December 22, 2021 • 52 mins
Jen talks to neuroscientist and psychologist Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett about her latest book, '7 1/2 Lessons About the Brain.'
Dr. Barrett breaks down what is happening in the moments before a panic attack, and the mythology that won't die about humans having a lizard part of their brain that runs entirely on instinct and is the source of our emotions.
Dr. Barrett explains how our brain functions and believes that the more we know about our brain the more we can understand why and when uncomfortable feelings might arise.
For more information on Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett's work or to purchase her books go here: https://lisafeldmanbarrett.com
For more information on Jen Kirkman, the host of Anxiety Bites, please go here: jenkirkman.bio.link
Anxiety Bites is distributed by the iHeartPodcast Network and co-produced by Dylan Fagan and JJ Posway.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
This is the Anxiety Bites podcast, and I am your host,
Jen Kirkman. Today my guest is PhD neuroscientists Dr Lisa
Feldman Barrett. Now, when I was posting about this podcast
Anxiety Bites, the podcast in general before it premiered, I
(00:29):
was saying, you know, I'm hosting this new podcast, and
you know what I want to bring to the table
with my background in comedy, is is maybe the conversations
are irreverent, maybe sometimes funny, you know, which just brings
a sense of levity to the notion of anxiety. And
I'll be interviewing all kinds of people. And I mentioned
that I would be interviewing neuroscientists, and of course somebody
(00:50):
wront wants that's gonna be hard to make this podcast funny.
Neuroscientists aren't funny. Excuse me commenter on the internet whose
name I don't remember, but it's still stuck with me.
Their comment months later, within the first five minutes of
this interview, Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett and I are making
jokes about sexual arousal. She's extremely funny and her latest
(01:12):
book is known as the First Neuroscience Beach read seven
and a half Lessons About the Brain is the title
of her latest book. So it's a lot of fun
talking to Dr Feldman Barrett. Now, just so that you
know who we're dealing with, okay. She is among the
top one percent most cited scientists in the world for
(01:36):
her revolutionary research in psychology and neuroscience. She is a
University Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University. She also
holds appointments at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital,
where she is Chief Science Officer for the Center for Law,
Brain and Behavior. She's also given a very popular TED
(01:58):
talk that has over six million views. Now, all of
this will be in the show notes. Dr Lisa Feldman
Barrett's book that came out before Seven and a half
Lessons about the Brain, is called How Emotions Are Made.
But in this interview we do focus mainly on a
lot of the concepts from her most recent book, Seven
(02:18):
and a half Lessons about the Brain. And while that
book isn't about anxiety per se, it answered so many
questions about the brain that people often you know, answer
so many questions about the brain, but put to rest
so many myths that people often bring up about the brain.
In regards to anxiety. You know, I'm sure you've heard
(02:38):
people say that anxiety is your emotions, it's your lizard brain.
Well that's not true. And the notion that we don't
have this lizard brain and that the brain is not
three parts has been proven to not be true for decades,
but people are still quoting disproven things. It's, as Dr
(02:58):
Feldman Barrett says, it's like if the flat earth theory
was still being taken seriously. I talked to her about
why this happens, Why people are not, you know, talking
about what's in her book. I mean, not that they're not.
That's I wasn't saying, why how come your book isn't popular?
It's huge, That's not what I mean. But why aren't
the other theories being put to rest? And she also
(03:20):
takes us on a step by step of what to
do during an onset of anxiety so that it doesn't
turn into a full blown panic attack. And she explains
exactly what our brain is doing in those moments, and no,
it has nothing to do with the brain thinking it's
running away from a wooly mammoth. She helps us learn
(03:42):
what to do so that are anxious feelings become uncomfortable feelings.
That's right. The hope I offer you on this podcast
is that one day you'll just be uncomfortable instead of
so anxious. Anyway, I learned so much from reading her books,
and obviously even more from chatting with her, and I
(04:04):
hope you get as much out of my conversation with
Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett as I did enjoy. Thank you
so much for being here. Dr Barrett. I you know
I'm reading and I read your new book Seven and
a half Lessons about the Brain, and I know your
book before that was How Emotions Are Made, and I
(04:27):
think this interview will concentrate mostly on the book Seven
and a half Lessons about the Brain. Um, of course
we can talk about anything. But what I found so
interesting about this book because this podcast is about anxiety,
and I will direct every conversation back to anxiety. But
something about this book, even though it's not your typical Hey,
here's how you deal with anxiety. I think this is
(04:48):
one of the best books that someone with anxiety could
read that dismantles what a lot of other books are
saying about the brain. Yes, Actlee, I'm so you just
made my week. I mean because um, the idea behind
this book was to make, you know, a little book
(05:09):
of essays that would go down easy, that would you know,
maybe have a tidbit of neuroscience that you could impress
your friends with at a dinner party or something. There
are a couple of jokes. I'm not actually the funny
one in my family, so you know, I'm like the
least funny of the of all of us. But you know,
there are a couple of little singers in there that
(05:29):
I'm very proud of that even now when I read them,
I still it's not polite to laugh at your own jokes,
but I do actually listen. I'm a comedian and you're
allowed to. And I laughed so much throughout this book,
Thank you. That means a lot. But the goal was
to really invite people to think about human nature in
(05:50):
a little bit of a different way, and to think
about the kind of human you are or want to be,
and to re evaluate maybe or reconsider some of the
truths about yourself and your life that you hold really dear.
Because even though the essays read quickly, the ideas lingered
(06:13):
for a while. And I think that anxiety is one
of the most misunderstood. It's probably right up there with depression.
Anxiety and depression are very very misunderstood phenomena. I think, UM,
and I'm really glad to hear that you um found
something helpful. What did it help you understand differently about
(06:37):
about anxiety in particular? Well, you know, for me, and
everyone's different, but I've been dealing with anxiety and obsessed
with you know, I had anxiety since I was eight.
I'm forty six. It's been a long journey for me,
and I enjoy uh, the notion that I'm not special,
the notion that there is a reason for this, and
the notion that you know, this is just how the
(06:58):
brain works. It's due in its thing, and it really
isn't this big emotional deal in a way that was
new to me, that the kind of like what you said, UM,
I wrote this down. I made a note on page
seventy six, and to me, this was the most important thing.
Whether I knew it somewhere deep inside me or not,
I just I circled. Brains aren't wired for accuracy. They're
(07:22):
wired to keep us alive. When you're predicting brain is right,
it creates your reality. When it's wrong, it still creates
your reality. So that, to me is like what everyone
with anxiety needs to understand, that we are creating our
own reality when we are getting anxious, because we're usually
not anxious about actual threats. That's true. And I would
actually even go further and say that, And I'm speaking
(07:45):
as someone who also has dealt with anxiety her whole life,
whose daughter has social anxiety. You know, like the anxiety
is rampant in our culture. It's really a lot up
there with depression, I think, as a kind of an emergency. Yeah,
but actually when you start to think about anxiety from
the perspective of what is a brain and why do
(08:07):
we even have brains? Like, brains are really expensive organs there.
You know, that three pound blob of meat between your
ears is the most expensive organ that you have. It
costs give or take your metabolic budget. That's more than
your heart, that's more than your lungs. That's more than
any of your muscles. Um. You know, um, And so
(08:29):
I mean individually worth it your muscles. So what's it for?
And the answer is it's you know, there'sn't one answer really,
but one important thing that your brain is for is
regulating the systems of your body, and so everything that
you feel, everything that you do, every you know, as
I say in the book, you know, every hug you give,
(08:50):
every insult you bear, every insult you give, you know
is um related actually to intimately to the state of
your own Audie. And so when you understand this, you
start to look at anxiety a little bit differently, or
at least I do. And I was giving an interview
to um Uh David Sharia Mandri at The Guardian, and
(09:15):
I was I was describing to him this experience that
I had right before the COVID pandemic took hold um
and and it will illustrate to you what I mean
by this about you. You start to look at your
own anxiety differently and maybe even deconstructed or dissolve it
into its more basic parts, which then makes it much
(09:35):
more manageable to deal with. So UM I was describing
to him the situation where I was in New Zealand
and um because every spring break I would accept speaking
engagements at universities or for my books so that I
could go somewhere nice with my daughter and take her
with me on holiday for her spring break. And so
(09:57):
I was in New Zealand, having done book fair and
this and that. You know, I gotta I was very
honored by a honorary degree at university and so on.
And I'm sitting in New Zealand. Wait, she's in the
air now, right in the air flying. It's a very
long flight, and I'm reading and listening to all of
this stuff erupting around the world about about the covid
(10:21):
Um virus. And I felt this increase in arousal that
was very unpleasant. And if I was anybody other than me,
I would have been anxious. I would have been anxious.
And the way my brain would have made sense of
that arousal would have dictated what I did next, what
(10:42):
I felt next, and would have constructed in the blank
and I anxiety and you know, um, all sorts of
things would issue from that. Instead, though the way I
interpreted it was Okay, I'm having trouble predicting what's going
to happen next, And whenever I'm having trump whenever your
brain has trouble predicting, there's an increase in arousal because
(11:04):
your brain secretes chemicals that helps it attempt to learn
something in the moment to help predict better later, but
that arousal can feel like shit. But instead of anxiety,
I felt high arousal that was unpleasant. And so, you know,
I got my sister in law on the phone and
(11:24):
I said, I'm feeling very you know, high arousal, unpleasant,
high arousal. And I because I don't know what to do. Yeah,
should I meet her at the airport and we should
turn around and go home? Or should I you know,
because it was this was we were still a few
days out before the official Uh. Yeah. By the way,
I just as a comedian, have to interrupt and say,
I do love that your family knows you so well
(11:45):
that you can call the same experiencing arousal and they
know this isn't a creepy phone called it. I mean anxiety, exactly, yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Arousal in our world doesn't mean sexual, rausical. It means like,
you know, you feel jittery and like your mind is
like flitting around, And you're right. But I think the
thing to understand is that the way that your brain
(12:06):
works is metabolically efficient, and that's hide directly to your
health for the rest of your life. A metabolically efficient
thing to do is for your brain to predict what's
going to happen next based on past experience. And if
your brain can't predict well for whatever reason, there are
lots of reasons why a brain can't predict well. If
there's a lot of uncertainty or ambiguity, there's an increase
(12:27):
in arousal, which you often feel directly as feeling worked up,
feeling jittery, feeling like you can't concentrate, and the go
to way that your brain makes sense of that is anxiety,
and that dictates your actions and also what you feel next. However,
(12:48):
if you learn to make sense of those sensations differently,
you will act differently, and then it becomes maybe an
uncomfortable state, but it's not an anxiety. And I have
to tell you Jan, this is not like bullshit you
know Jedi ring games here, This is real well, I mean,
(13:09):
Jedis aren't bullshit. No offense to any Star Wars please,
we can't lose them. This is not like psychological mumbo jumbo.
