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Episode 219: Increasing your self esteem and escaping the pleasure trap during Lockdown
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I got this a couple of days ago said in the last podcast dr. Wilde did a good job explaining how unlikely it will be for me to die from coven 19 unfortunately since listening to the podcast I've now become terrified of driving well very fair point yeah yeah I mean one of the things that actually did occur to me last week when he was winding out on it is is the you know fear is not rational I think we did talk about this a bit and in my own I have I think I've talked about it before like I hate I hate flying I have a very irrational fear of flying and everybody knows it's safer to fly than it is to drive like a lot safer and but that doesn't stop me from being irrationally terrified to fly like that's just it's it is what it is and it's something that I can't I'm not sufficiently independently wealthy to go through graded exposure therapy which is really the solution for people that have big big fear big fear of flying is that you essentially hire a pilot to to take you up and land like 12 times in one day which like I boggles the mind like terrifyingly so but even if I had what's this called something exposure they're great graded so in that case Brutus it's yeah you're in that case you're just kind of jumping into it and you're facing your fear straight out but we've talked before with different people who have different if you if you do for example have a fear of public speaking you work your way into it with little smaller examples that would trigger the fear so you give a toast to you know maybe you're afraid of giving a toast at a wedding so you just you just dial it back and you do smaller and smaller versions of the thing that's making you afraid so you you raise your hand and a staff meeting at work and you say something and you just you kind of go through that process of the adrenaline and you feel your heart racing and you feel the terror and then you realize that you did that and it was very scary but you actually survived and you didn't die and it's it's fine and so then you can escalate bit by bit as you move toward doing the thing that you're actually very afraid of if you're essentially teaching your nervous system that this this thing that you have built up a bunch of terror around is not actually as fatal to you as you think it is because you're approaching it very slowly data would you say it's wet or would you say you're collecting data yeah you are you're improving your information your so the the fear is based on a distortion and a bad estimate and a bad inference of how likely this this how how detrimental that process is likely to be to your survival and/or reproduction so you're correcting that by exposing yourself so it's the same it's it's exposure therapy for people who have symptoms of what we would call OCD or OCD like behavior so they can't leave the house without you know clicking the light switch 20 times but if they don't do that and they just leave the house anyway they discover that nothing terrible happened this guy didn't fall the ground didn't open up and swallow them whole and so it's it's improving the the calibration of the computer that's making that estimate as they realize that they can survive it mm-hmm I'm really glad you brought this up now the is it it's 12 times a particular number or was it just a number you came up you you just just kind of mentioned I think I said 20 actually didn't I didn't Oh 20 yeah no no the pilot I'm sorry the pilot where's is just know I'm wondering if there's a certain number of times just gonna depend on everybody that was based on you know my idea of what a terrible terrible day would look like well I'm glad you brought it up because you know once once this pandemic starts to get get you know once it once the let me put it see how I put this so I don't get a whole bunch of people accusing me of something mmm hopefully once the city and the local government starts to you know phase people back into away from a lockdown there may still be people who are afraid to go out because they may be afraid of catching this thing would this exposure therapy you know where they go out to the you know maybe they go out to the you know I don't know rent a movie and one of those vending machines you know and then they then they go into a convenience store and then they go into a grocery you know what I mean so yeah and then then they may be more relaxed going out yeah yeah it's gonna be an issue for a lot of people anybody who has that kind of circuitry in their nervous system that has been really latent and not triggered by their environment until now you get into the situation where it's it's linked with innate disgust mechanisms which are incredibly powerful this is you know we've developed really really powerful aversion and disgust mechanisms in the human nervous system for very good reasons to keep us from dying and so the this whole everything that we've been through and everything we'll gonna continue to go through is just really enforcing and essentially conditioning classically conditioning disgust an aversion practices and those are going to be really difficult to unwind for everybody and particularly for certain personalities who we're gonna get really in a deep groove and it's essentially just like any other conditioned behavior all of the little cues of the wearing the mask and and all of the things that are conveying to you that you're dealing with something that is really