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Episode 161: Explaining the Ego Trap 1 of 2
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all right good evening everybody it's Nate G here along with dr. Doug Lyall dr. Lyle how you doing this evening good good how you doing doing pretty good you know today is our episode about the ego trap and as I was researching for this episode we have a couple of questions about the ego trap which you know this entire episode will be dedicated to the ego trap and so hopefully that will answer these questions and if we if we don't answer the questions and we'll go over them next week as a follow-up but as I was researching this episode it turns out that there was a really interesting article that came into the news a call a bit ago and this was a young man was it's a runner and he was running in the mountain somewhere and a little baby mountain lion attacked him mm-hmm and it turns out this runner happened to kill the mountain lion in this attack and I'm very cool to read these before we found out the entire story the articles were runner kills mountain lion with his bare hands runner suffocates mountain lion it's all these really cool sensational articles and then a couple of days later as the runner recovers I mean you see his face and he's young you know bloody bruised he finally recovers and has a press conference and he talks about what's going on and what exactly happened and how he actually killed this mountain lion and it's really interesting to see exactly what you've talked about before in the ego trap where this exact scenario where the the young hunters maybe not as capable accidentally kills a wildebeest and then spins a big story but in this case it's been a big story he was actually a pretty honest guy so he gets out of this press conference and the first thing you notice is the guy is small you know he's not a young stature at all and it's funny because dr. lout in the previous episode you mentioned how to get the audience on your side by using some self-effacing humour so here's here's what the runner said is the first thing in this press conference um hey everybody just a show of hands who all is disappointed that I'm not in fact Chuck Norris yeah and I'm for everybody you thought it was a big beefy guy so so so right away this guy is smarter than ten bucks yeah a little more self-aware I like it yeah and so he goes and tells this story of what exactly happened how he just he said it was luck of the draw I mean he's so honest about this I was incredibly impressed you know he yeah talks about his story how mountain lion was just a baby it was like a younger mountain lion and tried to fight it try try to bite him and he happened to just step on his neck took a rock and you know killed killed the mountain lion and so these reporters who had just written articles about how this savage beast you know was bested by man and killed with his bare hands and that the last question that he takes is asking him well what now you know are you gonna are you could go go and you know become the next Steve Irwin travel to earth and you know be the mountain lion hunter and he says an interesting thing that reminded me of the ego trap he said two different things the first one is this about earning a steam in the right way I don't know kind of weird to feel kind of famous for like an unearned reason it's very much like a situation of happenstance where like a wrong place wrong time instead of an earned sort of degree of Fame I guess so that's been pretty weird yeah and then he goes yeah it isn't that fascinating he got a pretty honest hunter here right and then he goes on to describe the weird feeling that is the ego trap that we're going to discuss today mm-hmm yeah I think that's going to be the hardest part is I will never be able to live up to the reputation and maybe that's what has led to some of my reticence for actually coming out because I know the story is bigger than have been by my puny form so yeah yeah that said dr. Lyle let's talk about this let's talk about the ego trap hit us with the truth yes beautiful what what a character you can tell he's extremely bright and that that that's no unusual human right there that's a terrific story Nate good for finding it there I end up talking about the ego trap a lot with respect to diet and lifestyle changes that's just because of where I've come from as a clinician so many of the people that have come to me have come to me you know with those problems it's not the only place that that this is involved it's it just turns out that that it enabled me to figure out the ego trap because of the problems that people face with diet lifestyle issues because I kept seeing there's a little bit useful I kept seeing the same type of problem over and over again and it helped me identify a pattern the the the the problem with diet lifestyle change or or any anything we're trying to make a change that's really going against instincts for addiction is similar and that is that that that problem is going to be what we call the pleasure drop so what the pleasure trap is is it's since I that's Alan Goldhamer invented the word I can say what it means precisely and what it is is it's a it's a trapping of our motivational instincts as a result not oh into a self-destructive Medivation as a result of changes in the modern environment with respect to the stone-age environment for which those instincts were evolved so the drugs would be the most potent example of that that a drug addiction someone is doing something self-destructive because the drugs are hyper activating pleasure pathways in the brain basically signaling biological success while the person is actually doing something self-destructive are sort of early insight we're one of the early people to make a huge case that this was actually the problem with this was the fundamental health problem of our time and it was primarily through eating so people were eating a diet that was super rich and therefore more pleasure stoking than a natural diet for the reason that the