Home 🏠 🔎 Search


Bad Transcripts
for the
Beat Your Genes Podcast & More

Episode 88: Quitting vices One by one or altogether Helping your SO with their vices
an auto-generated transcript


To get a shareable link to a certain place in the audio,
hover your mouse over the relevent text,
right click, and "copy link address"
(mobile: long press & copy link address)
 


good evening everybody this is Nate G along with dr. Doug Lyall dr. Lyle how are you doing this fine evening good all's well alright and today we are talking about health and wellness and in essence the title the show is called quitting your vices and it has to do with a couple of the questions that we got today and over the last couple of weeks about quitting devices dr. Lao since you did your webinar with chef AJ the crammed circuit we've had a lot of questions on this crammed circuit and we've had questions about quitting alcohol and and how to get rid of all these things but so the questions today are about the cram circuit and quitting your vices one by one or whether you think you should tackle them one at a time next question is about helping your significant other with eating these not eating unhealthy foods and then we've got a couple more but before we go on we have a caller who's been waiting on hold patiently for the first couple of minutes of the show so we want to welcome Marsha from New Jersey Marsha how you doing today I'm good how are you doing excellent you're on Redang Island hi doc all right hi how you doing good how are you good good a couple questions I've started from chronic pain fibromyalgia for about four years now and my son has me on a raw food diet and how it's been helping me a little bit I also have diabeetus and my blood sugar still is like in a little high I'm on influenced and I was wondering eating all this fruit and there won this role that helped my diabetes - okay well my white sugar yeah okay we'll just do a quick couple questions here so the diabetes that you have is this type 1 or type 2 - I paddled okay it speakers you had it for about what 15 years 15 years okay I'll right yeah what what's your age Marsha I'm 57 57 years old okay so and this in so you got a type to die at a raw food diet that's a that's a pretty extreme diet what's your what's your height and weight um 5-7 about 180 to five four okay I got 182 yeah I've seen a lot yeah that diet I mean so and I was always on the thin side but right here I have my ivory taken out I gained a lot of weight and then I guess I cheated but it's also hereditary - yeah and my yeah yeah I would say you know diet was raw food diet there's you know usually those can work pretty well for a variety of reasons I mean a variety of conditions usually they help people if people actually do a raw food diet that is in reasonable macronutrient balance that means reasonable balance between fat protein carbohydrate fiber water if they do that people usually get pretty pretty skinny and thus they start processing their food or they start eating a lot of a lot of rich rich foods like nuts and so forth so it's a it's a little unusual to to see someone hanging on to that much weight but with a thyroid I assume you're taking synthroid yeah I take my rock right right thanks yeah yeah well as far as your question goes this is it's probably a better question for you know a medical professional on this specific issue someone that knows a lot about diet so I would I would recommend certainly any of the any of the folks the doctors at True North health center in Santa Rosa are exceptionally good at at at this side of the diet equation in other words being somewhat unconventional and looking to use to use very healthy diets in with respect to chronic diseases like this so yeah right you've got enough moving parts in here that you're not a simple diet question and and so I you know I more or less know what you probably ought to be doing but your your condition is just disturbing enough that I would defer this to to someone who does this for a living okay hi so oh okay okay thank you sure all right Marsha thank you very much for the call we really appreciate it all right yeah all right okay so we're going to move on to our very first question of the evening and this is has to do with the your webinar dr. Lyle about the cram circuit and then the question that you answered in the podcast I think it was about alcohol and this listener says dear dr. Lyle I appreciate the information on the cram circuit and quitting alcohol I'd like to know if a person uses more than one of these substances say alcohol and caffeine and eating healthy smoking and eating unhealthy foods and smoking do you think they should tackle them one at a time or in a certain order or all of them at once and if it's all of them at lunch once is there a health concern that it would be such an abrupt change to the body very good question there's not a problem doing things all at once and the abrupt change to the body is nothing but to the good so your body is not going to go into anaphylactic shock because it's starting to get healthy too fast the this this thing will we'll know what to do so that's not an issue now the the other issue is how difficult or easy it is to go about doing things this person is talking about a lot of moving parts here now there's two moving parts that have my little ears prick up as a clinician the in general so when we talk about the use of alcohol there's there's two types of use of alcohol there's normal use of alcohol and there's alcoholism so alcoholism is a completely different animal than normal use of