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Episode 221: Lockdown changes and annoyance, Dealing w Burn out, How to Help a friend
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la is I guess they're on lockdown for another few months Orange County is starting to slowly open up how's the lockdown going for both of you I don't know since I'm locked down I don't pay any attention bowls from Jamba Juice yeah Jamba Juice means salt remain solvent then this is all just fine no way Jamba Juice goes down because of this coronavirus oh I'm going to be pretty irritated I have to tell you that that's well it won't be because of your lack of support oh my god well I see that I see that the the apocalypse is not quite arrived yet because Starbucks is open yeah that's right Starbucks Starbucks opens most of its stores this week which is a pretty big deal so at least at least they you know open to some degree if not for dying in traffic they're there at least semi functional and there have been many many videos making their rounds around the internet that have shown like huge drive through lines and you know obvious visual evidence that Starbucks is not gonna fold anytime soon so yeah well go America despite not having an exhausting they don't have acai bowls yeah well it's to help them like it yeah yeah doesn't want to serve anything LP well I I I tried it on acai I don't have an ax John but juice near me that has a sauce acai bowls but I tried an acai shake like a smoothie at the local in yankin smoothie shop here dr. Lao they're pretty good they're really delicious if you get really desperate make them at home you know never like a lot of work I mean then I got a workout for a few days in a row to get my muscles ready for that driver that's the trade what a minute acai bowl shows up at my door the new rules of lockdown all right oh well this this goes into our first question of the evening oh yeah maybe later we'll do a little corona recap or something just thoughts about corona they'll probably creep in yeah okay I need to do it now let's go let's just go to questions yeah yeah okay so our very first question dear doctors do you all see any big long-term changes coming as a result of this shutdown in the isolation that will last more than a few months for example I think we might see huge emergence of telemedicine and teleconferencing with less travel for face-to-face interactions question is will this cause any long-term evolutionary pressures for habit change or will we revert back to the same norms and status symbols I can I can jump in here I think there's a couple of different questions there the second question that's embedded in that big question I think we can answer more easily which is will it cause any long-term evolutionary pressure for habit change it's not gonna it's not gonna change the species meaningfully it's not gonna change the way in which we allocate status or perceive status all it all it has the potential to change if we do see permanent changes to the environment that we're operating and it can change the cost-benefit analysis that we we individually are running on maximizing our opportunities in the face of a new terrain and that may move certain social equilibria in different directions but that's not the same as an evolutionary change so and I think we're unlikely although the question about you know what sort of long-term changes are we're going to see we're unlikely to see anything that is that significantly like the world has truly changed we truly have a new normal but I also think it's a little premature to say either way kind of what we're looking at there we're definitely going to the the observation of moving toward telemedicine and teleconferencing and and sort of having big backup plans for remote events that is going to be a big change that happens and I anticipate and I'd be interested to hear what Doug thinks about this too but sort of a a new equilibrium for general bureaucratic ass-covering at every level which is going to take like the correct the correct choice a lot of the time is going to become to move big events to remote if it's if it's possible or to cancel big big sort of social events and to essentially become more reactive to perceived threat if this if if we see spikes in cases or new viruses emerging or anything that would sort of similarly alarm the masses and we've now established this new kind of baseline for freezing all operations and moving into lockdown mode and I think there's going to be a tendency to want to do that if jobs and reputations are on the line so I don't know I don't know about permanent changes but I definitely think there's change in expectations around big social gatherings and people should be prepared for and moving toward a situation where they're embracing working remotely working distance working we're getting getting more flexible about all of that kind of stuff that's that is very much the new reality but things have been moving that direction for a long time one of the most astute observations I saw in Twitter was I think we may have talked about this last week or I mentioned it somewhere but somebody said that they're they're like eight or nine year old son said you know budding sociologist said that we're never gonna have schools never gonna be canceled for a snow day again now that they have zoom childhood is over we're always plugged in now like nobody gets a day off for a natural disaster because we we get to move into this full-time connectedness which comes at its own cost so those