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Chef AJ: Chef AJ Live! | Interview with Dr Jen Howk on Personality and Resiliency
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everyone or afternoon depending on where you are sorry we're starting a little bit late but our guest is having a little bit of connection problems so we hope that the internet gods will be smiling friendly on us during this broadcast and if not I hope that you would consider coming back this is her second time on the show and she's a very popular guest and maybe she'll even come back once a month like dr. Lyons been she's been described as a kinder gentler prettier version of dr. Lisle and we're going to be doing a Q&A today and some of you have already sent in questions which is really the best way to get your questions asked when we send out the email every night who the guest is because then I have it on a piece of paper versus trying to see a ticker-tape feed that goes really quickly if you watched on Sunday dr. Lisle did a wonderful explanation on anxiety because so many people asked this being may mental health awareness month the heightened anxiety due to cope in nineteen and he pulled the camera back and did a wide-angle view of what anxiety is what causes it a lot of people were reassured and calm down especially when it gave some of the statistics like more likely to die in a car accident then from this virus but there were a lot of questions left unanswered specifically what do we what do you do about your anxiety right now and you know a lot of people have maybe lost their jobs or lost incomes and they're anxious about that other you know people can't graduate high school so they're anxious about that or go to school people have not been able to go to funerals or visit loved ones in nursing homes I have a friend that actually had a wedding plan for a year and had to get married in a parking lot so dr. Mott welcome and what do we do about it well it is great to be here and I did I caught dr. Lyles broadcast so I know that hopefully most people who are watching now we're there for that and got kind of the evolutionary perspective on what anxiety is and where it comes from the very back of the envelope thumbnail sketch of that I won't I won't go on for an hour about it like he did and you can go back and watch what he said but essentially it's a it's a signal all emotions or signals from the nervous system about your relative relationship to survival and/or reproduction in the moment because you're an animal just like any other animal that is designed by nature to survive and reproduce your genes that's your entire purpose in life it's not the same thing as the meaning of life like we can talk about we can have a philosophical discussion about the the meaning of life versus the purpose of life but the purpose of life for humans just like for turtles and for dogs and for earthworms and any other creature is to get your genes into the next generation and emotions are our main signaling device they're the main guides that we have to know if we're doing the right thing to survive and/or reproduce or not so if we feel all things equal if we feel really happy and we feel really good about things that means we're doing things and we're getting feedback from our environment that is good for our either our survival odds our reproduction odds or both if it's good for both of those things we're gonna feel really good we're gonna feel really excited really happy if we feel anxious if we feel depressed if we feel sad if we feel upset that's a signal that something is happening in our little world that is is taking us away from those goals of surviving and/or reproducing so if you think back to your emotional history you just you can see this pattern is really clear if you ask someone out on a date and they say yes you feel elated because your reproduction odds have just increased don't yell wildly if you get bad feedback from your boss at your job you feel crappy because that that's not so good for your survival that's your income that's your security so so this is the whole the big picture of what emotions are and how they're trying to help us they're trying to help us change our behavior to increase our likelihood of survival and/or reproduction so there's a lot of anxiety around this this pandemic rightly so because this is this is information that's coming into our nervous system that we are estimating is really potentially detrimental to our survival and potentially our reproduction but it's it's mostly our survival angst is getting stirred up and what we're watching is across the population some people are more anxious than others some people are dealing with this information having a harder time than others and what you're watching there is the distribution of personality characteristics in the population so rule number one of evolutionary psychology is that personality is genetic your the way that you react to stress is genetic the way that you sort of if you're a catastrophize er if you hear a little bit a bit of bad news and you just go crazy and you spin out and spiral with it that's a genetic quality that you have and you can see this distributed in the bell curve among all all people that you're dealing with it's like the people who are spinners are like how can everybody remain so calm in the face of this information and the people who are calm or like you people need to chill out because it's not that big a deal so it's all just a big personality Derby that we're watching we're watching people's natural kind of coping mechanisms their baseline resilience that they that is that is sort of nature eliminate to them how it is responding to a signal from the environment that is definitely a stressful signal but this is this is a real example of how not everybody in the population is going to react the same way to the same stimuli so the the main main piece of advice is to kind of know know who you are know what kind of personality you have we have ways of doing that there are there's something called the Big Five personality inventory that you can take to kind of discover your core personality characteristics but you don't even really need to do that you just kind of need to observe who you are and how you respond to the world historically and now and and then it's there's no special sauce there's no magic method to this everybody kind of wants you know what's the what's the special mantra that I can repeat that will make all of the all of the anxiety go away all of the suffering go away but you know what I tell people is that sort of the the Buddhists that have this correct for millennia you know it's not you can't make yourself less comfortable or more comfortable with anxiety and uncertainty you can just sort of like learn to accept that you are in a state of great uncertainty and that you you make friends with it you make friends with your emotions you you develop a little bit of discernment and and mindfulness for a better word watching for lack of a better word to watch yourself to watch like how am i as an animal responding to the stimuli that I'm facing and Am I am i exaggerating my response because I have a personality that is crone to do so and just to get curious about that and to develop you know sort of a witness position to your own emotional landscape and then to continue to inform yourself about the realities of the situation which I know dr. Lisle has talked about with you we've certainly discussed on the podcast for the last five weeks in a row that this is not this is not the statistical catastrophe that a lot of people think it is it's it's it's not that it's not a big deal it is a big deal but your individual odds of being affected or are really quite low and particularly if you're in reasonably good health so informing yourself with high quality data staying up to speed on all of all of the good information and not falling into all of these informational traps that are out there with rumors and bad information and these information entrepreneurs who are trying to get your eyeballs to look at scary headlines on websites or on blogs or whatever I I was raised by a pair of newspaper journalists radio journalists and they always said if it bleeds it leads that was the that was the guiding light of journalism and that's what you're watching you're watching like really scary stories outliers being promoted and over-represented in