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Chef AJ: Why is Sex Sometimes Painful | Interview with Dr Jen Howk
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hey everybody and welcome to chef aj live i'm your host chef aj and this is where i introduce you to amazing people like you who are doing great things in the world that i think you should know about today is going to be a really fun q a with one of our favorites here on chef aj live sometimes she's here by herself sometimes she's here with dr doug lyle her name is dr jen hawk and she is broadcasting live for the most beaut from the most beautiful place on earth hawaii i think maui actually to be more specific please welcome back dr jen hawk it's so good to see you again in your idyllic paradise it's good to see you too yeah it's really very nice here today it's cooling down a bit so um it's pretty perfect yeah so you know we will get we have some questions some that were sent in recently and some that i've been saving because i felt like dr lyle i don't know if they were like they were kind of like about women's sexual stuff i didn't know if i should have him do that we'll start with that but you are teaching and or coaching you're starting a class tomorrow and i'm taking it and it's i believe it's called moments of gen with zen maybe talk about it a little are there still places and if not how can people find out more about your classes yeah so i used to um you know i used to work at true north health center and when i was there i did um sort of a weekly gathering that i called moments of zen with jen just because it was a cute little rhyme and i wanted to integrate a whole bunch of different things that i i have done along the way with my own process and my own journey so you know i'm seven years in recovery from alcohol so a big part of my my process around that in the early recovery days was um 12 steps so i don't i don't like everything about 12-step meetings but i do think there are components of 12-step that are very helpful for people who are going through any kind of addiction process including addiction to pleasure trap foods um and just coping with life you know there's there's really good tools that come out of 12-step um and then i also spent years doing really deep training in some meditation traditions and some tibetan buddhism and all of these things that i used to be really involved with and so there are lots of components of that that i also found very useful i think mindfulness and discernment and awareness around your monkey mind are incredibly useful tools again for people whether you're actively trying to get through um you know releasing pleasure trap foods any other kind of addictive substance or behavior or you're just going through a hard time which a lot of people are so um and um and of course evolutionary psychology so i i came once i was at true north health center i started working with dr doug lyle who is now my business partner we're writing a book together um and the tools of evolutionary psychology and seeing the world through that lens and and the sort of biological realities of human nature and human behavior and human relationships that kind of completed the whole puzzle for me with all of these things that were just really powerful tools for living a better life and finding greater happiness and and just doing doing things better as much as we can be expected to do so i loved doing that at true north and i decided to um just start it up again during december in a virtual kind of way so this is totally an experiment the membership is still open if people want to go to my website they can go to jenhawk.com um in the either click on group coaching or just go to junhawk.com then and i sort of envisioned it as a little bit more a little smaller than it looks like it's turning out to be i've actually had quite a lot of people sign up many more than i anticipated so i don't want to close off membership and limit it because there is clearly such a demand so it's i'm not quite sure what sort of form it's going to take it's not going to be traditional group coaching where there are only a few people in the zoom room um but if people are still interested and and want to participate they're welcome to sign up there it's going to be them and you know 150 of their closest friends so um so come on in i will be doing a smaller group coaching because clearly there's there's a call for this sort of thing i'll keep this going into january and i will really cap the membership then and depending how this goes into december um it's only for five weeks and i might split the group up i might do two separate groups so we can have a little more of an intimate experience it's just just an experience here's an interesting question and i don't know the answer to it from angela is jen's program tomorrow going to be available on replay for members of she she went ed and i i read it as erectile dysfunction but i realized ed is a steam dynamics i know it's a really unfortunate acronym and i i sometimes will start to use it and then i'm like no i can't call my own website ed uh yes it's it will be available in a replay um if you're in the living wisdom library and you're a member of our website it's also um for people who are already members of our website membership in this group is free which i think is part of why i have such high high memberships so um yeah the replays will be available i'll i'll post them somewhere on the esteem dynamics website in the membership section wow that's cool you know i want to know i i don't know your whole story but what came first the chicken or the egg and what i mean by that is did you end up going to true north to work and then meet dr lyle and become his business partner co-host of the podcast or did you know him and he brought you to true north um i i had been in conversation with him before so he i wouldn't say he brought me to true north but i definitely knew him we had connected a bit i talked about my dissertation with him a little bit um we we had a little bit of a pre-existing relationship but it wasn't until i really got there and you know he would come out and give his lectures every weekend and we would talk afterwards and and just kind of spin all of these like oh my goodness you touched on this concept and that's so interesting because it feeds into what i'm working on with political science here and so i think i was able to bring a different perspective to some things that he was interested in and i i found evolutionary psychology just an incredibly powerful modality for my intellectual work and for my personal life as so many people do when they come across it so we call it source code you know you may have heard us call it that before that you know when people first encounter this way of looking at the world and understanding themselves and human nature it just it dings this deep understanding that oh that's actually true like that really is the manual for human life and and it's not always pretty and it's not always what you want to hear particularly for women but it is it strikes a deep chord with people because it's it's speaking to very fundamental realities of human nature well do you know how lucky you are i mean like people like just like they're so jealous of you you get to write with him you get to be on his podcast i mean like you know chicks really dig him yeah well i pay the toll in the mansplaining so for all all the mansplaining that the world gets at large i get i get a much higher dose but no of course he's he's brilliant the mansplaining is also mostly brilliant and i am very very very fortunate to work with him so um if if there are any chicks out there who dig him who want me to fix him up you know make your case he's he's always looking i know well you know i've tried he's you know what well here's the thing you know he doesn't believe in astrology and i tell him that is because he's a verbal that's exactly why he doesn't believe which proves that astrology is real but virgos as you know the felix sanger of the zodiac they're very very picky very picky very yes very uh just very demanding yeah he's i you know i mostly regard astrology as a as a sort of a entertainment at this point in my life um but uh because it's it's my openness that keeps it in the catalog at all um but yeah you could not come up with a better cartoon virgo than dr lyle he's bad as virgo as they come i tease him about that all the time well we love him and we know he loves you okay let's see if there's any more questions here okay so let's get to the female sexual health question because