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Episode 177: Does seeking validation hinder happiness, Role of evolutionary mismatch
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we are talking about a couple of articles about happiness now the whole point of this podcast is to find happiness in the modern world by identifying different ways that that we can fall into certain traps and dr. Lisle you know you've talked extensively about different different things that hinder our happiness so a new article actually just just this year has been published about happiness now previous myths about happiness say that happy people live longer well and we kind of hear this all the time that if you know stress may cause an early death and all these other types of myths well to researchers named Bruce Edie and jong-seong out of the University of Melbourne they have been questioning this this wisdom of happiness's relationship to longitude e so what they did is they they took data from two very large long-term panel studies conducted in both Germany and Australia and they explored some anomalies in these happiness longitude D studies and so a couple of points about their research there is a big role of health that that is played in happiness so people who are set to die younger for whatever reason than their age then their counterparts are they're going to be unhappy er because they are suffering from poor health and happy people live longer because they don't have the chronic conditions that shortened life and so this was the authors are sarcastically quoted in this article saying that unless we're to believe that happy people stay along by sheer willpower and we know that Roy Baumeister's work on willpower this is that we really don't have as much as we we hope we do mmm but also personality needs to be factored into this equation so there was one prior study that reported that it's actually that the happiest people died at younger ages and their early deaths had nothing to do with happiness per se but with the factors that led to their death as it turned out the the happy people who died sooner were actually carefree and reckless as children so the lower trip rate the personality trait of being lower in conscientiousness meant that they took fewer preventative measures met an early death than their less cheerful but more careful health conscious people they also meant that there cheerfulness and happiness was matched with smoking drinking too much driving too fast from not complying with their doctor's orders and health treatments early didn't die because they were too happy but because they failed to guard against the threats to their health but and you know healthy people live longer barring any random cause of death and they're also the ones I'm sorry healthy people live longer and so they're also the ones left standing when the less healthy members of their generation die off so any study by aging no matter what the topic there there's going to be people dropping out of that population who lack the right stuff the secret sauce that gets them to live longer so that they may have inherited unhealthy genes made decisions that place them in harm's way like you know rock climbing or skydiving or whatever it is and subjected to harsh early environments but the authors state that quote because those whose health seriously declines also suffer a decline in life satisfaction it may seriously bias results in favor of finding a positive link between life satisfaction and longitude II if the last few years of life are included the other issue that they raised is the possibility that the previously reported happiness and longitude relationship assumed what's called linearity if this assume if this assumption is true then happy ten-year olds are supposed to become equally happy 90 year olds but from the review of the literature the authors actually concluded that people with low levels of life satisfaction die young but otherwise life satisfaction appears to be unrelated to longitude and that there's no evidence that even very high life satisfaction or very happy individuals live longer than people who report average levels so this is what the study actually tested they this was first tested in 1984 they had about thirteen thousand twelve 12,500 individuals and they followed them on a yearly basis and by that time by the last way is testing the sample had grown to about sixty thousand people and then the Australian study they began 2001 and they had about fourteen thousand participants and this grew to about 17,000 and the people got lost because they died but they took out as much as possible the role of selective survival of happiest so with these average scores they actually corrected for the possibility that life satisfaction late life ratings can reflect changes due to ill health so they actually eliminated ratings from people for the last three years of that person's life if that person had died and then with the average scores they then divided all the panel members into three groups high lifetime medium lifetime and low lifetime life satisfaction and so then they included they controlled for health disability status obesity and a lot of socio-economic measurements age was also used as the time duration variable in other words the older you are the longer you have endured across time then they also controlled for behavioral choices like physical exercise social network smoking they also include religious attendance interestingly enough because they thought that was possibly due to the social support that people receive and so with all those controls in place then the authors were able to calculate the relative risks of dying for those three life satisfaction groups and as they predicted the relationship between happiness and longitude II was nonlinear so the evidence just is very strong that suggests that unhappy people die young but across every bit of the rest of the distribution happiness makes absolutely no difference to how long you live - longitude II mm-hmm longevity by the way oh I'm sorry I'm on Javits gosh yeah and you would get once you get it in your head wrong yeah it spins around for a while yeah this