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Episode 124: Stress in the modern world vs stone-age
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this week we're going to be talking about the fractured village and I heard dr. Lisle I heard you talk about the fraction bill it's a long time ago and the question was where distress come from and I wanted to ask you today where does stress come from and why is the stress nowadays different than stress in the Stone Age well let's talk about this stress comes from having a goal that in having some some value that we're seeking and we're getting we're getting blocked by some kind of a challenge and so very often a component of that a major major challenge is is going to be time now time isn't going to be the only factor that results in stress but it's a major one you can imagine also someone that's trying to lift their car to try to get their child out from under it that's being crushed that person's under stress so they're there that's not a time pressure situation that's a do I have the resources available to me in order to accomplish this goal that's that's what this is so one of the major resources that will continually come up for people will be time pressure that makes sense the reason is is that most people's goals do not depend upon them suddenly sprouting wings or having abilities that they wouldn't normally have the reason why you have the goals that you have is that your self the area of your brain that I call the self as I divide the brain into the esteem mater the self and the internal audience it's my my tripartite method of understanding human motivation the self is a set of ideas knowledge etc about what it is that you are capable of doing in the world that includes your ability to lift a rock it also built about your ability to pick up on a girl in a bar so these things have to do with you visa visa nature and your abilities as well as you visa vie competitive problems in the human marketplaces so yourself generally sets goals for you in in in as you try to obtain or protect things that are valuable to you it it sets those goals in a way that are reasonable and the goals may be high and there may be great value in seeking them they may be modest in terms of a goal to get out the card start the car and go down to the grocery store so you could say well where would stress be in getting going out to the car and going down the grocery store the answer would be and get back in 11 minutes before the big game starts now we put it under time pressure so stress comes from factors in a goal seeking situation that are reducing the perceived probability of success so you you might want to think of it this way that suppose you have a young child who is learning trying to learn how to tie their shoelaces if they are if they are struggling with this and they're starting to get it so they can do it right you know some of the time they're getting it and then the mom you know can't resist bragging to her friends look at little Julie she can tie her shoelaces now and now Julie feels the pressure of the social situation in the possible status loss and isn't sure that she can tie her shoelaces it feels to her like it's about a 50/50 proposition that she might be able to do it that kid is under stress okay now what stress does is it's essentially organizing attention and priorities to try to marshal all available resources to direct towards getting that goal the goal is worth having or we wouldn't be under stress about it in other words it wouldn't be important enough to generate stress so we tend to think it stress is a negative thing for some reason but it isn't it's a it's an inevitable component of a situation where we have a goal and that is important to us a value that we're seeking and the perceived probability success is less than a hundred percent now let's let's fast forward 15 years and we have a completely normal child who has been tying her shoelaces now for 15 years and mom says to her friend look at little Julie look at Julie she can tie your shoelaces it's like for God's sakes mom of course I can dry my shoelaces like what kind of a stupid thing is that and the answer is of course there is no stress in fact let's suppose they're on a little hike and they say Julie your tote shoes are untied can you tie your shoelaces and she's she has under no stress at all tying her shoelaces because her perceived probability of success of tying the shoelaces is 100% now let's go to a basketball player in a big game and his shoe comes off or shoelaces are untied and he's in the middle of a play and then the play stops and then they're moving forward again and everybody's running down the court and now he is under stressed to tie his shoelaces under a specified narrow window time window so now we have the stress in the system so stress is a psychophysiological event in that involves both mental and physical components that are that are essentially directing attention and energy towards a goal to increase the statistical likelihood of success in pursuit of that goal so if you look at the different flavors of human feeling around these issues you're going to find that if there's an important goal and the person it appears that the person is that the odds of that goal are slipping away or factors are conspiring to make it less likely that they are going to achieve or keep that value then what you're going to experience is anxiety so anxiety you want to think of this on a continuum so this is the continuum that I want people to sort of have in their mind to understand this on the far left of the continuum is going to be just think of it as a is a line a line segment so on the far left of the line is going to be what we're going to call depression so we're