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Chef AJ: Emotional Eating, Entitled Children, Charitable Giving More | Chef AJ Live! with Dr Doug Lisle
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hey everyone 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 well today we are graced with the presence of everyone's favorite psychologist dr doug lyle and he's here to answer your questions which always are given priority if you send them in in advance because whenever we have a doctor in general and dr lyle in particular we get lots of questions and this will be his last appearance probably until next year so please welcome back to the show dr lyles so nice to always see you oh hi aj great great thanks for having me oh well we we could i mean i have you every day like all lyle all the time but i know that you have other things to do so we so appreciate you coming so we have a wide variety of questions on things you're used to answering about diet trauma but the first few i are about things that are happening around the holidays so i'll give them a little bit of priority because people might want to know this is an interesting question from jason dear dr lyle so many people and organizations are aggressively asking for money this time of year from the bell-ringing santas of the salvation army at the mall to the constant emails from all the plant-based doctors and organizations not to mention the increase increasing of homeless people with their families with signs like we have no food for christmas please help which tug at your heart how does one learn to balance charitable giving without breaking the bank and still feeling like a good person um it's actually interesting i never even thought about that the the uh the i think we begin with we we begin with something that's kind of curious is we're the the the thing that we're even watching is we're watching the the the instinct of the human being which is designed to live in a moderate sized village so human beings are designed to live in maybe a village of 30 40 50 people and in that village um the little families each are out gathering food and the uh and they're pretty steady at their abilities to do so the the men actually are engaging in hunting collectively and then they divide those resources so what there is is that there's a what you're watching is you're watching the integration of safety nets uh that's that's why they're even together uh there's there are costs associated with living in close proximity to a member of your own species because you want the same things they want okay it's not a problem with me living for example next next to a bunch of you know oak trees because we aren't after the same resources so we're not in competition with each other that would uh and i doesn't even bother me too much to have squirrels around but another human is a potentially significant cost and that is exactly what they want tends to be exactly what it is i want so there's conflicts so why do humans even live together and the answer is because they are competent to actually help each other so they are there's value now so there's other value in other creatures for for living close together but those are herds and they actually don't help each other they're just they there's no conscious behavior directed at helping uh what there is is that there's just a uh there's a geometry associated with their existence that they are better off being a member of a herd because the herd can protect itself uh in some ways that where an individual can't um and so there are uh so there are so a bunch of horses running and heard they aren't friends okay they don't have emotional attachments to each other the um uh if one of them has its foot stuck on a snake hole and a tiger you know is is chasing it then uh it's chasing them we don't stop and say oh my god george you know let me see what i can do let me get my head underneath your foot and see if we can pull it out of the snake hole they don't do that they just run for their own existence okay humans aren't like that they don't they're not in a herd they're actually in a they are a motivated collective they want to be in there they're in there because they like it and they like it because it's valuable and one of the most important things about its value is not the fact that we have conflicts of interest with each other about what's valuable for god's sakes that's a problem okay no the value of being together has overridden the conflict because it turns out that we can help so one of us have our foot stuck in a snake hole some and where there's a trouble coming the other members of the tribe are like whoa let's stop trying to figure this thing out so human beings have helping hands and then they've got brains that are willing to help and the big thing that's involved is insurance and insurance is is an unbelievably valuable uh possibility in nature where if i help you if i give you a thousand calories today that i have been gathering and because i see that you're a lot hungrier than i am then what happens is is that let's suppose your odds of dying you know just went from 50 in the next three days to ten percent of the next three days because i just gave you a thousand calories so that thousand calories literally saved forty percent of a life it was a statistical gain that is phenomenal unless suppose you're 30 years old so you have 40 years or so left on the planet so i just went 40 times 40 years i just pulled up 16 years of human life on that moment where i gave up a thousand calories which took me all afternoon to gather so i trade one afternoon in my time for 16 years of your game okay that is how why it's it's an incredible potential but but other animals haven't been able to harvest it it requires a really sophisticated brain and that brain has to have machinery in it that feels good about helping okay you have to want to do it and the reason why you want to do it is you've been selected to be in these little what we're going to call insurance schemes or tribes or friendship circles that you feel like oh i see and feel and experience their pain and i want to help them okay what you don't know is