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Beat Your Genes Podcast & More

Living Wisdom Library Q&A
2020-06-21
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hello I think I am live if someone could just confirm I'm gonna go through this again if someone would type over in the comments if in fact I am live the system says I am I'll just sit here awkwardly until confirm one way or another read says I'm live all right hello I am all alone today um there is no Dr Lyle with me unfortunately we we are not our operation is not quite sophisticated enough to do um like a distant Zoom live stream thing we are figuring out that technology um and should have it squared away pretty soon um but for this week I am just going to do a solo live and I uh we also don't have a strict schedule for these so a few people have asked um if it's going to be every Sunday same time it just kind of has worked out that way um and I can you know it can sort of be a several defaults but no promises that it'll be every single week but we'll see how it goes so I had a couple of questions come in ahead of time I see uh Reeves Reeves is being hilarious Reeves do I have to ban you from the chat room um okay so I had a couple we actually have a ton of questions coming in so um I keep asking you guys to submit questions and you have a lot of them are um they're good questions for either Dr Lyle to answer because he has a little more expertise on it or for both of us to answer because it would be something that would benefit from two two different perspectives so there are sort of various buckets that all of the questions go into so if I don't get to it today it's definitely it's it's in the queue somewhere so we'll get to it on the podcast um or we'll do it in a joint q a or I'll get to it in another q a I want to make sure that I do sort of balance of um evolutionary psych stuff and health stuff and not focus uh too much on one or the other because I know people have a wide variety of things that are going on Reeves says don't ban I will behave okay you're on notice you're on notice um where can we submit questions so you can always email me so my email address is just jennifer.hawk h-o-w-k gmail.com there's also a contact form on the website that you those come to me so if you fill out the contact form I will get an email with your question you can send me a message on Facebook there are lots of different ways that you can get it to me there's also the beat your genes.org for the podcast mate curates all those questions that come through there so if you submit on the form or the email address on that website he will get a question and that's designated for the podcast so all right lots of people yay it's good to see all oh AJ in the house found the link all right very cool okay so there were a couple that I uh was gonna make sure that I got to because they've been lingering since like last week or people felt very very strongly urgent about them or in some of these I have gotten many questions that are kind of similar so I've just aggregated them together so you may recognize that it sounds similar in which case it's you just can can infer for your personal situation um so the first one was do you have any survival strategy or tips for creating your personal Utopia for people who are very emotionally unstable my emotional instability hugely impairs my ability to enjoy life sometimes so this is just a general kind of how to beat your genes with your personality question and instability is a particularly tough thing to beat because it is essentially it's the I I have been um evolving no pun intended my my view of instability and what it's really doing so it's it's like it's what kind of tree you are so what how how strong does the breeze have to be to cause you to sway a little bit so highly unstable people are are reacting in a really large way to slight permutations in the value proposition of the moment so it these are the people who notice um all the little every little microaggression every little micro expression um if you it's like though oh she rolled her eyes slightly therefore I have to modulate my behavior to optimize this Dynamic that's where the real cost of emotional stability is coming in because you're picking up we're always everybody's picking up all the data in any particular interaction or situation that if you're more on the unstable side of things you're assigning more value to all of those tiny little cues that you're getting in the interaction and it's it's costing you time time and energy because you're you're trying to modulate your behavior you're trying to optimize that particular Dynamic so you're getting the best evolutionary bang for the buck and that takes a lot of energy and it's very stressful and it's really consuming for unstable people particularly if they're also fairly introverted which is often the case so um we get lots of exciting traffic out here it's either sit on the side of the house with the traffic or the other side of the house which is like so blazingly hot that it's sort of impossible to sit outside right now um so if you're sort of on the introverted side and you're unstable you're you get really overwhelmed in crowds because you're getting you're you're trying to read all of those tiny little cues from too many people at once and it just kind of shorts out the system so that's a really stressful thing so the the general advice to control your environment is the the overarching thing here you want to make sure that you're not putting yourself in situations that you know are going to be just systematically more stressful for you more more information you want to limit your information so one-on-one interactions and I also have come to think about instability really as your meta awareness of your own instability is less helpful to you in the moment like we hope that it's hopeful to you in the moment we hope that you know we can talk about it and try to beat the genes and when you're feeling really escalated and reactive about something that you're you're going to catch