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Chef AJ: Chef AJ Live! | QA with Dr Jen Howk and Dr Doug Lisle
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everybody and welcome to chef aj live i'm your host chef aj and this is where i introduce you to amazing people like you who are doing great things in the world that i think you should know about today's guests are popular fixtures on this show they i i like to have them on once a month when they're available and this is their first appearance this year they are the dynamic duo of esteemdynamics.com and the co-hosts of the wonderful beat your jeans podcast which you have to listen to if you haven't and they're here to answer your questions which are given priority when you send them in in advance please welcome dr doug lyle and dr jen hawk hey good to see you yay good to see everybody how are we all doing yeah you know before i jump in with the questions either one or both of you why don't you talk about the wonderful membership service that you have at esteem dynamics and the wonderful classes that you have jen i'm i'm in one of them and they're i love them cool sure yeah go ahead jen yeah well so we've got all kinds of stuff going on so for people who are not familiar doug and i have a a membership website called the living wisdom library which is sort of a it's part of our bigger website of steamdynamics.com so if people go to steamdynamics.com they can click on enter the library and it's a portal to just a vast treasure trove of information about evolutionary psychology so if if you've never heard us before and something we say today piques your interest from this perspective or if you know us well and you haven't found your way over there um we have uh you know the membership starts at three dollars a month and and all the membership tiers get you access to everything so we don't do that thing where if you pay less you only get some stuff and if you pay more you get more stuff like everybody gets access to everything whether you do the three dollar monthly or the 99 lifetime or anything in between um and we have you know uh every couple of weeks we do a members only q a we have uh videos that are only available to members including this four hour overview of evolutionary psychology that we have called the human nature series where we go really really really deep on the history of psychology and personality and how to how to start thinking about applying these concepts to your life so that's kind of our big our big thing that we're doing and we welcome everybody to come over there um and then i um i'm doing a couple of things i have an ongoing monthly group coaching course uh that used to be called moments of zen with jen and now it's called the virtual village it's the same same thing for people and that's every every sunday night we just kind of get together on zoom and we talk about whatever people are going through it's kind of a mix of a kind of like part a a meeting part meditation group part part psychology coaching it's kind of a mishmash so that's really fun so people can join that by going to my website jen hawk.com just to confuse people so there's sort of different operations um and then at the end of this month i'm also doing a um a four-day webinar with dr lyle and dr michael greger if people are familiar with him um on a sort of a a restart like a review and renew for people who have gotten into january and stalled out on their health goals we're going to revisit sort of why this is so hard the the first episode is literally called i i know what to do i just can't do it why why do i know what to do it but i just can't do it it's one of the most common questions that we get so pleasure trap basics strategies to overcome common pitfalls all that kind of stuff will be in that four-day webinar so people can sign up for that on my website as well so if if if in doubt just go to both esteemeddynamics.com and jenhock.com and you'll find something interesting that you're looking for great well i'll make sure i'll put everything in the show notes dr lyle what is the level of membership where one can call you 24 hours a day [Laughter] oh well i guess that that hasn't been created yet i will be the first one if that ever does get created so you have to be you have to be one of those cats to get that level of action no i just always thought you know when i grew up you know i was born in 1916 one of my favorite shows was batman i loved adam weston i loved that show and i loved how commissioner gordon had the bath phone and i always wish there was a doug phone you know because it's great to have a session but just to be able to like pick it up at that moment you know what i mean i mean i think that would be priceless okay so this first question the person says they're not it's not they're not joking and they're asked to be anonymous but it well i know it's a girl because she said her name in the email she was i'm not asking this question at all to be funny i truly would like an answer in your book the pleasure trap you talk about how we have stretch receptors in our stomach and i'm wondering if we also have them in the bowel or colon the reason i ask is because is because i actually feel extreme fullness until i poop feels similar to satiety when i eat and until and unless i poop i simply don't get hungry is this normal 10 years first question about poop i've had for you yeah the um i think the the smart answer for me to give you is that this is uh probably an ongoing investigation in physiology you certainly have stretch receptors in your colon you can you're designed by nature to be feeling uh material in there and feeling the the you have a sense of the amount of it so the the question is is does the amount of material in the colon impact your hunger drive that that's an interesting question and i don't know the answer to it um my my guess is that it probably does uh and somewhere out there there's a physiological psychologist that knows but not me so sorry about that you know i remember taking a class a long time ago with some indian doctor and and one of his things was don't eat breakfast until you poop you know has to come out before you put more in so anyway you have any thoughts on that dr hawkins i certainly i don't know i don't know the technicalities any more than than doug does but i can say that's true for my dogs watch it i definitely watch that sequence where they're they're not interested in food until they take care of business so um yeah yeah that's very good so i guess i have to find a physiological psychologist do you know what i've never heard of that no they're they're dead they're down deep in the laboratories in the basements of psychology departments with chemicals and tubes and stuff like that they don't even talk to people aj okay poop scientists don't talk to people no no so carl asks why do some people seem more resilient than other people and is there a way to increase one's resiliency there are people who've been through the holocaust and have survived brilliantly and other people crumble from things that are muscle much less traumatic well jen's our go-to personality person so and uh she has a doctoral dissertation about these things so i'm gonna let her rip on it go right ahead jen well yeah the dissertation is sort of about these things in a roundabout way i don't i don't talk so much about personality in the big five but that's this is a great question i mean we we so much of what we do comes down to the the heart of what this questioner is asking about which is you know why do people this it was the animating question of my academic work is sort of why do different um alaskan villages that are experiencing this sort of same crisis of erosion from climate change why are some villages coping