you've been engineered to do that because if the shoe or the on the other foot they would help you so people get upset when you start explaining this that this is the underlying biology that drove these feelings you say no i never want anything in exchange of course you don't want anything in exchange for god's sakes you hope to never be in a position to need it okay so you're not hoping that they do something bad for you when you save their life you're just but you know that you have established that you are someone who would help therefore if the shoe's on the other foot you are worth helping okay so what you've done is you paid for an insurance policy and just like when you pay for state farm we're not sure that they're not going to renege on the deal we're not sure that we're not going to have a dispute with them when we've got a bad neck injury and they're saying no we think it was pre-existing and you're like no it wasn't it's a hell of a lot worse than it was before that pre-existing thing that you talked about in my medical records was nothing compared to this don't even talk to me about this okay you can absolutely have disputes with insurance companies that's why it's a massive bunch of law but the bottom line is is that you're better off with the insurance than without it because of the probability that they're going to come through when you're in trouble you know i don't have earthquake insurance on my house because i'm out in the middle of sacramento valley it's like i've looked at it and i thought well let me tell you what's in the computation number one it's not very much money why i look at that it's like well it's not much money because they know there's very low risk amount if i was in the bay area it's completely different it's expensive because the odds are high but i also look at it like wow there's an earthquake out here and you know and there's a bunch of losses i'm not so sure they're going to come through very well they're very likely going to say gee sorry okay so this is why you know that runs in my computation that runs in a person's computation when you're when you're going to think about being some homeless person it's like what are the odds that we're going to be in a position where you could reciprocate on me okay for me and the odds don't seem that good but at the same time you also recognize that other people are observing this process and they're trying to decide how generous you are about helping people that are in trouble and this process of helping other people when they're in trouble mimics the stone age problem where it's a member of the village and their value is actually very high and you have a tacit responsibility okay and your your willingness to be a high character individual which would come through under those circumstances being is being judged by everybody that observes you which is why i feel slightly guilty and embarrassed walking past the salvation army person when they're ringing the little bell and i don't want to stop and give them a dollar because i don't have a dollar that's handy okay all i've got is 10 bucks it's the slo smallest thing in my thing and it's like you know what i don't even want to deal with this and i'm irritated a little bit that i'm being put in that position because i also know intuitively that i'm a very good reciprocator but i absolutely pay my debts to my coalition and more and that i want to be a really good person and do a really good job so i know morally that i'm on super solid ground but you put that situation in my face and it mimics a stone age situation and particularly a homeless person with a little sign with three little kids it's like whoa you talked about the stone age crisis of the woman who lost her warrior husband you know what i'm saying and then she's starving with three little kids it's like what am i supposed to do and the answer is i'm supposed to help if i could possibly afford it and can i afford it hell yes i could put those person people up in my house and feed him a big old fancy dinner for god's sakes there's a tremendous amount that i could do and in the stone age we're designed by nature to have it that nobody's way better off than anybody else but this is all about keeping these basic income processes extremely even in the stone age so if i get a little bit extra benefit that i need my food's going to rot anyway i might as well look around the village and see who is a little bit light oh your your wife was sick or out of spraying ankle so she couldn't gather as much let me give you a little bit of our extra so we're extremely sensitive to making sure that everybody gets fed and everybody's warm and everybody's in reasonable shape and when we get evidence that they're not and we know we've spent a bunch of money and time and energy putting up christmas lights for god's sakes uh it's like wait a minute this feels out of balance so this is why this is a problem okay you are this is the the example of the pleasure trap in a different way you're being confronted with supernormal stimuli where the environment that you are watching and that you're participating in uh has aspects of it that are reminiscent of the stone age but you are actually dealing with highly intensified stimuli so um that's when and your your instincts are being called on to do something about it so i know this is a very long complicated answer to this question but you know it's a very very interesting question hopefully people are are tracking this and people that have heard me before are you know somewhat conversant with this basic logic about how what what is these basically unconscious adaptive processes that are driving our motivation and we and we can see that the modern world is full of these little traps you know i'm saying it has a lot of them go to las vegas the whole damn thing is one big pleasure trap okay the uh and you go uh you know into your store and it's a pleasure trap and your kid is struggling with you know marijuana you know and trying to figure out whether or not he should give it up but even though it's now legal that it seems to be undermining his motivation all of his friends do it it's like wow