yourself and your not going to be as reactive and you're not going to you're not going to fly off the handle or behave in an unstable way that is not terribly likely going to be the case just because the genes are telling you so strongly in that moment that that's the correct thing to do and it's really hard to have that that awareness in the moment to change your behavior so I think of what you know EP has to offer this problem more as what do you do after the blowout so what do you do after your reactivity and your volatility has gotten you into some trouble in an important relationship this allows you to go back and do a little bit of Cleanup Crew Duty and say I I was in my unstable self I'm sorry I didn't mean what I said can we start again I was being really reactive I apologize my inner five-year-old was driving the bus and lost control and drove off the cliff that now we can have a conversation and I'm more grounded now um and part of that is also just knowing that you're building this into the expectations in your most important relationship so your romantic relationships your work relationships just kind of letting people know that sometimes your initial reaction is not the final reaction that you can you have a tendency to respond excessively to the circumstances of the moment and that you should just institutionalize sort of a 24-hour uh hold rule we talked about this a little bit on the podcast a few weeks ago about disagreeable and the um the sleep on send rule so you want to maybe that was just actually on last week's q a so just you know check yourself before you wreck yourself and make it make it a rule in your life that you don't make any big decisions until you've slept on it for 24 hours and make it an expectation with your core relationships that things things could really change no matter how extreme it seems in the moment 24 hours later you're very likely to be walking that back and regaining your um your stability your presence in the moment so those are the main things that I would say you're obviously you can't can't change your personality as we we talk all the time but you can sort of adjust expectations and you can adjust your own um your own expectations for how easily you can you can walk something back over time okay so let's see what else we have here we have Chef AJ is asking a very important question what are the meaning of my tattoos and kind of try to go back between free asked and live ah Meredith in the house and Carter lots of lots of good folks um so I I just have the two tattoos so I've got this this is my my girlfriend here and I also have the Space Needle with roots coming out of it one of these days when I'm more are independently wealthy and I decide to also undergo the pain of the experience and I can find really high quality vegan ink which is also harder to find than you would think it's really sort of a tough proposition I will I have a scheme to kind of complete the sleeve but they're very independent of each other so I got the Space Needle first after I went through some [ __ ] in Seattle some major major life [ __ ] of on a couple of different levels and I felt a very deep connection to the city of Seattle I lived there for over 10 years I was did my undergraduate work at the University of Washington and had some really high highs and really low lows in Seattle so it's sort of a mixed this image of the Space Needle actually came from the Seattle International Film Festival poster for that year which had a giant squid that was laying waste to the city sort of a King Kong style thing and it was ripping the spacing the Latin so there was some talk of doing the whole squid but I decided against that and just got the Space Needle detail so it was sort of this I'm rooted in Seattle but I'm also uprooted and it's all it was very deep at the time everything's really deep when you're 25. um and so I got that and then a couple of years later after having my heart annihilated um and feeling like I was going through heartbreak like no human had ever experienced heartbreak I found a lot of Solace I've talked about this before in a particular Buddhist lineage called the Shambhala tradition and there's a Shambhala Center this is a Tibetan Buddhist lydian beautiful Shambhala Center in Boston and I went to a lot of Retreats there a lot of weekend Retreats got really into meditation developed some tools that I continue to use to this day and this image of this particular character in Tibetan Buddhism who I won't try to butcher the pronunciation of her name but she's she's the emanation of the Buddha's mother she's the first fully enlightened woman so she was the concert of the king who brought Buddhism to Tibet and she eventually achieved Enlightenment before he did because she was The Reincarnation of the Buddhist Buddha's mother and she's this this amazing figure who is just this first for compassion and love and Enlightenment everywhere that she goes and there was this big banner of her hanging in the in the center where I was sitting you know feeling my heartbreak and trying to meditate my way out of it and so I just kept staring at her and at some point I just figured I should have her with me all the time so that's where she came from all right let's see Portland does have vegan tattoo shops that is true Reeves is gonna contribute to a crowd fund for my tattoo is that's awesome that's awesome very good Michael is Michael no squid yeah I I don't I no longer want the squid tattoo that was yeah new rules is really you just probably shouldn't get any tattoos before you're 30 and even then it's probably not ideal that you always think at the time that it's incredibly deep and you will you'll never regret it I don't regret them but you know I do wish they were a little more sort of uh there's a little more artistic coherence to the whole operation okay um all right somebody asking about a god Gene um believing in a clock Winder which is kind of similar to a question that I was asked ahead of time about what use does the Mystic Chip have in the Stone Age Village so so is this