are the main kind of patterns that I'm seeing but I think it's really premature to sit here and try to you know prognosticate on what what long-term changes we're going to see in society and and how it's gonna change the labour force per family and we just were only a couple of months in and and we don't know how this thing is going to behave long term or how long it's gonna be with us or anything like that so I don't want to be terribly irresponsible and just make some stuff up but maybe Doug does yeah I all mine but I wonder I wonder when the status symbols of blinged-out Phipps that's going to be gone so blinged out fastening oh gosh yeah humans yeah that's already very much like you're advertising your personality through your face covering that's totally I mean I I moved into that territory immediately I'm like if I have to wear this thing I'm gonna use it as an opportunity to advertise my big five to people of course I am so so I think you're gonna see more of that as well the they think it's kind of interesting to just speculate and God knows someday we may listen to this podcast again and just see if we knew anything the in general I would say that there's the reason why things have been done the way they've been done is for a whole complex constellation of obviously evolutionarily based motivations and I have never it's never made any sense to me not not for a while why why you know a thousand people would get on an airplane and and fly to Las Vegas and sit there and listen to some doctor drone on and on about how how he thinks these are good stitches for the gallbladder that we're gonna take out and then they all have to write their big check for their continuing ed and they have to sit there while they serve him a bunch of greasy food for lunch and like this is continuing education this is like a complete total waste of time and yet the we we do see that that these kinds of things conventions etc these are being driven by evolutionary pressures it's it's you know it's a whole lot about sex and so why yeah why open bar afterwards yeah it's not about the sitting there and listening to the education or eating the greasy lunch it's about what happens at the end of the day yeah totally and and the thing is is that there is something to be said I suppose sometimes in creative processes for being in physical proximity to somebody but usually not the very same creative processes can take place by phone by Skype by you know anything like that so the so yeah I think that that we've just we see that there's an awful lot of quote waste and in the way people do things but it's not wasted because it's actually being targeted at sexual motivation and sexual ie status and etc so my guess is that this is not going to change a lot of that in other words what do I really care when I really find out that so if the coronaviruses in season you know two years from now and that means that that my risk as a 50 year old you know guy is you know one in eighteen thousand that I could actually die from this thing in other words it's not as threatening as driving my car is and so that's gonna keep me away from some convention that I think is cool and where I had a cool hookup two years ago no I don't think so so I think that human nature you know the reason why so much of the world when it gets assert to a certain were club wealth level looks very similar in other words the the behavior in London and the behavior in Chicago and the behavior in and New Zealand it all looks pretty similar and there's a reason why and that's because the underlying human nature is so similar and so I think you know people that are hasta que ting about major changes in the way things will be done no I think you're gonna see you know the creeping conveniences of doing things online you know these are coming and they've been coming anyway however some of the other things that you see are gonna stay because this isn't going to scare them away the some interesting things you know a lot of little in other words what I think you're going to see is parameter ships you're gonna see little changes here little changes there you're not gonna I don't think it's going to be wholesale if it was so financially intelligent to do it in a different way before and those over it all other explanations or reasons then it would have happened anyway and the coronavirus is not going to be the tipping point in any major shift in human behavior 9/11 wasn't I mean I mean talk about capricious you're you get on a plane somebody flies into the ground it's like you could be thirty four years old with your whole life in front of you with your with your family with you this isn't the corona virus the corona virus is the the median victim in the world for the corona virus is over 80 years old that's true for the United States as well okay it's more more true for the European countries they have a little bit older populations than we do so literally the 50th percentile of the age of the person the United States that dies from Corona is at least 80 I mean that's unbelievable when we realize the the the amount of time and tension money and sacrifice that is going on economically we've now learned enough to know that you know what would be responsibly be done at this point would be a high high level and a lot of intelligence on how it is that we're going to manage our our frail elderly people and see to it that when there's outbreaks that they would be reasonably protected as well as we can but in terms of widespread protection of the population this