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Episode 75: Helping friends and family, self-confidence vs self-esteem
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good evening dr. Lyle how you doing good about you doing how about yourself Jim doing pretty good all right so we had a caller that I thought was you but it wasn't you it's a different color okay okay all right so I was just telling the our audience feed there is a there was an article on in the Florida State University and the name of it was called researchers discover an ugly truth about attractiveness and of course I'm reading this article on this forum called reddit and there's a science sub forum and someone posts a bit and I'm reading through this article very interesting article and then I go to the comments section and one of the listeners what one of the common ters was asking about details about this and you know why this happens the the journal article was saying that these researchers they found that the attractiveness of the romantic partner can actually be a driving force behind the desire to diet and seek a slim body and so they were found that women who were evaluated as less attractive were actually more motivated to diet and be thin if their husbands were attractive when we've talked about on the show before and the reasons why while I was on this forum reading this article and one of the commentary commentary was asking why and apparently one of our listeners chimed in and said oh you should have listened to this podcast beat your genes podcast aha so very interesting so we want to thank the listener I don't want to put their username in just just for privacy perhaps but well I think that listener for chiming in on about us now unfortunately the the entire discussion got removed or censored by the moderator before I'm not sure why but they were well uncomfortable yeah oh well I gotta was that evolutionary psychology is not politically correct yeah at such as life yeah exactly so no all right so we've got a couple of questions today one of them has to do with helping helping friends and family in certain situations we've got a self-confidence vs. self-esteem and then we've got a couple of more questions with regards to esteem dynamics and figure out how we can navigate the world of love sex dating and relationships so let us begin dr. Lyle you ready I'm ready all right okay dear dr. Lyle I've been taking care of my ill mother for a few years and I'm not really sure what to make of my current feelings on one hand I feel almost annoyed that I have to take care of her every need but the other hand I feel actually really guilty and feel like I'm obligated to help her since after all she's my mother on top of that recently she's been making smart snarky comments towards me which makes me feel underappreciated and it's enough on my plate to upend my own life and then they have to come home to hear her complain about sometimes this puts me over the top sometimes I feel like I'll be relieved when she passes away so I can start living my life again that just makes me feel like I'm a bad person to think like how do I look at this from a beat the jeans lens and why does it seem like I feel the opposite emotions annoyance and then guilt them in annoyance and then guilt right very good well annoyance is just a soft word for anger and in other words you can you can have a whole bunch of words on that dimension that mean the same thing just to matters of degree so we can be annoyed irritated angry or in a rage and those are all the same process so that to just keep in mind that what this is is an anger guilt processed now angry guilt are actually the opposite sides of exactly the same coin so what they are is they are emotions that are that are used as signaling devices both to the individual themselves and to whoever's on the other side of this in the social environment about the nature of the fairness of a transaction or relationship so when you when you feel angry your feeling is that you are being treated unfairly when you feel guilty you are usually getting a signal from someone else on the other side from their anger that you are treating them unfairly so guilt is an is an or panting emotion to tell you that you could be being perceived as unfair or you could be being unfair in a in some kind of relationship context to somebody else now you might feel guilty without anybody signaling to you but you are thinking that they're going to be signaling to you in other words you are suspecting you have to have an internal audience that's watching watching you and you can see that you could be treating other people and fairly this is what Freud would call a super-ego and and as a result of this your internal audience is sending you a warning signal that if others were to observe what it is that you're doing they would consider it unfair and therefore they would be there would be some anger directed at you and therefore you feel guilty in advance so this is the what this person is experiencing is in alternative emotions around the issue of fairness about caretaking of them of his or her mother now this is reasonable that they would be feeling these opposite emotions because at times they're going to be feeling angry themselves feeling like things are unfair to them and the reason why they're going to perceive that things are unfair is because that the relationship is not in balance the relationship is is now a relationship of all tourism and dependency so they are putting more energy and resources into the relationship than they are receiving back human beings are fine with this on a short-term basis you know any romantic relationship or any good friendship has an ebb of Evan flow of credits and debits and