potentially very dangerous to your survival and or reproduction they're gonna be getting those reminders all over the place even if it's not true or not not as true or not statistically significant true in any kind of way that it should be really guiding your behavior if you're trying to optimize your life so there's risk of with everything everything carries risk but just like my fear of flying you know there it doesn't it doesn't benefit my life experience to have a lot of superstitious behavior and a lot of a lot of little conditioned practices associated with that that are trying to keep the fear at bay when they're actually just conditioning in the whole process that is supporting the fear so I discovered that actually when I when I flew recently and I was flying with a friend who was talking to me the whole time before takeoff and and through takeoff which is always the worst time for me and for most people who were afraid of flying I couldn't engage in all of my little superstitious behaviors you know I couldn't do all of the little things that I that I have been kind of conditioned to do that I was like oh god do this to keep the plane safe and it was actually very liberating to not be able to do those things and to feel this the rise and anxiety with like oh my god I'm not I'm not gonna be able to do this I have these like professional norms where I have to continue to have this conversation and in the way that I'm talking about that that really kind of was a form of exposure therapy where it was like okay well I couldn't do all the little rituals and we're fine so I guess I don't need the little ritual and that's that's what people are gonna be in a similar similar situation when we get later into the summer and you know we're on the downslope presumably I mean data can always change and we can always be in a different situation but if if the current trajectory is hold if we're only seeing you know a minut number of new cases people are gonna have a really hard time letting go of this effectively what then become superstitious behaviors they start off as adaptive useful processes that are are protecting you from some unseen Menace but it's it's very difficult to let those things go when they've been protecting you from the invisible disgusting thing that they hold a bay even in the face of new evidence yeah I guess people don't know it's bad luck to be superstitious at least I didn't say go up and go up and down 13 times and one day that would be obviously this terrible idea so yeah so so this covet thing have you had any consults of people like giving up essentially or like just saying okay I can I can take a vacation for you know six weeks or whatever it is yeah well not only have I had consults with people who have sort of made that decision but I think that that's a really prevailing source of wisdom in the mental health community so I think a lot of people have been going to counselors and therapists and reading things online and we've talked about this a little bit in previous shows as well where you know there's a lot of memes floating around that say things like you don't have to be productive right now you don't have to do anything right now we're we're going through this very difficult collective trauma together and and it this is not the time to ask much of yourself and this is like a you know there's there's always a grain of truth to these things and there people are having very different experiences as they're dealing with whatever they're going through so some people genuinely are experiencing a huge amount of upheaval and financial great financial distress and tremendous uncertainty in their lives but a lot of other people are just in a moment of sustained inconvenience and maybe a little bit of discomfort but you know ultimately just significant inconvenience and they are hearing these kinds of recommendations whether they're from mental health professionals or advice on Facebook or wherever it's coming from and it's resonating with their desire their their sort of inherent energy conservation circuits that everybody has is what gets everybody in the pleasure trap and all of the other traps that we get into behind energy conservation it taps into your desire to oh there's a there's an excuse here that allows me to back away from competitive realities and so all things equal I should probably grab on to that because that's that is going to save me energy in the competitive scramble that is life and people don't recognize that in that process they are they're really sabotaging their own well-being a lot of the time they're eroding their capacity to develop self-esteem because self-esteem the whole self-esteem process is coming from diligent effort toward progress on an important competitive goal you can't really build self-esteem unless it's embedded in a larger system of of progress toward an important goal so if you've taken yourself away from the goal if there if there is no goal other than oh we just have to survive this difficult time as intuitive as that feels and as much as it seems like the right thing to do your genes are telling you this is a this is a really valuable shortcut this is a time that everybody agrees that we can this is the ultimate big Louie I don't have to participate I don't have to take a chance I don't I don't have to make life difficult for myself right now you're really putting yourself in a situation where you're not gonna get you're not giving your own nervous system in your internal audience any positive feedback about your progress in the world and that's a big trap and it's gonna