Sooner or later, you have to give up all hope for a better past. What's up? Yes, isn't that a great quote? It's probably my favorite quote out of all quotes in the history of the world.
The psychotherapist Irving Yallum talked a lot about that. And the importance of taking that existential perspective with his patients. And I think for all of us, it's really important to recognize that we shouldn't be prisoners of our past as much as we keep ruminating over and over again that we wish something was different, that's not going to change the thing. No matter how many times we ruminate about it, it's not going to change it.
So what I really want to do is help people practically and hopefully move forward with their lives. That's a great point that you, if you're kind of railing against something that happened in your past, hoping that you can enact some kind of control over it or alter what it was that occurred, you are fighting and losing battle. That's just not going to happen. Yeah, that's exactly right.
And I think for a lot of us, we get stuck on a certain frequency. And I think sometimes therapy is not helpful with that. And that shouldn't be a controversial thing to say at all. If I had to choose, I would choose Erviolum as my psychotherapist.
Who? Erviolum is the psychotherapist who has that quote sooner or later, you have to give up all hope for a better past. Yeah. Talk to me about the intersection of psychotherapy and identifying with that past.
Well, there are a lot of different orientations out there for psychotherapy. There's an orientation called trauma-informed therapy that I criticize a little bit because a lot of therapy is going and talking about your past. And I think that it's possible that if you're viewed only through the lens of your trauma, you can forget that you have other things that you can provide to the world. You forget that you're allowed to have a future.
You're allowed to have a great future. So I mean, there's not all trauma-informed therapy is bad. Of course, there's nuance here. But I think a big part of what I wanted to the message I want to give in this book is that if we only view you through the lens of your victimhood, your potential takes a backseat to your pain.
I have to say, I did twice weekly psychotherapy for about a year. What was it? Fascinating. It taught me more about myself than 1,500 to 2,000 sessions of meditation.
It's like inviting somebody into a house you've lived in your entire life and then walking around and pointing out rooms that you didn't know existed and those rooms connecting to other rooms that you didn't know existed. And you're going, oh, fuck, I wondered why the kitchen is through the back of the kitchen. Oh, that's that leads into that leads into the living room. And that's how that thing's connected to nothing.
And the veils really do fall from your eyes. But it creates a fucking ton of open loops. It's basically here is a thing that happened. And maybe this is why and this is how it impacts you in the present.
But if your sort of action oriented, if you're a bit of a ruminate, if you're a little bit sensitive, dude, the fucking temptation to become a victim is so strong. And I saw this. I'm still seeing this in myself. And that's why I was so excited to speak to you about your book largely so that you can detox, I need to be exercised of the stuff that I'm fighting with.
Do you know what orientation your psychotherapy was that you underwent? Yeah. I can ask. Yeah, I was like a little bit.
Yeah, it was a little. Well, therapy obviously could be very helpful. I'm also a big fan of coaching. And that's why I've gone into the coaching space in the past five years because coaching is very future oriented.
And it's not about diagnosing you or trying to find what is the diagnosis. I think sometimes we get hung up too much on. What is my diagnosis or what am I? And we get so hung up on that, it's like a grasping for something to reduce ourselves to to hang our identity on.
And that can get in the way of us seeing our full potential, but seeing the depths of our being as well. What do you mean when you talk about a victimhood mindset? That's set out of terms. Oh, absolutely.
So having a victim mindset means you tend to blame all your problems on external circumstances, whether it's that life dealt you a bad hand or that a person or even an entire group of people have it in for you and are holding you back. You believe you don't need to take responsibility for your actions or reactions because of your past trauma. It's perfect. Okay.
Go around being an asshole to people because you can blame that on your own past trauma. You can't stop ruminating about your past victimization. And this is probably the most important part of the definition. You may fixate on how to enact revenge and you rarely think about solutions or ways of moving forward with your life with hope and purpose.
That tends to be a real big part of it. Everybody has bits of that though. Yeah. So to say, you know, the entirety, you explain all of your, I think most people would go, well, that's not me.
I don't explain all of my, even the most victim, you victim doesn't explain all of their things. Everyone has a degree of agency, right? I have control at least over this one bedside table. I have control at least over the color of socks I put in my feet or whatever it might be.
So dig into that for me a little bit because I guess that most people are varying degrees of victim on different days based on how much sleep and their blood sugar and, you know. Well, you nailed it. And this is, this is what was tricky about the framing of this book and trying to come up with how we frame this book because most of the self-help books that sell really well will tell you it's not you, right? It's, it's either usually the two go-to's we blame are your ex-boyfriend and your mom.
Those are the two big ones. And most of the corner of the market and self-help world either blame the mom, you know, the narcissistic mother and borderline mother or the ex-boyfriend. And so in discussing this with, and then also the Jews, we like to blame the Jews as well. That's another story.
So I was working with my publisher. First I wanted to pitch a book on vulnerable narcissism, which is what is the topic I've been scientifically studying the last 10 years. And they're like, well, people aren't going to admit that they're vulnerable narcissists. So I was like, okay, but this is something that we all, it's a dynamic mindset that we all can go in and out of.
And I do think that you lose your agency and you lose your empowerment when you do outsource all your problems to others. When you blame all your problems on someone else, you are stripping yourself of your agency. I really wanted people to see that. And I also wanted to come from a clear place of caring and not diagnosis.
And I go through great pains. You'll see in the book, right? Like every sentence, there's a caveat. You know, I'm not here.
I'm not in the game of shaming anyone, not in the game. Usually when you talk about narcissism, when you talk about victim mindset, it's always like, it's the liberals. It's the librils, you know, the littards. Or it's always about something else that people bond together to like, have the algorithm be the narcissist.