basic pleasure system is designed by nature to detect calories and it's designed to give more pleasure when the calories are of greater concentration so we could see that the modern food supply with simply man's ingenious methods for concentrating the food supply and getting rid of fiber specifically and isolating fats out and adding them to the food and essentially turning the food into a drug like substance that would be hyper activating the dopamine pathway specifically so this is and then neo Bernard came on scene with a similar argument about Kasem morphine's and essentially arguing that another big component of this was you know the endorphin pathway essentially it doesn't really matter the point is is that we're talking about the modern food supply being supernormal stimuli in the same way the drugs are supernormal stimuli it's super normal meaning stimulation that the organism was simply never designed to experience and it it was similar similar experiences but now intensified beyond so in that same way that if you if you listen to really loud rock music for a long time you're going to do damage to your ears you may like it and then as the damage gets done you can't hear as well so you turn it on even louder and do more damage etc so you can see a cycle of self-destruction in that process the the same thing is true of food and the same thing is true of drug addiction now that is an unnatural problem so the pleasure trap is an unnatural problem it's not a problem you were designed to solve this is why so many really smart people can't solve it because your intelligence isn't really an issue here the people who saw the best are people that are probably very emotionally stable highly conscientious they don't have to be that smart they just have to have identified the problem and and not be so reactive to the stimuli that they can't back themselves away from the problem so this is this is also a puzzling issue because so many problems in life the higher your IQ the you can solve problems that less intelligent people cannot solve and you can solve them with ease this is not a similar problem this is an unnatural problem that has more to do with going into essentially neurochemical processes involved in motivation and so that that's what makes the pleasure trap a unique and particularly slippery and difficult problem to solve now that's the problem that that I was attempting to solve in the late-1990s and early-2000s and the book that Alan and I wrote called the pleasure trap is the story of a bit best explaining to people that the reasons why they're having a difficult problem with addictive type issues is because it's going against their instincts the this is a different argument then you're going to see typically or these so typically at the time they typically nap you go on The Biggest Loser you're going to find out that you know they're talking about the underlying emotional issues why people are having these problems this is the this is the story of our time is that you know people have underlying emotional psychodynamic problems that are driving these self-destructive tendencies this is ridiculous the these problems emerged in the late 20th century in the Western world and they emerged in humans dogs and cats they didn't emerge anywhere else in the world and so that now that as the products of our food supply for example spread now it's heading into Samoa it's heading into China etc so we can see that these are in fact problems of behavioral management as associated with novel environmental problems if the organism wasn't solve that's the source of it now because it's a these are unnatural problems I it's and they're problems that are frustratingly puzzling with respect to for particularly diligent and intelligent people so they can't figure out why they keep failing and so of course one of the things that they do is they infer that there's an underlying psychodynamic issue their mother issues comfort issues from their grandmother etc the the interesting thing is sometimes there is an underlying self-destructive psychodynamic like process and that process I identified and it's what I call the ego trap so this is where we get a little fancier about the psychology of understanding self destruction and ego trap is particularly potent with respect to pleasure trap issues but it's also potent in its own right so now we're going to now talk about a second self-destructive process that goes on in people so the first one that we can identify and it's really quite obvious if we look at it and we're not clouded by some pretty serious misconceptions about human motivation the pleasure trap is is simply the super stoking a pleasure pathways by artificial stimulation that will cause an addictive like response that makes complete sense simple straightforward and very potent in its explanatory reach the however when people attempt to simply take that information and apply it and go against what it is that they are trapped by they find themselves sometimes in an interesting dilemma let's give an example of somebody who is attempting to stop smoking cigarettes so they're in the pleasure trap so if they if they stops try to stop smoking they go into withdrawal the withdrawal is uncomfortable if they then resume the nicotine they feel better the nicotine Stokes the dopamine pathway so they're rewarded it feels like they did the right thing so all of that we can see the trap and if we're an intelligent person we can see that how the trap works and we can see what we need to do to get out of the trap which is to enforce abstinence over a period of long enough time where the normal neural chemistry writes itself you know that's it seems simple and straightforward the only problem is because it's an unnatural problem it's more difficult than we think and it's more difficult than other people that don't have the problem think and this is where it gets interesting that let's suppose were bright capable person and we smoke and other people near us and around us know that we're bright and capable and they look at this habit