better than other villages seem to be this was like this huge puzzle i couldn't figure it out um and through that research and then through evolutionary psychology research the answer it it's sort of disarmingly simple it's a little bit of a paradox because people don't think they they make it so complicated oh it's the you know the governmental institutions and it's these cultural factors and it's all these different things but it really it just comes down to the the people themselves and the personality characteristics that are in that group of people and and so whatever we're going to call resilience however we're going to measure that and there are so many different ways to think about what constitutes resilience or what doesn't it's like this whole big academic argument but most people when they use that word they they're using it like this this person is using it sort of how do you bounce back from something bad that happens how how well do you roll with the punches of life essentially um and that comes down to your essential personality profile and who it is that you are and who it is that you are has nothing to do with how you were raised or very very little to do with how you were raised and so this is like this big intuition that people have that um you know parents have toward their children and and adults have looking back on their childhoods that we were shaped profoundly by these forces in early life that that turned us into the people that we are and this is just not true and we have the we have the receipts we know that this is not true um primarily from 15 million twin studies more than that now that have been done on identical twins raised in very different families um experiencing very different sorts of life events very different kinds of uh childhood circumstances and and measuring in if we were going to measure their resilience throughout their life measuring very similarly um despite having super different experiences in early childhood and beyond um and you you have so many replicated studies that show that again and again and again and the stability of someone's personality characteristics over the course of their lifetime so you give someone a personality test that measures what we call the big five characteristics of personality and we can get into this a little bit today if people want but you can also go to esteemeddynamics.com and and listen to the human nature series where we go super deep on this um but if if you were to measure chef aj's personality her sort of her conscientiousness or her agreeableness or her openness to new experiences these major sort of fundamental personality characteristics they are the same at at age 18 as they are at age 32 as they are at age 57 it never this doesn't change of course people express their personality differently throughout the the course of different life events and they're going to be sort of steered into strategic reasons to express themselves differently under certain kinds of pressure other kinds of incentive but the fundamental nature of who you are does not change from from age zero to the grave um that is very consistent and parents i think have this intuition about their children you hear over and over again from from mothers in particular they just kind of that's who they came out as you know they just sort of emerged as this person they've always been this way there wasn't anything i could do to change them or make them different they've always kind of had these characteristics so so resilience is exactly the same as as eye color or sense of humor or any of these things that are primarily biologically rooted but we're not used to thinking about uh personality characteristics in that way but it's it's so important for understanding so many things in our relationships and our work lives and uh everything that we do so we we talk about this question a lot so no way to really increase it then um so one of the interesting things that you know the personality inventory does not change like i was saying here it doesn't your we could measure your personality over time and it's fundamentally the same with one exception which is that um what we call emotional stability so it's one of the big five it used to be called neuroticism and then kind of all the all the scientists thought that that might wasn't the nicest way to talk about this trait so it's called emotional stability in most studies and that's what that's really talking about is kind of this resilience measure it's um how how excited do you get when things are going your way how depressed do you get when things are not going your way just on the ocean of life are you a little boat that bob's around a lot or are you a big barge that really doesn't feel the waves very much and that is a fundamental that's a characteristic so you can't change that but we do become more emotionally stable over time you know relative to our earlier measurements but not relative to the rest of people because everybody becomes more emotionally stable over time just as you accumulate more life experiences so think about you know your first breakup and how you'd never gone through that experience before and how devastating it was compared to later in life you kind of know what's coming you kind of have something to compare it to so you're not going to be rocked as much by events later in life as you are early in life when you're sort of you're like oh my god no one has ever felt this bad in the history of humanity and i'm feeling things that are brand new and horrendous um that softens over time so that you you do become more resilient in the sense that you accumulate more evidence of how serious life's traumas and slings and arrows really are you get better perspective as you age but apart from that and just kind of going through those experiences there's no way to change that basic characteristic of your personality okay well thanks dr lyle is there anything you want to say about that before i move on i guess i would add the the person's original question talking about the holocaust and this uh this this question was uh to some extent caught the attention of victor frankel uh when he wrote the answers for meaning he was i think he was curious about that and didn't understand and speculated about it um trying to figure out why some people were crushed you know by a bad experience uh and and other people seemed remarkably remarkably unaffected and so that he didn't know what he was looking at but he was looking at uh genetic differences in personality that's exactly the reason for the perplexing outcomes that people see when they look at post post apocalyptic you know uh people's life experience that's interesting growing up that was one of my favorite books okay so antonio says do you guys believe in feng shui i want to know how i can convince my husband to get rid of all of the ashes from all of our dead dogs things get sorry everybody if you want to hear me talk if things get a little mystical it's gems it's jen's all the way oh man i'm sensitive i always turn that i never see comments because i'm anti-comments but i'm sure comments are like oh jen's talking too much let dr lyle talk but um yeah feng shui i think i mean there's i i there are many different ways to answer this question there's there's not much there's no there's no i mean i don't think there's any scientifically valid argument to that you could present your husband with uh to that we could give you certainly we don't have access to evidence that's going to convince him in a in a scientific way that this is a valid way to approach your domestic sphere uh but i think i think people are very i mean there is kind of a subset in evolutionary psychology and people who are interested in it and how we respond to our space you