person's asking what does the Mystic ship serve in the Stone Age or is it just evidence that somebody really highly neurotic finding ways to alter perspectives to beat their genes so um yeah it's interesting so the Mystic ship serves a couple of different purposes it's mostly a reflection of the human capacity for imagination so the quick thought experiment about life in a Stone Age village and um somebody somebody having a particularly a sexual selection Advantage with a Mystic chip over somebody who doesn't um makes pretty clear that this is a this is an attractive thing so you're you're sitting around the campfire at the end of the day and there are two two men back from the Hunts and the one just kind of Grunts and offers the food and says time to eat and the other one tells this big story about being aided by forces Beyond his understanding and control and the symbols and the stars and all these things and which of these is just more inherently interesting and attractive and speaks to interesting and attractive because it speaks to more going on in that brain a higher value mate search object so it's it's going to have a sexual advantage over time and so I always I always use this in my arguments with Doug when he complains about my Mystic ship say hey it's a sexually selected characteristic I'm just a superior specimen so that's the main thing that it's doing an imagination is uh generally uh it's it's it's both um subject to sexual selection because it's more interesting and attractive but also natural selection because you're you're you're you're more efficient if you can infer what other people are thinking about you and how they're going to strategize in Warfare um how they're going to interact with you in any particular situation the the ability to project into the other person's mind and make those sorts of inferences about what they're going to do next is a hugely huge huge advantage and that that is sort of bundled together with the Mystic chip as it informs imagination so people who are more intuitive people who are more able to have higher emotional intelligence tend to be more imaginative tend to have more of a Mystic chip so all of those things are going together and then religion sort of emerges from that both because we we have a you know sort of this drive toward the Mystic chip in the population in general but also as a as a shortcut to ensure obedience and control of a larger population uh with people self-policing their own behavior without having to actually rule over them by immediate force all the time which becomes handy when your village is getting a little um too big for you to Wrangle at any given time okay so let's see seeing all of these different chats how did I first get into EP so I've talked about this a little bit I think on the a podcast that I did just with Nate um but it's a long long and Winding Road um the short version is that I I got into it by resisting it for a really long time so I encountered the first form that I encountered EP in was a book called the moral Animal by Robert Wright which came out probably I was in high school I think and somebody had a copy of it I don't remember if it was my grandma or my dad it was likely one of those two and it was floating around and I picked it up and was sort of intrigued and very disturbed and um and just was like okay well this I'm just gonna set this to the side and it kept following me around the pursuit of all of my different intellectual interests so I've always been a capital T truth Seeker that's always that's what the direction that my openness and my Mystic chip take um the the that's the Mystic chip is also very linked to openness which kind of kind of goes without saying um but it's that's the whole imaginative piece those are very connected um and so I've always wanted to discover what's true what why are we here what's the meaning of it all um and I could never entirely dismiss evolutionary psychology as a component of that because I kept stumbling into it no matter what other kind of world view I adopted at any given time I just kept running into these little kernels of source code all over the all over the intellectual space and resisted it and resisted it and resisted it and came up with all kinds of my doggies or having having a good time barking in there the misogynistic cover story for bad behavior of men to uh you know spread their seeds and for um for women to just stay home Barefoot in the kitchen all the time uh and that I just had no interest in this whole Paradigm and uh it really took a lot of time for me encountering the same problems in Social over and over and over again as I went through my political science training and other social science training and finding these really unsatisfying answers that were rooted in um cultural environmental institutional kinds of answers to problems of fundamental human behavior and obedience and power and all of the things that inform politics and sociology I just found those answers incredibly incredibly unsatisfying and I kept going back to the unit of the unit of analysis of the individual rather than the group so the a lot of sociology and poli-sci is is looking at the as the fundamental unit of analysis would never freaking made sense to me sort of like no I'm an individual I'm making individual choices there's a rationality that is unique unto me so if we could come up with some sort of way of understanding what is rationality to the individual and then how does that inform group Behavior maybe we might get somewhere and so I stumbled across Max Weber who is the intellectual father of the the individual is the unit of analysis and sociology is called verstan in German and really that was the sort of first moment that okay not only do we have individual rationality but that rationality is subject to those individual constraints of that person's life and history and all of the things that have happened to them so this is a better way of understanding rationality than some sort of rational Choice model that is equal across the entire population