Why You Can’t Think Your Way Out of Overthinking with Adam Mastroianni

In this episode, Adam Mastroianni explains why you can’t think your way out of overthinking. He unpacks why the thoughts that feel the most important are often the ones that keep us stuck. We also explore what it means to have a “skull full of poison,” how anxiety disguises itself as insight, and why real change isn’t about breakthroughs—it’s about repetition, action, and feeding the right wolf.

Key Takeaways:

• [00:06:07] Anxiety and its misconceptions
• [00:08:21] Overcoming obsessive thinking patterns
• [00:16:25] State of psychology as science
• [00:25:04] Building blocks of psychology
• [00:27:06] Emotions as control system signals
• [00:30:43] Basic vs. constructed emotions
• [00:40:44] Context matters in psychology
• [00:44:31] Mental heater and air conditioner.
• [00:47:01] Happiness set points and variance
• [00:50:42] Control systems and mental states
• [00:54:11] Changing set points in life

If you enjoyed this conversation with Adam Mastroianni, check out these other episodes:

The Purpose of Emotions and Why We’re Not Wired for Happiness with Anders Hansen

How to Find Peace and Balance in Managing Anxiety with Sarah Wilson

For full show notes, click here!

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
I wasn't worried about things I shouldn't be worried about.
I was thinking very hard about important things. And then
I realized, like, oh, maybe that's why anxiety is anxiety. Like,
if you felt like you were worrying about something that
you shouldn't worry about, it would be much easier to
stop doing it, when instead it feels like you are
spending your time wisely considering all the things that might

(00:20):
be wrong or go wrong. That's why it's difficult to escape.

Speaker 2 (00:27):
Wow, welcome to the one you feed throughout time. Great
tinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have.
Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what
you think ring true. And yet for many of us,
our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity,

(00:49):
self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't
have instead of what we do. We think things that
hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not
just a out thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent,
and creative effort to make a life worth living. This
podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in

(01:10):
the right direction, How they feed their good wolf.

Speaker 3 (01:16):
Do you ever feel like your brain is running some
kind of cruel experiment on you. Today's guest psychologist, Adam
Mastriani calls it having a skull full of poison. And
let's be honest, we've all been there, the thoughts that
won't quit, the anxiety that doesn't seem like anxiety. Because
this time it's really important, the endless loop of trying

(01:38):
to think your way out of a problem caused by
thinking too much in the first place. In this episode,
we talk about why our minds trick us, how mental
health is like a broken control system, and why real
change isn't about epiphanies, it's about action. I'm Eric Zimmer
and this is the one you feed Hi, Adam, Welcome

(01:58):
to the show.

Speaker 1 (02:00):
Than for having me.

Speaker 3 (02:00):
I'm really excited to have you on your newsletter or
your sub stack is called Experimental History, and it's one
of my favorite ones out there, and it's really a
lot about science and psychology. And we're going to dive
into a lot of those things here in a minute.
But let's start like we always do, with the parable.
In the Parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their

(02:21):
grandchild and they say, in life, there are two wolves
inside of us that are always at battle. One is
a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery
and love, and the other's a bad wolf, which represents
things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild
stops think about it for a second. They look up
at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins?

(02:44):
And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd
like to start off by asking you what that parable
means to you in your life and in the work
that you do.

Speaker 1 (02:53):
Yeah, it's meant a lot of different things at different points,
and I think what it is meant most recently is
how do you tell the wolf a part that like?
It seems like it should be easy, right, one's the
good one, one's the bad one. But it is easy
to find yourself inside value systems and to create one
for yourself where you get rewarded for doing things that
aren't good. And I feel like this this has been

(03:14):
the story of the past few years of my life
of realizing that, like for me, academia was one of
those value systems that I was getting rewarded for doing
things that I didn't actually think were good, and I
could see that, like, oh, everyone was cheering when I
feed the bad wolf, and so maybe the bad wolf
is actually the good wolf. And it took a long
time to be like, no, the bad one's actually the
bad one, and I need to go somewhere where I

(03:34):
get rewarded for feeding the good one.

Speaker 3 (03:36):
Yeah, I think the other thing to continue your point
about knowing which one is, you know, a lot of
listeners are hearing this and they're thinking about their internal world,
and as your work points out, it's really confusing in there,
and the so called experts sort of maybe know what
they're talking about some of the time, and our own

(03:59):
int tuitions sort of maybe sometimes know. It's just very
tricky to know how to respond, I think, to difficult
internal circumstances. And I want to start by going to
a post that you talked about where you talked about
having a skull full of poison. So set up for

(04:21):
us kind of what got you there, and maybe also
set up, just very briefly, an intro the type of
psychologists that you are. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (04:30):
So I'm trained as an experimental social psychologist, which means
I'm not the kind that you go to for therapy.
If I help people, it's only through a few steps,
and I'm not licensed to talk to someone one on
one unless it's on a podcast. So the skull full
of poison story is that in the high point of
the pandemic, just started to feel really bad. And at

(04:50):
the time, I was a resident advisor, a graduate student
living in a dorm, and I had been in the
discourse about mental health for a long time, and it
didn't feel like that to me, Like that felt like
a very euphemistic way of talking about the way I felt.
Was it just like undifferentiated bad for no reason all
the time. The whole post is about like all the
things that are really weird about feeling bad, Like things

(05:12):
will seem extremely important that aren't important, things will happen
for no reason. It was about like navigating that, which
I'm happy to report that I feel like I'm out
of now. But I feel like it was this whole
story that it's not the way I thought it would
have unfolded.

Speaker 3 (05:26):
Right, So to sort of say that differently, you had
some degree of professional training as well as you know,
talking to a lot of people about mental health, and
you were a little bit shocked by how this thing
happened and how its experience was different than what you
thought it might be like when you observed it from
the outset.

Speaker 1 (05:47):
Yeah, yeah, totally.

Speaker 3 (05:48):
And so looking back, I want to get more into
some of the weird things. But looking back, do you
have any sense would you be able to and I
know you're not a clinical psychologist, but would you be
able to give it a diagnosis at this point with
the hindsight of time and knowing what you know.

Speaker 1 (06:07):
Yeah. One of the more surprising and weird things that
happened was when I ended up working with a psychotherapist,
which is sort of its own story. At one point
she was like, Oh, this sounds like anxiety, and it
had never felt to me like anxiety that I always
thought anxiety was people being like worried about things that
they shouldn't be worried about. But I wasn't worried about

(06:27):
things I shouldn't be worried about. I was thinking very
hard about important things. And then I realized, like, oh,
maybe that's why anxiety is anxiety. Like if you felt
like you were worrying about something that you shouldn't worry about,
it would be much easier to stop doing it, when
instead it feels like you are spending your time wisely
considering all the things that might be wrong or go wrong.