going to be depressed when the perceived probability of success of us gaining or defending an important value appears to be very low so that's when the nervous system is signaling depression and it's basically giving up on expending energy and pursuit of this goal that's when you realize your girlfriend's dumped you and she's not coming back okay that's depression you're perceived probability of success that she's ever coming back is close to zero or very low and so therefore you don't feel like doing anything you're not going to call her you've already called her 42 times you already showed up at her work you already dead all these other things that you did to try to get the relationship and finally the door is so clearly shut that it's not going to open okay that's depression we're going to move up the scale from very low perceived probability of success to low perceived probability of success so let's just put some numbers on this three percent chance of success we're depressed you know 18 percent chance of success we're anxious we're under high anxiety here depending the degree in acuity of the depression or anxiety or stress or ultimately excitement is going to be dependent upon the survival and reproductive value of the goal that we're talking about so essentially how does that we're feeling is going to be a relationship between two factors it's essentially a two factor equation the first factor is our perceived probability of success which is essentially our we we have a word for that called confidence okay Albert bandura for students of psychology calls this perceived self-efficacy and he jumped up and down in his career and swore at anybody that said hey it's not confidence don't don't take my words and call them confidence because it's not the same thing well it isn't exactly the same thing but it is they are intimately related the perceived probability of success is the deep mental algorithm that churns the probabilities and confidence is the result of those computations so they are they are different manifestations precisely the same thing which is why people would get sloppy and use those interchangeably and you know much to bender as frustration so it is your perceived probability of success which is felt as confidence okay that is one factor the other factor is what is the degree of the survival and reproductive value that is on the table okay is it a little hand in a blackjack table in some casino that's five dollars okay if that's what it is then we're not going to expect that the stress excitement or depression level is going to be very significant okay now you might say well it depends on whose five dollars it is because if I work in in rural Mexico and I earn a dollar in hours as a carpenter then five dollars is a very big deal so I don't want to do to act like five dollars is nothing depends on who you are in the world but the point is is that if it represents a very small perturbation in your survival reproductive assets then we would expect that the amount of excitement or depression or anxiety or stress associated with the outcome is going to be very low if the value is very high it looks like the love of your life it's the biggest business deal you ever saw it's whether or not you get the big grade that's going to give you a big score that's going to get you into Harvard Law School okay if it's going to be something that has major impact on your survival and reproductive process then then that factor is enough that even if you're perceived probability of success is very high like 90% you could still be quite anxious okay because essentially what we see is that there's a lot to lose potentially so you can have so these feelings we use words to describe what are not in fact discrete processes it is a continuum of a process that goes from depression and then we go up the scale of proceed probability of success we go to anxiety then we go up the next notch as to what we call stress so stress is kind of where we're in what I'm going to call 50/50 land like if you really push hard and you marshal all of your resources your odds success are pretty decent and it's a big deal whether or not you put out that energy if you put out that energy we might be able to get ourselves up to 65% chance of success if we don't put out the energy it's going to be down to 35 now the question is what's on the line if it's $5.00 I'm you know what I just soon flirt with the girl next to me at the blackjack table and not even think too hard about it because there aren't a lot of consequences so I'm not under much stress and it's not even marshalling all my resources there's something else that is marshalling my resources I'm more stressed about that than I am about the blackjack hand okay but if it is a very big deal if a lot of chips are on the line so to speak then what's going to happen is the stress response is a psycho physical process that Orient's your energy and your attention to trying to statistically increase your likelihood of success that's what stress is okay now we're going to see that as you move from 50/50 and we move it up to 80 or 90 we're gonna have a different word for that and that word is excitement okay so that word is oh my god I think we're gonna win this big one oh my god I think I'm gonna get that job oh my god I think I'm gonna get that date okay when we think that we're going to be successful at something that is of great value then our excitement level is very high okay so you can watch all of these things interplay in a big athletic contest very easily so you can watch this whole process and there's one more when you get all the way to a hundred percent perceived probability of success what you get is boredom so this is why our girl had no interest in showing off that