which also didn't make sense to me um anyway it's all very long winding tale of how I got there but it was just I was trying to understand what makes people tick and what the meaning of life is uh and pretty soon you just if you if you keep reading and you keep asking these questions and you have enough intellectual honesty which I think I do I think you can't avoid it I think it eventually the road takes you there because it's the only the only place where everything really adds up and it all kind of clicks and truly makes sense um and then I have also told the story of how I wound up at true north and started working with Dr Lyle but that's that's on the podcast and we've talked about that okay so uh okay lots of different questions coming through here hi O's unite all very good um thoughts on meditation so going back to that the question about instability that's where something like meditation is really can be really useful because your your um developing the muscle of attention is how my meditation teachers always talked about it when I was in this kind of space so you you can the The Barking is really very impressive um so you you can learn you can cultivate an ability to be able to step outside of yourself when you're being super reactive with with instability with super high conscientiousness with crazy high openness that wants you to do crazy things without thinking about them first you can if you've got the IQ and you have access to this information over time you can get better at stepping outside of yourself and observing yourself in in that what Buddhism would call the witness kind of position so you're you're sort of watching yourself operate with the with a abstract curiosity like okay well that's interesting that you're doing that and I can see why you would come to that inference with the personality Distortion that you have so if you've got major personality Distortion and the the kind of personality Distortion that's most responsive to meditation would be instability or the super high conscientiousness those are those are the two if you're super disagreeable it's probably not going to be as responsive but instability and or super high conscientiousness you you can get better at at monitoring your reaction in the moment to people and over time you can get to a point where you can actually step outside of yourself in in the moment that is getting you all keyed up and change your behavior in that moment you can you can beat your genes a little bit more when it's actually all happening but the goal should be at least to have the awareness even if you can't change the behavior and then later on to kind of clean up your damage in a more effective way by having a higher degree of self-understanding and I know in my own life that the the meditation is a tool to to just develop that practice with with finding where your attention is at any given time and the more you're doing that just a very basic mindfulness meditation where you're sort of watching your breath you're watching what thoughts are coming up you're getting better at tuning into the the monkey mind um and the noise that's being produced in your head so you're not just being yanked this way in that way when when thoughts are bubbling up but you're actually developing this sort of distance and ability to to watch them as they emerge in real time and select the ones that you want to act on because you recognize the others as very distorted so for certain personalities meditation can be incredibly useful it's not going to change the monkey mind from tossing up the irrational thoughts but it gives you a perspective on the irrational thoughts that can inform your behavior in a really powerful way at least in my in my experience and I know for a lot of clients who have the same same deal okay other to have other questions I think I got this let's see if I missed things okay do I still meditate now what about doing breath work I do still meditate um I don't take it super super seriously I don't I don't think of it as a magical solution to anything I just use it uh to keep myself in that practice of watching thoughts come up and and detecting which ones are crazy distorted and which ones are actually reflecting reality breath work um I have played around with I I am not prepared to completely dismiss it out of hand um I know Dr Lyle more or less does um but I would like to see I'd like to see a little more research on it um because I have had uh you know in moments where I've been really highly escalated I've been able to to modulate that a little bit with some breath work so I think there is a time and a place for it that I don't have any particular practice related to it um book recommendations on the big five so all of our book recommendations are will we will move this over to the current website but right now there's a reading list on the beat your jeans site so if you go to beat your genes.org I think it's slash reading list or slash reading hyphen list but there's a tab in the menu to get there there's a list of virtually every book that we've ever talked about on the podcast um so they're not particularly organized in any way it's just kind of a dump of everything that we've talked about uh but the of those books that we have discussed the ones that are there's there there aren't too many that are explicitly on the big five except for Jeffrey Miller's book spent um so spent is Miller's a tour de force of how we everything that we do everything that we consume everything that you're going to spend money on and that you're going to try to display to the village is reflective fundamentally of your big five big five plus intelligence so the car you drive the house you live in the clothes you wear um the the tattoos you have everything that you are consuming spending money on is an advertisement of your big five and he has quite a good discussion of what the big five are um and uh not so much where they come from he doesn't get into the behavioral genetics of it but it's a good kind of starting place and then of course you can also um