and they say why don't you just stop since they don't have the problem they don't know the difficulty of the task and as a result they are under estimating the task difficulty and they are overestimating the individual's ability to actually master it and so as a result the individual now is listening to this feedback and they have the following problem and that is they are expected to be able to manage the problem while they themselves have actually worked at the problem maybe 40 times and they have failed consistently so as a result what happens is is that they understand that they are being overrated um they're their peers their family they're their loved ones etc whoever it is people out there in the village actually believe that they have more chops with respect to this problem than they have now now this this now sets the stage for what I call the ego trap the ego trap is a natural motivational dilemma if we believe that we have more esteemed to gain by trying and then even if we fail we haven't lost that much then we're very excited about the prospect the the way meditation works as it works on essentially cost-benefit analytic programs and so the the main the main feedback wordy the ultimate feedback for these programs is genetic survival so it's going to turn out that gene survival is going to be tied into things like pleasure upon sirs painful responses and all as well as emotional impact so Pleasant emotional responses and painful emotional responses one of the most pleasant emotional responses that you can have is to get signals from other people that you are valuable and cool and that they're impressed by you that means that they're more likely to mate with you they're more likely to be your friend and they're more likely to hire you it turns out that if you lose regard from other people then you are less likely for them to be willing to mate with you less likely to be befriended and less likely to be hired so these are the three grand markets of human survival reproduction which are mating friendship and trade and how other people feel about us or what they think of us is going to be central to the range of our opportunities with respect to those three trades so therefore if we do something that causes others think less of us then this is costly it shrinks our markets shrinks our opportunities and reduces our likelihood of a survival reproductive success so therefore we're designed by nature with exquisite emotional machinery that essentially feeds back to us whether it appears we've increased our esteem from others or we've decreased it and so this this is part of the process that what I call the same dynamics in other words your feeling about your about your life how it is your emotional tone and your day at any given moment is largely but not completely the result of feedback that you're receiving from other people whether or not they're sending you positive signals or they're sending you negative signals now it's going to turn out that if people are sending you positive signals that say we think you are better than what it is that you're doing we think that you can you know you can put down these cigarettes you're so smart you're so capable that we fully believe that you can do it in principle that should be a good signal and they feel like they're sending you a positive signal you're essentially reminding you that you've got this nasty self-destructive stinky habit and they're basically telling you hey you're too smart for that nasty stupid stinky habit don't you know that self-destructive of course you know that so why don't you just stop it the the problem is is that the people that are sending the signal are operating under a delusion and the delusion is is that it is a simple process - stop stop the pleasure trap and to get out of it they themselves may not be in that particular trap so as a result they lack intuition about the nature of the trap and they lack intuition about its difficulty and as a result they have now overrated the individual in terms of their ability to manage this trap they may not have overrated the individual generally in other words the feedback that they've given that person is consistent without is if they feel about them generally the problem is they've underestimated the particular slipperiness or difficulty of this particular problem which is the pleasure trap so it's going to turn out that the pleasure trap actually uniquely sets up the ego trap the pleasure trap is because it is surprisingly difficult and we have a lack of intuition about its difficulty it sets up the ego trap all over the place so let's for example let's take a woman who's 40 years old and his 30 or 40 pounds overweight and she's highly intelligent capable conscientious okay the the rest of her world says hey Sarah you know what has just gone on a diet you Weight Watchers do this do that they've got all kinds of advice for her all over thin friends and her thin mother okay and they all believe that hey this is not a problem what do you do just do at control it'll while or you know just go on on Weight Watchers or hey just do slimfast so they've got no end of vice for this individual who they believe is fully capable of beating this problem the problem is is that the people that are given in the vise do not understand the problem they don't understand that the problem is the pleasure truck and that the pleasure trap is an unnatural problem that shows no respect for how beautiful how intelligent how wealthy or any other of your life advantages pleasure trap is an insidious nasty hidden force of an interaction between the modern environment and Stone Age circuits that were designed for an environment of scarcity so as a result of this are highly intelligent conscientious motivated human is an ego truck because the the friends and family and boyfriend all think that you should just be able to handle this problem and it turns out they are not handling the problem they are not staying out of the corn chips and corn dogs and pizza they just think that they have the ability to somehow push