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Episode 45: Willpower and Change Part 2
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all right dr. Lyle how are you doing today good about yourself I'm doing pretty good you know it's getting a little cold and I'm down here in Southern California so for us like freezing weathers like 50 degrees you know yeah you're really suffering down there yeah I used to go ahead Ella I always I never really quite realized like what cold actually meant until I was living up in Northern California where were you near where you are and and now I know oh my god yeah know anybody that happens to be listening from Boston now is just rolling their eyes at you that is a naive young woman [Laughter] all right you know well we got Yellen yeah today's show we're going to be continuing a little bit more on willpower and change now last week I just want to tell you you know what you said about how to change something it really struck a struck a chord with me because I'm constantly trying to change things in my life for the better and improve here and there and you know whether it's miss geyser or not always wondering why like well how does that happen how does change come about and how you said that basically change doesn't happen unless we have new information and then we have a past where we might see that it's possible to change that was really really really a revolutionary to me good yeah and so what that does is that literally changes your brain and that that gives you new information about change itself and that can then influence your your ability to change that strange as that is it's a little recursive situation going on there but is absolutely true this is why I will I will submit that it is my belief that human beings don't have any choice as to what they think and they don't have any choice as to what they do but what happens is is that they are in fact designed to learn so by learning the the brains can actually become more effective and more efficient at what it is that they do in essence more accurate and so with better information inside your head your your brain becomes a better problem solver and you triangulate more accurately towards the truth and the truth is an accurate identification of reality and as you have a more accurate identification of reality you are likely to be much more effective in your behavior and in pursuit of what your goals are so it's a this is how it is that you can can essentially see an entire class of organisms a whole species our own improving in its behavior this this is not something that you're going to see in the animal kingdom you're seeing human beings over the centuries making radical improvements in their behavior as they is they individually and collectively become much more intelligent their IQs aren't any higher but they are there they're effective IQs are a great deal higher because they are accurately identifying the nature of nature and therefore they are making less and less mistakes and wasting less time and energy by doing things in a more effective manner so when you when you figure out that you can have an internal combustion engine instead of having an ox you have correctly identified the nature of nature and you are utilizing that discovery to aid and abet your existence and so the the march of human progress is astounding particularly in the last 200 years as human beings have become increasingly effective because they understand reality more accurately the and so the same thing is true what is true for human beings collectively is also true for them individually so the more accurate your brain is at understanding reality the less and less mistakes you make and what a mistake is is ultimately a essential an unnecessary waste of time and energy that's what a mistake is and so the there are mistakes you can you could call things mistakes that are essentially necessary errors in the system where you've hit a constraint on the organisms ability to do things accurately like for example a great example would be shooting a basketball so there is a there is an identified technique for shooting a basketball that is optimal for the for the the nature of how a human being is architecturally designed and that is the one hand shot okay so you know eighty years ago nobody shot with one hand but a young guide named Hank Lewis Eddie at Stanford figured this out and I think there was another guide too so there's maybe some historical debate over who gets credit but Louis Eddie was the the most widely known player that that used this technique and it was a superior technique and everybody else thought that the proper way to shoot a basketball was with two hands and it turns out that is not the proper way to shoot a basketball because it even though they dot that way exclusively for 50 or 60 years the it was it was an inaccurate hypothesis that that was the best way to shoot a basketball the the problem is is that to shoot a basketball straight with two hands you have to have extraordinary bilateral coordination on with both arms pushing the ball equally hard in order to get it to go straight whereas if we you just have one arm pushing the ball you don't have that problem and so the you you massively reduce you you reduce the source of massive variance in in that problem and you wind up with a much much more efficient method for putting a basketball in hoop the that is a is an example of an ineffective strategy for doing something then getting corrected and now of course the whole world that plays basketball that's all they do is shoot with one hand so the players of today are infinitely superior to they're shooting abilities to the players in the 1930s or 40s the it's also true and we could talk about that in all kinds of sports so if sports are constantly evolving as people figure out better ways to do things in the same way that you see this happening on a societal level you can do it in your own life so you're you're attempting to what we're attempting to do here is to walk away from the essentially unconscious demands and script that is put into you by the genetic code that tells you to do things in a way that optimizes gene survival that don't not necessarily cause you to optimize your happiness that's why we call this podcast beat your genes we're looking at it as essentially like a game of solitaire where we're trying to figure out how to make all the right moves to activate the moods of happiness most efficiently so that you use your time and energy on earth and ways to optimize your life experience that's as far as I'm concerned that's that that's the game of life and