alcohol so if we're talking about a person that knows that they're drinking too much and that that it's dragging down their health etc etc that's a different issue that someone who knows that they're an alcoholic so obviously that belongs in a different category another red flag is smoking so to my way of thinking the smoking is the number one health threat that exists it easily Trump's diet so if I tell people if you are trying to make a choice between what you're going to try to change if you're going to try to stop cigarettes or you're going to try to work on too many things at once and you your throw up your hands and despair because you can't do them all your job if you're a smoker is to stop smoking that is the most important thing that you could do for your health the the diet can be done later it can be done at your leisure the damage that diet the diet is doing is so long term and so slow it's like you know turning the Queen Mary no problem you can do it nice and slow this is not an issue smoking you needed to stop yesterday you might have needed to stop two years ago to save your life we don't know but you need to understand that that is far and away the first thing on the list this being said that would be independent of the notion of whether or not you you are struggling with alcoholism is a problem so if you if you are if you are a smoker and drinker then we tend to need to stop those both at once and I'm not too worried about anybody's food certainly want to encourage healthy food because people will feel better but that is a secondary consideration if you've got an alcohol plus smoking problem those things sort of counter condition each other they're a synergistic pair of drugs and you want to stop them both at once slam on the brakes and grit your teeth and try to get through the extinction the cravings to follow so the anyway a lot of times people will come to true north health center and try to quit a bunch of stuff at once and lot of times they're very successful from doing this and so I would actually say that sometimes the use of a modified diet like a like for example a juice diet for three or four days may be a way to reduce some of the cravings associated with caffeine withdrawal I'm not sure exactly why that may be but it looks like that may be the case that's something that we we seem to observe a true north so anyway that's how I look at things if alcohol is not actually an addiction problem then then cigarettes Trump ball we focus on that even at the exclusion of everything else we we white-knuckle our way through the tobacco problem and then after that we can take on other things and what's really cool is the patients that True North when they fast the smokers that I've seen there's they actually don't don't crave cigarettes they don't crave smoking while they're fasting and it might because Alan locks them up in there but yeah but they uh yeah I do quite well yeah they do they do very well so if you have a person that is trying to struggle with multiple issues and and they can they could afford it and they can take the time then I would certainly recommend True North health center and a short water fast in that facility I think that that's one of the most effective things I've ever seen for peeling away multiple addictive processes at the same time people can feel so much better in a week they can't even believe it and so that that's another that's another tool in the drawer if you if you don't have that available you can do something a modified version at home with a you know take a 3-day weekend or so three or four days and just do a juice diet and slam the brakes on get the cigarettes out of there and get through the extinction verse and fight for your freedom it's the most important thing you'll ever do for yourself when it comes to your health and we get that cat from wandering back home and scratching at the door yeah you got you got it is in that example dr. Lao that cats named Clarence by any chance hmm yeah cross-eyed lion you got it yeah all right all right so next question all right so now the question turns towards your significant others so dear dr. Lisle if the love of your life doesn't take as much action as you would like to see how do you lovingly help them they say they're stuck and not sure how to get unstuck I wish the action was about picking up clothes off the floor or something small meaningless but it's about health concerns and things that could impact both of our lives in a big way being overweight Healing chronic disease exercising eating better and taking better care of themselves I don't want to really follow them around waving a carrot yelling are you sure you want to eat that doughnut when there's this nutritious carrot right there what do I do yeah this is a obviously a tough one what we're talking about is we're talking about the reason why they are doing what they're doing is the reasons why everybody does everything and everything does everything which is cost-benefit analysis so the people are running a cost-benefit analysis and they're running it not not cerebral e on any on any statistical or principle basis they're running it impressionistic Lee in other words they're running it with their stone-age brain and their stone-age brain I can't can't really see the pleasure trap very easily they're simply following their instincts and they're reading a bunch of rich stuff and and it always seems like it's pretty much the right decision and to go in the other direction seems like the wrong decision and if they if they in principle understand that they need to go