she could tie her shoelaces in front of her mom's friends when she was eighteen or twelve or even nine okay of course I can do it and so there's there's no chips on the line here even if the chips are large we're going to find that it's boring so let's suppose that you are I don't know a New England Patriots fan and so you're watching the Super Bowl again in Tom Brady's in there again okay and so now what happens is you're all excited and so it's a very exciting game for the first quarter and then you start to get a head and then they fumble and you return a touchdown and then you pick off an interception you run another one back and pretty soon it's like thirty five to three and it's halftime what's going to happen is it's going to be boring now are you going to still feel some excitement yes because we're going through a process where we quote gained in terms of a survival reproductive value if you're a fan in theory use just statistically increased you're likely to getting laid if you're a guy that's why your testosterone is twice as high as it was in the beginning of the game and now you're a group it looks like is going to lay waste to the other people from the other side of the river and you're going to be able to rape and pillage so this is like genetically cool now the the thing is is that we're going to find that your excitement is going to wane and pretty soon we're going to be looking at those Super Bowl ads and talking to our buddies about what you're good at and what isn't a good ad and whether or not Cheetos is the funniest one or the one about Ford okay in other words it's not very important it's not very interest the whole thing isn't very exciting because it's already basically done that's boredom so people will find this in their careers they'll find it in their relationships they'll find it in a card game they'll find it anywhere the boredom is the signal that we no longer have a lot of chips on the one that there's not a lot to be gained or lost in this process because our perceived probability success of managing whatever the variance is on wins or losses it makes it effectively material so now we circle our way back to stress and people in the modern environment whether the modern monuments are stressful and whether they're stressful in a different way than it was miss Doane age etc the answer is yes the stresses are different than they were in the Stone Age and the stressors are are much more benign in terms of what was at stake they're sort of calm they're kind of like it's the difference between living in a in a land we have to cross rivers and there's a bunch of these nasty leeches that get on you and suck your blood and it's dangerous versus living having a nice yeah I don't know an Airstream trailer in a national park and then going out and and complaining about the mosquitoes very different level of stress so in the Stone Age the stresses are pretty damn serious and the the problems between people in terms of when they can feel violent are very scary and disturbing a lot of men killed each other in the Stone Age and do kill each other in Stone Age villages today over territorial disputes particularly involving females etc this is uh so it was high-stakes dangerous absolutely stressful you also had real-life stresses of real live hunger so in other words there's there is a lot of stress in the Stone Age today the stressors are different mostly they're about time pressure so it's going to be that pretty much everything that everybody wants to do that is on their goal sheet to get done is pretty well very doable the only question is can I fit it all in okay that really becomes the issue and so probably the biggest problem that we find when people are quote stressed out is that they are that they are actually over their time-pressured and their nervous systems are are actually a burdened with this process so that is why this is most likely to going to be the case when we're dealing with people that are are actually very agreeable so these people are much more likely to wind up getting getting pressured in in relationships where they're going to get overburdened as people are going to continue to try to take their time from them and these people are going to have a very difficult time saying no okay so this is why on my website I have a lecture called success forces and it's all about trying to figure out how to protect your time from the fact that if you're an agreeable type of person particularly with high conscientiousness it's very likely that you're going to be in a situation where you're where your life is going to be overburdened and you're going to be put in time pressure the the reason why this is going to be more likely to be the case than it would have been in the Stone Age environment is this nice conscientious people in the Stone Age environment when their schedules were full everybody could see it and when people would push and pull on on their behavior to try to get more out of them it was obvious that they couldn't do so and that they were actually already fully scheduled and there isn't anything more that they could do because big Pete had them I don't know gutting catfish and they can't get anymore catfish and they can't do any more for you right now because their hands are literally full and the modern environment you can't see big Pete okay and you can't see that the boss is actually pressuring the person to stay late that the pastor wants them to volunteer again for the bizarre and they need a bunch of work out of them in other words the village is fractured and because the village is fractured every little potentate in that person's life can be pushing them and they are targets because they are agreeable in conscientiousness they are targets to try to