i know i think it's a good one and i take it very seriously uh the lady that asked you know what she's it's anonymous she goes no one in the plant-based space really talks about sexual function in post-menopausal women they basically tell you not to take bioidentical hormones like estrase because of the cancer risk but they don't tell you what to do about having no sex drive or having painful sex the lubricants are not enough what are your thoughts and it is true because you know when i i interview a lot of doctors and that that comes up and most of them most of them are and they're not gynecologists either they say no don't take it you know because apparently i guess that helps stuff mm-hmm yeah well i will preface this by just reminding folks that i'm not a medical doctor and nor am i a clinical psychologist i'm a coach that is you know passionate about evolutionary psychology but my phd is in the social sciences so my my sort of ability to speak meaningfully to this is pretty limited in terms of giving actual medical advice but i can give the evolutionary perspective which is that you know we uh women over women post menopause was a there was a pretty uncommon situation in the stone age so we lived much shorter life spans in the stone age in general um and there was just you know it was not a very common situation for women to be leading active and certainly active sexual lives past menopausal age it just wasn't it wasn't something that we adapted to very um robustly and commonly so a lot of this is just it's sort of because of the modern environment and because of the light the lifestyles that we live now and and because we have managed to solve a lot of our ancestral problems with infectious disease and sanitation and everything else that leads to longer healthier lives where women are able to enjoy uh you know sexual experiences into into older age than they ever were in our ancestral history there's a little bit of a mismatch it's we always start an evolutionary psychology with looking at where's the mismatch between what we're actually successfully adapted to in the stone age and how the modern environment differs from the environment that we actually adapted to um and so you know this is this is a little bit of a mismatch it's going to be more of a mismatch for certain women with genetic predispositions to to these issues than others some some women are able to enjoy um you know they don't they don't see a lot of disturbance they don't have the the pain or any other issues that come in later in life a lot of women do so um i i don't think i have anything really meaningful to add other than what the plant-based doctors are already saying i would just sort of have people pull back a little bit and look at this as it's it's it's a problem of the species that we we did not adapt to the situation and so we have to solve it creatively just like we are going to solve any other problem creatively the lack of sex drive is um a almost universal situation with women again because this is part of our adaptive history so women postmenopausal women it's it's it's very very common for them to have their libido significantly drop off because women if they did live that long in the stone age were very much moving into more of a nurturing grandmothering role this is called the grandmother hypothesis in evolutionary psychology they were not continuing to um to serve as mates to the men in the village they they would generally have their last child at about 40 and that was about the point at which by the time that child was old enough to be on their own that was basically the length of time they were expected to live and so it would make sense for evolution to shut down the reproductive process at the time that you're having that last child right before your lifespan runs out so you're not having babies right before you die that would be that would be a mistake from evolution's perspective because there's no one around to parent the child so it all makes sense if you take the big picture of things and you look at us as successful animals who embraced certain reproductive strategies and evolutionary adaptive strategies to increase our reproductive success but again that's that's not necessarily the life that we want to live in the modern environment so i would take the the best nutritional advice and and do the best you can with what you have and and you know accept this to whatever degree you can as a as a unfortunate part of getting i thought you were going to say do the best with what you can and outsource the rest nothing wrong with that all this money well you know when you look at other animals they never have sex except for reproduction uh yeah not not universally but it is very common that most most species are just having reproductive sex so yeah we're we we have a recreational element which is a little unusual for the species that's so interesting well here this is this isn't this one i think you might do really well with this is from lena and it's more general it's not specifically about sex but she says how do i come to terms with the fact that i am aging and not gracefully uh well this is this is the question this is why i say that evolutionary psychology is sort of a rough ride for women in particular because you know you you start to kind of look at the whole situation of what we're really up to as a species the whole point of of being here the whole the general conceit of looking through life through an evolutionary lens which is what dr lyle and i do is that we are an animal who is here primarily we want to survive but we mostly want to survive because we're in the business of reproducing our genes into the next generation so that's really our job that's that's our entire purpose of existing it's not necessarily the meaning of life i like to make a distinction between the purpose and the meaning of life because the purpose is very clear the purpose for the human species is the same as it is for any other species it's you're trying to get that dna into the next generation to continue your genetic line um and but the meaning of life is you know that's a much broader more existential question and and we can talk about that that's that brings in a lot of other ideas and um important concepts but so you're you it's always you always have to kind of start like what is the purpose like why why am i here why did nature build me this way why why am i aging in a process that i find very uncomfortable and it's it's not ideal um and it all has to do with you you have you've done your genetic duty you know you this the sort of mate value that is associated with beauty early on in women's lives is something that diminishes over time because of these evolutionary impulses that i was talking about a minute ago and the shift that women were making into that sort of grandmother uh crone role in the village essentially so men are able to reproduce up until their dying day and women are not so this is just it's a trade-off that evolution made to have a more successful species and so as part of that we we wouldn't be bothered by these aging cues that we experience um in the same way that men are less bothered by them i mean men of course are often bothered by their aging queues but it doesn't it doesn't torture them at this in the same way that it tortures women because for women they're watching the most important part of their mate value decline um beauty is at the heart of of what men are seeking in a mate at least during that reproductive time uh we know this from cross-cultural studies uh that david bus has done and and just all kinds of evolutionary science all over the globe so you you're supposed to be feeling some anxiety and some depression about that because this is this is something that has historically been the most valuable asset that you have that is slipping through your fingers as you're as you're going through life so um this is just again the sort of is always helpful to understand where these feelings are coming from to contextualize them and depersonalize them a little bit it's the emotions are being generated by the fact that you were looking at your you're having a changing what we call cost benefit analysis on on your competitive standing in the world and you're realizing that your competitive standing has slipped a little bit relative to younger women in terms of competing for the same mates and that is inherently distressing and difficult and it causes a lot of of bad feelings to arise so that is supposed to happen there's nothing unique or or particularly terrible about your experience with