You know, your brain is always guessing at what sensations mean,
and when you learn to guess differently, you are architecting
your life that so that you will act differently and
experience things differently, sometimes with very profound effects. We'll be
(13:35):
right back. This brings me What you just said brings
me to the most mind blowing part of your book
that made me literally want to run in the streets
screaming why isn't anyone listening to this. I can go
on a tangent with you in a minute about the
sexism of it all, because I think there's some sexism here.
(13:57):
But what you just said is when we are feeling
those feelings of arousal, you know, the beginning of what
could be, for some of us, a panic attack. What
I was taught as a young twenty something, and I've
still been taught it to this day, is that when
that's happening, my body is just having some crazy reaction
because I used to be a caveman and all these
(14:19):
chemicals and my limbic brain and my lizard brain, and
you know, I never found that to be of comfort,
because what I used to say is so you're telling
me my brain hasn't evolved at all, and that I'm
just this victim of this limbic, this lizard. I don't
like that at all. How the hell am I going
to overcome this? So the way you just described it
(14:40):
is actually what's happening in that moment is not a
helpless victim situation. Your body is actually doing something in
that moment to help you. It just needs a minute.
But we don't have a minute when we're waiting for
our feelings to show up. So it's it's it's scrambling
to make sense of these feelings. Attach a story to
it so we know if what we're feeling is whatever.
And by that time, if we're not practiced like you, um,
(15:04):
we're adding our own thoughts into it. Now it's just
a jumble. Um, you know, we're telling ourselves a story
while our brain is trying to make a story. I'm
putting it very not scientifically, but basically what I ended
up having to do to work on my anxiety is
eventually get to where you started in your story, which is,
you know, talk to myself during it to calm myself down.
(15:26):
But the original thing positive to me was because lizard
brain caveman limbiic blah blah, and reading your book that
that is all bullshit, that we don't have three parts
of our brain, and that this is all back from
like men who worshiped Plato can you talk to me
about I'm going to give you your quote. Bad behavior
(15:47):
doesn't come from ancient and unbridled inner beasts. Good behavior
is not the result of rationality, rationality and emotion or
not at war. They do not even live in separate
parts of the brain. The three layered brain was proposed
by several scientists over the years. UM Paul McClean concluded
that mammal brains had a collection of parts that reptile
brains didn't, which he called the Olympic system. And now
(16:07):
the human origin story is born. Please dissect that, dismantle
it for me. Sure. So this idea that we have
this ancient lizard brain, and then layered on top of
that is this newer mammalian part called Olympic system, where
limbic means um border, that is the tissue that borders
(16:28):
you know, your lizard brain. And then on top of
that evolved, um, your you know, big neo cortex, which
is where rationality lives. And this idea UM has been
around really since the beginning I would say, modern neuroscience
in some ways. And when was that for for people
who don't know, yeah, yeah, yeah, um, And actually I
(16:51):
have a whole section in um how emotions are made?
Where I dissect this history of like how did people
come to take this an idea really that you can
trace all the way back to Plato and tattooed onto
the brain and then make that, you know, um, the
origin story of human nature. Right, and and if you
(17:11):
go back to the Plato story, it's really interesting story
where he's he's in a number of places. You know,
he talks about the human psyche, which isn't exactly the
same as the modern human mind, but for present purposes
will just use them equivalently. Now, human mind can be
(17:31):
understood as two horses and a cherry tear. One horse
is your instincts, um, like you know, hunger and thirst
and sex drive and so on. Um that you know
a neuroscience joke ready is uh? People call it the
four fs, feeding, fleeing, fighting, and mating. Excuse me, doctor,
(17:56):
Mating does not begin with an F. She she means
to say fun exactly. So one horse is, you know, instincts.
One horse represents emotions. And then there's the chariots here
who's controlling the two beasts? Right? The human controlling the
two beasts? This is actually a morality tale in Plato's hands.
(18:17):
You know, this is a story of human morality, that
you've got these inner urges that have to be controlled
by your rational self. And in modern times we say,
you know, when your rationality controls your your inner beast,
you are mentally healthy and you're a moral person. When
(18:41):
your inner beast gets the better of you, you are
either immoral because you didn't try hard enough to control yourself,
or you're sick because you can't control yourself. I mean.
That's basically the um the narrative that you find embedded
in a lot of modern writing um uh, scientific and
popular writing about um right, that your mind and therefore
(19:04):
your brain is a battle ground between your inner beast
and your more rational self. The problem with this narrative
is that it it completely The science doesn't doesn't at
all back it up. That this reminds me of like
the flat Earth of neuroscience, I mean, and the fact
that it is in fact that it hasn't been laughed
out of society is frightening. That's so funny that you
(19:28):
said that, because the flat earth myth is something I
talk about in How Emotions Are Made. I got okay,
I read that book too. It must be in my brain.
I I lifted from you in front of you. But
but yeah, but the myth of the sort of the
battle ground in your brain is really pervasive, and I
(19:49):
think the the important thing to understand is that what
you feel is not in your body, it's actually in
your brain. You your brain or with your brain. You
smell with your brain, if you take your pulse, you
actually feel that pulse in your brain. Your brain is
(20:11):
modeling your body in the world. Well wait one, it's
like that could be very helpful. I'm going to mark
that for my listeners. Where again, this is even until recently.
If I'm having an anxiety attack, I look at it
as a battle between my body and my brain. Right
I will think, now my body is having a rapid
heart rate and it's having a lien to that. Because
(20:32):
you know, for me, if I'm having a panic attack
these days, I always say that it's usually from very
physical reasons. I didn't sleep enough, too much coffee, bloody blood.
So I'll start to do that and I'll start to
see my body and brain is two different things. And
I might do a cognitive exercise like you did in
New Zealand or on the way to New Zealand. But
from now on I will stop thinking of it as
(20:52):
body versus brain. It is. That's right. My body can't
feel a damn thing or smell a damn thing if
I'm brain dead. And so maybe this helps our listeners,
who you know, I do want to go back to
it in a second. I do think some people might
not want to let go of the limbic lizard brain.
It's fun and easy for them, but I want to
empower people to say, um, you're not a victim of
(21:14):
your own body. This isn't um something of to fight against.
You just have to know more about it. So so
I'm so sorry to interrupt. Continue what you were saying
that you can't you smell with your brain? You you
taste with your brain? Please feel feed interrupted, I'll probably
just natter on, but I think it's really important that
you have to understand that what your your brain is
(21:35):
modeling your body to control your body. So hopefully your
brain is accurate. Right, So your brain makes predictions about
what's happening in your body. It actually prepares. So for example,
if we were to hold time still, we just stopped time,
we look into your brain. Your brain is representing what
it believes to be occurring in your body and in
(21:57):
your brain and I mean and world, And based on
that it makes a set of predictions about what to
do next. So it starts to prepare the signals to
change your body so that you can do something that
will be beneficial. And what you experience are the consequences
(22:19):
of those motor and what we call visceral motor that is,
the changing of the internal state of the body. Those
motor signals actually give rise to what are called sensory predictions.
So your brain asks itself figuratively, the last time I
was in this physical state and I was about to
(22:40):
change my body in this way, what did I see?
What did I hear? What did I feel? And then
it starts to construct those experiences to prepare for the
sense data coming from the body and from the world,
that is expecting when you're battling, you're anxious, when you're
operating your less anxious. Yes. And I want to say
(23:04):
two things about this. I'll say the first the first
thing will follow up directly on what you said, And
then I want to say this other thing about why
does it matter that we understand how these things work?
The first things that to your point, if your brain
constructs anxiety, that is, it makes sense of since this
high arousal state unpleasant state as anxiety, and it leads
(23:25):
you to act in certain ways as opposed to other ways,
and so that prolongs the arousal and so on. You
suffer like you you you experience suffering, but you know
there is a difference between suffering and discomfort. I agree.
Can I say one quick thing that people know that
(23:47):
I talk about anxiety and that I having this podcast
come out and I will get emails from people saying
I suffer from anxiety. And I don't want to sound
woo woo, but I always say, if you keep saying
you're suffering, you will be suffering. Ring you have anxiety, anxieties,
your friend anxiety shows up. You're a human. But the
more people keep with the dramatic narrative I'm suffering, you
(24:10):
know you're not. You're uncomfortable. It sucks. It's scary. If
you don't know what the hell is going on, it
can feel like suffering, but you're not actually suffering. And
I feel like I want that to be good news
for people. But we like to hold on our story.
So I know right now some people are you know,
turning the channel as I say and going, no, she
doesn't get it. But I agree, it's not suffering. Yeah,
(24:31):
So let me just say that I don't doubt for
a minute that people, when they experience anxiety, crippling anxiety,
that they suffer. They do suffer. The point is that,
I mean we all everyone has had this experience um
at least once and um. But what I and for
some people much longer. But what I'm trying to say
(24:51):
is that the suffering isn't obligatory, and that you have
more control than you think you do. And when I
say that you have more control than you think you too,
I'm not saying that you are therefore responsible for your
anxiety and suffering. I'm not saying you're culpable in some
like cosmic way. I am saying that you have more
(25:12):
control than you think you do, and you have maybe
a little bit more responsibility for your feelings than you
think you do, not because you're to blame for them,
but because you're the only one who can change them.