suck a little bit more energy out of them they become actually very good targets for the energy expenditure of pushy people to try to negotiate them and intimidate and pressure them into givin up some of their time okay so this becomes the great stress of the modern environment so if people will sit back and look at why they feel overburdened and stressed today they're not being chased by by you know gorillas they are not facing life-and-death type of circumstances at all they aren't facing the most that they're going to face is a snarling legal battle or a ticket from a cop they're not actually facing in this magnificent country they're not facing the kinds of problems that even remotely resemble problems that we would have been common in 1900 much less ten thousand years ago but what we do have is time pressure and the time pressure is essentially takes things that we're very capable of doing and it moves them down the scale down into that stress level where I'm not sure I can get it all done okay and then people will feel anxious when there are significant losses that are taking place because they can't get it all done and they feel anxiety and then when they're completely overwhelmed they feel depressed this is what we call quote a nervous breakdown that it's just kind of I don't even know why people call it that but it's basically like I'm done I just can't I can't even do it and I just I'm wiped out I mean smoking a million cigarettes I tried to get it all together and I'm just exhausted and I don't feel like doing anything and I'm just depressed as hell okay maybe even feel suicidal so this is this is what this is so that is that is the nature of stress so people can can take a tip from this and realize that the solution to a life that has got a lot of stress in it and therefore less excitement not much boredom and somewhere in the sweet spot between excitement and boredom is going to be a nice spot that we could all call happiness it's a mood of happiness certainly excitement as a mood of happiness the but there's a place where where we can see that our team has won and that our perceived probability that the team is going to win is so high that it's really not boring quite it's pleasant in joyful and it's working and we're happy ok that's a nice spot what we want to do is we kind of want to live our lives pushing away from boredom incidentally the whole purpose of having boredom as a specific emotional event is to tell the organism that the goals now are too low ok that you are not reaching for enough that you have grit you're perceived probability of success is too high it's effectively 100 percent and that that means it's quite likely that you are wasting some of your potential and you could be more successful or you could you can be more successful in terms of achieving survival and reproductive values by by lowering your odds of success but raising the bar in terms of the difficulty and the value that you're seeking so that's how that's going to work so boredom is a signal to tell you you know the guy's not cute enough you're not making enough money you're the school that you're in isn't challenging enough literally the high jump bar isn't high enough in other words that's what boredom is telling you that the bar is not high enough ok happiness is the bar was high enough we've achieved it feels really good excitement is I'm not sure I can get there but I think I can get there and this is really cool it's reaching to the upper limits of my abilities ok stress is I'm not sure I can get there I would really like to and I think there's a possibility but it's going to take everything I've got and I'm not sure I can do it ok anxiety is I would love to do it and I thought I could have done it but it looks like I'm not going to be able to do it I'm not so sure that I can okay and depression is I would have loved to do it I thought do it I put a lot of energy out and it looks like I can't do it okay none of these things is a tragedy so we tend to look at something like stress and say ooh that's a bad thing it kills people which it doesn't okay we look at depression and say ooh what a bad thing you have we have to chemically medicate your brain because you know that's a disease no it's not okay ooh you've got anxiety that's a bad thing we've got to chemically medicate that and get rid of it no it's not all of these things are evolutionary engineered signals to try to orient the organism in a way that is optimal for gene survival that's what they are okay we can we need to interpret them and understand them and then when we have a lot of things sort of the left of the middle if we're experiencing a lot of depression and anxiety and a lot of stress and not much excitement and not much happiness and not much boredom then it means that we are overburdened for some reason so the notion is that we want to live our lives ideally somewhere between the high end of anxiety in other words lowish anxiety what you call stress all the way up through excitement and happiness and then occasionally boredom that's what we would like you cannot get to excitement without getting to stress there is no way you can be smart enough about setting your goals in a way that it turns out they're all it's going to be exciting and you did better than you thought and it looks like we're going to do it and it's going to win there's no way that you get to reach that place on the graph without more often reaching the place called stress okay so stress is an inevitable byproduct of the goal mechanisms that humans have and it's there's nothing inherently wrong with it and some of my colleagues who have written best-selling books and talked endlessly about what a terrible thing stress is and how we have to mitigate this etc etc I just