how we want to play it there's many nuances to that and there's so many different sort of targets and goals that would be part of human life but we see as we look inside of those that those targets and goals are remarkably uniform around the world because human nature is human nature and in the same way that our barks have things that aardvarks like in the same way the killer whales have things that killer whales like human beings have things that human beings like and so human beings all have extremely similar goals and they are competing with each other for esteem being in inmates friends and trading partners those are the main goals of the system and those are the main sources of potential happiness and what we want to watch out for is letting the system essentially run unconsciously in a way that it optimizes our genes survival but doesn't optimize our happiness the when we talk about change last time we're now going to want one of the things that we see is we see a puzzling tendency for people to have a goal where they they would like to do something better but they aren't doing it and they can't understand why it is that they can't manage to make a change and the reason why that is is that their their their minds design is to run a cost-benefit analysis on all available alternatives and to essentially come up with it what it believes is the most efficient use of its time and energy in pursuit of survival reproductive success that's what it's doing and so until something changes in that cost-benefit analysis the behavior is not going to change so I talked about last time for people that didn't listen to this and find this this little discussion interesting last time I talked about how the organism is designed to run extraordinarily complicated cost-benefit analysis is we started with a single example of an organism with a single sense organ for for example temperature preference and then we added sight sound hearing you know etc and pretty soon you have an organism that has extraordinarily complex sensory inputs and that all the sensory inputs need to be calibrated against each other as they are able to rate and calculate these survival and and reproductive benefits and threats of different sensory inputs so if you're a rabbit for example you and you have three hungry little rabbit pups in your in your lair under the ground and you are hungry and you can tell that you are you are nearer nearer possible starvation or point where you're going to get pretty weak you have to run the cost-benefit analysis of going and digging for the carrots against the fact that in your observation the there's an awful lot of foxes around in the environment right now and so your job is to actually run a cost-benefit analysis again of the opportunities and the environment versus the threats and come up with the right answer and what you have inside your head is a if you're a rabbit is you have a universal value' calibrator or a value computational system that actually does those computations for you automatically they are extremely complicated they're so complicated that that the 20th century and psychology largely didn't even consider that that was possible and so they essentially suffered from a massive blindness to what it is that they were observing an animal behavior they didn't do a lot of observing of animal behavior that was were left to sort of other kinds of people but they certainly missed it when it came to human behavior so the 20th century psychology is suffered academic psychology suffered from what we're going to call a massive instinct blindness that they did not understand the subtlety and magnitude of these extraordinary computations that are happening automatically inside the mind in order to arrive at an optimal cost-benefit analysis or what I should say it's an optimal analysis but it may not be the right answer so it's the equivalent of a great poker player who actually computes the correct odds on whether or not he should bet or he should or he should fold and he makes him move based on the correct computation but he loses everything okay because that was just the nature of that game so animals make the right moves according to the innate value system that is built into their genetic code and so do we but that doesn't mean that we have optimal outcomes and and so that's that's the game of life that we are set with your your behavior or tends to human behavior tends to be quite stable to the extent that their relationship to the environment is stable so for example let's suppose we have somebody that's not very happy on their job and they're not very happy with their boss they're not very happy with their co-workers and so what they are is that they're not there for eight or nine hours a day they're not very happy and so they would like to be happier and part of them would like to just have things different maybe they maybe one hope for things changing might be a management consultant that's going to come in supposedly early next year and talk about how to make the work together better yeah good luck with all that the so the truth of the matter is is that that individuals relationship to their social environment is for whatever reasons there's problematic there's there's conflicts of interest there and we could we could do a little ad hoc calculus and probably find out a lot of the solution to to the problem of what it is that they're facing so when a person comes in to me for example and they're complaining about their situation at work and then I talk to them further and they start complete start explaining to me how every previous situation that they've ever worked in has been unfair and ridiculous and exploitative and everything else and then I then I hear about their relationships and they're they're unfair and exploitative and disgusting and then I hear right you know it said II star he thinks there's a common denominator there he starts it comes out but uh what what the problem is that we've got a brain that runs cost-benefit analysis from a skewed perspective and winds up feeling like the world is treating the individual unfairly okay so that's that's what's happening so I know where the general locus of the problem is that it's in the individual's nervous system as opposed to in a particularly unfortunate environmental circumstances however if I have a different situation where I have a really sweet person and I can tell that that person is perfectly agreeable and and that now in fact things were wonderful at their work until two years ago when this when they got a new boss that came in from the outside or was promoted or some such thing and he's