is absurd okay and this this this reality will percolate its way down into not only how things will be handled in the near future but absolutely how things are going to be the long-term future the long-term future this level of threat to the average individual is so slight it's such so insignificant relative to all the other threats that their life faces that that it's basically immaterial and that will eventually be percolated down into all decisions so that's how I see it I do see however some things that Jen pointed out are going to be as she talked about we've now found out what governments can do and will do in the face of threats and as a result that is going to establish some very important baselines for all kinds of things so I for example if you're in business insurance your industry just changed completely overnight the if the financial vulnerabilities of all kinds of industries have been exposed in a way that nobody saw them coming you know Hawaii did not see anything like this coming like literally there are an entire economies on its knees yeah indefinitely okay so and you know essentially subject to you know an entire culture as well as a lot of government decision-making that that essentially makes you know a trillion dollars worth of hotel space worthless and for for the time being so this is you know you got a wonder who is smart enough to put put options in the stock market waiting for something like this I'll bet one guy dead named Bill Gates because he's been thinking about this kind of thing for a long time so wouldn't he probably probably didn't do that but he might have Jen that guy sure will see a documentary you didn't want it to happen but I mean you couldn't be Bill Gates and have been thinking about this at this level and not be prepared for it so the yeah I think the Huawei foundation what one of the favorite critiques of the conspiracy the tinfoil hat conspiracy where you and types is that the Gates Foundation did sponsor pandemic preparedness exercise at Johns Hopkins in October they they funded and the the hypothesized virus that they were sort of having their table discussion around was a common virus so there's a lot of conjecture part of why this was all planned and they'll be embedding the chips and the vaccines in us anytime now yeah yeah yeah scenario a lot of people were anticipating that you know it was just a matter of time it was not a question of if but when something like this would emerge and that's that's also like you know all of this we talk about well how how has kovat 19 changed the game and and how are we going to continue to be trying to adapt social institutions and all of these things to it specifically and that might be the wrong question because they're you know this is just this is the the pandemic that we're dealing with this year but it is really just a matter of time until we're dealing with something else that if not worse is it goes through another period of great uncertainty as this has while we kind of sort out the the case fatality rate and figure out what we're really dealing with and now we've established this capacity to lock down and and self isolate and so I think the tendency for bureaucrats and politicians and institutional leaders at universities and elsewhere to put that into motion before full information comes in is going to be very strong so I think in we should be anticipating that we're going to be ordered to shelter in place whenever we're facing any any kind of moment of public health uncertainty basically for the rest of our lives at this point whether it's covered 19 related specifically or not you ready yeah yeah wonders all right stock up on your toilet paper now all right what else we got Nathan yeah well mmm well I'm the same topic dear doctors this is a listener saying that they are I'm disagreeable and fairly low conscientious and I don't respond well to Authority if I get told to do something I don't want to do it just makes me not want to do it even more during the pandemic how can I stop getting annoyed and getting into arguments with people like supermarket workers random idiots on the street who think I'm not walking fast enough to qualify exercise and other people making pointless and unreasonable demands beyond the legal requirements of social distancing sometimes it feels like some people are in a competition to be seen as doing the pandemic better than others and they love to point out all the faults real or imagined others this is this is like Nathan Nathan must have seeded this question for himself I smell a rat no I'm sure he did good point it sounds like a long-lost cousin I promise it's not my question but but I can I can relate to some of some parts of this it's not the pandemic making you disagreeable and annoyed by everybody else this is who you are as a personality I mean this is sort of just what we're dealing with so that again the second part of the question just to disaggregate it a little bit like this sometimes it feels like people are in a competition to be outperforming each other in their you know they're compliant social distancing behavior there there's their community policing or whatever that that can be very true that that is happening that kind of virtue signaling is going on all over the place and we've talked about that quite a bit on previous shows but but your annoyance with people criticizing you or making demands on you that you you're uncomfortable with or that are pushing you past the limits of your disagreeable thresholds this is just a this is just