I'm astonished that anybody would would look at something that is such an underling natural process and feeling and believe that the body would be doing itself damage by having an emotional response negative emotions are not bad for the organisms health folks okay negative emotions are orienting systems to tell the organism that goals need to be reorganized and thought through that's what it is the fact that it's physically unpleasant in some cases to a mild degree stress is not that physically on present anxiety is not that physically in present generally and depression is not that physically and present there psychologically and emotionally unpleasant okay and they are signals to help the organism orient itself more effectively and intelligently that's what they're for so if you spend a lot of your life to the middle left of the graph depressed anxious stressed then we got some things to address about your goals and how it is that you're attacking these things and how essentially you you may need some guidance and ideas about how to be more effective and why is is that you are falling so consistently short on on the feedback that you get relative to what it is that your self keeps setting the goals out okay usually that's not most people's experience most people are experienced a fair amount of frustration around what we would call stress they can do all these things but the truth is is that their time pressured and overburden and overcommitted okay you've only got a couple of options you are either inefficient and you can increase your efficiency and thereby get all this stuff done or you are over committed and sometimes both okay but the final analysis most of the time is what we need to do is take some pruning shears into our lives that they feel stressed and figure out where we're going to cut and we got to figure out what relationships and what goals need to be cut until we can cut these things down to size where our life is more about moderate stress and excitement than it is about stress and anxiety and depression so that's that's how we look at that well phenomenal I didn't even make the connection that stress and anxiety was the opposite of boredom so and yet after excitement I was I was you know hoping that you would say this extra word that was like more than excitement and then you just say boredom and I just went right down right down the valley so yeah but I do it is that it's a mood of happiness a calm mood of happiness sits above anxiety before we get to boredom that's a that's a feeling of kind of mastery and control over a situation that's valuable but but that we're not surprised okay and we're happy about it so think about a romantic relationship guys the guy's anxious asked the girl out you know he's gotten a couple of positive signals but he you know it's too kind of too good to be true but his buddy pushes him in the back and he anxiously goes up there and and blurts out you know asking her out for a soda okay and she says yes now how does he feel he's excited as hell is what he is because now we've left from 18 percent of success up to 80 so now he's extremely happy about that now when the big day comes you know next Friday lunchtime so now he goes over and you know he shows up and now what is he he's anxious and now she does show up he's excited but he's also stressed why because he knows this is above his pay grade by a nice little margin there and it's enough to be super exciting if he gets there but actually what he's feeling is stressed he's feeling like oh my gosh I've got to be on my a-game I better be paying attention to everything do you think he combed his hair carefully do you think that he was careful about not eating crap so he didn't have zits break out do we real did did we find that he you know polished up his Dodge Dart like what all of the things that he did he focused and put an awful lot of energy into this moment is what he did that's what stress will do is he stressed you better believe it he's got adrenaline coursing through his veins as if he's in a big battle he's sweating under his armpits he's trying to keep his wits about him that's what's happening there's reasons why I would know all these now yeah so now he they're having a conversation and he you know he's saying some things and turns out you know he collects coins and turns out she collects coins and it turns out she's really excited about it he's really excited about it and so now how is he feeling he's really excited because his perceived probability of success ie date 2 and then beyond it looks really good and she's smiling and laughing and drinking her you know I don't know or cherry coke and this is all great okay now so now let's fast-forward a year and they've been boyfriend and girlfriend and but now it's it's not boring he still feels you know you've got this nice feeling of over award and it's cozy and there's a lot of happiness but it's not the same level of excitement as it was in the first couple of weeks because the perceived probability of success went from 80 percent when she said gee I'd sure like to see you again whoa that was really exciting and now it but now we're up to basically close to essentially a hundred percent so he's it's still valuable but his perceived probability success the next weekend should you know that they're going to go iver e hi so it's still valuable his it's not a hundred percent he knows in principle that she's fancy and then he's got competitors and that she could defect on him so it's always nice to get good feedback from her and reassurance and it bet he is not desperate and excited to get feedback from her he's happy to get to feedback from her so that's how that works does that make sense oh yeah that makes perfect sense yeah yeah and so