themselves away from the table in time and they go to the gym and they do yoga so that's why is that there then that's not weather then but then as a result of natural genetic variation that visits people differently with respect to this specific characteristic okay I can imagine dark-skinned people looking at white skinned people in Panama and saying come on you just got to like get with it you don't need to be sunburned don't don't have your Sun turn red like that just don't do it okay this is similar the so the fin people have no clue that they are every bit it's pleasure trapped by these same instincts as everybody else it just turns out that people that are having weight problems how where the pleasure trap on them almost no 10 people less than 1% of the thin people you'll ever see have earned their thinness through any intelligent diligence about their diet and lifestyle 99 plus percent of any thin person that you will ever see in your life any of the thin people they are all the result of eating the same diet as the overweight people are eating except that they are eating it in quantities that are being regulated by hunger drives and by metabolism differences that result in them remaining slender they are not earning it through any kind of execution of behavior against the pleasure drop now but they don't know this they're completely oblivious they're like fish and water and they have no idea what water is so the thin people have no idea what it's like to get out of pleasure trap because they've never done it and so when when our overweight person is attempts to do this they find great difficulty in it and they slip like a rat trying to get out of a greased bowl can't get out of it it's very difficult to do the however the entire social environment says come on Sarah so I mean it's important you know look at your dating life you know your boyfriend's thinking about leaving you he's not that interested whatever okay oh there's no end to subtle feedback about this issue or not so subtle you know her dad takes her aside says you know kid you really got you really ought to really take care of this side well thanks a lot it's not like the person doesn't know okay so the problem is is that they are firmly in the ego trap the expectations are that they should be able to handle this problem they have attempted to handle the problem a hundred and eighty seven times and they have almost always failed often not completely so by gritting down the hunger drive for a while eating less pizza and oranges and now what they do is they lose a little bit of weight and they thank God that's how it's supposed to be done huh it turns out they don't have the right solution and even if they have the right solution and they actually listen to a Neil Barnard or a Colin Campbell or John McDougall or not all Goldhammer if they do that and they get it right the problem is is that even doing that is very difficult tell them to join a group like chef AJ try to get some more support it's still difficult ok so as a result what happens is is that the person is having great difficulty but the world spec's them to execute so this is the ego trap they think that you're supposed to be able to do it you find out that you're having a very difficult time it's going to turn out that if you continue to struggle and you struggle obviously then what people will do is they will judge they will they will make judgments that they have actually overrated your general competence and that they will say ha you're not as together as I thought you were maybe you've got underlying emotional problems that I didn't know about there's more chaos inside of your nervous system than I thought I was walking with a friend of mine on psychologists we worked together and an overweight psychologist walked by and my friend said you know what he must have some really serious issues to carry that extra weight now and I didn't I didn't you know clarified my friend that he completely was off-base it's a practicing psychologists have no clue as to what is that he's looking at and inferring what everybody else in first that the weight is the result of an underlying problem which is exactly what they promote on something like the big loser and everywhere else Kimmy people obviously don't have any problems in our right they don't have any emotional problems at all okay so here's the problem so you can see how easy this is to set up the ego trap the ego trap takes place when your ego or your esteem meter your device that is picking up cues about how much other people value you this device basically senses that that other people think more highly of you and have higher expectations for you than you and you have for yourself the expectations you have for yourself are generally quite realistic in other words you actually have made a lot of attempts and you have failed so nothing irritated me more than my cool good-looking friends saying hey that's no problem and sure yeah you just got to go up to the girls talked really yeah well I've tried that about 17 times I'm over 17 so don't tell me okay so this is the this is the ego trap and it's it's a brutal place to be living when other people's expectations are unrealistic lehigh and you know that they are wrong under those circumstances there is one most intelligent move on the chessboard this is engineered by natural selection the right move is to not try that is the correct move the correct move is to not try and be obvious that we are not trying the reason is is that if it's obvious that we are not trying then when we are when we fail which we will then the others that are observing us will say well the reason you're failing is you're not trying of course you could do it if you tried but because you're not trying that's why you're failing that's kind of a weird thing that you're doing there Sarah by not trying but you're not trying okay and in this way Sarah maintains some component of her esteem despite the fact that she continues to fail and have and have negative consequences for this competitive problem this is the ego