we're surrounded with it okay and this is an example not of a pleasure trap but of a responsibility trap okay and so this uh different aspects of this i've talked about in in a you know talk i did many years ago called success forces where we talk about the fractured village and the fact that you can have a bunch of people pulling on your time and energy and each of them feels like they're the most important and none of them even know each other okay and so as a result of that you are you are in a lot of conflict because people are frustrated that you aren't giving them more time and attention and energy because they don't see your whole village because your village is fractured where in the stone age big louie tells told tells little george no she's coming with me to help me on this project not your projects my project's more important and big louie wins the argument and big george isn't mad at you that you're not helping him you know pick flowers or for his girlfriend's birthday like you said you were going to because big lou says no we gotta go repair the fishing net and that's more important and that's the end of the subject you didn't have to you know deal with this the way we have to deal with it now which is an unnatural situation and that leads highly agreeable highly responsible people to be getting their their they get run and run in circles with no time left for themselves exactly this problem so this is a great question and you're asking well what's the answer well we can expect that it's complicated and we can expect that it's difficult and we can expect that everybody has to deal with this in some ways relative to their own personality okay um i you know and how do i deal with it well anybody asked me for money you know by virtually in any way the answer is going to be no i have people that are close to me and people that i know that need help okay i i will come across individuals that are actually needing you know assistance and if i can and it's reasonable and it seems to me like they are a very good character you know it never bothers me to help to help somebody even extensively help them if my estimation is if they are a high character because it feels like a really good stone age trade it feels like one unit of my effort is going to come back 10 you know even if it's just an insurance that it just feels like a good thing but if i sense that the person is notified character that they're manipulative and that they're they're they're in some way that there's a there's a process in here that doesn't ring sound then i clam up like that like i'm not no i'm not interested at all all of these uh agencies and organizations they've got their own agendas they have you know more or or lesser you know people in terms of their character what their agendas are what they're listen that's fine as far as i'm concerned if it feels good to you to donate to a bunch of causes go ahead i don't donate to any causes okay i donate to individuals and i donate what i can reasonably and responsibly afford versus what it is that i think that they need and i try to figure that out and i make my own decisions and that's that okay so i give charitably uh more uh more in a year than than i would have ever dreamed giving if i was quote writing checks for a tax write-off for some 501 c 3 somewhere sorry that's not just not going to happen i don't care how valuable the research is and what an important agenda we are like life goes on and i'm not interested okay i'm interested in people i'm interested in some individual that i can see that my 500 right now could make a difference you know i mean in them being able to take advantage of an important opportunity for them or missing that opportunity okay so that's how i go about doing things so when i walk by people or i i ignore uh clamors for my resources it's because i'm thinking a little bit differently about that i'm thinking uh right close to my own personal fractured stone age village that i live in right so that's how i do it and i pass that on as a possible guidance system for you that remember every every thirty dollars that you give some cause that gets frittered away in the bureaucracy of them trying to look for a cure for cancer you know that's thirty dollars you couldn't give to you know your nephew that that you know that that is the that is in a broken home that there's some financial stress on resources that it might be a really nice thing for that kid to have that thirty dollars you know that uh et cetera that that may be the best use that you have for that uh for those resources so that's me then i'm not rich so i can't just say well fine i'm gonna give a million dollars to something and they're gonna put my name on a building yeah if i had that kind of money maybe i would undoubtedly be looking for causes i don't so i uh the kind of resources that i can responsibly invest in my village are going to be targeted towards individuals that feel like their situation and their character are worthy and that's how i do it it's still you know these things sometimes tug at your heart strings like you know you you see these commercials and have you ever heard of the concept of tithing that some people do where they just say okay i'm giving 10 of my i don't know if it's gross or net income to worthy cause yeah that that that's something that people do and uh uh i again once again these are sort of individual things and because we're dealing with an unnatural problem there it's a tricky solution so all human beings most essentially basically all normal human beings have these moral instincts in them that would function perfectly in a stone age village in the same way your satiety mechanisms would function perfectly with stoneage food okay but things can get out of balance when we change the environment up on on our innate psychology and the modern environment is very very uh wacky when it comes to this and so no doubt that's why we get this question it's a confusion feeling when we see something on the tv or we walk by somebody with a homeless sign it's like you know what do you do and there's times when i help and there's times when i don't help generally i don't uh