And that's not the vibe of my book. I really wanted to, I call it honest love, you know, you really validate someone's real felt experience of suffering. And you're honest with them that you believe in their higher potential. And I think as missing as that latter part in our society today.
Where, give me some examples of times where people might be acting like victims that they might not realize it. The person who, you know, moderately agentic, upwardly mobile, I do my thing. But where does a victim mentality sneak in in ways that we might not notice? Yeah, it's a terrific question.
All throughout the course of our day, there's an opportunity to choose a victim mindset or to choose a power of mindset. For it's sweet and Starbucks. There's a long ass line. It's very easy for us to forget that there are other people in that line as well that are probably also not having a great day, you know.
But it's very easy to fall prey to the notion, gosh, don't they know how bad my day is. I deserve to be at the front of this line. It's like a certain mentality that I think we all can kind of fall prey to and we forget that we're not the only ones that are suffering. It happens everywhere.
A big cognitive distortion associated with a victim mindset is seeing malevolent intent in ambiguous stimuli. I know you'll be able to parse that. But it's a very nerdy way of saying, you, let's say you're going out of the street, you smile at someone, they don't smile back. And you take it personally.
You get mad. You're like, why did that motherfucker not smile back at me? I went out of my way to smile at them. It's like, okay, chances are they probably didn't even see your smile.
They're not thinking about you. They don't care about you. They don't care about you. They don't know anything about you.
You know, most likely it was just ambiguous. It wasn't that aggressive. So personalizing everything, seeing malevolent intent in really just neutral stimuli, a really good example of that is really everybody's comedians because that's their job. But if they're like, they see aggression in ambiguous facial expressions when they're performing on stage and that makes them really angry.
Like, why are you not laughing loudly at my jokes? And they interpret that as well. The person hates them and hates their jokes. So that's an extreme example.
But if we go across, you know, our everyday life like that, you know, over personalizing things, you know, if someone doesn't text you back right away, you fall apart and I think, oh gosh, they hate me. You know, all that stuff is really holding you back. Where does a victim mentality come from? Like, why?
Yeah. Well, I think everything honestly comes from a mix of nature and nurture, all of our personality dispositions. It's definitely a personality disposition in the sense that some people we find in our studies over and over, some people score higher than others regularly on it. But I also think it's a dynamic mindset.
And a lot of it does come from, I'm hesitant to use the word trauma, but a challenging experience in our life where we felt like we've been wronged. There's some really interesting research where they wronged the people in the laboratory intentionally and they look to see what that does in terms of whether or not they punish an innocent person in the experiment. It's a very well social psychologist. So they found that a very statistically significant effect that those who were wronged in the study, like they got the short end of the stick in one way, were more likely to give a puff of white noise to annoy a completely innocent, they suddenly became a sadistic psychopath.
So I think it is a mindset that we all can trigger all of us. I really can't stand this constant, you're a psychopath. I'm not, you know, we're living in a society right now where everyone is so quick to call everyone else the narcissist and see themselves as the perfect angels. And I just don't think that's the acryty of the matter.
So is this retributive justice? Is that what you think these people are doing? No, I think we feel justified because the universe to balance things out a little bit. Like, you know, it's interesting.
A lot of people say they're really into justice, but what they're really into is self justice. What's the difference? Just not justice for all, but when there's injustice they see against their self, then suddenly they hashtag myself matters. Oh, right.
So most people's self justice is a threat against one's own ego. But also the campaigns publicly are usually motivated personally that I would get something would tell me that most of the people. Actually, I was going to say this, but then this we kind of run against Rob Henderson's idea of luxury beliefs, right? Although I suppose that that's actually a hollow campaign that's someone not really caring about defunding the police, not really caring about black people, not really caring about this social.
No, I think they really care. I think they really care, but they care because it's a threat to something they see themselves apart of. And I think that what really accounts a signal against I am not part of the bourgeoisie. I am not oppressing you.
Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. You link that to the luxury beliefs idea.
I mean, the idea of signaling is everywhere. He started to, Jeffrey Miller told me that once. He said that it copies it. Once you start to study signaling, you can't see anything in this world in any conversation that isn't some form of signaling.
So I always thought that was interesting. But I think that what is really lacking is a real care for universal principles, universalism. If you say you care about justice against racial discrimination, you should care when a white person is discriminated against, right? And that's just an example, but it should work all the way around.
If you're a white person, if you're a white supremacist and you're like, I can't trust this against white people. You should also care about black people too. Like we should care about universal principles, not just the extent to which injustice has occurred against something that correlates with yourself. Why is victimhood so seductive?
Like what's the... So it is our default state. Here's something interesting. Have you heard of word helplessness?
The theory of word helplessness? I have. You put dogs in a cage. You shock them.
Yes. Give us the full overview and explain how it's been debunked. You were halfway there. Martin Seligman in the 70s and 80s, all series of studies starting with dogs and rats and then they eventually went to humans and I'll get to humans in a second.
But they found that in dogs, you continually shock a dog and then you open up the cage. So you keep them walking the cage and you... This is delightful, right? This sounds like psychopathic behavior, doesn't it?
But on the part of the experiment, but you continually shock a dog while they're walking inside a cage and then you look to see at what point when you open up the cage, do they walk out? Because you give them the option to be free at some point and you look to see how many times you shock them before they no longer walk out of that cage, even though they can be free. And so they found that dogs pretty quickly weren't helplessness. It doesn't take that many shocks for a dog to give up and not walk out when the door's open.