is very interesting study I just looked at this earlier today and it was it was nice to see some clear thinking humans actually take on an obviously absurd concept and in blow to smithereens so let me let me let's cast this net a little wider even further than we have the so of course it let's let's break this down let's not think like typical thick-headed individuals who are not interested in in being critical looking for the truth let's think like biologists and let's think like psychologists and let's think like you know essentially biochemists they think like an evolutionary thinker the if you if you if you for example sprained your ankle would we expect that the experience of the pain that goes with that would damage you the answer is of course not the experience of the pain is a guidance system that it's that's there to engineer behavior changes that are in your best interest the fact that the behavior changes are being encouraged by pain is just one way to do things you can encourage movement by making it Pleasant and you can encourage movements by making them painful either way what you're going to do is you're incentivizing the organism to move in such a way that's optimum for its survival or its gene survival in the case of sex now the arm but in any event we wouldn't expect that the qualitative experience of the signal would have any impact on the tissue of the organism for godsakes and yet it is not uncommon for people to think that if they have something terribly upsetting happen to them and they have their quote heartbroken that this is going to somehow do damage to their body and similarly people feel like if they're really happy somehow that's the key to a long life is that if you're happy and you have things going well then that's healing for you somehow this is ridiculous okay the nervous system and it's and it's feeling states are simply guiding systems to tell you whether the circumstances you're in are good or bad for your Jeane survival into what degree and in what way okay so when you sprained your ankle it doesn't hurt in your ear it's there the feelings are as specific as possible but their nature of course it would make any sense for the signal no matter how painful it is to do any damage for God's sakes the but this is a little too sophisticated for most of the world so yeah this was always an absurd concept it's an absurd people thought that oh if you have terrible things happen to you emotionally it causes you to have cancer this is insane as make any sense at all why would nature in near you to have a feeling that would do you damage for God's sakes okay now we have to separate out that when you sprain your ankle there's damage to the tissue so the tissue is damaged but the pain isn't what damaged you but it was that it was the movement that was inconsistent with distressed tolerances of the organism and therefore damage was done and now the organism must signal to you the nature of that damage and its extent okay and so that therefore you can you can compute the further use of that tissue in its damaged State and the further damage that you will do to it and you can compute that against the cost-benefit analysis of all the selection pressures that are taking place so with you on that moment so if you're running for your life from a predator and you sprained your ankle Oh too bad your your the feeling of pain is there but you are you are fortunately I have so much adrenaline that you can't feel the normal pain signal because the system is so incredibly focused on survival that it will go ahead and sacrifice damages that will done appropriately now that adrenaline isn't magic it's there to appropriately balance the the actions that the decisions of the organism now so anyway so this was a neat study because it basically said of course you know having being happy in life doesn't lengthen your life and being miserable in your life doesn't truncate your life what they're basically showing is is that the myth if you have a miserable life one of the reasons you're miserable you're having a miserable existence is because you're falling apart and you're in serious frickin discs physical goods suffer because you're sick and you're dying okay so once you control for that factor the emotional component of the human's life has absolutely nothing to do with how long they live just as we would expect if we're an intelligent biologist that's using even a few neurons we should be able to figure this out okay so anyway cool but like I said you know we can we can take this wider and explain that a bunch of negative emotions aren't doing you any damage either so that's fine so we can all be comforted in our misery that is actually damage and if you're having a great time in life you know don't use that as a buffer zone to make a bunch of self-destructive decisions but you think you're buffered against it because you're feeling so wonderful that it's not a problem to light up a cigarette again because you know the wonderful endorphins that you're feeling from your new love affair are going to buffer you against the the impact of the cigarette they will not buffer you okay so you are machine everybody all right great job yeah it's interesting lives yeah it's interesting because I in the case of our physical bodies if you break a rib for example or break a bone it'll actually heal back a little bit stronger than than when it was originally so so there's an example of doing the complete opposite but when I was uh when I was in sports when I was younger I you know I hmm I would go to the doctor once in a while if I broke something and not that that happened very often yeah but but they said that oh you got to be careful because if you don't take care of it then it's going to it's going to cause problems later on in your life and so perhaps that's where the whole trauma you know thing that damages you came from maybe that myth came from there who knows we'll never know but but but I hear this all the time that yeah yeah all right all right okay so our first question has to do with this exact topic dr. Lyle my question for you is pertaining to a problem I've been struggling to find a solution for over the past few