the public sphere to get your attention to get eyeballs on on the page on the website to get you to watch ads or whatever so people just need to be very mindful of what kind of information they're consuming and then be mindful of how their reaction to it might be informed in some part by a personality Distortion okay well that's that's a wonderful explanation so you said to pay attention to you know accurate information how do we know when there's such a disparity amount of stuff out there even from in the plant-based world so people again get very confused as to who to listen to because we have everything from the sky is falling - this is a hoax and in between so like what is the trusted source yeah yeah yeah you have to do the same thing that you do with information about diet which is that none of us most of us are not trained public health epidemiologists and most of us are not trained sophisticated statisticians to do a primary analysis of this information so everybody in the population is beholden to sort of find it figuring out which expert they do trust like which you know who which which member of the Stone Age village do I align my interests with because I trust their analysis and and their intelligence and their ability to make sense of this uncertainty so that's that's an individual calculation that people have to make I'm very sympathetic to that problem I'm watching people I have a great deal of intellectual respect for NGO in my opinion pretty far off the rails as far as their analysis goes of the situation and I would say also that you know you gotta got to put your analytical hat on for this sort of thing and and and watch this process through the lens of lions have been drawn like partisan lines have been drawn people people have a tendency and again this is an evolutionary stone-age mechanism where we dig in once we make a public declaration about what we believe to be true the costs of reversing that that declaration that we've made publicly to the stone-age village we're very disinclined to be like oh my bad I got that wrong you know I got some new information and I'm gonna walk that back and I have a new analysis for you now that is not something that is really in human nature it requires a great deal of intellectual honesty and humility to do that and most people don't have that particularly if they have a big profile and they're out there in the in the public space and they're sort of standing behind some kind of analysis so all of the incentives in psychology are once you've taken a stand you double down on that even in the face of contradictory information and this is an inside game where you you cognitively are really convinced that your position is the correct position you you surround yourself with a lot of informational confirmation bias you don't even give a hearing to contradictory information you just really double down on what you what you have established to be true for your your brand and your tribe and this taps into all kinds of human in-group out-group thinking and in the modern sort of social media environment everybody's got a platform everybody if they tweet something about this they've sort of taken that their nervous system views that the same way as taking a big public risk in the Stone Age by hanging it all out there and taking a big risk with the public opinion saying this is what I believe is true if you're with me come with me if you're against me then we're at war and that's what that's what's really happening in our psyche and it's mapping on to the political system and it's becoming this sort of cartoonish partisan battle where it's you know if you're generally left politically you're you're more cautious you're more you're more accepting of extending the quarantine you're more you're you're posting more things that are reflecting those biases as far as oh well this is very very concerning we're looking at a second wave we're looking at we don't know what's happening it's we have a lot to still be effective and if you're generally more right on the spectrum you're like opened up America open up the economy this has gone on long enough so that's it that's a very broad and you know I'm sort of exaggerating those positions for effect obviously there's a lot of space in the middle I'm somewhere in the middle a lot most people I know are but that's sort of what you're watching takes shape and I'm a I'm a trained political scientist primarily I'm a social scientist and and but political science was my specialty and I can tell you watching this on the eve of this presidential election I don't think we have any reason to expect that those those lines now that they're drawn and that this has become this big pitched partisan ideological battle like that is going to continue to animate public life for the next several months through the election because now it's become it's it's it's gotten all connected up with the left not wanting to let the president have a victory of you know solving the makovan crisis and the and the right pushing the opposite direction and so this is just getting exaggerated and and ridiculous and the truth is very difficult to pick out of a situation like that when everybody's got so much ego and and so many interests that are invested in that process well thanks how about we solve like a particular problem for a particular person let's may be related to this for example he said this is an example so now she's required to wear a mask at work she's extremely claustrophobic and it's going to be difficult any tips on getting her out of her head and handling this without panic so that's an actual situation how would you like advice somebody that it's claustrophobic that now has to wear a mask yeah yeah I'm sympathetic to that I find the masks pretty pretty claustrophobic myself and I've had a little bit of luck like just playing around with different types of fabric and different types of masks so I would I would advise you first to do that so you know if they're requiring you to wear a very specific type of mask that's a very specific sort of problem but most of these places are it's it's anything goes so I was in the store the other day and there was a guy walking around with like a bath towel that he had butterfly clipped to his head I'm like how is that a better public health outcome then I'm not wearing a mask so there's there's no regulation about what kind of fabric you're using so I would I would go for like the lightest material you can find like one layer so what's worked for me is just a very thin like old t-shirt material it's very very very light and it's very loose you know so it fits on my head but it's loosely fitting me and so there's room like air can kind of circulate in and out of there obviously this is like no great deterrent to to the virus but really probably most of these masks are not any great deterrent and there's you know there's various science on that it's something of a deterrent and probably overall makes some kind of difference particularly if you're working with a high-risk vulnerable population but if this is just something that you have to do to tick a box to get through the day at work I would I would push the envelope as far as you can to make it as comfortable on your face and to get as much air circulating in there as possible there's really nothing like going back to what I said before there's no there's no magical mantra that I can give you to diminish that claustrophobia you will get more comfortable with it over time just as you sort of like push through that discomfort and and your nervous system will recalibrate because right now your nervous system having that claustrophobic circuit in there it's basically inferring that wearing the mask is diminishing your likelihood of survival and reproduction most mostly survival and so it's running that circuit it's running that circuit but the more you do it the more you actually wear the mask and you go to work and you you come home and you find out that it's fine that your survival was not diminished that it was just a little uncomfortable that that gently recalibrates your nervous system so it feels less panicky as time goes on and this works for any kind of exposure therapy if you have any kind of fear or specific anxiety about anything the more you can kind of just force yourself to do it we you know staged exposure therapy where you start with like a small version of the scary thing