August 18, 2025 • 33 mins
Hour 1- Dr. Wendy is covering reciprocity in relationships, the dopamine debt, and how complaining is actually ruining our brain. It's all on KFIAM-640!
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
This is doctor Wendy Walsh and you're listening to k
I AM six forty the Doctor Wendy Walsh Show on
demand on the iHeartRadio app. Welcome to the Doctor Wendy
Walls Show on a KFI AM six forty five everywhere
on the iHeartRadio App. I'm doctor Wendy Walsh. If you
are new to my show, I have a PhD in
clinical psychology. I'm not a therapist. I'm a psychology professor. Oh,
(00:25):
but I'm obsessed with the science of love. So I
talk a lot about our interpersonal relationships and have I
got a story for you? You know, I've always said that
relationships are an exchange of care. Now, when you're looking
at somebody's relationship from the outside, you might be like,
I would never be with that person. They don't do this,
(00:46):
or I need my partner to do that. It doesn't matter.
It feels fair to the people inside the relationship, assuming
they have a happy relationship. Generally, we're not supposed to
be happy all the time, you know that, right anyway,
So the kinds of care that couples might exchange might
be emotional care, where they offer empathy and understanding when
(01:07):
someone's upset, or they might actively listen to their partner
and not judge them or validate their feelings like oh,
I can totally see you while you're so pissed off, right,
or just expressing affection with words you know, I love you, you
know I'm proud of you. Sometimes it's physical care that
might include dopamine rushes that you get from non sexual touch. Obviously,
(01:29):
it could be sexual intimacy. It might be comforting physical gestures,
just stroking someone's hair or rubbing their back or something right.
And then there are those practical cares. I call it
the labor of life, sharing those household chores and errands.
I have to say, I've been married just over a
year now, Julio and I have been together five years,
(01:51):
But my life feels so easy now. I always say, like,
I used to have three people in my house, and
two of them did nothing, were my kids, Because you
know what, I was a busy, tired, working single mother,
and I would come home and by the time chores
and dinner and cleaning up and all the things you
had to do for me to sit there and train
them how to be good house cleaners. I just didn't
(02:13):
have the bandwidth. I didn't have the time. I could
do it so fast myself and better. So yeah, I
raised messy kids and I had the work of three
people to do. And now that it's just Julio and
I I feel like ohing on, I'm doing dol like
the work of half a person. Right, it's really really wonderful.
So that might include sharing those household chores, managing bills, budgeting,
(02:38):
organizing schedules, cooking meals, making coffee, all that stuff. Then
there's social care, and this is really important. People forget
the value of social care. You know, I've been watching
The Gilded Age. I'm all the way through it now.
I hope they get picked up for another season. You
know why I think they are If you've ever seen
The Gilded Age on HBO Max, I think it's about
the early age of New York City, the building of
(03:00):
the railroads and the bridges, and the huge industrialists who
tried to adopt It's about old money, new money with
the old English and the new whatever, and you know
the upstairs downstairs life with the maid's lives and what
have you. But you see the division of labor when
it comes to social care. In that series, because the
(03:23):
wives are out there using their social capital, organizing their
charity events and their balls and getting tickets to the
arts programs and deciding who's going to be in and
who's going to be out, and their husbands ultimately benefit
because they do business. And it works the other way too.
Sometimes in a business meeting, they'll be like, if you
want to do this business, you better bring your wife
to my wife's ball, right, And so it's important that
(03:47):
you work together as a social unit and sometimes defending
or supporting your partner socially. One of the worst things
anybody can do in a relationship is disagree with their
partner public in a way that puts them down. Now,
I'm not talking about you know, you're out with a
bunch of friends and they say something and you go,
(04:08):
I don't know, do you think that's true? Where to
read that? Honey? I don't. Oh yeah, I'm gonna have
to look that up. I'm not sure that's different from no,
you're totally wrong, because here's what I know. You do
that in front of people and embarrass your partner, you're
probably not going to be in that relationship very long.
I've actually seen people do that and I've been like,
whoh crazy, So defending them in public is really important too.
(04:31):
And then there's intellectual care, which Julio gives me very
well because he's a brainiac and he challenges me and
I challenge him, and we ask about our ideas and
we give thoughtful feedback on things. And I will say,
of all the relationships, long term, serious relationships I've had
in my life, he's definitely the smartest. And I love that.