lead to feelings of helplessness and low self-efficacy and depression and more anxiety and all of the things that you were trying to avoid by avoiding competition to start with yeah that's I personally like this like so I took a couple weeks off during during a like a couple weeks ago with the patients here and like for the first week I was just like laying in bed doing nothing watching TV Facebook than at my internal audience was like yeah that's that doesn't feel good you're not really doing shit like yeah you can't go out and you know work out what not but so yeah I started like slowly cleaning things up in my garage and like I realized I hadn't really unpacked that much since I moved in here yeah and like my garage was full of shit so just like I took everything from the garage put it in the living room and it was just one at a time just where does it go and organized and like all it took was maybe six days where I was just like I wasn't completely done I still not but I just felt like every room I walked into that was organized I was like I felt this pride you know yeah one of the metaphors we'll often use to explain kind of the the difference between self-esteem and self-confidence for for people which can trip people up is you know self self confidence doesn't doesn't say anything about what you know about the process that got you to how presentable your house is for a party so your your house can be very presentable for a party and you've got people coming over and everything looks fine and you're confident that it's gonna it's gonna look okay and the the boss's wife is gonna make a good assessment of your efforts and everything is gonna be fine so you have self-confidence about that situation but your self-esteem could be in the toilet because you know if they go in the bedroom and they look in the closet but everything's piled up and locked in there and they you know the kitchen drawers are full of crap and everything's just like you've just shoved it all under the proverbial carpet and under the bed and and you know that that's lurking and that it's it's eroding your ability to enjoy the outcome where self-esteem is the fact that your house may not yet be exactly where you want it to be it may still be pretty messy like you're experiencing when you're pulling everything out and from the garage but you know that you spent that day doing really deep organizational work and you and that you made really good progress and you know that you made that progress you know that you took four bags out to the dumpster and and you you dealt with some stuff that you hadn't dealt with in a long time so even though it may not be ready for the world yet you've got you're starting to nourish that little pilot light of pride that lives inside that the internal audience is attuned to so that's that's kind of the difference it's the same thing when people are in trying to turn their health around trying to you know adopt a healthy diet lose weight you people may not see it on the outside yet but when you have turned things around and you have made some amount of progress and it's as as you noticed with the your cleaning efforts it's usually somewhere between like three and six days of consistent effort that it really awakens that feeling of of pride which is just another word for self esteem so when people are just withdrawing from competition entirely and you know using the time to do nothing with their lives and slacking off and and all of these things that seem like a really good idea at the time it's essentially the same kind of pleasure trap that you're you're getting from your nervous system when it wants to eat crappy food instead of healthy food it's it's your nervous system screaming at you that this is the right choice because it's energy conservation and we never want to waste time and energy in nature if we can help it but ultimately your your health and your happiness are being sabotaged in this process because you're you're taking away the one thing that is most responsible for driving human happiness which which is the self-esteem mechanism and it's so it's like this is this has just been it's it's ubiquitous in professional recommendations everywhere that I look and it's been really amazing to watch the rhetoric unfold around how what what conventional wisdom this has become in such a short amount of time this is not the time to ask much of yourself like well yeah but maybe not but it's also probably not the time to opt out of life either mm-hmm probably somewhere in the middle you think yeah yeah I mean it's gonna be context dependent like everything else is but most people if they're you know in in a position to have internet and they're housed and they're listening to a podcast then they're they're probably in a position where they they should reflect on what meaningful progress they could be making toward improvements in their life which may be those maybe the goal posts have changed as a result of all of this but you you're still you're you're always in that process as a successful human if you're not in that process then you're you're not gonna be experiencing optimum happiness in my example I actually like started cleaning stuff and stuff myself do you think I would have had a similar feeling of pride if I say hired someone to go organize my garage and I walked in and now everything's organized and I didn't do it myself but but I paid someone to do it um you might have I mean as long as you were yourself up to something that was at the threshold of your your capacity and your ability so if you've got a really big goal to