(06:49):
That's why it's difficult to escape.

Speaker 3 (06:50):
Yeah, you say something that I think is really profound.
You say, I wonder if this is the secret behind
a lot of skull poisons. You secretly think you're not
sick at all, and you believe that what you're thinking
about is actually extremely important. And I think that's really
very insightful to what happens to a lot of us,
because I've always said that one of the biggest problems

(07:12):
with mental illness or skulls full of poison or addiction,
like my background, or depression or whatever it is, is
the thing that is trying to figure it out is
the thing that's i'll just use the word broken for now.
I don't like that word in general, but it's easy
to be used. The thing that's trying to solve the
problem is the very thing that is malfunctioning. Cakes. It

(07:32):
extremely difficult from your own side of things to sort
it out because the thought seem really, really true and real.

Speaker 1 (07:44):
Yeah, And so to overcome them, to deal with them,
you're going to eventually have to do something that feels crazy,
the idea of I don't need to think about this.
It feels stupid. It feels like, no, this is the
most important thing to think about in the world. And
even if part of you knows that, like, no, it's
actually it's the thinking about it over and over again
that's making me feel really bad. Those thoughts go like, no, no,

(08:06):
we really need to get to the bottom of well,
why are we thinking about it over and over again?
Let's think about that, right, right?

Speaker 3 (08:11):
And so what did you find that helped you? Because
I think a lot of people do get to the
point where they recognize that this rumination we'll call it,
that is problematic, right, They now suddenly are like, Okay,
these thoughts are intrusive. I don't like them, they're probably
they're not good for me. I want them to go away.

(08:32):
And it's not that simple. So what worked for you?

Speaker 1 (08:37):
Yeah, a few things. One was accepting a longer timeline.
So at the beginning I always felt like something's broken,
but it could be fixed immediately, and so all solutions
are going to be solutions that work right away. Obviously
none of those end up working. And even when people
would tell me this, I'd be like, now you think
that because you haven't found yours, I'm just looking for
mine and instead, And I was like, you know what,
what if the way that I deal with obsessive thinking

(08:59):
is like each time it happens, I go like, oh,
there it is again, I'm going to stop and do
something else. And even if like half a second later,
I start doing it again, then I have to respond
the same way again. And what if I have to
do that one thousand times in ten minutes? Yeah?

Speaker 3 (09:13):
Uh?

Speaker 1 (09:14):
And what if I have to do that over and
over again for three months before I start to feel
even a little bit better. But that was the only way,
ultimately that it felt like I ratcheted toward feeling like
it wasn't important to think about that over and over again. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (09:25):
I'm writing a book that right now is loosely titled
How a Little Becomes a Lot, And it's based on
that very idea, particularly with thought patterns, that the good
news is, I do believe you can change them. The
bad news is it often takes a long time, and
the longer you've had them, the longer that time period
might be. Yeah, and so it's just that repetition, and

(09:45):
I think you're right this desire that we are going
to have an insight or epiphany of some sort that
is going to suddenly fix it keeps a lot of
us really stuck and not buying into what you're saying,
which is okay, I kind of know the issue. There's
no blinding insight to come. There's just a really hard work.

Speaker 1 (10:07):
The insights and epiphanies I think can help, yeah, but
they're not the final moment. So there was a moment
where I had a really long drive back from my
campus to home, like Boston to Ohio, and as I
was like an hour into it, I had sort of
this moment where it kind of the clouds opened up
and I was like, Wow, my thinking has been really
obsessive and repetitive recently, and even in that moment, I

(10:29):
felt like, wow, it's so helpful to have this moment
of realization, and it's going to come back again. Like
my head's above the water for a second. This is
what it's like up here. I got to get back
here again.

Speaker 3 (10:39):
Totally. I think the insights or the realizations are critical
to know what.

Speaker 1 (10:43):
Direction to go.

Speaker 3 (10:44):
Yeah yeah, right, Like until you have that, you don't
even know what direction to go. But once you have it.
There's still a ways to go. But again I love
that that's what worked for you, was just a little bit,
by a little bit changing those things.

Speaker 1 (10:57):
Yeah. Yeah, And I worked with a psychotherapist that it
was also helpful for pointing these things out and was
helpful to for like giving me a kick in the
pants a couple times where I had sort of thought,
because of the discourse that we have around mental illness
that like, now, the way you need to treat it
is with you know, sensitivity, And that's true, but also
sometimes I needed to be told like no, stop, like

(11:19):
stop doing this. Yeah, but like you know, I care
about you, but like this thing that you're doing, you
do need to stop doing it. It is unacceptable.

Speaker 3 (11:27):
Yeah. I think about this a lot because on one hand,
I think we have become a lot more sensitive and
we're a lot more understanding, and we recognize that people
need to feel seen and heard and understood. But I
sometimes wonder if we've gone too far in that direction
or we just stopped there. And my experience and I

(11:48):
got sober twenty five years ago in a pretty hardcore
twelve step area program and there wasn't a lot of
I mean, the sensitivity could have been dialed up, and
certainly is part of what eventually made me not want
to go, but also just being told very directly like here,
do this do that turned out to be really really helpful,

(12:11):
and I think sometimes somebody just needs to be heard culture.
I think sometimes we also need the next step, which is, yes,
no one until they feel heard will listen to anything
you say, so don't bother to try and shortcut that step.
But there are other destinations beyond that where we do
need people who are on the outside to say, well,
here's something I see or why don't you try this? Yeah.

Speaker 1 (12:34):
A big one for me was thinking less about myself
and more about other people. The thing about obsessive thinking
of any kind is it's usually about you. And when
I could realize that, like, wow, I feel better when
I think about other people a little bit more and
think about myself less, or when someone could point that
out to me, it was really helpful because I'm like,
I don't want to be the kind of person who
is only thinking about how bad I feel all the time.

(12:56):
You feel a lot better when I can I can
help lift other people up totally.

Speaker 3 (13:00):
I think this can sometimes take an interest in deviation,
which is that the worry begins to be about people
that are around you, and so it seems like it's
not self referential, but it is in a way ultimately right,
because whatever that person is happening or whatever they're doing

(13:20):
is causing an emotion in you that you don't like. Yeah,
and so it can be tricky.

Speaker 1 (13:26):
You think you're thinking about other people, but really you're
thinking do they like me? Did I hurt them? Rather
than like are they achieving their goals? Like what do
they need from me? And like how can I help
them do the thing that they're trying to do?