people usually if the relationship is a good one the cost-benefit analysis is not being run very closely because both people feel solidly on the 'black with respect to the relationship and so there's no particular anger and no particular guilt that's being activated at any time however if you have a relationship that's out of balance where one person feels like they are investing deal more than the other and that the situation is not likely to change then you're likely to find anger and guilt emerging so let's suppose that in a romantic relationship let's suppose one partner loses a job loses some function becomes unemployable loses some attractiveness because they have some situation come up and one way or the other they become handicapped in some fashion if that's the case the first thing that's going to happen is the June generally the other partner is going to feel very compassionate and they're going to be very helpful if they've loved each other however if you would then watch over time what's going to be difficult on this relationship is going to be if this continues to be essentially a 95/5 process where one party is bringing the overwhelming majority of the resources it could be a hundred zero potentially if that happens then there's going to be a time when when the giving party starts to get annoyed and they're going to start to feel like they're being exploited and in fact the relationship is no longer fair and so as a result they're going to start to signal this in little bits of their behavior they may feel guilty about it because they may feel like that is being unfair to the other party who can't help it but at the same time they can the predominant judgment inside their head could be that it's being unfair to them person on the other side can feel the opposite they can feel very guilty it's not their fault for example in that situation and so you can see how anger and guilt can emerge from a relationship that wasn't balanced but it's now out of balance and the giving party can't see how it's ever going to get back into balance and this is the situation that this person is is talking about here that this is a situation that is now out of balance like of course when you're young parent-child relationship is inherently altruistic that's how it's designed as we reach adulthood hopefully if we're lucky we have relationships with our parents that are far more equal they may remain somewhat mildly altruistic paying for our wedding or whatever that that sort of thing there so there could be continued altruistic process going on it might even be the case that out there in the future people might inherit for goodness sakes and so it winds up that the parents out earned their own expenditures and are planning to go to the grave and there's going to be an estate and the children are going to get even more for Christ's sakes so that that could be the situation so there's all kinds of different ways that this can play out but in this particular situation we have one where this is feeling exploitative in other words the person is saying listen I'm investing a tremendous amount in my mother she's I feel obligated since she helped me ie were feeling the the nature of a relationship where there's an oscillation between giving and receiving depending upon what the person's circumstances are and now it is tipped towards the oscillation where our person is now giving but now it's going on pretty long sounds like there's an awful lot but they're needing to do so it's possible that the mother doesn't have a lot of resources if the mother does have a lot of resources for goodness sakes don't try to save them your job would be to organize the expenditure of those resources so that there would be all the help that you could possibly legitimately hire to make sure that the mom is taken care of and that the child does as little as possible and once again we're trying to have the relationship be the intersection of those things that two people enjoy which is what we want to do in romance and which is what we want to do in friendships and which is what we want to do in parent-child relationships you know as people age so you want to have it as little as possible be an altruistic situation and as much as possible be a joint enjoyment situation as much as you can now in situations where that that the mother's getting snarky in other words quote recently it could be that there's starting to be some passive-aggressive behavior on the part of the caregiver here and some of those things hangs like not being that reliable saying that they're going to come and do something and they're not doing it so this is this is not an uncommon pattern that takes place when people feel like they're being exploited they're irritated however there they've got mixed emotions about this because they can also feel guilty that they might not be doing enough because this is a hard one to judge as to what's fair and so as a result there can be some confusion about this in a person's own thinking about what's fair can be oscillating and at the same time a dependent individual dependent upon how disagreeable they are they might start signaling that that they feel like the the caregivers being unfair one of the things that's hard on people obviously you could have a disagreeable pain in the neck dependent person that would be a very difficult challenge to to maintain your equilibrium and be giving to however it could also be the case that sometimes caregivers can get unreliable and like I said they're actually in cognitive dissonance about the amount that they are giving and so they can wind up getting passive-aggressive not following through not being reliable essentially signaling their irritation but doing it in a very