completely get your house organized it's completely reasonable to outsource parts of that and you don't necessarily have to do every little bit of the labor yourself but you're you were still the the author and the organizer of the whole enterprise so you're not gonna have much of a feeling of self esteem if you are completely removed from it and just kind of check again and see what happens because then it's not a goal that's your your you've got the confidence as a result of the whole process but you didn't build up the esteem by watching yourself what having your internal audience watch you pack up those bags of garbage and take them out yourself there's something very different about that are there any tips that you any specific tips that you would recommend people do if there are lock down in their home with any nowhere to go that can little things they can do to improve their self-esteem or their confidence yeah well they're probably the things that they were engaged in at some level before this all happened so everybody's got you know some improvements that they can make in their life there's some there's some distance between where we are now and where we might be that would improve your standing in the competition that you're facing with romance or with friendship or with work those that that's where that's where it all lives in the realm of human motivation so before kovetz landed upon us you were engaged you had some self-reflection and the goals that you have for yourself relative to those domains of life and where you stood and kind of what you what you knew that you needed to do to improve your situation and make some progress toward improving your competitive station in life and so I just don't want people suspending that behind this idea that okay well normal life no longer exists and so therefore competition doesn't exist either competition still exists and the feedback mechanisms of your happiness are still very dependent on your place in that game it occurs to me just another another example with your question about the garage it would be the same thing you know you wouldn't feel self-esteem if you had somebody you know if I if I had hired somebody to write my dissertation for me it's like that's a slightly different example because then there's a little bit of deception involved and then there's guilt and shame about that but it's it's similar where it's like you know you won't you want to be in the position where you're doing the work and showing yourself that you've made the progress that you've you've done that you have put in the time to build something that didn't exist before and that it was challenging for you that's where that's where the feeling of pride is coming from that you're you're right at that frontier of what you think that you're capable of you're pretty sure that you're capable of it and you're pretty sure that if you pull it off it's going to lead to good results in your life and improve your competitive standing if you then apply yourself really diligently to that process and you create something that wasn't there before you solve a problem that wasn't previously solved that generates very authentic positive feedback for for the self-esteem process whereas if you if you bypass it you're you're gonna pay a cost you're gonna you're gonna feel guilty about it yeah at worst you're gonna feel really guilty about it if you are bluffing or deceiving as part of the as part of the operation and at best you're just gonna feel it's kind of an empty victory that you you didn't really earn it and therefore you don't yeah yeah so so dr. dr. Hawk you know as far as organizing goes we and and you know getting those esteemed processes where you feel more confident and more higher self-esteem during this lockdown can you talk to us about the pleasure trap and the role that it may play during this particular time yeah well it's very similar so it's very a lot of people are kind of giving themselves a free pass to well you know I'm so stressed out and my life has been so disrupted that it's really unreasonable to ask myself to have healthy behaviors or no one could expect me to have healthy behaviors right now and again like like with the other question there there is potentially some truth to that especially when things first started out and people you know couldn't get the staples that they're accustomed to shopping for and did you know we're rearranging schedules and had kids at home when they don't normally have kids at home and all of these all of this upheaval that accompanied the early process here but at this point it's if you're if you're still in that zone and you're still kind of telling yourself oh when this when we return to normal then I'll get back on my diet then get back up then I'll prioritize my health then you're you're falling into the same kind of trap that we were talking about before where it's really you are you're not only potentially sabotaging your health but you're really sabotaging your happiness you're sabotaging your whole self-esteem process which depends on you taking action against the difficult things in your life the things that are blocking you from being successful competitively that those that that is the heart of what is going to unleash self-esteem for you and for a lot of people that is this particular struggle so it's it's and it's so it's such a subtle thing because this is another case where it just feels like you're doing the right thing it every every cue that you're getting in from your nervous system says hey you've got a built-in excuse here nobody's gonna give you a