know how how our different types of architecture why we like the things we like i mean this is john tubie and leah cosmetics certainly talk about why we like certain kinds of views certain kinds of structures over kinds you know we like to be up high there are a lot of different visual cues in the environment that are actually linked to very ancient assessments of our likelihood of survival so we don't like to be high and look at a view i'm high looking at a view right now and it's very pleasant and it's because i can see the invaders coming you know i have some lead time my my sort of ancestral self the the the genes that are still within me that survive the stone age look at that view and go i've got plenty of time to get away from the bad guys before they get to my house and the things that i care about so certainly i think there are there are inherently little things in our environment that are more pleasing and less pleasing and there's probably some consistent rules about that that inform something like feng shui you know there's i know there are different approaches to it but some things like don't put a mirror on the uh other side of a door and these kinds of things that are sort of universal there's probably some scientific validity to that in the sense that we respond to certain kinds of space better than other kinds of space but beyond that i don't think i have much to add maybe maybe doug can jump in yeah it's uh i would say that there's a with respect to her situation i can't remember it exactly but there's a uh i have a principle of of human cohabitation and actually human cohabitation of a life and that is that if something is noxious for one person and pleasant for the other then it shouldn't be in a relationship in other words the the notion here is that we we have the relationship happen where there's a mutual intersection of positive interests and so if if uh my lady friend doesn't like watching the nfl and i do then i don't wear it in the house and i don't ask her to watch it with me similarly if she likes to go to parties and chitchat with people and i don't then i'm not going okay and so the fact that she she would like it better if i happen to be by her side is irrelevant in the same way it's irrelevant that if i might like it better if my lady friend sat next to me while i was watching the 49ers but too bad for me okay the truth is if it's noxious then it's not part of the overlap so if uh so that would go on also with an issue of dispute as to what's going on inside of a house in a given wagon wheel coffee table you know if somebody doesn't like it then it's not in so that's the that's the way to look at that when we're talking about feng shui ashes and things like that if it's noxious for somebody it's out okay the uh that's how that's how i like to do that okay and by the way i have a dog that looks like he needs to go out so jen you have the con no no no because because dr lyle i have to follow up on what with that and and it's just that dr lyle i appreciate what you said it's sort of like it takes two yeses and only one no but if the noxious whatever has to go out couldn't that apply to junk food in the environment too certainly uh the uh in other words that's uh that's a noxious problem for an individual who's trying to get healthy and so that would be the correct compromise uh and and you might have to gerrymander the space in the in the environment like i.e there's a refrigerator uh and a cupboard full of uh you know cookies out in the garage have at it take them up to your room while you're looking at you you know etc but i don't want to see it and uh that's a if it's noxious enough for you and it's a problem enough for you that is a legitimate way to uh uh come to an agreement yeah okay vlog i'll be back okay we we we owe doug many many thanks for taking care of my dogs while i'm out of town i really appreciate that he's getting gold stars for what a great pet sitter especially since we know he's a cat person and i suspect the dog wants to go because he can hear my voice and it's can it's all confusing so yeah he is a cat person but he my my he has a bromance with my dog so it's okay nice so here's a question from jill i have quit alcohol and gambling but i'm unable to stop smoking even though i am on the verge of copd i've tried everything why is smoking so much more difficult to stop oh yeah um i i think doug has a little more experience with this question i mean i i always think of addiction just on a continuum and but it's not the same continuum for everybody with every you know genome across the board so you will find people who uh you know their first taste of wine they're basically they're they're up the alcoholic uh addiction curve you know it sort of does something to their brain it did something to my brain um but those same people you can dangle another drug in front of them and they can even try it a couple of times and they don't have the same response you know they don't they don't respond to cocaine like they do to heroin or they don't they're not as interested in caffeine as they are nicotine um and the same even even with super normal food there are uh you know all of us who have pleasure trap you know have have gone through a journey with the pleasure trap we have sort of what we would what we would call for lack of a better word sort of trigger foods there are certain foods that you know speak to us a little more loudly than others and get us in more trouble than others um and so some people are like you know donut people some people are salty crunchy people you've got you've got all kinds of things all over the spectrum these are just individual genetic differences that people have so this this person has a particularly strong set of addictive tendencies around the substance of nicotine and nicotine in general is you know pretty tenacious i forget what the average number doug will know the average number of times people try to quit before they actually manage to to let it go oh it's seven major attempts eight eight major advantages yeah yeah and major attempts you know can can go on for a year you know that's what constitutes a major like that it's like before you manage to actually let this thing go um alcohol is much the same for for a lot of people certainly was in my case so uh it's it's you know you're not it's you haven't finished doing battle with this thing all you can do is keep doing what you're doing i mean you certainly have the motivation you you know what you're up against it's an addictive substance that has hijacked your brain it's not supposed to be in the environment we weren't supposed to figure out how to create this in the stone age and we have brilliant uh money hungry uh creative people who have devised these amazing ways to lead us into these addictive traps and nicotine is one of the biggest so um apart from that and just you know keeping the faith and doing your best and doing all of the best practices that we have for getting out of any addictive trap i'm i i will hand that back to doug and see what else he has yeah i would say this you know i don't know what this individual circumstances are everybody's circumstances are different however in most cases a major uh process can be can be engineered in order to take this on uh it depends upon just how serious you are about wanting to pull this off the let me give you an example i believe for all intents and purposes uh heroin is as bad as it gets uh i i suppose uh crack cocaine is probably um you know crystal meth these are these are probably the most addictive substances in existence the uh the odds of beating heroin are excruciatingly small uh we've known a few people that have done it but i mean it's really really rare it's exceedingly difficult to do it the i