This is a point where I made you know when
I in my TED talk that I think people really
resonated to that you know, if you're responsible sometimes for
(25:32):
yourself and for the horrible, Like you know, if something
horrible happens to you, you're not to blame for that,
and you're also not to blame for all the ship
that comes from it. Yeah, but you're the only one
who can change it. And that means you are, in
an unfortunate way kind of responsible. And that may feel
to you like you're being victimized twice, and you are, maybe,
(25:54):
But what other options do you have? You There isn't one,
And so I think understanding that you can dissolve the suffering.
You might not be able to get rid of the discomfort,
you can dissolve the suffering into discomfort. That's actually a
really powerful set of abilities that you should cherish, practice
(26:19):
and cherish because you know what, when we exercise every day,
we're uncomfortable, but we have that effort as like an
investment in a healthier brain and body and a healthier
you in the future. And the same thing is true. Um,
anxiety is not your friend, but arousal is there for
a reason. It's uncomfortable and it might feel like shit,
(26:42):
but it's there for reason, and it's there actually, you know,
in part because your brain believes something is important enough
to learn or that you have to do something really hard,
and so even if it's uncomfortable. And I also want
to say that, you know, for example, research shows that
in chronic pain, if you learn to deconstruct that chronic
(27:08):
pain into um, discomfort, you can not only reduce your
own suffering experience of suffering, but you can like reduce
your dependence on opioids for example. Yeah, and I'm you
know right now we're talking and uh, you know, I
(27:29):
am three months out from major back surgery, Like I
had a open back surgery, a spinal fusion at three levels.
So I'm talking to you as a scientist. I'm talking
to you as someone who's sister in law suffers from
terrible chronic pain from my algy and she uses how
emotions are made actually as a little manual for her
(27:49):
with her patients. I'm talking to you as someone who
just had major back surgery. Yeah, and um, there's a
guy named Eric Garland who's done a lot of research
on meditation and other ways of learning to dissolve suffering
into discomfort and the consequences for opioid use, for example.
(28:10):
So and I could go on and on and on
about this. I mean, there's an analogy I would say
that a lot of people find really helpful. A while back,
I was really interested to learn to paint, you know. Yeah,
and so I took some lessons from a painter and
and and she explained to me, so I'm going to
hold up a glass. Now, I'm holding up a glass
full of water. She explained to me that if you
(28:32):
try to take this glass and it's a three dimensional
object and you want to render it on a two
dimensional canvas, you could just look at the object and
then try to draw it on the canvas, and you'll
end up getting a pretty shitty looking drawing. Yeah. Or
what you can do is do what classical painters do,
which is they take the object and they deconstruct it
(28:52):
into pieces of light. So you deconstruct this and you
have to learn to kind of undo what your brain does. Naturally,
your brain us to sort of teach itself to see differently.
And you can see I don't know about you, but
I can see like even though it's a clear glass, Yeah,
I see blues and black and gray, and there's actually
some yellow like right there, like yellow. And then you
(29:17):
paint the pieces of light on the canvas, and you
get a pretty decent rendering of a three dimensional object
on a two dimensional canvas. Unless you're meat. Yeah, well
me too. Anxiety Bites will be right back after a
quick little message from one of our sponsors. You know,
(29:44):
most people I know who do not want to go
to therapy, who do not want to work on their anxiety,
they know somewhere, because you know, it's just in our culture,
right that everything comes from somewhere. But at the end
of the day, like if you find out, Okay, maybe
I'm anxious because my parents were anxious and I learned
this from them or whatever, it's like going back in
(30:06):
time doesn't really solve what you have to do anyway,
which is just learned skills you've never learned, like we
talked about all the way to the beginning of this conversation.
And so in that way, I feel like people are
afraid to dive deep because they're like, what's not my fault?
I have anxiety. It's not my fault. I was born
during a climate crisis, not my fault. But but and
it's like, no, it's not. But are we only taking
(30:27):
care of ourselves when it's our fault. I mean, what
you're pointing to is the difference between culpability and responsibility. Yeah,
like you could be responsible for something that you're not
culpable for, meaning you're not to blame. Yeah, you are
responsible for for dealing with it. I mean I didn't
learn something. I'd say I'd probably got some rusty tools
(30:49):
handed down to me from my parents and dealing with
anxiety or even just knowing what anxiety was. So I
had to get my own tools. But the way I
look at it is great. I also had to get
my own apartment. I to get my own clothes, Like
I'm not so walking around in the clothes that I
wore as a toddler going. So my fault I grew,
you know, like, well, okay, but now you have to dress,
you know, and it and that can actually be fun.
(31:10):
You can actually differentiate yourself from where you came and
it can be really empowering, which helps reduce anxiety in
my humble opinion, for sure. I mean I will say
that you aren't born knowing to construct anxiety out of
out of arousal. You learned that. So this culture is,
(31:34):
you know, the cultural practices that we have in some
ways are the perfect recipe for creating anxiety disorders and depression. Actually,
there's so much uncertainty, yeah, in in so many domains,
and the go to meaning that everybody makes is anxiety,
(31:56):
and that dictates your actions and it dictates, like physically,
what happens next. But that isn't the only explanation, That
isn't the only narrative that's available. And you can deconstruct
that anxiety into unpleasant arousal and have a completely different
trajectory for what happens next. Oh, I love that, Which
is why it's important to understand how your brain is
(32:19):
constructing emotions, how is it constructing anxiety. So the techniques
of like deep breathing and yoga and like, you know,
all these things are you know, reappraisal as it's called,
or like you know, reconceptualizing making sense of things in
a different way. All these um strategies work, but they
don't work for the reasons that all the you know,
self help books say why is that important? It's important
(32:42):
because in one situation they might not work or they
might stop working. And then if you understand the principle,
you can figure out other strategies that you didn't read
about that, follow that principle of brain funk shin. But
if you are just following other people's recommendations and you
(33:05):
don't understand how it works under the hood, then um,
you're stuck. When those strategies stopped working for you, which
they will in certain circumstances. Not it's not you know, reconceptualizing,
you know, trying to make sense of things differently doesn't
always work as a strategy, And so you need to
have a tool, you know, a toolbox that's filled with
(33:28):
other tools, or you might even need to make your
own tools on the fly, you know. And that's really
what seven and a half Lessons and the longer you
Know and and How Motions Are Made, which is a
much longer book. Yeah, it's really designed to to sort
of impart well I And I love that because too. Yeah,
I have so many people say to me, you know, um,
I've tried everything for anxiety. Nothing works, and it's like, god,
(33:49):
you know, I wonder what they're doing, and it's it's
like you said, they're probably it's probably not the right
tools for them, you know, or even the right way
of understanding what's going on under the hood. Yeah, I
would say also that you know those like the list
of tools is is not a recipe, it's like a
tasting menu, Like you've got to figure out what works
for you and what doesn't in certain situations. Also, what
(34:12):
does it mean to have something work exactly? It doesn't
mean that you know that the arousal goes away. It
doesn't necessarily mean that your discomfort goes away. And also
it's not like flipping on an awful light switch. You
have to think of in terms of a trajectory, which
means you're nudging yourself, nudging yourself in a particular direction.
(34:34):
You know, every new experience that we cultivate for ourselves
in the moment with effort, you know, it's like an
investment in a in a different future. Right. But every
new experience we have, every new experience the brain makes,
the brain learns to make it again in the future.
(34:54):
And the more you practice it, the more this experience
or the skill, the better you get at it, the
more automatic you'll get it at like driving kind of
So in a sense, what you're doing every moment of
your life, you're really in a sense cultivating your past
that will determine who you will be in the future,
(35:15):
and by past you mean that moment you're driving will
be the past someday when you're when your brain is
predicting next week. Yeah, if you with a tremendous effort
and maybe even great um you know, sense of disbelief,
attempt to deconstruct your anxiety into unpleasant arousal. And it's
really hard to do the first time you do it,
(35:35):
and it's hard to do the second time you do it,
and probably hard the thirtieth time you do it, and
even after it gets automatic, it might be hard to
do it occasionally. But it's hard to do. But the
thing is that that every time you do it, you're
training your brain is training itself. Yeah too, make meaning
differently in the future. So the way that your brain
(35:59):
works is it predicts what's going to happen next using
your past. So every experience you have, everything that you
do in the present is basically like your brain training itself. Yeah,
it's like cultivating your past. Yeah, the past of the
future that's come and you know, you know, it's like
(36:20):
anything like I put a dollar in my savings account.
I don't go, wow, you know, I've got no money.
It's like, well, in twenty years that will be whatever dollars.
And you know, same with working out, you know, it's
it's it's exactly the same. Yeah. Now, okay, So as
we're wrapping up, I I want to go nitty gritty
into this and and circle back to this notion of
this myth about the brain. So if we don't have
(36:42):
a three part brain with a lizard and a limbic
and a caveman. Now I'm throwing the caveman and there.
You didn't really say that, but I'm throwing it in there.
I might be wrong, but it's almost like, is our
brain smarter and more functional than these myths give it
credit for? And and what is the brain if it's
not this three part thing? Well yeah, yes, basically yes.
(37:02):
But I would say the way I would think about
it is that, um, this idea that anything about your
body or your brain being you know the same as
you know from caveman or you know from the place
our placed to see ancestors, you know under gathers is
(37:23):
is a bit of an overstatement because genes don't work
like that. And so you know, this whole idea that
we have this fixed human nature in the way that
our brain is structured and works in the way that
our bodies work, and that we have nurture. This kind
of learning, which overlays or modifies this nature is wrong.
(37:46):
It's just it's not even wrong. It's such a profound
misunderstanding of how genes work. Um, you know, we have
the kind of nature that requires nurture. We have the
kind of genes that require learning in order for your
brain to even finish wiring itself after Okay, love it, Okay.
(38:08):
You know when you're born, your brain is not a
miniature and dull brain. It's a brain that is unfinished,
and it's waiting for wiring instructions from the world and
from your own body. And part of that is, you know,
your brain wires itself to the distance between your eyes,
and it wires itself to the shape of your ear,
(38:29):
and it wires itself to the amount of sunlight that
you get and when you get it throughout the day,
And it wires itself in all these physical ways. But
it's also wiring itself to the social feedback that you get.