Speaker 3 (13:37):
Yep, yep, this is funny. This is just coming to
mind because a friend of mine, he's much younger than me,
told me recently they're starting to try and have a kid.
And it's like, I think parenting just adds a whole
new dimension of weirdness to dealing with your own mental stuff,
because on one hand, you are obstensibly thinking about someone
else a lot, and yet it's a weird space. One

(14:00):
of the other things that I read, and it's not
exactly a secret, but as you have a tendency to
do you wrote about it in a way that makes
it so obvious is that you say, if you want
to get a taco, the world comes rushing your aid.
Everybody's got a taco. Everybody wants to talk about their taco.
People will vehemently defend their taco stand versus that taco stand,

(14:22):
or whether al pastore is better than carne asada. But
you need a therapist, you're on your own.

Speaker 1 (14:29):
Yeah, it's wild, but like there's no YELP for therapists,
at least not one that I found or that worked.
Which ones take my insurance? Which ones will take me?
When I was the person who was telling someone like, hey,
have you ever thought of talking to someone? I had
no idea that that's the gauntlet that they had to
face if they decided to do it, at the point

(14:50):
where they are least equipped to do it, to deal
with the system that makes no sense, it's super annoying,
doesn't give you feedback. And then even when you start
talking to somebody, they don't tell you, I mean a
good one might that like, we're going to take a
while to make any progress here. The first time we
talk is maybe even just to see if I think
I can help you. I'm not gonna be able to
do much for you the first of a round. It

(15:11):
might take a couple of months before we start working
in any direction.

Speaker 3 (15:14):
Which is really difficult when you have a skull full
of poison. Yeah, yeah, right, I mean it's the same
thing I've dealt with my mother and chronic pain for
years and years, and you finally find a new doctor
who's like, Okay, we're great at what we do, and
you go and they're like, well now we're going to
I mean, and you're just like, I could be months
from any relief. It's just really it's really challenging.

Speaker 1 (15:38):
Yeah, especially when our level of understanding is so early
and so rudimentary for anything psychological. We just haven't been
at this very long. And even though you know, we
produce these big book of diagnoses, like that book is
going to be different or entirely gone hopefully, you know,
fifty or one hundred years from now. And so the
limit on what we can do for people is also

(15:59):
offen and not that high, and it really varies by
what you present with and a lot of things we
can help a little bit, but few things do we
know exactly what they are or what to do about them.
And this is like a limit that you have to
accept if you're ever going to get better.

Speaker 3 (16:14):
Right, right, I think that is a good segue here
for us to sort of talk about the state of
psychology as a science and what we think about the
state of psychology and what we know is very helpful
in how we navigate the journey. Right. And one thing
that studies that seem to keep showing is sort of,

(16:35):
I guess, for lack of a better word, disconcerting, is
that we don't really know what makes a good therapist,
or one type of therapy doesn't seem to be better
than another type of therapy. Sometimes it doesn't even appear
to be better than talking to a friend, and yet
we know it can be. Talk to me about what
we know about the role of therapy, I think you

(16:58):
would say you were glad you did it.

Speaker 1 (17:00):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The way I think about it now,
especially in retrospect having had a good experience, was that
like the part of it where I think of this
person as a practitioner of science like didn't actually add
anything for me. I would rather think of them as
someone whose job it is to help me navigate the
issues in my life, and like they come from this
tradition where they're very interested in the inner workings of

(17:21):
my mind rather than say theology or whatever else the
way that you could get there. But that doesn't mean
that we have all of these studies that are going
to make it very clear what they should do with
me and how I should accomplish my goals or not
there yet, But it did matter a lot to have
someone whose job it was to pay attention and listen closely.
But a lot of experience helping people navigate these kinds

(17:42):
of situations was informed somewhat by some of the things
that we know. But it isn't like taking an antibiotic
when you have an infection, like that's just not the
kind of result you're going to get, because that's not
the level of understanding that we have. And so mention
that the study that I almost wish we could do again.
Now the window was closed on doing this study. But
in the seventies there was this very small study where

(18:03):
people got randomized either to go to a professional therapist
or to a professor of history or engineering or whatever
who'd been selected for being empathetic. And this study is
really small, it's not very well conducted, but as far
as they were able to tell they couldn't see any
difference between the outcomes of the people who are assigned.
You know, an older person who's empathetic and understanding versus
someone who is all those things but also trained in

(18:25):
the ways of psychology. And that was fifty years ago,
but I think you'd get a pretty similar result today.

Speaker 3 (18:31):
Yeah, and without going into the science to the degree
that you do and are capable of. It seems to
me that general thinking is that rapport is the name
of the game. Right. If you have a good rapport
with your psychologist, that's far, in a way the most
important thing.

Speaker 1 (18:46):
Yeah, I think, especially if you don't have that somewhere
else in your life. Yeah, that if you're at a
point where your relationship's afraid, or you don't have many
of them, or there's no one that you feel like
you can talk about this stuff too, it's a no
brainer that you could go and work with someone whose
job to do that. And then I think there's plenty
of things probably above and beyond that they can do,
like be an outside observer on your life. Note things

(19:07):
that you do over and over again. Just ask you
the question, what have you done to try to solve this,
and has that worked for you? All these things that
seem really obvious you could conceivably do with a friend
or with the mirror, and yet we don't because we
don't have the structure around it. Right.

Speaker 3 (19:21):
Well, there's this idea. I believe that doctor Ethan Cross
at the University of Michigan was one of the coiners
of this term Solomon's paradox, which is an idea based
on King Solomon, that we can have a lot of
wisdom towards someone else, uh huh, but it's really hard
to have it towards ourselves. And I find this to
just be amazingly true. And I also have found I

(19:45):
had to write a little reminder to myself at one
point that even if I think I know what somebody
is going to say to me when I bring them
a problem, right, they're going to just pare it back
my own advice to me or whatever, it still helps
to talk to them about it still helps somehow to
get it out of the squeamishness of my own brain.

(20:05):
That's the wrong word for it, not squeamishness, just amorphousness
of my own brain. Yeah, right, and talk about it
with someone.

Speaker 1 (20:13):
Else, Yeah, Yeah, like your own thoughts are squishy, and
when you have to express them to someone else, you
suddenly realize like, oh, I really I need to put
this into words. I need to frame this in some
way that makes it make sense. And when you do that,
you can get it to a level of specificity that
you couldn't get to on your own. I mean, this
is also what I what I find when I'm writing that,
Like you can think the same thought over and over again.

