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Chef AJ: Chef AJ Live! | Q A With Dr Jen Howk
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I have a beautiful and very intelligent guest today you've seen her here before hopefully unless this is your first time seeing me her name is dr. Jenn Hawk she is a psychologist and she has a very great great announcement to make about a like it's not project it's it's what she and dr. Lisle have been doing with their website esteem dynamics calm they have this thing called the wisdom the Living wisdom library I think of that we have this thing here called the living Zoo that's completely different but this is a living wisdom library and they have this membership site now that's like three dollars a month less than the price of a Starbucks or $99 forever and you get an autographed copy of their new book and she'll talk about that a little bit but she is here to answer your questions that many of you have emailed in that we didn't get to yesterday with dr. Lyle so please welcome back dr. Jen Hawk hello it's so good to be here I'm so excited and I'm so excited to talk about the library - that's a it's an awesome new thing that we're doing absolutely that's the first thing I would like you to talk about but I just wanted to show you I'm or the shirt just for you it says yes you may be know I always think about you because you've said that like what masks we wear what shirt we were it's sort of a reflection of our personality oh my gosh everything that we do is a reflection of our personality the kind of hat like how you decorate your house what kind of car you drive what kind of what you wear what kind of earrings you have and certainly you're you're like you're making it easier for the Stone Age village to infer your character and your personality by emblazon me net with actual words so you're providing a cognitive shortcut for people who might be confused about your priorities but dogs are definitely my priority yeah that's funny because I always have a shirt that almost always that says vegan or dogs or so thank you for clearing that up so please talk about this new is that really a new venture but it's an improved venture that you and dr. Lyle have been doing and all these things yeah I mean it's new in the sense that we've sort of could we've consolidated everything that he and I are doing together so for people who are not familiar with either of us we're both working and the sort of psychological space that's adjacent to the plant-based movement so we talk to a lot of people who are a lot of people in your audience AJ who are trying to improve their diet and their lifestyle and give them give them advice that is sourced in sort of a different kind of paradigm than they may from typical therapists a lot of therapists you go in and they're there telling you that your issues around food and lifestyle are very much rooted in childhood damaged or or that you're trying to you're trying to fill a hole in your soul of some kind and as a former as a person in recovery I've heard this for many many years and we we come at this from a very different perspective which is known as evolutionary psychology which a lot of your viewers are very familiar with dr. Lisle and so I don't need to go through the whole thing but the the nutshell version is that evolutionary psychology begins with the premise that humans are animals just like any other animal and that we we can we can make inferences about what it's difficult for us to do and to accomplish and why we can't meet our goals and why we struggle with motivation in certain areas including in health and lifestyle because of our nature as humans so we're always we're always pulling back to the Stone Age how would we have solved this problem in the Stone Age and how is there a mismatch with how we adapted in our evolutionary history to solve the problem and the modern environment and there's almost always a big mismatch and so that's where we kind of begin our investigate investigation is what what went wrong in the modern environment and that's where the whole idea of the pleasure trap comes from the pleasure trap is just the fact that we live in an environment that we never adapted to live in we've got all this abundant super rich food and we are a species that adapted to cope with scarcity and starvation and to be really efficient around that so so that's basically what dr. Lyle and I do we we help people who are dealing with all kinds of issues not just health and diet but relationship issues career issues friendship anything that people would go to a normal psychologist a normal psychologist for we wait a second isn't that an oxymoron animal psychologist yeah there's there's definitely a little you know memes in the psychologists world that be you know psychologists go into that business because they have the biggest issues and there's there's perhaps some truth to that and I just to be really clear I'm actually not a clinical psychologist now that I've sort of besmirched the profession my PhD is in the Social Sciences but I've I've taken on evolutionary psychology is a real first just a major intellectual interest and then developed my own clinical practice in collaboration with with Dougs so we were very closely together we're co-authoring a new book which will be out next year I know sometimes people are signing up for the lifetime membership on the site thinking we're immediately going to send them the book it's not ready yet we still need to we need to finish up some edits and get it into production and do everything that needs to happen but that's we're looking at probably 2021 we're not exactly sure we don't have a release date yet so but we if you've signed up for a lifetime membership you were on our list and we will we will come to you right before it's ready to send to make sure we have your address correct so we're we're writing a book that is essentially the Li statement it's like I think of it as half textbook and half self-help book on how to use these principles in evolutionary psychology to to optimize your life on all of these dimensions and we also do a lot of other things we we talked to you we talked we do other podcast he and I have a podcast every week and we just produce a lot of content so the new website is it's a compendium of everything that he and I are both doing in one place and there's a lot of stuff that people have never seen before so it's not been publicly available before we sat down and we recorded nearly four hours of introductory lectures on human nature II call it the human nature series really explaining in great detail you know sort of where conventional psychology gets it wrong what human what really motivates humans and what directs their relationships he talks about sort of fundamental psychological analysis I talk a lot about personality in the big five and then we talk a great deal about esteem and esteem processes both self esteem and esteem between yourself and other people which is the main thing that we're interested in so that is members only content four hours of of us just mansplaining the heck out of evolutionary psychology and then a lot of other things special subscriber only q and A's we did one last week I'm doing another one later this afternoon that's just me this week so if people want to join that live they can head over to the it's called the living wisdom library and you can join for three dollars a month that is the but sort of our base rate now you can also join for a year for 29 or for a lifetime for 99 and you can pay that in three installments if 99 is too much we really really we're not trying to be slick and salesy about this at all we really we literally wanted to be as cheap as we could be make it available to as many people as possible so they can benefit because it's really this is revolutionary insight into human nature and how to solve esteem problems and health problems and anything anything else so we're not trying to it's not a get-rich-quick scheme for us we just wanted to provide the content essentially at cost to people so it can be available to anybody who wants to join and share at about three dollars well and also yeah you can never be accused of that because just the rates to see see or have a consult with you or dr. Lila it's like seventy five dollars I mean you can't go anywhere and have a consult yeah yeah that with such an amazing person and doctor and Jesse says can you ask dr. Hawk her opinion on the major difference between a