Trump okay the ego trap takes place whenever the cost benefit of attempting to try and failing is is is overshadowed by the the loss that you could have if you are observed to fail so we want people and people are normally in a situation where if they do their very best and they and they fall short of expectations it's not it's not too much of a problem however from time to time in in Stone Age environments and in the modern environment what can happen and did happen is that occasionally people had an unusually lucky streak or from for some strange reason circumstances maybe they were overrated and not the end this is our mountain lion story is a great example of this so this situation happens and then suddenly this guy is overrated and you know the interesting thing about this character his character is very sophisticated psychologically and he recognized the absurdity of the attention that he was getting and the inferences people were making about about him about the story and he he showed unusual grace and how it is that he was going to make sure that he didn't sit inside that ego trap because that was it would be a third place to live the odd but that you know that same type of thing can happen all over the place with people and it happens every day every competent overweight person has this problem every alcoholic has this problem every drug addict has this problem everybody trying to stop cigarettes has this problem every student that has been told by their parents that they're brilliant at their genius every coach that said that you're going to be a star the people are well-meaning in attempting to heap adulation and praise on children other adults etc and and predict great things for them probably this is in the best interest of the person doing it because they get credit in that in the talented persons coalition for being the first to call it to be the first to see ok the odd so I believe that there's an evolutionary adaptation that says if you think there's someone with talent call it early ok call it early and call it loud because that that way you called it before others and so when that person rises in the world as you expect that they will they will remember you for the person who saw their greatness before it became more widely evident this is a this is independent of the fact that carrot parents are trying to tell the village how great their children are how great their genes are etc so there's a lot of reasons why the ego trap would spontaneously arise in Stone Age environments 30 years ago there was a young man you got you know this happens on a daily basis so I just remember this one this one incident there was a terrific young basketball player at Temple University he decided as a to go play for Don Cheney and he he was like a gift he was an absolute top level recruit it's just decided he liked Don Cheney and he was going to go play for him Cheney didn't even after recruit him hard he just dropped out of the sky in the temple his name was Mark Macon and he was he was fabulous he was 6 foot 6 inches terrific athlete great shooter he had it all and and Bill not Billy Park Packer there was a really a forget who the announcer is a he's super he's super he's March Madness crazy guy gosh like I'm sorry I'm bulking on his name I'm walking he is he's a super high energy super excited character the number one commentator of March Madness for the last 30 years I have my basketball trivia sucks what this guy did and dick vital in stick by tell very well named character super vital character dick vital I think is a great guy but he did something that he shouldn't have done and that is he went overboard in praising Marc makin and he said this guy's the second coming of Oscar Robertson he just couldn't keep his mouth shut ok this created a tremendous ego trap for makin and makin went out and had a miserable quarter final in the NCAA tournament it was a really embarrassed and he went on he struggled along got to the NBA where he belongs for a while he had a modest NBA career for several years but nothing special this was not the second coming of Oscar Robertson you know so although that might have felt amazing if your mark make it at the time to have someone of that stature saying that about you it wasn't true and Vitalis saying this and so how much psychological misery he caused in that young man for years as that praise echoed around his entire life okay so those of you that think that you want to praise your children and build up their you know what what do you think we're doing there's self-esteem no it's not touching their self-esteem their self-confidence now it's not actually impacting their self-confidence it will very very temporarily until the evidence indicates that you're wrong and then what you've done is you put them in an ego trap so the ego trap can be a very substantive major force as people's cost benefit analytics run this one the numbers and they it basically says hey if I've got more esteem to lose then I have the gain then I'm not going to try there's probably no more potent recurring generator of the ego trap than the pleasure trap and that's because there's probably no problem in human achievement that is so misunderstood than the pleasure trap so the and so as a result the social environments that people have are consistently generating expectations for people that are struggling with the buzzer drop that are inconsistent with the realities of actually facing it in dealing with it and as a result what we wind up with is people that are constantly quitting they try a little bit and they quit and then they try a little bit again sometime and they quit and then they suffer in the misery that as a result of the of the the lack of achievement with respect to the problem whether it's alcohol cigarettes some kind of drug addiction or it's food and weight issues and then they suffer for a while longer and then their natural competitive instincts say you know why my life's going down the tubes I need to do something about it they roll up their shirtsleeves go on you know listen to a