know of a young man who um didn't have a lot of resources that he knew he was in he was he was look he was staring down the barrel of his life and he took himself to thailand and he went to a buddhist monastery and parked himself there for two years okay that's what he did and so he worked the farm or whatever it was it's like he knew he could not be anywhere near where heroin was in existence and so that's we couldn't speak the language but you know obviously he could have sought it out somewhere but it was such a you know a tremendous clean environment all bent on essentially you know essentially self knowledge and honesty to the self and attempting to be self disciplined he couldn't have taken himself to a place that would be more directed towards exactly emphasizing every ounce of those strengths that can exist in a human so that's what he did and he beat it okay now so we think about that and we say wow pretty extreme it's like yeah except that i i i remember watching uh dr alex falcov who had been the psychiatrist that was in charge of the haight ashbury clinic for 20 years in san francisco making a presentation on heroin addiction showing his data and showing that despite he and his wife's absolute best efforts to do everything that they could possibly do everything that they could think of i believe his wife is a social worker so they turned every screw on the engine of their clients and they would find very typically when they would track them but 100 out of 100 people that they had treated with every trick that they knew for the last six months a hundred out of a hundred had relapsed okay so you you talk about heartbreaking and tremendous effort great intelligence you know what psychiatrist sits in the haight ashbury clinic for 20 years what kind of dedication does that take that guy could have been in marin county treating neurotic housewives for three times the money no that's not what he did okay and he did that in the face of phenomenal amounts of failure okay that's why i've been personally very interested in things like the stories that i know adam said okay i know people who have beat heroin and they are very very interesting stories the um but the point is is that this person is staring down the same kind of barrel that that young man stared down which was not adam's another person um which is you're looking at your life you're looking at copd and you're looking at a cigarette okay now let's understand most people don't beat this thing they don't beat it because the pleasure trap is massively underestimated all kinds of things in the world are blamed for the lure of the pleasure draft your childhood trauma relationship with your mother all kinds of stuff none of it's true the truth of the matter is the pleasure trap is a very direct hijacking of instinctual circuitry that's what it is you are not supposed to beat the pleasure craft it is amazing to me that anybody ever beats the pleasure craft and it was that question that led to the book okay uh once i had learned about the nature of how the pleasure trap works with drug addiction working with drug addicts uh at the at the national center for ptsd in palo alto in the early 90s once i once i learned about the the you know the neurophysiology of the pleasure craft i spoke with alan goldhamer and i said i can't imagine that we are not all addicted and alan looked at me and he said we are it's the food okay that's where that was the dawn that was the moment that the pleasure trap concept was born was when i realized i couldn't understand why we are not all addicts and then it turned out oh we are and uh and the ingenuity of the modern environment has you know crea has found out the magic substances and processes that will do it so we now have a couple of other processes that we've discovered gambling okay gambling is a major process and the genes that involve gambling addiction are not evenly distributed throughout the globe they are in different locations with different gene pools have them much worse than others i know this i have a friend who uh was a casino king and in certain locations in the world was very successful and then when he went to other locations in the world no business it's like oops different people different genes if you're selling alcohol go to ireland and scotland that's a really good place to try to sell alcohol don't go some other places where people aren't aren't so don't have the proclivities for those addictions the um i got lost jen where was i going uh nicotine addiction i was actually winding around to social media they discovered another one okay so social media uh with the phenomenon of social media you have discovered another addictive potential inside of human beings and uh you see their lives being swallowed up looking at little screens etc go ahead jen designed by the way by the vegas the the very same people who designed slot machines in vegas were hired by silicon valley to design things like the little notification bell on facebook and anybody this will rock anybody's world who hasn't heard this but you know how you scroll on your phone that's a slot machine it's just a slot machine you have to wait like this half second to see what pops up and it could be it could be a post from a friend it could be a note from someone exciting in a romantic way or it could be an ad you don't know it's like you're you're just rolling the dice every time you scroll and there's that like little split second and the split second is calculated to get you all anticipatory and excited it's literally the same people that built the slot machines that built uh built social media so just you know tuck that away and and rant about why everybody needs to quit social media another time i have very strong feelings on the matter i'm trying to walk my own talk but um but yeah it's really really we we have not faced a process-based social addiction of its ilk ever in human history and it it has the potential to bring down civilization so we should proceed cautiously the um yes so with your nicotine addiction what you're hearing from me is take it very seriously and understand that it's your little stone age brain with its vulnerability against the the ingenious greedy intelligence uh of the absolute winners of how to manipulate human beings that's who you're playing poker against with your life okay and so that means it now doesn't become such an extreme idea to take out some of your life savings and head for a small cabin on a lake in vermont where there isn't even a store you know i mean don't even rent a car or have uber drop you off so that you can't walk for three miles okay and they're not going to deliver cigarettes to you because you're you could be an 18 year old so they're not going to do it so you can get your you can get your pancake mix or whatever else it is that you're allowing yourself to eat while you don't smoke cigarettes okay i'm i'm just talking here but get your you know do what it do what you can afford and what you can afford is a lot more than you may have considered because the truth of the matter is it's your life on the line you know what let's take it super seriously if a young man can go you know can't speak the language get on a plane get away from his family and his support system and his therapist and the psychiatrist and just go to a buddhist monastery in thailand you can do something equivalent that isn't so dramatic and get yourself out of this trap i feel for you because it is a you're in the jaws of this thing and literally your the rest of your life experience is on the line yeah well she says she can't afford treatment but aren't cigarettes pretty expensive these days she doesn't she doesn't yeah we're not talking treatment she doesn't need treatment she needs isolation she needs to