counseling session with her versus a normal psychologist well the major difference is that I'm trying to get you to fire me and I think Doug would agree with this we're they're they're trying to solve the the origin of your problem I think a lot of I went through a lot of conventional therapy myself and it's all the sort of conventional modalities are like well we did some really good work this week but we're gonna have to have you come back next week so we can dig a little deeper into your childhood and figure out where your intimacy issues really came from when that day that you're your father ignored you when you were watching the movie and you tried to get his attention and you didn't pay enough attention that set in motion this whole lifelong baggage that you have that is all as Doug would say that is not how this whole thing works and so we are we the business is sort of really getting to the roots of what is going on in your life right now what is what are the dynamics of the relationship that you're struggling with whether it's a romantic relationship or a friendship or at work what's going haywire in that set of circumstances and particularly the esteem signals that are being sent back and forth that we can try to intervene with and fix with some insight into human nature how people get their status threatened how people are looking for signals that they belong and that they're valued and if they're not getting that they're likely to lash out so we're very we're more like engineers or were like mechanics trying to really figure out what's going why is your engine making that knocking noise we're not just trying to get the knocking noise to go away we're trying to figure out why is it happening what is the root of the problem and is it possible for us to fix that and if it's not possible to fix it and sometimes it's not then how can we come to some sort of new relationship through this understanding that it's it's not it's not a personal thing it's a it's a reflection of what humans are and how we work in the world thank you that's a very good explanation what you do I'm curious how you guys hooked up because a lot of times when people are similar there'll be competition but you guys are so collaborative oh I think we complement each other really well so where we are you know we overlap almost entirely with our view of the world and and the thing about evolutionary psychology is it's grounded in what's called conciliate so Concilium says this notion in in science that if something is true it's going to be true no matter what lens you put on it so so if you if you're an anthropologist if you're a chemist if you're a biologist if you're an archaeologist if something is truly capital-t true you should be coming to more or less the same conclusion no matter what your disciplinary bias is and the paradigmatic case of that is the the theory of evolution so no matter what your training is if you're looking at if you're an archaeologist or chemist or a biologist or a political scientist or an economist you're coming to the same kinds of conclusions about how evolution behaves and how it how it shapes behavior over time and and how you can make inferences about things like relationship and self-esteem as a result so the we we are so grounded in this conciliate view of the world that if you follow conciliate and the logic of evolution you almost always come to the same kind of conclusions so he and I don't disagree on virtually anything because we're we're using the same guiding principle to get us to the conclusion we just take slightly varying routes to get there so we have very different styles and approaches because we have very different personalities and I actually talk about that on the website and the personality module so and lots of other things that I've done on this so we we're we interpret reality a little bit differently but it gets us with the many paths up the same mountain to the same the same peak so and I think we we come each other well in that yin-yang kind of way I'm a lot nicer than he is and prettier - he might disagree with that well the only thing he's really wrong about I think is astrology otherwise you guys are spot on you know yeah people and people who follow me know that I have a long and storied history in the New Age movement I worked as an astrologer for many years I I can I feel like I sort of have a little bit more of a position of authority to talk about evolution now and evolutionary psychology because I really did my time in the woowoo world and spent a lot of time immersed in those thoughts and that whole tharid I am and loved it and still find it very entertaining and very classically ilio and doug is very classically a Virgo for what it's worth tell me about it yeah absolutely I have so many questions live I don't know what to do because so many were sent in and this is like I feel like you know I'm gonna end up offending somebody but I'll try that I'll try to be quick well okay get there as much as we can I don't know 45 minutes per question like my okay and some of them are long so I'll try to read them fast no this is from Jan dear dr. Hawke I know you said you'd had some experience with alcoholism alcoholism and I'm wondering what you think of 12-step programs in general and the ones for food addiction in particular are they helpful or hurtful I've gone to a few different meetings and they don't really resonate with me because they insist we say things like I am powerless over food which I don't believe I am although I certainly have trouble with certain foods and they either don't recommend a sound vegan food plant or if they do it's always based on weighing and measuring which I learned from dr. Lao yesterday is not a good idea thank you yeah sure so kind of a multi-part question I'll the first part is whether I think 12-step programs for food addiction are helpful I do not so I think 12-step programs for alcoholism can be helpful to some degree for food because the information is so bad as you're pointing out with the weight and measuring and the sort of focus on calorie counting and it's you know they're really no-go foods and all this kind of stuff it's it's a I find that the advice actually undermines any benefit that you would get from the rest of the 12-step experience whereas with the with AAA or Narcotics Anonymous or you know some of the others it's the the advice of abstinence is is solid and you're getting a few other benefits from the 12-step process there is no special magic sauce to 12-step you don't you don't need 12 steps to get sober what's happening with people who achieve sobriety by participating in 12-step is that the they happen to be the people who were likely going to get sober anyway because of certain personality features so a high level of conscientiousness and a high level of motivation the same qualities that you need to to stick to this diet to achieve a lot of goals in life that are working against your instincts so alcoholism is working against your instincts in exactly the same way that super normal food is it is the pleasure trap it's a much more tenacious version of the pleasure trap because it's hijacking your pleasure signaling so much more strongly than the food is but if you can extract yourself from that it means you have a lot of grit you have a lot of conscientiousness and you probably also have a lot of motivation that is all independent of whether you're participating in 12-step or not 12-step itself can be can be a nice environment to achieve a little bit of of community esteem when you're probably pretty esteem deficient so if you've had a problem with alcohol or other drug abuse for any amount of time your social life is probably in great disarray you probably have really messed up relationships that are based on using I know mine all were at that time so that community that comes with 12-step of people who are on the same journey that you are who are able to give you the appropriate esteem for going through this process that they have also been going through that is very valuable and you might not be able to get that otherwise I'm getting you had a helicopter going overhead this is the the joys of sitting outside so the esteem signaling can be really really powerful for getting you through that initial withdrawal period which is an incredibly difficult thing to try to put yourself through particularly when it's something with that's it's so addictive as alcohol so I still go to meetings periodically if I'm in a new place