if you if you're a membership member of the site which you presumably are if you're here with me now if you go to the human nature Series in the subscribers section my whole little module in the human nature series on personality goes into a lot of detail of the big five uh what they are the behavioral genetics of them uh the twin experiments all of all of that kind of stuff is covered in that hour of mansplaining that I do um plus no countless podcast episodes about it so that's that's where I would probably start with that um I will also be doing a book review on Jeffrey Miller's fence in the in the near future and I'll get into more detail on that too let's see I got a couple of questions both in the live feed and ahead of time about asking about the protests from an evolutionary psychology perspective so Cheryl was asking about it now and I had several emails so I have a lot to say about that um I don't I'm still kind of putting my thoughts together and figuring out exactly how I want to talk about it so I'm going to hold off on that today but I am I am going to either write something or make a video I haven't figured out what the best format is I've talked to several clients about a few key issues that are going on again like bringing the camera back to that unit of analysis being the individual it's always you can really understand these things if you're if you're understanding the individual their cost benefit analysis it's always where you have to begin is where is this individual how has their cost benefit situation changed do they have is there is there a movement to attach themselves to that wasn't there before that is essentially a a cognitive shortcut that makes it makes it cheaper for them to engage in that behavior all of these things are relevant so is in-group out group thinking which has really not been part of the national conversation the fact that the United States is this incredible experiment where you have um you know a historical out group that is has been Incorporated with this under this veneer that we're now sort of one big in-group without that recognition that it is in fact it was historically very much an out group all of these things are little components of what I will eventually be talking about on this but um I I will punt on that for now because I want to make sure that when I do um put something out on that that it's uh not completely incoherent so I feel bear with me that'll that'll be forthcoming um okay Maureen is asking why am I avoiding a remodel I think I want it but I never quite make all the decisions to move forward it's the CB so the CB is never wrong so you're you've got this big project I see me mean like remodeling your home um so that's a big intimidating project so at some level yeah you want it but you don't like the perceived cost of what that's going to cost you in terms of time and energy uh damage to your relationship remodels are notorious for undermining marriages um all of those inferences about what the actual cost of this is is not competitive with what you perceive the benefit would be so this is going to apply to everything so the most common place that we see this especially working in the Health Arena is people who are trying to get healthy and lose weight and they lose a bunch of weight and then they stop they stop like 20 30 pounds short of where they want to be and they get stuck and they think it's a physical problem they think it has something to do with the food and it likely is mean it is it's you it always comes down to the food it's always a thermodynamics problem at the end of the day but you your willingness to tighten the screws on the diet um at to the level that you would have to to continue losing weight that entails quite a bit more uh time and energy and existential misery and you may not be willing to extend that time and energy in existential misery unless you were perceiving some really commensurately big payoff for those extra 20 pounds which probably are not going to come to you so if you if you've lost a bunch of weight you've gotten all the status that it you know you're able to kind of harvest from the village are you going to get another you know 50 percent more amount of status from the village in exchange for the 50 more expenditure of energy that is required to not only continue what you've been doing to get to where you are successfully but to be even more careful even more diligent even more restrictive and the answer for most people is Gen really know that they're it's good enough they've gotten to a place where it's good enough so if you're if you haven't taken action on something it's likely because your perception of the benefit that you stand to gain from doing it is just it's just not there as far as the expenditure uh and the cost involved and putting yourself through all the trouble so your house is good enough it's good enough for anybody who would look at it it's good enough for people who are in the village who would judge you and infer your personality characteristics from visiting it it's good enough for you to suffice you in your daily life um and there's there's this big uncertain Nasty Project staring you down in the face and it's like no I don't think I don't think the CB is there the other piece of that that might be happening is that you haven't really sat down and figured out exactly what the cost is so you might have an idea about what the benefit would be oh it's going to look it's gonna you know have better resale value and it's going to feel nicer and we're going to solve this problem and we're going to have better chi in the living room or whatever it is but the the sort of there are some knowns in the process to get there and that will grind the CB to a halt on any any project if the if you if there's a project in front of you that is 10 steps and you know step one two and three but you don't know step number four but you're pretty sure you know step number five but do the seven and eight are a little bit it's like this uncertainty in the sequence of events is is too much for the