that um and so i think that a big part of that is just having that awareness you know getting getting that um the personal insult of the process out of it and realizing that there are plenty of other things that are of great value in your life that the things that are important in relationships as we age um change from the things that are important in relationships when we're young and in that reproductive uh competitive scramble um and to focus on those things and building those kinds of connections with people who recognize what you have to offer and um you know continuing to invest in self-esteem processes that continue to encourage your competitive status in the world in ways that are not necessarily related strictly to that that beauty chip that is so important in youth do you think it's it's only about beauty jen because like i know like i think i look better now than i did when i was younger but i don't like aging for other reasons because things hurt that didn't used to hurt like i don't i don't see so good i don't pee so good so is is is it just about beauty or is it just that like you just can't do the things that you used to be able to do well yeah of course i mean any kind of you know physical debilitation is going to it's going to have the same it's going to work on the nervous system in the same sort of way so anything basically you can look at your emotions and your moods and your feelings about the world as a barometer of your competitive standing in the world and you know people sometimes get annoyed with us for talking this way because it feels very reductionist and low life is not just a competition but from an evolutionary perspective it really is because we're engaged in this battle of natural selection and sexual selection for survival of the fittest right so you can really kind of reduce it down to that notion um and the way that nature kind of worked this out is to let us know if we're on track or not um it gives it it shifts our feelings in response to how competitively successful we are at any given time and so things like not being able to pee very well and having aches and pains and all of the signs of aging that come along with that it's it's just hey you know i'm not the top of my game anymore like i'm vulnerable i'm i'm i'm in trouble relative to other people in this stone age village i require more assistance from other people i'm more dependent on other people all of those things are there they're troubling signals to be receiving because they they make you more vulnerable they take you out of that position of power in the stone age village and you realize that your well-being and your safety um are all dependent on others and and that generates as it should some anxiety and some hustle to maintain those relationships and to to sort of get better signals that guarantee your position within that stone age village so like you feel vulnerable sure yeah which we all we all are i mean that's um that is definitely true those signals are not coming out of nowhere um but you you were less vulnerable in the modern environment than your ancestors were in the stone age so in the stone age somebody did manage to escape infectious disease and getting eaten by a tiger up until their their 60s or so and they started to have the sort of more debilitating consequences of of getting older they were increasingly a liability to that village because the village was living on the edge of survival anyway and it really sort of needed everybody to be at their at their best and so as we get older you're you're constantly if you if you're if you don't have the mate value that you had when you were younger you're looking for substitute cues that you're not going to be neglected and forgotten if things go badly in the village if there's an invading tribe that is trying to you know take over your town if if you run into any kind of trouble if there's scarcity of any kind you you want to you want to be receiving signals from people that you are valuable you're not going to be left behind that people care about you and that you're important and those things those signals are important for us to generate happiness throughout our entire lifespan but the source of those signals changes as we age and our our perception of what is valuable about us also shifts with time you know you're from alaska is it true that they used to just put the old people out on an ice floe and send them off yeah i mean that is that is uh something that happened in certain cultures in in uh antiquity i don't think too much of that happens anymore but yeah i mean that's we will make apocryphal references to that like you you're no longer of use to the village and so you know we'll just leave you behind i mean this happened in all kinds of ways it happened it happened with children who had developmental disabilities it happened with um people who were wounded on hunts and in war they were they were left and so because it is in our ancestral history such a high cost um to not have people around us supporting us and taking care of us when we are vulnerable we are very highly attuned to looking for cues from other people that that's not going to happen because in our past all of our ancestors if that happened to them they were dead so we we've adapted these abilities to kind of scan the environment and and look at people and try to read body language and try to read all of the different things that they are they're letting us know about whether they're going to be there for us if we do break our leg out on the hunt or or we do get a little older and we can't keep up like we used to um so these are these are the things that actually are a big component of driving um human happiness because we we need to know that we're part of the group well you know it's interesting because i'm jewish and like my mother like she didn't get the memo about that because she was like you know a mother can take care of 10 children but 10 children can't take care of one mother like she just expected you know total care oh yeah yeah there are big cultural differences we talk about this a little bit in the book too um and and this is just i mean you're tracing the genes through you know generation after generation after generation and how how um strongly tightly knit those community bonds were and how much of your success um you know it differed depending on your cultural context your geographical context all kinds of things how how much competence you had to have if you did find yourself out on your own versus how dependent you were on the group so you will see that variation throughout the species even today that's interesting when you talk about that part of it is like grieving the loss of beauty how do you define beauty i mean is it different for what women and men and was it different in the stone age i guess my question is like is it more important that like a pretty face a nice figure and was it the same in the stone age yeah there are certain universal um cues of beauty that are cross-cultural so the real leading authority on this is david buss who is an expert on evolutionary human sexuality um and has written an amazing book called the evolution of desire if people are more interested in his work and where these ideas come from that we're not pulling them out of thin air so we know that there's great um great agreement cross-culturally on characteristics that are considered beautiful among women so um a certain uh a hip waist ratio for example you know we've all heard uh dr lyle talk about this i think we've talked about on other episodes the that is not an arbitrary characteristic the sort of hourglass shaped female what that is telling you is that that is a female who is not pregnant because she her her stomach is not sticking out past a certain point and she has literally child-bearing hips so you're you're looking for these fertility cues that's really the watchword of what signals beauty for women so anything that is associated with strong fertility is generally considered youthful that's beautiful which is why youthfulness is essentially synonymous with with beauty in in many many of our understandings and cross-culturally so there are definitely different distinct preferences from culture to culture you know some people value certain types of hair certain types of you know taller shorter or anything like that but those the sort of youthful fertility cues um cut across all cultures and that has been consistent for the entire species um and men it's a it's a little different i mean some of it is is similar where you know you can take a some of