against it and they start to try to go against their instincts and try to do things healthfully the problem is is that they get immediate feedback that it's the wrong decision ie it's not very tasty and they also even if they were managed to go half a day which is a miracle for most people to go half a day without some kind of indulgent food the what we find at the end of that half is a feeling of pointlessness like what's the point there's there's no way they can see into the future that they would do this 150 days in a row which is what it's going to take to make a substantial impact on their morphology so this is this all seems pointless and the cost-benefit analysis it's kind of like if you have a credit card debt of $18,000 and and you you just got somebody just I don't know somebody just sent you $20 for your birthday and you just feel like what's the point paying off $20 against this 18 fellows are debt just it doesn't feel like it's worth doing so I'm just going to go spend the $20 and forget it this is essentially what's happening here and so the person is basically lost in in a trap and they don't know how to get out now they may have some motivation to get out they probably do they certainly are aware of the prices that they're paying behind this at some level but they also feel overwhelmed by the cost-benefit analysis so one component of the cost-benefit analysis is the embarrassment that comes with being a failure at taking on this problem so one of the things that we want to do is we want to as much as possible well not as much as possible but to a significant degree we want to reduce the embarrassment that comes with trying and failing because one of the things that they're doing is they're contemplating any time they're making changes they're also realizing they probably will not do a very good job following through and therefore they're going to look bad because if they make an effort they probably won't follow through and then they're going to look like they're weak and that they're a flake etc so it's going to be a character wrap on them and so if they don't do a good job on any given plan and so as a result the they can feel the scrutiny about their character and this will stop them from even making any attempt so I've made many discussions about this phenomenon I call this the ego trap the motivational system is essentially locked in an endless procrastination cycle because the person is running a cost-benefit analysis that they they have more status than they probably deserve when it comes to self-discipline and conscientiousness etc so the the person on the other side of the table actually quote believes in them and therefore they are boxed into a situation where they had better not try because if they really try them and they fail then they will be lost even more esteem so what we want to do is we want to depersonalized the potential for success or failure and instead put the success or failure on the scheme not the human and so the notion is like in this particular case I mean I would manage this in different situations depending upon the personality dynamics involved but this person says the love of your life okay and that the person feels stuck so so there's discussion about this and the person who is stuck is feeling the intimidation of making the best effort that they can and that they that they're likely to fail right in front of their partner who looks better and is doing better and so they're going to lose esteem so they feel stuck they feel like for some magical reason or mysterious reason they cannot get the gumption to get the motivation going the reason why is that the bar is set too high so the way we're going to set the bar is not to make the bar so pathetically low like well gee why don't we just start with a quarter of an apple every other day and you can add that to the pizza and you know etc let's put the bar there no that's not how we set the bar low we set the bar low in the sense that we're going to have schemes that we're going to try so we're going to say listen what we haven't found for you what's got what seems like it's got you stuck is we don't have a scheme that really fits you so we haven't had a plan that really fits you so let's come up with a plan and give it a shot and then if it doesn't work no problem so we'll try a plan for like three weeks and we will see what happens and if it turns out that it kind of falls flat on its face and it you can't maintain any momentum behind it that's okay well we'll sit back and we'll kind of we'll do a post-mortem on the plan a little bit and we'll take some time we'll think about it then we'll go back and try to retool then somewhere down the road we'll try another plant now we'll just keep trying plans so sooner or later we find the plan that fits you because I got to believe that there probably is one so it's just that it's not easy to find the right plan so essentially we make it not a problem with the person's character we make it a problem of the plan and so each plan that we have actually has the bar fairly high and now the stance of the person that is the loving human that's trying to help is hey you know maybe this will work for you maybe it won't okay but that's not a problem maybe you know and we slip in the very tiniest edge of insult very tiny and I'm talking about you got to be so smooth about this you got it's got to be in your soul to be loving when you do it the notion is going to be well you know maybe this is maybe this is one you can do and maybe you can't do it okay so now the person hears this and it's a