a core disagreeable personality question you're essentially asking how can you change your personality and you can't and you know our stock advice is always you can't change personalities to change your environment but unfortunately for you you can't really change your environment because we're in a quarantine here you are your options for reconstructing the your social environment are definitely more limited right now than they normally would be and you might be systematically more exposed to these things that frustrates you than you would normally choose to expose yourself to and on a normal ongoing basis and your ideal utopian daily life but you know welcome to Planet Earth right now like everybody is is essentially being pushed to make those kinds of compromises and not but you know I've been I gave notice on my apartment in April because I was supposedly moving but I like my new house is a flight away that I can't get so I'm living in hotels until I can do that and that's not you know not my ideal life equilibrium and I definitely even as an agreeable person I'm hitting my frustration thresholds more often than I normally would because I'm in an environment that I didn't necessarily it would not be my first choice for what I would what I would put myself in but this goes back to the kind of you know when when you lose don't lose the lesson kind of situation like this is to some to some degree we want to be sure that we're just kind of prepared for these kinds of eventualities as we go on and and face more uncertain states of emergency where we might not have a lot of control over who we're living with or where we're living or who we're running into on a regular basis and we lose all of the little rituals of daily life that buffer us and protect our personalities from these things so you're a disagreeable person other people are annoying other people they're always annoying but they're more annoying if you're a disagreeable person so I'm afraid there's really not much that we can we can tell you to do other than maybe invest in a better set of headphones and turn up your music when you're out and about and ignore people as much as possible because you're not gonna transform your your internal emotional landscape and you can't do much about the environment yeah and just have them drop the acai bowls on the front porch yes yeah that's true and all of these apps there's even like a little you can put in the notes you know I don't want any contact I want no contact delivery so you know you don't even have to deal with the person's face which is gonna upset you or the way that they're looking at you if you're not wearing your mask so there are there are little tweaks where you can kind of control here in fact I just started watching this wonderful net Netflix series called afterlife with Ricky Gervais have either have you seen this sir no watch this at all oh it's it's it's really great I won't spoil it too much other than to say that the the title character is is a very typecast Ricky Gervais who plays this quite disagreeable character who's who's had some difficulties in life recently and it's just profoundly irritated by absolutely everything that he runs into on a daily basis so like the guy eating chips across the different table is just unbearable for him like people you know smacking their gum too loudly or you know staring at him on the street or whatever it is and he's just lashing out all the time but it's clearly this is the core of who this person is and he's having a difficult time and he's gone through some tough events in his life and it all just seems it's just as it's all been turned up to 11 for him because it's it's just that much more raw and that's that's what's going on with personality and with relationships and everything right now everybody's just a little bit on edge so manage it as best as you can but there's no mantra that we can give you to make the bad feelings go away all right gran Nathan what do we got I was curious oh okay so our next question dealing with burnout now dear doctors I am a hyper conscientious nutcase as dr. Lisle would say and I've been running tech startups for over 25 years but my latest one has really burned me out my love my time sorry my life and my office are in disarray I'm normally a very organized person but now I have piles of things everywhere and I can't seem to dig myself out I can't get motivated the only thing I'm very conscientious of now is my diet and exercise is there a way to kick-start my natural tendencies and get organized again what do you suggest for recovering from burnout and how long do you suppose it will take to recover well mm-hmm that's actually interesting because jen-jen just a sort of explained as we will do many times that we don't change our personalities and so this individuals personality is what it is this is a very hard hard working super high conscientious driven individual and so as a result what they're going through is inherently temporary so it's a little bit like asking somebody we're talking to somebody who's just been through the breakup of a major relationship and they're depressed and saying well you know what can I do to snap out of it and the answer is not much because the truth of the matter is this is a natural reaction to loss it's a natural reaction process and so your mind has to go through a process where it's sort of you know runs through the gamut of of the Monday morning quarterbacking to try to figure out what went wrong what could have been done differently etc etc and