just this nightmare to deal with so now we have a situation where the person is is doing a tremendous amount of unnecessary suffering that because of something that could could be changed and so we look at this and we we're trying to figure out you know how is it that we're going to get the person change and they may have a number of reasons why it is that they are not doing anything about this and those are the things that we pick apart one by one to try to to essentially disillusion their mind as to the cost-benefit of making changes so changes will take place only under circumstances where there's new information that's coming into the brain that new information could happen literally because we change the sensory input from the situation so for example the rabbit is is heading is heading out into to the wild to get some carrots and it is determined that it's going to take a risk of going to get those carrots even in the face of this potential foxes and it's a time of day when it's seen a lot of foxes where it's been dissuaded before but now it's circumstances change and it goes outside and there aren't any foxes and in fact it may hear of a bunch of foxes squealing a death squeal from hundreds of yards away and it feels like good you know whatever the big predators are they're all busy so we've now changed the sensory input on the system when we change the computations people will notice that one of the best things that you can do if you're all twisted up about some kind of a problem is to change your location go somewhere since you know that it's very soothing in terms of the senses and very different and just change it up people will notice for example that they can be very harried at their workplace and very stressed to get out of town but once they get out of town even within you know less than an hour they can find themselves starting to relax and getting a perspective on their life and on the life circumstances and changing their mood as a result of just changing the sensory input however when it comes to changing a behavior pattern what we want to do is several things that are useful and that is sometimes changing any variable in the equation at all you know in order to shake things up so that you see things from a somewhat different perspective this is the equivalent of if you're stuck on a jigsaw puzzle one of the things that you want to do is to just scramble the remaining pieces around and just move them around you've been staring at them too long and you can't see a solution so sometimes what you need to do is stir I've had people that are stuck and can't you know can't get a job and are depressed and feel like it's not worthwhile to go to some you know business mixer in Marin or whatever it is that nothing's going to come of it and I will tell them nothing may come of it but nothing is going to come of it if you sit hum so we want to stir the pieces and just you know even if there isn't anything brilliant about any strategic change that we're making literally banging around out in the universe will cause you to have possible new experiences that could be useful so just getting even unstruck experience where things have changed is a useful strategy incidentally this appears to be a strategy that the brain uses in in your dreaming the brain is not asleep when you're asleep it is still working on your problems and it's still attempting to organize solutions that run cost-benefit analysis in order to try to aid and abet your decision-making when you're awake and it appears to be the case that when you are dreaming there are highly regular blasts of acetylcholine that are put into the brain in order to apparently disrupt and jumbled up the the fragments of your thinking in order to possibly result in a radical reorganization that you might not ever have happen in waking and this is very much equivalent to scrambling around the the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle in a way to possibly see things reorganized from a new perspective very many solutions to many people's problems have come in they're dreaming and the the Dreaming tends to be chaotic in this way with sort of bizarre juxtaposition of ideas which is exactly what you would expect from a scramble like this but what will also happen is you will occasionally have brilliant combinations of a potential idea of potential solution that you would have never come to when you are under a more logically oriented thinking process now another thing is to to get expert help so there are people almost any problem that anybody has ever faced in this world somebody else has faced this problem before and in these days somebody is an expert on the problem and so if you've got a problem with a patent and you think you've got a great thing and somebody is threatening to sue you then you know go talk to a patent attorney if you've got a drain plug talk to a plumber and whatever the problem is that you're facing it's a good idea to to seek experts and of course your job is to get smart enough to cross-examine experts and don't open your wallet any too too early or frivolously in other words be smart about experts bet and don't just listen to one if you're going to invest a significant amount of time and energy and trying to make some change you may want to talk to two or three and see whether or not expert opinion will triangulate towards the direction that makes a lot of sense I would say another thing that will get people stuck and keep them stuck in situations that they really would like to change is going to be supernormal stimuli so supernormal stimuli or drugs food the electric light bulb pornography even music etc things things of this nature Facebook is super normal stimulation when you when you hyper concentrate stimuli in a way and process the stimulation in a way that was never done in the Stone Age and you then transfer that information to these sensory organs what's going to happen is that you can you can essentially get experiences and cost-benefit analysis being run that are distorted and as a result the brain will make systemic and repetitive air and it can be very very difficult for the brain to correct those errors so one of the smart things that we can do at times is to get out from under you know literally consciously get ourselves out from under the supernormal stimuli cancel it ban it whatever it is that it takes and that sometimes can be a great way to to affect change there was a story told before we go on there was a story told by William demet who is one of the great researchers in sleep science at Stanford University and demet told the story of a friend of his who