and you move up to scarier and scarier versions of the real thing it basically just convinces you oh hey I did that thing and I didn't die so maybe maybe this is okay and the nervous system is very good at sort of re re establishing its inferences and catching up with the calibration over time thank you you know I find that like you said comfortable is the best way to go I have a friend that's a and so and she made it with a really soft fabric on the inside and an adjustable nose thing and now it's not so bad it's like getting used to contact lenses or wearing a watch yeah for me it's all about having likes it kind of hangs but there's error there's room underneath so it doesn't like cling to the bottom of my face - that made a big difference for me in terms of just feeling more comfortable with it because there if there's fresh air kind of coming up from underneath I'm less less panicky less anxious about it the first masks I made were that you know from the internet tutorials where you like take a piece of fabric and you fold it three times and you do this whole thing you put the elastics on that was way too thick and way too tight and was really like stressful for me and I'm not truly claustrophobic I just am a little bit like not a fan especially when it's hot it's getting hot you know you're going to the store it's really it's it's uncomfortable so if this is something that we sort of need to do for the next couple of months I am I'm in a hotel right now because my I'm trying to try and blow out of town and my flights been cancelled four times so I'm just homeless and so I'm living in a hotel and but now it's the airline has officially changed his policy so we have to wear masks the entire time on the flight which is giving me a little bit of anxiety it's like oh my god I have to sit there for six hours wearing this thing and so that's that's not ideal but on the other hand it's it's six hours your workday is eight hours it's it's something you can take breaks you can take it off in the bathroom you know you can take a big deep deep breath of air it's just something that we have to get through and until and unless some sanity is restored to the kingdom I find at least for me having a very stylish one makes a difference yes yes I took one of my old t-shirts that had a cartoon picture of Richard Nixon on it and made a mask out of that so if he pleases me to advertise my well this is this is what humans are doing all the time with personality everything that we buy basically there's a there's a great book called spent by Jeffrey Miller on this where all of our consumer behavior is essentially just advertising our personality to other people we're always in the business of look how conscientious I am look how extroverted I am look how open to experience or emotionally stable I am that's what everything is if you if you drive a Jeep instead of a Toyota you're basically telling the world I'm very adventurous I'm open to experience you should hang out with me because that's the kind of personality I have so this filters through our clothes to our to our cars or our houses and now to the kinds of the kinds of masks that we choose to wear in public that are also advertising key personality characteristics it's how each how we select our coalition and find our people that's very interesting dr. MacDougall's birthday's this month and I got him potato masks no hopefully it's mine now oh he's a Taurus Taurus that makes sense that seems like a tourist it's funny that I wanted to treat you a very nice comment and somebody wrote a Terry Tessa wrote I really like listening to her the way she explains things and talks clicks for me if that's true for you she does do private consultations and so does dr. Doug Lyall and the website is esteem dynamics calm and you can talk to both of them and you can listen to them every Wednesday night at 8:30 p.m. Pacific time they have over 200 episodes of the your genes podcast so I agree she has a very calm saying that and you had just mentioned exposure therapy and interestingly enough the question I was gonna ask you that was sent in by Cindy was about exposure therapy because on last week's podcast you talked about your fear of flying and how you can do your therapy but she said for what she has a phobia of she has no idea how to approach it and so I'm gonna paraphrase because it's long but basically she's she's almost 60 and when she was a teenager she went into the hospital for what was gonna be just to remove a cyst the same day go home operation she was allergic to the anesthetic she was resuscitated by respiratory therapists almost put on a ventilator and in the hospital for three months instead of three hours and so now her fear is medical procedures general anesthesia she can't even get her teeth clean how do you I mean you can't just take a little anesthesia here and there to do exposure you know yeah yeah that's the tricky one and it's similar to my so when I talked in the podcast about my fear of flying it's sort of I'm in a similar position because I can't you also can't just do it you can't fly a little bit you know you gotta yeah either commit to it or not you're going on a trip where you're not and so people who were independently wealthy can hire a pilot and they basically spend the whole day doing takeoffs and landings take us and landings and that has a big effect on calming them down and so you know in principle you certainly could if you have the right connections you know go spend time in a hospital that that would actually not be a bad idea to just kind of if I would actually only advise this if you're facing a procedure if you're like if you get to the point where you're you're up against it and you're actually you have to have some kind of procedure and you're feeling really terrified of it then you can start to think about okay well how can i how can I sneak up to this whole experience in a way that's gonna help my nervous system and kind of warm up to it a little bit otherwise you're not this is not something that's gonna come up in daily life too often you know for the dental stuff I there I would suggest you know they have they have various techniques and and you know of sedatives to help with that a little bit just to get you through it you could do something like a beta blocker that's something that I use to fly so I you know I'm almost seven years sober so I can't do any kind of any kind of xanax or anything but I do I do take a beta blocker before I fly because it basically suppresses the adrenaline in your system so you don't have the you don't have the physiological response so you still feel anxious but you're not sweating your heart's not racing and and that kind of helps teach you as well because if you're not if your mind is not making the correlation between the sweating and the heart racing and the freakout and the activity it starts to kind of short-circuit the correlation and so your nervous system is sort of like well hold on maybe we're not afraid of this thing because we're not experiencing all the physiological cues so that's helped me a lot with fine and that's a non-addictive I mean it's you'd have to talk to your doctor to see if you have any reason that you wouldn't want to take it certainly it's not ideal for everybody but it's a very kind of subtle thing that can be useful in that kind of case if you if you don't want to you know do any kind of harder harder drug which I would not advise doing but mostly this is just something that's not gonna come up that often in your life it's it's you know most people are not going in for procedures that require anesthesia on a regular basis so I would not not stress yourself out too much about it until you're really in a position where you do have to confront something then you do have to do it and at that point we can really look at just go sit in the hospital waiting room you know just just like I will go sit at the airport a couple of hours ahead of time and I'll watch the plane so I'm not going up and down in them but I am sort of sensitizing myself to oh look that one took off and it was fine no that one landed and it was fine and it's just like you watch and you watch and you watch and it's just you know hundreds of them and so if you're sitting there and you're just kind of watching the the traffic at a hospital that might be helpful as well okay well Chuck says I'm an airplane pilot and I get a bit nervous when sitting