to put the entire experience in some kind of context that's what the mine does and so that's what's taking place here probably you know if they're if they're hitting burnout now there's a good chance that they worked extremely hard at the latest startup and something didn't go well and so that may be what the burnouts about it's probably that they didn't achieve a grand victory which was the whole point of doing it in the first place and so we've probably got a sort of a hit to the hole perceived self-efficacy of the value of the effort in the first place and so when you're and and remember to back the camera up and get it to get it fine focused your feelings and your motivations are all derivatives of cost-benefit analysis of genes survival related values that's what they are so as a result when you're looking around piles of crap and and there's no money in those piles and there's no solution to a major problem in those piles all there is is getting rid of the the residual fallout of messes that have to be cleaned up then the CB just doesn't feel like it's worth it and so what we're going to be hitting is we're going to be hitting some procrastination circuits that are going to be saying you know what I'm not so sure it's worth doing maybe if we just fiddle around long enough we're not gonna have to do it at all the so that's that's one part of the procrastination process that's going on in quote burnout another thing that goes on in burnout is that people are just literally physically tired specifically with respect to sleep and so that's why it's good thing that this person is you know eating healthy and exercising etc so that's a another part of a catch-up process of what burnout is and another component of what burnout is is that looking at the extent of a mess you can feel that you don't have hmm you don't have a lot of upside in its in its completion so in other words there's just not a lot of motive there's there's not a lot of benefit relative to the perceived cost and when you look at a big mess a lot of times you you also can can have a sense that you might not be able to do it and the reason is is that you're thinking I might not be able to do it in a time frame that would be commensurate with the it being valuable to do so when you run a cost-benefit analysis you're not just looking at the benefit you're looking at the cost and the cost is translatable into time and energy so consider like looking at a big mess in your back yard and you know the trees are overgrown and you just bought this place and you know this bunch of old furniture out there and a in a compost pile that stinks at the back and you know it looks like my art so you got this bunch of balls that are empty thrown in there [Laughter] so the point is with compostable you've got this you've got this mess and you feel like sort of what you would be willing the energy you would feel like you would be willing to put out to fix it and then you sort of estimate that you know what that amount of time and energy isn't gonna fix it and so therefore the essentially what you do is your mind runs a perceived self-efficacy judgment on how effective our actions are going to be in closing the distance between where we are now and where what the goal is that we're trying to attain then it feels like you know what it doesn't feel like it's worth it because I don't think I can be as effective as I would need to be in order to make it worthwhile so sometimes the the true feeling of burnout is a feeling of overwhelm where there's so much crap when you look at that yard or when you look at that desk that you literally can't imagine that you could actually do it it just feels like now it's actually just feels like it's beyond my abilities that is a key a key thread of the process of burnout and so one of the ways that this turns around is that when a person is either sufficiently rested or somehow a little parameter shift somewhere and suddenly it's more motivating and so something happens to mobilize a bit of energy and when that happens and the person starts to work at it and they start to make progress they find that they're the self the essentially the internal audience watches the progress being made can see it and then that becomes part of a feedback mechanism that starts to then fire up the self-efficacy and now we get an achievement cycle being stoked we've all had this happen so we've all looked at our messy living room or messy kitchen or whatever felt overwhelmed and just felt like forget it I don't even want to tackle it tonight but then if we start moving on it and we start to see progress then the internal audience starts to smile on us as it watches us make that progress usually if that progress is sufficiently feedback rich it will fire up increase self-efficacy that looks like the the we are making enough progress relative to the energy that it seems like it's worth it and that will stoke an achievement motivational stoke an achievement cycle that will result in a cascade of motivation and then it all comes back ok so that that is a very typical process with respect to burnout so one of the ways that I handle this clinically is hmm I'll do this with myself but I'll do this with clients so let's suppose they've got a big mess like this person does and so they look at that mess and I'll say well ok how long do you think it's really gonna take to get to the bottom of that mess and actually get it all organized and they'll say like oh my god I don't know I think it'd be like 6 or 8 weeks and they don't they