was a physician that would get burned out during the year and then he would go camping for a couple of weeks and he would get away from all the electric light and he would catch up on his sleep and he would hike etc and he said the guy would always come back just completely with a rebirth of his enthusiasm for medicine and his career or in his life and I read this and I I knew I knew it was undoubtedly true and I thought it was a great story and I'm glad dr. Denman shared the story in his book a very fine book called the promise to sleep but of course it it it left open the question why are we why are we having the problem we clearly are seeing overwhelmingly that this guy's short of sleep and he's working too hard you stand up late etc etc and he's burning himself out so why is this you know he hasn't gotten to the root of figuring out how it is that he needs to organize this existence and change his environment so that he stops the problem and so he doesn't need to get all burned out and then rediscover the the beauty of having your mind and body reregulate it to her appropriate homeostasis and then wind up finding out how much better it feels he could do it simply enough by making some changes in his own life I had a question along these lines just today from from person that was asking in a forum that I was doing and she said she's having trouble at work with with making some positive dietary changes because the environment at work is so bad and I talked about how important the environment is you know what is she supposed to do about this and what I explained was the sometimes the environmental change we don't have to be passive recipients of the environment we can change the environment ourselves and so I explained that she needs to put out time and energy to actually have really good exciting and interesting healthy food options that she brings to work and so therefore that's how she changes her environment at work and in order to have those sensory inputs competing with the supernormal inputs that are you know that are not in her best interest in her best health interests and weight-loss interests essentially that that's how you can change your own environment and make your environment more conducive to your positive behavioral change all right that all makes sense yeah that makes a lot of sense there are a lot of stuff there and so when people are starting to make their changes yeah you've talked about this before and some of your some of your audio clips and videos is I read a book at your recommendation a couple years ago by Roy Baumeister and the book is called willpower rediscovering the greatest human strength so I know that for me if I'm trying to make a change for instance if I come home and I'm trying to stay away from Facebook and you know unhealthy food I'm trying to get to the gym and like all the stuff that I'm trying to do I get home and it's like I'm tired I just don't want to do anything that I'm supposed to do I just want to do the easy stuff and reading this book about willpower kind of helped me understand a little bit about it so so yeah can you take us through a little bit about willpower and in kind of the lessons we've learned from Roy Baumeister and then they will take a phone call from one of from a listener who's calling it sure sure the balusters research I think is very interesting it's it's come under some recent controversy as the the effects are a little a little more tenuous than we might have expected after having you know read some of the synopsis I still I think there's a lot to promise in and I think there's a lot of truth in it so let me give our listeners just a brief synopsis of the the Baumeister paradigm and and explain what it is that he thought he found and I believe he did find but we're just going to find it it's a it's not quite as powerful and universally potent as we was we might have thought at one time the the Baumeister paradigm looks like this the the this was done in the 1990s where for some reason people in Baumeister's laboratory came up with a very interesting experiment and the experiment was to have people come into a room is going to be college students and they will have been told to be too fast so they're coming in hungry and what they're going to do is they're going to be placed in front of a table and on that table there's going to be a bowl of radishes and there's going to be a plate of chocolate chip cookies with chocolate candy on it and they will have just baked the cookies and a little oven right there in the laboratory and the subject is going to draw a straw and find out which condition they're in they're either going to be in the cookie condition or they're going to be in the radish condition and it's ostensibly a study about taste preferences and so obviously if you get the radish condition you are really bummed out because you are to sit there and eat these radishes for about ten minutes and then the experiment will come back in and you'll fill out some forms and that's that meanwhile you would really like the chocolate chip cookies and of course it feels unfair that somehow you wound up with radish conditions so the cookie condition if you get the cooking condition you're fine you're just sitting there eating these cookies and trying to trying to think about what you think about the taste of them and the quality or whatever so this is all a setup and for some reason Baumeister and his colleagues dreamed up that this was going to have an effect I don't know why they thought so they just did and I think their intuition was fantastic so let me let me tell you what they then discover so after the people go through this process and we know oh the people in the radish condition were pretty stressed we know this because they had hidden cameras where they were able to observe people picking up the cookies and sniffing them and everything nobody actually ate any of them but they were very you know stressed out about wanting to eat them so after the experimenter came back in they gave him their credit thank you and they sent him down the hallway to a second study and a study was on geometric intelligence so these two studies look unbelievably unrelated to each other so the subjects would have had no idea that these two things were related the nothing could be much different from each other than taste preference study versus a study of geometric intelligence so as they come in the laboratory they're met by a completely different person and they say this is a study of geometric intelligence and something like this I don't remember the exact cover story but it's very close to this and they're