years I'm twenty-one year old male and have been in two enjoyable relationships with women each of which lasted around four months and ended relatively happily I'm very close friends with one of my former partners if it is of any rebel relevance one of the relationships ended on my own volition and the other did not though this mammal size is small those were unquestionably the happiest periods of my life so far and it wasn't until long after they had ended that I realized why that was the case the feeling that I was and still am craving was validation from another person I suppose I can boil it down to the idea that quote I really like this person because they're amazing they're really and they really like me so I must be doing something right I suspect that the palpability of this feeling likely stems from having low self esteem though fortunately it seems to have been growing over the years the problem here is I don't want to need this feeling in order to be as happy as I can be I think I very well could go the rest of my life giving in to it but I'd rather reach a point which I know I can live happily without seeking validation from others it's partially for this reason that I've refrained from engaging in a romantic relationship over the past few years as I figure I'm more likely to solve the problem when deprived of that form of validation I've attempted to find solutions to this in a number of ways including continually reminding myself the reasons why I like Who I am and practicing mindful meditation which I like to think has helped to some extent I'd love to hear any advice you can offer on this issue this is a thing of beauty all right kid here's a deal you will be seeking validation from another person it will be the high point of your resistance if your for as long as you live the there's no such thing as not being as that not being the most exquisite thing that there is okay so we can go talk to some some yogi on a mountainside so that it's not so but they're bluffing the the your quote low self-esteem it isn't what's driving this need and the exhilaration that came from being quote validated let's translate the word validated into something into English that we can all understand so what you're seeking is the steam signals that indicate that the other person finds you valuable enough to engage in sexual relationships with you as opposed to your competitors so the quote validation is simply the sexual choice on the part of the females who are saying given all of my options right now and all the options that I'm likely to have in the short-term future at least you're the best option and you're above the bar you're in other words I'm not wild about most of my options however I'm actually very pleased with you as an option so therefore if you want to calculate I'd be into it okay now so we're going well yeah that's why that's why if you go to buy door right now there's a whole bunch of winder on the block I know men might our mate I gotta take some lessons cuz I don't have anybody wrapped around the like all right so anyway the deal is is that your device inside your head that I call the esteem meter is a built in that system in order to be sensitive to feedback signals from other people it is essential that but this is a this is the epicenter of human life satisfaction because the the greatest statistical variance that's associated with your likelihood of survival or your likelihood of reproduction or both has to do with how valuable other people find you those those how valuable they find you is not independent of their options so they you are simply a player in a marketplace and so in this case we're going to assume that if this was a very big high for this young man that he found these two young women quite attractive so therefore they they were another component to understand this particular individuals situation and maybe some of his puzzlement is that another component of your mind is what we're going to call the self so I've gone through this in other podcasts where you have three primary mechanisms inside your mind you have an esteem meter you have an internal audience and you have what I call the self so the self is is a set of calibration equipment that that assesses your your competitive standing in the world and assigns goals for you to pursue for example in this case it's with respect to romance so the two young ladies that he got involved with were two young ladies that his calibration system as it analyzed his percentile rank in the competitive pool and analyzed their competi percentile rank in the competitive pool it came up with the computation that said that these were both pretty exciting deals so therefore he pursued these deals and and it turned out that he got positive esteem signals accepting esteem signals from these young women it was it was extremely exciting that's how it's supposed to be I want to translate this into a sports analogy suppose you're LeBron James and you've won three titles this guy's won two titles and the dating so far but LeBron is 1/3 and suppose that LeBron said you know what it is that I seek what is it I seek is to not really care um what happens with respect to my career whether I win or lose that you know and what other people think of me in terms of my abilities I really don't care that's what I seek I seek not giving a damn about any of that oops that doesn't make any sense at all okay what that man is doing is he's seeking esteem from two parties number one the outside world as he as he advertises his fitness indicators as well as he possibly can and also from his internal audience who is driving him and coaching him to make the most of his abilities in order so that he can optimize his trading and across the major domains of life and therefore if he can trade as well as he possibly can and it secures the finest possible relationships then he will get happiness as a result of the feedback systems and the processes that take place within those relationships okay so this young man asks very deep interesting intelligent questions he's being sort of goaded and diluted by some New Age philosophy uh away from reason and no you will never be in a situation