I kind of like to get the annual coin it's like yeah it's like well bling but I I don't credit 12-step per se with getting sober it was a nice place to go and distract myself and find a little community when I was otherwise really deficient in those things that's great thank you I really appreciate that answer Judy says dear dr. hawk can you help me with some cognitive dissonance I experienced I've been an ethical vegan for over thirty years and asks and as such all my pets are rescues from the shelter and I get them when they are much older therefore I have a very difficult time transitioning them to a vegan diet when I force them to be vegan and then on walks they'll try to eat dead squirrels or even kill bunnies this is such a daily source of stress for me that I feed them animals and I'm constantly being criticized by my fellow vegans do you have any advice for me other than just not having pets anymore oh it's an interesting question I mean the chasing the bunnies and the squirrels is not something that you really can do anything about I mean these are these are predators and they're gonna you know some dogs in particular very motivated to seek out prey animals and so I would you know sort of curtail that behavior as best as possible but not at the not to the the point of really constraining that the dog's existence in the world but I think transitioning them to the vegan kibble is is less of an issue and most dogs much like much like humans just need a little bit of a transition period I think that is worth doing for your own ethical commitments because non vegan dog food is really really bad stuff it's really it's really bad stuff for a lot of reasons on many many dimensions that we don't need to get into but you can very rapidly disgust and appalled yourself if you do a little bit of research as to what some of those ingredients actually mean and some of those nights like nice benign sounding ingredients like animal fat if you look into what that actually is it's pretty horrific and so I think the the vegan kill bowl is pretty tasty and you can you can make it more tasty by adding some things that doggies like like sweet potato I put nutritional yeast on there sometimes blueberries my dogs love kale so you know you can put a little water that most of the flavor of the kibble is on the coating of the outside of the kibble it's not on the inside so if you activate that with a little hot water and you add some other nom noms on there other little vegan treats the little my dogs love the peanut butter wiggle biscuits from v-dog blizzard those are all ways that the dog if it's hungry it's going to eat and it will get used to the new diet and it's gonna have way better digestion and I mean dogs are omnivorous but they do just fine on a vegan diet and the longest-lived dogs in the world are on vegan diets and so I would I would highly recommend transitioning them if you if you possibly can so my dogs are very happy on their vegan kimball have no you know far fewer they were both rescues as well and had some digestive issues early on that have totally gone away and they very happy with their food it's worth reminding people if they haven't heard the story there's dr. Lyle tells this anecdote all the time of a it's in the its tells the story in the pleasure trap of a bunch of a bunch of lab rats that were fed sort of typical rat chow for some amount of time and we're very happy on their rat chow and then the researchers put them on effectively a super normal diet so do the equivalent of humans eating a standard American diet and the rats loved it and they gained about you know between 20 and 50 percent of their body weight very quickly just like humans would just on the same kind of bell curve that humans would and the rats were like this is living this is great then the researchers took the super normal food away and reintroduce the rat chow and the average rat rather than eating the rat chow went on strike fasted for two weeks because it was like no I'm not gonna waste precious chewing and tummy energy on this crap when the bread and chocolate is coming back so I'm gonna hold out and they basically waited until they were sufficiently hungry and had lost enough of that weight gain that the cost-benefit analysis changed and they finally resigned themselves to the rat chow so humans humans are just like this and so is your server your rescue dogs thank you I like that idea of nom noms I do that with my food they eat it I had no non see maybe that rat tricks some of the parents whose kids just won't eat healthy food maybe they should try that yeah yeah works works for all species haha that's funny this is this is a fun question it reminds me of this restaurant they had an LA Moroccan restaurant where people actually ate with their hands Claire says I love to eat with my hands obviously not soup but almost anything else my husband thinks it's disgusting I really enjoy my food more this way is this wrong isn't this how they ate in the Stone Age I have hold on a second somebody saying something about nom noms Oh hey you guys might know this is my partner Michael Greger I wonder how these two got together hmm and he brought me he brought me cherries seasonally appropriate treat G where's my check where's my check this is amazing oh my gosh you guys have questions okay dr. Greger answer the one is it okay to eat with our hands he's actually eating with his hands right now you can't hear the question Oh is it okay to eat with our hands is there any problem with eating I mean thank you baby G I'm dying here thing I thought was really that was a surprise what a wonderful surprise he's a he's a wonderful if people are not familiar with dr. Michael Greger of nutritionfacts.org I will go ahead and recommend that extremely highly it's a talk about a compendium of resources I mean we have a lot on the living wisdom library but nutrition facts which has been you know a decade of research and wonderful material on everything that people could possibly have any curiosity about about evidence-based results in evidence-based findings for optimizing a plant-based diet that is the me place to go and he also just released a book called how to survive a pandemic which if people don't know that was originally he that's that's sort of his original passion and training was an infectious disease and had had basically done all of this incredible research on pandemics and tried to communicate it to the masses and nobody wanted to hear it and lo and behold now it's finding a little bit more of a receptive audience so if you're curious about where pandemics come from spoiler alert it's from our relationship with animals and particularly factory farms and the sort of domesticated animals that we eat for food and that we use for for things like dog food that is what creates these these super viruses these massive these incredible mutations that are able to take out huge percentages of our population so recommend his book as well how can how can you not love a guy who brings you cherries I mean so I guess Claire's question was is that not a zit okay like maybe physiologically but but her husband doesn't like it but she seems to enjoy the food more hand to mouth I think that's absolutely a personality quirk so dr. Lila and I will talk all the time about sort of how you have specific circuits for things and if you enjoy that that is just you you had more ancestors that were more successful eating food with their hands I mean that's how we we didn't have silverware until quite recently in our evolutionary history so this is a very ancestrally aligned way of eating and if it gives a dizzy pleasure and you enjoy it then I would say if it's causing your husband great distress maybe it's worth thinking about compromising on but there's I I know plenty of people who predominantly eat with their hands and there's no issues so hey thank you this is a little long but we don't get as many men writing and but I think it's a good question because it sort of reminds me of a situation I hear from people that are on weight loss programs hey doctor hawk and thank you for answering my question my name is Randy I'm a 42 year old male 6 foot 1 inches tall 150 pounds I've never had any health or weight problems until now when I recently lost 30 pounds I contracted a severe case of food poisoning on a cruise and ended up with post infectious inflammatory bowel disease causing me to lose 30 pounds and now I look quite then I'm working with one of the top place top plant-based