told okay here are these geometric figures and these geometric figures are there they're complicated but you can draw them without lifting your pencil and so we're going to give you a stack of paper here and your job is to figure out how to redraw these things and reproduce them without lifting your pencil from the paper and it were really timing this to see how fast people can do them and and so I'm going to leave you alone I'm going to be on the hallway when you're done just ring this bell and then I'll come back in and then you'll show me how it is that you did it oh by the way for some people you know some people can't manage to do it a few people so ie if you're an idiot and you can't figure this out then then just you know when you've figured out when you've decided that you can't solve the problem ring the bell and I'll come back in now Baumeister had the following intuition and his intuition was that the people that were in the cookie condition in the first part of the study would not have been stressed and so when they come back down to do this next study they are going to look at this problem they're going to work at it and we're going to work at it and are going to work at it and finally they're going to come to the conclusion that they can't solve it and eventually they're going to pick up that little bell and bring the and it is what it is he had no idea how long that might be it turned out to be about 20 minutes that the average subject would go the but he believed that the people in the radish condition would have been stressed out by by wanting to eat the chocolate chip cookies but not eating them and that when they would go down the hallway to the new study that when we put them in a new stressful condition where they they couldn't figure out how to do this drawing that they would quit sooner and so it was a very interesting idea that there was sort of a limited bank account inside the head of how much stress it could put up with before it would just quit and it turned out that the effect was beautiful that the average I think the average length of time that the people in the radish condition would work on these figure drawings was about eight minutes so the difference between eight minutes and twenty minutes was staggering and in fact it turned out that there wasn't a single person in the chocolate chip cookie condition that went for a shorter time than anybody in the radish condition no words it was a perfect distinction between the two groups now it's time passed more experiments were done and what Baumeister was able to surmise from a number of studies was that effectively this this sort of guts to continue on and persevere had a great deal to do with the amount of glucose that's in a specific area of the brain that's attempting to work on that decision and so it looks like what happens is when you're trying to sitting there and deciding for ten minutes whether you should steal a cookie or not steal a cookie and you would really like to steal a cookie but you can't do it and you have to keep going back and forth and back and forth in your own mind but that effectively tires out the system by burning through the available glucose in that particular area of the brain not the whole brain but an area of the brain that's involved in sort of integrating decisions and looking for mistakes is what it appears to be related to and so when they go down to the the other study where they're supposed to do the figure drawings they are already fatigued and essentially the the system is this is what Baumeister would would eventually label he would call it ego depletion and ego is supposedly sort of the reasoning side of the brain that is figuring out how you should be doing things of what you should be doing and then the but the ego sort of gives up and just quits and this is so this became known as ego depletion and the what wouldn't be until after he actually named it that it would come to light that it looked like this glucose in the glucose concentration in a specific area of the brain was related to this now other investigators have poked poked and prodded and had disagreements and have had difficulty showing the effect in a number of situations however there are there are many experiments where the effect has been found to be striking and so I'm not sure why we're seeing some of the confusion we've got more to learn about the situation but in an extraordinary study that was it was an archival study which means there they didn't run a study they went into the file drawers to actually look at statistics of a past set of decisions that had been made by a parole board in Israel and this parole board the people on the parole board had a great deal of experience in making decisions about whether or not people should be sent home and so the notion was that these people considered all these very various and sundry factors and you know they were judges and attorneys and and psychiatrists and correctional officers so they're really analyzing the daylights of whether or not somebody should be let home or not well the average number of people that they would let home in front of this Israeli parole board in a given year was about thirty five percent and so if you were to collapse those decisions across a day mm-hmm take a thousand decisions and collapse them across the hours of the day in principle you should expect no difference in the outcomes of people cases that are heard at eight o'clock versus people's that are heard at 4:30 in the afternoon if you are have listened to this you start to suspect the possibility that maybe this is not the justice is not being done uniformly that line if you were to draw a graph on the rate of given parole that that graph should be absolutely horizontal it should be 35% at eight o'clock nine o'clock ten o'clock eleven o'clock you know then lunch time one o'clock two o'clock three o'clock four o'clock it should be absolutely flat as those years data are compiled the reason it should be flat is because the case factors don't vary by day so they don't hear the axe murders at 9:00 a.m. and here the parking tickets at 5:00 in other words the the random the case factors are randomized obviously throughout the year nobody knows what an 11:00 a.m. case is going to look like till you see it and over the course of the year those case factors are even plenty even with respect to an 11:00 a.m. case as opposed to a 2:00 p.m. case so it turns out that in an extraordinary finding that the first case of the day the odds of going home or about 70% if you hear if your case is heard a little later on in the morning before the judges go on break