sometimes i do but generally i don't because i'm i'm thinking wait a second i'm i'm here to help my village uh by the way i uh i had heard the story of a pastor who had handed out little cards for free food um about where people could come and get resources and nobody ever came and he actually kept track of it he handed out like over 200 of them and he paid attention uh and he saw they nope nobody in other words it wasn't they weren't interested in free food most of those cases they were interested in money to get alcohol that doesn't make them bad people that just means that your resources aren't necessarily going to the solution to a problem so he did that for his own personal internal sense of uh his own internal sense of of helping because he wanted to actually give those people food he did not want to give them access to alcohol so he thought how can i do this and this is how i can do it okay and so uh curiously he found out nobody took him up on it so that's a that just shows you that those people actually aren't hungry they are they're going through another process which deserves our compassion but we don't necessarily solve or help solve the problem by putting five dollars in their hand okay and that's a that's a useful thing to keep in mind when your heart strings get pulled that way okay all right eight day we'll try something else all right well you mentioned alcohol and interestingly enough the next question from emily is about that dear dr lyle i'm not a fan of alcohol for many reasons the least of which is my brother was hit by a drunk driver i know the people who drink insist on defending their addiction and say but i drink responsibly but the person who seriously made my brother was not an alcoholic and had a very low blood alcohol concentration at the time of the accident i believe that any amount of alcohol can impair driving and that if people want to drink they should not drive on thanksgiving we invited a couple that we met at our church who are new to our small town for thanksgiving because they had mentioned they were vegan they were excited to come and ask if they could bring anything i texted both of the couple and the menu and said you really don't have to bring anything unless there is something missing from this menu that you would like to have little did i know that would be alcohol and not just wine but hard liquor also once they were in my home and asked for a glass and some ice i was caught like a deer in the headlights and didn't know what to do i am mostly angry at myself for compromising my values and would like some advice on how to handle this situation in the future because they want to continue socializing but i am not comfortable in an environment with people who are drinking alcohol do i just say from the get-go that no alcohol is allowed in my house the same way i say no animal products are why am i so judgmental of people who drink thank you um yeah that's a what we're finding we're finding an interesting uh what life is about is it's about the the um prioritization which means under uh priority means that there's conflict of values and so this person's got got two different questions um one of them is really sort of about these particular people and the other is to about the process more in general so the and what she's finding is i'm not exactly sure about this question i'm not sure what there appears to be an underlying problem where she likes the people enough that she's frustrated with the with the issue that they that they drink alcohol and so the um so now you are confronting the fact that there are inherent conflicts of valid uh of value in life and so the uh and you're asking why am i so judgmental the um the that that's a derivative of two things it's a derivative of your genetics and it's a derivative of your life experience so you can imagine um that that your life experience has been very important here that the drunk driver hitting your brother sounds like your brother you may have died or may have been seriously injured so there's a catastrophic loss obviously um and as you looked into it you re you realize oh well we can't say that this was a bad luck of the person who's falling down drunk and should have been locked up no it's actually a person who is drinking quote responsibly according to standards which means that you're saying well then the standards aren't good enough now you haven't necessarily stepped through a full analysis of this because there's nothing that says that the alcohol was responsible for the accident okay the vast majority of accidents have nothing to do with alcohol so the they have to do with just limitations of human capability in a complicated information processing problem but but people will often when they're trying to figure out a catastrophic loss they will be looking for what we call a salient explanation in other words something that stands out to us in the array uh and so what stands out in the array of a catastrophic accident is alcohol with somebody under the influence i.e this shouldn't have happened so so we're making a leap that uh that the alcohol was contributing or therefore ultimately the cause and that is that's an error of inference in other words it may be the true and it may not be true but we'll never know so now uh so but i think that your personality we've got a perfectionistic personality um that is uh that you know you're born with which why it is that you're part of this group and so we we add that to that life experience and we we come up with a quote very judgmental uh stance that judgmental stance uh tends to make life easy for itself by saying hey people that do that are essentially they're expensive they're not worth the trouble they shouldn't be allowed to do that they should act differently you know they are imposing costs on the rest of us right the uh remember also that when your brother's driving he didn't have to be driving he's taking his chances okay when you get in a motor vehicle you get out on the road you are taking some statistical risk that you may never come back okay so you know and we we all do a hell of a lot of traveling and driving that we don't have to do we