But what was interesting is when they got to humans, they found and they had to completely redo the theory. So they have a paper of 50 years later where they say they got it completely wrong, they completely opposite. In humans, it seems like weren't helplessness is the default state in humans. There's something very primal about that where we default to weren't helplessness.
And what we have to learn is hope. Hope is an intentional process that has to be learned. So you ask, why is it so seductive? Well, there's something so primal about the rewards we know we're going to get if we signal victimhood.
It is something that just through that we're such a social species. And we know that the person who's perceived as the victim throughout the course of human evolution got a lot of support. And of course, there are real victims. And of course, we need to say that.
It should almost have to not be said, but we obviously should make clear that we're too compassionate humans. And of course, there are real victims. But there also are so victim mindset is independent of victimization. You can have real victimization and not harness a victim mindset about it.
I have a friend who's really cool and he has no arms or legs. And he has two hooks, Tom Nash. And he's like, I'm out of victim. He had a menococcal disease that caused him to lose to come quadriplegic.
And he's like, I'm out of victim. I actually, I love these hooks. He rolls up in style with them. Vice versa.
You can not have been a victimized and have a victim mindset as well. And I talk about the dark triad in the book. I have a whole section on dark triad activism. Yeah.
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Right now, you can get the brand new whoop 5.0 by going to the link in the description below or heading to join.woop.com slash modemusdom. That's join.woop.com slash modemusdom. Stick a little deeper for me. I think I've heard you talk about this, upending of learn helplessness to learn hopefulness.
Just that kind of turns the gravity of a lot of the way that people see their efforts, their perspective on how successful they are. The fact that I don't default to thinking positive sum, to being agentic, I find it hard to overcome difficulty. A lot of the time I feel like things are outside of my control. I sometimes get this sense that my past is marionating me in the future.
But I think that's a really deep, I think that's such a powerful remover of guilt for people. I'm not broken. This is a personal curse. This is an inbuilt part of being a sensitive human.
I'm really glad you said that. A lot of people, and this is really known in the trauma literature, a lot of people who have had a terrible thing happen to them, especially when they were young, they do implicitly unconsciously believe they deserved it. It's a defense mechanism. It's not a healthy one.
But a lot of people will say, in Tribid why, why this happened, I must have deserved it. They start to develop a sense unconsciously often that they're broken inside. A big mission that I'm on, and the whole second half of the book, this whole second half book is find the parts of you that are not broken. Find the light within yourself.
That is the biggest problem when you identify with your victimhood. What Bob was my mind is there's a lot of people that are committed to that. They're committed to identifying with their victimhood completely. It's Bob was my mind.
I guess for some people it is the only way they know. It's encouraged in their community, in their certain in-group that's the way to be. They're entire communities where it's not. If you're part of the athletic sports community, I feel like there's a whole culture around overcoming a victim.
You don't lose a game. The coach goes, all right team, let's pack it up, let's blame the other team for all our problems, let's give up, but there's not going to be a next season. You have to go brah, the Lakers, not mention the other players. But I don't think he has a victim mindset over that situation that happened this year.
I think there's certain cultures and communities that really encourage it and some that don't. Just to go a little further back, you mentioned people who are struggling because humans are so pro-social will tend to be helped up. They will be given assistance. This is sort of ancestrally, I guess.
Have you thought anymore about the EP approach, the adaptive reason for how victimhood works, that dynamic, what it means? Yeah, I hinted at that a little bit earlier. We are such a social species and social value is such an important core part. Reputation and social value is such an important part.
I think if you go all the way back to Savannah Desert, we're a very tribal species. There's a constant victimhood Olympics going on going back to the start of humanity, the dawn of humanity. We've been engaging in this victimhood Olympics where you have two sides that are warring against each other. And there's this notion that there can only be one victim and there can only be one oppressor.
It just that is what gets you the greatest rewards because if you claim that spot of being seen as the victim of the conflict, you get resources and support. But if it's the second that you're seen as the tribal group that is the oppressor, you are nothing you can do can be right. Like nothing, you are pure evil no matter what happens. So I think it's something so primal about that war for that coveted seat.
And as you see it's in my last chapter, I don't shy away from saying how it's playing out again in the Israeli Palestine conflict and how it plays out in almost every intractable conflict among humans. There's something so primal about it. Does that suggest then that modern culture isn't contributing to incentivizing victimhood because a lot of culture war conversations talk about how victimhood is not being pedestrian and people to get completely contribution free status and manipulate the system? But you're saying this is vestigial and has gone back as long as humans have had social groups.
So which one's right? Do you think our modern culture incentivize it does not incentivize victimhood? Oh, I would say it does. It does.
I'm trying to work out is that magnifying effect? Is it become a catalyst? What is it about modern culture that's caused that to happen? I think it's like asking why do humans still like fatty foods?
I mean, I think that we're seeing remnants of an evolutionary primal need that needs to be overcome. I mean, it's something that I think we see a generation after generation of generation because it's so deeply seeded into our DNA to incentivize that. It's very hard for people to because it's so deeply ingrained. It takes cognitive work to be able to perceive that there could be two victims at the same time.
It's very hard for people to wrap their head around that. And I think that's the only way forward. Is there an additional level of incentivization or contribution from the modern world? Is it social media?
Is it desperate need to try to upend inequality? Why is it that there's a catalyst going on? Yes. I just had a conversation with Jonathan on my podcast about this.
Yes, social media, especially TikTok, really incentivizes a victimhood identity among youth. So there really is a lot of peer pressure. It's no surprise that teenagers go through an identity crisis. That's happened since the dawn of teenager hooded.