doctors now to restore my health and restore my gut but he said it could take at least six months I have to be on a very strict diet which is not a problem for me because my wife is an excellent cook and it makes my somewhat limited options very delicious I'm very motivated not to step out of line because even one bite of off-plan food can cause a flare and I'll suffer for three days with pain and bloody diarrhea the problem I am having from the illness is psychosocial and they don't know how to deal with it the doctor said that I must give up alcohol and coffee and it's not been a problem because my wife has been kind enough to give these up as well in solidarity so they're no longer in the house and there's no temptation my friends are a different story now that we no longer drink alcohol the social invitations are becoming fewer and fewer because they say were not fun anymore I've explained to them that I can't eat at restaurants for the time being because of the seriousness of my condition and if they invite me overall either have to eat in advance or bring my own food to which they say either well don't come or if they do come they mock me I've never experienced this kind of treatment from anyone in my entire life so I'm interested in knowing what really is going on the fact that these people are so unsupportive has me wondering if they ever were my friends in the first place my wife said she's heard of this happening to some of her girlfriends that were dieting but I cannot understand why someone would treat someone with a serious disease like this any enlightenment you can give me on the subject would be appreciated that's yeah well horrible it's very common and I think a lot of women are very familiar with this dynamic where if you start seeing a little bit of success with some major dietary change suddenly it's those those friends who were super super happy to be in miserable solidarity with you or are suddenly very threatened by your success whether you're having success on a diet or success in a relationship and this is rooted in major evolutionary paradigms and dynamics that we talk a lot about so the the longer more extended answer to this if people are really interested is dr. Lisle has a video on our website called getting along without going along and has you know really gets into the nitty-gritty of where this comes from and some real good strategies for phrases that you can use and and how to help mitigate what's going on but fundamentally what's going on is you've become a threat to their status so when we talk about esteem and esteem dynamics we're talking about status fundamentally it's sort of a less friendly word but that's what it is so so we are Stone Age creatures we are we are really quite unchanged from the end of the Stone Age in terms of our actual physiology and also our our brains are really unchanged we are the same we're the same species if anybody out there has seen the fine piece of American cinema cinema called Encino man this was a great movie came out in the nineties I say great in big quotes but a very entertaining movie in the 90s about an unfrozen cave person in California who seamlessly merges into modern Los Angeles life or Encino life I guess specifically so the idea being that if you took any one of us and put us back in the Stone Age or vice versa we would we would be unrecognized we would fit right in it would be a sea with transition as long as we were sort of used to the procedures so so we are Stone Age creatures which means that we are adapted everything that we adapted to thrive in was a Stone Age environment so the kind of food that was available the kind of mortality threats that were most breathing down our neck and the kind of social problems that were most relevant so the social problem that's most relevant in the Stone Age village when you're living in a community with like one or two hundred people who are all up in your kool-aid all the time and are hyper aware of who you are and who you're sleeping with what's going on and it's like everything is very you have no secrets in the Stone Age so that's one of the most important things that governs Stone Age life is relative status so there's a hierarchy there's sort of like who's at the top who's at the bottom where are you in the middle so all the action really kind of happens in the middle and if you've been going through life with your with your friends and they're sort of like thinking that they have a little bit of an edge on you in some kind of way and this doesn't have to be shitty you know people are not people are not really explicitly conscious about this but you have if you're really honest with yourself you will you'll find that you kind of have this awareness of your your social standing relative to other people that you're close to in terms of you know who's who's got the nicest house who's got the better job who's got the better spouse it's all like all this this is why we have so much gossip than modern life it's where it all comes from as the Stone Age dynamics so what happens when you start changing your diet or you start finding some success you get a promotion you find a relationship you lose some weight you have threatened the status quo you have gone from like number seven in the village to number six which means because it's all zero-sum that your buddy is now bumped down a notch and that can be very very very threatening to people and it's particularly threatening among women as women are very familiar with if they are the person at work who you know it's one thing to all commiserate about how everyone's struggling with the same dietary problems and everybody wants to lose weight but you start having success and those women start being real catty and stabbing you in the back and it gets really really nasty in a hurry and so this questioner is seeing a version of that where his is success and and even without success just kind of change in what you're doing in a direction that is maybe not entirely understandable to the people that you're with because they're sort of frightened and confused by it and they don't know why you're they can't make sense of it and they they infer that it would not work for them or they think that it's a bad idea all of that is just inherently very threatening to all of those very fragile interpersonal dynamics so I went through a version of this when I got sober from alcohol as well to a lesser degree with the food because I was embedded in some more of a plant-based world at that point but when I got sober from alcohol I had to give up my my partner at the time all virtually all of my friends my job because it was putting me in proximity to alcohol like these were trade offs that I had to make to preserve the median cost benefit analysis I had which was that I alcohol was gonna kill me and I have to stay sober at any cost and you're having a version of this with you know getting out of line has major health consequences for you so it may be the case that these are friendships that really there wasn't that much substance there to begin with they were they were built on this really fragile social contract that you had with these people where that depended on you being sort of a notch below them or at least not not rocking the boat in any kind of way and you rock the boat and it has disturbed them and so maybe they will come around and get used to it you're not in the business of trying to convince them of anything you definitely don't want to start telling them what a great diet it is and how they should do it because that becomes even more threatening so the best thing to do is just to keep doing what you're doing quietly try to you know make it as the least intrusive process for them as possible and if they come around they come around and if they don't they were they were never really your friends to begin with and that's fine that just creates it creates space for new people in your coalition who belong there but it doesn't sound like he was trying to gain status by doing this he was sick it wasn't like he was trying to lose weight or quit drinking because he thought it was a but it's a healthier diet it's a healthy and people have that perception that you're a little more virtuous than they are that you're doing there you're doing a better job with something that they themselves struggle with and so they too are aware that they would be better off if they ate a healthier diet maybe even a plant-based whole food plant-based diet but they for whatever