in the back as a passenger I think it has something to do with not being in control oh it's totally not being in control and that's and that's why I talked to on the podcast about all my little rituals that I have which may help me feel more in control which i think is a very adaptive thing that a lot of people do around fears and anxieties they have they're like and this is you know you take that far enough out the bell curve and that's where you get something that we would call OCD so so OCD is just a more you just go down the continuum where you get the kind of like nervous little ritualistic behavior that I have before an airplane flight and you you jack it up to the point where you really just can't walk out of the house until you check the stove 17 times so it's this is it's all the same circuits it's the same brain that's running the same inferences and the same the same pattern of behavior but again this is where personality and sort of just who you are as a human comes into the environment and intersects to give you a particular outcome or if I were more unstable on the on the stability spectrum which is one of the big five personality characteristics I happen to be extremely stable thank goodness it really helps me deal with this kind of stuff but if I was very unstable I would have a much harder time that would make me more of a perseverate or more of a I'd have I'd be more anxious it would be a heart you know might might actually get in the way of making these plans for myself so as it is I like I don't like it but I do it and I just pushed through it and I know that it's gonna be shitty and uncomfortable but I just kind of I have enough kind of just suck it up circuits in my nervous system from that stability that I just get through it and every time I do it like when I'm flying regularly there was a time when I had first started grad school where I was dating somebody back into Seattle so I was going back and forth from Boston in the Seattle every week practically and it did like I I sort of started to recognize the actual planes like oh this is the same plane I took last Tuesday the same flight attendants like it began to get in enough of a routine that I was I was much much more relaxed about it so that was the closest that I've come to having troops those your therapy and the longer I go without flying the more I build it up in my mind and the more anxious I get so this is gonna work the same way it where your nervous system is always just trying to make an estimate it's taking information and it's trying to estimate what are my chances of survival and reproduction and the longer it goes without true information and just relies on your own brain cooking things up the more distorted that inference gets and the more prone to error it gets so the best thing always for you to make good inferences and to engage in productive behavior around that inference is to make sure that you've got real undistorted information about the situation and that you're not just feeding and your fears and or your hopes or my dog is making some noise over there we're living dangerously in the hotel room because there's nothing to do with the dog so they're just kind of hanging out and they're being good so far but they could always there could be barking and could get very exciting terrific okay there's two questions on beta-blockers so less than both together he says is it by prescription and what is the name and Caroline says do they make you sleepy could you take it before a job interview I've never heard of beta-blocker I mean it's nothing I've never heard of them I've never heard of him usually yeah they are yeah it's by prescription but it's it's you know fairly straightforward they're used by a lot of people and I sort of first heard about them by people using them on stage people who had sort of stage fright because it's if people do have like a big presentation or something they will it just kind of takes that adrenaline anxiety edge off particularly if people get physiological if they get really shaky or their voice gets really shaky and they have to do a performance it's something that's recommended - it's obviously this is all off usage uses for it but it's it's pretty side-effect free for most people it can it can mess with your blood pressure so if you've got very low blood pressure naturally it's probably not the best for you because it's going to lower your blood pressure even more I'm not a medical doctor so I'm in no position to give specific advice to people about this but if you talk to your doctor about it they're gonna be able to tell you what the appropriate dosage would be and if it's if it's something that makes sense for you it does make you a little sleepy that's the that's the main sort of effect that I get my my main challenge with using it on a flight is that essentially caffeine will cancel it out so I have to make sure that I don't have a cup of coffee if I'm gonna take a flight because it's basically that's fighting in the adrenaline from the caffeine to try to suppress the adrenaline with the beta blocker and then I'm just there's no point to the whole thing so part of the sleepiness is also slight caffeine withdrawal so I'm not I'm not sure if everyone would have that effect you're just caffeine addicts like I do but it does it's it's very it gives you it's not a big effect it's a very it just kind of just kind of blunts it just very very slightly and and you do it's it's sort of startling to watch yourself kind of like well I do feel like I'm anxious about the situation but I'm not I'm not escalated physically about it and that is that's just more more information for your nervous system see I I'm a very anxious person but part of my anxiety is I'm afraid to take drugs so I would actually be afraid to take that oh yeah well that's that's you know I basically am completely anti medication almost always and certainly anti anything that would be any kind of opiate or any sort of like any anything that has any addictive qualities so for me this is just it's it's you know three times I mean it sounds like great like I mean it sounds like a great option because I have a big fear of anything like medical or whatever anyway I never heard of it so thank you yeah who is watching live from England says our anxiety and excitement similar emotions they can be so it's all about its again it goes back to your your inference about your survival and reproduction so anxiety anxiety is almost sort of you can you can definitely feel anxious in an excited sort of way if your likelihood of success at any particular goal that you have if starting to get up the like if you can imagine that there's sort of a scale of likelihood of success of meeting some sort of goal like let's say you're you're asking you're asking the your your big crush to the prom you know so you can imagine that there's the scale of emotion that accompanies that with your perceived probability of success of them saying yes so if you're perceived probability of them saying yes is a hundred percent your your you're gonna be you're gonna be happy about it although if it's truly a hundred you're also not you're not that excited you're kind of you're kind of bored it's probably your high school girlfriend and you there's no anxiety in the system at all it's like yeah okay well I'm gonna ask her out and she's she's certainly going to say yes so so that's cool if you're perceived probability of success of asking them out and having them say yes zero you're gonna be super depressed because it's like well what's the point I don't even want to ask them it's just this whole situation is very depressing but the sweet spot between zero and 100 is where you start to get feelings like anxiety sort of feeling stressful feelings so the closer you're moving up the scale where you're actually starting to get to a point where you're looking at potential success that starts to generate some anxiety in the system because it's basically bringing all of your faculties online it's saying hey pay very close attention because we've got some survival and reproduction stakes here and we need to make sure that we do the right thing to secure this goal that we're going for if your odds are a hundred or zero you don't you don't get that same kind of agitation happening in your nervous system so that's that's like excited anxiety and then of course if you have if you're if you're having an