nervous system to try to optimize and so it will table the whole thing it will table the whole thing and be like come back to me when you've got better information on these parameters because I can't optimize this for you right now so it's the the most successful thing that we can do from an evolutionary perspective is to procrastinate and to avoid and to do something that's a more guaranteed source of of pleasure uh I.E sex and food and we're gonna go take care of that and we'll deal with this whole remodel question later so sitting down and getting really very clear about okay what exactly has to happen to make this remodel happen really really painful details not missing a single step of okay what's the first thing and then when that's done what's the next thing and then what's the next thing and write it all out and you will find most likely in that process you will you will gain a sense of the efficacy as you really write it out you're like well I can do that and if I could do that then I could do that and then well yeah then I could do that and then it starts to really look like something that you've put together as a whole and the sense of efficacy is going to drive the motivation to actually tackle the project motivation is always a combination of two things it is how much gain do you perceive that you stand to to grab from accomplishing it uh is it is it like a significant gain in status or not if it's not a significant gain in status it's probably not worth doing no matter how easy it is to achieve uh and your perceived probability of success or your self-efficacy so how when we really sit down and think about this How likely is it that we're going to be able to pull it off and if you're not really sure that you're going to be able to pull it off either because you've tried and failed before I.E weight loss or you're not really sure because you really don't kind of know the parameters of the project you've never remodeled the house before it's a little uncertain then getting really clear on that can can drive that self-efficacy to the point where the whole system moves in the direction of higher motivation and that's going to work for any kind of problem that can face you and if you don't know what the steps the fundamental steps are to remodeling a house and I certainly wouldn't know the first damn thing about it that's when you reach out to an expert that's when you sort of bring in people who are able to to walk through that with you and and do a very very fine grain step-by-step analysis of what's entailed all right so let's see okay what else do we have Ed is asking is there a way to build or reconstruct one's low conscientiousness up to a better level even partially using the inner audience to observe and participate in that process oh the could I just get a little more conscientiousness question we actually we get this question a lot um and it's you know the answers generally no um you can't you can't change your conscientiousness what you can do is you can you can um you can gain you can hack the internal audience a little bit so your conscientiousness is a dynamic animal so my level of conscientiousness is not static relative to any particular problem that I would want to solve so uh it depends a lot on the expectations that I feel are on me from the external Village and also from the internal audience and if those expectations are too high either externally or internally uh my my conscientiousness can be very high but it's still going to throw me into the ego trap if I think it's very likely that I'm not going to be able to accomplish what the external or internal audience think that I'm capable of so conscientiousness almost it doesn't matter how much you have it will table itself if you're feeling that the expectations are unreasonable from from either outside of you or within your own internal audience so this is a um you know we would want to look specifically at what you're trying to accomplish and what the um where you've been where you've been failing to meet those goals and are your goals realistic they could be either too low low or too high if they're too low they're not going to impress the internal audience there's no motivation because there's no ver there's no perceived gain like we were talking about a second ago if they're too high it's going to trip you into the ego trap so it's this is really a very sensitive very subtle process of finding the sweet spot to set those expectations with your internal audience in such a way that you drive the maximum motivation for the problem and if you have enough motivation that's going to maximize whatever conscientiousness you do have to bring to bear because the conscientiousness is going to be highly excited about the motivation so that's that's really the only way to do it the um the other you know I talk a lot about spreadsheets and tracking and how helpful that is to submit a little report to the internal audience here are the metrics that we agreed on this is what I've done I did my part I've accomplished the job give me my gold star please um so that sense of momentum and the positive feedback that you will inevitably receive from the internal audience as a result of it also allows conscientiousness to fully Blossom as much as it is capable of blossoming but you can't you can't make yourself more conscientious unless you're going to go about it in that sort of way or you're going to bring in some sort of external cost I mean you can always if you're if you're the type of Personality that can impose some external cost on your behavior um that that will temporarily hack the conscientiousness problem so I I know people who have you know made some kind of pledge that they're going to do something for some amount of time and if they don't do it then they have to for instance make a donation to a political candidate that they detest um or they have to say something publicly that would embarrass them these kind of like external sanctions um so the stick instead of the carrot can work if that's the kind of personality you have it's