challenge and what they hear is that even though you're you're loving them and supporting them you actually don't necessarily believe that they can do it now that's exactly where we want them we want them a little bit insulted we want them embarrassed that that but it looks like there's this problem that they can't handle however they can also sniff that they are loved and supported in spite of the fact that we suspect that they can't do it it's like hey you might not be able to do it but that doesn't that doesn't mean that I don't think you're wonderful you want a wonderful but I'm just not so sure that you can do this planet maybe you can maybe you can't we'll find out we're going to give it a shot see what happens now the person can feel like they've got status to gain by giving those best effort and they don't have that much status to lose if they make a good effort and they fail they don't have as much to lose so we have altered the cost-benefit analysis on whether or not it's worth quote getting unstuck they're not stuck in mud they're not stuck by tar they're not stuck by circumstances they're stuck by a psychological process by which the cost is greater than the benefit for making the effort and that cost is the loss of esteem from you so what we have to do is we already have to have them lose the esteem we have to already signal to them that they don't we don't we're not so sure that they can do it if you put that vibe inside their head now it will rock them out of the ice and we'll get them moving and attacking this problem so if it turns out that they start attacking the problem and then they fail and fumble our attitude should not be disappointment our attitude is a you know what this tough problem you know the people that work with this problem say that not very many people succeed and so and the game is apparently keep trying different schemes tell you find one that fits you so we'll let's see what else we can do and to have a cheerful resilient relaxed not rushed methodical attitude that we're just going to keep every now and then we're going to get get organized and give ourselves a little three week plan and take a run at it see how we do what we're going to try to do is get them to a place where across three weeks they get through some extinction bursts they get themselves tasting adopted in the right direction they get their self-esteem rolling the right direction because they actually do 21 decent days in a row they actually lose you know five six pounds behind being really diligent and we say hey what do you know about that that's pretty cool and they get some wind at their back we say well maybe we ought to stick with this for a little while it seems like it might it's got a chance okay and we keep them right there in this stance that we're not sure that they can do it but looks promising and we keep right there until you know if you can get them on a roll for a couple of months they start being a believer that this is for real this is what they can do they drop 20 pounds and now suddenly it's like hey this is something that I could do so this is how we change the motivational equation all right and that's accept works for everything in principle but that's how I would manage it in this particular set of circumstances and so a follow-up question for me is in this product in this type of circumstance would you suggest the plan to them that they just kind of go cold turkey or just leave it up to them and see what they think they can do um I would actually say that I would probably do I would probably pull a webinar of the MacDougal website early 2016 January a webinar I did called the slow fast way and and there's a little chart that I have there that you can make your own chart or someone that person emails me at dr. Doug Lyall at yahoo.com and asked for my little check sheet chart called starch targets it's a little chart that that outlines a two weeks at a time a little scheme that I present in that webinar about getting on a roll okay and this that webinar is all about getting yourself on a roll where the expectations are down and modest and we're attacking goals methodically and we're trying to essentially breathe life into a self-esteem that is twisted sideways behind essentially giving up before we start because we don't want to lose any more status so that's that's what I would do but in this particular case if I was the person yeah we they might they might join together watch this webinar and see whether it speaks to them and then use the search target sheet and say let's see what happens and maybe it'll work maybe you want and that that needs to be the attitude we frame this not that this is the the solution that this is maybe the first of several attempts to try to put a scheme together interesting and so in your opinion you only have this discussion when they admit or in NF essence they're asking for help and they're admitting that something's going on right and I think they can't do it themselves right this is their there was obviously been some talk between these people about this issue and the the person who's struggling feels stuck and defeated but they're still loved by their partner and so the this is there there should it sounds like there is a dialogue on these issues and we this is how I would I would fashion that dialogue towards this notion of hey you know what let's let's let's give it keep giving it a shot and one day maybe we'll find a scheme that works for you and that's the dental I would approach it what would you suggest let's say we have this exact scenario or well not exactly