where's if he were a little under rewarded he would he would reach that stage of boredom fair much quicker than then okay that is exactly what would take place that's that's precisely so as a psychologist when I had people come in that this is what I call the general mood model okay I just made that up I'm I made it up 20 years ago but this is what I call it so a general mood model is that the general mood that you have goes from depression all the way to boredom on the high side and the variables are how valuable is it which is going to tell us about the intensity of the feeling and then the nature of the feeling whether it's depression anxiety stress excitement happiness or boredom that has to do with the perceived probability of success that is the variable that is driving those changes of those feelings now the specific mood model is going to depend upon which neural circuits of the brain are being activated depending upon the life domain that's involved so the excitement that you have about getting a promotion is different that the excitement that when the girl says yes she'd like to go out with you again there are two different areas of the brain contemplating different life goals and so the feelings are different okay the feelings of watching your team when are different than the feelings of the girl winking at you and smiling they are both very they're both very positive feelings but they are actually hitting different circuits and they're having different circumstances the same thing is true with sensations so someone rubs your feet and it feels really good you pick up a spoon and have yourself a I don't know creme brulee I'm not even supposed to know what that is something of fancy things about that wrong by one thing I hate it with that so the things that are wrong anyway so that that proves you you don't know is it of course I know it'll pronounced like watch you got it so the point is is that that that's a those are our bull pleasant sensations but they are different neural circuits and so now now hopefully people could see that we have a model of the mind and feeling that use two different sets of logic one of them is the perceived probability of success and the values involved the magnitude of the value or the intensity of the survival reproductive value ie how many chips are on the line that determined is where we are from from the the range of depression up to excitement and happiness and boredom the the specific mood model is the specific neural circuits and their particular eyes feelings that are now speaking to us about you know what what experience the person is having so when a person comes to me what I ask is I ask the questions to find out what are they feeling and then I want to know what domain is causing the feeling and so in this way we triangulate very quickly on whatever it is that is driving them to either feel stressed or anxious or depressed their feeling one of those three things essentially and they're feeling it in some specific domain is the driver and so that helps the diagnostic problem of how it is that we're going to help somebody it helps us move it along very quickly at a desert well it brings us to one of our questions from a listener which is that aside from agreeable people getting pushed around from several different directions are there any other disadvantages to our communities getting so large and so fractured and what brings about the structural changes in society like going from hereditary absolute rulers rather than elected politicians and vice versa who those are big sweeping different questions okay so the first question had to do with other problems of the village being fractured yeah there are problems one of the problems is is that people the fractured village ie that's what I call the way we live today so we all live in our own little houses and apartments and condos and we are not wrapped around a campfire at night talking about the day's events that we were all pitching in trying to do the best we could for everybody's benefit including our own so we don't have a sense of shared fate the way we did in the Stone Age and as a result the deep psychological connections and value that other people had to each other is much less now people will feel this in certain teams like a startup group in Silicon Valley it's working day and night together and knows each other's sweat because they're all trying to get rich okay or a platoon in the army or a squad in the army that is working super hard together and they're in a foxhole and their lives depend upon each other's movements etc when people have to band together and become interdependent in order to reach you know a goal defend a value then it turns out that those deep connections feel can feel really really good the the person has been tested we find out that that we have a lot of esteem from them they from us etc so there's a very strong high intensity the esteem dynamic okay we a lot of times people don't have much of that today so they've got it in their families but even their families it isn't even that tight so we we it isn't that important how will we get along with our brother or sister when we're 35 it's just like well whatever I hope I get along with them well but but we don't have a sense of shared fate and our fates are not dependent upon each other's working and sacrifice etcetera so that is a the fact that that that can be missing and is missing from a lot of people's lives in a significant way is a casualty of the modern environment now that in other words this is a two-edged sword and I would much rather have the situation today the one that we have today the one than the one wood that we used to have however we are missing we often are missing that sense of shared commitment and