seminar read a book and try again okay they face the ego trap again and then what happens they fail very often and as a result of this then they crawl into their hole and they die for a while and we don't see them again for a while this is how this works so the the pleasure trap being in a spectacular generator of the ego trap these two things together wind up is a very potent mixture of human self-destruction it's also interesting to note that the pleasure trap and the ego trap are actually in a bizarre fashion they were opponent processes and that is that if we let's let's say for example that the that we're attempting to stop a drinking problem the the world says come on just push yourself away just put down the bottle throw it away as if that the decision is that simple the that the problem is is that the if we if we actually set the bar at a level of achievement that would be an awful lot more reasonable for example I'll tell you what let's cut down your alcohol use by 10 percent in the next month and then we'll cut it down by 10 percent the next month and 10 percent the next month and 10 percent the next month and then after 10 months we'll have the problem solved that would be a reasonable goal for any other kind of problem if you're attempting to you know I don't know learn how to juggle you'd stop want to start one step at a time and take one little piece at a time and by successive approximations we would move towards a more complicated and more outstanding achievement that's how we learn anything that's how people learn to walk and that's how they learn to talk through exactly that process the problem is is that the ego trap actually causes its own problem excuse me the pleasure trap pleasure trap actually causes its own problem so if you if you drink you actually stoke the problem itself so really the correct place to go with respect to something like alcoholism is to go to complete abstinence but complete abstinence is an unbelievable achievement it's a tremendous leap and so if and if that's the expectation it's exceedingly likely that people will fail so the however so this is this is why this is a problem the lower you put the bar with respect to the pleasure trap the more easy it would be for a person to reach that goal ie it gets them out of the ego trap however it keeps them in a pleasure trap in the pleasure trap itself is a devastating news if we put the the goal very very high in order to get the person out of the pleasure trap ie absence from alcohol the problem is we've almost certainly walked them into the ego trap because when they look at that that that mountain they're like oh I can't climb that mountain I've tried to climb that mountain 170 times so I can't do it and so what do they tell you I'll start tomorrow okay so procrastination and despair wind up being the recurrent hallmarks of the ego trap and they are particularly present with respect to pleasure drop problems so what's the solution um the solution to the ego trap with or without the floater trap being the generating mechanism the solution is actually to pay very close attention to the fundamentals and whatever those fundamentals are our job is to set up incremental small positive movements and to set those as daily expectations so these aren't vague okay they're actually highly specific so for example if we were trying to quit smoking cigarettes we could absolutely do this incrementally so if we're trying to get out off of you know morphine use we could do it incrementally if we're doing an alcohol believe it or not you can do that incrementally it isn't necessarily the only way to do it but it is a way that you can do it so in certainly with respect to processed foods etc you can do this and with respect to any other ego trap you can do it so let's suppose you have writer's block because people think that you're a great writer and because you've done something very well in the past and now you haven't you can't get yourself to live so this is what writer's block is writer's block isn't some magical process that happens to writers it's the ego trap okay the ego trap is essentially saying the expectations for others are so high that you are you know that you are very unlikely to meet those expectations so the right thing is to do nothing and as long as you do nothing and we can call it writer's block then other people say oh my god you know Sarah is a brilliant writer she's got writer's block so someday she will be unblocked maybe and we'll see her brilliance again but right now she's got writer's block okay and so that's what writer's block is is the motivational system of the mind running a cost-benefit analysis on whether it's worth actually putting the energy in and winding up with a result that is beneath the expectation of others so what do we do what we do is we change the focus as best we can for how it is that we're earning a steam and from home so the way we are generally attempting to earn a steam is by doing great things and having great results so that other people can see them that is the that is the esteem seeking process of humans so the the lady that needs to lose 40 pounds wants to lose 40 pounds and then have other people say oh my gosh now you look great okay that's what she wants that's what she's thinking about that's what she's dreaming about that's what she's scheming for because when that happens that those are the esteem signals from her environment that are actually where the rubber hits the road in evolution that's when it changes men's mating men's or women's mating decisions it's where it is that it changes friendship decisions it's where it changes hiring decisions so therefore that's what she wants that's what she's focused on however I will argue that that's the wrong place to put your focus the right place to put your focus to beat the ego trap whether the ego trap is involved in the pleasure trap or not the right place to put your focus is actually on a different device inside your mind that we're going to call the internal audience the internal audience is a bizarre feature of