quiet and muted fashion but it's being picked up and the problem is is that when we're unreliable in those circumstances it can be particularly hard on a dependent person because dependent people can really look forward to and expect that they're going to get some kind of contact did you know 9 a.m. on Saturday morning or whatever it is and so what I would recommend is that that whenever you have the situation use you set limits as to what it is that you're going to do and what you're not going to do you don't sacrifice your life to anybody and what you may give but there are limits to the giving but what you want to do is establish a system that has regular intervals of help and regular expectations that are being met consistency winds up being a very important issue here I believe it was probably Ellen Langer and Judy rhodanese are a pair of social psychologists writing in the 1970s and 80s and 90s there were a couple Ivy League professors they did a lot of work in nursing homes and the as I recall some of their research indicated that predictability was of visiting and so forth was a very very big deal for people in that were in that dependent State and so we don't want to be violating these people's expectations they can I think they can do very well and adapt very well to a fair minimum of help and assistance but the biggest thing we want to be is consistent and and so that rather than feeling like you have an infinite debt getting passive-aggressive and then and then winding up unreliable that's going to create xs-extra turbulence and emotional disturbance that we don't need mom okay excellent and so when when people we can apply this to friends as well as friends are not necessarily depending on us but they're kind of taking what in their giving hmm and then your suggestion is not be passive-aggressive about it it's just to kind of be direct and set up some boundaries yeah these directors you can set up some boundaries and then be consistent so in other words that that shouldn't be happening too much in friendships these are made if they do they do and then you then we have to confront this but and confronted gently and set boundaries and then see how they adapt to those boundaries but yeah this is mostly going to be the case in dependent alterus situations so it can be the case with with young adults or teenagers that are expecting about to help from parents and parents are starting to get irritated and there's going to be very big difference between expectations about what everybody needs to be doing at that point we need to set boundary set limits set you know define and what it is that we're going to do and not do set up the contingencies and then be very matter-of-factly predictable about what it is that we're going to do so muddy boundaries muddy expectations muddy support is a problem we want to be more direct and clear about what is that we're up to and that works better for everybody okay very very interesting it's great question great answer thank you very much okay so next question well this is from one of our listeners so asking dear dr. Lyle can you talk about the difference between self-esteem and self-confidence and as I understand it self-esteem is built from the inner and the outer audience how is self-confidence built or is it just potato potato yeah great question yeah they're they're completely different so the let's so it's a little difficult to do this without a chalkboard but I'm going to walk people through this just for a minute so that you can understand this there are inside the human mind inside there I am concerned about three basic functions of the mind the Hmong functions that I'm concerned about are going to be the esteem meter which is going to be a device for decoding cues from the social world that tell us about how much or little people value us so that's a this is akin to dr. mark Larry's Sochi ometer I've changed the name of it for purpose that we'll see in a minute so the his attitude is that it's just it's just a device sensitive to cues from the outside from the outside world so when people give us feedback give us a smile give us a frown give us encouragement give us a raise reject us for a job reject us for a date this esteem meter is there to track our successes and failures to give us feedback essentially about our advertisements we are advertising for three classes of relationships in the world that we're competing for those relationships are mates friends and trade or business relationships so these are the three major sources of resource expenditure and acquisition for human beings in the Stone Age and that remains true today so we are trying to secure the most profitable relationships possible the most beautiful exciting fun supportive loving mates the most loyal diverse interesting supportive friends and most profitable and most grateful business relationships this is what people are seeking and in doing so they have signals that are being sent to them from the outside world to what I call their esteem meter now that's that's esteem from the outside now you also have an internal audience that's watching your efforts at all these things that's what I've termed the internal audience so the internal audience is watching you when other people are not watching and they are sending signals to you they are sending signals to the esteem meter about what it is that the person is accomplishing how hard they're working at it and they signal pried into into the esteem meter if if you are doing well and working hard and they could signal disgust if they feel like you're doing a lousy schlock job so that's a that's a critical device for an internal feedback on these same efforts as we get our advertisements ready so if you're looking at