hard time for gaining the Quarantine 15 you're like this is you know everybody's in the same note with you you've got you've got every excuse to relapse on crappy food to relapse on alcohol to do you know just basically to put all of those goals that you've had for yourself and all of the progress that you may have made toward them aside while you just quote-unquote survive this difficult thing but you know it's macaque aviato at that that may have been true initially while people were initially calibrating and figuring out where they stood at this point it's it's really important to take stock of where you are and what your goals are and how you can get yourself back in a situation where you're you're making meaningful progress toward those goals mm-hmm yeah it seems like the guy I was talking to a patient maybe a week and a half ago two weeks ago and I said well maybe maybe now is the time where I don't know if I want to mention coffee but but coffee might be something you know you can get rid of because you're not really you don't have to be at work you don't have to be you know at the meeting here I mean yeah yeah well as a well-known coffee addict I actually tried right that's why I didn't want to mention like I don't want even feel like I'm judging you no it's fine because I actually did but this is part of the learning process and this is important for people so like I tried I had exactly the same rationale where I thought ok well this is actually a really good opportunity to try to put myself through this withdrawal process and because I've quit coffee before and I know how crappy it is and how exhausted you are which is always also if you are a coffee addict and you want to quit it's important to try to quit so you get that feedback this is when we talk about relapse is part of recovery this is what you're talking about because I you know every time I quit coffee the withdrawal sucks so hard that it dudes like informing me of what a powerful drug caffeine is because it has such a powerful compensatory response and it's like oh man my adrenals have been absolutely walloped by this thing and and I can I can feel it with the withdrawal process and the compensatory reaction that my poor little nervous system has been gearing up for this onslaught of caffeine that I assault it with every day so that's an important thing to experience just so you've this really really understand what you're up against and then of course the process of actually quitting if you if you want to quit and experimenting with whether all of the wonderful things that you expect will happen in your life when you quit the substance that you're trying to quit if those things actually come to pass or if things are pretty much the same and you just miss caffeine which is usually the case for me so like I will quit and I'll go through withdrawal and it'll suck and I'll be like oh my god I can't believe the brutal drug that I've been putting in my system obviously I need to stop and then two weeks later it's like well where where are the cupcakes and rainbows that I was promised because like life is not that great and I just really meant coffee right right and I think that this this this feels like it's a corollary towards let's say someone's trying to try to get off the pleasure trap it's like well we're in lockdown we can't see any of our competitors we can't see any of the objects of our affection anyway so they're not watching the only person who's watching is us that seems like the most difficult thing to do is when the only person's watching is you yes well in some ways yeah but the this week on his well your world show Dylan Holmes actually talked about this he did a plant ranch hashtag plant rant so if people are not familiar he go to youtube and search for well your world so Dylan Holmes the friend of ours oh great guy yes yes really really great recipes and he's also hashtag sauce boss so we love Dylan and you guys should dressings and sauces are delicious yeah yes but he talked about this this week where he he actually was touching on a subject that we talk about a lot which is the social pressure that people always claim to feel with being a big deterrent to being compliant with with a help with a plant-based lifestyle or with any healthy lifestyle so people one of the most common things and common questions that dr. Lyle and I hear from people who are struggling with the pleasure trap is oh well I can't do it because I have all the social pressure I have to go out to restaurants I can't I can't be compliant at restaurants and then I've got people at work that there's always tempting food and then I've got all of this judgment from other people bla bla bla bla bla there are many different iterations of this and Dylan was pointing out that hey you're it's just you it's you and your food right now like you're at home you don't have social pressure you don't have all of these compliance problems that people will often point to as an excuse for why they haven't been able to make progress and so it's it's really it's sort of like well what do you really value what do you really woody what are you really trying to do what do you really need to change and as he was talking about - it's you've you've got to have a pretty high degree of compliance with particularly with a whole food plant-based approach if you want to experience the benefits that ultimately shift the Seabee and make the whole thing worth it so you you don't actually know that it's worth it until you've done it fully enough for long enough that you've you've tipped the needle and you're feeling the