anxiety about a bad outcome it's a similar process it's it's like your your estimate that the bad thing is gonna happen is somewhere between 0 and 100 it's not it's not a hundred because then you would just be sort of fatalistic and like well it's you know the asteroid is going to hit us in five minutes so what are you gonna do like goodbye world and if it's you know it's it's somewhere it's like there seems to be something that I should do to change this outcome in a direction that would be better for my survival reproduction odds therefore I'm going to generate all of the this emotional response to try to get me to move in that direction so anxiety is it's trying to help you but again if you have if you have a personality type that is more prone to sort of overestimating the worst-case scenario which means that you're probably either a very conscientious person or a very emotionally unstable person or both you are going to hit that anxiety threshold before somebody else will give in the same situation so it's just this is where we want to know who we are and how we deal with things great we have a compliment from Laura dr. Jen looks like she's lost a lot of weight since the live ultimate weight loss conference in Vegas would she mind only guess how much weight she has lost since Vegas Neffe I'm gonna blush I should have taken a beta blocker before I I've lost about a hundred pounds total from when I first started the process with I started with the sort of basic McNichol program and then as I got closer and closer I've had to really tighten the screws a little more so now I eat more of a of a chef a j-style kind of diet which is very hard to do when you're living in a hotel room so there's definitely you know have a microwave I don't have an oven I don't have a tiny little fridge but yeah probably it's been about you know it's like somewhere between three and four pounds a month generally so you know whatever that is since since the conference so oh well I appreciate that in my my hotel lockdown I had a lot of bananas I do have my Vitamix with me which is keeping me sane so people who know me know that I am totally obsessed with bananas cilantro smoothies which is hilarious because people followers of dr. Lisle know that he is very anti cilantro and I like cannot get enough cilantro so my favorite smoothie is actually a banana cilantro smoothie sometimes with some spinach in there so I've been having a lot of those which is very alarming to him that's great Cheryl says have a session with you it's fantastic and Sue says I love dr. Hawk she is beautiful so you have your family you have you noticed either people you know or people you talk to there's a certain segment of people and again when I say this I'm not saying that I'm happy that there's a pandemic that people are dying losing their jobs but I I'm a very anxious person and I have never been happier or convert not with the pandemic part but with the shuttling at home and if they're guilty that I like it but the more I talk to people they're like because people think I'm an extrovert because of my job but I'm really not no you're a disagreeable introvert this is paradise for you this is ideal for you and this is what we see this is like personality is just splayed out over social media so if you look at your social media feed and you watch what people are posting the people who have personalities who are going to thrive in this kind of situation are disagreeable introverts like hi conscientious disagreeable introverts you were the poster child of somebody who would be very very happy in this kind of situation it's like it's hitting all your circuits just right you're like yeah keep all of the the jerks at home and I can I can still function and everything's fine whereas people who are you know super agreeable extroverts are having a really hard time because it's like they can't people people you know I'm pretty introverted as well I'm similar to you where people always think that I'm more extrovert because I'm open and I'm stable so I'm I can be social but my preference is always to hype at home with my dogs so I'm actually quite introverted and I'm not I'm not suffering as much in this situation as some people are because of that and and I'm quite stable and conscientious as well so it's like it's it's a pretty good mix of personality characteristics but people forget that extroverts extroverts suffer just as much from lack of social contact as introverts suffer when you throw them into some social situation that they don't want to go to so all of the anxiety that an introvert feels if you drop them into some party where it's like just go socialize imagine that feeling that is what an extrovert feels like a true extrovert feels when they can't connect with other humans and they're stuck at home and they they don't know when they're gonna be able to leave it's actually very difficult for them so you get disagreeable extroverts that's who's storming the Statehouse in Michigan and everywhere else they are like hey enough enough this is really uncomfortable for my personality and I don't see this changing anytime soon and so my cost-benefit analysis is starting to change on taking action around this and I'm gonna go out there and I even put myself at risk or put other people at risk to try to secure a different outcome and of course it goes back to what I was saying before with people sort of drawing lines in the sand and affiliating themselves with a certain ideological tribe and that's all part of it as well but essentially your comfort level with the current situation and your your feelings about it and what you think everybody should do as a result is just a litmus test it's a projection of your own personality bias so that's the first place to start I actually wrote an essay about this in my first first newsletter that I sent out about this called of personalities in pandemics so people can find that on my website where it's really you're you're you're just watching you're watching how conscientious people are you're watching how open to experience they are how agreeable they are how introverted they are that's that's really an how stable you are you're getting just the whole spectrum of personality getting amplified and exaggerated by this situation Wow I have to so that's on your website Jen Hawk comm yeah yeah I've got in my little article section I have a backlog of my newsletters that I have to read that and that sounds amazing I had I mean you are explaining the pen there were people's responses to the pandemic in terms of personality that feel like a whole book that's incredible yeah well we talk a lot about that in the books that we're in we're writing not that we're ready not the pandemic specifically but how important personality is for how you see the world and how you you are just essentially filtering life through through the lens of your personality there's a wonderful quote from Anais Nin that's been around forever which is a lot of people have probably heard this but not really thought about it in these terms which is we do not see things as they are we see them as we are and that is really the central tenet of the way that we approach evolutionary psychology through behavioral genetics which is you see the world as you are you've got what we call egocentric bias which is informing your inferences your cost-benefit analyses about what is the best thing to do how the world should be but you are a snowflake you've got your little personality distribution in you or you exist on points of the bell curve that other people don't even people that you may be very close to and certainly people that you don't know very well you've got the full continuum out there walking around and they have every right to their opinion of what what the world should look like as you do and it's probably very different from yours so you can't you're just lost trying to understand human behavior until you understand personality and what do you think reading that book blueprint would help us understand personality a little bit yeah blueprints a wonderful book it's it's by a psychologist and behavioral geneticists called Robert Plomin and it's a little lofty it's a little academic and a little lofty and it's a little tough a little rough sledding to read for some people you can find speeches that he's made various places talks that he's given at Google and elsewhere on YouTube it's Plomin PLO mi