yourself in a mirror ready to go out on a date your internal audience is looking at what you look like and it says see idiot you shouldn't have been eating a bunch of chocolate now you're broken out now you don't look so good how do you know that this is going to be a hot date this was a mistake what an idiot see now the cognitive therapist might try to pick that apart and say that this is a overly critical internal critic talking to you I would say hey so the internal audience giving you feedback and the internal audience is doing that for a reason it's trying to call your attention to some rather sloppy behavior that is now putting you at a competitive disadvantage so the that's the internal audience it also sends signals to the esteem meter as if it was people sending those signals so now that's self-esteem the other is other esteem and and so did that is the esteem meter now I'm at is the internal audience now the third part of the mind that we're interested in is the one that is going to decide which people we are going to try to secure in relationships which people are we going to try to be friends which people are we going to be trying to trade with and in what way that's going to be coming from what we're going to call the self so the self is going to be what you recognize is you you don't recognize your esteem meter as you that's a device in your head that is going off and give in causing emotional responses that are either positive or negative depending upon the feedback from other people you don't really think about it your your the esteem meter is its independent entity it's a device that has given you feedback and you're reacting automatically to that feedback you don't really recognize your internal audiences you either it says if it's other people now it's sort of you and it's sort of has the people in there the audience has sort of personality characteristics that are similar to your own so there's some ego centered bias that's sitting inside the internal audience but effectively the internal audience is outside of you and so you will hear people make interesting comments like I'm so disgusted with myself it's very interesting it's as if it's a bunch of sports fans disgusted at their team and they want the team to win they feel part of the team but they're not responsible for the team's behavior and they will give the team feedback and they'll throw popcorn on the floor if they think the team is doing a lousy job they will cheer to their to their limits of their ability to scream if they feel like the team is doing an outstanding job so that's what the internal audience is like and that's how it works before we go on the self I just want to point out the internal audience you can see this in any kid playing soccer or basketball or anything else by himself so when kids shooting baskets by himself and you'll hear them countdown just walk by and hide behind a book and he'll say Johnson you know seven seconds left six five four he shoots and then the crowd roars and he make you know etc so this is this is the internal audience the kid is imagining an audience watching him and he is now performing for the audience and then he's you know he's feeling an emotional reaction to the esteem meter as if those people were real people giving him feedback so you know in my particular case I not only made sure you know I kept taking those shots if ever I missed the shot I was fouled by the way so then I would up to shoot free throws I always generally though what happened to sewers some problem and I was fouled so we would take the ball out and we do it again and then when I make the shot you know it wasn't just the crowd cheering it was also I also within of course do interviews after the big game so you know and I've always really just so you know I was always really humble about it you know so I you know I thank the coaches and the staff and the organization and the fans and my teammates because it's not like I won this whole thing by myself if only I was their diagnostic Gatorade on you to dump the Gatorade on you but so in any event this is the internal audience obviously alive and well and human beings and a very important component of our of our psychology now the self though is the one that's actually doing the thing and the self is actually taking the actions and itself has to decide what actions it's going to take and the self therefore what the self is it's a set of relational estimates about how attractive you are how smart you are how conscientious you are how tall you are how athletic you are how clever you are how skilled you are so essentially you decide what jobs to apply for what schools to apply for what people to try to hit on and date who's too good who isn't good enough and and what friends do to befriend now go to fashion you sew and are these are these honest measurements of what's actually there or what what the displays look like well though the self is actually trying its best to figure out what the truth is okay and it's designed by nature to to be trying to run it's really running algorithms and those algorithms are appear to be inside the self what it looks like is it looks like there's three primary sets of evidence that builds the person's what we're going to call their perceived self-efficacy so this is now what self-confidence is so self-confident really doesn't have anything to do with esteemed feedback from the outside so it doesn't have to do with that it doesn't have to do with self esteem mechanisms at all self confidence is very narrow with respect to the target that we are talking about at the moment so someone could be extremely self confident in their ability as a neurosurgeon and yet tomorrow morning they're going to wake up and play