where you don't care about the feedback from other people you're designed by nature to care deeply about the feedback from other people you're designed by nature to be exhilarated if you get positive feedback from someone that you consider to be out standing that's called falling in love and there's no more exquisite experience on earth for human being than that okay so the desire to seek that and the exhilaration that comes with that is is not does not stem from quote low self-esteem you should be unless you have had extraordinarily positive feedback every time you wink I would expect you to have substantial insecurities so let's suppose that an individual is a 70th percentile attractiveness individual then we know let's suppose it's a male so what we let's assume that we can that we can we're seeing him as a heterosexual individual and we're going to keep all psychological parameters constant so now we're just talking about sheer physical attractiveness we would expect that who he'd be most interested in would be people north of him so that the more attractive they are the more exciting it would get okay the blue so the fact is is that when approaching or interacting with people who would be above his percentile rank in a substantial way I eat more than ten percent more attractive than he is we would expect him to feel competitive stress we would expect him to feel like he might not be enough okay this is not quote low self-esteem this is low self-confidence this is not the action of the internal audience giving feedback to to the self about its performance this is the self calibrating data from the competitive realities that the individuals facing and causing low self confidence which causes him to tread carefully as so as to not be embarrassed about reaching above his station and therefore looking like a fool okay that's not low self-esteem yeah this is an interesting confusion that people have low self-esteem comes from your internal audience observing your efforts and having those efforts be judged as deficient and thereby the performance of effort being you know disgusting and frustrating so that that will come about from a variety of motivations ego trap being a major factor and other problems their laziness the so low self esteem is effectively a moral judgment low confidence has nothing to do with that so you can expect as a person that is not Brad Pitt or George Clooney you can expect yourself to feel competitive stress in situations where you may be reaching above your percentile rank and you can feel the insecurity that's associated with that and so that that is not quote low self-esteem and you can expect that to be a recurrent theme throughout your lifetime and and you're going to hopefully have long periods maybe forever where if you get lucky and you get a great situation with a great partner and you qualify for that person that you are you know deeply happy and definitely in that situation and you don't wind up feeling those recurrent processes that go on if you're on the market but if you are in the market and you are searching mitt for mates you can expect to have the situation come up that there's going to be times when you're going to be interested in other people but they're not going to be interested in you and the feeling of what he's calling low self-esteem which is actually low esteem they're the signaling that one gets from people that are that are fancier than us that indicates that they don't find this very interesting is not low self-esteem that's low esteem that's a negative esteem signal and those don't feel good and they are they're not the result of any childhood issue this is the result of a naturally in a appropriate built-in market sensing dynamic and it's designed by nature to calibrate your actions with respect to the competitive opportunities in such a way as to optimize the the utilization of your time and energy in the search for gene survival so the search for gene survival don't expect it to be pleasant expect it to be expected to be a roller coaster and it's more of a roller coaster in your youth because you're not that well calibrated and so there's some surprises and hopes and devastations as you find out what your calibration score looks like however you'll always be searching through a mysterious haze just exactly what your calibrations are because the feedback we don't actually carry around percentiles in our heads specifically and other people don't always agree about what our percentile is or us about them so there's slop in the system and therefore there's both hope and there's devastation hey guys our first factor of a romance novel written by dr. Doug Lyall alright okay we're going to take one question we're going to do one question here and then we're going to take our we have a caller on hold right now so caller please very just hang tight for a second and then we'll get to you in just a second hmm so dr. Lam my question here is more of a meta meta one I suppose and it is influenced by works like Darwinian happiness by researcher Bjorn bright green day grind I don't know as established in so many ways in the field of evolutionary psychology we seem to suffer greatly from what is coined evolutionary mismatch the current circumstances be it environment social structure diet exercise we find ourselves in are vastly different from what our brain has been evolved to in almost the entire history of Homo sapiens we're made to live on days in a tribe like structure in a green environment having access to a limited amount of extremely calories rich foods etc yet we wonder why we don't become happy by doing our mindfulness meditation or whatever all alone in a gray concrete building mostly surrounded by people we barely or not at all know and Trust trying to digest way too much calorie rich foods found in abundance in the subtle M next door so the question is shouldn't all of our folks should all of our focus and efforts be directed towards fixing as many of these evolutionary mismatches as possible to recreate as good as possible circumstances our brain has developed in and thereby resolving so much with the mental and physical issues we have stemming from the absence