the feedback physically mentally emotionally you're just you're experiencing that that is if you maybe resolve some health issues that's what's going to convince you that the all of the trouble that you're going to to change your diet and change your life is worth it but unless you do it it's like a little bit of a paradox you have to do it wholesale and you have to do it for a fairly decent amount of time so man most people talk themselves out of it long before they do it get there often for these social reasons so you don't currently have any of the social reasons cuz you don't have a social life so so that excuse is off the table and then it's getting replaced with this oh well you know I'm home and it's it's chaotic and i you know i'm i've got a lot of feelings that i need to medicate and so i can't possibly so it's just we're just substituting one excuse with another mm-hmm yeah I think dr. Goldhamer tell us tell people well you do what do what I tell you for 50 years and then you can eat whatever you want yeah and that just seems pretty unreasonable yeah it's pretty reasonable I just asked people to go for 15 years and then they came yeah I mean I fully appreciate as someone who has done battle with the pleasure trap unlike dr. Lisle by the way you know this is something that I understand very well and it's it is very difficult when when you get it's basically any time that you are taken out of your standard life so you get out of the groove that you're in you you're going that's a very disruptive situation and it forces your mind to come up with to run a bunch of new cost-benefit analyses on the best use of time and energy going forward and that's a very taxing process that's a very you're trying to you're depleting a finite amount of willpower you're making cognitively exhausting decisions and if you don't have a really beautifully dialed in environment that is going to ease those decisions in the right direction then you're likely to make the wrong decisions and so everybody to some degree or another has been disrupted and so everybody's being taken out of their groove and you're you're gonna go hunt around for a dopamine drip on the lowest branch that you can find and if it's in your house and of crappy vegan food or whatever kind of pleasure trap food is your drug of choice you're gonna get into it it's just then a question of okay well so that happened now what do we do now how do we squarely confront this reality and and dial this back and get ourselves back into some kind of self esteem stoking process where we can move forward with our lives rather than to continue justifying it as something that's beyond your control because it's not beyond your control all right okay so yeah so dr. huh can you can you talk to us about how the different personalities might respond to being in lockdown in the face of the pleasure trap specifically sure I mean yeah you're you're going to watch the bell curves emerge in real time particularly around conscientiousness and emotional instability so those are the two things that are going to be most stressed by this kind of situation where people with less conscientiousness are always going to struggle with compliance and need a particularly structured rigorous environment where there's just no room for error if they are gonna hope to be successful and then unstable personalities or people that are more toward the unstable end of the bell curve are they're just more prone to celebrating and medicating with food in general and they're they're a little more that the lure of that the little hit of dopamine that they're gonna get from from eating anything really I mean dopamine dopamine is not just generated from eating crappy food it's from any food so eating the carrot sticks is gonna give you a little bit of dopamine but if you've got anything in your house that's more exciting than that and you've got a little bit of instability where you're trying to self manage your anxiety a little bit then that's gonna be more of a problem for you so yeah those are the those are the things that are gonna be most highlighted by this particular kind of situation and they're gonna interact with other personality characteristics as well people who are super open super open particularly with regard to their food choices which is not not a way that my openness manifests my openness is very happy with really boring food but a lot of people who were very open on that that end of the bell curve require a lot of variety a lot of novelty they want to go to a different restaurant every night they're going to be extremely frustrated and they're gonna be you know getting regular orders from door - instead of instead of going out every night because they're gonna be seeking that variety particularly if they're lower conscientious and particularly if they're unstable so these things are all iterative and they all in or intersect with each other in all kinds of different ways super conscientious people I mean I've talked to people who most people are struggling most people that I've talked to were struggling for all the reasons that we've talked about but some of the HC NCS are actually just leaping into it as a great opportunity so they're fasting or they are you know getting just really there it's there at home and they really are taking advantage of the situation that they don't have coworkers and birthday parties and boxes of donuts in the conference room and and that they have complete control over their food environment and so they're really having great success for the first time so you do see different results that