shared fate I think it can be very very valuable and rewarding experience for people so that that's a casualty it's it like I said basically it's a good one in essence we would like to be in a situation where we're not dependent upon anybody that's really the best situation in terms of our own personal safety etc it's like listen it doesn't really matter what anybody thinks of me and what it is that they do I can pay fee for service and I can get things done that I want to do and I can afford it that that is actually a better situation than to actually have to be loved and like in the village in order to have someone you know pull it pull a worm out of your back okay so the similarly and just to just to sort of cross boundaries here into a vaguely reaching the other question that was involved about societal changes from monarchies to modern you know democratic states the truth is is that I would say similar things about our government when you have a democratic republic like we have when you have a situation where we've got nice rules set up and and we've got a we've got big broad agreements about what's fair and we've got we basically started with an outline or a scaffold it was all about how we're going to try to make this thing fair and more or less as we've wandered on down the road the system is set up in a way to try to constantly course-correct to a way that's fair what happens ultimately is that who's in charge really doesn't make that much difference that is a great thing okay the fact that it doesn't really matter much at all for your life but who the heck is your president or who is your senator or congressman or anything else that is a good thing okay the fact is you're stone-age brain doesn't quite believe it because it's you feel as if who's in charge is this big deal because it used to be it feels like it is ie we call him a leader well quite frankly I can't recall being led by any president or politician nobody led me to do anything okay I'm just been doing my own number from the time I was a kid and I wasn't forced into much of anything by anybody okay the so certainly no politician so this is a so essentially we're looking at the continued fracturing process where human beings are more and more independent life units really not interdependent and and less and less subject to force as the philosopher most Iran said that civilization is the process of freeing men from men okay sort of a sexist statement I suppose but we know what she meant did say the that's what it's about it's about not having other people being able to force you around and you're not leading you know nobody is leading you anywhere your your your own agent now in terms of the profit historical process of what led us to here you know there could be many discussions about this and this is a land for political scientists and historians everything else there there'd been a few moments in Western history that have been pointed as if that they were a very big deal and maybe they were hard to say what what was you know the big moment certainly I would think the printing press ultimately was a huge moment in history and it would take time for the influence of that to then wind up being felt as a possibility for essentially undermine monarch authority the but the Magna Carta was an important moment in history historically where a bunch of Lords basically told King John or every was that no we're not going to go fight your war we're not going to do it and and so it turns out that you know did that first protest even though it didn't fly apparently I believe that that it's signaled the fact that we are going to push back on you and we're going to band together and we're not going to do it because we don't think it's fair we can't afford it we don't want to do it and so this this this idea you know what were the ideas of the American Revolution were ultimately came from and from whose brain and who influenced them etc etc like I said this is for political scientists and historians to sort of hash out and give us a little bit of insight but fundamentally what we're going to find is that the the move towards this way of doing things is the right and proper way for human being live it's the only way that we're going to wind up optimizing the opportunity for human happiness and so I believe that it is so much more effective so much more productive and so much more worth defending that this way of living will can you know sweep the earth it's only been around a couple hundred years and so the old leadership idea of us all following the Pharaoh United mean this is sort of a Stone Age legacy it's a dinosaur and it will be replaced and we will have a world of increasingly free people as we now see so modern Germany looks like the United States acts like the United States basically so it is in Japan you know the China is getting there and will eventually get there this is how it's going to go freedom is the right way to do things and it's going to win fascinating yeah every time I hear you speak about the future I'm reminded of our previous episode about about what the world will look like in about a thousand years as just fascinating how how you know we watched news media and reports and it just seems like the world is the sky is falling every minute but it turns out that you're left there the logic that we hear it's actually not falling and everything's getting better and better so all right the little final question yeah I think we can wrap up okay so dear dr. Lau can you elaborate on the neuroticism and emotion emotional stability trait of the big five if I understood you correctly you said that stress can be attributed to conscientiousness our stress and anxiety different and how did they relate to neuroticism and conscientiousness