(04:52):
I love that. It's a very important kind of care
that I need. And then it's that health and well
being care. When we say the word care, we say
we often think like, you mean someone's sick. Well, that's
part of it. So let me get to my point.
This week, I had an emergency room visit. It turned
(05:12):
out to be nothing. It turned out to the I mean,
it was something, but it's treatable with medication. It's fine.
And the best news of it all was that I
got to have a cat scan of my entire you know,
from my shoulders down to my hips, and they looked
through with a fine tooth comb and they didn't see
any cancer cells. I'm like, hey, it's like a reset.
I get to start over. Now you know, when you
get through a test like that, you're like, wow, okay, great.
(05:36):
But they did find the thing, and the thing is
very treatable and I feel better now and everything's fine.
So but it was Julio that kept begging me to
go to the er. Let me take you, let me
take you. And I had this pain and it was
going on for a couple of weeks, and finally I
woke up one morning at four in the morning and
the pain was clearly there talking to me, going, you
got to figure this out. And Julio jumped out of
(05:57):
bed and he goes, are you're finally ready and takes
me to the hospital. Go I've never had a boyfriend. Now,
he's a husband now, but before I had boyfriends who
would do that, who would come into the room and
take notes from the nurse or the doctor and hold
my hand when they put me on the machines and
all that kind of stuff. And on the way home
from the hospital he said something that shocked me, because
(06:20):
of course I'm worried about him the whole time. I'm like,
you should eat something. I know they have no food here,
Just go go eat, Go answer your emails, go make
a phone call. It's okay, you know, because I'm just
worried about him. On the way home in the car,
he said, I'm finally going to get a great night's
sleep tonight, and I said, why, because you've been up
since four in the morning, and he goes, no, because
(06:41):
I've been losing so much sleep worrying about you. I
was just so touched that there's this other human on
the planet who worries about my well being. And I
hope that for all of you. By the way, the
psychological theory I'm talking about is called the social exchange theory,
(07:03):
and it basically says that, whether you like it or not,
quietly in the back of your mind, you're naturally tracking
a kind of balance of what you give and what
you get, and it's not always equal, right. What it
is is perceived fairness. That's why it's easy to judge
other people and go, oh, that doesn't look fair. It
feels fair to them, and that is all that matters.
(07:25):
But I'm telling you, I was over the moon with
this feeling that I am cared for, that I am safe,
that someone will take care of me, and I just
honestly wish that for everybody on the planet. Now I'm
gonna not lie to you. It took me fifty eight
years to not only learn good relationship skills, but find
(07:46):
somebody with good relationship skills to practice on. So you know,
don't worry about timing. But I want it for all
of you.
Speaker 2 (07:53):
So, maybe you are in.
Speaker 1 (07:53):
A relationship, maybe what I've just said doesn't sound like you,
or maybe it did once and now you're getting a
little bored, or you're in adultrums, or maybe your relationship
is just running on autopilot. Well, let's talk about how
so many couples today seem to be doing less and
expecting more from their relationships. When we come back, you
(08:16):
are listening to the Doctor Wendywall Show on KFI AM
six forty. We're live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. Welcome
back to the Doctor Wendywall Show on KFI AM six forty,
Live everywhere on the iHeartRadio App. I know, sometimes after
you've been in a relationship for a long time, you
(08:37):
kind of lose the dopamine high, the big romantic rush. Okay, fine,
that's cool. You know how to deal with that, add
novel to your relationship. I'd say it all the time,
But also too many of us go on autopilot. Once
we have our division of labor, whether it's physical labor,
emotional labor, social labor, intellectual labor, whatever, we just let
(09:01):
them do their piece and then we do our piece,
and then we kind of forget to connect. You know,
there was a recent survey done by the dating site eHarmony,
and they found that sixty seven percent of couples admit
that they put less effort into romance now than the
(09:24):
first year of their relationship. Well, obviously there are researchers
who look at what we call relationship maintenance, and they
like to say that it is all in the small things.