but this yeah Mary oh except the love of the life actually doesn't think there's a problem and it's and is essentially you know addicted and is getting unhealthy but really doesn't doesn't have any plans or doesn't really realize what they're doing yeah the well there's of course nobody's quite that oblivious the obviously the person that's in those circumstances the it's it depends upon what the cost-benefit is to the person who is actually in healthier circumstances and what they how they feel about their partner and just as they are in other words if your partner has habits that are frustrating to you because you're worried about their long-term health but they you still find them sexually attractive you still find them very you know a great partner in life then part of my attitude is hey don't get greedy like if you're if you're worried you know relax this is hopefully you have educated them enough and they're enough close enough to the evidence that they can sort of decide for themselves we're or it's unlikely that their life's on the line the difference between a very healthy eat or in a very sick eater is 3.6 years of life not that much okay so this is really about disability and quality of life and the truth is disability and quality of life can be changed along the way so if you are if you are overweight kind of struggling along type-2 diabetes your feet are starting to get tingly hey there's plenty of time so you you can change when the price seems to be high enough that the benefit seems to be worth it so if if you're in love with a person attracted to a person and the relationship is otherwise working but you're frustrated that they appear to be self-destructive my attitude is hey make some really healthy food that is Kaycee that they like and have some of it around and otherwise don't worry about it because it's their life and if you've got a really good intersection that that that life is a rewarding one then call it good don't get greedy very good excellent all right so we're going to turn the compass a little bit and change the output I change topics away from the crammed circuits and quiting devices and a pleasure trap and we have a question from one of our listeners about about education and why is it so difficult to be a student so dear doctor lot want to know why is it difficult to be a student why does the brain give the students such great emotional stress when he or she studies does it have to do with the brain wanting to conserve energy by being used up by the brain and if so what tips would you recommend to persist in the face of this stress in any academic pursuit in other words the stress that your brain create for you while you study alright well I we would obviously have to cross examine this person to try to get what their what they're describing about what their problem is but but let me let me give several comments about studying and studying strategies that could cover I might just happen to hit the bull's eye with this specific individual and you know I think most of our audiences is older than student age but you know some of them might be young enough or they might might have kids that struggle so I will give a few minutes to this issue not very many people know how to study so that's problem number one and so let's let's look at what's happening the there's there's several broad components here so hopefully you're motivated for with the outcome so if you're trying to get yourself to study to where there is no major outcome that's associated with with success then it's going to be hard to get your brain to focus the if there is an outcome that is important to you that you need the GPA you need the class you need things for important outcomes for your life then this is a legitimate stepping stone and it's a it's a test for you to execute on and so it becomes something that you need to do and you should do it well you might as well now how do we study what we do is we break problems into little chunks and so a very good way to study is to do whether it's obviously you study for physics differently than you study for history so what we're going to talk I mean if you're setting for physics that it's clear how you do it you have to work problems so if we're talking about chemistry physics mathematics etc it's obvious that that we you know we need to understand the concepts and then we need to do many problems one of the things that you do is you get multiple books for example on the same topic and you you drill and then if you get stuck you get help etc that all hopefully makes sense the what we're talking about usually is copious amounts of reading material that people are supposed to read and they're supposed to go in for a test and boy does the brain get tired and it does not want to focus and it wants to wander off on everything else and it's very unpleasant now one of the reasons is is that the person has essentially an infinite debt to the problem they don't know when they should stop setting because they don't know when they've mastered the material to the degree that they should easily master the material so the way I saw students study and I still see students study is that they get a book and they take a yellow highlighter and they highlight the book as they read it and then they're going to go back and read the highlighters that is a losing proposition that is not how to study for a test this is how you that's a way to steady steady steady you have a bunch of anxiety cram all the way to the end and then go in there and get a B okay now if you happen to be brilliant maybe you get