don't want to touch it it doesn't feel to them like six or eight weeks of that trade to get that done would actually be a benefit that was worth having relative of the cost and they're not even sure they can do it because there's so many details involved that they are overwhelmed and that feeling of overwhelmed like I can't do this is a the low self-efficacy involved there is the a major oppressive feature of what we call burnout so hmm so now the solution is to in your imagination monkey around with the timer essence so sometimes I will say to myself I looked at the messy backyard or anything else or with a client like this I'd say okay so do you think that you could actually clean up this mess if you took the next two years off and just salt that's all you did on it and they'll laugh they'll be like well of course okay so now suddenly that feels of course doable you say well okay well what what if you took like a year and a half could you do that you know it's eighteen months you think you'd clean it up a bit well of course I can that's not not even close now what's funny about that is if you start asking those questions you'll start to fire up the self-efficacy that it can be done because they'll realize of course that I can do that that's plenty of time like they do have parameter estimates in their head about how long it would take to do this and so then if you say well what about a year oh yeah of course okay well what about four months yeah I could do it in four months okay so now they just couldn't do it in 60 days which is kind of what they were planning and what they they were realizing hmm it may not be worth it 60 days times so if I tried to squeeze in into 60 days could I do it and the answer is maybe I couldn't do it and therefore if I can't do it in 60 days my self-efficacy of pulling that off is low and therefore I don't feel like doing it all in the hell with the whole thing burn out okay but if we actually consciously change the time horizons to make it very easy then what happens is that the self-efficacy mechanism wakes up a little bit and now it's started the parameter estimation shifts therefore the cost/benefit starts to shift the person starts to feel like they're not overwhelmed okay so this is a way we try to slowly coax the system into action and if it coaxes it gets coaxed into action like so for example a person you know looking at their messy yard and it's like well do you think you could you know it looks like it's too much to clean up so I quote could you clean it up if you had you know four weeks well of course I could what about if you had four days yeah okay yeah I could do it in four days but I don't have four days okay well how much do you know why don't we see what you can get done in in four hours and the thing is is if they start thinking along those lines and they start taking action then what happens is this feedback rich process starts to take place and now we have a cascade of motivation okay self-efficacy changes and it fires up an achievement cycle so this is one of my long drawn out explanations to burnout so burnout it's it's worthy of discussion it's a very good question because burnout is seen as some kind of bizarre psycho dynamically transmitted malaise without explanation okay and that's not what it is burnout is not some special process it lines up with all other life processes that has nothing other to do basic motivational functions being derived from cost-benefit analysis which are then being computed according to parameter estimates so when a person feels burned out and try it is trying to figure out when is it you know when is it that I'm going to start at Windows am I going to snap out of it the answer is going to be when your cost-benefit analytic engine gets new information that's when you'll snap out of it okay and so that that may be when you finally had enough sleep or maybe when we have shifted time horizons or some parameter in the stack of the mess has suddenly become far more worth doing okay so that's the that's a that's a long answer to a question about burnout that's wonderful dr. Lyle thank you just live this Nate this is where you've been for the left this is the your parameters shifted in just the right way to get to your act together well yeah I mean some of the silver linings of yes lockdown was that my openness was held in check and so I could I could organize things that I just put off organizing for a long time so yeah I mean it started with a little thing just looking at these whole boxes and saying I got to do one little thing at a time just like dr. viola said I actually had to go back and listen to some of the podcast just to just to make sure I did it right all right any more all right our next action yeah we're at 37 minutes it looks like 30 35 minutes so maybe one more question okay dear doctors how do you help someone to get the right help a colleague of mine recently opened up to me about struggling with what seems to be a deep depression and suicidal thoughts she told me she has started a depth or to psychotherapy that is based on psychoanalysis and has started taking antidepressants which seemed to help a little bit having listened to all of your episodes of course I gave her a very light version of the Doug download on depression I even told her about my friend with depression who had a single over the phone session with dr. Lisle and already feels a lot better but of course anything I say is only a drop in the ocean knowing what I know about psychoanalysis antidepressants and the evolutionary