(20:33):
When you have to put it into a sentence, you
suddenly realize like, oh, I didn't get this or I
didn't really know what I wanted to say. And I
think these are all tools of nailing down the thoughts
that you're trying to have.

Speaker 3 (20:44):
Yeah, it's funny. The book I'm writing is based on
a program that I've taught for a number of years
called wise Habits. But in writing it, you know, sitting
down and trying to write the book, I'm like, huh,
I didn't think that all the way through, or well,
I'm saying this here, but then I'm saying very like
almost the opposite that, like just inconsistencies that were not

(21:05):
immediately apparent to me in putting it into presentations and
talking it out loud.

Speaker 1 (21:10):
Yeah, it's a way of dispelling what we call the
illusion of explanatory depth, of this feeling that you know
something when you don't actually know it, but like you
know it as well as you need to know it
for the purpose that you're doing that, like you know
it at this level until you bump into something that
requires you to understand it better. And like writing is
a way of doing that, talking to people is a
way to doing that. Teaching is a way of doing that,

(21:32):
breaking through that superficial level of understanding to the level below.

Speaker 3 (21:36):
Right, there's that idea that if you want to learn something,
try and teach it to someone else. For that reason,
and the fact that we have that illusion is enormously
helpful in most areas of our lives. Yeah, you and
I are both talking into a microphone. I couldn't do it,
the most basic job of explaining to you what is
happening there, despite having been around microphones not just as

(21:57):
a podcaster but a musician my whole life. I have
no idea.

Speaker 2 (22:01):
Now.

Speaker 3 (22:01):
I have friends that could take this thing apart and
explain every bit of it and fix it, but I
don't because I've never needed to.

Speaker 1 (22:08):
Yeah, if you didn't have that illusion, if when you
got to the studio you were like, WHOA, what's that? Like?
How could I possibly use this thing? If I don't
know everything about or you're constantly distracted by that when
you were in the world filled with things like that,
like we could never survive or get anything done if
there was an alarm in your head that went off
every time you didn't understand something, because it would always

(22:29):
be going off, like you never have any peace, right
And so it's helpful to have this thin film of understanding.
If what you want to do is get by, if
what you want to do is understand, then you have
to puncture that envelope. Yep.

Speaker 3 (22:41):
So let's use this idea of understanding to go back
to psychology and the state of psychology, because I, like you,
believe we don't fully know what is going on in
people's brains. I mean, I've worked with enough people one
on one and my programs to know that for some
people you say this and for other people they need

(23:04):
the exact opposite thing. And these could be two people
who demographically look the same, two thirty five year old men,
but one of them has a problem speaking up, and
so you're like, hey, we need to work on that.
And the other has a problem of just being aggressive
in conversation. He needs something completely different, yet they look
exactly the same. And so the number of variables that
go into even when we're trying to blind control or

(23:27):
control a study, seems crazy to me, and it makes
me doubt that we'll ever get a lot further. And
a lot of people share this view. The mind's too complicated,
we're not going to get there. But you don't share
this view. You believe that, well, you say what you believe,
instead of me saying.

Speaker 1 (23:46):
Yeah, you believe well. I certainly agree that it's complicated
and it will be difficult to get farther, and it's
also possible that we'll never get farther. But the fact
that it is difficult and is complicated is not in
fact evidence that it is hopeless that will get farther.
And the examples that I take are from the rest
of the history of every other science, where there are
plenty of periods where things seem like hopelessly complicated. How

(24:08):
can we possibly make progress? And eventually we do because
we discover the underlying structure of the system that we're
trying to work with. And so if you think about
the alchemists who are trying to change elements into other elements,
and they have no idea what an element is or
what they're made of, or that like the position of
venus does not affect the result of the reaction, but
like some things that they consider one element are in

(24:29):
fact a mixture of two things. If they don't understand
any of these things, there's a real limit on how
far they can get. But when you start getting those
little building blocks of like, oh there are things called elements,
they cannot be reduced further. Just from that you start
to be able to do a bunch of things. Now
you can ask like, well, how many are there, how
does each one react with the other ones? Are there
ways that we can predict those reactions. What we don't

(24:50):
have for psychology yet is the equivalent of those elements.
We don't have a good idea of what are the
units that make up the world we're trying to study,
and what are the rules that govern the interactions of
those units. I think we're still in the prehistory of psychology.

Speaker 3 (25:04):
That's a really good point to think about. The periodic
table of elements as a reference, because it's not simple, right,
we haven't simplified it. Right, There's a lot of elements,
and as you mentioned, how do they combine with each other?
We begin to learn that. But by having a certain
number of building blocks we can begin to make progress.

(25:25):
And it seems that perhaps with psychology, like you say,
we don't have even these basic building blocks. We have
these diagnostic ideas that are I use the word amorphous earlier,
are very amorphous. Yeah, almost to the point of being
useful to a point in some cases I think is

(25:46):
the best way I could say it for them. So
where do you think if you were given the reins
of psychological science? Right? You talk a lot about how
you think we should and shouldn't do science if you
were just for some reason, I mean, our presidents doing
all sorts of what seems to be kind of crazy things,
So this would be no crazier. He comes to you

(26:06):
and says, Adam, you are in charge of psychology for
the next four years. You got all the budget you want.

Speaker 1 (26:12):
What would you do? Two things? One to be diversify
the budget in that I have the things that I
want to do, but I also want to hedge against
it by trying to find a bunch of other different
crazy ideas, because this is what I think we haven't
been doing, or what we're really bad at doing in science,
is diversifying the ideas that we're working on. The one
that I would want to work on, and I've been
working with some friends on this and they're just starting

(26:33):
to release the series now. Is basically a cybernetic proposal
for the way that psychology works. Cybernetics being the science
of control systems and control systems just being a few
units that work together to try to maintain something at
a certain level. So I get a thermostat is a
control system. It reads what the current temperature is, it
has the desired temperature, and it tries to reduce the

(26:54):
difference between them. And I have some friends working on
a proposal for like a lot of psychology can be
thought about in terms of control systems, that there are
many things that humans have to keep at the right
level or else they die. We need some salt, but
not too much. We need some sugar but not too much.
We need to be at the right temperature. We need
to interact with other people, but we can't spend all
of our time interacting with other people. And so when

(27:16):
you start to think about that, you might think, like man,
the error signal in each of these control systems, the
thing that says when it's out of whack, could be
what we think of right now as an emotion. The
feeling of hunger is an emotion your nutrition intake control
systems saying it's time to eat. The feeling of loneliness
is a feeling from your sociality control system saying that
I need to be around other people. And now we

(27:38):
might start thinking, well, how many emotions are there? Which
ones are stronger than other one? Like, which ones get
to take precedence? You know, not all of these go
from zero to one hundred quickly, some go slowly. And
now we can start to get something that looks a
little bit more like a table of elements. Because we
start asking how many how do they interact? We can
try to start filling in the ones that seem to
be missing.