reason don't believe that they can or that they don't believe that they can at the level that he's doing it and so it just is intrinsically threatening to them and this is this is human nature we are we are souped-up chimps and we get we get all sort of angsty and and threatened very easily by these kinds of things I mean I just can't imagine somebody your friend doing that I think about Jerry Seinfeld's quote people oh they're the worst they're the worst that's why I go back to your shirt dogs dogs yes people well I loved all the same thing I mean you should write a book is what you set up in your kool-aid I've never heard that before that is a great one and once you said magical unicorns flying up your butt you have some great genesis is it that I think we need to write down I'm gonna skip to a live question before it disappears on the screen Lou he's you know I can't see your picture Lou so Lou could be a girl or a boy so I apologize but it says is CBT a scam it seeks to change our feelings by changing our thoughts but if these are just expressions of personality what hope can there be for changes at either a cognitive or cognitive level Oh interesting question so so Lou was asking about cognitive behavioral therapy or CBT it's not a scam but what CBT is doing is going back to my example of fixing the knocking engine in knocking noise and your engine in your car if you take your car into a mechanic and you say my engines making a disturbing knocking noise what CBT is gonna do is it's going to figure out a way to make the knocking noise stop or be quieter it's gonna it's gonna do whatever it can it's gonna like you know wrap the sound absorber around it it's gonna put headphones in your ears so you don't hear it anymore it's gonna it's gonna take the noise away but it's not grounded in any real theory of or any accurate theory of why the engine is making that noise to begin with and so it's like work it's working more at the symptomatic level than the root cause level so they're not it's still much more useful than going to some psycho dynamic Freudian therapist who's gonna try to unwind your child to damage those people are a scam those people are operating on in like career incentives to keep you a client forever they are essentially trying to get you to generate pain to generate more paychecks for them so the you know evolutionary psychology is the the sort of the best strategy that you're going to get clinically there are not that many of us out in the world because this is a fairly new way of looking at psychology evolutionary biology has been around for quite some time but it's being applied the sort of problems of human behavior in relationships that's something that dr. Lisle really pioneered I mean this didn't exist in a clinical sense until dr. Lisle started developing these concepts a couple of decades ago and has built them up into you know pretty much virtually the only real clinical clinical psychologist who's working exclusively in that paradigm so CBT is great if you find a good CBT practitioner they can really help quiet it down they can help you work with what's coming up and and help you you know question the irrational thought that's sort of the the CBT mantra we are doing the same thing we want you to question that irrational thought but it's so much richer if you can understand what is generating the irrational thought the irrational thought is being generated by systems that you have adapted to you that are trying to protect you that are trying to encourage you to survive and reproduce to get your genes into the next generation and sometimes it goes haywire either because it's a mismatch with the modern environment or because you have what the what Lou is suggesting you have a major personality distort distortion so people have personality distortions people are all over the map with their personalities and you cannot change your personality that is that is genetically set your DNA is really it's it's inscribing your core personality characteristics so if you were an extremely conscientious human you're gonna have a lot of irrational thoughts you're gonna have your brain is going to be telling you to run a much much costlier worst-case-scenario evaluation on any particular problem then is actually appropriate for the problem so if you can recognize that you're a hyper conscientious nutcase as Doug Doug calls with great love people like this HT MCS and that your brain is generating a lot of noise that's running this sort of exaggerated worst-case scenario all the time if you didn't step back from that and recognize that's a lot of noise I don't necessarily need to act on every thought that my brain spits out because I recognize that I have a distorted brain that is a little loud relative to the actual degree of the problem that can be a very empowering thing for people but we're and CBT is also trying to get you there it's just not routing it in evolutionary fundamentals like we are Hey oh my thought that Lou asked about CBD not CBT so I'll try to articulate a little bit better Oh God it's about CBD oh no no no it is about CBT I think I need tol other questions yeah I need to articulate better so it was a question live from Aubree but people have to understand there's a lot of people watching so that your question disappears quickly but I do remember that it was about what do you think about affirmations Oh affirmations so I always think a Stuart Smalley when I think of affirmations so from the old Saturday Night Live in the 90s there was the elf Rankine Stuart Smalley characters sit in front of a mirror and he'd say you know he punked himself up I'm good enough I'm smart enough and doggone it people like me like me I think affirmations are fine I don't think they're damaging and I think they can be it's it's sort of almost a psycho some psychosomatic thing if you really if you believe that the affirmations they're helping you and they're they're building you up and they're affecting some kind of state change for you I don't want to take those affirmations away from you I have used affirmations a lot there's a big part of my sort of New Age world I will still occasionally if I'm about to deal with something super stressful or something something that I'm afraid of I've talked before on your show EJ about how I have irrational fear of flying I will do some affirmations you know I definitely will engage in that kind of thing because it can be helpful for redirecting your thought process again your thoughts are not random they're not irrational they're coming from the survival and reproduction algorithms but that doesn't mean they're helpful does it think you need to attach to every thought that's being churned out of your brain so if you can distract yourself with an affirmation more power to you I think they can be beautiful and lovely they're not going to fundamentally change your life they're not going to affect real real changes in the kinds of thoughts that are being generated and causing you the suffering that you're trying to resolve with those affirmations but I don't I'm not I I don't want to be dismissive of them and I don't I don't I'm not in the business of trying to take them away but they can't they can't hurt that's the thing so that I think about movie the help you is good you as kind you is important there there you go very similar very similar notion but yeah the can be damaging if you are leaning into affirmations without confronting the survival and reproduction algorithms that are generating the the suffering in the esteem dynamics or the interpretations of reality that are actually causing you the suffering so if you're avoiding doing that work because you're sort of like you know Pollyanna anahi near way through life with the affirmations then you're being avoidant and you're missing an opportunity to to really kind of improve your situation in life but you know as a sort of addition to your toolkit they're fine but not by themselves because like I used them like one of the affirmations when I was still heavy it was something like I eat healthy and nutritious foods in the right amount and I easily maintain my trim ideal weight sure I use that but I also did it like I didn't just look in the mirror and say it I actually did what the affirmation was saying so totally totally yeah the affirmation itself I mean there's so much kind of bad science out there about what a lot of people will call blob ology the sort of idea that oh it lights up a new part of your brain when