But now teenagers are hitching their identity as much as possible on some sort of marginalized identity because they know that's the way that can belong. That's the only way they can feel like they're included. Why would somebody be more included on the margins than in the middle? Well, this is the million dollar question.
You get the Nobel Prize if you figure out exactly what was happening. But there seems to have been a cultural shift among youth where, and Gene Twangi has done a great analysis of this in her book Generations, prior generation, high self-esteem and grandiose narcissism was the major form of entitlement, which is where the best. You know, where the best generation and they're proud and happy about being superior. But now the entitlement, you get special privileges for saying you've suffered.
So it has become a vulnerable form of entitlement that is being incentivized more than prior generations. It's interesting question. I think a social media must play some role in that. There's some sort of feedback mechanism where that seems to be what gets more attention and gets more likes.
When we deal with the attention economy, like we're doing with social media, you start to see certain things start to get magnified and certain things start to compound that maybe we didn't even that weren't as prominent in the past. But you just don't get as many likes if you're not being polarizing and if you're not talking about some sort of victimhood. I remember, I think it's in the happiness hypothesis. Jonathan Hyde says sympathy is investment advice.
And especially what he's talking about is the fact that if you see somebody who's really down on their luck and kind of desperate and in need of support, that person will, you basically get a multiplier for every unit of effort that you give them compared to somebody who doesn't really need the effort. Now the person that doesn't really need the effort, you give them some berries, they might be thankful some berries, but someone who's starving, you give them some berries, they really, really owe you. There's lots of reasons why we have sympathy. We're a prosocial species.
We don't want to see other people suffer, et cetera, et cetera. But deep down, there is going to be a bit that says, hey, you support this person, they're really going to, oh, this is going to be great for you long term. And I wonder whether your opportunity to crowdsource that level of sympathy across the internet is a big motivating factor for people to do that because you have an unlimited sized tribe of people who can think, oh, God, I really should help this person. I don't even know why, but they really seem to be struggling.
And wow, in an internet filled with people that are being performative and not showing their true selves, look at this person. That's real vulnerability. It's authentic. That's relatable.
I see me and them. And as soon as you create this dynamic where people are incentivized to help and you stand out by having some degree of what appears to be authenticity, authenticity very easily, I think a good way to talk about authenticity would be or to signal it is to say a thing that typically would be costly to say otherwise. Yeah. You know, Sam Harris, I think is authentic.
We don't need to agree with him or disagree with him, but he pays a high price for a lot of the opinions that he holds. So you have to assume that he believes them because if he didn't believe them, why the fuck would he still hold them? Like, why would you talk about them? Like you would just say something that was easier than that.
And he gets a lot of shit for it. He says the only way he ever finds out about it is when I forward them to him. Keep doing that. That's very important.
But yeah, what do you think about that? What do you think about this sort of investment advice, authenticity, relatability dynamic? Is that contributing? I want to think this through.
Is it contributing to what? I mean, I think Sam is such an oddball in the human space. He's willing to say what he believes to be true regardless of what's going on. Sam wasn't the example that I was using.
I mean, I think the point being that typically people see a degree of vulnerability as being authentic. But the problem is if you can bypass the authenticity and just be vulnerable, that gives all of the benefits of authenticity whilst not having to do it, which is why performative vulnerability comes from. If you film yourself crying on camera, people think, wow, they're really sad. They don't know if you're sad or not.
Like maybe you're just going to cry. Maybe you convinced yourself that you were sad. Maybe you over-eggged your degree of victimhood in order to be able to show this online because you're going to be positively reinforced to do it because people are going to care. I think there's a really great insight there.
I do talk about the difference in performing. I call TikTok vulnerability versus authentic vulnerability. I see this kind of TikTok vulnerability on steroids and it does get rewarded. I think that there's genuine sympathy involved there.
There are people who when they see the signal, they generally want to help. They generally have the empathy and want to help. And so that kind of TikTok vulnerability, they know that they are going to get some reward. It's like when you're a child, you exaggerate a little bit that you're sick because you want to stay home from school and you get rewarded by your mother showing you a lot of care and concern.
It does feel good to have that attention. It does feel good. Even you, Chris, Mr. Novik, to mindset, I'm sure if you're not feeling well or whatever, there's a human tendency to want to broadcast to others that you're not feeling that well, to get that sympathy.
Okay. Are genes, our destiny? Surely they're the most immutable part of us. So how can people not identify with their genes?
Did I address your prior point though? I thought it was really interesting. Really interesting. Yeah.
So genes. Okay. So G is like a dirty word in a lot of circles. I think people think of genes as something that is immutable, that we can't change, but I would much rather live in a world where nature and nurture are contributed than either living in a genetic deterministic world or an environmentally deterministic world.
So I'm actually happy with the way that evolution has given us genes that are highly sensitive to the environment but are not completely determined by the environment. So I like that. So do you want to cover attachment theory? Is that whatever you think is what you think is good?
Whatever. Whatever you think is most salient from the genes side. Let's dive into attachment theory. This episode is brought to you by Shopify.
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I think a lot of people have a victim mindset about attachment theory. They say, well, I have an insecure attachment because of the way I was raised. But as I talk about in the book, the behavioral genetics research shows that there is a pretty substantial heritability of your attachment style. And I think that it relates to your personality.
If you are, it's going to be very high in eroticism, which is going to be influenced by your genes and your environment. But genes really matter in influencing the development of your neuro-norotic traits. You're going to be more anxious in your relationships. You're going to be more self-doubting.