an A but you probably don't that's it that's a B way of studying if I ever saw it so let me tell you how you do it right what you're going to do is you're going to take the book and you're going to make an outline in your own handwriting in pen that is a facsimile of the book so it's going to say chapter 1 George Washington and then you're going to read the first paragraph and it's going to say he was born in such-and-such in Mount Vernon and then you're going to write that down but you're not going to write the whole paragraph down you're going to write your synthesis of that paragraph and then if there's a heading and the heading says the day chopped down the cherry tree so then you're going to have a little synopsis of that and as you go through you know the as you go through the the headings you're going to put the same headings in your notes as they have in the chapter if there's big important headings and if there's obviously anything italicized or in bold we're going to make sure we know what those things are and they're going to go in our notes so at the end of the day what we're going to have let's suppose we have a 27 page chapter on George Washington we're probably going to have a dozen pages of our handwritten notes which are of course far few words per page than the text so we've synthesized the text down into a facsimile of the of the text and then what we're going to do once we have that facsimile is we're going to now write a quiz so we're going to have chapter 1 George Washington quiz and it's going to look exactly like the notes that we have and in fact it should be on the same amount of pages so I wouldn't use back and front two pages I would just use you know I would just write on the front of every page so we're going to have quiz page one quiz page two we're going to have critical page 12 and the the quizzes are going to be what we call cued recall so it's going to say George Washington was born in and then it will have a blank with a with a line that we put so it's a cute recall and you might even put the last so say was born in 1723 we might put one blank you know blank three so you have to be like god I kid yeah that's what it has to be 1700 so it's got to be 17 something and that's right it was 17 23 when you when you make cued recalls the brain has to fight to fill in the blanks and when it fills in the blanks is massively more efficient at remembering information so if you simply took notes and then you after you took the notes you passively read over the thing no good if you actually made a quiz that did not have cued recall you just ask a question tell me about George Washington tell me about the cherry tree not good enough if you make a fill in the blanks through this thing so it's like somebody went through your notes and then they wiped out half of the words and then you have this with little things like well there's three things he's famous for you put three famous things and you put little cues to what those three things are and you're putting them on the same pace the kwid place on the quiz page as the information is so now it's going to turn out that we are going to go when you do this you'll find typically after you have read the text carefully and while you're reading you've actually put the notes in your own hand and then after you did that you wrote a cute raqual quiz when you then go back and take the quiz the first time you'll typically get about 50% of the material right which is unbelievable you have now studied vastly more intensively than anybody with a reading with a highlighter and you're still only getting in half so then you're going to go back a couple minutes later and you're going to drill it again this time you get about 70% then you're going to drill it again a couple minutes later and this time you're going to be at about eighty or ninety percent and then you're going to drill it one more time a few minutes later and then you'll be at a hundred percent so this way what we have is we have a methodical machine for the memory system so this is a very efficient mechanism for the human memory so you don't want to read and highlight take notes online and it's so cool that you know they got the text there and we can block it forget it write it in your own handwriting this forces your brain to synthesize the material and get the gist of this thing so that you've got it under your fingertips there is nothing like teaching in order for you to learn it forces you to learn and by taking your own notes and synthesizing the material it is forcing you to teach someone else which is the person who is going to read that thing so that's how we do it then we create a cued recall and then we drill the recall if you do this you have such a deep structure now for how it is that this is how this information hangs together because your own notes are now effectively a facsimile an informational facsimile of the exactly the way the guy laid out the chapter exactly the way that that he had organized everything to get these points across so at that point you have now absorbed in your own mind the structure of the entire of what was being communicated and so now when we that now drill in that thing you can now set that thing aside if it's four weeks in front of the final you can put it aside in a nice little stack and guess what your brain is going to remember it and when you come back two hours before that final and you pick up that sheet of paper and you do your drill you'll be at about 50% and two minutes later you'll be at seventy-five and five minutes later at drill number three or four