n and the book is called blueprints how DNA makes us who we are so plumbing is great because he was one of the original researchers who embarked on the the Minnesota twin studies which was the sort of the first really concerted effort for researchers to discern between nature and nurture which was having a bigger effect on human behavior and decisively these twin studies where they took identical twins who were raised in incredibly different environments they turned out to be really similar if you track them through over the course of their life in every important way that you can measure so IQ whether they were obese what kind of car they drove there was even a very high incidence of marrying people with the same name because the sound of the name was pleasing to their ear like innately so genes are really driving the show and these twin studies which have been replicated over 15 million times now have really closed the door on the on the so called nature nurture debate it really is nature nurture all nurture is is it's a way to sort of define the experience of a child for the duration of their childhood certainly it matters it matters to give kids a good environment as they grow up but you're not changing who they are you're not shaping who they are they are who they are they're going to become who they are just like my two dogs have very distinct personalities I give them as nice and is calm and as loving of a home as I can because I care about their life experience but I in no way can change their personality I've got one disagreeable stable one and one agreeable unstable one and that's just what they are they're being really good so since we can't change our personality I shouldn't feel guilty that I'm enjoying it because a disagreeable conscientious introvert yes yeah you really are this is this is just perfect for you so yeah you shouldn't feel guilty about it but you should definitely have some mindfulness around the fact that it's just because it's a really good situation for you it doesn't mean that it's a good situation for everybody and it also doesn't mean that it's your your ideas about how things should be are should be universally embraced by everybody so this is one of the ways in which evolutionary psychology sort of takes you in a more politically libertarian direction just just as you as you sort of recognize behavioral genetics it's like oh gosh everybody really is coming at life from very different perspectives and so it would be it would be really kind of unfair of me to impose my estimate of what's best for them because they have they just have a very different view of reality so it sort of gives you this this latitude to give just let people let people be who they are and have the life experience that is optimal for them but so yeah I think the agreeable people often fall into the trap of if hey it's good for me it's good for everybody keep it this way like we have no reason to change it so just just some empathy for the fact that a lot of people are struggling with it at the personality level particularly the agreeable extroverts who just want to get out there and and hang out and take selfies and post them on Instagram and bars this smells funny god you're really explaining things so well AJ I thought you were an extrovert no I'm a force extrovert because you know I was very shy as a kid and it wasn't until I had all this acting trick you know I was just that's that's who I would have been if I did wasn't forced into this you know I'm very happy I actually prefer doing this interviewing other people where I barely speak then having to get up in front of 2,000 people on the cruise and yeah so interesting I found my niche so the airplane pilot Chuck said this is some good and Thank You Chuck for being here and this is some great information check that I wish I had before I had panic attacks on airplanes which because I do not like to fly it's not so much the flying I'm afraid of it's just I don't like the feeling of the anxiety that it causes and airports are even more stressful I think sometimes in the plane but Chuck says for our nervous airline passengers if they let us know ahead of time we bring them on board before general boarding and let them sit in the captain's seat on the right deck and go over how things work seems to take the mystery out of out and personalize the crew which seems to help most airlines do this and for sure Southwest I did not know this I love Southwest Airlines by the way if I we don't have it unfortunately where I live anymore but that is such great information I do I'm gonna ask for that next time this sounds yeah I thought that I thought that was only something they did for kids you know I didn't didn't think that you could do that as an adult I'm not sure if that would help me or not because part of part of my my approach to it is sort of like you know day I it's not really happening you know I was like I sort of go to my happy place where it's not really a plane you know I'm sort of right just pretend that I'm in a room and and it's a room it's a little bumpy and so I don't I don't I don't like to tune into the fact that I actually am 30,000 feet in the air on an airplane so I'm not I think people people should you know if they think that if they feel if they resonate with that and it feels like it would be helpful absolutely go for it one thing that did help me little bit paradoxically just along these lines is when I did my fieldwork for my dissertation in Alaska I was working in Western villages these Alaska Native villages very small remote populations I was writing a dissertation about sort of indigenous Alaskan responses to climate change and I so I had to fly to these villages and the only way in is on very very tiny planes like little five cedar planes and they are terrifying however I had an easier time with those planes than I do with the Jets because you're more you're just more in tune with the with the actual forces at play like there's no there's no doubting for a second that you were in an aircraft that just got lift and it just took off and you feel every little motion of wind and everything and then there was something about that like connecting to the actual physics of it that was very reassuring to me where I was like okay well just like when you kind of stick your hand out of a car window this is my dad's favorite trick when I was a kid if you stick your hand out of car window shaped like an airplane wing it lifts you can feel like the air rushing underneath your hand and it wants to lift so I felt that when I was in the little plane and there was there was something about that that was very reassuring those bush pilots are like seriously reckless crazy dudes though they like they do these crazy hairpin turns and they want to come in fast and show off for the ladies so that was not as reassuring but the rest of the experience was right and this says awesome interview thank you for getting Jen back Jen you have an open invitation if you even just feel like it to go live just just text me and I'm like you know right alright I don't want to know your banana cilantro smoothie is it just banana and cilantro are there more ingredients oh well so I have a couple of variations so the important thing the thing that makes it the best which is unfortunately something I can't do right now because my freezer is like this tiny little mini fridge freezer that doesn't even work that well ideally you start with frozen bananas and you let them just thaw a little bit so you know let them sit out for fifteen minutes or something so they're not rock-hard and then I don't add any water or anything I just take those mostly still pretty frozen bananas and I add in the cilantro and sometimes I'll just do that so it's good to have a really good blender so the Vitamix you can really beat it into submission and get it it's like a very thick very cold almost an ice cream kind of consistency at that point so if you like a superior smoothie you can add some almond milk or some water sometimes I will add some spinach as well just to get some extra greens in there so throw some baby spinach in which you can't really taste the cilantro is a very strong flavor and sometimes I will add what I'm doing right now is the freezers not big enough for bananas but it is big enough for a little bag of frozen mango so I have some chopped frozen mango in there that I just got in the freezer section so I