these studies that bus has are just remarkable because the you know you'll have a pile of 100 photos of of men or women and then you have the opposite sex kind of sort them by who's most attractive to least attractive and there's actually very tight agreement among people so nobody is looking at a photo of you know a guy let's call him george and nobody that group is not you don't have a split group saying oh well half of them think that he is the most attractive guy in the pile and half of them think that he's the least attractive guy that's not how it works they're going to coalesce around a range of attractiveness with that person um there are people are going to vary by a couple of points some people are going to think he's the 78th most attractive some people are going to think he's the 65th but it's not going to be this huge huge difference so all of this is with men and with women it's what we call mutation cues so how how different are they you know how how far off base are they um in terms of their their genetic health yeah nice um take a look at the chat there's something in there and i'm going to read this question from sharon it is uh for jen what does jen love most about being in hawaii what are her favorite foods there and what are her favorite things to do that she can get lost in and how often does she do that oh that's a really interesting question i'm i'm multitasking a little bit because i was as directed looking at the chat so i do i'll just get this out of the way because there are a lot of questions about um my my former relationship with dr michael greger um i really just would wish people would embrace the holiday spirit of kindness and compassion and um you know just kind of keeping gossip to yourself so uh this question you know doesn't i think this person does not understand that we're no longer together so i'm no longer being bombarded by questions about nutritional information but it gives me it just gives me the context you know i am i am human i see the comments i see the youtube comments i see people discussing and gossiping and not really knowing anything about the real situation and i will just put on my little disagreeable hat and ask you to please not do that and remember that there are humans involved who you know loved each other very much continue to love each other very much and it's complicated so thank you yep yes and when i asked the question that's why i put it in the desk um as for what i like to do in hawaii i mean it is i moved here in part because as someone who was born and raised in alaska i love the the outdoor environment i love anything outside um i love the ocean so i've been learning to paddle board that's been my new obsession so i i kind of came not knowing the first thing about surfing or paddle boarding and have been obsessed with learning to paddle boards so i'm very terrible at it i can't handle much of a much churn in the water at all but i find it very meditative and very very peaceful there's so much um you know you can kind of use it as a boat and go snorkeling off of it and look at turtles and look at fish and all kinds of cool stuff so i have been spending as much time as possible on the water i hike with my dogs i live in an area kind of up in the mountains with wonderful hiking trails and so i take them out every day and we go exploring and sniffing around and um you know foraging for for local food and all kinds of things so there's no limit of exciting really soul fulfilling things to do here have you had the i think it's called poi it's like brown it's kind of like pudding no uh not since i've been here i i have had it before um but i i haven't i actually haven't managed to find it here i you know sort of as the whole time that i've been here one or the other of us has been traveling and in quarantine and going out of quarantine and so when you have sort of traffic in and out of the house everybody has to quarantine at the same time and so um i haven't been out and about to many restaurants or anything like that so my activities have mostly been of the natural variety sort um but yeah yeah angela says how is your favorite sea turtle myrtle the turtle is doing very well i go i go and visit um there's a particular beach that i like to go to in the mornings and um yeah the the there's i think there's one particular turtle that i see all the time in a similar spot on that reef who likes to swim under the board and say hello so that's yeah yeah who's watching live says hi jen with the holidays coming up have you got any advice for dealing with narcissistic family members my family are so deliberately emotionally dysregulating i dread seeing them any advice well i'm not a doctor but i'd say don't go yeah our general piece of advice with with difficult family is to you know the first rule here is to just limit your exposure so if you've got toxic family members you you just want to limit the amount of time that you're spending with them so uh you know if you have to go like really i would i would take a moment and really reflect on whether you have to go or not so very often we get um tossed into these situations and and feel like uh you know we have this obligation by virtue of our personality so you might be very agreeable you might be very conscientious you might have gotten yourself into something where you're sort of um you feel like you have an obligation where really if you stand back and you take a hard look at that you don't you don't you're not really obliged to to do anything in particular for the holidays you don't have to spend time with anyone um if it is a case where you really can't get out of it and you really have to deal with these people um i would you know do everything you can to control your environment so this is this is the number one piece of advice with um staying out of the pleasure trap and it's applicable to all areas of life because you cannot control other people you all you can control is your environment so if you're visiting the family you know don't stay with them don't don't stay in the guest room where they're going to be waking you up at all hours and bugging you and you're going to be having all the issues that come with that go stay in a airbnb or stay with a friend or stay somewhere where you have some independence and then it's like okay you've got some amount of time that you have to spend with these people before you get through the holidays so we call this mathematizing the misery this is like you sit down and you actually calculate out okay i'm here for a week that's seven dinners and two brunches and three visits that i have to make to the house and so you actually go ahead and calculate out literally how many hours that is of time that you have to spend with these folks and then just start counting it off like you're you're a prisoner marking on the wall and that helps you kind of realize that it's not forever so much of our distress often comes from that feeling that you're um you you can't see the end of it you're sort of burdened by the situation and you feel like there's no way out and there's no light at the end of the tunnel and you're gonna be you're gonna be stuck forever so if you kind of create that container around it and you you can see that there is a light at the end of the tunnel it can help you get through the short term um that and the only other big piece of advice is to you know choose choose your battles recognize that a lot of conflicts that come up with family members are battles for status and if you can just accept that you don't need status and you're happy to kind of let them have it they can be right they can be blowhards they can say whatever they want if you're not fighting them for that status that is going to eliminate a lot of the inherent conflict and a lot of family problems so it's it's very as my meditation teacher used to always say would you rather be right or happy and so sometimes it's better to just let go of needing to be right especially if it's about lecturing people about a whole food plant-based diet or it's about anything else and it's just like you know what i'm just i'm i'm just here for the pie that's interesting because when you ask that question would you rather be right or happy my part of my brain said well of course i'd rather be happy but my behavior always is no i want to be right right well you've you've got that disagreeable bias in your personality it's very hard for you to kind of like not be right so even more important for you if you want to avoid those conflicts that are just guaranteed to be status battles zero-sum status battles