you'll be at a hundred percent it'll all hang together beautifully it'll all be Gestalt it and cross-wired and this is a way that you can do studying a month ahead of a final that you cannot otherwise do when people cram and highlight okay so this is a way to have an hour that you spend three weeks ago be just as efficient at at memory systems as as the literally 20 minutes before the final so everybody instead what they do is intimidated by the enormous amount of detail that they're going to try to learn by reading this thing and highlighting it and trying to go back and remember what they do is they wait till the last minute and they cram that's that that's what they try to do and that's what everybody does not everybody but that's what most people do and as a result most people do a have a mediocre job of how it is that they use their brain and it's very stressful okay because you don't know when you're done if you do it the way I'm talking about you know when you're done you've drilled this thing to 100% you set it aside go take yourself a walk incidentally frequent breaks when you're studying information of this kind is a really good idea because it requires time for these for the brain to essentially synthesize and cross wire and essentially cross pollinate this information all over the head you take breaks and when you're done with George Washington you take yourself a nice long break for half an hour then you come back you start in Thomas Jefferson okay new chapter new stuff etc and and just bit by bit we set up an accretion process in memory and you can be way ahead of the game and it's not it's not stressful at all to study this way it's a you you are essentially like a mulcher you are just putting information in there and mulching it and mulching it and mulching it and mulching it you're a machine I used this strategy all through my academic career I could take a book and I could I put a put a look at my watch and I would read a page of the standard page of whatever the text was and then I would multiply that by four and that would be how long it was going to take to master the material in that book so if it took three minutes a page I would know it was going to take me 12 minutes a page if so if there's 200 pages associated with the midterm I knew that it was going to be 12 times 200 so it was going to be you know 2,400 minutes in order to master the material on that midterm and make sure that I would get an A so that's that's that's how you can do it and that's more or less with the parameter sar for how the brain works and so our as memory does memory have to do with IQ or intelligence or is that just a process of just repetition or actually memory certainly people with with higher IQs tend to have better memories but the in all kinds of things but here's the point the point is is that there's most effective ways to utilize the memory circuits and how they work so this is a this is a method that is extremely efficient relative to typical study methods and so it doesn't matter your intelligence is going to make is going to be mostly in play with how easy it is for you to synthesize the information and to understand it and to get the gist of it in your own words that's going to be the main efficiency there the memories itself are pretty mechanical so it has to do with these very mechanical processes and you don't have to be brilliant to memorize a tremendous amount of material effectively and where were you when I was can memorize all these muscles and nerves and arteries and veins yeah and I would have told you you should have gone in and learnt learn Latin and Greek before you do that mostly Latin yeah that's how you do that all right let's go on alright so our next question this is about how to manage life as a very agreeable person dear doctor while I'm a highly agreeable person which can be a distinct disadvantage at times in my daily life I often don't stand up for myself when I know I should and it seems to be getting worse as I age I'm 58 for example I bought a product for several thousand dollars paid up front and was told that it would be about a month before they could ship it which was fine by me one month became two then three then four and now it's been five months and the vendor seems to always have good reasons why he can't get the product to me I just couldn't keep agreeing to the latest delay I finally gave him a deadline where I told him that I wanted the product or my money back but that's weeks away is this agreeableness or am I just spineless how can I beat my jeans and become more I feel weak and less than a man but I can't seem to beat it oh man this is this guy's a great neighbor here's here's the problem whatever whatever line of work this person's been in it has been one where he is not dealt with a bunch of shifty people and so he hasn't learned to defend himself so he's been in some some sort of nice guy arena where he's been insulated from some of the rough-and-tumble issues we have a president who would never be in this situation okay not a check so the this is we can't tell what what the situation is here he may be in literally a legal and financial position of weakness so there may not be a contract or the vendor may be shaky enough where the vendor could just walk off with the money and then you'd have to sue the guy and the guys broke anyway because obviously there's some big problem with this vendor with whatever this is the my attitude was that this is this is a lesson that you need to learn and it's not a matter of getting more assertive it's about understanding of the