psychology to explaining and treating or rather helping someone understand and tackle the reasons of depression this is really frustrating to me how can you help someone get the right help and what advice do i best gives to someone who I know is on the right track I was on the wrong track well I could speak to this Jenner whatever you want to whatever you feel like doing yeah this is this is more a you question you've addressed this kind of thing before and especially because you there's a reference to a session with you here so but I think we'll probably wind around in the same sort of idea so take it away well take a nap Jen because this might be another long way [Laughter] I've got things to do I can just myself my hotel lock down take the dogs for a walk I'll be back in about 15 minutes actually I would say the following and that is that that very often when it comes to making a changing direction on a decision there has to be sufficient motivation to do so so this individual is getting the patient there is getting a reassured by professionals that they are doing the right thing and and that that they have you know some fancy stuff in the drawer that is this is the way this takes place this is how it's going to be fixed so it's your credit against the professionals credibility they they're heavily incentivized they also believe in what it is that they're doing and they don't have anything else to do and they're pretty damn sure that there isn't anything else other than psychodynamic analytic depth therapy plus drugs that's what they think it is they think that's the that is the status quo that's the legally defensible way of doing things you could do CBT as well if you wanted to you know but but this is sort of this is like the person is doing what they're being told is this highly responsible thing you did something very smart which is to give them a light version about saying hey listen there's an alternative view that being depressed that this is an adaptive mechanism it's a natural consequence of negative feedback and so the way to approach this is to maybe look at to see how to be more successful in getting better feedback then what will feel better very reasonable obviously the but not necessarily sufficiently motivating it isn't clear enough how that would work it's a it's a nice talk but there doesn't seem to be any necessarily walk with it and if there was then certainly these other geniuses would have figured it out so therefore it's reasonable that the person doesn't think that you have anything useful for them fair enough okay so they've got time we would hope we would hope that they don't take their own lives partly as a result of ineffective intervention and so they probably won't so they've got time to mess it up time to suffer time to maybe let spontaneous fixes that take place in their own life as their own natural motivation continues to seek solutions to the problems and they may eventually get some partial or decent solutions and they may resolve the depression and then just have to put up with the fact that they're getting a little midget brain disruption on their quote medication that they quote need so there's nothing about the path that they're on that is that is doomed to fail at all the it's not likely to be as effective and as efficient and clean and healthy and and potentially long-lasting and useful as they might if they would become educated about how their own mind works and then figure out what levers to pull that they have their own personal options on that they're in control of in order to better their lives so they they may not get lucky and hit they you know pull the right lever it's okay okay there's time also for them in the future so the no rush this is you know sometimes I'll deal with parents that are very very frustrated about their late teens or early 20s children that are kind of messing up or maybe they're mid teenagers and they're they're very worried about them because this or that is happening not optimally and my response is relax okay no reason to panic the couple things I'm worried about I'm worried about drug addiction and pregnancy that the beyond that I'm really not worried about much of anything and so when they make sort of lousy choices they they should have made this friend instead of that friend or they should have this job it's sort of that job or they were they need to get off their rear end and do something productive or they if they were just steady harder they get better grade so we could get a better school all of that is irrelevant to me I consider that unimportant because the truth is there's plenty of time plenty of time for people to learn lessons plenty of time for them to correct poor strategies that they've been using and that's fine and so there's plenty of time for this person so be patient and and no worries and they will go along and they may be fine and you may see four months from now that that they're pretty comfortable with where they're at and then we didn't you know we did what we did which is to whisper in their ear now a few months from now they're still really struggling and they don't look like they're doing well we whisper in their ear again the second time you whisper in their ear it's they're slightly more interested than they were the first time because now they've had a bunch of failure okay they're still suffering and we aren't whirring up and down to them that we've got the solution of the universe here but it might be interesting might be worth looking into and so I would send