you do these kinds of things and the the visualization is effectively the same thing as doing the thing and the the this is just not not how it works the evidence is not there for that so it's it's can be very helpful as a distraction and you know a way to build some habits and some ritual in your life that that essentially provides a shortcut for doing the right thing the more you can make doing the right thing easier for yourself if affirmations are part of that then all the matters is that you're doing the right thing and you're staying on track and you're making these fundamental changes toward improving your life so whatever gets you there right this question from sherry I think a lot of people will be able to rate relate to why can't I throw anything away it's not a financial thing with me and I'm not to the point where I would have to be on the TV show hoarders but I find it hard to part for things with things like greeting cards that people gave me a long time ago wrapping paper and bows that are pretty and can be reused and the like I really want to simplify my life and move and downsize I feel this clutter is to taking control of my life are there any therapies or strategies you recommend yeah this is it's pretty common as well so there are a couple of different things going on here so when we're talking about personality and personality characteristics if you can think of like if you've got a little circuit in your brain for how much of a hoarder you are that is on a continuum just like everything else is so you know you're the the the thickness of your fingernails if we were to take everybody in California and plot them on a graph and and measure with great detail the thickness of their fingernails that would fall in what we call a bell curve so it's a bell-shaped curve and most people are right in the average of that bell-shaped curve they have average thickness of their fingernails you have some people at the end not many who have very thin fingernails and some people who have very thick fingernails so this is also how personality works so conscientiousness is gonna fall on a bell curve of most people are in the middle there average conscientiousness relative to an appropriate level of conscientiousness for any problem that life throws at them some people not many are hyper country in just nut cases who were way too conscientious about things that they shouldn't be conscientious about and some people not too many are total flakes who can't pay their bills who don't you know find themselves getting kicked out of apartments who don't pay insurance like all of this kind of stuff so this is the continuum of behavior and it applies to everything so something like a hoarding instinct is also going to fall on a bell curve so she sounds like she's just a little she's not on hoarders but she's a little clingy about stuff and a lot of people are so there's no no issue here this is just kind of how you're wired the other thing that is informing that is that we didn't have stuff in the Stone Age if we had stuff in the Stone Age it was immensely precious it was some sort of heirloom that had you know that we had to hold on to that had enormous value just because the the cost-benefit analysis I'm holding on to anything and transporting it as you moved to me locations and through Wars and famine and everything else what would have had to be a very precious thing to to run a cost-benefit analysis onto keeping it and we didn't have money we didn't we didn't accumulate we didn't accumulate wealth we didn't accumulate riches we didn't accumulate property and so the fact that we it's so easy for us to accumulate things is hijacking that part of our brain this is if we have a thing it must be very precious my precious you know it's like it's getting it's getting completely redirected and because you have a slightly more clingy hortie personality than maybe the baseline of the species you're more likely to hole onto it than other people are so there's no again there's no magic sauce in resolving this you can't really you can't change your personality you can't change your orientation toward this problem if people are really in trouble sometimes the best thing to do is to outsource the problem so somebody who's gonna come in and clean it all up for you without your active participation it has a lot to do with you looking at the item and holding it in your hand and then not being able to part with it where if you just give somebody permission and you say hey look out of sight out of mind please take care of this for me and don't even tell me what you're throwing away unless you really have big questions about it that can really help help people deal with major amounts of clutter the other extreme if it's really affecting your life and it is it's really like you can't live with the clutter and it's causing you a lot of emotional angst I will recommend that people get a storage unit for some amount of time and go through the process of just boxing it up putting it in the storage unit and making a deal with yourself that if you don't think about it for six months while it's in the storage unit then whatever's in that box just needs to go just like tape it up don't don't make a list of what's in there and you know prepay six months on the storage unit and at six months say okay have I thought about those things have I missed them have I wanted to get them out of there if not then you just let them go it means it's not not that important you're conscious in your consciousness right you know things like I live in the desert but I still have an umbrella because I don't want to buy it every time yeah it rains you know yeah there's um there's a great documentary called the minimalists and they have a rule that I have followed with my decluttering efforts which is the 20/20 rule so if it can be replaced for less than twenty dollars within 20 miles of your home those just in case things you can really let them go especially with Amazon Prime and the immediacy with which we can get those just in case things if you're holding on to something like an umbrella just in case it rains you you could get yourself an umbrella for less than twenty dollars within 20 miles no problem and it's taking up space in your psychic awareness that's great thank ya yeah it's been really helpful for me to 20/20 rule I love it thank you I just want to read some nice comments Jenny says well Jen you seem like a great match for the doc I've never listened to you before but I can see you are very wise smart and caring not to mention adorable best of happiness to you both and let's see I wrote this I did speed is going fast I took a picture and that says chef AJ I would love it if you would do an interview with both dr. Hawk and dr. Greger well I would love that too because I just realized if you guys had a baby your website would be a steam fax org I suppose it would be I do it probably other nutritional esteem and the engineer we could we could think about how that would work yes we will have to ask the good doctor about he's a very very busy man and I know that it's so it said we're so blessed like the times that I have been able to interview them they've always been so much fun so I haven't even gotten to the written ones but I have to do this I don't have to but I want to because I promised her soul star she texted me so this is from Antonia and she says I have a question I work as a psychologist at a nursing home rehab center and despite the fact that health and nutrition are one of my greatest passions I've even completed dr. Campbell's online nutrition course I am NOT allowed to give my patients nutritional advice as it falls outside of my scope of practice any tips on how to help my often sadly very sick patients oh gosh yeah that's hard I mean I would I would want to know it's hard to tell within the scope of this question like what constitutes nutritional advice like is it really outside of the bounds of your job to recommend just eating food that your grandmother would eat you know you can sort of we can think about how to generalize this in a way that it's not going to run afoul of your overlords but that is still giving really good fundamental advice so you know it's it is it a food that like how many there are a couple of different metrics that you can apply to it is it something that your grandmother your great-grandmother would have had access to and you know how many people have interacted with this product to get it in front of you is it is it