position of power you do not want to be fronting large amounts of money in a situation where you don't have incentives for the person to deliver it's a disaster so everybody that is ever dealt with it with a contractor knows this is just a no-no you don't pay the painter thousand dollars and and then have him show up you know three days from now to start painting your house that's a mistake because he won't show up he'll that money is going to be at the local bar and there will not be a painter standing you're out so so this is the this is really somebody that is agreeable and pleasant and honorable and so they would simply expect that if if they would make this deal in the way that they made it there shouldn't be a problem you need to know that there is a problem and you don't want to put yourself in a financial / legal position of weakness like this so if you'd ever if you ever are fronting a substantial quantity of money for you you need to make sure that you've got legal teeth and all of the incentives are pointed the right direction so you know it needs to be a thousand dollars down and six thousand dollars when the thing comes in and and then and and then if you don't meet the deadline then this is that's going to happen and so these are these are just very simple this is what we call the carrot and the stick you you need to this is it particularly a problem by the way when you are when you're in what I call a one move prisoner's dilemma which is that if you can just tattle on your friend and get out of prison and there's no consequences then you better just do it that's a old fashioned game theory prisoner's dilemma and so these lot of business deals in life or potential one move prisoner's dilemma us like when somebody's going to paint your house or they're going to sell you a car they're not in it for the long term you might say well sure they are there could sell me another car yeah really that salesman is not going to be on that lot nine years from now when you go looking for a new car so when when you are buying a car or you are buying a house or you are you know making some major purchase of some kind or major investment you're restocking your garage this is a one move dilemma and that means that the people on the other side cannot be trusted and so that's why we have civil code that's why we have contracts and why we have penalties and clauses etc we got to be pretty smart about that with any substantial money on the line and one of the ways that that you can do this when you are inherently vulnerable to some degree is what we call the carrot and the stick so what we have is we have a carrot that we hang out in front of them and we tell them not only are we going to have our house painted but before they start we want them to go look at our mother's house because she's going to need her house painted - okay and now I like too so if your mother is not going to have her house bedded but they don't know this and so as a result they paint your house honorably and everything is on the up and up because they expect that they're going to pinch your mother's house and then it turns out there's going to be a delay and we're going to think about it maybe next year okay so that's how we see to it so we need just a little more savvy it isn't the person is overly agreeable it's that they're they're a little like I said insulated slightly naive a lot of people have not wound up in a number of situations where they've gotten burned some people have some people have been in rough-and-tumble business situations and they're they're burned a lot and they learn early by the time they're twenty-seven they're like an old Marlin in the sea there's seventeen harpoons in their back they're not they're not going to be having these problems about many people that have worked in potentially insulated situations where they haven't had this kind of thing come up for them they may not know this yeah you got to protect yourself positions of power carrot-and-stick at the end of the day we don't we don't put ourselves in that position you are not being unreasonable by being pleasant to this person if they're in a position of power we we keep trying to be as nice as possible because we hope that we don't want to turn and have them irritated with us if we threaten and the threat is empty if you threaten anybody you better not be bluffing okay this is what I call bluff my not bluffing we are not bluffing so if you if we are going to come after somebody and you're going to cross swords with them and say and listen I'm telling you you're going to have to get this thing done or else okay you better be ready to follow through and and so that they know it and they can feel it and that they are aware that you've got that option so that that sometimes is the only way to get people to play ball all right fantastic all right see what else we got we got time for one more we've got one more question it's a pretty long question about borderline personality oh all right you want to leave that one for next week or ah yeah let's leave it for next week it's a long okay that's due yeah so we've got the next questions about borderline personality disorder then we have a couple of other questions about OCD and multiple personality and then another one so yeah well we'll table these and we will go over so next week we have a on air listener we have a session with dr. Lyle so tune in next week then the following week we're going to go back to the live version and we will have these questions so keep sending men we'd love to read them
Back to the top
🏃     👖




Artist