of exactly that what we are meant to have very good thinking and the answer is yes so that that's a really good place for people to be focused focus their energies so that's what this show is about we're actually talking about that I I was not aware of the books that that he's talking about so it's interesting that other people are discussing these same things finally and that's good yeah I'm sure my take on these things is is somewhat different than some of theirs but there's going to be considerable overlap which is all good so yeah there's a we've talked about on this show ego trap we talked about pleasure trap we talked about pseudo esteem we talked about behavior genetics and understanding that individuals are not changing and therefore it's very useful to try to select out your own personal village the the obviously as I spoke about this in the pleasure trap that the modern world is a wonder it's a it and it's a two-edged sword every time that you see a benefit there's a substantial possible cost that's associated with that advantage it would be unwise to say that the modern world is a mess and that we're all miserable that's not true people are happier today than they've ever been ok they they are more satisfied better fed can see more of the world better educated etc there it's just and so people that lament the good old days when you you know essentially we're in a little village of a but starving you know savages that that we're worried about the warfare of the tribal village next door and we're you know losing half their kids in the first year or two of life etc and worried about predators all the time this is no grand way to live so however it had some advantages that we don't have the you you did have among virtually everybody there feelings of deep connection with other people you you survived and or you either made it or didn't make it as a group so you don't have that today you can have people all in their own independent little apartment silos doing work that that isn't connected to any Stone Age money process at all and so there's uh there's advantages to and the way we evolved there's advantages to simpler life that we left and there's also grave disadvantages as well so our job here is to as intelligently as possible take advantages of the advantages while we keep our eyes focused on the problems associated with what the changes that have taken us away from our nature so that's what this is about and that so I yeah I'm just babbling because I could say more but that's exactly what it is that I spend my life doing is to instructing people as to where it is that their life is now veered away from their Stone Age nature and what they're feeling centers are telling us that something is out of balance so our job is to to use those feelings as a guidance system just as a doctor does or dentist as asking where you're uncomfortable that we use feelings as a guidance system to tell us where things are out of balance and using the Stone Age brain as an understanding of of how those value systems are built and therefore what these feeling signals are attempting to generated tell us by actually having a heuristic that tells us how this thing is working it's immensely valuable clinically and it's also very valuable if it's not clinical if you just read it a book and follow some instructions so this is the the value of understanding of self understanding who it is that we are the suped-up fabulous chimpanzee that is a human being fascinating all right doctor well let's take our collar hmm all right all right Marcus welcome to the show thanks for calling hey thanks so much and very good I could flood you certain hey I could flood your circuits just a little bit you're on innate I wanted to tell you Nadel very dry the broadcast you're Nate you're providing a great public service and I know that all the fans of the show really appreciate all of your hard efforts and what you do and dr. Lyle finding that yeah dr. Lyle your teachings through your lectures and webinars and the podcast I made a big difference in my life and I wanted to get the opportunity to thank you for that I'm just giving my story briefly I've been dealing with a big weight issue which caused of course a lot of serious health problems I am I'm five feet eight inches all of my biggest point I was 276 pounds I was wearing pants as a 52 inch waist at that time and and due to the due to my horrible diet I was shoveling in junk food with both hands my head gallbladder removed panics kidney stones bladder stones I had part of my colon removed due to diverticulitis and I had a colostomy bag for four months so I was in bad shape and so starting out with forks over knives and then trying to dig out information and you know and finding your lectures and the all the webinars that you did with dr. mcdougal the site and on YouTube and all that stuff I have lost a little bit over 50 pounds and I've kind of hit a equilibrium and what I'm trying to do is up the exercise a little bit and look for the the places and when I work and I can clean up and kind of tighten those things up because really being honest I was probably following the plant-based diet about 80% or so some some times some weeks better but mostly you know around there and on the weekends that would kind of get kind of get sidetracked and really I think the my best success is during the work week when I've got the structure of my work day so again I'm planning out what I'm what I'm going to eat during a day and so I'm wondering if you would have any strategies to where I could you know maybe get over the hump of the of that equilibrium and and tighten up things a little more tighten up the diet does that make sense oh sure it makes sense all right I've chuckling because I take about I do about a thousand phone consultations a year and and your question is probably did the question of about at least 150 of them okay so this is a a common common question and it's a question that I had today so what's the secret well everybody lean in like this is an EF Hutton commercial from the 1970s so you guys are probably too young to know what that is alright beyond pure on blue can i doing it right now okay good