something that you know was was picked out of a field and shipped on a truck and arrived at a grocery store or is it something that was ground into a powder and extracted and put in a plastic bag and you know so there are these different metrics that you can apply and that might be okay to communicate just a sort of general eat you know the Michael Pollan eat whole food mostly plants kind of notion so that if you can do that that's going to be helpful the thing to keep in mind here is that you're the evolutionary principles that are bothering you are the humans have a teaching gene there's this strong incentive in the Stone Age if you've got information that other people don't have there's a lot of unclaimed status associated with that information if you can bring it to people who don't know so this is why everybody it goes plant-based and has some success suddenly becomes the zealot for the cause and wants everybody to watch forks over knives and everybody to to convert immediately like you don't understand this is fundamentally life-changing information and so you need to do it so this is your teaching gene that is bothering your nervous system saying your your leaving a bunch of extra status on the table in this village by not sharing what you know because in the Stone Age if you knew something that other people didn't know like how to make a more efficient fishing net that could feed more of the village or how to protect yourself against the roaming barbarians that kept trying to trying to torch your village to the ground these were extremely relevant things for survival and reproduction and if you could share that information that you had either come up with on your own or gained from your travels and and come into another village that was doing something better something more efficiently and then you were doing it huge amounts of status it meant that you were gonna get better mates better friends you were gonna be more protected and more loved in the village and that means this is all relevant because if you're more more valued in the village your survival likelihood increases and your reproduction likelihood increases because you're more desirable as a friend and a partner to people so we were driven by this teaching gene which it sounds like she has she wants to share this information with people who could really benefit from it and so a lot of this is just realizing that you're not able to do it in this context and that you're subject to these of this evolutionary drive which is causing you a lot of distress but it's actual you know in practice ability to change the outcomes for these humans is probably not as high as you think it is because people the number of people who are able to actually take action on this information and change the lives that's very very small again it goes back to that you god have a lot of conscientiousness you gotta have a lot of motivation to get yourself out of the pleasure traps so if you can share a very generalized version of it with no no pressure and no insistence and then to monitor those irrational thoughts about how your how your making a mistake by not sharing and teaching more than that's gonna probably send do that for you to some some degree very nice so apparently if I don't read the nice comments I start getting text so I'll have to read you this one from Thomas I think she's wonderful and she really makes what she's saying easy to understand what I'm trying to do so good that's that's good to hear yeah yes Lou says could Jen talk about Jen's doctor talk to you not just talk about competitive mothers my mom has compared me across so many life domains wait athletics career our mothers inherently competitive with their female children oh that's interesting some degree they are so because it's sort of a there's their there's a Stone Age algorithm about competition for the provisioning resources of the of the male at the center of the family so so mothers can be competitive with their daughters at that level because again everything in the Stone Age is zero some if you have more that means I have less you can't not everybody can have more so there there are especially as the female becomes of reproductive age either it she's competitive for the attention and the resources of the father or even worse if the mother of the of the you know adolescent daughter is also unbonded up in the Stone Age village then they're competing for the same males that's a really bad scenario and that can get that can sort of launch those processes the other thing that's going on it sounds it's probably rooted more in just the what we call the why mom cares paradigm so we have the we have a video on this and we talked about this on the website as well mom cares we are the only species where parents care about who their children are dating you don't have mama aardvarks who are like you're no one's good enough for my son you know that just doesn't happen in the animal kingdom but humans because we're very low yield species and the Stone Age the average woman was having about somewhere between ten and fifteen pregnancies not all of those were determined not all of those children survived but your your job was to be pregnant all the time but even in that context that's not a very reproductively high-yield species relative to other mammals and so because we very few offspring we are hyper invested in their success so you your genes are walking around in your child and you care a lot about whether your genes in that child survive and reproduce effectively or not the whole reason that you want the best possible mate that you can get and so you can reproduce to have the most reproductively successful offspring otherwise you wouldn't care otherwise it wouldn't matter who you made it with you care who you mate with so you produce successful offspring who then continue the lineage of that DNA through successive generations so we care about the activities of our children for that reason as well we care about whether little Timmy gets you know it gets a good sort of report card in kindergarten because we're anticipating well what did Timmy's prospects in kindergarten mean for high school what kind of grades is he gonna get in high school what kind of college is he gonna get into what kind of car is he gonna drive is it gonna be fancy enough to get a good mate to have very reproductively successful grandchildren so you essentially care about your kindergartner because of his sex life in 15 years so this is really what's going on at a deep sort of ancestral level we are not conscious of this but that's what's driving those impulses not in the to some degree probably if they're fair amount of female competition just for the the resources and the protection of the males in the village so some combination of that is probably driving that process nice Linda wants to know where the pups are they are inside they are likely to to bark up a storm if they're out here there's too much excitement going there's a cat who a cat named peaches who lives right next door who comes over and tries to steal our food all the time and is just torturing my dog Mellie so Mellie just can't stand that peaches is out there climbing trees and having fun without me Sonny watching life says doctor what does a parent do with a child who has a very high IQ and is a 4.0 GPA student but thinks smoking weed once a week is not bad for them how can a parent handle such a case oh gosh I mean this is this is assertive like we we have another we have little mantras for all these sorts of things and one of them with with kids is let them run their own show so smoking weed once a week is not ideal I mean obviously it's it's it's pretty damaging not ideal the odds that you are going to stop that behavior with any kind of lecture any kind of information it's it's some sort of making it very clear that it can't happen in your house and that you're very displeased about it and providing your child with as much good evidence-based information as you can it sounds like your kid is old enough to be finding a way to do this no matter what so you you want to run that cost-benefit analysis from a place of you know you don't want to be damaging your relationship with your child by sort of poisoning the dynamic between the two of you any more than you have to it sounds like this is pretty low on the bar of things that this kid could be doing to destroy their life and to really harm the relationship with you and there's almost certainly not that much you can