not the kind of personality I have so I don't generally recommend it but it's something to think about if if the other techniques are not working okay personality disorder okay so I've had several questions along the lines of what Kate is asking here so sort of where do certain personality disorders uh fit on the big five so this is a big topic and I think that's something that we should reserve for when both of us are talking together I've had a lot of questions about narcissism in particular and she's also asking about BPD and I've had questions about schizophrenia so how to locate those things on the big five it's a complicated question and I think the big five is a little too blunt an instrument to try to give a really Pat answer to that like there is no sort of we can talk about Trends on the big five that we would call those kind of personality disorders um but that's a that's a pretty unsatisfying way to look at the problem and really you need to bring in flowman um and talk about just all of the the thousands and tens of thousands of genes that are really uh operating on the normal curves that are contributing to this the manifestation of any kind kind of personality trait that we would give a pathological name like a personality disorder so we can describe them on you know narcissism being sort of an extreme form of disagreeableness is the general way that we will we will talk about that but there's other stuff going on as well so um I want to hold that for when we're both doing a live q a or and or the podcast because I've been getting a lot of questions about that I want to make sure we give it a lot of time um okay why do some people seem to enjoy talking about the same problem over and over again but not do anything to solve it how do you deal with friends and family who come to you with the same issues on repeat um so there's status seeking they're status seeking they are uh you know that I definitely have friends who have done this and it's very very frustrating and it's frustrating as the respondent uh in part because it's basically they are bringing you the message by bringing you the question again they're not listening to your advice so if you sat down with them last week and they brought you their big problems and their relationship issues or whatever and you gave them a bunch of Genius advice about what to do um and now they're back this week and they're asking again it's like well you're clearly not listening to me um and so my cost benefit on investing in this conversation again has plummeted and I'm really not interested in doing it so it starts to become annoying that's what annoyance is it's trying to move you away from that interaction um so the you just want to kind of flood their little circuits give them the status that they're seeking you know a boy that yeah that sounds really hard and then you do what we call Sharp angle so you sharp angle them so rather than indulge them in the whole in the like let them Spin and have the whole quality and give them the advice that they're clearly not listening to despite your infinite wisdom you just say something like I've heard Alan goldhammer say things like this like sounds really sounds like you're really going through a hard time but I'm sure you'll figure it out and then just stop like even which is very hard for agreeable conscientious people to like not fill the space and keep talking but then just kind of keep repeating versions of that like I'm sure you'll I'm sure you'll find a way to figure that out I'm sure you'll I'm sure you'll find a solution like you're really you're really smart and I've I've seen you solve a lot of problems that are harder than this and I have every confidence that you're going to figure it out and that basically that eliminates their CD on going to you for the status seeking of the attention that you've been giving them um and so that they will be a little peeved at you and they'll go seek their status elsewhere but you won't have to hear the the song and dance again so um that can be very handy but it's hard for an agreeable nervous system to pull that off I I have a hard time with that technique because I feel the sort of like obligation to like indulge and hear the story again and again and again and again even though they're not taking my advice take my advice all right uh let's see what else we have here I think I missed a couple of things discussion okay all right gone for about 40 minutes so I think I'm gonna take like one more question let me see if I had there was other stuff on the pre list oh yeah this one I had a couple of versions of this one too um and this gives me the excuse to rant about your environment so my partner constantly police is what I eat I love him and we have a really good relationship but I fear that because I have shared with him that I want to commit to the whole food plant-based diet and lose weight he thinks he is helping when really it feels like he is just putting me down any thoughts so this happens a lot this happens a lot I have a lot of clients that have told me some version of this story and it pisses me off so um you're you're like you're going to your partner and trying to share some improvement that you want to make in your life and they turn into the food police and are like are you sure you should be eating that or is that is that is that compliant with your diet um and so this is really really this is shitty and I think it really depends a lot on the particular dynamics of the relationship um how open of a conversation you can have which ideally you would be able to have a very open conversation and be like I know that you're you know again flood the circuits always start flooding the circuits like I really I appreciate so much that you're trying to help me and keep me on track but I have to tell you that it's it's really hard for me to hear that you're you know when you do this I feel like I'm I'm I failed myself and I failed you and that makes me really less motivated because I feel like I'm not going to be able to do this successfully and I know that