basketball with their group of guys on Sunday morning and they're the worst player on the team and we throw them the ball and it's a tough game and it's big deal because it's I don't know it's Saturday morning league among the doctors and it's a team that they hate and our guy is like a deer in the headlights he's completely without confidence in the situation and war may be more less contrived is some some guy who's a terrific you know I don't know he's a terrific when we can have a neurosurgeon again why not we'll take on neurosurgeons all right so he's a terrific neurosurgeon I got plenty of money great job really respected but he's not very attractive at all and so even though he's got this hot thing that is true about him that would be potentially very attractive to a lot of women the truth is he's very uncomfortable and and not not confident at all when he goes out on a date so we can see that the self-confident is not a general property of the individual any more than their esteem is a general property it is not a general property so your esteem in one domain can be vastly different than the esteem that you get from another domain now obviously the esteem that you get the feedback that you're getting from the marketplace is going to help calibrate the self as to what it believes it's capable of achieving and what isn't capable of achieving so it is the feedback from other people in our environment that is the chief determining factor of our self confidence in a given domain however there are two other sources incidentally this this was mapped out by Albert bandura who is the world's most famous living psychologist professor emeritus at Stanford guide must be 95 by now the but I believe he's still alive the bendera basically mapped out the underpinnings or the the evidence process that is leading to what he calls perceived self-efficacy so his word for self-efficacy is how your perception of how effective or how competent you're going to be at something now if you swore up and down in his career that it's not the same thing as self-confidence well it is okay so to be to be very very precise here he has a point he's basically saying the perceived self-efficacy efficacy is the computations that the mind makes and the result of those computations is the feeling of confidence this is accurate okay so essentially there's computation and then there's feeling but the two of them are intertwined and that is the relationship between perceived self-efficacy self-efficacy and self-confidence so now we can see we could see that the self and it's self-efficacy mechanisms are definitely different than the esteem meter you can see that the esteem meter is providing feedback from the outside world which helps calibrate the self this is apps necessary so the self has got to be reading feedback use and it's compiling those feedback kids over time and in a way in order to estimate the person's essentially trading power in the village in these various important three domains and so bandura's work indicated that there are three primary sources of data number one is have you done it before so if you're if you're brad pitt and you've you've had 15 women you know by the time you're 19 years old 15 gorgeous women have come on you and tried to corner you in the corner of the bar then you kind of know that where you're calibrated at and so you're not going to forget that that's going to be in your nervous system for a long time and so you are going to quote be self confident about your ability to be in good shape in that domain so that's your own personal experience now let's suppose that you're looking I take your word for it I've never had that trust me yeah we're this is all very imaginary okay now so now we're going to look at something else so it's also true that suppose you've got a brother and that brother is about looks about the way you look and your brother let's get away from looks for a minute let's do let's do something else in the world your brother who you know is no smarter than you and no more coordinated than you picks up a saxophone on his 11th birthday and starts blowing into that saxophone and gets a couple lessons and and you know three months goes by and he can play the darn thing okay now what is yourself perceived self-efficacy about your ability to play the saxophone my guess is that it's very high and the reason is is that you have a relevant other that you can compare what they have done and you can look at that and say well if he can do it I can do it because pretty much everything I've been doing in this life is something that you know he and I do similarly well and so it's not going to likely to be impossible so your self-confidence or your perceived self-efficacy drives the self-confidence it's pretty high that if you pick up that saxophone three months from now you'll be playing about as well as your brother is now so you have a comparison to relevant others okay that's a second part of the self efficacy mechanism the third part is what do knowledgeable people or experts tell you so if you're a little ice skating girl and your mother thinks that you're going to be the next you know I don't know Nadia Comaneci I guess you didn't ice skate tara lipinski okay so your mother or your your grandmother says you know you could be the next you know Michelle Kwan well you have a relevant expert that knows and he comes up and says listen I hear that people are trying to get you to invest twenty five thousand a year to coach to coach you thinking that you could be a national player I'm just telling you I'm just trying to be nice here but I'm telling you that you can't okay I've been around this game for 38 years I'm a national level expert I know when people have what it takes to