get herself away from the cigarettes uh you know it doesn't have to be anything fancy like literally a um what do you call it a tent and a sleeping bag and go to big sur and camp at pfeiffer state park for two weeks and watch the ocean roll in that's the kind of thing that you need to do get yourself distracted out into out of the woods breathe fresh air don't have cigarettes anywhere in sight this is how you face it facing the same environment where it's too convenient it's going to be a problem this is sort of a progression of the same advice we give to people wherever they are with a pleasure trap struggle so you know sometimes we'll come up with these crazy ideas for people who you know they live next door to a grocery store and they're they can't keep themselves from going in at midnight it's like okay well you have to either move or you know go into the grocery store and speak to the manager with a poster of your face on it and say put this in your put this in your employee room and don't let me come in here you know i'm banned from your store like i'm banning myself and the reason that we some sometimes we joke about this kind of stuff but not always because this is you are dealing with an extraordinary problem that the species is not adapted to solve and people just don't they don't believe that everybody has this willpower fallacy that they think that because they've they've beaten iterations of the pleasure trap before and it's even suggested in this question that you've beaten other things and so you think you should have the willpower you should have the resilience you should have the ability to take this on and the fact is you've got the evidence that that will power is not sufficient to tackle this so it's all it comes down to the environment just like it does with keeping doritos out of your house or anything else and an extraordinary problem that has hijacked your strongest instincts sometimes requires extraordinary measures that are really outside the box that take you to to a tent in big sur big sur or take you to thailand or take you wherever it is that you can eliminate the uh incentive and the opportunity to um to take part in this addictive process and you just have to think about what that could be for you given your financial abilities and your life circumstances and everything else but there's there's there is no other way i've known two people that got off cigarettes by water fasting at true north yes that's uh i've met i've seen many people do that so that that's an option it's a you could in principle water fast yourself at home for three days see what happens but uh but in any event uh jen has encapsulated it beautifully extraordinary problems sometimes require extraordinary measures right thank you guys very good so i just want to thank christina for her super chat donation so that bumps her question up because it appears in bright blue you can't miss it oh we can be bought yeah absolutely you can that's why i asked the beginning how much was it for the lyle phone she says how do i address a man when they are mansplaining something to me i am tired of just plowing through it by being nice and agreeable and please explain mansplaining because i honestly don't really know what that means you feel it though aj [Laughter] all right this is a this has got to be a gen question comes back like the chip questions come to me so for people who are not familiar with name like the term mansplaining i will i will mansplain it man's flaming is a term coined by rebecca solmet who is this buddhist author and and zen practitioner in san francisco really really prolific author who was at a party once and had just written a book a very successful book and met this man at this party who proceeded to describe her own book to her and how interesting it was and how thought provoking and she tried to communicate to him that in fact it was her book that she had written it and he was so busy grandstanding about all of his newfound knowledge misinterpreting the the ideas in her book and wanting to impress her that he did not like he could not absorb the fact that it was actually her book and her friend kept reminding him so she went and wrote this essay about mansplaining and mansplaining is essentially men explaining things to women that women already know in a patronizing manner that that would be sort of the best definition of it so this is a a a just part of the female condition i think i think this is something that most women have experienced certainly not gender specific men women this is a personality trait this is sort of a this is an arrogance a narcissism a disagreeableness that is present and a lot of men who uh have a little bit of a cultural past to engage in this behavior in ways that women who may have those characteristics as well don't necessarily have the same kind of cultural past to practice as as much of it but um women women can be as guilty of mansplaining type behavior as men can it just sort of men get more blamed for it and more often just because of the way offices are structured and different different situations are presented to women they find themselves in this situation as the more agreeable gender in general um where they're sort of playing this captive audience to these these these uh bombastic blowhards who are trying to explain things that they already understand very well or don't need explain to them in such a way or don't need to explain to them in the particular way that men are doing it so my advice on this it's actually it's funny we get this question frequently this comes up often probably because it's a very common problem uh it's kind of a situational question is this chronic mansplaining from the from the same person is this something that you're just running into intermittently um what kind of position of power are you in with this individual uh is it is it somebody that you can mostly dodge like my first line of defense with mansplainers is to avoid them just try not to get into the situation and get yourself splained if you can help it um and the next line of defense is to have a big louie what we call a big louis so have a hard out on on a conversation if you see him coming down the hallway at the office you already are coming up with an excuse in your mind about why you need to leave in four minutes because you have some phone call or you have a meeting or you have you have something that urgently you need to get to and then you just need to practice acting on that and getting yourself out of the situation um you can certainly you know sometimes they these are perfectly nice humans who are just not aware that it's kind of noxious behavior and you can also get a fair degree of leverage just by you know putting your hand on the shoulder and saying i you know i really enjoy talking to you but i need you to know that i'm actually already really familiar with this or we've already talked about this or whatever like i don't mean to offend you but you know how however you want to phrase that they might just need to be interrupted um a lot of mansplaining is coming from a very natural desire of men to impress women so that probably a lot of what's going on there and this is i every time i use this explanation i feel like i'm the mom telling the little girl that the the boy on the playground is pulling your pigtails because he likes you but it's kind of like that he's probably just engaging in a display to to demonstrate to you his his intelligence his knowledge his ability to solve problems in the village um his high mate value to you so it's it's coming from sort of a sort of a sweet earnest place a lot of the time um and and so it's not necessarily uh just just pivoting that meaning for you might make a difference so but it depends on the exact