them to our website just say but I want to just take a look at the steam dynamics website it's interesting okay and so who knows you know might might be helpful might not be helpful who the heck does you know I just think it it's interesting and that's how we talk to people about anything whether it's dietary change whether it's you know a good book that we think it would be great for them or whether or not its steam processes in evolutionary psychology it's interesting might be useful who knows I want to look at it nice soft cell gentle we don't steamroll and we don't insist and we don't guarantee we don't do anything just lead the horse to water so they're not ready to drink they might be in the future that's how we do it wonderful dr. Hawke what say you I think that's exactly right I think you have to let the source code of evolutionary psychology speak for itself you know it's people are either gonna be either recognize the truth of their situation when they are exposed to it or they're not and they're it's it's not something that most people sort of need to be convinced into there's sort of a resonance or there's not and that resonance is a function of a lot of things it's sort of general life circumstances it's the cost-benefit on their relationship with their other therapists and what they're getting out of that relationship which might be a lot you know a lot of maintenance of enlightenment traps and competitive avoidance that they are hoping to continue to sustain and have an endorsement of there might be some personality factors at work there there could be some distortions and education going on that was the case for me where I was resistant to some of these principles for a long time even though I was sort of exposed to them I preferred to pursue my own therapeutic relationships in sort of a more psychodynamic space because I I was misinformed about some of the science and and the explanatory power of evolutionary psychology so people people just kind of go on on their own path with this stuff and when it's it's the right fit for the kinds of problems that they're facing and they come across the information in the right moment and it resonates then they will that is when they will drink the water that they have been led to but yeah you can't force it down anybody's throat just like this is very akin to you know we're always getting questions that are similar to this about dietary advice how can i how can I share the great advice that I found about a whole food plant-based diet with my my friend or my family member who's struggling with some disease process or some health issue and it's exactly the same process all you can do is he expose expose them to the information kind of you know dribble it out this is kind of interesting you might want to check this out here's a documentary this is you know might be worth looking into and remain in that space for them if they decide to tentatively approach you again with the same question that the more you you more you push this kind of thing whether it's dietary advice or advice about what kind of psychology to to integrate into your problem solving then the you're tapping into innate status rooted resistance mechanisms so you never want to be doing that you just want to be the you know keeper of the of the wisdom should they come looking for it beautiful wonderful now dr. Lao dr. Hawk maybe maybe you can correct some of my thinking is it sounds like if someone's in this position they are trying to earn esteem from the friend they're trying to give advice to so do you believe it may be helpful for the person trying to earn this team to try to earn it in a different way rather than trying to beat the drum on on you know esteem dynamics or hopefully plan based on whatever when we talk about this we talk about people sort of having the the teaching gene or the impulse to share valuable information with the village and so if you ever find yourself in a situation where you're sort of feeling upset you're feeling an emotional response to somebody not taking your advice that's a I don't I I don't necessarily get that from this question but if that is the case that's a little signal to you that you've got some status invested in the bid for status directed in the wrong place because that you're asking them to make themselves inferior to your to the wisdom that you were offering them you're basically demanding that they lower your status relative to yours and that's not usually a comfortable request that anyone is going to make of you so if that's if it's generating that little charge where you're like why won't you take my really good advice like I'm like I know what I know it's best for you you know just step back from that that's not that's not something that you want to be doing it's not seeking to seem in the right ways from the right people and the way that it matters so yeah today go seek a different path it's extremely tempting yeah it's beautiful sailing but it is extremely tempting and so if if ever there was a time to be thinking beats your jeans it's there because you're you're you're basically like a barracuda you know gonna hit gonna hit a gonna hit a shiny thing in the water and the so we we need to exactly as Jen says that that's where we need to back up if we feel really acute frustration that's a sign that that our very natural instincts have have taken along a little too much steam behind this and it's time to to just you know dust it off and back off a little bit
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