your odds of going home or about 10 or 15% if your case is heard after the judges come back from break your odds are about 70% if your case is heard right before lunch your odds about 10% if your case is heard after lunch your odds are about 70% in other words it's not even remotely close the the odds of going home can be a factor of seven difference depending upon what time of day it is that this is being heard so despite some challenges to Baumeister paradigm that have come to light recently and Baumeister himself is puzzled and kind of upset about it and he's going back to the lab himself and he's going to try to work out try to understand some anomalies that have not been explained but when I saw the Israeli study I was astounded by the evidence right there in our face we see what happens to the mind when we fatigue the mind and therefore it becomes impulsive and it's a very impulsive thing for judges just when they're tired to just say I just keep them in we know that that's a much easier decision than a much more carefully nuanced decision about whether or not a person deserves to leave so at any rate this is useful for us because we can now see that the the old message from Alcoholics Anonymous called halt hungry angry lonely and tired this is sort of dis lae lae analysis of some things that people have seen in working with addiction that when people get hungry they're more impulsive when they're more emotional they're going to likely be more impulsive and and when they're fatigued they're more likely to be impulsive and this is this is going to be true and so it's useful for us to know that when when you are sort of overwhelmed and you can't muster up the energy to do the right thing it's likely to be that you're fatigued and so I will tell couples that see me that are struggling with the relationship that they should at the end of their day they should not even have any discussions about any kind of problem solving about anything that's slightest bit contentious until they've eaten okay they need to get some food in them and sort of recover from all the decisions that they've been making all day long because they're basically like a couple of judges that are at the end they're on their last leg so that's that some things to know about your own psychology when it's when it comes to trying to make behavioural changes you should recognize that that you are making these changes within the backdrop of a brain that's ability to hang on to a wise behavior pattern is fluctuating depending upon its own essentially glucose reserves on its own it's stress tolerance by virtue of its fatigue so I will tell people that there's a few useful strategies to help combat this this sort of ego depletion or or fatigue factor when it comes to willpower number one is try to invest in the process of having your own home situation in your work situation very orderly it turns out if you're very orderly and very organized then your mind has to work less hard at determining what priorities it should be dealing with and as a result life actually gets easier so life gets easier and easier the more and more organized you become and so that's a that's a useful strategy for changing your existence for the better another thing is to have plenty of healthy food that is around and available for you the the most useful food is likely going to be things like complex carbohydrates rice beans potatoes corn wheat oats that sort of thing that what we want to do is we want to have bananas we want to have food food stuff that's healthy that can actually carry us through periods of intense concentration that might last for two or three hours that's a that's a good thing to essentially build our diet around that sort of material and then finally we want to do a couple other things a regular modest exercise is good for or essentially all kinds of bodily functions particularly probably the kicking out or the ability of the liver to mobilize glycogen under stress is probably improves with exercise which may be the reason why when people start exercising it actually improves their willpower and finally we want people to get to sleep because shortage of sleep is going to compromise the minds ability to to do complex analysis and and and be willing to stand up to the stresses of that so these are four rather simple prescriptions for supporting your willpower as you try to go about the process of making positive changes alright well we had a thank you very much that's a lot of useful information we had a caller who was on hold for for a little bit oh it looks like they hung up so if you want to call back caller please give us a call back I know we ran a little bit you know 10 15 minutes on hold but we will take you right away but until then we've got a question from from one of our listeners regarding making some changes in her life so um here we go okay so here dear dr. Lam my problem is my boyfriend and I are 30 years old no children we've been together for nine years and we live in Central Europe a couple of months ago my boyfriend got a job in a foreign country and it was an offer we just couldn't refuse so we moved and we have been living in Switzerland now for two months I don't speak the language don't really know the culture I don't have any friends relatives or acquainted to zero except for my boyfriend and I don't have a job I had problems with procrastination before the move after I got a college degree and realized getting a job would be very difficult but I haven't put things off to this extent now I put off learning the language finding the job meeting new people I actually have a couple essays due from my previous arrangements in my native country but I can't even finish those it seems I might be missing a deadline which has happened maybe once before in my life I don't think I'm not happy or depressed I actually feel it was a good idea to move but I do feel incredibly guilty lately because of my lack of work or involvement I do all the housework exercise our relationship is still great I do spend too much time playing video games and watching random TV series simply put my lack of ambition or desire to make something of myself have risen to a whole other level and I'm sure it will start to affect my personal growth in our relationship I'd be really grateful for a couple of pointers or some help in this matter fabulous great question seems very authentic here's here's what I would say what we want to do when we see the problem is we we want to look at this through the lens of the Stone Age mind and so let's let's look at a few things the right now she's not really unhappy because she's not