throw a few of those in which adds some coldness to the the room-temperature bananas in the cilantro so you can play around with it and see what you like it's it's sort of like if you like mango salsa like if you've ever had like a mango salsa with that mix of sweet and Irby kind of flavor then you might like it if you're a cilantro or lover it's very unusual but it's very good thank you let's see where we're going next oh and I want to say is people are asking to see your dogs but one of the reasons I can fly now is because I got my dog Bailey trained as a service dog before my panic disorder and it's a lot easier to fly with a service dog because yeah because I want to take medicine so that's what helped me you can you can let me see if I can show you there over here there they are adorable yeah illegally sneeze lean on the hotel bed and so we just worked on management but you're very precious I saw a question from a Jan but now I can't find it and I can't remember it she said ro to overweight people tend to be more introverted I don't think that's is is your weight a function of your personality no no no not in that causal direction but it could be in Makati in the other causal directions so one thing that'll often happen is that women who were overweight and I've watched this in my own personality when I weighed a hundred more pounds than I did now I was both more I don't know if I was more introverted because I've got a little bit of noise in my data because I am a recovering alcoholic so I was more extroverted when I was drinking but I definitely was more agreeable so this is something that you'll see because you're essentially not in as much of a position of power you're in a position of weakness relative to all of the different value proposition that you're seeking as you go through life so your your relationship with your your co-workers and your boss any kind of romantic relationship if you are significantly overweight you you were basically going through life in a position of weakness relative to other other women and so it makes you if you've got sort of room in the expression of your personality a lot of people will become more agreeable they're more deferential because they're they're estimating that they're less valuable essentially is what's going on there so they're they're more willing to accept kind of a bad deal in their relationships they're not going to raise a fuss they're not going to set boundaries as well they're not going to generate conflicts because they're they're perceiving that on the market they're not going to be able to get a better relationship so so you will you'll watch that sort of thing and I can I can understand that working for introversion as well if you if you're not estimating that you're a very good value proposition on the dating market or on the on the social market you're going to run the cost-benefit analysis and it's gonna tell you to stay home and watch Netflix so that's gonna be a personality dependent thing and sort of where you're where you sit pre-existing on the spectrum but I don't think there's any evidence to suggest that the there's a correlation in the other causal direction we're more introverted people are more likely to gain weight the only one that might exist is if you're highly emotionally unstable that you're sort of a person who's more likely to celebrate and medicate with food because you're seeking dopamine wherever you can find it more than the average bear so that could lend itself to obesity so could low conscientiousness if you've got very low conscientiousness you're gonna have a very hard time eating a healthy diet staying on track with any particular diet so those two traits are going to make it more challenging for you but you know even you you could be super unstable low conscientious flake incredibly extroverted and open to experience and super agreeable and unable to say no all of those things are liabilities as far as dealing with a pleasure trap but it's still not a problem for obesity if you're not eating pleasure trap food you're still not overweight in the Stone Age because there's no super normal food that you can get your snout into so if you're living in the modern environment it becomes a problem to have those personality characteristics because it makes it more likely that you're going to get into super normal food and run into trouble but if that food was not available you would still have those personality characteristics than they did in the Stone Age but they would just be celebrated medicating with berries and tubers and whatever sort of Stone Age food was around it would be fine so so it's still the problem is always the pleasure trap the problem is always super normal food if you were overweight it is because you were eating too much food that is not compatible with the species so at some level you need to dial down the process nature of your food great Stephanie says dr. Chen thank you for being honest about your anxiety and struggles and whey struggles and the fact that you have handled them with strain it's inspiring and Sylvan said something in response I just things a good comment sorry it was very fast sylvan says yes I feel more valuable strong and less agreeable since losing weight so basically I was always a disagreeable but when I was 60 pounds heavier I didn't feel like I could manifest it yes yeah I've been watching myself get more disagreeable I am NOT a disagreeable person I'm quite an agreeable person but I'm not I'm not a doormat I'm an area rug so I do I hid my disagreeable boundaries a little earlier than I did when I had a lot more weight on me I'm much more likely to sort of be like no too far you've chiseled my goodwill enough and that is it and I am out of this full dynamic so whereas 100 pounds ago 50 pounds ago I was much less likely to do that and I could have made a lot of really crappy relationships as a result so this is actually people who who believe that they're codependent if you've been told by your therapist that you're a codependent which I was told for 20 years because I grew up in a family of alcoholics and addicts and I had trouble setting boundaries and they kept falling in love with other alcoholics all that means is that you're an agreeable conscientious person and that you're trying to clean up other people's messes and that you're probably in some kind of position of weakness relative to your own self perception of your market values so that would be the first place to start is get yourself in the position of power every level that you can great I love you're an area right I'm a person right you're a person rug that I like classic for the Aries in the house okay so in the last few minutes you know I listen to your podcast religiously I usually listen to it the first time just kind of let it wash and then the second time I actually kind of take notes on it especially if it's a subject I'm interested in and you said some really brilliant I mean yoy say brilliant things but this last one you said and of course and when I agree with you it's even more brilliant but you talked a little bit about the environment but you had a saying that I never heard you say it this way before and I'm going to read it but you talked about how the environment is not just the best defense against the pleasure trap it's the only defense that people believe their willpower is causing their success and it isn't and then I love how you said they'll look for a dopamine drip on the lowest branch they can find I never said that way but I loved it yeah yeah no it is and I can see it in my own psychology like it's it is freaking hard trying to stay out of the pleasure trap when you're living in a hotel room like when you're in a pandemic you're living in a hotel room it's not like I'm going on any dates it's like there's nothing going on I'm Safeway is two blocks away it's it's hard and so I've got enough conscientiousness enough stability and I'm highly motivated but it's it's not like this this goes away as a constant sort of like I am I am an animal who is seeking dopamine when I'm stressed just like every animal wants dopamine when they're stressed so so the environment you really that is the only thing you can do so for me that translates to this current situation where I just keep the hotel room stocked with compliant things where I'm able to just like constantly sort of eat because you you basically think of yourself as