For example, how much do your parents talk to you,
how much do they make eye contact with you, how
much do they use gaze to help you regulate what
(38:52):
should you care about in the world and what can
you ignore as noise? For example, if parents don't properly
use gays with their infants, there's not like one way
to do it. There are multiple ways. But basically with
gays and with other things that we do, we're teaching
our children are infants, these little developing brains. What do
(39:13):
they have to care about in the world and what
can they ignore as irrelevant? And if you don't do that,
the child's brain will think that everything is potentially relevant.
That my friend is vigilance. Yes, and a lot of
people with you know, chaotic homes or whatever, right, they're
super vigilant. They end up being kind of anywhere from
(39:34):
like a codependent anxious right. Well, but remember if your
brain can't predict, if it thinks every novel thing is
potentially important, yeah, and there's gonna be a lot of arousal,
a lot of anxiety. And I will also say very
(39:54):
metabolically costly, like every time you are vigilant and you
don't need to be. Every time, when your brain prepares
you for a big metabolic outlay and you don't need it,
you pay a tiny little metabolic tax and those taxes
add up over time. Another myth I think that's as
(40:17):
big as the myth of the try and brain is
the idea that like cortisol is a stress wormon, the
cortisol is not a stress wormon. Cortisol is a hormone
that your brain directs your adrenal glance to secrete when
your brain believes that you have a big metabolic outlay coming,
So it gets cortisol just gets glucose into your bloodstream
(40:38):
really fast. So I love that part of your book
where you say if you eat when you're stressed, that
adds a hundred calories to what you're eating. And that's
really the myth, the mythology right of the cortisol weight
gain thing. It's like the mythology. But that's the explanation.
That's one of the explanations. Basically, that's one of that's
part of the explanation. I would say, But you know,
before you wake up in the morning, you have a
(40:58):
cortisol search because you're going in your brain is predicting,
you know, based on past experience, that you're about to
drag your ass out of bed. You need glue coast
right and right before you exercise, and as you exercise,
you have big portosul serge why because you need blue
coast and your right But that secretion with when you
don't actually need it, So your brain is being vigilant
(41:18):
and UM doesn't know whether this novel thing or this
ambiguous situation, whether you know this is um you know
some kind of like coping response is required not it's
kind of prepare just in case it's going to attempt
to learn just in case. That's an expense. And the
(41:39):
more you spend when you don't need it, the more, uh,
you know, you run, you drive your your body budget
as as I that's the metaphor I use you bet
your metabolism basically driving it into this like deficit state.
And that's a very simplistic metaphor for a very complicated
set of processes. But now the last I think it's
(42:00):
a useful metaphor. Yeah, UM, to understand what's happening kind
of under the hood. Anxiety bites will be right back
after this message. Well, I'll let you go, but I
want to end on UM. In your book, you do
(42:23):
mention it UM, and I'm sorry I couldn't quite remember it,
but you were saying something about even in the nineteen sixties, Um,
science knew that there was this was a myth of
the three part brain and the kind of male mythology
of you know, the all that stuff we talked about,
and yet no one's do you feel like in your community,
you know, why is no one saying anything? Why isn't
(42:46):
your book that just came out, like maybe it is?
And I don't know what, like ending all these other myths,
like why is this still allowed to persist at the
same time as the truth? Like you said, the truth
has been out there for decades. Yeah, So I think, Um,
there are a couple of this is just speculation and
mighty right, but a couple of reasons. I think one
(43:07):
is that, you know, scientists don't like the afword. Fact
that's scary, okays right, because it's it's always right, okay,
so you know, and there might be it might be wrong,
and you know, so we we concern ourselves with these
probabilities and some one but I would say that the
(43:28):
evidence that the trying brain is wrong. And I feel
at this point like it's I'm not going to mince words.
It was a metaphor and it's not useful because it's
it actually has it's incorrect. The evidence was sequestered away
in a literature that's very very hard for people to read,
even other scientists to read if you're not an expert. Yeah.
(43:54):
So it's in the literature that requires knowledge of um
embryology for example, and deep knowledge of genetics. And I
had to learn in fact Barb Finley, who's a a
neurse scientist who I think, you know, she's The book
is really dedicated to her and all the other nerth
(44:16):
scientists who really trained me to be a neuroscientist after
I was already professor of you know, psychology. I mean,
she taught me how to read that literature. And she
still meets with me. I meet with her for two
hours every week. She still is sort of acting like
a guide for me. Um. You know, for certain literatures
(44:37):
that I'm just you know, not familiar with. But I mean,
it's just it was sequestered away and it still is
to some extent siloed away. So a lot of people
don't know about it. UM and it there's no it
doesn't have a cheering section, you know, like there are
popular writers right who who um like science writers who
(45:00):
popularize what they understand. And when you look at a
brain and you look at these diagrams of brains, it
looks like they have three layers, I mean using the
naked eye. But the naked eye is not always the best. Um,
it doesn't always give you all the information that we
need to understand how something emerges and what its function is.
(45:22):
It must be like looking at the Earth from the moon,
where it looks like there's land and there's ocean, but
really that's so interconnected. Yeah, well there's also land under
the water, right right, Yeah, and you can't really see
that with the naked eye. So we we really understand that.
You know, we we develop tools as scientists that allow
us to see things that we can't see with our
(45:42):
naked eye. That we can hear things that we can't
hear hear with our ears alone. Um, and you know,
we translate these other signals which we don't have sensory
surfaces for that, we have no senses for these other signals,
and we translate them into signals that we can that
we can detect. And so molecular genetics, you know, the
(46:04):
evidence from molecular genetics of how brains might have evolved,
and the evidence the sort of anatomical evidence that uses
that knowledge has been around for a long time, but
it requires a lot of background knowledge to really read
that stuff. And as a consequence, every time, you know,
(46:24):
even even neuroscientists who aren't familiar with that literature still
are using try and brain ish type uh interpretations. So
every time you hear that your prefrontal cortex regulates your
amygdala right there, that's just that's the sign that that
person is making an assumption about the try and brain.
(46:45):
Sometimes scientists who write for the public will rely on
that you know, three layered structure idea of the sort
of lizard limbic you know, neocortex because they understand that
it's easier for the publick to to think that way. So,
for example, yeah, Robert Sapolski in his book Behaved talks
(47:06):
about the limbic system, and he knows there's no Olympics system,
and he knows that that's you know, a myth, but
but he uses it because it's easier for people too.
It's an easier platform for people to start with, so
that he can get to the material he wants them
to get to. Whereas I'm directly more concerned with that
(47:29):
material of like what is a brain? How is it structured?
And why do you need to know? Yeah? And when
you and you made it so easy. I mean, I
I don't know if you like that people have said this,
but um, people are calling it like a beach read
about the brain, which I think is you know, their
way of saying, it's digestible and fun to read it.
(47:49):
I wrote it that, I mean, I read you wrote
it on purpose, okay, like that way, because um, but
it is so brilliant that you've just blown my mind.
I mean, I'm I'm your biggest fan. I think you're genius.
And thank you so much, Dr Barrett for chatting with
us today. And I hope you've blown minds, changed minds,
helped people. And uh, I'm going to change this podcast
(48:13):
now to uncomfortable arousal bites, not anxiety. It doesn't have
the same kind of like lyrical ring to it. No,
but we'll get people there. But thank you again for
being on the show. My pleasure. Thank you so much.
I hope you loved my talk with Dr Lisa. Let's
(48:33):
just go over some of the bigger takeaways from my
talk with her. Anxiety is a very misunderstood phenomena, so
don't worry if you don't fully understand it. The brain
is for regulating systems of your body. Period. The function
of your brain is to continue to predict so that
(48:54):
it keeps you safe when it's having trouble predicting when
it's not quite they are yet it hasn't come to
its full conclusion. That's when there's an increase in arousal, which,
as Dr Lisa says, feels like shit. But if you
learn to make sense of these sensations when your brain
is in arousal, you will begin to act differently and
(49:17):
the state is reduced too simply an uncomfortable state. It
is an absolute myth dating back to Plato, that rationality
controls your inner beast, and if your inner beast gets
the better of you, you're either immoral or you didn't
try hard enough to control yourself. Suffering from anxiety and
anxious sensations is not obligatory. Now, you're not to blame
(49:41):
for the bad things that have happened to you, or
for any of the wiring or nurture that you got
that caused you to have you know, the habit of anxiety,
but you are responsible for yourself. So unfortunately, you have
no choice. If you want to get better, you do
have to make a choice to work on this. Your
brain has to teach self to see differently, and that's
(50:01):
called reappraisal or reconceptualizing. It's basically just making sense of
things in a different way. Don't forget there's lots of
things you can do for anxiety, like you can do yoga,
you can breathe, but don't just follow what someone else
says works for them for their anxiety. You have to
also understand the brain and the mind. And if you
(50:23):
don't understand how that works, what's going on under the hood,
then you're going to be stuck with strategies that eventually
stop working in certain circumstances and you'll thank God, I've
tried everything it doesn't work. Now, having a list of
tools for anxiety like yoga, meditation, breathing, talk, therapy, counting,
(50:46):
is not a recipe. Think of it more as a
tasting menu. You're going to to your what word was that?
Your gun too. You're going to figure out what works
for you and what doesn't in certain situations. Okay, so
what does it mean to have something work don't forget
when Dr Lisa said, it means decreasing your arousal so
(51:09):
that you're merely uncomfortable. I'm sorry, we're not really able
to get rid of uncomfortable feelings, but I think you'll
know once you get to that level, it's a hell
of a lot better than anxious feelings. Now, it's really
hard for the first time to um, you know, deconstruct
(51:30):
your anxiety. Your first attempt at it, it's may still
go into unpleasant arousal, but as Dr Lisa says, maybe
by the thirtieth time you do it, you'll get there.