Speaker 3 (28:23):
I love this idea of control systems because I'm a
big believer in I would just call it the middle way,
meaning that you can look at most things in life
and there is a too much and there's definitely a
too little right and when we're at either of those.
A really great solution is just you don't have to
abandon whatever that thing is, You just have to turn
it up or down a little bit. But even this

(28:46):
idea of emotions, right, I mean, people have been arguing
about what the core emotions are for a long time.
How would we even get past that to a point
that we could begin to say, here's our periodic table.
Because every book I read, there's four, there's twelve, there's
seventy nine shades of blue.

Speaker 1 (29:04):
Yeah, it's a great question, and I think that this
cybernetic approach finally has an answer to it, which is
first a conceptualization of what an emotion is in terms
of like the units and how they work together. So
when we talk about emotions, we're usually like, you know
that thing you feel, But in this paradigm, an emotion
is something very specific. It's the error signal of a
control system. If we don't have a control system for it,

(29:27):
we can't have an emotion about it. And thinking this
way leads to like calling some weird things emotions. In
this system, the need to pee is an emotion. We
don't think about it that way, but obviously sometimes you
need to urinate, and that feeling is an error from
your control system, That too, is an emotion. It would
also lead us to think about, like, you know, the
thing that we call hunger, that's an emotion too, But

(29:48):
it's probably a confederacy of many emotions because there's many
different kinds of nutrients that we have to intake, and
so there's probably something called salt hunger or sugar hunger
or protein hunger. And it's easier to do it animals
and in humans by depriving people of one thing and
see if they feel hunger and eat another thing. It's
just one way, as a very schematic way of investigating this,
and so I think the way we make progress is

(30:10):
by treating this like we're trying to figure out the
rules of a board game by reverse engineering it. We
don't know exactly what the little tokens mean or what
they can do, but we do believe there are tokens
that can only go to certain spaces, and now we're
trying to figure out what those are. Rather than the
squishy idea of like, well you feel a certain way,
what are the tendencies that you have or are they constructed?

Speaker 3 (30:30):
That's the difference okay, because one of the core emotional
theory disputes, and again I'm a lay person in all this,
is that there are these core irreducible emotions. Every human
has them, they're the same group. And then there's the
as you just said, the constructed theory emotion, which is
that there's basically just a stimulus of some sort, and

(30:54):
then from there we build everything that goes on top
of that. Do you have a feeling there? How does
thinking through that issue tie into control systems?

Speaker 1 (31:07):
So this view, I think would be much closer to
the idea that there are basic ones and all the
labels that we apply to them are sometimes pointing to
emotions that really exist and sometimes calling things emotions that
are not productively called emotion. So also in this paradigm,
happiness isn't an emotion. It's a thing that we feel,
but it's not an error signal, which means that like
whether it's constructed or not now becomes a nonsensical question.

(31:29):
It's not part of the list of elements. Original attempts
at a table of elements included things like light and heat,
which didn't end up being elements, And a moment of
progress was when we realized, like those things are different,
and so it's possible that like, happiness is actually a
different thing in this proposal for a paradigm. Happiness is
actually not a signal that something's gone wrong. It is
the feeling that you get for correcting an error, so

(31:51):
you really have to pee, you find a bathroom. Happiness
is the feeling that you get from your need to
pee error signal going to zero, but the same thing
you get for you know, I feel lone, I talk
to someone. Happiness is the thing that you get for
reducing that error. So it is a different thing. We
don't have a word quite for it yet, but there's
a weird way of thinking about it, which is part
of what makes me excited about it. That like, it

(32:11):
uses words in ways that are really counterintuitive, because it
has a strong idea of what are the components of
the system and how might they work together?

Speaker 3 (32:19):
Right, And I would love to actually spend about an
hour and a half on this because I am fascinated. However,
I don't want to make the whole interview about this,
but I'm going to use it as a pivot point
because one of the things that you say about psychology
as a field is that we keep producing paper after

(32:40):
paper after paper after paper, and that by and large,
none of it moves the needle much anywhere. Yeah, and
that the way that we're going to make more progress
than we have in the time we have so far
is to begin to think about what you call alien ideas.
And so I have a question. This relates to something
else that you talk about strong link and weak link problems.

(33:04):
One of the things about alien ideas is I agree
with you, we need them, and when we're in the
middle of, say something like a pandemic, they seem dangerous,
and alien psychological ideas seem like they could be dangerous.
So how do we allow ourselves to take some of
the shackles off psychology So maybe we can make progress

(33:25):
in a different direction, but maybe not loose a bunch
of craziness into the world. Yeah, we need to do
it all in secret.

Speaker 1 (33:35):
No, I think really, what you're pointing to there is
there are at least two separable problems that we're trying
to solve at the same time. And that's why there's
a tension here when I say science is a strong
link problem, which is to say that we proceed at
the rate that we do our best work, not at
the rate that we prevent our worst work. Is to say,
I'm talking about science is like the process of trying
to understand the structure and function of the universe, which

(33:57):
is separate from how do you make sure that people
believe the right things, which is a totally different thing
science communication or public health dissemination or something else. The
way that you make sure that people don't believe crazy
ideas that are wrong is different from, and sometimes contrary to,
the way that we would discover truths about the universe.

(34:18):
So recently, when I brought that post back up again
and someone was like, you know, but look, there's this
paper about vaccines causing autism that like caused all this
trouble before it was retracted twelve years later, I'm like, totally,
that's a big problem. From the standpoint of how do
we solve the problem of making sure that people don't
believe the wrong thing, it is actually unrelated or mainly
unrelated to the idea of how do we understand autism.

(34:39):
So it wasn't the case that when that paper came out,
all the scientists study autism were like, wow, vaccines must
cause autism. Many people were like, oh, I don't believe
this paper at all. And at the time, it might
have actually been reasonable to think about like, oh, is
this a possibility, Like it's better for there to be
more information rather than less. That is different from the
kind of person who's going to look at that and
go like, oh, this means I should change my vaccine behavior.