in not in a hell of a lot of pain the circumstances are good this was an offer he couldn't refuse so financially they're doing they're doing fine so she just have to worry so much about that the relationship itself is pretty good so as a result that all seems like a secure enough situation for the interim however she's feeling guilty well the reason she's feeling guilty is because things are not fair he's going to work and he's working and she's playing video games and so the fact that he's not bitching about it yet this is fine in other words it's telling that the the relationship is currently strong enough that that he's not you know he's not no furrowing his brow about this but her her she's got enough conscientiousness naturally that she's running the she said running the the alternative scenarios in her head and she's coming up with the fact that she really needs to be contributing much more reasonably to their situation in it because she's not doing that she's living on credit is effectively what's taking place now there's reasons why that's taking place and that is that it's she's in a new place doesn't speak the language may be difficult to get a job etc so she's being stymied in a way that would never happen in the Stone Age and the Stone Age there's no unemployment if you're able-bodied at all you wake up in the morning and there's 50 things that need to be done there's no possible way that anybody quote can't find anything to do there's food out there there's roots to be dug there's you know worms to be dug for the fishermen in other words there's always something to do in this case we are so wealthy and this person lives in such a benign so circumstances built literally she can sit around and play video games and and yet there's no easy alternative for her to go out in the village and start to be helpful now not particularly unhappy just kind of guilt etc now our fundamental problem is that she doesn't she hasn't solved the problem of how it is to get work so that's a serious thing that's in front of us that we don't have solved a thing that is crippling this and her things that she's not finishing up on is that she's in the thralls of a super normal stimulus which is video games so video games are obviously designed to try to stoke mechanisms inside humans heads that makes them think that they are being productive so it's she's getting a pseudo productivity sensation in her head without actually being productive and of course the more ingenious these people are about causing that pseudo experience the more games they sell okay and so they people will join teams and they'll have little dominance hierarchies and competitions that they that they work on and so that all feels very very productive whether or not she's playing those sorts of games or not this is how elaborate this gets a lot of the decision-making that goes on in these video games is very carnal just as it would be in the Stone Age they're actually going after circuits that are sitting in the Stone Age mine for you know food and weapons and and sort of coalition and risks and injuries etc etc in other words they're there they're playing off the circuitry so it feels inherently productive to be working those types of problems inside the system etc so this is Sochi sending the throws of a supernormal stimuli that is that is uh it's kind of like a computer virus it's effectively what it is that that the virus is in her head it's taken up a bunch of space and it's it's so compelling that she can't get herself switched switched over so I would tell her that her goal would be to essentially shut down the video games for just make commitment to yourself you're going to shut it down for the next six weeks it's not like we're going to say we're never going to play a video game again but you could just watch how difficult this is and the fact that person will go through psychological withdrawal I mean not they're not going to be sick and throwing up if they're going to be kind of disturbed and upset and that's because we are they're they're they been addicted to the supernormal stimuli of feeling like this productive activity we shut that thing down and we shut off that television that that human being does not need that super normal stimulus now it gets real quiet and it gets real quiet and now we start looking at the problem of this essay that's due and if we can't turn on the TV and get supernormal stimuli and we can't turn on a video game and get super normal feedback that we're being productive suddenly we've got to actually be productive and we actually have to earn that feeling and of course it's harder to earn that feeling that it is to get it in a pseudo fashion and that's why it's people would much rather drink a cock let's shake then actually eat an apple and that's because we can get an awful lot more stimulation of the chocolate shake and it takes almost no effort to chew it whereas the Apple actually requires a significant amount of effort to chew it and it's less intense so that's why the essay isn't done that's why she's procrastinating and waiting for you know some incremental evidence that not getting the thing done is going to be somehow costly but nobody's rattling their saber at her or threatening her and so she's likely to wait all the way until there's a tremendous threat at which point she would do it in a half-assed fashion and throw it in at the end getting away from the video games but we can do better than that we can recognize that the video games have got essentially a tractor beam on top of her motivational system and that we we need to chop them off completely go cold turkey for the next six weeks in the next six weeks we're going to be facing the problem of how it is that we would learn to get a job in that foreign country there there are going to be people that may know this there's going to be people to make contact with we want to stir around and start getting some action on that and and at the end of six weeks we will know a hell of a lot more than we do now about that problem we may not have a job and we may not have a solution to the job but what we will have done is we'll have done some homework and put ourselves in a position where where we are closer to the solution than we are now so that I would also submit that when you have an educated person that would expect themselves to be able to get a job and it would be expected in principle they could get a job that this person could be in the ego trap where the expectations from the social environment and from from their internal audience would be that they should be able to get a job but now she's got some