are following from different personality types so this always it always goes back to you know where the advice hasn't really changed which is know know thyself know what your personality really is and where you're likely liabilities are with reference to this problem and then alter your environment accordingly to compensate for whatever deficiencies you have in the personality realm well now your environment has changed and so may be the equilibrium that you had and the environment that you had constructed that was really serving your personality and working for you and you were making some progress maybe that has been disrupted to the point where you now have to revisit that and think about okay well given the new reality and the fact that I don't have as much control over my environment in the same way that I did I have a spouse home I have kids home I can't I can't pack a lunch and take it to work and have a lot of control over that and so now I'm grazing all day like all of these things have really changed the environment on people so all that means is that you kind of have to go back to the drawing board and figure out where the pitfall which are you know you've had several weeks now with which they those pitfalls have surely become very obvious to everybody and be really honest with yourself like you know are you is it your openness that is getting you back online and ordering food from different restaurants every night is it your your conscientiousness that is not high enough and so you're getting into the stash of junk food that your kids have whatever it is there's there's got to be some kind of way that you can reverse engineer that environment and make it more more protective for who it is that you are and an opportunity for you to actually thrive and and get back to making those progress on those goals which is the whole key to self-esteem and pride and and Happiness which is the whole point of the whole thing not just take great pains because I can see that can just I can see that being totally misinterpreted out of context not to say that the point of life is losing weight and being healthy and that you can't be happy about doing that but if that is an important competitive goal for you if this is something that you're really struggling with and that you have you have elevated as a competitive pursuit and rather than retreat from it it's this is an important thing to stay engaged with and to try to continue to build a successful strategy to accomplish mm-hmm now the and so the the hyper normal stimuli the food does that actually alter the motivation where people are like well actually now it's not so important because the food is so good that's right it's a pleasure trap and also I mean almost everybody that I've been talking to you for the past couple of weeks is deep deep in the grips of some kind of condition crammed or another so you know new environments bring new equilibria with which bring new rituals so people have kind of gotten into some new groove where they're getting into the same kind of junky food on a regular basis some kind of really high calorie dense food and now they've conditioned that process so it's the the conditioned cram is two parts it's the sort of built-in capacity and interest that humans have to get into rich food when it's available because it's it's ancestrally very rare to find rich food so you've got that but then when you repeatedly have rich food night after night it doesn't take very long it only takes a few nights you're teaching the nervous system just like you teach your dog when you pick the keys up off the table that it's time to go in the car and go for a car ride or go for a walk you you're making the association with the environmental cue and the behavior that oh now it's time to eat that rich food it's time this is when we get into the coconut ice cream or the granola or whatever it is that you have on hand that may be very biochemically totally fine for you but you know not not absolute crap but it's still a little too calorie rich and once you build that association and you you wear down that little conditioning groove then you're in trouble because that's when craving kicks and craving is just the compensatory response that your nervous system is mounting against the unnatural process of the cram so all of the little stomach enzymes come online you start to salivate you start to anticipate that you're this is the time of night when we get into the chocolate if you've done it for a couple of nights in a row just just like Pavlov's dogs so the only way out of that conditioning process is to break it by white-knuckling it and going through the withdrawal and the withdrawal is riding out the compensatory response until your body finally realizes that looks like the good stuff isn't coming and it's not worth putting out all of this compensatory time and energy I guess we better invest that elsewhere so that usually takes between three and five days for people so almost everybody that I've talked to you a big part of the trouble that they're in is that they you know they're home and so they're binge watching whatever they're binge watching on Netflix and they're ordering a pizza from their favorite place or they they order groceries from Safeway and they get the same kind of vegan scream or whatever it is there's there's like some kind of new set of food-related rituals that have entered people's lives and with those rituals because it's super normal food you'd get a conditioned crab I would have expected that people without kids and our on lockdown there they're deemed a non-essential