this is like somebody somebody wins this somebody gets more accolades from the village and you just just roll over and let people have it and it it neutralizes the conflict immediately i can't do that yeah well then even more important for you to control your environment and just like limit those interactions i do i do so m watching live says i am now a normal bmi for the first time in my life congratulations and i am in my mid-30s and i'm now perceived as in my early 20s and beautiful by men how does one deal with this status change um interesting um well it's just gonna you're going to get more used to it with time so any kind of status change you know for good or for ill it takes some time to recalibrate so all of so much of what we're doing in life is we're we're basically little computers that are running inferences on how things are likely to go based on how things have gone in the past under similar conditions and so you haven't quite caught up the software hasn't caught up with the new hardware yet and so you just have to give it time you have to collect more evidence of how the world responds to you and what kinds of things you can expect as you as you go about these interactions with other humans and over over not too much time you will start to slowly recalibrate um it's it's a process that everybody goes through as they age and people definitely go through if they lose weight if they gain weight if they you know have any sort of major change that changes the way that people perceive them nice okay well speaking of gaining weight there where did this question go sorry i'm looking at two screens the ones that were emailed in okay it's right here okay why are um this is from what said don't say my name so almost did why are so many prominent people in the plant-based movement who have publicly chronicled their weight loss success stories now slipping and regaining weight uh because it's the pleasure trap so i mean we can start from ground zero with what the pleasure trap is and how tenacious it is and how almost nobody ever beats it but this is this is this is something that we are not adapted to deal with um and the fact that anybody can ever manage to beat it to any degree for any amount of time is nothing short of miraculous i mean this is this is an incredibly strong force of human nature it requires you to constantly override your most powerful instincts to defeat this thing um and so if people really want to understand how what the pleasure trap is and how it works there's a there's an abundance of material out there you can watch any of doug's talks on it tons of other resources so i won't go through the whole logic of the whole process but really people really underestimate what you're dealing with especially if you or a person with some egocentric bias about it not being too hard for you so there are certain types of personalities who they kind of hear the good word from on high of what to do and how to change their diet and they're like oh okay all done got it figured out and they're not dealing with genes that really want to gain weight and put on weight so if you're a personality that struggles a little more with doing the right thing in a consistent way and you have a genetic predisposition to put on and keep on weight um you are very you're you're you're facing it from all directions and it requires extraordinary vigilance to protect against that creep um and it's going to be it's going to be the norm that people are going to kind of go in and out of of states of success with this problem instead of just like solving the problem and being done for life this is this is something that uh is not just a problem for plant-based doctors it's a problem for everybody in the in the world who is trying to deal with this so i'm always trying to get people to change their mindset around this and realize that if this is a struggle it's going to remain a struggle there is no there's nothing that clicks for most people that just changes the situation overnight and you never have to worry about it or think about it or struggle with it or have relapses ever again this is a this is a three steps forward one or two steps back kind of process for the rest of your life so the idea is that you know success and failure are not not determined by anything other than how many times you pick yourself back up i mean that is really true when it comes to the pleasure trap it's true with with any kind of process where you are fighting your deepest genetic instincts against a force that you in no way are adapted to um cope with or or deal with effectively people are surrounded by a abundant environment of supernormal food that we are biologically engineered to be drawn to so it's incredible that people don't slip more often so the fact that they chronicled their journey in the public eye that doesn't make it easier or harder for this problem um it can it can have unintended consequences it can it can do both so some people if they do that it it sort of increases the cost of relapse a little bit so you know they sort of realize that they're being watched and that there's a village judging them um and that can go into the overall cost benefit analysis of how likely they are to to be able to fight their instincts and resist this thing um in other cases it can set up what we call the ego trap you know so people if they set those expectations too high for themselves um very often people will have this this situation where the expectations on them are so high that they don't believe that they can live up to them and consistently live up to them and so the correct evolutionary strategy becomes to actually self-sabotage to prove to the village that hey i'm not even trying i'm so far from trying that you don't even you can't judge me anymore um and so it can have some unintended reverse consequences if people are too public too early in their journey before they really have this figured out and consolidated there's a lot of enthusiasm and early energy that comes when people first initially change their diet they usually have a lot of early success they lose weight very easily especially if they have a lot of weight to lose and there's a strong impulse to share that with the stone age village because people are perceiving that there's a lot of status to be gained by sharing it um and then they get into it and they realize that they're there they've got the dragons at the door never go away like you may have sort of scared them away briefly and you feel like you're all safe but then they're back and they've brought friends and they've brought a battering ram and they're never going away they know they can follow you all around the world they know exactly where you are they actually learn your your weaknesses even better over time and that this is a lifelong battle that is going to be chronically very difficult for people and so once people kind of get to that zone and realize that's the case it can it can really become a self-defeating strategy to have been too public and too enthusiastic about an early journey great i'm glad you mentioned the ego trap because there's a question from eric about it this is the one i told you before i came on that i didn't ask dr lyle last time because i thought it might make him mad but i know even if you even if it makes you mad you won't get mad so he says i know that you and dr lyle talk a lot about the ego trap but i still don't understand how telling people to lower the bar is helpful doesn't it just give people a license to just keep failing and not do their best and then the people that could have done their best don't try as hard um yeah i mean this is this is a very you've got to account for personality when you're talking about something like the ego trap so you know we will generally give the advice that you don't want to set the bar too high because it can kind of create this feedback loop of of not being able to meet the expectations but every ego trap is a snowflake um it is it is a snowflake that is produced by the circumstances of the goal that somebody is trying to reach the the dynamics of the expectations that are put on them and that person's personality who's at the the heart of it so a lot of personalities are more susceptible to ego traps than others and it's all relative so you know you i i would never say across the board to set expectations low um you you you don't want to set expectations low across the board because for some people that is going to be very demobilizing but if you've got a situation where you have somebody who has been immobilized by their inability