Speaker 3 (35:00):
Right, And I think part of that comes from something
that I don't think the genie goes back in the
bottle on, which is the popularization of and the bastardization
of science into the public consciousness. I mean, you don't
have to look very hard to suddenly start seeing that
there's a study. There are people whose job is go

(35:23):
find a study and then write an article or a
news article about it. And sometimes they're reporting the study
relatively accurately, even though there's still a lot of nuance
getting lost, and other times it's just near nonsense. And
so I understand what you're saying on one hand that
science itself, the process of science, needs to be a

(35:47):
problem where we don't worry about the bad ideas because
the scientific process will eventually weed them out, and what
we need to be focused on are the really big
good ideas. And the only way sometimes to get those
is to venture way off course from what everybody else
is doing, and then you have what's done with that science?

(36:08):
Is this just a problem we have to live with.

Speaker 1 (36:10):
That's a problem that we can get better at. And
where it starts is in how we teach students about science,
like from elementary school onward right now, when you get
your scientific education, it's like, oh, you know, we we
thought atoms were plum pudding, and then we thought they
were this other thing, and then and then finally we
discovered the real thing, not understanding how that process unfolded

(36:33):
that like for a long time, we like went off
in this direction and then we did this other direction,
and like it took a long time for us to
figure out what was true. And so when you see
a scientific claim, you should go like, yeah.

Speaker 3 (36:44):
Maybe precisely, yeah, we don't follow that with the thought
of and by the way, this current understanding could go
through the same revision, right, Yeah, we just take it
as now we know, and if you look back at
scientific history, you realize it's kind of a silly position
to take.

Speaker 1 (37:03):
Yeah, anybody should be able to trace this through like
the evolution of nutrition recommendations over the course of their
own lives. If you're old enough right that, like I
grew up in every cereal box had that pyramid on
the back that was like you should eat six to
eleven slices of bread per day, and then like ten
years later people were like, you should never eat a

(37:23):
slice of bread, like both of these extremes, and the
next year it's going to be something else. And what
this means is like, we're still figuring out how nutrition works.
Like we're very early on, and the only mistake that
we're making is being extremely certain at each stage that
now we know for sure.

Speaker 3 (37:40):
Yeap, Before we dive back into the conversation, let me
ask you something. What's one thing that has been holding
you back lately? You know that it's there, You've tried
to push past it, but somehow it keeps getting in
the way. You're not alone in this, And I've identified
six major saboteurs of self control, like autopilot behavior, self doubt,

(38:02):
emotional escapism that quietly derail our best intentions. But here's
the good news. You can outsmart them. And I've put
together a free guide to help you spot these hidden
obstacles and give you simple actionable strategies that you can
use to regain control. Download the free guide now at
oneufeed dot net slash ebook and take the first step

(38:25):
towards getting back on track. Part of the problem with
nutrition is part of what we wrestle with in psychology,
is not everyone is the same. You know, my partner
and I wore a continuous glucose monitor for a while.
We just kind of wanted to see, like what's happening
with blood sugar. Her mom had Alzheimer's, my dad has Alzheimer's,
and one of the theories is that there's a metabolic

(38:47):
issue here. So okay, we want to study our metabolism.
And it was fascinating to see, like I can eat
brown rice and it's okay, she eats brown rice, she
might as well have drank a Coca cola. It's just insane.
And so people, you know, we keep saying, like you
should eat this, but people are just very different, and
we don't know what constitutes the difference enough yet, Yeah,

(39:09):
to be able to make any sort of like recommendation
that I should eat the same thing as you. We
just don't know, but yet we think we do.

Speaker 1 (39:17):
Yeah, this is a problem that I really wish that
it were so much more apparent to people that like,
whenever you want to make a universal recommendation, you need
extremely good evidence, but like we're really willing to just
like make universal recommendation.

Speaker 3 (39:29):
Well, I think it's partially that's a human tendency, and
I think that people want it. I mean, I think
that it goes back to what you were talking about.
You know, when you had a skullfull of poison, what
you wanted. The desire that emerged from that was not
to listen to an hour long, nuanced conversation about the
science of psychology like we are doing right now. You

(39:50):
wanted somebody to say, here's the one quick trick to
get rid of your skullfull of poison, right, And so
we're just in a world that nuance is not in sense.
I find it personally semi painful as a person who
my brand is nuance.

Speaker 1 (40:06):
I think yeah. And I also think it's on the
part of experts making the recommendations, there's this fear that, like, oh,
people are too stupid to understand nuance, so we can't
give it to them, even though we know it might
be there. We just need to tell everybody the same thing,
or else they'll get the wrong idea, or some of
them will do the wrong thing, And so we just
need to be really confident and conclusive about telling everybody

(40:30):
what they should do, which ultimately just leads the erosion
of trust, because why would you trust someone who's going
to knowingly tell you something other than the full truth
of what they know.

Speaker 3 (40:40):
We sort of hit this, and you may have already
answered it, in which case you could say we've already
covered that. What are some of the ideas in psychology
that you find interesting promising? New? So you've just mentioned one,
which is this idea of control systems? Yeah, are there
any others out there that you currently are like? Wow,

(41:00):
that's really interesting.

Speaker 1 (41:02):
That's the one that I think is most promising. Yet
I think it is worth looking back at the ideas
that we have had that were productive and good, and
now there's a temptation to keep doing them forever, even
though I think we've gotten out of them what they
had to give us. So some of those dominant ideas
in psychology where like, oh, people aren't perfectly rational, they
don't obey the rules of optimal decision making. This is

(41:23):
an idea that's been so successful that it's won the
Nobel Prize twice, and I think it's a great one
and it started, you know, all kinds of lines of research.
I also think that now we've pretty much gotten everything
out of it that we're going to get out of it.
Same thing with situations matter. So this is like a
revolution in the sixties and seventies that at the time
it was reasonable to think that, like, you know, there's

(41:43):
just different kinds of people, and some people are good
and some people are bad. And then people started creating
these like little pantomimes and situations where you put someone
in it, someone who seems normal, and like now they're
you know, shocking someone to death in the other room,
or at least they think they are. That was a
really important point to make. But we can keep doing
that forever. We can keep inventing new situations and showing

(42:05):
like wow when you do this, like some people do
that thing. And I think here too, we've gotten most
out of it that we're ever going to get out
of it.