When I hear people say, oh, relationships are work, there's
so much work, I always remind you it's tiny, little
(09:45):
joyful gestures that should happen regularly, a compliment, a thoughtful text,
doing some activity together, even if you're just chopping the
vegetables for a salad. You know what, for lunch today,
I did a really naughty thing. I made homemade French fries.
(10:06):
You know. I just they were like little discs, right.
I sliced these little potatoes real thin and threw them
in some healthy oil. I help avocado oil to boil
them in some nutritionoust are right to me and tell
me that's not the one for high temperatures. I don't know.
The robot told me it was the one for right
temperatures anyway. And Julio's not a cook. But there he
(10:26):
was over my shoulder, going some of them are sticking together, honey,
let me watch this and you deal with the salad
over there, and it's those are the moments. Those are
the moments. Really, it's important that you don't wait for
a special occasion. You have to add tiny romantic acts
every day, even if it's just a text. I know
it sounds weird. You've been married for decades just to
(10:48):
send a text to your hobby. It says thinking of you.
Keep your emotional connection alive. One of the things I do,
and I think Julio appreciates it. I learned it from
my mother is every night when we have dinner, I
use crystal china, silver, a linen napkin, and I light
(11:09):
a candle and I have little jazz on our regular
Tuesday night dinners are fancy because that's how I like
to do it. It just adds the romantic ambiance. Now,
if you think social media is something like, oh, well,
I'm on with my spouse all day long, I'm sending
them dms or whatever. Well us one study says, and
(11:33):
it was published in Computers and Human Behavior, you know,
there's a journal for everything computers in Human Behavior. They
found that while couples often use social media to quote,
stay connected, heavy reliance on it for interaction was actually
associated with lower in person intimacy and higher relationship conflict.
(11:58):
So passive scrolling is not the same as shared emotional time.
So get off the social media. You know. I talked
in the last segment about the science of reciprocity, this
social exchange theory. There was a study done in twenty
twenty one. This one was published in the Journal of
(12:18):
Social and Personal Relationships, and they found that whenever remember
I said, you know, it may not look fair from
the outside, the exchange of care, but it feels fair
to the partners inside. Well, if one partner feels that
it's one sided, that they're doing all the giving and
(12:39):
the other person doing all the taking while nobody does
all but you know, in their mind they're imagining that,
then resentment starts to build up. Right, So even stable
couples get eroded over time, right, and for this time,
I just want to say this, And it's just so easy,
you guys, it's so easy. But you have to stay mindful,
(13:03):
conscious and aware of your relationship. Relationships shouldn't be work
if you sustain your love with small, consistent acts of care.
If your relationship feels like it's coasting, you are going
to be sliding backwards. You're going to start to become disconnected.
And that's when I hear from people. You know, I
(13:25):
love my husband, but I'm not in love anymore. So
it's really important that every day you say to yourself,
what is a little thing I can say or do?
And sometimes it's just a compliment.
Speaker 2 (13:34):
You know.
Speaker 1 (13:34):
I have always said that we are supposed to water
what we want to grow, not the weeds. What happens
when you've been in a long term relationship with somebody
is you start to water the weeds because you're like,
they know, I love them, we got this down. I'll
just let them know when they're not doing something right. Right.
So that's watering the weeds, giving attention to the things
(13:57):
you don't like instead of the things that you do like.
So I want you to switch your brain. And actually
later in the show, I want to talk about if
you are a negative thinker and you complain a lot,
that it can really really wreck your brain. No, seriously,
you can wreck your brain. We're talking a lot about
brain chemistry and our relationships today, but you know, I
(14:18):
want you to think of your neurochemistry as kind of
like a super highway, a network of super highways, and
the more you travel on them, those highways, the more
they become, you know, the easy way in, the easy
way out. So tomorrow morning, when you get up, I
(14:39):
want you to turn to the person you're living with,
who you love, and just simply say, good morning, darling,
good morning, honey, good morning, babe. Hey, how do you sleep?
Good to see you cuddle them. If one of you
jumps out of bed without doing this, grab them, chase
after them. Literally start with these small acts of care
(14:59):
because ultimately this is going to be the thing that
sustains you. It's the tiny things all the time. And
I used to look at couples that did that and
I thought, oh my god, there's so muchy, so romantic.