want to do it because there's opportunities out there i do a lot of driving just for joyriding i like to go out and look at the landscape and the trees and lakes and the ponds and the sunshine uh you know i just like it sometimes i just like driving around listening to music but i'm exposing myself to potential tragedy by doing so oh well i'm not going to live under a rock okay so anyway the the what's sitting under here is the fact that there's conflicts of value conflicts of value you know create processes where the brain has to resolve them and she's struggling now the uh prior to the experience with these people uh if it turned out that you didn't have any fancy dietary problems in your life then these people wouldn't be as valuable they're vegans for god's sake and apparently they're pleasant and intelligent and reasonable and nice and uh and so there's good things about them it just so happens that they also drink alcohol okay and it's like oh damn that was a liability that i didn't see coming because i didn't ask okay i incorrectly inferred that if you're a vegan and therefore you're highly health conscious that you would also keep out of alcohol well that's a mistake i've sat right down at a table and watched colin campbell and essie esselstyn drink a beer i have to tell you i was shocked [Laughter] i'm sitting there and i was actually really surprised because i had made that same inference like aren't you one of our club that never does anything like that you wouldn't even think about that and of course the answer was you know in other words i wouldn't think of that of other friends of mine uh that aren't like vegan so fastidious about their behavior i'd be thinking oh yeah so-and-so drinks a beer now and then or so and so likes wine doesn't bother me at all but with colin and essie these two icons of our knowledge about help i just assumed that they would that they wouldn't drink any alcohol and i and i looked over at them and colin's like so they said i don't know they made some funny comment about it like yeah it's perfectly good grain you know what i mean b vitamins or there was some goofy little comment defending it and i just remember thinking huh what do you know about that that's not what i would have been thinking okay so the um so anyway the point is is that you have two different sets of neural circuits in your mind and those neural circuits are in conflict one of them says these are potentially valuable people because we they share a rare orientation about food okay now that may be that may not be quite as rare as pristine as we thought okay as you'll also find that you know everybody's got their own landscape about how they judge health behavior and importance of different things et cetera et cetera so uh you know if i'm sitting down with michael grieger uh he he's going to be he's going to be worried about making sure he gets more of these he's going to be eating the dark red stuff and i'm going to be like well what's wrong with the other stuff well it doesn't have as much of this or that in it okay so these people are are are probably not irresponsible as individuals in other words when you look at their whole life landscape so now you've got a clash and we're finding out that you've got your own particular subjective uh inferences that you have made about people about how they should behave etc there's nothing quote wrong with those except that they it's like the attitude of well if i should i expose myself to unnecessary driving around the town okay and the end the answer to me is yes i'm willing to accept that risk okay there's losses associated with it and so in this case uh if you if you narrow down your friendship circle to only those people that overlap with you unbelievably highly on almost all dimensions you may be by yourself on thanksgiving okay so at that point it's like okay you got to run a cost benefit analysis and so you're finding being pushed by this conflict it's going right into a very sensitive area for you and my so my attitude is you you are judgmental because of the interaction between your genetics and your life experience your life experience has has led you to make some inferences that are probably um challengeable in terms of uh of what you've come up with so there's so anyway i i so i look at it that way and i would say that a way to manage this one way to manage it is is uh if these people are sufficiently interpersonally attractive i would hang out with them a few times and see whether or not you find yourself modifying your own position because you become it challenges some of your stereotype inferences about their levels of responsibility okay if it doesn't if it turns out that it continues to stick in your craw this is basically by the way consistent with early research on on interaction between people that have have racial prejudice okay same kind of an idea so the uh so the notion is do we find that you're that it remains an issue and if it remains an issue and you don't find yourself basically chilling out about this which i'm not saying that you should i'm just saying that you very well might okay if it turns out that you don't that you are still in high conflict about this uh then then you can start deciding for yourself whether you want to have an honest communication with these people about the fact that you happen to have this essentially relatively unusual quirk uh as a result of you know who you are and your history and that that do you do they want to hang out with you but not have alcohol involved okay but in other words i wouldn't spring that on him without two things in place first but number one we have found out through repeated experiences with them whether or not we have chilled out or not okay so that's one thing that we would do because it may turn out that we recalibrate our own stereotype with some existing with more data okay and it sounds like it's probably worth getting that data from who it is that these people generally are second of all if that doesn't work then but we still feel drawn to them because we still feel high good character personality value then we may need to have a discussion with them about this specific