okay let's let me let me try to answer this the these things can start looking pretty similar even though statistically when you try to look at them they break out as as largely independent these the two issues of conscientiousness and and emotional stability also labeled neuroticism the so let's look at this the eye think of the so-called neuroticism dimension as emotionally as emotional stability so think about a continuum so you have a bell curve we're on the left side of the bell curve the person is very unstable and on the right side of the bell curve they are very stable so I want you to think about that dimension as a dimension of essentially the intensity of the feeling so not not the character of the feeling but the intensity of it and essentially how much energy will be brought to bear on this task as a result of you know a given value proposition that the organism is being confronted with so think about an average guy with the average threat to his average average ly decent worthwhile relationship so there he sits at the 50th percentile and we're going to so there there is now so now if he starts to get a higher threat the average guy is going to feel more emotionally threatened we could say we could change this and say the average guy with the average business proposition what does he feel he feels average about the excitement of this business proposition if it turns out that the value proposition is is considerably fancy in terms of rate of return to capital we would expect the average guy to get a lot more excited okay so the average guy and that excitement incidentally will drive him to take actions in order to seize that value in the same way the average guy getting the average cues that he's got a high chance of losing his mate should be you know should be quite anxious and energized to do something about it so now what we're going to do is we're going to move along that curve so we're going to move over to the right to very stable individual so that very stable individual given an average threat doesn't move a muscle it's like you know what vaguely recognizes that he may be in some hot water with respect to his mate but he just can't get all that upset about it because he's just not going to generate that much energy behind it okay the now we're going to move it to the other side of the equation where we're now he is very unstable so this guy has far greater feelings far greater amplitude in terms of his emotional reactivity so now he feels the threat and he he feels an average threat and he's upset and he wants to talk about it he wants to have a big deal about it etc so we can see why we call that quote neuroticism because they're they're actually generating much greater intensity of emotion and it could be anger okay so it'd be that this is different from how disagreeable somebody is so a person who is average in agreeable disagreeable but they are very unstable we'll take a a situation of average irritation and feel much greater irritation that some cetera so that looks like they're disagreeable but they're more disagreeable but they're not because they're also more excitable on the high side so what you're looking at is the degree of intensity of response and essentially how much energy emotional energy and actually physical energy are going to be behind any event okay so that doesn't mean that I'd stable people are unstable every minute of the time but when they're running into average vicissitudes of life in a given day they're just hella more reactive than somebody else than the average person so that's what that looks like conscientiousness can share some superficial characteristics with that but it's not the same thing so conscientiousness has to do specifically with anxiety it doesn't have to do with anger it doesn't have to do with excitement and happiness about something it has do with one specific thing which is what's the worst case scenario and how much mitigating action should I be directing towards towards fixing it so now if we put these two things together a highly conscientious person that is also unstable whoa we've got somebody that quote melts down you know when they start to get criticized or etc when when they think they might be doing something wrong and they flip you can and they're all upset and they're crying etcetera etcetera and you know get out the xanax I mean that's what you're looking at the on the other hand we could have a highly conscientious person that is very stable and so they stay up to make sure that all the emails are answered and all the I's are dotted and T's are crossed but they're not particularly emotional in any way that you can see and they're not pushing that emotionality on anybody else that is disturbing for anybody so this is where these things look different and you can see that they could start to get confusing trying to parse these out because someone who is highly conscientious under a intermediate-level threat can be feeling quite anxious about it and in fact you might say well that looks neurotic as hell okay but it's really not neurotic as hell it's what what you're seeing is just their their anxiety being driven by the high conscientiousness but the the magnitude of the feeling is is not anywhere where where it looks real wacky what looks a little wacky is their perceived probability of the threat that's where it looks wacky okay if they were right about the threat the degree of anxiety that they're experiencing is perper ticket is totally reasonable all right so this is where this is sort of how we put these two things together and try to parse them out and understand how combinations and individually they act when we're observing humans and their personalities
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