It becomes automatic. Now, don't forget. Every experience you have
is the brain training itself for the future. So it
really behooves you to keep trying to deconstruct your anxiety
(51:51):
from arousal unpleasant arousal too uncomfortable. And we have the
kind of nature that does require nurture, so we have
the kind of genes that require learning. In order for
your brain to finish wiring itself. You can rewire your brain.
Well that's it. I'm gonna get busy rewiring my brain,
(52:12):
and I hope that you will all join me next time.
Don't forget anxiety bites, but you're in control. For more
podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app,
Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
This is the Anxiety Bites podcast, and I am your host,
Jen Kirkman. Today my guest is PhD neuroscientists Dr Lisa
Feldman Barrett. Now, when I was posting about this podcast
Anxiety Bites, the podcast in general before it premiered, I
(00:29):
was saying, you know, I'm hosting this new podcast, and
you know what I want to bring to the table
with my background in comedy, is is maybe the conversations
are irreverent, maybe sometimes funny, you know, which just brings
a sense of levity to the notion of anxiety. And
I'll be interviewing all kinds of people. And I mentioned
that I would be interviewing neuroscientists, and of course somebody
(00:50):
wront wants that's gonna be hard to make this podcast funny.
Neuroscientists aren't funny. Excuse me commenter on the internet whose
name I don't remember, but it's still stuck with me.
Their comment months later, within the first five minutes of
this interview, Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett and I are making
jokes about sexual arousal. She's extremely funny and her latest
(01:12):
book is known as the First Neuroscience Beach read seven
and a half Lessons About the Brain is the title
of her latest book. So it's a lot of fun
talking to Dr Feldman Barrett. Now, just so that you
know who we're dealing with, okay. She is among the
top one percent most cited scientists in the world for
(01:36):
her revolutionary research in psychology and neuroscience. She is a
University Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University. She also
holds appointments at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital,
where she is Chief Science Officer for the Center for Law,
Brain and Behavior. She's also given a very popular TED
(01:58):
talk that has over six million views. Now, all of
this will be in the show notes. Dr Lisa Feldman
Barrett's book that came out before Seven and a half
Lessons about the Brain, is called How Emotions Are Made.
But in this interview we do focus mainly on a
lot of the concepts from her most recent book, Seven
(02:18):
and a half Lessons about the Brain. And while that
book isn't about anxiety per se, it answered so many
questions about the brain that people often you know, answer
so many questions about the brain, but put to rest
so many myths that people often bring up about the brain.
In regards to anxiety. You know, I'm sure you've heard
(02:38):
people say that anxiety is your emotions, it's your lizard brain.
Well that's not true. And the notion that we don't
have this lizard brain and that the brain is not
three parts has been proven to not be true for decades,
but people are still quoting disproven things. It's, as Dr
(02:58):
Feldman Barrett says, it's like if the flat earth theory
was still being taken seriously. I talked to her about
why this happens, Why people are not, you know, talking
about what's in her book. I mean, not that they're not.
That's I wasn't saying, why how come your book isn't popular?
It's huge, That's not what I mean. But why aren't
the other theories being put to rest? And she also
(03:20):
takes us on a step by step of what to
do during an onset of anxiety so that it doesn't
turn into a full blown panic attack. And she explains
exactly what our brain is doing in those moments, and no,
it has nothing to do with the brain thinking it's
running away from a wooly mammoth. She helps us learn
(03:42):
what to do so that are anxious feelings become uncomfortable feelings.
That's right. The hope I offer you on this podcast
is that one day you'll just be uncomfortable instead of
so anxious. Anyway, I learned so much from reading her books,
and obviously even more from chatting with her, and I
(04:04):
hope you get as much out of my conversation with
Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett as I did enjoy. Thank you
so much for being here. Dr Barrett. I you know
I'm reading and I read your new book Seven and
a half Lessons about the Brain, and I know your
book before that was How Emotions Are Made, and I
(04:27):
think this interview will concentrate mostly on the book Seven
and a half Lessons about the Brain. Um, of course
we can talk about anything. But what I found so
interesting about this book because this podcast is about anxiety,
and I will direct every conversation back to anxiety. But
something about this book, even though it's not your typical Hey,
here's how you deal with anxiety. I think this is
(04:48):
one of the best books that someone with anxiety could
read that dismantles what a lot of other books are
saying about the brain. Yes, Actlee, I'm so you just
made my week. I mean because um, the idea behind
this book was to make, you know, a little book
(05:09):
of essays that would go down easy, that would you know,
maybe have a tidbit of neuroscience that you could impress
your friends with at a dinner party or something. There
are a couple of jokes. I'm not actually the funny
one in my family, so you know, I'm like the
least funny of the of all of us. But you know,
there are a couple of little singers in there that
(05:29):
I'm very proud of that even now when I read them,
I still it's not polite to laugh at your own jokes,
but I do actually listen. I'm a comedian and you're
allowed to. And I laughed so much throughout this book,
Thank you. That means a lot. But the goal was
to really invite people to think about human nature in
(05:50):
a little bit of a different way, and to think
about the kind of human you are or want to be,
and to re evaluate maybe or reconsider some of the
truths about yourself and your life that you hold really dear.
Because even though the essays read quickly, the ideas lingered
(06:13):
for a while. And I think that anxiety is one
of the most misunderstood. It's probably right up there with depression.
Anxiety and depression are very very misunderstood phenomena. I think, UM,
and I'm really glad to hear that you um found
something helpful. What did it help you understand differently about
(06:37):
about anxiety in particular? Well, you know, for me, and
everyone's different, but I've been dealing with anxiety and obsessed
with you know, I had anxiety since I was eight.
I'm forty six. It's been a long journey for me,
and I enjoy uh, the notion that I'm not special,
the notion that there is a reason for this, and
the notion that you know, this is just how the
(06:58):
brain works. It's due in its thing, and it really
isn't this big emotional deal in a way that was
new to me, that the kind of like what you said, UM,
I wrote this down. I made a note on page
seventy six, and to me, this was the most important thing.
Whether I knew it somewhere deep inside me or not,
I just I circled. Brains aren't wired for accuracy. They're
(07:22):
wired to keep us alive. When you're predicting brain is right,
it creates your reality. When it's wrong, it still creates
your reality. So that, to me is like what everyone
with anxiety needs to understand, that we are creating our
own reality when we are getting anxious, because we're usually
not anxious about actual threats. That's true. And I would
actually even go further and say that, And I'm speaking
(07:45):
as someone who also has dealt with anxiety her whole life,
whose daughter has social anxiety. You know, like the anxiety
is rampant in our culture. It's really a lot up
there with depression, I think, as a kind of an emergency. Yeah,
but actually when you start to think about anxiety from
the perspective of what is a brain and why do
(08:07):
we even have brains? Like, brains are really expensive organs there.
You know, that three pound blob of meat between your
ears is the most expensive organ that you have. It
costs give or take your metabolic budget. That's more than
your heart, that's more than your lungs. That's more than
any of your muscles. Um. You know, um, And so
(08:29):
I mean individually worth it your muscles. So what's it for?
And the answer is it's you know, there'sn't one answer really,
but one important thing that your brain is for is
regulating the systems of your body, and so everything that
you feel, everything that you do, every you know, as
I say in the book, you know, every hug you give,
(08:50):
every insult you bear, every insult you give, you know
is um related actually to intimately to the state of
your own Audie. And so when you understand this, you
start to look at anxiety a little bit differently, or
at least I do. And I was giving an interview
to um Uh David Sharia Mandri at The Guardian, and
(09:15):
I was I was describing to him this experience that
I had right before the COVID pandemic took hold um
and and it will illustrate to you what I mean
by this about you. You start to look at your
own anxiety differently and maybe even deconstructed or dissolve it
into its more basic parts, which then makes it much
(09:35):
more manageable to deal with. So UM I was describing
to him the situation where I was in New Zealand
and um because every spring break I would accept speaking
engagements at universities or for my books so that I
could go somewhere nice with my daughter and take her
with me on holiday for her spring break. And so
(09:57):
I was in New Zealand, having done book fair and
this and that. You know, I gotta I was very
honored by a honorary degree at university and so on.
And I'm sitting in New Zealand. Wait, she's in the
air now, right in the air flying. It's a very
long flight, and I'm reading and listening to all of
this stuff erupting around the world about about the covid
(10:21):
Um virus. And I felt this increase in arousal that
was very unpleasant. And if I was anybody other than me,
I would have been anxious. I would have been anxious.
And the way my brain would have made sense of
that arousal would have dictated what I did next, what
(10:42):
I felt next, and would have constructed in the blank
and I anxiety and you know, um, all sorts of
things would issue from that. Instead, though the way I
interpreted it was Okay, I'm having trouble predicting what's going
to happen next, And whenever I'm having trump whenever your
brain has trouble predicting, there's an increase in arousal because
(11:04):
your brain secretes chemicals that helps it attempt to learn
something in the moment to help predict better later, but
that arousal can feel like shit. But instead of anxiety,
I felt high arousal that was unpleasant. And so, you know,
I got my sister in law on the phone and
(11:24):
I said, I'm feeling very you know, high arousal, unpleasant,
high arousal. And I because I don't know what to do. Yeah,
should I meet her at the airport and we should
turn around and go home? Or should I you know,
because it was this was we were still a few
days out before the official Uh. Yeah. By the way,
I just as a comedian, have to interrupt and say,
I do love that your family knows you so well
(11:45):
that you can call the same experiencing arousal and they
know this isn't a creepy phone called it. I mean anxiety, exactly, yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Arousal in our world doesn't mean sexual, rausical. It means like,
you know, you feel jittery and like your mind is
like flitting around, And you're right. But I think the
thing to understand is that the way that your brain
(12:06):
works is metabolically efficient, and that's hide directly to your
health for the rest of your life. A metabolically efficient
thing to do is for your brain to predict what's
going to happen next based on past experience. And if
your brain can't predict well for whatever reason, there are
lots of reasons why a brain can't predict well. If
there's a lot of uncertainty or ambiguity, there's an increase
(12:27):
in arousal, which you often feel directly as feeling worked up,
feeling jittery, feeling like you can't concentrate, and the go
to way that your brain makes sense of that is anxiety,
and that dictates your actions and also what you feel next. However,
(12:48):
if you learn to make sense of those sensations differently,
you will act differently, and then it becomes maybe an
uncomfortable state, but it's not an anxiety. And I have
to tell you Jan, this is not like bullshit you
know Jedi ring games here, This is real well, I mean,
(13:09):
Jedis aren't bullshit. No offense to any Star Wars please,
we can't lose them. This is not like psychological mumbo jumbo.