conflict and whether or not we can we can essentially hack our way or band-aid our way around that problem okay so that's how i would that's how i would approach that it's so fascinating watch you watching you work with these because i never know what you're going to say but the way you look at it from all these different angles it's it's like fascinating to me cool well dr lyle you know i i don't allow animal products in my home i've been vegan for 45 years nor do i allow alcohol but i'm pretty clear about that up front but i've had people say they wouldn't come over unless there were animal products or alcohol what i don't understand is why can't people go two to three hours without alcohol like that to me is weird yeah well there's again there's also there's also some subterranean uh processes that are going on there in other words they're also saying um i'm not going to be interacting with people who are going to be looking down on me because i'm someone who would use alcohol or animal products so if that if you're going to set that as a moral bar to this proceeding i'm not going to be there okay so that's actually it's not that they couldn't go without it it's that they are they are essentially saying i'm not going to be a second-class citizen okay and so that that's a it's a different motivation for that pushback that you're getting yeah well i remember when i had my mom's 80th birthday party i just couldn't afford the alcohol i mean i it's and and family members said i will not come unless there's alcohol so yes that's interesting again i think that that was probably significantly about the moral about the undertone of the of the of the moral righteousness uh than anything else so that that i believe that that's correct thank you so this is uh this question is for from chloe and it can be any time of year but because christmas could be a particularly difficult time for people having extra things in the house i thought i would ask it in my attempt to make my omnivore family healthier i make them whole food plant-based snacks and treats when i have these around i find it really hard to resist them i find it so frustrating how can i help my family eat healthy without falling off track myself do i just let them eat store-bought crap that doesn't appeal to me oh uh at a time like this if that's true that's a completely reasonable solution so you're uh to be thinking that we have to defend our family's health you know 365 days a year super carefully and try to nudge the needle at every possibility because we're fighting against disaster and slipping over niagara falls is a mistake okay we don't have to do that and your your family each of them your children uh and your spouse and your sister these people will over their lifetimes they will migrate towards wherever they're migrating towards which is largely a function of their genetics so their uh the evidence indicates for example that adopted children although they are forced to eat what it is that their family is eating is is the family that adopts them it turns out as soon as they are out of the house they uh their behavior does not correlate at all with their upbringing there was none it turns out that the only thing that they correlate with is they correlate with their biological parents so if their biological parents were people that ate greasy crap and french fries and chocolate shakes and they were brought up by chef aj and they lived in a pristine home for 18 years guess what at 19 they're right back at mcdonald's okay that is an extraordinary bunch of research but that is truth so the truth of the matter is is that we don't need to be constantly trying to pressuring and educating and motivating and tipping the scale towards your family what you want to do with your family is you're going to want to provide the opportunity for health healthy food to be there in case they have such a proclivity is to pick it up and put it in their mouth okay so that's all fine but we don't have to be worrying constantly about trying to get him the best option relative to a bunch of a continuum of mediocrity we don't have to do that they're going to be we don't have to worry about that and if it's better for you to have the more mediocre mediocre thing there on some occasions it makes it easier for you it creates essentially a better contrast for you to make a better choice for you that's what you should be doing okay and don't worry about the fact that for you know 20 days out of 365 a year you could have had a better second place option for them rather than the one that you had that would drive drag you down from a more pristine perch don't bother make it good for yourself and don't worry about that fine detail that's a great question a lot of highly conscientious people are very worried about a very worried about the environment that they are providing and that they're worried about every little transgression and and uh toxic mistake that some offspring makes don't bother okay the uh the truth is is that their future is ultimately going to be in their hands not yours and what's happening early is not particularly important at all uh and it's certainly not formative when it comes to their uh when it comes to their uh choices later which is really interesting super interesting it's almost unbelievable uh and you wouldn't have believed it unless painstaking research hadn't demonstrated or at least i wouldn't but painstaking research has demonstrated it and it is fact yeah all right well we have that a similar question was just asked today to feel fabulous for dr frank and my answer is i just would make something that i didn't like that was still healthy but delicious so like i love candies cakes cookies but i just don't like pie i don't know why never did so i can bake pies all day for charles and i don't care but they're healthy it's delicious there you go all good yeah we just fiddle our way around this problem yeah so i've got a question on trauma a question on entitled children and a question on emotional eating is there one you'd like first i have them all pulled up i'm ready to start just fyi i need to end a couple minutes before the top of the