It's going to show up in your relationships, but it's also going to show up everywhere and everywhere else in your life. I think attachment theorists sometimes look a little too gnarly at the attachment relationship to mean. I think they could use the zoom out a little bit and take a bit of a personality, neuroscience, such an edX perspective a little bit more. Well, I mean, genes are everything.
They are your height, they are your ability to gain muscle. I'm sure you've looked at some parts of the sort of in-cell, black pill ideology, all of that is genetic, dead end. That's actually what they refer to themselves as. So it's difficult for a lot of people to eat facial symmetry.
Are you telling me I'm going to have to go? People are going to get leg lengthening surgery. You know, all of the different ways the compensatory mechanism I've gone bald early in life, you know, whatever your, and then you compensate, you fly to Turkey and get new teeth or get new hairline or whatever. Genes in many ways are our destiny and it's hard not to identify with them because they are immutable in many ways.
Yes. And I gave only that message then. There'd be no point in writing the book rise above because we also have an agency, as you said, to compensate, to do what we need to not, you know, what's it going to do to help you to say, oh, I have the genes for shortness. I'm just going to never talk to women ever again.
You know, what is the use of that? What is the benefit of that? So no matter what circumstance you're in and no matter what hand God has dealt you, I think it's very much in our control to do what we can with what we have. So I think both are true and we can hold both in our mind at the same time.
But you're right. I mean, it drives me crazy when people ignore the world genes. And I have a whole section of my book on that in terms of not just attachment theory, but also, well, it's a very controversial thing to say that trauma is heritable. That's probably one of the most con if you want to not be a lot of people to like you at a cocktail party, tell them that heritability, that trauma has a high heritability.
Have a look. I did dig into the research around that for me. Okay. How do we cover this sensitively?
Well, I think that in a lot of ways trauma is the narrative that we tell ourselves about an experience that happened to us. A notion that trauma is stored in the body, I don't think is scientifically accurate. You know, the body keeps it scored like the number one. It's been on the New York Times bestseller list.
It's created a whole cold falling and it's so much popularity. But I don't believe that's how the brain works. So our trauma story is stored in our brain. It's not stored in our body.
What we have in our body for sure is survival stress. We have in our body lots of we can obviously feel the stress involved with assaults with various things that happen to us. But the word trauma, that really is the narrative that we've cognitively and consciously put on a series of things. And it can change.
You can see a change too. You can see situations where a person never thought they had trauma and then they go to therapy and then they get convinced by their therapist that what happened was trauma. So then they change their whole narrative. So you can see how fluid our notion of traumatic experiences are.
So when I say that trauma has a high heritability, well, it is interesting because there is research showing that people who have a genetic for the personality, personality, trait, neuroodicism, do tend to see the world differently. And then people who are low in neuroodicism, they tend to see threat everywhere. Whereas people who score low in neuroodicism don't tend to see the threat everywhere. You could have twins.
You could have siblings who are not twins. You could have siblings who don't share a lot of genes, not identical twins. And they both could have experienced the same exact thing in their childhood from their parenting style. And one is like, I had a traumatizing childhood.
And then you see this case. And then the other child is like, what are you talking about? We had such a great childhood. You know, it's like, what's the truth?
In a lot of ways, the truth is in the eye of the beholder. And you also see that with the touch and style. So I talk about in the book, but the genes for neuroodicism color the extent what you focus on in your relationship. And so it focuses your attention on various aspects of the relationship and it makes you ignore maybe some of the better, lovely aspects of a relationship that you just can't see because you're so focused on, will they leave me?
Will they leave me? Will they leave me? Does that make sense? I hope that was somewhat sensitive.
No, yeah, it does. It does. I mean, I remember you talk about epigenetics and I can't remember who it was. I was speaking to might have been right by myster and he was saying that if a mother goes into poverty during pregnancy, so if a mother who's pregnant loses her job, she's a pretty reliable way to go into poverty, you get epigenetic changes inside of the baby that is being carried inside of it.
So, you know, ancestral trauma, which is, I think people talking about I'm one 16th Native American, one 120th Native American and I can feel the sort of pain of the ancestral land. I think that starts to get us outside of the realm of science and into the realm of woo a little bit. But given the fact that if you have a daughter as a baby that's inside of you, that baby has every egg that she's ever going to carry for her entire life. So at one point, you were inside of your mother who was inside of your grandmother.
Like that's the kind of position that you hold. I don't know how epigenetics works down to the level of egg cells inside of a developing baby. But I can see that you could quite easily create two generations of epigenetic change by having a really, really stressful event occur to the mother while she's pregnant. Yes, yes.
And people do make too much of intergenerational trauma effects because the data does show that beyond two generations, there's no indication in the blood of this. So I think that there's some partial truth to this, but I think the trauma researchers make too much of it. They go way beyond what the evidence actually shows. I mean, I could literally show you papers that I wouldn't even minimize my use of the word literally.
I want to work on that. But I would love to show you some papers that really cast doubt on the pervasive effects of intergenerational trauma beyond two generations. So in terms of the Holocaust, for instance, or in terms of people's slavery, black people say intergenerational trauma from my great, great, great grandmother is the reason why I am the way I am today. And evidence is actually slim on that idea.
One final element here to try and curveball you epigenetic change, the increased activation or of particular genes, expression of genes within someone. Surely, let's say that you start off child of a slightly neurotic parent, you've probably got the genes for a bit of neuroticism. And then during childhood, you or even during adulthood, you go through a really, really protracted period of chronic stress. And this epigenetic change that was primed, you had all of the materials, you had all of the ingredients for this very neurotic soup inside of you, and they get turned on.