You know, your brain is always guessing at what sensations mean,
and when you learn to guess differently, you are architecting
your life that so that you will act differently and
experience things differently, sometimes with very profound effects. We'll be
(13:35):
right back. This brings me What you just said brings
me to the most mind blowing part of your book
that made me literally want to run in the streets
screaming why isn't anyone listening to this. I can go
on a tangent with you in a minute about the
sexism of it all, because I think there's some sexism here.
(13:57):
But what you just said is when we are feeling
those feelings of arousal, you know, the beginning of what
could be, for some of us, a panic attack. What
I was taught as a young twenty something, and I've
still been taught it to this day, is that when
that's happening, my body is just having some crazy reaction
because I used to be a caveman and all these
(14:19):
chemicals and my limbic brain and my lizard brain, and
you know, I never found that to be of comfort,
because what I used to say is so you're telling
me my brain hasn't evolved at all, and that I'm
just this victim of this limbic, this lizard. I don't
like that at all. How the hell am I going
to overcome this? So the way you just described it
(14:40):
is actually what's happening in that moment is not a
helpless victim situation. Your body is actually doing something in
that moment to help you. It just needs a minute.
But we don't have a minute when we're waiting for
our feelings to show up. So it's it's it's scrambling
to make sense of these feelings. Attach a story to
it so we know if what we're feeling is whatever.
And by that time, if we're not practiced like you, um,
(15:04):
we're adding our own thoughts into it. Now it's just
a jumble. Um, you know, we're telling ourselves a story
while our brain is trying to make a story. I'm
putting it very not scientifically, but basically what I ended
up having to do to work on my anxiety is
eventually get to where you started in your story, which is,
you know, talk to myself during it to calm myself down.
(15:26):
But the original thing positive to me was because lizard
brain caveman limbiic blah blah, and reading your book that
that is all bullshit, that we don't have three parts
of our brain, and that this is all back from
like men who worshiped Plato can you talk to me
about I'm going to give you your quote. Bad behavior
(15:47):
doesn't come from ancient and unbridled inner beasts. Good behavior
is not the result of rationality, rationality and emotion or
not at war. They do not even live in separate
parts of the brain. The three layered brain was proposed
by several scientists over the years. UM Paul McClean concluded
that mammal brains had a collection of parts that reptile
brains didn't, which he called the Olympic system. And now
(16:07):
the human origin story is born. Please dissect that, dismantle
it for me. Sure. So this idea that we have
this ancient lizard brain, and then layered on top of
that is this newer mammalian part called Olympic system, where
limbic means um border, that is the tissue that borders
(16:28):
you know, your lizard brain. And then on top of
that evolved, um, your you know, big neo cortex, which
is where rationality lives. And this idea UM has been
around really since the beginning I would say, modern neuroscience
in some ways. And when was that for for people
who don't know, yeah, yeah, yeah, um, And actually I
(16:51):
have a whole section in um how emotions are made?
Where I dissect this history of like how did people
come to take this an idea really that you can
trace all the way back to Plato and tattooed onto
the brain and then make that, you know, um, the
origin story of human nature. Right, and and if you
(17:11):
go back to the Plato story, it's really interesting story
where he's he's in a number of places. You know,
he talks about the human psyche, which isn't exactly the
same as the modern human mind, but for present purposes
will just use them equivalently. Now, human mind can be
(17:31):
understood as two horses and a cherry tear. One horse
is your instincts, um, like you know, hunger and thirst
and sex drive and so on. Um that you know
a neuroscience joke ready is uh? People call it the
four fs, feeding, fleeing, fighting, and mating. Excuse me, doctor,
(17:56):
Mating does not begin with an F. She she means
to say fun exactly. So one horse is, you know, instincts.
One horse represents emotions. And then there's the chariots here
who's controlling the two beasts? Right? The human controlling the
two beasts? This is actually a morality tale in Plato's hands.
(18:17):
You know, this is a story of human morality, that
you've got these inner urges that have to be controlled
by your rational self. And in modern times we say,
you know, when your rationality controls your your inner beast,
you are mentally healthy and you're a moral person. When
(18:41):
your inner beast gets the better of you, you are
either immoral because you didn't try hard enough to control yourself,
or you're sick because you can't control yourself. I mean.
That's basically the um the narrative that you find embedded
in a lot of modern writing um uh, scientific and
popular writing about um right, that your mind and therefore
(19:04):
your brain is a battle ground between your inner beast
and your more rational self. The problem with this narrative
is that it it completely The science doesn't doesn't at
all back it up. That this reminds me of like
the flat Earth of neuroscience, I mean, and the fact
that it is in fact that it hasn't been laughed
out of society is frightening. That's so funny that you
(19:28):
said that, because the flat earth myth is something I
talk about in How Emotions Are Made. I got okay,
I read that book too. It must be in my brain.
I I lifted from you in front of you. But
but yeah, but the myth of the sort of the
battle ground in your brain is really pervasive, and I
(19:49):
think the the important thing to understand is that what
you feel is not in your body, it's actually in
your brain. You your brain or with your brain. You
smell with your brain, if you take your pulse, you
actually feel that pulse in your brain. Your brain is
(20:11):
modeling your body in the world. Well wait one, it's
like that could be very helpful. I'm going to mark
that for my listeners. Where again, this is even until recently.
If I'm having an anxiety attack, I look at it
as a battle between my body and my brain. Right
I will think, now my body is having a rapid
heart rate and it's having a lien to that. Because
(20:32):
you know, for me, if I'm having a panic attack
these days, I always say that it's usually from very
physical reasons. I didn't sleep enough, too much coffee, bloody blood.
So I'll start to do that and I'll start to
see my body and brain is two different things. And
I might do a cognitive exercise like you did in
New Zealand or on the way to New Zealand. But
from now on I will stop thinking of it as
(20:52):
body versus brain. It is. That's right. My body can't
feel a damn thing or smell a damn thing if
I'm brain dead. And so maybe this helps our listeners,
who you know, I do want to go back to
it in a second. I do think some people might
not want to let go of the limbic lizard brain.
It's fun and easy for them, but I want to
empower people to say, um, you're not a victim of
(21:14):
your own body. This isn't um something of to fight against.
You just have to know more about it. So so
I'm so sorry to interrupt. Continue what you were saying
that you can't you smell with your brain? You you
taste with your brain? Please feel feed interrupted, I'll probably
just natter on, but I think it's really important that
you have to understand that what your your brain is
(21:35):
modeling your body to control your body. So hopefully your
brain is accurate. Right, So your brain makes predictions about
what's happening in your body. It actually prepares. So for example,
if we were to hold time still, we just stopped time,
we look into your brain. Your brain is representing what
it believes to be occurring in your body and in
(21:57):
your brain and I mean and world, And based on
that it makes a set of predictions about what to
do next. So it starts to prepare the signals to
change your body so that you can do something that
will be beneficial. And what you experience are the consequences
(22:19):
of those motor and what we call visceral motor that is,
the changing of the internal state of the body. Those
motor signals actually give rise to what are called sensory predictions.
So your brain asks itself figuratively, the last time I
was in this physical state and I was about to
(22:40):
change my body in this way, what did I see?
What did I hear? What did I feel? And then
it starts to construct those experiences to prepare for the
sense data coming from the body and from the world,
that is expecting when you're battling, you're anxious, when you're
operating your less anxious. Yes. And I want to say
(23:04):
two things about this. I'll say the first the first
thing will follow up directly on what you said, And
then I want to say this other thing about why
does it matter that we understand how these things work?
The first things that to your point, if your brain
constructs anxiety, that is, it makes sense of since this
high arousal state unpleasant state as anxiety, and it leads
(23:25):
you to act in certain ways as opposed to other ways,
and so that prolongs the arousal and so on. You
suffer like you you you experience suffering, but you know
there is a difference between suffering and discomfort. I agree.
Can I say one quick thing that people know that
(23:47):
I talk about anxiety and that I having this podcast
come out and I will get emails from people saying
I suffer from anxiety. And I don't want to sound
woo woo, but I always say, if you keep saying
you're suffering, you will be suffering. Ring you have anxiety, anxieties,
your friend anxiety shows up. You're a human. But the
more people keep with the dramatic narrative I'm suffering, you
(24:10):
know you're not. You're uncomfortable. It sucks. It's scary. If
you don't know what the hell is going on, it
can feel like suffering, but you're not actually suffering. And
I feel like I want that to be good news
for people. But we like to hold on our story.
So I know right now some people are you know,
turning the channel as I say and going, no, she
doesn't get it. But I agree, it's not suffering. Yeah,
(24:31):
So let me just say that I don't doubt for
a minute that people, when they experience anxiety, crippling anxiety,
that they suffer. They do suffer. The point is that,
I mean we all everyone has had this experience um
at least once and um. But what I and for
some people much longer. But what I'm trying to say
(24:51):
is that the suffering isn't obligatory, and that you have
more control than you think you do. And when I
say that you have more control than you think you too,
I'm not saying that you are therefore responsible for your
anxiety and suffering. I'm not saying you're culpable in some
like cosmic way. I am saying that you have more
(25:12):
control than you think you do, and you have maybe
a little bit more responsibility for your feelings than you
think you do, not because you're to blame for them,
but because you're the only one who can change them.
This is a point where I made you know when
I in my TED talk that I think people really
resonated to that you know, if you're responsible sometimes for
(25:32):
yourself and for the horrible, Like you know, if something
horrible happens to you, you're not to blame for that,
and you're also not to blame for all the ship
that comes from it. Yeah, but you're the only one
who can change it. And that means you are, in
an unfortunate way kind of responsible. And that may feel
to you like you're being victimized twice, and you are, maybe,
(25:54):
But what other options do you have? You There isn't one,
And so I think understanding that you can dissolve the suffering.