hour so we're but uh so just to let everybody know that that's where i'm headed i'll show you start with the first one okay i have this one pulled up from susan our grandchildren ages five and eight are being raised as entitled children with a plethora of fun experiences and no apparent requirements to be helpers in the home or follow reasonable directions our daughter was not raised that way is there any hope they will eventually be able to emerge from this parenting style as responsible adults who do not expect the world to ensure their happiness on a daily basis yeah how much they're spoiled won't impact their psychology at all so uh the how entitled people are uh isn't subject to what their history was in their upbringing so this is once again uh this is like a similar question or worry about parents worrying about what they're they're feeding their children uh once again uh the the answer to this and the reason i can speak so definitively toward towards it is that the research evidence is not even remotely equivocal it's exceedingly clear uh it's outlined by robert pluhmann uh in a book called blueprint so relax doesn't matter how spoiled that child uh is it won't impact if it's alan goldhamer you're going to get the same hard driven ascetic you know whack job no matter what you did in in their early upbringing and if it turns out that they're an entitled little brat it doesn't matter if you put them in military school and it doesn't matter if you you know make them dig for every for every worm that they get to eat as soon as they are in a position where they can start making claims and grabbing and cutting corners and flaking out they will okay you're not changing the personality through life experience uh you're just changing momentarily what it is that how it's manifests that's so that's all your environment does is it's a it's a short-term impact on the computations that that particular personality does you put a gun to some mafia chief that's head and they get incredibly cooperative you take the gun away and they're murderous okay you uh that that's that's how that works so yeah no worries thank you this is from ella dr lyle i am not in the medical field so i apologize if i'm not worrying this correctly i understand from your talks that nothing neurologically changes in your brain if you've been through childhood trauma but what if childhood trauma without a provocation or a trigger continues to play in a loop in your mind even though you're an adult and have no contact with your former abusers with me without realizing it i will just recognize that my heart is pounding and i am really upset and tense and realize that i am playing over and over one of those memories in my mind how do i stop this from happening thank you so much for everything you do your teaching is fascinating yeah that's exceedingly unusual by the way so people that have had traumatic events are rarely playing these things over their mind years later the reason why that's true is that the what comes up from the adaptive unconscious is information processing related to optimizing current survival reproductive problems so the the uh so therefore bad things that have happened in the past there they are files that sit inside the system and they are only called up when the current set of circumstances um indicate that they may be relevant so i don't remember about what spices to put in my pizza sauce until it's not on my mind i'm not working at my computer or eating an apple or walking around the block or petting my cat and suddenly thinking oregano i got to be remembering now that isn't how it works your the files of your memory are like a library they're like books sitting on the shelf and nobody's reading them okay they're not active little processes that are that are impacting us they are files they sit there and they are they are inert until the environmental circumstances come up as soon as i go you know go down the kitchen and start making spaghetti sauce now all those files get called up okay but i'm not thinking about any of those things all the other time and i'm playing basketball trying to figure out how to who i should be passing to i'm not thinking oregano or sage or marjoram no that's not anywhere in europe none of those neurons are active so that's why it's exceedingly unusual for there to be traumatic memories coming up over and over again 20 or 30 years later because they're simply not profitable for the nervous system to be considering those things in analyzing current behavioral decisions because they're not relevant now sometimes people do something because they're struggling in life and i'm not talking about this question she's asking the question of course i couldn't possibly answer her specific question but i can answer it more writ large in terms of human psychology the reason why it might be coming up over and over again would be there would be something in the present where this is actually germaine one of those things could be a person could be in psychotherapy and they have a therapist that has an incorrect theory that the reason why the person is struggling in a current domain is because of childhood trauma and so the therapist is encouraging the process of examining that trauma and as a result of that those memories are being called up because they're being asked to be called up in service of searching you know searching for a better situation so the therapist get essentially explains that there's a tacit uh there's a tacit responsibility that says you need to be thinking about these things because in there is the critical information that explains why it is that you're fat okay well it's not true okay but that doesn't stop the fact that the person learning that they you know essentially that an expert thinks it's true doesn't go ahead and call up those memories and then they get a bunch of tumultuous process okay so you could be doing that wouldn't have to be a therapist it could be a book okay so it could be a book i don't know there's a thousand books on that subject that will tell that story so a person who is seeking self-improvement in some important ways and is confused about their inability