How do people not identify with the fact that maybe they can even remember a time before this when they weren't this way, and now this epigenetic changes occurred. It's very, as far as I am aware, it's easy to increase the expression of genes, but it's very hard to decrease the expression of genes once they've begun to be expressed. Yeah, great point. And if you want to discuss epigenetics within the development of an individual's lifespan, there is a lot of evidence for that, for sure.
And that's a different topic than the intergenerational trauma issue. Those are separate issues within an individual's lifespan. There seems to be genes that influence general sensitivity versus organ-dandelion, hypothesis. So there are genes that influence you to be the kind of person who's sensitive to everything for better and worse.
And then there are some people who seem to have a combination of genes that cause them to not be so affected by anything. And for those who have the genes that make them really sensitive to everything, the environment, the epigenetics really, really matters for those folks, because there's some really cool studies with summer camps that takes these kids who are prone to a general sensitivity and may show neurotic traits and cause them to really face their fears. And in a very supportive, encouraging environment, Rachel Grasio, Plan A, and Colanda Young did a great study about this, by the way, and really support them and activate the curiosity element of this, because sensitivity, it can go either way. It can cause you to avoid the world, but it can also, sensitive doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing or a way of holding you back in life.
If you're in a supportive environment where you learn early enough that you can take that feeling of fear and anxiety and still act, it actually gives you a sense of great resiliency and it gives you a great sense of curiosity. So they found that they had those kids had the highest, by the end of the summer camp, they had higher curiosity scores and openness to experience than anyone else in the camp. But unfortunately, most people listen to this podcast are not going to be children. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Kind of be hopeful. Realistic, we're being realistic and hopeful. Yeah, and both, both. Yeah.
It is true. The other way around is true as well, and it's a real shame. I mean, it matters a lot. What kind of partners you choose, do you have sensitive, you have partners or sensitive to your triggers, do you have partners who are going to gazulate, you abuse you, you know, especially, you know, if you have a genome that makes you super sensitive to that sort of thing.
It is interesting that there are some people with the genes that don't, that make them just rock solid or like stoic regardless of like whatever's thrown at them. That's interesting. You know, there's like a genetic quickly towards that as well. You know, I don't know.
David Goggins, that's those genes, or maybe he developed it. Maybe he was the other way and he developed it. Who knows? But it is interesting.
So, yes, so of course we should have compassion as well for all the different ways epigenetics time, but I don't think it means that there's no hope. I mean, like you said, it makes it harder, especially in childhood. I bring up childhood because it's in adulthood, you know, if these things happen, you're really influenced a lot by these sense of periods in your life when your brain is still developing, when your prefrontal cortex is developing and you're coming up with cognitive strategies to overcome things and learn things. But I do think you can learn these strategies at any point in your life to a certain extent.
Right. Okay. What's the research on highly sensitive people? I literally didn't even know that this was a thing.
I thought it was just- Really? I thought it would just be like a colloquial term. Oh, yeah, it's very sensitive. But highly sensitive people is a, I mean, tell me what it is.
Yeah. Thanks for the opportunity. And we should also talk about the link between masculinity and being an HSP because I think a lot of men score high in this trait and feel ashamed of it because they feel like societal expectations say that they're a cis-boy or something just because they score high in these traits. But being a highly sensitive person is the combination of two traits, neuroticism that we talked a little bit about, which is being fearful, having a lot of anxiety.
But also people who were high as also score high in openness to experience appreciation of beauty and excellence. And what you often find is that they're so open to so many, so much input in the world that they get overwhelmed quickly and then they need to retreat. So there's a constant push and pull between a full engagement in the world and all of it's splendor, and all of it's splendor and it avoidance because one becomes overwhelmed with all the input that's coming in. That's really all it means.
Some people make more of it than it is. I saw an interview with Kanye West where he said he's very misunderstood. He's really just a highly sensitive introvert. And then I made the argument.
It's actually possible to be a highly sensitive asshole. There's no contradiction in that. Right. Going into the highly sensitive people thing because I get the sense that this sort of show is going to be very heavily trafficked by people who lie somewhere on that spectrum.
They're introspective. They reflect. They do self-worth. This is the best use of their time.
They want to be better. They're probably plagued with quite a lot of self-doubt. Maybe they're dealing with a little bit of self-esteem. They worry about what the people think of them.
They care deeply about other people's opinions, probably too much. Yeah. All of that stuff doesn't sound very good. What are the advantages?
How can people transform high sensitivity into a strength? Yeah. I'm really glad you asked that question because I think a lot of people can view these things as negatives. But contextually speaking, it is very conducive to creativity, to be able to see the nuances and things, to be able to see, to have such an open mind where you're able to make connections between things that most people aren't seeing.
A big part of my PhD dissertation was investigating the trait reduced to lean inhibition and its correlation with creative thinking. People who have reduced lean inhibition, actually do this research with Jordan Peterson, believe it or not, back before he was famous, we published papers on this. But a reduced lean inhibition means that your filter is down where you don't see things as necessarily irrelevant to the current goal that you have. There are people who, when they have a goal, they're so narrow minded and single focused about it that they ignore everything else around them that doesn't seem obviously relevant to their goal.
But we found that really creative people, especially in the arts, and actually the paper I published Jordan works at the difference between scientific creativity and artistic creativity. We found that people, particularly in the arts, have this reduced lean inhibition where they actually at an unconscious level, let in a lot more information than, for some reason, their salient brain network is not tagging this incoming input as irrelevant. So they're able to entertain it. And they also have the working memory capacity to entertain it.