Speaker 3 (42:12):
So these are both good. Let's take that second one there,
which is essentially is another way of saying context really matters. Yeah,
I get on one hand, how like we just said it, right,
Context matters? Okay, move on, right, But are there useful
ways of showing in what ways context informs or changes

(42:35):
based on different things? Like I still think like you
and I know that, but a lot of people are
going to take a personality test and they're going to
go off and believe that that personality test is telling
them a lot about themselves. And I would argue the
primary limitation to a lot of those is context matters.
I hate these things. They drive me up the wall
because it's like, would you rather read a book or

(42:56):
go to a party? And I'm like, well, I have
nine questions I need to ask you before for I
make that decision. You know, what's the party, who's going
to be there? What book am I reading? Am I tired? Like?
I mean? Is it cold outside? And so it seems like,
on one hand, we know context matters, and yet broadly speaking,
I'm not sure that most people do. Yeah, but is

(43:18):
that a communication versus a research issue? Again?

Speaker 1 (43:21):
Yeah, I think so, Like, I don't know how many
more demonstrations we can do that. I think. I mean
the Milgrim Shock experiments from nineteen sixty three. This is
the famous experiment where probably a lot of people have
heard of it, but in case they haven't, Like, you
get brought into what looks like a lab and you
think that you are doing a learning task with someone
who's in a different room, and you're supposed to give
them a little shock when they get the question wrong,

(43:42):
and they set it up that like, oh, the person
gets so many questions wrong that eventually it seems like
you're shocking them to death. Even when you're and there's
this whole like recording here, you think it's real where
it seems like they have a heart condition and they
maybe pass out whatever, And like in that situation, two
thirds of people kept shocking someone until they ostensibly die
because the person behind them was like, no, no, it's

(44:02):
very important you can continue, Like, I don't know what
better demonstration you can do. And by the way, people
have tried to debunk this a couple times, and I
think it has survived the debunkings. A lot of great
research from that era hasn't, like, I don't know what
else you can do to show people that like, no,
that you a very normal person could be put in
a situation where you could do something that you look
back on it and think that it is horrifying, Like,

(44:23):
I think the only way that you can drive that
point home better is by bringing that person into the
lab and doing it to them, right, Otherwise it's not
going to land.

Speaker 3 (44:31):
Yeah, okay, so let's go back to For some reason,
I don't like the word cybernetic because it makes me
think about a cyborg or something. But I get it.
We're talking about systems, and I'd love to talk about
one of your posts that's all about systems, and it's
really about the idea of us having a mental heater
and a mental air conditioner. Kind of walk me through

(44:52):
this idea.

Speaker 1 (44:53):
Yeah, so this comes from my thinking about the control
systems of the mind, that there's this naive idea that
we just want to be maximally happy. I mean literally,
psychologists will write this in their papers like, well, obviously
people want to be happy and not unhappy, and they'll
give six citations for it. But I actually, things of
you watched people, this doesn't seem to be the case.
People will do things all the time that do not

(45:14):
seem to make them happy, like why do we go
to haunted houses? Like why do we watch movies about
the Holocaust? If you ask people afterward like did that
make you happier? People will be like no, okay, well
why did you do it? And I think part of the
reason is we don't actually desire maximum happiness. We desire
the right level of happiness. It is dangerous and bad
for us both to be too sad. It is also
dangerous and bad to be too happy. Like we call

(45:34):
that mania. And when people are stuck in that mode
for too long, they end up doing things like thinking
they're the reincarnation of Jesus Christ, or they do a
bunch of drugs, they spend all their money starting a
stupid business, and they end up in the hospital. And
so like it is bad for us to max out
this system, it is also bad for us for the
system to be working at its minimum. This seems like
a case in which we have a control system governing

(45:55):
trying to keep us at the right level. And so
when we're too high, it tries to bring us down,
and when we're too hello tries to bring us up.
And that's the thermostat that runs with the furnace and
the air conditioner.

Speaker 3 (46:04):
So with mania, you know, my favorite example, what we're
not getting across well enough in this interview is how
funny you are in your writing right, Like I mean,
you're genuinely hilarious. And one of the things you did
when you're writing about mania is go look at like
reddit forums for what people did when they were under mania,
and my favorite was collected enough signatures to become mayor

(46:27):
yeah yeah. And if you've seen it, and I've been
close enough to people with addiction problems and severe psychological
problems to have been on some psych wards visiting and
mania is terrifying, you know, when you see somebody who's
in mania, it is genuinely frightening. So I get the
idea that, Okay, we don't want to get too high,
we don't want to get too low. Right, you get

(46:48):
too low, you basically don't move, and as humans, we
need to move and do things. You also talk about
how happiness doesn't tend to change a lot over time.
Do you then believe that we each have an individual
happiness set point that we're largely going to return to.
And if so, why would mine be forty percent and

(47:09):
someone else's would be ninety percent? And is the fact
that I am reporting myself as unhappy simply my error system?
To use your theory my sense of unhappiness is simply
my internal control system saying you need to be up there,
because one of the things that I've found I've said
before about having depression is one of the things I've done,

(47:30):
I think is get better at it. And what I
mean by that is I often just don't make a
very big deal out of it. There are times where
I'm like, it is what it is, no existential crisis needed.

Speaker 1 (47:40):
Yeah. I mean to your first question of whether I
think different people have different set points, it seems to
be true empirically that you track people over time that
some people are consistently at a six out of ten,
and some people are consistently at an eight out of ten.
And even when disturbances happen in their lives, even when
they get a new job that they love, lose a
job that they love, find someone they love, lose someone

(48:01):
they love, they obviously go up or down, but they
come back to that point. And so that seems to
be empirically true. Now, why would it be that some
people are stuck at six when they'd rather be at eight,
or why can't we all be at ten? I think
for the same reason that we differ in all other
kinds of ways, Like other control systems also have different
step points, so we think that weight is probably also

(48:23):
governed by some kind of control system. Some people weigh
one hundred and fifty pounds and some people weigh two hundred.
Like why is that? The ultimate answer is genetics and
then what you get exposed to it in the environment.
But like, from a broader sense, who would there be
variants across humans? Like, because it is actually useful for
people to be different, I think is the ultimate answer.
That the way that humans have succeeded is by producing

(48:44):
a diversity of humans who have different ideas and behave differently,
so that we can benefit from the different strengths that
different people have. And so like, there may be a
reason why we don't all have the same level of happiness.
That would be my guest. We don't really know, but
that's my guest.

Speaker 3 (49:00):
Now do you think that then what we might think
of as extreme levels of high which would be mania,
but the opposite seems to be far more common, which
is yeah, you know, being very low is a control
system failure. Because when you talk about weight, right, yes,

(49:20):
we all have a natural weight. We also know people
who weigh seventy five pounds and people who are way
on the opposite end of that that are not in
what we would probably consider the natural range because we're
exposed to all sorts of different things. So is that
what mental illness is is a control system failure?