business since therefore they have to stay home I would have expected people in that position to have much less trouble with with pleasure trap or any other type of goals because now you can work quietly in your woodshed while nobody's watching and there's no distractions whereas people whose kids may have now now they're forced to be at home while the person may be working from home and so now they have way more distractions I would expect them to have much more trouble with this pleasure trap or any other goals that they're dealing with whereas if people are locked down with the same situation hmm I I wouldn't have expected them to have more problems with polite or trap and everything else but now doctor dr. Hawk that you explained the the conventional conventional I guess recommendations which is know you've been through a lot and this pandemic is ravaging everybody's emotions and so therefore you know you don't have to be anxious about not competing and not you know getting things straight yeah yeah I think all things equal people who are you know the more moving parts you have that have been disrupted the harder this is going to be because the the more uncertainty you have and the more difficulty you're gonna have kind of reconstructing that environmental equilibrium so if you do have kids and you've got a spouse or you've got roommates or lots of your cohabiting cohabitating with different people and you're trying to find new ways of getting along and organizing your daily life it's just more fatigue on the system and it takes you further and further and further out of your group where if you're a single person who was you've gone from getting up and going to work and coming home and watching TV by yourself and going to bed and now the only thing that's changed is you don't go to work you just still get up and then you still watch TV and gone by yourself to bed it's like there's fewer moving parts there's less disruption and so the effort to reconstruct an environment that works for you and for your goals is it's a lower threshold so for those people all things equal it is easier but you know of course there's personality in the mix and so if you're if you're low conscientious and part of your routine was that you packed a lunch for you know you stopped by the store and you got the stuff that you needed for your salad and you prepped your salad a week in advance and then you packed your lunch for work and this was all very much like structured which it is for a lot of people and that that's all been thrown into the air and you and you don't have that routine to your day anymore it's basically like you're in a permanent weekend and it's it's a truism of the diet world that people do really well all week long and then it goes to hell on the weekend and so now it's it's sort of this is why because you're you've lost the structure you've lost the routine you've lost the groove and the more decisions that you're forcing yourself to make per day the more the more times you're trying to count on your willpower to do the right thing the more you're setting yourself up for failure because that's a very limited resource and we can't you can just the pleasure trap does not does not speak willpower it's not it's not a defense against it the only defense against the pleasure trap is structural change in structural environmental protection you know moving away from the store that you're gonna find yourself going to all the time locking up your husband's treats so you don't get into it you know you can't get sober working in a bar mm-hmm I love that I love that the environment is the best defense yes the pleasure it's the only defense yeah I mean and people will have this is you know I've talked about this many times and I've lived this reality myself where it's like you you get confused because you you feel like you've defeated it through the force of your willpower and you're all proud of yourself and you think your willpower has got this locked in and you've finally gotten it together and you figured it out and you're finally just sufficiently motivated and organized and your willpower is on point and you've got this and so people get diluted and and deceived into thinking that their willpower is a lot stronger than it is but it is a it is an illusion there happens to be some willpower present the willpower is not doing the hard work for you the environment is and so the more you're counting on willpower to affect change for you the more you're setting yourself up for failure absolutely wonderful dr. Hawke thank you so much for coming on solo anytime I apologize for the lack of math oh you don't have to apologize for that at all but we know that dr. Hawke you you did a dissertation at Harvard so there must have been some math you have to know to do that and to calculate all these experiments and data and and put together a defense of this PhD in front of a group of other PhDs is that my accurate there yes that's very true they do they've run you through quite the trial and make you take really terrible stats classes and you do have to be able to particularly in political science which is basically the the poor ugly stepsister of economics you have to be conversin enough to be able to read the literature and to analyze the findings and a lot big portions of political science are very statistically driven particularly in American politics and I'm I'm half I have half a leg in comparative politics in half an American so I've done my time it's just not where I choose to live most of the time
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