Shelley Carson also did some really great research showing that having a reduced lean inhibition plus an enhanced working memory capacity is kind of like the ideal state of being for creativity. You can handle this influx of information and sort out what's relevant and what isn't at the conscious level, whereas most people filter out at the subconscious level. I imagine if you get this wrong, you get perilously close to attention deficit disorder as well. And schizophrenia.
Yeah. In the most extreme versions, this is what you see in mental illness. We put people in mental institutions for having too extreme version of this. But for people who can have a moderate version of it, it seems to be the most conducive towards creative thinking.
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That's nomadic.com slash modern wisdom. Right? What are the advantages? I also think that social sensitivity, I think being able to be in a conversation and feel what another person is feeling or taking a lot of information, even nonverbal cues, not be blind to them, can be very valuable.
I can help you make you a more caring human in a lot of ways. So we have the creativity, we have the sort of social aspects. I think also just appreciating life. Being able to see beauty where other people don't see beauty could be a big part of it as well.
You do tend to find, they actually have separated, I talk about this study in some of my articles, but they separate the appreciation of beauty and excellence part from the anxiety part. And I find that if you separate that part of the high sensitivity, it's actually correlated with much higher levels of happiness and well-being, whereas the anxiety part is correlated with lower levels of anxiety and well-being. So I think there are good things we can take from being a highly sensitive person and we can try to manage the other parts. And I think that's the key to leading that to if, actually, first off, how can you tell if you're one of these people?
How can people, we don't want to get self-fucking diagnosing, but you know what I mean? I don't want to go down that rabbit hole. But how can people tell if they're highly sensitive? And then on top of that, if this is you, if this sounds like you, what are the challenges that people should be aware of?
What are the areas that if you can just get control of this and this and this, your quality of life is likely, you're really able to unlock the advantages of being more highly sensitive. Do you think you might be a highly sensitive person? Okay. Yeah.
I, based on what I've read, given the fact that I've known about this concept for about two years, I would identify with a lot of those things. I had a huge genetic test done at the back end of last year and all of the alleles that came back that were interesting from a behavioral perspective would predispose me to this stuff. Very dopamine, epinephrine, norepinephrine, sometimes struggles with serotonin, very gold ribbon, may struggle to come back to emotional baseline after a perturbment, clears adrenaline slowly. Like, it's dude, it's fucking wild.
Like when you look at... Yeah. I think this is really important for people like you to admit that. I was in a movie recently called Sensitive Men Rising, starring me and a lot of smart set and Luke Goss.
Do you know who Luke Goss is the actor? No. Google him. Luke, G-O-S-S, he reminds me of you a little bit.
Okay. He's very buff. Very good looking. He's bald.
Yeah, well testosterone is clearly baldness. Okay. But look, he's a great actor, but he really talks in this movie about how he thinks he's a highly sensitive person and how he feels like there shouldn't be this stigma about manly looking men saying they're highly sensitive people. And I really agree with that.
I agree with that completely. And I think we need more people like you and Luke and me. I've been living the gym. I'm being cheeky, but we really need to give more men the memo that it's not a negative.
It doesn't make you a sissy. You know? Well, dude, look at what is it that drives people to do the things that they do to their career or to their body or to their mind or to their net worth or to their ability to communicate odd these things. There's a need for control, safety, validation, desire for respect, a sense of something that was missing when you were a child.
And yeah, certainly for me, I was pretty lonely, pretty bullied in school, pretty unpopular. And you're bullied. Yeah. I was small in school.
I was late bloomer. I spoke differently. I don't have the accent of the place I'm from, even though I'm the same working class gum that everybody else was, the town I'm in didn't appreciate the fact that I spoke differently that I used long words, like my obsession with stupid vocabulary has kind of existed. So I was like, were you giving education education?
Yeah. You strike me in. It also didn't help. I think from the school that I went to, maybe, I think my young group would have had 200 kids in, 250, so it was a big school.
And I think maybe one or two other people went to college, so sixth form, continued into high school, only maybe one or two other people. And of that, maybe those one or two other people also went to university. So such a low rate of people going on to higher education, maybe the college number was wrong, but the university number was almost definitely correct. I think I know one other person from 250 in the school I went to for five years that went on university.
So anyway, I get to university and I start being able to lift weights and I get this job that's kind of socially impactful, running nightclubs or helping to run nightclubs at that stage. And I realize, wow, if I become successful, then the world needs me in a way that it's never really needed me before. It seems like it respects me. I get validation.
I get positive reinforcement. I've got friends. I've got people that seem like I've got my back. I don't even know what that feels like.
And all the while, you're kind of building up this version of you outside of you, which is competent and successful and looking increasingly masculine as you're able to gain muscle and go to the gym and you're diligent with these things and you go to uni and you do one degree and you do two degrees and then you finish and then you build this business and you, you know, the classic insecure overachiever mindset is someone who tries to fill an internal void with external accolades. And yeah, I mean, I know some of my favorite people are highly sensitive superchads. Chris Bunsett is one of these guys like regularly cries on camera, weeps on the floor of his bathroom because of the stress in the build up to his event, but it's a six time world champion in bodybuilding and maybe the greatest sort of bodybuilder of Arira. Alex Walmosey, another guy who is unbelievably introspective, but also jacked out of his mind, literally looks like a caveman.
And these are the people that I resonate with a lot because I see a lot of myself in them too. And, you know, there is a, there is kind of an inverse of pretty privilege for men. There's like masculine disprivilege in a way where if you present as somebody that's got it all together, well, you look healthy and you're all right, look in and you'd seem pretty muscular and people seem like they like you or whatever, what the fucking whining about? Like why do you find things hard?