Speaker 1 (49:41):
Yeah, there are lots of ways that the systems can
break that end up looking like different kinds of mental illnesses.
So my friends who write under the name Slime Mold
Time Mold are releasing a whole series about this, so
hopefully by the time it comes out, it'll be out
there for people to read. They have a whole series
of papers about how different way that you break the
system produce different things that look like depression or anxiety. So,

(50:03):
for instance, if you turn down the errors on all
of your control systems so you get no error signal,
you will look like someone who is extremely depressed. You
won't do anything because you have no errors to correct.
This looks ultimately like that kind of bedrock depression where
that person doesn't move. If you increase the sensitivity on
all of your control systems so you're getting super high

(50:24):
errors all the time, now you start to look like
someone who's manic because you're rushing around all the time
trying to correct your errors, and you're feeling great about
it because you're always corrected, and then they pop up
againting and correct them again. So you're playing whack a
mole and it feels wonderful. There's like ten other ways
that you can break the system. But it starts to
lead you to think about, like, Okay, when people feel
bad or feel really good, like what is going on underneath?

(50:46):
Like not at necessarily the level of like chemicals, which
is I think has been a real dead end for us.
Like what's the software that's running on the mind that
could possibly produce this pattern of results?

Speaker 3 (51:21):
Obviously at the end of the day, the brain is
firing off electrical signals and chemicals. Is your belief that
that software is Ultimately that's how it does what it does, right,
is through those things.

Speaker 1 (51:35):
Yes, So like often when I tell you about this,
they're like, oh, okay, so you think all psychology is
just neuroscience, And I'm like, no, ultimately it does have
to work on the machinery of neuroscience, right. But this
is just like saying, if you want to understand how
a subway system works, you're not going to talk in
terms of like atoms of like carbon and oxygen moving around.

(51:55):
You're going to talk in terms of there's trains and
stations andassengers, and all those things are made up of
smaller things. Yeah, and whatever I say about a train
has to be possible at the level of the elementary particles,
but that it makes no sense to explain it in
terms of like, oh, a massive carbon is moving. What
you want to say is the train is arriving in
the station. So there's different levels of analysis that are

(52:16):
useful for describing things that are happening in the system.
The train and station and passenger level is the one
that we're trying to get to. In psychology, got it.

Speaker 3 (52:24):
When we talk about happiness set points, sometimes people just
take that as like, well, this is just where I am.
I'm fixed, right. We do know that if we follow
your theory, it's possible that you're not at your actual
set point of happiness. You're at the point that you're
at because of these errors and the control system, and

(52:45):
we can do things to fix that. And so like
I can look at myself and be like, Okay, twenty
four I was a homeless heroin addict, which I'm going
to just make a grand interpretation here and say I
wasn't doing so well heading in of all that, Right, Yeah,
I think I can look back and go, Okay, there
was depression happening in all of that, and so I
think that I've changed obviously from there to here, and

(53:09):
then within that, I think there's this point where things
get tricky. And this gets back to kind of some
of what we talked about with your Skull full of Poison.
Let's just say that I've got my control systems kind
of working fairly well, and I'm a six. If I
keep thinking I have to be an eight, I might
be then turning myself into a four.

Speaker 1 (53:29):
Yep.

Speaker 3 (53:29):
Right, from everything that we've talked about and from your
own experience with this, how do you think about this
in navigating your own internal world?

Speaker 1 (53:38):
Yeah, so I guess one thing to say is that,
like consistency over time is in itself like not necessarily
evidence of a control system. It's consistency against disruption. So
if you put me in a cell for the rest
of my life, I'd be pretty unhappy. And you could say, like, well,
you know, I came back and checked you twenty years later,
and you were a four. Four must be your set point.

(53:58):
But actually to know that four is my set point,
you have to put me in a cell versus like
you know, I have to dive into a swimming pool
full of gold coins. Like if I'm a four across
every situation, it suggests something is trying to keep me
at a four. So when you're in a situation like,
situations can keep you at a four for a long
time if they're really strong. These things can change over time,

(54:19):
and we can see this in some of the systems
that we understand a little bit better. For instance, if
you take lithium as a psychoactive medication, which usually they
do for bipolar for a lot of people, that causes
them to gain weight. For some percentage they lose a
lot of weight. On average, they gain weight, Which is
also interesting that there's these paradoxical reactions. Right, we know
that it is possible to change the set point of
people's weight by like introducing foreign substances, So like the

(54:42):
fact that works for one control system suggests it's possible
for other ones that you can change these set points
either by introducing chemicals that at the chemical level make
things different, but you could probably also do it, you know,
at the trains and stations and passengers level, to make
things different. So I think this is what a lot
of us are trying to do when we're trying to
to live a more balanced life. Is like, Okay, this
isn't going to be a matter of what substances. I mean,

(55:04):
some of it might be a matter of what substances
I put in my body and that change my set point.
But like, what are the things that I might consistently
do that could keep me artificially lower than I might
otherwise be? Yeah, for me, some of these things are
are obvious, Like, well, if I don't sleep enough, if
I eat poorly, I'm going to be a consistently at
a lower level.

Speaker 3 (55:20):
Before we wrap up, I want you to think about this.
Have you ever ended the day feeling like your choices
didn't quite match the person you wanted to be? Maybe
it was autopilot mode or self doubt that made it
harder to stick to your goals. And that's exactly why
I created the Six Saboteurs of Self Control. It's a

(55:41):
free guide to help you recognize the hidden patterns that
hold you back and give you simple, effective strategies to
break through.

Speaker 2 (55:48):
Them.

Speaker 3 (55:49):
If you're ready to take back control and start making
lasting changes, download your copy now at oneufeed dot net
slash ebook. Let's make those shifts happen starting today one
you feed dot net slash ebook wonderful. Well, I think
this is a good place for us to wrap up.
You and I are going to continue in the post

(56:10):
show conversation because we need to talk about eating frogs
and the statement that demons are real, which seems like
an odd statement from a I guess you wouldn't call
yourself a rationalist, but a guy who's on that side
of the spectrum. Listeners. If you'd like access to this
post show conversation with Adam, as well as ad free
episodes and to support this show, then go to oneufeed

(56:34):
dot net slash join and become part of our community.
We'd love to have you there. Adam, thank you so much.
I've gotten so much pleasure out of reading your substack.
We'll have links in the show notes to where people
can get to it, and I highly recommend it.

Speaker 1 (56:47):
Thank you very much, thanks for having me.

Speaker 3 (56:48):
Thank you so much for listening to the show. If
you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I'd
love for you to share it with a friend. Sharing
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(57:10):
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