do this and I'm telling you you got great stuff you're good and you're a terrific little ice skater but you'll never get out of the regionals it's never going to happen okay now if that person says that to you true or not it will have a major impact on your perceived self-efficacy so the human being is susceptible to feedback from experts where those experts look like they are not trying to con us but they're essentially trying to give us the straight feedback trying to tell us the truth and when it lines up reasonably well to what it is that the evidence looks like we have no reason to doubt it okay so that winds up being a major component alternatively if some coach till some kid listen you know I have I've been around the block I see know what's possible and let me tell you something you've got the chops to go a lot further than you think just to I had it I had this happen to me young not to me but I did to another kid this we were both youngsters I was a couple years older than him and we were aiming for grad school and he was he was hat was aiming pretty low and I told him listen we talked about it he was proud of some of his scores and I said listen you you are really smart we were both we were doing we were like the proctors in a computer lab for statistics and I said listen you're really smart and what you need to do is you need to really really study the GREs you have to you must invest in this process you have to memorize memorize memorize memorize words I said you're you're a typical guy you don't have a vocabulary guys don't have vocabularies guys can do math so you you are going to get killed and you're going to have your options limited if you don't memorize a bunch of words so he did he believed me and that kid wound up getting accepted new to a ph.d program at Johns Hopkins so he wasn't anywhere near looking for anything that high and I heard later three or four years later that he was singing my praises haha that is that on the wires he was he was still talking about what a great thing I did for him so that's an example of a a relat because I was a little bit older I had been accepted into a good grad school we had sort of similar records and I told him listen this is what I did you can do it too I know I know this game you need to play it this way and he did he put out the energy and he was successful in this big wind so relevant expert feedback that's the third part of the puzzle so Albert bandura identifies the self-efficacy computations that are sitting underneath the confidence level that sits inside the self with respect to any problem that the self is contemplating doing whether it's jumping up and taking an Apple higher off the tree if some other guy they can twice as high as you pick some apple tree you don't say that think well I could do it you think no he can jump a lot higher than I can he barely got one I don't think I'm going to be able to get one you're whereas if your little brother they can't jump as high as you did it then you think well if he did it I can do it or if you did it yesterday then you think that you can do it today so these are the three things relevant others what experts say and most importantly what you yourself have done under similar circumstances those are the the main three informational inputs that give rise to self efficacy computations and therefore the feeling of self confidence those those feelings of self confidence in those computations are essential as the individual needs to be calibrating how high on how low they need to be looking to set their goals if the guy is very fancy and suave he needs to set his got goals at very attractive females if he's not so handy and not so suave he needs to be setting his goals lower why would we do this why wouldn't everybody just set their goals high and see what happens well what happens is is that if they were to do that then they would waste the time and energy that they have in this life in order to try to secure the optimum amount of of and quality of assets in order to survive and reproduce so animals must actually self calibrate and and they do so animals figure out which other animals they can take sometimes when they're not sure they got to get into a wrestling match and figure it out so to humans and so this is the kind of things that we do and there that is the difference between self-esteem and self-confidence and those are the fundamental roots of those things are different the self attained feelings are coming from an internal audience watching your efforts as well as how it feels to get feedback self confidence mechanism is being generated by by as a result of that feedback and other computations that are going on in order to set goals for the individual to expend energy in pursuit of those goals fascinating and so I got a question about a little bit maybe maybe I'm reading too much into it but for for example once a while the my home gets gets a little bit messy and and then then I you know get into the routine of scrambling you know someone's coming over to hang out and I like scrambled to make it look presentable so essentially I'm displaying conscientiousness by presenting clean place like whereas when a person comes over they don't really know that maybe the closet is just completely stuffed with everything you know it is a big mess well I know that you know I feel confident at the place is nice and and and clean and presentable but internally I kind of have a little bit of anxiety that if they just open that drawer everything is going to come falling out what you're into at alliant well yeah your internal audiences is recognizing I mean it knows what it's watching this process it knows that you've done sort of this mediocre job and you are you are also recognizing