human psychology it's an internal set of social psychological neural circuits they they it acts as if they are real people and they are watching you and they're watching you when other people aren't watching or sometimes when they are watching but particularly when they're not and they are watching you take action and in the the preparation for your displays of other people so for example your internal audience is watching you when you've got your calculus book open and you are diligently working on your calculus problems and your homework okay and when you're done after two hours and you work very hard your internal audience essentially signals to you that it respects your very hard work and that's a feeling of the essentially an audience signaling your esteem meter and the source of or the the resultant feeling is going to be what we call pride okay that's where pride comes from pride is a specific emotional experience that comes from the internal audience signaling the esteem as if other people were watching and saying boy can I respect what you just did that's what the internal audience will do if the person knows that they should study for two hours and they only study for half an hour and they decide to go leave and go to a concert the internal audience is aware of this and the internal audience says hey you're kind of a flake okay and it gives them an internal signal of self-disgust earned okay turns out on the cover of Psychology Today for April 2019 is the very cover of it says I had something nine ways to talk back to your internal critic internal critic is what I'm calling the internal audience it's it's the term that came out of cognitive therapy and so we're talking about the same device but we have a very different view of what that device is and how it works so if you look at their little prescriptions of how to quote talk back to the internal critic you'll see that the internal critic is largely viewed as an annoyance it's largely viewed as some pesky thing that gets in the way of human happiness okay it's not it's a beautiful construction of human evolution to help you be more competitive with respect to your survival reproductive problems in terms of advertising what what your value proposition is to other people in terms of mates friends and trade can you imagine an internal audience that when you look in the mirror every time it just says oh you look fabulous just the way you are what good would that be you need an internal audience that says whoa that doesn't look so good change this wait a second try a different hat wait a second try a different this ooh you've got hair coming out your nose get out the tweezers your internal audience is there to help you by actually looking at what it is that you can be doing that will make your advertisement to others more competitive your internal audience knows intuitively that a great many achievements take a lot of effort and so if you have something standing between you and causing you to be far more competitive or effective in the world then it knows that it's not going to be simple now believe me simpler people and we're going open people and less conscientious people go to a seminar that tells them all you got to do is think big thoughts and believe and then things will best well nothing will manifest out of such sex other than continued failure the it's going to turn out that success in any endeavor is going to be the result of addressing the fundamental issues the the talents abilities resources etc skills that are necessary in order to be more competitive so if that means for example losing weight then it means addressing the specific fundamentals that are associated with weight loss which means executing on the diet that is that is going to get you out of the pleasure trap and your job is to do that and if you can't do it perfectly then you should be doing it 80% do it better than you've been doing it at the present and set set a daily set of goals about what is that you're going to do and that may not that those goals don't have to include perfection if you're trying to study calculus it doesn't mean that you have to get every problem right or understand actually everything that went wrong and the problems you didn't understand deal is did you make a very good diligent effort that's what that's what you need to do the question might be how good of an effort do you have to make and the answer is an f3 or an internal audience to be proud of you that's what you need to do so the if you do that you can you can check it because the system when you stop putting in your efforts the system will say that was well done that was good enough well then we move on to something else now the if the system doesn't tell you that then it expects that you are you that you were leaving it short you're not actually doing a good enough job and it will not give you the pride okay somehow for some reason people think that you should be able to have that kind of pride as a result of I don't know hypnotism thinking big fancy thoughts etc you don't it's not going to do it for you what's going to happen is is that when people make the what I call micro goal efforts the little things that you actually do every day that are component of an overall scheme in order to ultimately improve when you do those little things your internal audience watches you and it will change how it feels depending upon what it is that you do if you do a mediocre job it will give you a mediocre feedback it's fair it's a coach it's telling you hey you didn't work for it hard today if you work very hard today and do a very good job it'll say hey well then it will pat you on the back and nod that's what it will do if you work extremely hard it will actually bow it will say outstanding ok but it won't give you that for nothing it doesn't give those trophies away for free so the the correct place to put our focus is actually understanding that that feeling that we have about ourselves is dynamic this is not well understood it's not well understood by psychology even at a sophisticated level and