You might not be able to get rid of the discomfort,
you can dissolve the suffering into discomfort. That's actually a
really powerful set of abilities that you should cherish, practice
(26:19):
and cherish because you know what, when we exercise every day,
we're uncomfortable, but we have that effort as like an
investment in a healthier brain and body and a healthier
you in the future. And the same thing is true. Um,
anxiety is not your friend, but arousal is there for
a reason. It's uncomfortable and it might feel like shit,
(26:42):
but it's there for reason, and it's there actually, you know,
in part because your brain believes something is important enough
to learn or that you have to do something really hard,
and so even if it's uncomfortable. And I also want
to say that, you know, for example, research shows that
in chronic pain, if you learn to deconstruct that chronic
(27:08):
pain into um, discomfort, you can not only reduce your
own suffering experience of suffering, but you can like reduce
your dependence on opioids for example. Yeah, and I'm you
know right now we're talking and uh, you know, I
(27:29):
am three months out from major back surgery, Like I
had a open back surgery, a spinal fusion at three levels.
So I'm talking to you as a scientist. I'm talking
to you as someone who's sister in law suffers from
terrible chronic pain from my algy and she uses how
emotions are made actually as a little manual for her
(27:49):
with her patients. I'm talking to you as someone who
just had major back surgery. Yeah, and um, there's a
guy named Eric Garland who's done a lot of research
on meditation and other ways of learning to dissolve suffering
into discomfort and the consequences for opioid use, for example.
(28:10):
So and I could go on and on and on
about this. I mean, there's an analogy I would say
that a lot of people find really helpful. A while back,
I was really interested to learn to paint, you know. Yeah,
and so I took some lessons from a painter and
and and she explained to me, so I'm going to
hold up a glass. Now, I'm holding up a glass
full of water. She explained to me that if you
(28:32):
try to take this glass and it's a three dimensional
object and you want to render it on a two
dimensional canvas, you could just look at the object and
then try to draw it on the canvas, and you'll
end up getting a pretty shitty looking drawing. Yeah. Or
what you can do is do what classical painters do,
which is they take the object and they deconstruct it
(28:52):
into pieces of light. So you deconstruct this and you
have to learn to kind of undo what your brain does. Naturally,
your brain us to sort of teach itself to see differently.
And you can see I don't know about you, but
I can see like even though it's a clear glass, Yeah,
I see blues and black and gray, and there's actually
some yellow like right there, like yellow. And then you
(29:17):
paint the pieces of light on the canvas, and you
get a pretty decent rendering of a three dimensional object
on a two dimensional canvas. Unless you're meat. Yeah, well
me too. Anxiety Bites will be right back after a
quick little message from one of our sponsors. You know,
(29:44):
most people I know who do not want to go
to therapy, who do not want to work on their anxiety,
they know somewhere, because you know, it's just in our culture,
right that everything comes from somewhere. But at the end
of the day, like if you find out, Okay, maybe
I'm anxious because my parents were anxious and I learned
this from them or whatever, it's like going back in
(30:06):
time doesn't really solve what you have to do anyway,
which is just learned skills you've never learned, like we
talked about all the way to the beginning of this conversation.
And so in that way, I feel like people are
afraid to dive deep because they're like, what's not my fault?
I have anxiety. It's not my fault. I was born
during a climate crisis, not my fault. But but and
it's like, no, it's not. But are we only taking
(30:27):
care of ourselves when it's our fault. I mean, what
you're pointing to is the difference between culpability and responsibility. Yeah,
like you could be responsible for something that you're not
culpable for, meaning you're not to blame. Yeah, you are
responsible for for dealing with it. I mean I didn't
learn something. I'd say I'd probably got some rusty tools
(30:49):
handed down to me from my parents and dealing with
anxiety or even just knowing what anxiety was. So I
had to get my own tools. But the way I
look at it is great. I also had to get
my own apartment. I to get my own clothes, Like
I'm not so walking around in the clothes that I
wore as a toddler going. So my fault I grew,
you know, like, well, okay, but now you have to dress,
you know, and it and that can actually be fun.
(31:10):
You can actually differentiate yourself from where you came and
it can be really empowering, which helps reduce anxiety in
my humble opinion, for sure. I mean I will say
that you aren't born knowing to construct anxiety out of
out of arousal. You learned that. So this culture is,
(31:34):
you know, the cultural practices that we have in some
ways are the perfect recipe for creating anxiety disorders and depression. Actually,
there's so much uncertainty, yeah, in in so many domains,
and the go to meaning that everybody makes is anxiety,
(31:56):
and that dictates your actions and it dictates, like physically,
what happens next. But that isn't the only explanation, That
isn't the only narrative that's available. And you can deconstruct
that anxiety into unpleasant arousal and have a completely different
trajectory for what happens next. Oh, I love that, Which
is why it's important to understand how your brain is
(32:19):
constructing emotions, how is it constructing anxiety. So the techniques
of like deep breathing and yoga and like, you know,
all these things are you know, reappraisal as it's called,
or like you know, reconceptualizing making sense of things in
a different way. All these um strategies work, but they
don't work for the reasons that all the you know,
self help books say why is that important? It's important
(32:42):
because in one situation they might not work or they
might stop working. And then if you understand the principle,
you can figure out other strategies that you didn't read
about that, follow that principle of brain funk shin. But
if you are just following other people's recommendations and you
(33:05):
don't understand how it works under the hood, then um,
you're stuck. When those strategies stopped working for you, which
they will in certain circumstances. Not it's not you know, reconceptualizing,
you know, trying to make sense of things differently doesn't
always work as a strategy, And so you need to
have a tool, you know, a toolbox that's filled with
(33:28):
other tools, or you might even need to make your
own tools on the fly, you know. And that's really
what seven and a half Lessons and the longer you
Know and and How Motions Are Made, which is a
much longer book. Yeah, it's really designed to to sort
of impart well I And I love that because too. Yeah,
I have so many people say to me, you know, um,
I've tried everything for anxiety. Nothing works, and it's like, god,
(33:49):
you know, I wonder what they're doing, and it's it's
like you said, they're probably it's probably not the right
tools for them, you know, or even the right way
of understanding what's going on under the hood. Yeah, I
would say also that you know those like the list
of tools is is not a recipe, it's like a
tasting menu, Like you've got to figure out what works
for you and what doesn't in certain situations. Also, what
(34:12):
does it mean to have something work exactly? It doesn't
mean that you know that the arousal goes away. It
doesn't necessarily mean that your discomfort goes away. And also
it's not like flipping on an awful light switch. You
have to think of in terms of a trajectory, which
means you're nudging yourself, nudging yourself in a particular direction.
(34:34):
You know, every new experience that we cultivate for ourselves
in the moment with effort, you know, it's like an
investment in a in a different future. Right. But every
new experience we have, every new experience the brain makes,
the brain learns to make it again in the future.
(34:54):
And the more you practice it, the more this experience
or the skill, the better you get at it, the
more automatic you'll get it at like driving kind of
So in a sense, what you're doing every moment of
your life, you're really in a sense cultivating your past
that will determine who you will be in the future,
(35:15):
and by past you mean that moment you're driving will
be the past someday when you're when your brain is
predicting next week. Yeah, if you with a tremendous effort
and maybe even great um you know, sense of disbelief,
attempt to deconstruct your anxiety into unpleasant arousal. And it's
really hard to do the first time you do it,
(35:35):
and it's hard to do the second time you do it,
and probably hard the thirtieth time you do it, and
even after it gets automatic, it might be hard to
do it occasionally. But it's hard to do. But the
thing is that that every time you do it, you're
training your brain is training itself. Yeah too, make meaning
differently in the future. So the way that your brain
(35:59):
works is it predicts what's going to happen next using
your past. So every experience you have, everything that you
do in the present is basically like your brain training itself. Yeah,
it's like cultivating your past. Yeah, the past of the
future that's come and you know, you know, it's like
(36:20):
anything like I put a dollar in my savings account.
I don't go, wow, you know, I've got no money.
It's like, well, in twenty years that will be whatever dollars.
And you know, same with working out, you know, it's
it's it's exactly the same. Yeah. Now, okay, So as
we're wrapping up, I I want to go nitty gritty
into this and and circle back to this notion of
this myth about the brain. So if we don't have
(36:42):
a three part brain with a lizard and a limbic
and a caveman. Now I'm throwing the caveman and there.
You didn't really say that, but I'm throwing it in there.
I might be wrong, but it's almost like, is our
brain smarter and more functional than these myths give it
credit for? And and what is the brain if it's
not this three part thing? Well yeah, yes, basically yes.
(37:02):
But I would say the way I would think about
it is that, um, this idea that anything about your
body or your brain being you know the same as
you know from caveman or you know from the place
our placed to see ancestors, you know under gathers is
(37:23):
is a bit of an overstatement because genes don't work
like that. And so you know, this whole idea that
we have this fixed human nature in the way that
our brain is structured and works in the way that
our bodies work, and that we have nurture. This kind
of learning, which overlays or modifies this nature is wrong.
(37:46):
It's just it's not even wrong. It's such a profound
misunderstanding of how genes work. Um, you know, we have
the kind of nature that requires nurture. We have the
kind of genes that require learning in order for your
brain to even finish wiring itself after Okay, love it, Okay.
(38:08):
You know when you're born, your brain is not a
miniature and dull brain. It's a brain that is unfinished,
and it's waiting for wiring instructions from the world and
from your own body. And part of that is, you know,
your brain wires itself to the distance between your eyes,
and it wires itself to the shape of your ear,
(38:29):
and it wires itself to the amount of sunlight that
you get and when you get it throughout the day,
And it wires itself in all these physical ways. But
it's also wiring itself to the social feedback that you get.
For example, how much do your parents talk to you,
how much do they make eye contact with you, how
much do they use gaze to help you regulate what
(38:52):
should you care about in the world and what can
you ignore as noise? For example, if parents don't properly
use gays with their infants, there's not like one way
to do it. There are multiple ways. But basically with
gays and with other things that we do, we're teaching
our children are infants, these little developing brains. What do
(39:13):
they have to care about in the world and what
can they ignore as irrelevant? And if you don't do that,
the child's brain will think that everything is potentially relevant.