specifics of the situation okay thank you all right here's a question from lynette why do seemingly intelligent people join cults are there personality traits that are more conducive to joining a cult would you consider the group that stormed the capital cult members or engaging in cult-like behavior um let's see i know i mean the group storm in the capital i don't know even who they were we'd have to look and see who those individuals were and whether or not they were a coordinated bunch of people that knew each other planned this and uh how many of them there were and how long they'd known each other etc uh that's not much of a cult that's i'm not sure what that what we would call that the um the occult is going to be there's a reason we call we have a name for this thing and it's a it's a group of people that share some um some delusion of some kind uh about the nature of reality and and that delusion has some significance to it with respect to their behavior and makes their behavior uh different and to some degree oftentimes the concepts that that are integrated into creating the cult have an aspect to them where they are uh they're essentially they've got an informational immune defense against uh against outside influences so uh you're gonna see that a lot in the history of religions in the world uh as well as other things in other words there's uh aspects to don't believe the other people uh and essentially be on guard because their information is dangerous so uh so now when we look at this we can start to see the outlines of personality characteristics that that would swirl around or somehow be involved in the formation of a cult one of them uh potentially would be open-mindedness and agreeableness on the other side there would be narcissism you know big-time disagreeable uh humans so i think in a lot of cults you're going to find leadership that is very disagreeable and probably pretty intelligent uh and so uh a narcissism and with intelligence associated with it um can be a dangerous uh situation for people who are agreeable and open-minded and so i think that's a a pattern uh that you're gonna see often i can't remember what the rest of the question is jen what what comes to mind for you that i haven't thought of i know i think that's that's absolutely sort of why you see the well i think the question is that was the capital mob part of a cult and i don't think you have enough unity of the kind of signal quality of a cult when i think of a cult is it has this um uh you know this teleological this kind of like it's this religious fervor there's something there's some transformation associated there's some promise of salvation there's some promise of if you attach yourself to this leader um or this set of ideology that is uniquely channeled through this leader like there's something like this the single leader or the council of leaders is a really important characteristic that they they alone are able to transmit this special knowledge that will save your soul or or take you to some sort of higher plane or um it's not it's different from kind of the the chaotic revolutionary impulse that you see motivating these people this is a political thing it's not a uh it doesn't have that that kind of um transformational personal quality i don't think so that's we might be splitting hairs with that but for me it doesn't it just doesn't read as cult in the same kind of way so um for for the kind of the best if people are interested in cults there's so many interesting there's like great educational material out there uh the documentary series wild wild country um on netflix about osho and his cult i mean talk about the mix of the open agreeables and the disagreeables who are really the puppet masters including him and his primary lieutenant who is um like a major character in this documentary and how she was really running the whole thing profoundly disagreeable human um capturing all of these open agreeable foot soldiers and the the whole structure of the thing being this dance between agreeable and disagreeable and openness and and um narcissism and oh it's really just incredible so i don't think i think there's a uh you know the other thing that would be important to defining something as a cult or behavior as cult like would be just organized you know organized and financially coherent around a particular organization and that's just not the case here so this is also not a revolution people are calling it that it's not it's not a coup it's it's just sort of um you know attempted seizure of power by a political and interested political group uh largely because of the power of social media or the power of social media that they had a couple of weeks ago that they no longer have which is actually a very big problem for its own reasons but we'll get into that in another show so yeah i think was there another part of the question that we missed not just i guess they were asking what like what the personality characteristics were of the people okay layla says why is it when people say that when they abstain from addictive or pleasure trapped foods they want them more when in reality they want them all the time anyway and then they blame the restrictiveness of abstinence for the relapse um that's curious but that's quite a statement um i would say that the people's motivation to to relapse is if we if we watched it very carefully we would see that it that it's uh it has a an extraordinarily variable course so literally for four hours they may not think about anything and then some some situation arises they see an ad for cheetahs on tv doesn't matter what it could be um they can they can your your memory systems are designed by nature to mark for you uh what what memories are is there actually devices to improve your your estimations of environmental threats and opportunities so uh i just i was talking to a person who had parents went through very difficult you know illnesses and now she's in a situation where uh a close family member is going through the same thing and now this is 50 years later and she's saying gee i'm being triggered and she's feeling as if she's has feelings that must be reminiscent and that must be being caused by the trauma that she went through 50 years ago that that's a misunderstanding of of these the nature of human psychology what's happening is what happened 50 years ago was major problematic difficult losses and as a result the nervous system flags those events in memory because they're important and therefore potentially useful anytime that you have a very significant loss or gain you should remember it okay and so now those memories have been dormant for 50 years until similar circumstances are now coming up and she's not being triggered by an avalanche of potential crushing emotional overwhelming loss that she's been holding back for 50 years against the tide no that's not how human psychology works at all that's how the freudians thought it worked that's not even remotely close to how it works what a memory is is it's a device to help you estimate the nature of your environment and so now the nature of her environment looks similar to the environment that she experienced 50 years ago so she opens up that file and is consulting it for information that may be useful i.e we've been through this before what can we remember about it that we learned okay that's why you're having the memories come back not having the memories come back because we've been holding against the torrent of their terror for 50 years and now the triggers are breaking apart the facade that is psychodynamic nonsense and it's totally wrong that is a anti-biological anti-scientific support that is not how memory works if you have bad memories if you've had traumatic events they are not doing damage and