other for if it's a 5-hour flight, they'll sit next to each other for 4 and 1/2 hours and not talk to each other.

And then just as the pilot announces that the plane's coming in to land, they'll start talking with the person next to them. And I've noticed that people do this. And I think the reason they do this is because they now know if the other person turns out to be somebody who's really someone I don't want to talk with, the conversation is naturally going to come to a conclusion 20 minutes from now when the plane lands. If I open the conversation when the plane takes off, I'm stuck talking to this person for 5 hours.

So I think it's the fear of not being able to extricate ourselves that keeps us from getting into conversations. And I think one of the smart things that Jillian Sandstrom is suggesting is that if you can go into the conversation with some ideas in your hip pocket about how you can extricate yourself, you know, so let's say you're sitting on a plane and you do open the conversation when the plane takes off as opposed to when it's coming into land, you know, and maybe you find the conversation has run its course, so there's not very much to talk about anymore.

Maybe you have something in your bag that you can bring out and say, "It was lovely to talk with you and I need to attend to a little bit of work now. please enjoy the rest of your flight or you know it was lovely to talk to you. I need to finish reading my book because I have an assignment due in my class next Tuesday. And so there are little tricks that you can use that give you an out. And I think more important than using the out knowing that we have the out allows us to actually start the conversation.

And I think that's Julian Sandstöm's point, which is not so much that we actually need to extricate ourselves because very often we find when we engage in these conversations, we actually have wonderfully interesting conversations and there's no need to extricate ourselves, but it's the fear of not being able to extricate ourselves that keeps us from having the conversation in the first place. One of my best friends met his wife after striking up a conversation on a plane. So, plane. So, plane. So, wow, wow, wow, it can go very right.

That's a great story. This conversation has been a delight, Shanker, and I'm very impressed by your ability, as I said earlier, to play hurt. So, let me ask one last question, which is, can you just remind everybody of the name of your podcast, your excellent podcast, and also of your book, and anything else that we should be aware of that you've made? made? made? Of course. I'm the host and uh founder of the Hidden Brain podcast. It's available wherever audio podcasts are played. I'm also the author of the books The Hidden Brain about the the role that unconscious biases play in our lives and useful delusions uh co-authored with Bill Mesler about some of the fictitious beliefs that we have that can hold us in very goodstead that can help us lead better and more functional lives.

I'm also on social media. People can follow me on on X or on Instagram. And I've for the last year, we've been presenting some of the key ideas of Hidden Brain at a 16 city tour in 2025. Depending on when this episode airs, we have uh new shows coming up in Philadelphia on uh March 21st of 2026 and in New York City on March 25th of 2026. Amazing. And one other thing to say to plug of Shunkers, he gave a great TED talk a couple years ago.

I'll put a link to that in the show note alongside links to his podcast and his books and places where you can get tickets to his upcoming shows. Shunker, this was great. Thank you so much. so much. so much. Thank you so much, Dan. It's been such a pleasure. Thanks again to Shanker Vansum. Always love talking to that guy. Don't forget this is the first day of the 5-day meditation challenge that we're running over on uh my new app, newish app, 10% with Dan Harris. The challenge is called Even You Can Meditate.

It runs through the 27th. Head to danh harris.com to download the app and start your 14-day free trial now. And finally, thank you to everybody who works so hard on this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Kashmir is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.