evidence that she may not be able to get one so this puts you in the ego trap and essentially causes you to do self-destructive behavior so that that both your internal audience and the external audience are observing that you really aren't trying and maybe that's the reason you don't have a job and so this is a this is a contributing motivational force along with the supernormal issues associated with the video games from the television those in addition by the way is also just general energy conservation programming this is running through this problem the but that I would submit there's a very good chance that this person has a significant ego trap self-destructive force that is taking place here that she's essentially doesn't know where to start to get a job it would seem that she should already know or she should be that marketable so therefore if we don't try the market hasn't rejected us and we aren't looking quite as as pathetic as if we really really try and it turns out that we still can't find the market so I would tell this person that look I don't know how I would find a job in Switzerland I don't know how I would go about doing it and I'm not sure that I could get one but what we can do is we can make a task out of getting super educated and our job is going to be to cover the groundwork so that we can pass on this information to the next person that comes behind us so if we can find some way to be to increase our odds that's information that's that's forever good for your village and therefore the process can seem like it is it is worthwhile fantastic well yeah I think I think that's gonna be pretty tough is not not even to know the language and she's been with her boyfriend for nine years and that's good sounds like he may have known the language too that's going to be a tough tough sell right for her well is it yeah we need to she if she is in the ego trap then listen this is we go back to the very same things that we were talking about earlier with respect to change we're going to seek out expert help somebody else has been transferred to Switzerland Switzerland people in Switzerland talk a lot of English okay so the I was just there a few months ago so there's all kinds English in Switzerland the success leaves Clues there are going to be people who have who have faced this problem before there's you know six million people in that country and an awful lot of foreign traffic and travel and commerce is going on and so as a result her job is to sort of face the scary specter that she may go out there and start asking questions and nobody may know the answer and nobody may have a solution for her that's a scary prospect but let's go find out let's find out just how deep this water is rather than staying on the sidelines and in sort of letting light pass us by where we are sort of guilty and vaguely in trouble and we don't know how to solve it and we're just hoping that one way or the other fate you know changes the situation up and we're going to be rescued from this dilemma we can be much more aggressive and proactive about how it is that we do this is if we get out of the ego trap and say listen we don't know what to do let's go get expert help let's go try the things that are that have the most rational possibility of success and let's find out what we learn in the process we may not get a job but we are certain to know more six weeks from now about this situation than we do now that I can guarantee and I and furthermore I can guarantee that hurt internal audience that may have the bar too high for her right now will readjust itself in the face of her of her sustained action in this regard as it watches her do her very best and when she gets thwarted if it turns out that the marketplace doesn't doesn't yield feedback her internal audience will not be punishing to her it will it will be it will experience the disappointment that we can't easily solve this problem but it will actually respect the fact that she's trying and the same thing will be true of her boyfriend okay her boyfriend will not think less of her if she tries really hard and can't get a job okay but part of her may be thinking that that is true and part of that part of that she may be protecting her status with him and with anybody else in her life by holding back and allowing herself to indulge in in this sort of this this pseudo productive process of the video games and TV and procrastination so that that's what I think that picture is and the we want to attack that problem by rolling up our sleeves and daring for the situation to be lousy and it may be a lousy situation let's go find out and when we find out we will have essentially removed distortions from our own mind about what we're up against and the removal of distortion is always the path to better functioning very good I liked us willpower and changes probably you know coming up on the end of the year willpower and change is kind of one of the big things that everybody's trying to change I was looking at an article about the top like 15 things that people try to do the new year's resolutions and I think almost all of them have something to do with willpower and change lose weight better managing their finances holding their tongue with annoying relatives holding our tongue with their boss all that stuff you know sure that the relatives they should just let it fly you think so haha alright alright well thank you dr. Lyle we really appreciate it we'll look forward to having you back next week I will come up with another topic that's and any listener ticket yeah you tell your listener sorry about that and you next time Nathan we're neophytes of this next time just just interrupt me and we will get to these people much more quickly and just make sure we got our apologies there oh yeah no worries not not a problem yeah caller if you want a call call back next week or anytime we are low up live here on Wednesdays 8:30 to 9:30 p.m. Pacific Standard Time the number is six five seven three eight three zero seven five one and if you like the show share it on social media write a review on iTunes we are now on stitcher and it's a one a couple of different platforms so share the share share with your friends share with your family members will that way we get the word out and if there's any people who want to email me with some questions for coming up episodes or just go ahead and call it in the middle to show any time we will always take priority over over the topic so we will look forward to seeing the next week dr. Lyle thank you thank you very very much pleasure thanks Nate
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