an animal who you're running a script in your head that's always what like what sex food sex food sex food what's the next best use of my limited time and energy to ensure survival and/or reproduction the answer to that is almost always going to be either something that is directly engaging with sex or food or it gets you in a position where those things are going to be more closer closer to you and easier to get so if you're not actually going you know to go find a partner you're you're working on your display your personnel display you're trying to find a job to make you more attractive mate you're doing something that's moving you in a direction of ensuring greater reproductive success and so you're always you're always circling around going what's the easiest thing that I could do to solve these survival and reproduction problems so if I didn't have a hotel room full of oatmeal and bananas and things to snack on that little relentless little little ticker in my head would eventually start saying hey go to Safeway get some super normal food get something else super normal like this is just what its gonna be it's always going to be there so your only defense against it is to is to try to buffer yourself with with things that you know that this is the behavior you're gonna engage in so way better to have another bowl of oatmeal than to go get a vegan pizza yeah absolutely a lot of people are saying they're overeating now even on compliance food and other people Tomin in the towel and eating crap but you know it's interesting at least with the the clients that I have you know I'm a big fan of eating at home and making your own food I've always said that restaurants or the kiss of death for anyone trying to lose weight suffers with food addictions and these people that fought me on it saying oh no the food I'm getting it's compliant it's not because there's always a little sugar installment even when you're not first time and they're like they're actually losing weight because the social social eyes they can't go to restaurants right makes yeah we talked we talked about that on the podcast but Dylan Holmes had this great little plant rant that he did where it's the number one thing that we hear that people have trouble staying compliant because of the social pressure it's like well we've taken the social pressure away so it's just you you're just at home with your food but it is you're going to be eating because eating is always like the almost always the best solution to your survival reproduction problems particularly when you're stressed when you're stressed and you kind of like you're like what can I do that's a sure thing that's gonna improve my odds of genetic survival I know I could eat something so you're going to want to just like chew on things because even healthy food gives you a little dopamine drip so let yourself chew on healthy compliant food have like don't worry about overeating on compliant food generally you know just just allow yourself to sort of get into that that is that is not what we're gonna worry about what we're worried about is the the super normal food that you're order and have delivered to the house yeah Debbie says she feels like she's always chasing dopamine don't go chasing [Laughter] wire to do we'll just end on a fun question is there anything that you're watching now maybe on Netflix or Amazon Prime or maybe you don't watch anything but if you are we'd love to know what shows you watch so I just yeah I have a friend who's been watching house of cards so I got back into that which is just like just like candy for my political science soul very very fun I'm a big fan of the crown the crown is awesome particularly the first season so if you guys haven't watched that it's sort of the mix of the inner personal family drama of the royal family and then the history of it is very exciting for anybody who sort of historically or politically minded sometimes have been the main this have been the main things that I'm watching I'm definitely like a series Binger like I get into something and I just go crazy I have a friend she's really trying to get me into killing Eve and I love Sandra oh and I am the other woman in that who has the fleabag show fleabag was also great if people haven't watched fleabags so so that's probably next up in my queue it's good to know that you've gotten doctors or real people this all started when I interviewed dr. Pham if I found out what he liked to watch and I just loved hearing the people like what if he was loved he loved Game of Thrones Oh Game of Thrones is just a little viscerally violent for me I have a hard time like you know watching the babies thrown out of towers and you know just like eaten by birds and all this crap that goes on so it's a little rough for me to watch so how's the car it's also very violent but you know political and interesting so probably very similar actually just a little less gruesome you on Game of Thrones we got through to part of the second episode and it looked like they were gonna hurt a dog and me never could watch it episode actually that was where I stopped - well ironically the the first I don't think it's a huge spoiler to say that house of cards and the pilot there's there's also a similar I almost didn't keep watching because there's a there's some violence to a dog that happens so it's like it's these are these are difficult things Oh speaking of pilots with violins Deadwood is my favorite show of all time if people have ever watched Deadwood it's actually probably getting time for me to just watch the whole series again Ed Wood has also pretty gruesome and violent but freaking amazing and the first episode has some gratuitous violence in it as well against women but it's um it's a great show great show with a very foul mouth what are you are you reading anything special I am rainy and I'm slowly working my way through Charles Murray is in your book which is probably like right behind me called human diversity so he is the infamous author of the bell curve a co-author of the bell curve which came out you know probably going on 20 years ago now more than 20 years ago and this is his latest effort which is sort of a asuma of all of the research having to do with a lot a lot having to do sex differences sort of the behavioral genetics behind the the differences that we see in the population in terms of sex race and class and so he's he's this is like a real comprehensive literature review that he has brought just decades of research - so yeah very little light reading you are a smarty pants man you just you're that's impressive well it's always so fun talking to you rachel says when I understood the pleasure trap my life changed and nobody explains the pleasure trap better than dr. Hawker dr. Lisle so please listen to their podcast they have over 200 episodes and I always recommend episode 161 where the the pleasure trap in the ego trap are explained because that's the only problem for a lot of people but they're over 200 now and you can always get a private consultation with either of them or both you know because I mean what could be better so thanks so much a dr. Hawk is really fun talking to you oh it's always always a pleasure so we're gonna chat anytime while I just languish in my hotel for the foreseeable future you know I have an idea next time you actually have a real kitchen maybe as part of the broadcast you can actually make your smoothie oh my god I just made it yesterday so it's so good yeah there will be another one happening soon so there's really no magic to it it's pretty basic that I recommend for the my fellow cilantro lovers which is genetic as well if you love cilantro it's because you have the cilantro genes I am in solidarity with you actually just I mean I don't have a strong opinion on cilantro either way but it just sounds really good it sounds yes very sweet refreshing sort of herbal very I go for it in the summertime in particular yes that sounds great so thank you guys for being here live and please come back in it what time today 1 p.m. come back in an hour what I'll be speaking with a cardiologist named dr. Stephen letterman he's the father of Matt Letterman from the movie forks over knives and he was requested by people watching live thanks again doctor Hawke be well and I hope he takes off at some point awesome sounds good I'll talk to you soon thank you
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