they did not do damage they are a file that sits inside your memory in case situations similar happen in the future to help you inform yourself more intelligently about the parameters in the current situation that you may already know something about and therefore you can help mitigate that's a long story to where i'm going to now the truth of the matter is is that your memories are constantly keeping track of where the cheetos are okay you know where the chocolate chip cookies are you know where an a w root beer float is you know where love's barbecue is you don't forget these things and so as you go through your day um the little tiny images of all kinds of things in your memory will tickle and those may or may not rise to the surface now they're going to rise to the surface extremely easily if for example i see an ad on television okay look out you know that that's you know one of the amazing things that truenor we didn't used to have tvs i can't believe we've got tvs in the room people are there watching ads on tv they're getting bombarded 200 times a day with food ads allen finally got crushed by the human demand wanting to watch television but i don't know i don't know that it's the best thing the um i don't know that's a i'm wandering all over the place here's the point the point is is that people quote relapse uh not because the restrictiveness is this person's suggesting that you know they disagree with this which i agree the disrestrictedness doesn't cause you to have a pent-up fury to have a chocolate chip cookie or to clean out a bunch of oreos now your mind actually already knows what it's like to clean out those oreos since you've done it 50 times and so it's flagged that little situation in life and so now when you run into you know a bunch of time when nobody is going to be around you monitoring you you've got plenty of money you've got time to hop in the car the kids are all gone off at white camp you know what i mean and it's like hey guess what i could have had a v8 i like oh i could go down and get myself a sack of oreos and sit and watch the crown and clean them off well the reason why you're having that isn't because you haven't had the oreos it's because you have had the oreos in the past and we're now in a set of circumstances where it all fits together like it might be the best use of your time and energy to ding the little circuits in your head so the people also will not only make misattributions as to why they're going through the experiences that they have but they are also probably have very deeply motivated self-deception and status defenses for telling stories about why it is that they're having the troubles that they're having and so this is this wanders its way into some revolutionary thinking that has taken place between jen and myself over the last few years as we now understand that a great deal of the motivation that swirls around the whole world of trauma is that it's a there's excuses that are being made inside the system that it can be very very useful for status defense that are unknown to the person consciously which have driven a tremendous popularity in psychodynamic thought as well as across the political spectrum for many uh purposes that that there's a there's bs in this and uh that bs is thick with many layers in it and so that's that's another that's one of the reasons why people uh will go to that excuse is because it's highly socially defensible it has superficial uh superficial plausibility and what it does is it gets us off the hook for the responsibility that we are shirking when it comes to trying to keep our act together i don't blame people for doing that i just want to call them on it and have them understand but that is not the reason why you're having the problems that you're having the reason you're having the problems that you're having is because you were not designed to solve these problems they are difficult not everybody can do it and even of the people that can do it very often they will not do it because the circumstances are sufficiently appealing and troubling that they can't actually cross the river so anyway long convoluted answer jen speak up and save me no that was that was beautiful the only the only thing i would add is that um you know i think there's this uh danger zone in when you're changing you're trying to change your behavior you're trying to get out of the pleasure trap whether it's with nicotine caffeine pleasure trap food alcohol anything um where you have this initial kind of beginner's energy this enthusiasm this like this time's different i've got a lot of motivation i'm very excited you're starting off that gets you some amount of time gets you a week gets you it gets you a couple of days and then you know before you're really starting to see any major changes in your in your health or your weight or your uh social relationships or whatever it is very adaptation or your neuroadaptation exactly there's a really vulnerable point of time where these things start to creep in and that's sort of why you're going to see that that what we call the extinction curve of an addiction process so it's going to it's going to look sort of like you you the first time you taste a vegan donut you sort of you shoot up that you build these little correlations between hey that's a really exciting thing to eat i'm going to build a little association in my mind that every time i think of or smell or hear about a vegan donut i'm going to salivate i'm going to get excited about it if people you know are familiar with the pavlov pavlov and his dogs with the bell you know ringing the bell salivating before they even eat because they've associated the sound of the bell with the with the forthcoming food we do exactly the same thing our we're a slightly more sophisticated brain but we build those connections in the same way um so you build the addiction you build the addiction until finally you're just full-on addicted so you go up the up the learning curve that's what a learning curve is um and then you're you're addicted you're addicted so every time you think of the vegan donut you're like i gotta have i gotta have it and then the extinction curve is when you take you you break that process apart so you can think of the thing without actually going and eating it and having that pleasurable experience um you can think of alcohol without you know needing a drink and that is not a smooth decline that is actually going to surge before it starts to decline because your your the craving that you have of the substance is more intense before it starts to quiet down and then as doug is saying even even when you get to the point where it's very very quiet if you see a picture of it on tv or you walk past a vegan donut shop or whatever it is you'll have this little what's called a spontaneous recovery and you'll have a craving you'll just it would be it would be crazy for your mind not to do that because there's such pleasure associated with that substance it's never going to erase that pathway it's just going to kind of you know let some weeds grow over it but it's never totally going to go away and so that's why controlling your environment is is so important but that no man's land between initial startup energy and and the sort of long-term benefits of changing your behavior that start to really set in that are kind of quiet and subtle that's a really vulnerable time for people and so you just have to white knuckle it through that that's what i mean it's it's there's no better way um and white knuckling with as much distraction and as much alternative you know uh you know don't don't try the biggest mistake i see people do is they under eat during that time because they're they're thinking they're on a diet so they're trying to change their