good all right glad that the what's the secret well let's talk about a few little details you're Marcus first of all the the reason why we do anything is because we're running a cost-benefit analysis and so you are uh and the cost-benefit analysis is being done through you know sort of complex web of sensation memory opportunity effort etc so it's a it's a whole you know set of parallel equations about different alternative courses of action that you could take and and what would you know what would be the best deal and so before you knew the connection between diet and your health you didn't there would be no way for you to know that you know a potato with butter was going to be healthier for you then then a steak you know a steak with some I don't know a little rice on the side so you wouldn't have known the difference and so you got sick enough and got lucky and you're smart enough and we're motivated enough bitch and you'd suffered enough through all the stuff that you've gone on that you decided to make a change so you watch forks over knives and you're thinking hmm seems halfway reasonable and so you you make some changes and that's no small event that takes place so you're down fifty pounds that that's no small victory I would call that phase one in other words you've now experimented with these behavior changes and you have now learned something profound and that is that it really makes a big difference to your physical self it makes a big difference what you eat that's huge okay so so anyway so that's sort of phase one now you've kind of hit an equilibrium now let me ask you this how's your health now you Payne how are things going oh boy I just feel so much better I've got type 2 diabetes and you know so I'm hoping to drop some more significant weight and in you know get rid of that or get it under control but why I just feel so much better than I used to for sure yeah you know what you feel so much better that you almost I don't have to bother anymore so is that that problem okay so the motivation the cost-benefit analysis is now changed because the the potential benefit for you before was enormous and immediate it was all the pain and you know debility that you were in so now it turns out that you feel you've made significant changes you've had a major change in your morphology okay to drop 50 pounds is is phenomenal and so say and you feel much better so now we fit at a different place with respect to your motivation how old are you Marcus 50 50 okay so uh any any smoking history no okay no smoking good okay so uh no no known existing cardiac pathology so no stents in there no heart attacks etc correct yeah none of that okay so yeah things are looking pretty good if we were to guess how long you were going to live right now we would guess about 30 years even with your type 2 diabetes okay so and and that's you know given how well it is that you feel that's kind of what your intuition is telling you your intuition is kind of telling you you know what Marcus I think we're out of the woods okay now so you're are you getting any peripheral neuropathy in your feed your hands anything like that yeah a little bit in my feet got it a little bit in your feet okay so that's good so now now instead of being one of those savages back on the Stone Age with some process going on that they couldn't possibly understand and blamed on the gods we now have a process that we know exactly what's going on okay we know that you're in trouble that there's going to be a creeping neuropathy that's going to take place as long as we we you know have diabetes and so things are so this far out of balance so things aren't good enough in order to stop a creeping pathological condition okay so that however it's not a runaway train so here you are you're like you're kind of like a dog on it on a porch laying on a little nail it's like mmm not that bad no then I'm sure you really want to get up and it's kind of pretty comfortable there there's a nice breeze everything's fine so I don't really mind laying on this nail because it's not too much of a nail and it's not causing me too much discomfort so that's where we are you you've you've made a big positive change and now you're you're sort of thinking well gee you know hmm how come it stopped sort of how come in this isn't enough and and sort of you know kind of what you're doing that is contributing to the continuing problem and yet you don't really have that much motivation to not do it okay right so that's our problem a problem is is that you're not that motivated you're not that scared the process that you're in now is a very slow moving trend so you we could just wait a little while until they start talking about cutting off your big toe okay then you will get motivated all right so what I'm going to want to try to do is I'm going to try to to get you to look at the problem from a slightly different angle the right now the the motivation is well let me let me ask you something else just a little sideshow how do you feel about the way you look now um well I look better got a loose skin which is kind of gross like right but you know I mean I'm down to like you know twelve inches on my in my waist so right you know I feel I feel better about that and right so yeah just that is the loose skin do you have a partner you have or you you're you sort of sitting on the sidelines because of the loose skin and the weight and all these issues or what's your situation I'm married you marry brie looking yeah very lucky in that respect she's very lucky married oh sweet girl God okay so so how do you feel do you feel embarrassed about the hanging skin um you know not not in front of her I mean I'm you know yeah wouldn't want to go out to go out to the plate you're right but you you feel accepted there as far as that goes from your primary partner so that that's pretty good so this is uh right so we're and that that's a that's a little side issue does it bother you for example if you were to lose another 50 pounds we're going to have more skin problems that's sort of lurking in the back of your mind as a challenge or a problem I you know it my thought is as Steve if I could you know really get the