That my friend is vigilance. Yes, and a lot of
people with you know, chaotic homes or whatever, right, they're
super vigilant. They end up being kind of anywhere from
(39:34):
like a codependent anxious right. Well, but remember if your
brain can't predict, if it thinks every novel thing is
potentially important, yeah, and there's gonna be a lot of arousal,
a lot of anxiety. And I will also say very
(39:54):
metabolically costly, like every time you are vigilant and you
don't need to be. Every time, when your brain prepares
you for a big metabolic outlay and you don't need it,
you pay a tiny little metabolic tax and those taxes
add up over time. Another myth I think that's as
(40:17):
big as the myth of the try and brain is
the idea that like cortisol is a stress wormon, the
cortisol is not a stress wormon. Cortisol is a hormone
that your brain directs your adrenal glance to secrete when
your brain believes that you have a big metabolic outlay coming,
So it gets cortisol just gets glucose into your bloodstream
(40:38):
really fast. So I love that part of your book
where you say if you eat when you're stressed, that
adds a hundred calories to what you're eating. And that's
really the myth, the mythology right of the cortisol weight
gain thing. It's like the mythology. But that's the explanation.
That's one of the explanations. Basically, that's one of that's
part of the explanation. I would say, But you know,
before you wake up in the morning, you have a
(40:58):
cortisol search because you're going in your brain is predicting,
you know, based on past experience, that you're about to
drag your ass out of bed. You need glue coast
right and right before you exercise, and as you exercise,
you have big portosul serge why because you need blue
coast and your right But that secretion with when you
don't actually need it, So your brain is being vigilant
(41:18):
and UM doesn't know whether this novel thing or this
ambiguous situation, whether you know this is um you know
some kind of like coping response is required not it's
kind of prepare just in case it's going to attempt
to learn just in case. That's an expense. And the
(41:39):
more you spend when you don't need it, the more, uh,
you know, you run, you drive your your body budget
as as I that's the metaphor I use you bet
your metabolism basically driving it into this like deficit state.
And that's a very simplistic metaphor for a very complicated
set of processes. But now the last I think it's
(42:00):
a useful metaphor. Yeah, UM, to understand what's happening kind
of under the hood. Anxiety bites will be right back
after this message. Well, I'll let you go, but I
want to end on UM. In your book, you do
(42:23):
mention it UM, and I'm sorry I couldn't quite remember it,
but you were saying something about even in the nineteen sixties, Um,
science knew that there was this was a myth of
the three part brain and the kind of male mythology
of you know, the all that stuff we talked about,
and yet no one's do you feel like in your community,
you know, why is no one saying anything? Why isn't
(42:46):
your book that just came out, like maybe it is?
And I don't know what, like ending all these other myths,
like why is this still allowed to persist at the
same time as the truth? Like you said, the truth
has been out there for decades. Yeah, So I think, Um,
there are a couple of this is just speculation and
mighty right, but a couple of reasons. I think one
(43:07):
is that, you know, scientists don't like the afword. Fact
that's scary, okays right, because it's it's always right, okay,
so you know, and there might be it might be wrong,
and you know, so we we concern ourselves with these
probabilities and some one but I would say that the
(43:28):
evidence that the trying brain is wrong. And I feel
at this point like it's I'm not going to mince words.
It was a metaphor and it's not useful because it's
it actually has it's incorrect. The evidence was sequestered away
in a literature that's very very hard for people to read,
even other scientists to read if you're not an expert. Yeah.
(43:54):
So it's in the literature that requires knowledge of um
embryology for example, and deep knowledge of genetics. And I
had to learn in fact Barb Finley, who's a a
neurse scientist who I think, you know, she's The book
is really dedicated to her and all the other nerth
(44:16):
scientists who really trained me to be a neuroscientist after
I was already professor of you know, psychology. I mean,
she taught me how to read that literature. And she
still meets with me. I meet with her for two
hours every week. She still is sort of acting like
a guide for me. Um. You know, for certain literatures
(44:37):
that I'm just you know, not familiar with. But I mean,
it's just it was sequestered away and it still is
to some extent siloed away. So a lot of people
don't know about it. UM and it there's no it
doesn't have a cheering section, you know, like there are
popular writers right who who um like science writers who
(45:00):
popularize what they understand. And when you look at a
brain and you look at these diagrams of brains, it
looks like they have three layers, I mean using the
naked eye. But the naked eye is not always the best. Um,
it doesn't always give you all the information that we
need to understand how something emerges and what its function is.
(45:22):
It must be like looking at the Earth from the moon,
where it looks like there's land and there's ocean, but
really that's so interconnected. Yeah, well there's also land under
the water, right right, Yeah, and you can't really see
that with the naked eye. So we we really understand that.
You know, we we develop tools as scientists that allow
us to see things that we can't see with our
(45:42):
naked eye. That we can hear things that we can't
hear hear with our ears alone. Um, and you know,
we translate these other signals which we don't have sensory
surfaces for that, we have no senses for these other signals,
and we translate them into signals that we can that
we can detect. And so molecular genetics, you know, the
(46:04):
evidence from molecular genetics of how brains might have evolved,
and the evidence the sort of anatomical evidence that uses
that knowledge has been around for a long time, but
it requires a lot of background knowledge to really read
that stuff. And as a consequence, every time, you know,
(46:24):
even even neuroscientists who aren't familiar with that literature still
are using try and brain ish type uh interpretations. So
every time you hear that your prefrontal cortex regulates your
amygdala right there, that's just that's the sign that that
person is making an assumption about the try and brain.
(46:45):
Sometimes scientists who write for the public will rely on
that you know, three layered structure idea of the sort
of lizard limbic you know, neocortex because they understand that
it's easier for the publick to to think that way. So,
for example, yeah, Robert Sapolski in his book Behaved talks
(47:06):
about the limbic system, and he knows there's no Olympics system,
and he knows that that's you know, a myth, but
but he uses it because it's easier for people too.
It's an easier platform for people to start with, so
that he can get to the material he wants them
to get to. Whereas I'm directly more concerned with that
(47:29):
material of like what is a brain? How is it structured?
And why do you need to know? Yeah? And when
you and you made it so easy. I mean, I
I don't know if you like that people have said this,
but um, people are calling it like a beach read
about the brain, which I think is you know, their
way of saying, it's digestible and fun to read it.
(47:49):
I wrote it that, I mean, I read you wrote
it on purpose, okay, like that way, because um, but
it is so brilliant that you've just blown my mind.
I mean, I'm I'm your biggest fan. I think you're genius.
And thank you so much, Dr Barrett for chatting with
us today. And I hope you've blown minds, changed minds,
helped people. And uh, I'm going to change this podcast
(48:13):
now to uncomfortable arousal bites, not anxiety. It doesn't have
the same kind of like lyrical ring to it. No,
but we'll get people there. But thank you again for
being on the show. My pleasure. Thank you so much.
I hope you loved my talk with Dr Lisa. Let's
(48:33):
just go over some of the bigger takeaways from my
talk with her. Anxiety is a very misunderstood phenomena, so
don't worry if you don't fully understand it. The brain
is for regulating systems of your body. Period. The function
of your brain is to continue to predict so that
(48:54):
it keeps you safe when it's having trouble predicting when
it's not quite they are yet it hasn't come to
its full conclusion. That's when there's an increase in arousal, which,
as Dr Lisa says, feels like shit. But if you
learn to make sense of these sensations when your brain
is in arousal, you will begin to act differently and
(49:17):
the state is reduced too simply an uncomfortable state. It
is an absolute myth dating back to Plato, that rationality
controls your inner beast, and if your inner beast gets
the better of you, you're either immoral or you didn't
try hard enough to control yourself. Suffering from anxiety and
anxious sensations is not obligatory. Now, you're not to blame
(49:41):
for the bad things that have happened to you, or
for any of the wiring or nurture that you got
that caused you to have you know, the habit of anxiety,
but you are responsible for yourself. So unfortunately, you have
no choice. If you want to get better, you do
have to make a choice to work on this. Your
brain has to teach self to see differently, and that's
(50:01):
called reappraisal or reconceptualizing. It's basically just making sense of
things in a different way. Don't forget there's lots of
things you can do for anxiety, like you can do yoga,
you can breathe, but don't just follow what someone else
says works for them for their anxiety. You have to
also understand the brain and the mind. And if you
(50:23):
don't understand how that works, what's going on under the hood,
then you're going to be stuck with strategies that eventually
stop working in certain circumstances and you'll thank God, I've
tried everything it doesn't work. Now, having a list of
tools for anxiety like yoga, meditation, breathing, talk, therapy, counting,
(50:46):
is not a recipe. Think of it more as a
tasting menu. You're going to to your what word was that?
Your gun too. You're going to figure out what works
for you and what doesn't in certain situations. Okay, so
what does it mean to have something work don't forget
when Dr Lisa said, it means decreasing your arousal so
(51:09):
that you're merely uncomfortable. I'm sorry, we're not really able
to get rid of uncomfortable feelings, but I think you'll
know once you get to that level, it's a hell
of a lot better than anxious feelings. Now, it's really
hard for the first time to um, you know, deconstruct
(51:30):
your anxiety. Your first attempt at it, it's may still
go into unpleasant arousal, but as Dr Lisa says, maybe
by the thirtieth time you do it, you'll get there.
It becomes automatic. Now, don't forget. Every experience you have
is the brain training itself for the future. So it
really behooves you to keep trying to deconstruct your anxiety
(51:51):
from arousal unpleasant arousal too uncomfortable. And we have the
kind of nature that does require nurture, so we have
the kind of genes that require learning. In order for
your brain to finish wiring itself. You can rewire your brain.
Well that's it. I'm gonna get busy rewiring my brain,
(52:12):
and I hope that you will all join me next time.
Don't forget anxiety bites, but you're in control. For more
podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app,
Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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