Why have you got a problem with this? Like, you know, do you not see that person over there? Look at them. They're only five foot seven.
Look at how many problems they've got in their life. It's like, yeah, I get that dude. But he sees something bad happen and he doesn't even fucking notice it. Or he had friends throughout all of his upbringing.
So you have this, yeah, inverse pretty privilege where it's the same when, whenever anybody goes to the doctors in the UK, any of my friends that used to train me within the gym because it was a nationalized health service, if you walked in as a well person trying to get fit, the doctor looked at you and went, dude, there's five people in the waiting room who are overweight, they've got angina, they've got heart palpitations, one of them is going to lose a foot due to their diabetes. Like, I don't care about the fact that you slightly tweaked your back doing CrossFit. And from well to fit is not my job. Getting from sick to well is.
And you kind of end up with the same situation that if you present to somebody that's got it all together, if you start complaining about the challenges that you face, or you start saying, you know, sometimes I get a bit of self doubt or this thing's harder. I can't get over this stuff from my past. Oh, blah, blah, blah. People go, oh, like how dare you?
And it almost feels, I get a sense that there's a bit of an ick around that too, which is look at how broken this man must be in order for him to not feel internally the way he presents externally, given that he presents externally in an elite manner. And his internal state does not comport with that. God, I hate that bias. And we really need to tell everyone that suffering is not a competition.
And you really see it. All these hierarchies being created that like these groups are inherently suffering. These groups are not inherently suffering. I'm not woke.
I made this my guess of price to you. I'm not, well, I mean, I'm not anti-woke either, but I really believe in humanism and treating all people with dignity, respect and listening to everyone's story regardless of how they present themselves. I do think in a big way, we need more people like you really saying that you're a highly sensitive person. So we don't stigmatize the trait, high sensitivity because it really can be a beautiful, beautiful thing.
And I'm sure it motivates you and is a big reason why you're good at what you do. You ask thoughtful questions. You're good at integrating lots of things that other people are not integrating. I've noticed that in this interview.
So you're a good integrator. Well, it's definitely deep. It's definitely a high resolution way to view the world. But it can cause you to move slowly because you don't make rash, I don't make very rash decisions.
I sort of think through things very carefully. I tend to move very conservatively. I have sort of massive loss aversion, fucking huge loss aversion, huge fear of regret. This is why the question that kind of got us onto this was if you're someone who resonates with this highly sensitive person archetype, what are the things that you need to get under control to unlock well-being in your life as much as possible?
Well, in my book, the biggest thing I say is don't be a victim of your HSP. Don't create a victim mindset around being a highly sensitive person. You see a lot of people who are HSPs, they literally see it as the core of their victim identity. So they expect people to tip toe around them.
Oh, I feel things are very deeply, please be careful with me. Blah, blah, blah. And you see it. I mean, you see it.
It was like, I'm triggered. Triggered is like, OK, really take responsibility for your HSPness and don't expect everyone to cater to that one aspect of your being because I find that very disempowering. You empower your HSPness when you lead with it. I can't let you continue to say the sentence, HSPness.
I just literally said HSPness. HSPness. HSPness. HSPness.
Is this an outtake? No, no, this is a key bend take. Yeah. Being a highly sensitive person, you know, it's like anything else.
Any other aspect of your identity, are you going to make it the core of your victim identity or are you going to harness it in the service of growth and becoming a better person? And I think you can ask that about any aspect of your personality. No matter what is your extroversion, your introversion, your consciousness, you know, all these things can have trade offs. People who are too conscientious, too conscientious, like too gritty, there's a dark side to grit, right?
You know, if you're a workaholic, if you're, you know, that could be part of your victim identity is that you're too, too, you work too hard. You know, you could make anything, you know, the core of your victim identity. And I don't want people to make anything the core of their victim identity. I want them to not see themselves as that's the thing that's holding them back from the rest of their personality structure, but as the thing that enables the rest of their personality structure.
Okay. How do people become victims of their emotions? Yeah. Yeah.
So when a lot of people think about becoming a victim in general, they think about all the ways they're victim to the external world. And the twist in my book is that part one are five ways that we're actually a victim to ourselves. It has nothing to do with the outside world. We can become a victim to our emotions when we take our emotions as facts.
We don't just treat them as sign posts, but we take them seriously so seriously that we act immediately on whatever we're feeling. And we are quick to label to find a label for whatever it is that we're feeling as opposed to just checking on the experience itself. So that's a big way that we become victim to our emotions. And what are the emotions that people typically fall victim to?
Anxiety is a big one. Fear. Fear is a huge one. Fear holds us back from so many things in our life.
And that's why in that chapter I talked about the act approach, which I'm a big fan of. Have you had Stephen Hayes on your podcast ever? And who's that? He's the founder of the act approach to psychotherapy, which is a really brilliant form of psychotherapy that allows you to act in line with your values, no matter how you're feeling about the situation in moments.
Maybe you don't feel like it. Maybe you wake up and you're like, I want to go to the gym. I want to lose weight, but I won't feel like going to the gym today. And you really are able to regulate your emotions in a way where you still end up in the gym, really thinking more about what you want to get out in the long term as opposed to what may be holding you back in the short term.
So I think the act approach is a really a really great way forward. Right. Okay. I just started the act journal.
Is it Psychologists off the clock? Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's the two ladies.
You do follow the psychology means psychology podcast. I wrote this. I'm I'm in. Where do you think where do you think that I get any of the stuff that I talk about from?