really do about it we don't know how old exactly we're looking at this kid but by the time he's he or she is 18 and they're out of the house then you've completely lost control of the situation so I would make your feelings very clear make it also very clear that it's absolutely not allowable in the house and if it if it happens in the house then there will be major major consequences but short of that with this particular concern I think that's the limitations of of what you're up to I have a podcast on the living wisdom library site with Peter Eisenman about parenting specifically where I get into all of this stuff so that's a more wound out answer I'm trying to like rapid-fire so if you really want to get into it that's I get into the the weeds no pun intended on that podcast okay it looks like we probably have time for only one more question and this person is asking for a snarky answer so I don't know if you're able to do that because you're so sweet but Leila says are you familiar with the column on MIT in Mad Magazine called snappy answers to stupid questions if so can you please give me a snarky answer for people who say things like this when I mentioned that I don't drink alcohol or eat certain foods I really try to use the same strategy and say things like well this seems to be working for me my doctor thinks I'm doing well etc but there are certain people who just won't back down and I really would like a snappy answer for example my brother-in-law is always trying to push me to drink alcohol but I've never drank alcohol he'll say things like well it's natural our answer xate fermented grapes I say that our species didn't involve drinking alcohol so he'll say things like well we didn't involve more any clothes or wearing shoes are driving but you do all that can you help me think of a clever answer alcohol is funny because it actually is a pretty key piece of our success as a species evolutionarily there's really interesting work about how the the reduction in inhibition has allowed more collaboration than perhaps we would have been inclined to engage in otherwise so part of why they Neanderthals died out is because they were very disagreeable and they couldn't collaborate and cooperate very effectively and so they were sort of siloed into their own little communities and they couldn't share information and improve everybody's station in life where we figured that out and alcohol was part of that story so so the argument that it's not part of our ancestor history is a little it's not the firmest ground to put it on what I what I would do if I'm feeling disagreeable and somebody comes after me with that is like well you know sorry I'm just not into the brain damage yeah like like I kind of kind of like my brain and I I'm not in the business of trying to drown it in fermented grains so that's the that's the most disagreeable snappiest I can come up with it's at this moment but yeah I'm probably the wrong person to ask because I mean I'm I'm not a doormat on the agreeable spectrum but I am an area rug I'm pretty agreeable but dr. Lyles definitely catch him next time he's on because he he can be a little snappier oh no I'm not I'm no carpeting at all yes well you're like you're way up there for disagreeable I think you're like basically Goldhammer level disagreeable yeah you know you guys are like though no I don't want to I don't want to ingest toxin like no just like old hands like I don't want to eat pus and die those are the kind of things that you could but the overarching principle with something like that is there somebody's being shitty and somebody's being really pushy and causing like relentlessly being being this way in your life just you slowly just fade to black on them you know just ghost them this is why ghosting exists it's just you just you don't need to have crappy people in your life it's it's the it's the principle of the ugly chair if you've got an ugly chair in your living room you can't replace it with a better chair until you get the ugly chair out so if you've got ugly nasty people in your life they're taking up space in your friendship coalition we only have so much time and resources to devote to the relationships that are most important to us so no go wasting your time and energy on people who are giving you bad feedback and being lousy and causing you distress and criticizing you just let them let them go you don't have to make a big fuss about it in a big argument but just stop taking their calls and stop investing in the insurance policy that that friendship represents because it's not worth it that's great people are wondering if you guys are gonna get side by side treadmills oh yeah if we had enough space we definitely would we're very space constrained at this current spot so but yes ideally I've learned to deeply covet the treadmill arrangement it's really cool and a great way to get exercise into your day so at some point we'll look into that maybe not because he listens to a lot of a lot of loud music and I'm a little softer kind of like classical hippy music kind of lady so well we'd have to reconcile that situation and any more dirt you can dish on him there's no he's he's a he's the most wonderful human I've ever met in my life he's fabulous so all the rumors are true wow that's beautiful so people are asking how they can book a session with you and I've been posting the link to the wisdom library but if you just go to the general website esteem dynamics calm you can easily do that there with me and dr. Lisle the at the esteem dynamics site there's the living wisdom library which is sort of the portal into all of the material that we've pre-recorded and have available to people but you can also just navigate up to the top menu where there's a consultations tab so you can click that and it'll take you to my calendar which it only the calendar system only books 30 days at a time for both me and dr. Lyles so it can be a little wee if booked out a few weeks it looks like we're just never available it's like oh you don't have any appointments for the rest of the year and that's not necessarily true it just means you have to check back in 24 hours because it'll open up the next day in a sequential sort of way and if it's looking really rough and you really want to get in you can just send me an email and I will I will try to squeeze you into my schedule I'm still in the middle of moving and wandering the earth with my bags in my suitcase and my dogs and so I'm a little itinerant at the moment so my schedule is a little bit compressed but I can always I can always figure it out well that's great and really guys if you're going to join for three dollars why not just join right now so you can be on the live Q&A today 2:30 and who knows maybe doctor careful will make another appearance you never know you are welcome here probably there's a there's a few people that I will would would interview every day fair available so you're available if you're available you can come out every week every month whatever you like you just let me know your schedule and thank you so much people we're loving this and they just appreciate your wisdom so much and we're so glad to know you and the ear on the plant-based team I mean this is great I mean you just kind of have this meteoric rise out of nowhere we've never heard of you and now Michael Greger I mean that's like I mean that's like a like like that's like an actress winning an Oscar basically you have won the plant-based Oscar well I feel incredibly lucky he is truly an extraordinary human and yeah it's pretty it's pretty amazing this is these are the contingencies of life that you just can't see coming so I I interviewed three people for that job and picked you and I guess I'm still waiting for my check but you picked you picked me even though it's a Leo Scorpio match which is pretty like normally as a former astrologer I'd be like no way but I read I read about it first I mean III read about it I mean I used to you for an astrological consultation sounds absolutely great well thank you so much Jen I know always a joy see you at 2:30 I'm looking forward to the live Q&A and everyone thank you so much for being here tomorrow at 11:00 a.m. we have Elyse clapper she is the wife of dr. Klapper she's going to be demonstrating chair yoga that everyone can do giving her favorite recipe for a raw energy soup so I hope you'll come back at 11 o'clock tomorrow thanks again Jen take care total joy
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