more weight off than you know if need be I would investigate you know surgery to get some of the loosen for me okay alright so that's sort of sometimes people get themselves stopped because they don't want to face you know more of that problem so I was just checking their if there's a little countervailing force that was kind of adding to the resistance to doing a better job okay alright so what I would say is that anybody that was ever five foot eight and 276 pounds has very thick jeans okay so your your jeans the fact that you know most people that were eating the way you're reading would have been five five eight and 200 pounds you know that's kind of what they would have been maybe 210 but the fact that you got to 276 just tells me you come from a family that has you know sort of burly genes on the males or curvy genes on the females in other words that's just how you're essentially built genetically okay right so what that means is is that you've been doing what I would you know you went from doing standard you know the standard American does about it what I consider like about addy when it comes to their diet on the way.i curve my particular class some mongrel between you know what you should do versus what what people actually do etc so in theory you would have been a see but the truth is that the whole damn society gets downgraded so we're going to give you a D for what you used to do and given a D you wound up with a sent worse than D like a d-minus results okay because your genes now now you've been doing what I would consider B or even B+ work probably be work some of the cheating you're doing you're doing enough of it so you're doing B work and what we wound up with is sort of cc- results okay that's the fact that your genes are what they are those we can't control so that means that and unfortunately because of that we're winding up with a creeping type two diabetes problem that at age 50 is not swallowing your function yet but you're you're heading into trouble okay so what I would tell you is is that to be to be reasonable you actually need to do more like B plus a minus work if you do B plus a minus work and we're going to start getting a C+ or a B - and health which means we're going to start heading down into you know 200 190 pounds something like that and we'll arrest the diabetes okay yeah and uh and that's that's you know that's this is what I would call phase two phase three is for the hyper conscientious nut cases like my friend chef AJ who just puts the puts the floor you know puts the gas in the floorboard and just goes as fast as the car will go okay yeah so we don't know you know you don't talk that into anybody that that's just in there and so there's people to just have that in them to do I don't and maybe you don't either you sound a little more naturally stable and so therefore I don't know that we're ever going to turn you into a hyper conscientious nutcase alright but we do if you just know you Newton just a nut that's all so what we need to do is we need to move you from being sort of the B player you are up to a beat + a - player okay it's really what we need to do and and the the place where we're going to look at this is not aiming at beautiful results because your results are actually got you relaxed anyway but there's a there's a process that's going on it's a little bit disturbing and that process is your internal audience so your internal audience was fine with you doing suddenly doing B work which relative to everybody else in your experience was like the top student in the class okay you're B work as a veggie vegan you know human your B work was is better than anybody else you saw much more conscientious much more health-conscious much more knowledgeable and much more concerned okay nobody else worries about dripping you know I don't know melted cheese on the pastrami sandwich at lunch with with a coca-cola the what's the problem okay but you did so you you drank the kool-aid got educated and then found out that it was true as all these things about your health and your body improved dramatically okay now mm-hmm however we've kind of ended that we now know you ran the experiment you you used your intelligence and your diligence to have major successes but now what we can see is that you're kind of doing a half-ass job Bryce hey yeah yeah and you know you're doing a half-ass job so your internal audience is watching you do a half-ass job and it's telling you hey Marcus you're kind of doing a half-assed job and now not doing a terrible job you know you're not doing a terrible job you're doing a half-ass okay decent job but you're not doing a really good job and so what I what I want you to pay attention to and this is a very unsexy secret it's the most important secret that there is in psychology but it is not sexy so people ask me 150 times a year this question what's the secret what's the trick how can I get myself on track I just can't seem to God get myself motivated blehh blehh blehh blehh blehh okay hear it all the time and the reason why you did a pretty good job is you're in serious pain and in serious trouble and you found the solution and you executed on it and you got out of serious trouble that's fabulous okay but now you're doing a half-ass job and with you doing a half-ass job ie B work doing B work is getting you cc- type of results because you're Jin's okay so we need to raise the bar to B plus a minus and when we do that we'll raise your results up to B we get rid of the diabetes we'll draw up 30 pounds maybe 40 pounds you know things are going to be better and you have a way brighter future in front of you but the way we're going to do it is not through some magic motivation of promising you a better future because your present isn't that okay what we're going to do is we want to look inside you and get you educated as to what to watch for the real value of doing a better job the real value of doing a better job is when your internal audience watches you execute on a very good long-term plan with good fundamentals as it watches you it starts to pat you on the back and it says hey Marcus you're not doing a half-ass job you're doing better than a half-ass job good