to make progress toward a goal because the feedback that they're getting is that the the external audience the the people in the village are expecting greater things from them than they can expect themselves then that is a moment where you may want to lower the goal and lower the signals of of what you are expecting from them to make it easier for them to close that gap so this is a very individual thing and i i think it's a little bit of a misunderstanding of the ego trap to sort of apply that widely and say oh we're just telling people to lower their expectations sometimes that's the right thing to do sometimes it's the wrong thing to do you really need to know who you're dealing with and what the circumstances are okay great this is from danica why are people so emotionally charged by the political arena and the people who deny that covet is a problem and refused to wear masks i think the political charge goes both ways so um yeah you definitely have people who are uh all fired up by the coveted deniers that's that's like their that's the main thing that gets them going and i think what you're seeing there is you're seeing very high conscientiousness that's looking at behavior in public that to the to that conscientious nervous system feels like a huge mistake that's going to get the whole village killed right so this is this is the same sort of thing you've got those conscientious genes those are the same conscientious genes in the stone age that we're watching people eat rotten meat and being like what are you doing stop stop eating the rotten meat you're gonna make yourself sick you're gonna die you're gonna this is gonna be a disaster stop like that's bad throw it out so you've got you've brought those genes into the modern environment and you've you've tossed them into a a a democracy where people can kind of get away with doing whatever they feel is best for themselves and you're you're watching that process of people um sort of pursuing their their own goals in ways that are very much at odds with what you perceive as the most successful the most important thing for the collective i mean this is just this is the paradox at the heart of living in a free democracy where people are regularly going to do things that we perceive as costly to the collective and so whatever you perceive is costly to the collective today i.e people not wearing their masks in public maybe maybe that is correct maybe that is a costly behavior to the collective but you you can flip the scales and those people are going to perceive some of your behavior as being costly to to to the collective at some point down the road so this is sort of a situation where to to live in harmony with people who are very different from us see the world very differently from us um is inherently very charged because these are life and death stakes as far as our stone age brains are concerned and maybe life in life and death stakes um in the modern environment as well but unless you were willing to embrace a higher degree of tyranny this is sort of par part of the deal of living in um a modern democracy where people are free to be idiots if they want to be idiots and people are free to to pursue their own goals in their own ways short of authoritarian direction not to right here's a question from somebody who's a health coach and she says why are so many people really struggling with food and weight loss issues during the pandemic and how can we best be of service of them you know are they really struggling any more than they are with the pleasure trap at any time or are they using the pandemic as an excuse yeah i've seen um sort of a lot of data on this question there were some really early studies that showed that actually they're really interesting studies they were looking at the the actual data that was uploaded to the cloud by everybody's smart scales so so everybody who's using smart scales somebody got a hold of this and was able to aggregate it and this was fairly early in the pandemic but the weight gain was not that high it was you know half a pound a pound something like that over the first couple of months from those people and of course you could say well there's selection bias because those are people who are weighing themselves every day so they're more likely to be on track et cetera et cetera but the the data that i have seen of the the sort of the average 20 pound weight gain or these sort of other things that you'll see that's also pretty questionable so you'll see that like a study commissioned by weight watchers will say that or similar sort of sources so i think we actually don't know if it's true that people are struggling more than at other times during covid definitely anecdotally a lot of people are but i think it is uh in large part this is the pleasure trap the pleasure trap is always there and the the dragon has found a new way into your house behind this pretext of oh it's unusual times it's coveted i can't get to the grocery store they don't have my usual stuff all of this is it's it's equivalent to somebody who is trying to stay out of alcohol you know having to get a job at a bar and starting to drink because they're in the bar it's it's just it's increased the proximity it's increased the likelihood it's increased the excuse making and so it doesn't mean that people aren't struggling more and haven't regained and that because it is more difficult to uh figure out the best efficient ways to kind of get in the groove in ways that help you escape the pleasure trap it's it's the covet itself is not the culprit the pleasure trap is and always is the culprit i love it thank you so uh debbie says i can't seem to go grocery shopping without buying sweets and pastries that i love so much and it is causing my weight to creep back up 15 years ago i lost 55 pounds but 20 pounds have crept back on and i can't seem to control myself any suggestions i say get the groceries delivered yeah the pandemic yeah i mean again this is sort of the theme of the day is it's the pleasure trap i mean that stuff is in the store it's not going anywhere you're going to keep buying it if you keep going to the store and you keep kind of having it regularly enough that your nervous system is expecting it you're having the cravings you're in the condition cram all of those sorts of things make it you've got to you've got to radically change your environment slash behavior to just rule this out as a possibility so yeah order your groceries from instacart for a month and you know don't allow yourself to include it on the list you just you have to get out of that immediate you have to get through that immediate withdrawal period um and and have a little more control over your um immediate tendencies and those those crazy cravings that follow immediate withdrawal just like you do with any addictive substance great uh let's see i just saw something from kathy is the zen with jen moments of gen would then via zoom i signed up but didn't get a link i'm not sure where to go saturday can you help um it is via zoom so if you've signed up in the last day or so i need to i need to send out another batch um of the forwarded email with the link because i've had people kind of sign up at various points and this is very kind of low-tech operation so i've just been manually forwarding the email as we go if you signed up a while ago and you haven't gotten a link then it maybe it didn't get to you somehow i will today i'm going to email the whole list the link again and if you don't get it by the end of the day just email me directly and i will be sure that you have it it is it's a private zoom length okay great you know the ones that are having struggles i wonder if their environment is clean you know the ones that are saying because of kova they're gaining weight i wonder what their house is like oh yeah most people i've talked to who have struggled in covid are their their media environment is not clean so they have kids they have a spouse they have they have trashy food around um and this is just like it's not supposed to be easy it's not like i never would have gotten sober from alcohol if i had continued to go buy a six-pack and leave it in the fridge and just like oh i'm not gonna drink it like it just doesn't it doesn't work that way you've got to get it out of your nervous system's calculation about whether it's a good idea to go get into it because if it is there your nervous system is always going to decide that it's a good idea to go get into it it might fight for a long time you might spend the whole day fighting that craving and devoting a lot of