to succeed may be looking for solutions there and therefore calling up those files okay that is probably the primary reason why anyone would have had that situation um let's see so that that's what i would tell you so i would tell you that that uh if you are doing that if you are diligently pursuing a self-improvement process that involves what we're going to call psychodynamic or trauma-based theory um stop it it's a mistake and uh and gets get some help that is not related to that theory and if we get away from that theory we'll quit calling up those files and then it won't bother you okay the other possibility is that there actually is a relevant situation in your life where the trauma is actually germane maybe you have a young child and there's a creepy neighbor or whatever in other words there will be reasons why that it would be in your best interest in the current situation in order to be calling up those files okay the uh but that is unusual uh for that to be true uh the it's just generally that information is no longer relevant any more than then it's relevant for me to remember that you know the color of you know scrooge mcduck's jacket you know i don't care it's lost in my memory somewhere in some file or you know uh something about you know i i don't know what to what what's the anything and there's all kinds of stuff whenever you watch a movie it was a great movie you watched it 10 years later you forgot 90 of what happened in that movie it's like if you're watching almost brand new all over again you forgot a tremendous amount of scenery and dialogue okay so the uh that so your memories are very quiet and they were they're only hot when there's some reason to believe that they're relevant okay and so if you're if you're going through this it's because there is some reason that your brain thinks it's relevant and my guess is is that there's a self-improvement um therapeutic agenda and that you are being directed by theory to to recycle those memories and then it's causing you a lot of unnecessary disruption okay so that's what i think about that thank you all right let's take on one more if you can't aj okay maybe you'll talk fast this one is from evan i'm dr lyle i have this problem where i can't wait to leave a dinner party so that i can pick up a high calorie snack on my drive home even though i just finished a full meal along with a high calorie dessert something inside me demands that i entertain myself with food for the drive home even if it's only a few minutes even though i'm not hungry i know i'm not alone in this how can this not be connected to some type of emotional situation i realize the part about it being fatty and or sweet but why would i want to do this in the first place and then another person commented i do something like that too so of course okay you're uh this is just your this this isn't some deep unconscious psychological and motivational anything every aardvark when we put that in the in the in the landscape that's exactly what they're going to do okay so every animal that's ever been investigated in terms of their choices uh if they so you're a strange human where it is that you could be in some situation where there is there's other food that's not as fancy and rich and then there there you are you're under a bunch of social pressure and maybe you've got a weight problem there's some social pressure to indicate that you're a well behaved individual that isn't responsible for the problem that you have and therefore look at you you're doing a good job and then you turn right around and then you eat a bunch of crap well of course you do the crap is in the environment and it's it's exceedingly difficult for people to stay out of it because it is a super normal stimuli that is telling you that it's that you if you consume it you're being highly biologically successful so even if you're full notice that there's still room uh to to cram in uh extra high calorie stuff we're never interested in cramming in a bunch of low calorie stuff which is in high calorie stuff not just high calorie stuff extremely high calorie stuff okay of course we are that means it's extremely valuable so the what your the solution to this and a much more complicated uh way of explaining it that i'm gonna do here is the the video that i did with um gustavo called the the condition cram and god knows i don't think i ever did that with aj so i think i think gestapo is the place where i went through a slideshow and you know it's probably 45 minutes and it will go through the detailed explanation that will will expose the the roots of your suffering okay and the roots of your suffering are suffering are not some emotional problems they are deep motivational systems that were designed to keep you alive okay and that that's what's driving you it's a survival instinct running a muck in the modern environment all right and there is a solution to it and it's not fun [Laughter] but you'll see what that solution is uh it's the same one that every alcoholic and every cocaine addict and every cigarette i.e it's white knuckle determination to get through what we're going to call the extinction burst and get into an extinction process and there in the extinction process lies a trap called spontaneous recovery so you'll learn all about shepherd seagull a brilliant psychologist i believe at mcgill and his work in heroin overdoses and you'll learn the story of ivan pavlov the nobel prize winning physiologist out of russia uh they discovered classical conditioning this is the story of the conditioned cram which is exactly the story that you're telling us okay so it's a tale to be told complete with some of my outstanding art well dr lyle thank you so much i know you need to get somewhere and we look forward to seeing you on one of the first shows of the year which is monday january 3rd at 2 p.m pacific time fantastic aj thanks for having me it's just grand this has been wonderful thanks and thanks all of you for watching another episode of chef aj live please come back tomorrow when my guest is chef colin mccullough making healthy holiday desserts bye dr
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