job okay it's subtle and it's quiet but the slightly negative feedback that you are now getting from your internal audience will quiet down now your internal audience is still unfortunately giving you a little bit of positive feedback just from having them done you're still in the glow of that but it's wearing off okay and now you're facing a new reality now that you're at equilibrium and we're still you know we've still got some significant trouble the internal audience is now going to start demanding that you step up your game okay time to quit doing B work it's time to start you know raising your grade point average we need to go from a 3.0 to a 3-5 that's what we need to do okay so what I'm going to recommend that you do is that you pay attention to your internal audience and notice that for example if sometime in the next month you decide to pin your ears back and do a really good job for about five to seven days in a row just do an exceptionally good job and we're not tricking you into doing this long term what we're doing is we're running an experiment on your own nervous system so that you can actually make an intelligent decision in your future about how you should be motivated to do what okay so let's suppose that you were a student that was pretty smart in some class and you weren't doing too well and then a fellow student came along and said listen you're not understanding you need to buy another textbook and do problems out of the other textbook and that gives you more practice and then when you get more practice you can do a lot better suppose you did that and you went from being a b-minus student to an A student do you think it might motivate you in the future to do that again for another class I think it was early okay and that's exactly what we're doing we're going to try to educate you into how it is that you know what it feels like and watch carefully your psychological dynamics that when you pin your ears back and do an excellent job I want you to see what that feels like inside forget about the physical part because you feel pretty good physically pay attention to the emotional part that your internal audience will say hey this is pretty damn good what you're doing okay that's the feeling we want to see that that feeling is not an accident that feeling is what we're going to call pride okay pride only comes from that process it comes from you knowing that you diligently did an excellent job that could be cleaning up the closet running a multinational corporation or sticking to your diet for a week and doing a really good job pride which is the internal audience saying well done I appreciate your effort good job okay I want you to feel that and recognize incredibly that that is totally under your control pop psychology thinks to send your control from affirmation so a young man and the earlier question does his affirmations and tries to say positive things or whatever the hell it is of course nothing like that if it works it's completely useless process what works what you feel about yourself arises from the internal audiences observation of your efforts that is where it comes from and if you do a good job it doesn't matter if you stare in the mirror and say you're an idiot and you're moron and you're screwing everything up if you're not an idiot and not a moron and you are not screwing everything up your internal audience you just laughs at this whole thing ludicrous okay and if you do a mediocre job and stare in the mirror and say you're doing fantastic you're you're beautiful you're handsome you're brilliant tonight you okay it's not going to change one bit about how you feel about yourself your internal audience is a pitiless judge as it watches what is that you do and gives you feedback it's a shadow coach and it's telling you the truth so what I want you to do is focus on watching how that mechanism works so that when you do an excellent job sometime in the next month and you decide okay okay okay okay I believe I'm going to start this week and I'm going to do this thing by four or five days into this thing you know six seven days your internal audience will start to tell you well done Marcus okay and then you will know there's the feeling there's only one way to get it and we can always get it back and it's a very interesting feeling and a very worthwhile feeling okay that's the feeling that I want you to be returning to for the rest of your life you're going to get drawn back into little versions of the pleasure trap you're not going to do things perfectly you will not set up a perfect score like chef AJ around Gold ham or any of these other hyper conscientious you know health nuts you're not going to do that that's fine but what I want you to do is to recurrently seek that feeling of internal excellence where you repetitively go on streaks where you do a very good job okay and if you do that we're not doing it just for the health benefits because we're not that scared we're doing it for the feeling of feeling really good about ourselves that's what will draw you back and we currently try to do the best that's the best motive I know for getting on a healthier track and staying on there a high percentage of the time that make sense yes sir okay Darryl is all right I just would say I'm really appreciate you coming on and asking a question the super valuable question for so many people and and so you know your your story is an inspiring one and it parallels many people that have that have walked this walk and and done a good job and had significant positive benefits but then got stalled as they got better and they got scored good enough and they got out of the acute distress and now they're kind of in an equilibrium and they're a little bit out of skiing there's no more wind in ourselves okay and so mm-hmm this is how we try to discover how to get some control over the wind it's it through our sensitivity to the self-esteem mechanism and and essentially getting a little bit addicted at least in stretches that feeling that really wonderful internal moral judgment that our self-esteem mechanism gives to us when we've done a really good job
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