time and energy and to know it's not a good idea no i don't want to do it no it's like that's that's not in my best interest but if it's still there by 10 o'clock at night you're going to get into it you're going to wear down all your defenses and it's going to happen so unless you have extremely unusual conscientiousness and perhaps extremely unusual motivation uh it's even if you get away with it for one day or one week this is this is something you can never count on your willpower when it comes to the pleasure trap you your willpower functionally does not exist you have to control your environment all right that's what i've been saying since i learned that from dr lyle ten years ago get upset when you say that you know i some funny because some of my clients actually have lost weight for the first time because of the restaurants being closed yeah yeah the restaurants are closed the social pressures are gone you know before kova the most common thing that dr lyle and i would hear about why people couldn't lose weight is because of all the social pressures they you know they're going out to lunch at work and they they have family members who want to get together once a week and go out and they're either pushing the the bread and the you know oily dishes on them and so now all of that's gone and so it's just you and your kitchen and your food and so if you're still struggling it you have to stand back and look at what kind of role is the pleasure trap playing in your life because it i can guarantee that if you've gained weight during covid there's pleasure trap food sneaking in under the gate somewhere somewhere you're not eating potatoes and kale i just guarantee it so you might be you might be maintaining weight on potatoes and kale because your balance of potatoes to kale is out of out of you know it's a little too calorie dense but you're not going to be gaining weight eating that way so somewhere if you if you get out the magnifying glass and you're rigorously honest with yourself there's pleasure trap crap getting in under under the door absolutely maybe we need two playbooks uh weight loss for introverts and weight loss for extroverts yeah yeah i mean it's a different set of problems this is why uh you know doug has that great talk called the perfect personality it's you really need to understand who you are and what your personality liabilities are when it comes to solving the pleasure trap problem solving any kind of problem so if you're an extrovert that's a different set of of challenges that are going to come with that in terms of staying compliant to a healthy diet than if you're an introvert same if you're disagreeable versus agreeable all the way down the line nice so matt says hi jen from an evolutionary psychology point of view why would someone identify as asexual with no sexual interest whatsoever but is able to acknowledge beauty in humans um so genuine asexuality is part of the human sexuality spectrum just like you know so many different things are so that we can kind of talk on balance about what the most successful reproductive strategies of the species are on average but you've got you've got bell curves of characteristics that fall across the entire population and that includes a lot of a lot of people on those tail ends with different characteristics so there are not that many people you know at the tail end of the bell curve who identify as asexual um but there are some and and so you know that that has traditionally been um associated in communities with sort of a uh its own kind of authority those those sorts of people are sort of above the reproductive fray and they can call upon more divine authority they can call upon they have like this shamany kind of role they're they're in connection with things that are that are beyond the hurly-burly of the normal human experience so this is why you see vows of celibacy in a lot of religious traditions etc so so there is an evolution there's a there's a small evolutionary strategy associated with asexuality um there may be different strategies associated with people who are not truly asexual but who have come to identify in that way out of um sort of competitive defeat in the mating arena so you know people who we we call this this is actually part version of the ego trap that we call we call the enlightenment trap but it can take the form of of sort of a withdrawing from the mating arena as well so if you meet with competitive failure after competitive failure after competitive failure and you start to kind of come to this conclusion that yeah you're not going to find anybody suitable to meet with you there can be a sort of a logic to withdrawing from the game entirely and saying you know what i actually i'm not even interested i i'm not interested in romantic interaction i am much happier um just appreciating the beauty of the world and uh staying above all of that trouble so it could be could be a little column a little column b it just depends on the individual situation great okay i lost one question so i'll go up to another one from emily i still have cravings even though i haven't eaten off-plan food in months much less cravings than before but still there is this normal yeah it's it's normal i mean this is your it's it would be the wrong thing for your brain to do to completely forget about the really exciting food entirely so the craving will die way way way way down over time but it's the right thing for your brain to do to occasionally just market test the idea be like are you sure are you sure you don't want that thing because it's linked to so much pleasure so um the same thing will happen for somebody who's quit cigarettes for someone who's put alcohol anything else that you can you can get that sort of um extinction curve of the addictive behavior of the of the pavlovian conditioning paradigm you can get the craving down to almost zero but it's never going to actually be zero because you have you have created a dopamine pathway in the brain that occasionally the nervous system is just gonna cycle back around and test for vulnerabilities that that would be the right thing to do so um you know i i had this experience i was in the grocery store the other day um getting ingredients for super healthy pumpkin pie i was making kathy fisher's pumpkin pie um and so you know i had to get some nuts but only enough nuts for the recipe um and everything else and of course it's holiday time at the grocery store and so it's just like it's a pleasure trapapalooza right i mean there's flashing lights everywhere about all the exciting things that are happening i'm obviously you know feeling emotionally crappy so i'm sort of susceptible to self-medicating a little bit to get a little dopamine drip of happy food and so i'm in that susceptible state where the dragons start to they're like hey wake up wake up she's vulnerable you know this is what happens um this is this is when people talk about emotional eating this is part of what that sequence looks like this is the nervous system looking for a set of vulnerabilities where it makes sense from an evolutionary perspective to get into something that's super normal so i fought one pleasure trap battle after another i was like no i'm not getting that no i'm not getting that no i'm not getting that get away from it and then i watched in amazement as my brain market tested the idea of alcohol for the first time in many many years it was like well okay if you don't want the ice cream and you don't want the pizza and you don't want that and you don't want this then yeah what do you think about what about wine when was the last time you thought about wine i it just came out of nowhere it was amazing and so i have enough you know i've been sober for seven years it was not a it was not a white knuckle craving in the sense that i'm like actually considering it and i have enough psychological mindedness that i i sort of was just able to stand back from that and watch that process but that's what happens that is like that is the brain hunting around for where can we find the lowest hanging fruit of pleasure that we can we can feed into this nervous system um and it will continue to do that it never never completely goes away your your best strategy is to control the environment to not have those cues to not be in the grocery store sort of looking around to you know let these things pound on your nervous system so um yeah it does get better over time but it's this is this requires lifelong vigilance which goes back to the question of why people regain why do people relapse you know why does philip