that you are vulnerable to having been caught being deceptive okay so that that's what's happening and so if you're deceptive about that what else are you being deceptive about so this is this is your internal audiences is essentially signaling to you hey look out hey look out it's sort of looking over your shoulder and warning you as it's supposed to it's trying to give you feedback about what the what the circumstances would be if they were to see what the truth is and it's supposed to there therefore generate some anxiety and generate behavior that's going to keep them away from the from the appropriate closet yeah okay and so and so there that's a big difference in the there isn't a confidence versus self-esteem mechanism because the self knows that I didn't really that's not really that clean its Jetta it's just presentable enough okay right right all right well so we all right all right so our next question dear dr. Lyle love the show love the analysis but it's making me worry about my relationship so here we go a little bit about me I'm divorced three years ago after 30 years of marriage I'm 57 years old six foot five 290 pounds got a college degree in psychology but I work as a mid-level bean-counter earning about 56,000 per year no kids I had on a physical attractiveness scale I think I'm a five and I don't think that's overly optimistic in high school in college I was a three but as me and the women I've met I've grown older my stock has risen I can tell they're good all right my my significant other she's twice divorced 50 years old 510 160 pounds with a nicely shaped body especially for a 50 year old woman she has a medical degree and works as a doctor earning about $150,000 a year she has one adult daughter who lives across the country I would think that most people would rate her a seven in attractiveness although I personally think she's an 8 we met online been dating about 15 months living together for 12 she's crazy she's crazy about me right now I have no doubt about that she shows all the signs now I think I know what love is and what love isn't and I'm confident that she is crazy about me well my question is this from an evolutionary psychology standpoint will this last a few more facts we are both fixed so there's no chance of an accidental child I'm very smart very easygoing very handy and fun and she loves all those things about me she's smart funny attractive agreeable stable I love all those things about her and she made it clear from the start that she does not care that I make less money than she does and I should add that I do have an inheritance around half a million that she knew nothing about when we met but she was happy to find out much later but from everything I've listened to on the show I think I'm in trouble not now but maybe sometime in the future when she might reevaluate our relationship now she swears she's mine for life I know we've all heard that before but what do you think I think it's great I think that he's in great shape and I think that that his anxiety is great it's an indicator that he feels over rewarded which he clearly does this is 15 months in for some people that are 50 years old and if you're 15 months in with a 50 year old woman with a medical degree that's emotionally stable she she is not delusional about who you are so this is this looks like a great love affair it's always great wonderful to see these but if you're 65 to 90 you're probably in pretty good shape but maybe not in the greatest shape so it depends upon just how big and strong you are but my guess is it wouldn't hurt you any to eat a little more whole natural food and be slightly worried about that turn that anxiety into 275 and then she'll feel even better rewarded and it'll be good for you anyway so but I be this all quite funny that's just me nitpicking and for all I know the guy's an amazon and he's not telling us what a fantastic you know macho muscles he's got complete with a tattoo and and therefore know so the point is is that this is this sounds terrific and no I don't I don't see any reason for any extra anxiety other than the fact that he does feel over rewarded and that's a that's a wonderful feeling and for people to have and it's also somewhat anxiety provoking but but this woman is given him nothing but positive feedback she is reading these kids very well she probably doesn't see him as a 5 the big guys a lot of times that big sometimes that really hits the circuits particularly woman that's 510 she's it's not easy for people for her to rock or head back and be looking up looks like probably the ideal discrepancy between male and female for height is probably I think women would prefer about 6 inches men would prefer about 5 in that range something like that so this is essentially right in the kill zone for just about perfect and and that's just one little factor here many but the point is she she probably feels very comfortable makes her feel very feminine to have somebody substantially larger than her in a ratio that's consistent with the natural history of our species this looks like just a fabulous ride good luck and it good luck to you and I hope it lasts forever fantastic it's always good to hear some good news you know one of our listeners a couple a couple months ago email messaged me and and they were thinking of making a dating website you know beat your genes dating website everybody rated according to evolutionary psychology gene mutations and all that stuff it's just oh my god yeah I got enough for one night or we should we do one more uh let's see we got one more we actually we have a caller on hold and I'm not sure if the caller's been listed at what you know I asked them in the very beginning of the show but I'm not shot