their food behavior and they're being really really good you know they're eating these brothy soups and salads and and not getting enough calorie density they're just not eating enough um so i i want people when they're in that danger zone to have full tummies all the time of really starchy food like this is not the time to be thinking about oh i only lost two pounds this week i wanted to lose four this is the time don't even look at the scale you were trying to calm that whole process down so you're in a position of more control as you get out of the rapids um and then and then you've got you've got a better position of power over the whole thing and we want steamy starches steamy starches that's right starches that have watery steam coming off of them when you take them out of the oven or the instant pot or whatever nice intelligent eating made a donation because they really want this question answered and if you want your question answered just pay three dollars and join the living wisdom community because they're doing a live q a tomorrow at two o'clock so the question is have you have any thoughts on havening as a technique for suppressing amygdala response to addictions say that first one the first one any thoughts on havening i didn't know what it is so i looked it up and it says havening is an alternative therapy developed by dr ronald rudin mdphd and popularized by a behavioral scientist paul mckenna hypnotist and author it relies on amygdala depotentiation that purportedly can help people with psychological problems particularly those related to phobias post traumatic stress and anxiety it elicits delta brain waves with havening touch proven to act directly on receptors in the brain where trauma is stored to down regulate the emotional charge chalk mostly when the client is distracted this way the client does not have to stay in talk about upsetting events or feeling havening shares features in common with another alternative therapy method eye movement desensitization and reprocessing however does not require you to stay immersed in uncomfortable feelings yeah never heard of it so it's not much the scientific rage probably in the field i would say that it's sharing a inference uh an inference that that i find immediately suspicious uh not necessarily my uh this inference doesn't necessarily mean it's it's utterly without all value it may be accidentally and very could be accidentally of some value for reasons that they're not considering the the the underlying inference that this and other such types of approaches make is a very um a very naive uh inference and that is that it's the notion that traumatic events are damaging the information processing systems of the brain um they are not so what what uh people people imbue magic damaging characteristics to what they the word trauma i want you to realize that trauma has a mystical a mystical aura in it for the last hundred and something years after sigmund freud's writings and there is no scientific reason for it to have a magic aura at all it's just that it has taken on a magic aura now instead i want you to change the name of that to unpleasant experience so if we change the name of trauma to unpleasant experience which is exactly what it is then we start saying things like okay well the change is in the brain as a result of the unpleasant experience why the hell would we want to change the brains if the brain made changes to itself it made changes to itself in order to help us inform our memory systems better to inform us in future events have characteristics that are suggested that we're about to face a similar loss that we faced five or 10 or 15 or 50 years ago then we need to be informed about that and be vigilant okay the brain does not over generalize this typically not for very long in other words it remains highly specific so uh would be otherwise if you had a dog bite you and you're all upset pretty soon you generalized to everything and you can't even leave your your bedroom that's how that's in in principle how that would work okay that isn't how it works so keep in mind that quote the changes in the brain that everybody's so excited and upset about and are are so uh grandstanding about their ability to manipulate including biological psychiatry remember that the changes in the brain that take place as a result of very pleasant or very unpleasant experiences are nothing other than information processing uh changes that are helping the brain be more adaptive for god's sakes so whenever anybody starts touting that they're they've figured out some way to go in and fix something that happened and they start throwing around places in the brain like the amygdala et cetera and we're going to dampen down its reactivity with our magic sauce my first question is what on earth makes you think that you're improving the organism okay and so that's that's what i have to say about that and all other such things so if you can uh if anybody you know has a specific problem and some dr schmo has some very fancy technique that they could help them uh mickey mouse their way around that specific problem and it works have at it uh when we generally take our sweet time and not have a hypnotist author does uh extol its virtues and instead we look in the american psychologist for a meta-analysis 20 years later about 17 randomly controlled trials we find out that the effect sizes are minimal for any such treatments so that's generally the history of that sort of psychotherapeutic process so i wouldn't be too excited about it but it almost certainly can't hurt you because your brain won't let it hurt you okay so go ahead if you want to do dr schmo's thing move your eyes back and forth to try to forget a dangerous trauma that your brain has sensitized you to uh so that uh so that you don't fall in that same trap again and we think that that's going to rewire your brain in some fantastic way have at it okay meanwhile there might be a might more effective way which is to actually try to figure out what the brain is trying to uh what what they're trying to tell you about your emotional and anxiety reactions what features of that situation do you have did you not understand when you went through it that the brain is coding a little mechanism to keep cycling back around looking for the critical principle that you need to organize your behavior around it with respect to a future incident and then once you get a hold on that and can understand it then we're going to find out that your post-traumatic uh reactions decline this is specifically what edna foa at the university of pennsylvania was able to demonstrate across her career with various classes of traumas in other words no secret sauce just good learning well you get such you gave such a great answer that intelligent eating donated again and said thank god thank you very much for your coaching answered pseudoscience validation which is appreciated made a donation saying thank you and queen of aries but let's just keep you on a little longer no just kidding we have a couple more questions i'll save them for next time because i know you guys have a members q a tomorrow so i'm putting in the chat and in the show notes that people can join that and then they can get more questions answered tomorrow fantastic great well thank you so much dr hawk thank you it's awesome to be here good to see both of you good to kind of catch a glimpse of my puppies in the background and and i hope to see you guys again soon thanks everyone and thanks all of you for watching another episode of chef aj live please come back tomorrow when my guest is kathleen from rancho la puerta in mexico you're going to love tomorrow's show thanks again dr lyle and dr hawk take care bye
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