it's certainly not understood by pop psychology and it's utterly not understood by by people in the culture at large this the esteem process this is what I call the self esteem mechanism which is the internal audiences signal to the esteem meter this mechanism is highly dynamic it's dynamic enough to change that if you are for example our overweight person if she went to the gym for you know 75 minutes and worked very hard it would change it would shift okay if she made one decision which we normally then even when she does that she goes and has a cheese quesadilla because she felt like she deserved it and she doesn't do that sted goes home and eats a bunch of steamed vegetables and some rice it's going to turn out that her internal audience will be shifting okay now it won't be giving her a standing ovation but it will be giving her positive feedback and if she pays attention to it she can feel it and the more she does this from day after day it's going to turn out that it's going to dial up how it is that it feels that it will be more consistent from day to day that she will be having a good feeling about herself she can feel the momentum and what will happen is if she's executing the proper fundamentals she'll start to get something else which is that she'll get objective evidence that she's improving just like a kid who wants to learn how to play the guitar if that kid if that kid actually sits down and works on his scales it's going to turn out that he is going to find objective evidence that he's improving and that objective evidence can be very important in increasing a person's confidence that they're on the right track now you see what happens that the that now we have essentially replaced the sensitivity to other people's feedback on their expectations instead with an internal audiences judgment of the diligence of your effort if we do that and we pay attention we're going to find out that we have control though it's indirect over how it is that we feel about ourselves so even though it's not as potent and as loud as the feelings that come within us as a result of feedback from other people on the outside a compliment from the right person or a more negative feedback from the right person can be very impactful on our emotional life for the negative or the positive that is true there's nothing as important as feedback from other people in terms of its intensity on your emotional experience but there's a but we aren't we are not in control of those things we're only in control of our of our self-esteem mechanism and of that we're actually in complete control the control is bizarre it's not a control that you can dictate and that you can will through through self-talk that it that won't do anything the control that we have is through the efforts that we make at the literal actions that are involved in that are integrated towards us being solving a problem in becoming more competitive if we do those things and we are diligent and we put in good effort our self esteem mechanism will fire regard it will cause pride and it will do it literally today okay the the most important thing in the in the ego trap is to actually understand that of course you are overwhelmed and stuck you you have expectations from others that are too high they are intimidating you into making any efforts at all and they cause a recurrent procrastination and despair doesn't matter what the nature of the ego trap is though it's particularly devastating when it's about pleasure trap problems the however if we dial back the problem into not focused on on the day of our grand achievement and our positive feedback from others and instead we become more sensitive observers of our own internal experience and we look for the connection between our diligent effort at fundamentals on an hourly basis and how it is that we feel about ourselves as a result of that effort if we pay attention to that then it's going to turn out that we have an amazing amount of control over the emotional content of our life that's what people need to understand so this is the story of the ego trap is really the story of the the changing of our focus from how much esteem we're winning on on the outside world versus how much esteem that we earn from the inside and if we get addicted to that process where we like that feeling of being morally right with ourselves and doing an excellent job as we continue to make diligent progress towards a worthwhile goal then one day we're going to find that we will have we will have travelled a long ways and we may not have gotten to the place that we wanted to get to but wherever we got to it's going to turn out that there will be a great deal of satisfaction with whatever that achievement is so this is uh you know this has echoes of Buddhism in it you know process not outcome John Wooden process not outcome not caring about winning we care about the peace of mind that comes with knowing that we did the best job that we could that's the notion and these are this is what it is that we want to do to solve these type of problems which wind up collectively the ego trap in the pleasure trap wind up being you know probably the the major motivation 'old ulemas of our time so that's uh that's why we look at these things together as well as separately and understand their dynamics and understand the important issue winds up being amazingly amazingly simple in that the idea is to break down something that is daunting into small parts and then start working on it on a sinch essentially a you know a minute-to-minute and howard our basis and watch our internal experience change as the result of our excellent efforts so that is not allowed that's simple but not easy right exactly and once you understand it this is why you will find that once people get on a roll they can make and they can do spectacular things in terms of changing their life around because they get they get essentially on a self-reinforcing cycle of earning the self esteem and then they fall in love with that process
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