feeling like I can do it successfully is a big part of staying motivated um so can you help me find a solution with you where you can be encouraging without telling me what I shouldn't be eating so ideally you can have a conversation like that where it's just two people coming together having an honest um you know what what we would call a crystal clear kind of conversation where you're you're using all of that non-violent communication skills that you can draw upon to say like this is my experience could would you be willing to help me change the way that we talk about this that's essentially the way that you want to tackle it but if that's not a possibility within the context of your relationship then I would seriously question the relationship itself and whether this is somebody that you want to be with um and I've had versions of this question where it's really it's it's very closely adjacent to not just food policing but to all kinds of um all kinds of criticism all kinds of body policing it's it's basically a pretext for your partner to make you feel really shitty about yourself so I would uh I would direct people who have this kind of questionnaire and are like struggling with this I have that video that I recently did um sitting in my very hot car it's called something like don't let evolutionary psychology ruin your life which is the don't don't take to heart so much the inferences The evolutionary psychology offers about female Beauty and waist hip ratio and um the the sort of very um precise way in which that should be optimized to get your best possible mate to don't take that on to the point where it is absolutely governing your entire existence and you're not you're not really thinking about anything else particularly if you have that conscientiousness Distortion which so many people who find their way into the space do um so I would recommend that people go to that for a little more info and in the meantime you know this is this is that person is really telling you who they are and if that's not a conversation that you can openly and honestly have with them and they're not interested in your happiness and and optimizing the happiness of the relationship um more than their own that's sort of like this this is uh we call that sort of the golden Dynamic of a successful relationship then it's really calling into question whether this is a good pair bond for you um and whether it's a good pair bond for them if you're not living up to their physical standards and whether it's a good pair bond for you because you don't want to live your life like this so uh that would just be my my short rant on that for the day so I think that is all I'm gonna do for today unless there's anything super super quick uh let's see oh the follow-up the the not giving status Nokia is asking um with the people who are complaining then result in changing and losing their relationship yeah it might it might I've I just I've recently lost friends because of this because I'm not indulging in the constant there's there's the ritual there's the misery ritual the shared misery ritual um and uh you know part of it is that I pipe up with my my own misery I'm giving all the status to listening to their misery and as soon as you sharp angle and pull back from that it could it could change the relationship and you might lose that friend but it's like like the boyfriend who's policing your food it's sort of like well okay well what was the substance of that relationship what was the what was the esteem Dynamic that was such a success to begin with um is is it really the case that this is the the best kind of personal Utopia that you can create for yourself probably not um so those are always really uncomfortable transitions to navigate and questions to honestly Ponder but they're worth honestly pondering um if if it's causing you a lot of unhappiness so and yes agreeableness does not like that option it's it's very agreeable people perceive it as incredibly costly to um to cause that kind of strife in the village and essentially what agreeableness is really doing is you were you were constantly keeping your own costs down for other people so you're making it easier for them to be with you you to spend time with you because you're you're you're suppressing your your artificially suppressing your market cost essentially you're not letting them know how what the real price of a friendship or a relationship with you is because you're you're dampening it and you're holding it back um and that can be a good strategy for certain types of situations certain work situations um certain friendships since the CB is really good but I in a core romantic relationship or a really good friendship it's not a sustainable strategy over time because you were you were cannibalizing yourself to make life easier for them and that is not something that you can continue to do for the rest of your life so um that would be that would just be my rant there all right well thank you so much for everybody who showed up these were great questions as always a delight to talk about all of these things um and as always just send send more questions by any means that work for you um you can like I said in the in the podcast if you're more interested in the health question which I didn't really get to today too much both Doug and I were on with Chef AJ this weekend on her live show and we answered a lot of questions about sort of uh weighing and measuring your food on the starch diet of various kinds of pleasure trap questions even what kind of dog food to feed your dog so we covered a lot of ground so we will share those links on the public section of the website under webinars and you can also of course find them on Chef AJ's page so I think that is it I will try to capture some of these questions for next time I love seeing all of you guys um and yeah I will see you next time perhaps alone or with Doug or we'll figure it out but um have a great weekend you guys and Happy Father's day I'll talk to you soon bye
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