they're calling ask questions suddenly try it here so caller the last three digits of your phone numbers 5 3 3 welcome to the show how you doing no okay I guess not here they're just listing the show yeah all right yeah we can we can do one more question we've got one about psychiatric disorders you want to do that one quickly or is that something we want to spend some time on next week okay now go ahead look do it alright dear dr. Lyle listening to the show I infer that you are of the belief that all psychiatric disorders have evolutionary roots now are you implying that the psychological problems are not caused primarily by genetic or brain chemistry malfunctions please shed some light on the cause of schizophrenia and bipolar disorders from your evolutionary perspective oh okay yeah this is where unfortunately if people hear me say little bits of things they can they can infer some things that I think that I don't think they're there are let's see now I am not implying that psychological problems are not caused primarily by genetic or brain chemistry depending upon the problems that we're talking about so people have heard me say that depression commonly experienced is not caused by brain chemistry disturbances that we need to fix by taking an SSRI I completely disagree with that interpretation I believe that depression is a natural feedback mechanism sent from the outside world to behind failure feedback to the esteem meter which then signals depression to tell the organism that its display a competitive display tactics are not not not consistent with the selfs expectation of what they should be so that's a very appropriate way that you should feel depressed then you need to feel depressed otherwise you will waste your time and energy on in life at pursuing goals that you cannot pursue and not not changing your strategies when its strategy change could be helpful now that is not the same thing as these rare instances of significant dysfunction like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder these have very strong genetic contributions the genetic contributions are undoubtedly dominant we don't know why it is that schizophrenia or bipolar disorder happen we do know we're identifying genes that appear to very likely to be causal in in terms of making this happen we're not exactly sure there's some interesting things that will happen so for example as men age they are far more likely to have a have a child that is schizophrenic so a man over 50 his sperm is going to be problematic there's going to will have been changes in the degradation of the quality of the DNA there'll be problems mutations etc that weren't there when he was 25 and so we're seeing you know evidence of essentially genetic damage in some cases is going to be responsible sometimes you could you're your father could have been 18 years old and you're schizophrenic but because they're the genes are disturbed there's problems with those genes so yes there for these unusual psychiatric disorders for which in other words this is the equivalent of being born with some disease process of it in your body so you're born with Huntington's chorea or something like this so you've you've just got a problem and the problem it could you know is very often going to be genetic in origin and these are just mistakes of the genetic code and how this plays out in evolution and why they're hanging around there they sort of there's there's microbiological debates about how genes work and how they keep themselves in gene pools and because the genes are the schizophrenia genes may likely be you know effectively making an impact on the person's behavior in order to keep themselves in the gene pool this all gets very deep N and you know arcane kind of thinking about this but from the standpoint of us just sitting here and looking at it saying what have we got here when you're looking at someone with schizophrenia or with bipolar disorder you're looking at somebody that has something wrong in the same way that someone that's you know born with one kidney you know I mean something is wrong and it's it's unfortunate and it's problematic and this is these are not the result of feedback systems that have been overwhelmed or disturbed so in the 1960s and 50s and before that and after that a lot of people thought there was such a thing as schizophrenic genic mother that that you know mother that that didn't hug you but said I love you cause to split in the brain because you know one part of the system was getting positive feedback on the verbal channel but then the tactile channel was getting rejection and this caused the brain to split apart and that's what schizophrenia kind of means now this doesn't turn out to be true at all so this is a this is a neurobiological abnormality as is bipolar disorder bipolar disorder is generally much much less severe than schizophrenia but it can be very very problematic for an individual with it it could be horrendously difficult but but there are many things in in the deep you know charts and psychiatry about some unusual cases that will come to light and I think a great many of those types of unusual conditions are genetic and origin essentially genetic abnormalities but that when you've heard me roll my eyes at kaya tree it is because that Sakaya tree will take a very common things and call these essentially disease processes looking to fix them with pills that they think we're going to fix the brain chemistry and they're not going to do it and you're not going to successfully approach most people's problems from that perspective so very good question and hopefully I've answered that so that the listener understands where I'm coming from
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