seymour hoffman relapse after decades of sobriety this is why it's you don't solve you don't solve addiction you manage addiction and it requires a daily vigilant struggle so you don't necessarily have to you know go to an aaa meeting and declare your your your surrender to a force greater than yourself whether it's for alcohol or doritos or anything else but you have to maintain your vigilance and and as soon as you let it down and you let this stuff under the door it's it's going to come for you that's right yeah i love that pleasure trap of palooza i never heard that that could be your next one terrific like flashing lights you know is there a tendency towards body is is a tendency towards body dysmorphia a function of high conscientiousness if so what are the ways to manage it yeah it's much more common um with with high conscientiousness so essentially high conscientiousness is always um along with agreeableness which they often travel together you will see people kind of systematically undervaluing themselves so high conscientiousness is is finding flaws where they don't exist you know you're you're looking at a painting and it's like it's really good except for that tiny little flaw right there so this is this is just the nervous system and if you have it yourself you're going to be turning that lens that critical lens on yourself much more often than somebody who's not as conscientious um so yeah it's it's this is again dysmorphia is related to all of the ancestral impulses that women in particular have to get signals of their of their beauty and their enduring mate values so you were you were particularly concerned about it because it is so linked to that entire process um so the the people who i've worked with who have the best tools against dysmorphia is that they they have somebody um that they really really trust you know they have a husband they have a really good friend who can kind of keep track of the counter evidence against against their case for dysmorphia and confront them with it you know on occasion so no actually remember this you know you you were distorted you were seeing yourself in a fun house mirror this is not who you really are let me remind you of this time where you know you you loved yourself and you saw yourself as you really are i see you as you really are this is really the only thing that people can combat it because you can't you can't retrain the mind out of that sort of hyper conscientious self-criticalness it's just always there all you can do i mean this is the theme of what we've talked about it's all about having the awareness of the distortion and and therefore being able to step back from it a little bit and take a bigger view of it rather than just being sort of pushed and pulled around by it um the distortion does not have to be in charge of you if you can be aware that it is there and it's trying to tell you what the world looks like but it's not reality it's it's the goggles that you're wearing on the world nice okay one more question bailey wants to say hello hi bailey the cutie pants dogs are awesome aren't they they're so they're just wonderful yeah they're my favorite one of my favorite people he was snizzling in the sun right now yeah i love her little bow that's so simple because people always thought she was a boy so we started yeah that's great anthropomorphizing making here girl okay so cynthia says what are some strategies to lessen anxiety regarding chronic health concerns yeah this is um again this is this is mindfulness so this is a lot of what we're talking about with mindfulness and awareness and stepping out of the distorted space is kind of um what are often just known as cognitive behavioral therapy techniques so it's it's about isolating the the thoughts that are torturing you so much so if you've got that anxiety the anxiety is being driven by a series of thoughts that are being generated by a mind that is trying to make you more competitive so you were you were a creature in the world that is uh very concerned about remaining competitive because that is the only way that your ancestors were able to survive and reproduce and so if you were in a situation now where you have a chronic health issue the mind is going to be looking through that ancestral lens going i'm not as competitive i'm compromised i have i have this issue therefore i'm going to generate a lot of anxiety about it in the hopes that i can shift it somehow and be more competitive so it's it's about isolating that that set of you know stinking thinking as they say um and just getting very curious about it and interrogating it a little bit and trying to discover how much of that thinking is based in reality how much of it is anything that you can do anything about can is there any way that you can shift the needle with your situation around your health um to to improve the situation and if there's not then it then it becomes this sort of process of slow acceptance and not being completely at the mercy of that thinking so this is it's not it's it's simple but not easy as they say so but the the first step is just kind of like realizing that you are not that thought wow well thanks this is this hour has gone very very fast if you guys can't get enough of dr jen then come tomorrow i'm posting the link many times moments at jen would send this in general we need this especially now it's at 5 pm pacific time it's five for five weeks right yeah yeah it's three i think the last one is january 2nd so um and i i think i will probably continue doing something like it into january so if it doesn't work now because of holiday craziness or anything else um just keep keep an eye out and i'll be re-running something similar in general this is like the perfect time because this is when a lot of people are struggling and i love 5 p.m pacific time because that's my dinner hour so this is yeah yeah i had to i know that's an inconvenient time for people particularly internationally but um with my own schedule the way it is this month it had to be that time or nothing um but everything will be on replay so if you if you miss it in person then you're certainly welcome to watch the replay that's terrific and if you can't make it we hope you will at least click the link and check it out dr jen hawk will be back with dr doug lyle the first of the year and they are on the 15th of january i know that because i haven't memorized well this has been so much fun thank you so much it's just so fun talking to you because the background it's just it's very relaxing watching you oh yeah i'm sorry there was like a weed whacker back there for some amount of time but that's like always happens anytime i'm on a zoom call so yes it's it's you did a really interesting one the last on your youtube channel you have a youtube channel jen hawk and you did something very smart that it's hard now to do because i've had my youtube channel for 10 years and i was advised not to but you have your comments disabled which is like the most brilliant thing and but you were wearing a this this is my favorite mug this was a gift from dylan dylan holmes and reebs and i i mean i tell you people like i don't care you might be saying nice things in the comments right now i'm never going to see it because for every every 100 nice things the one shitty thing is going to drive me nuts so and i just my nervous system like that too but i was advised that after 10 years it's not so good so so but my question was is this uh the last one you did it was about pre-lapse you had a shirt on that i loved it was a black shirt with open shoulders where did you get that black shirt with open you just had like an open shoulder black i loved that shirt uh where did i get that i don't remember somewhere in santa rosa maybe maybe macy's probably macy's i didn't do much clothes shopping in santa rosa other than macy's so that would be my hypothesis but it's a couple years ago anyway so yeah anyway i just wanted to let you know oh you're so sweet yeah i really like that sorry i didn't mean to give you a compliment but i but i said i really like because those are the kind of shirts that i like so yeah i know they're very yeah i like that one so yeah absolutely all right well thank you so much dr jen hawk thank you all for watching another episode of chef aj live if you come back tomorrow at 11 a.m we have another great show a cooking demo with elle smith feldman she's been on the show many times she's the speedy vegan and she's going to be making recipes from my new book own your health aloha dr hawk aloha
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