I hate that. Ugh, you know why because I was envious,
And now that I have somebody who will suddenly look
at me and go, I don't think I've really looked
(15:19):
into your beautiful eyes today. He'll say stuff like that,
or he'll say have we even kissed in the last
three hours? That's terrible. I mean he's such a romantic.
Remember his nickname for me is CEO. Apparently I'm the
CEO of the relationship and he's the romantic. All right, tomorrow,
you got it. You got your marching orders, say, Doctor
Wendy said, we're supposed to do some consistent small acts
(15:42):
of care. Shoot him at text and just thinking about you,
compliment them on something. Just do little things and the
romance will come back. All right. Speaking of which, maybe
your relationship is on an autopilot because you're suffering from
something called a dopamine debt. Yeah, a dopamine debt. I'm
(16:05):
going to explain what our iPhones and our computers and
our technology is doing to our brain and why life
now all of a sudden feels boring. Yeah, and I'm
gonna tell you how to fix it when we come back.
You're listening to The Doctor Wendy Wall Show and KFI
AM six forty. We're live everywhere on the iHeartRadio App.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
You're listening to Doctor Wendy Walsh on demand from KFI
AM six forty.
Speaker 1 (16:35):
Welcome back to the Dr Wendywall Show on KFI AM
sixty Live everywhere on the iHeartRadio App. Do you know
why they call dope dope? You know it? Dope is right,
recreational drugs. I think it was usually I don't know
what do they call weed? Dope? No, what do they
call dope back in the day, heroin, major dopey. I
(16:56):
used to think it's because it's a short form for dopamine,
because most recreational drugs increase dopamine, which is a natural
feel good neuro hormone. So I like to say that
what dopamine is, it's a brain chemical, but it kind
of acts like a messenger that creates motivation in us.
(17:20):
So dopamine isn't about actually achieving pleasure. It's the little
messenger that says, Ooh that felt good, I want to
do that again. You ever have you know that is
exactly the feeling you have after the first glass of wine. Right.
I remember talking to a girlfriend one day who liked
her wine, and she had two or three glasses every
(17:42):
night with dinner, and I said, you know, maybe she
just have one glass of wine, and she was just like,
who can have one glass of wine? Right, because that
first glass of wine knocks out the prefrontal cortex, so
to speak. And basically you get this rush of dopamine
that says, hey, that felt good, Let's do that again.
And then by the third glass of wine, you're like,
(18:02):
that felt really good, Let's do that again. And then
you're sick the next day or that night at three
in the morning. So it's motivation to get more dopamine
that makes us do things like want to check our
iPhone a lot, craving dessert even though we know sugar
is not good for us, or I love it this
way sometimes when you feel really excited to start a
(18:26):
new project. I love that I'm writing another book right now,
and I'll get into a chapter and I'll get this idea.
I'm out driving somewhere and I'll be thinking, oh, I
got to quote that study, I gotta say this, and
I'm like rush home with this kind of excitement. That's dopamine. Right.
So if you're not getting enough dopamine, you tend to
feel flat and unmotivated. Right If you get too much
(18:50):
too often, your brain actually gets numb to it, it
gets used to it. So then everyday life starts to
feel dull. And guess what. In our modern society, we
are actually over stimulating our brains with dopamine. There was
a study published in Frontiers and Human Neuroscience, and they
(19:14):
found that constant high stimulation activities like scrolling away on
TikTok and instagram, binge, watching those series rapid Fire, texting,
these activities actually flood our brain with dopamine. Feels good, right,
But if you keep doing it after a while, you
desensitize your dopamine receptors and it makes everyday things suddenly
(19:40):
start to feel dull. So there's a Stanford neuroscientist. Her
name is doctor Anna Lemke, and she wrote a book
called Dopamine Nation, and she goes back into evolutionary psychology,
my favorite area, and she says that our brain is
wired to have a reward system that evolved for survival
(20:04):
environments where pleasurable experiences like hey, finding ripe fruit, spotting
a potential cave man mate, or hearing really good news
from a friend these were rare because mostly we were
just trying to stay alive out there. We didn't take
over the planet, by the way, because we were the strongest.
We might maybe were the smartest, but we were prey
(20:26):
to a lot of animals. So life was a little
rough back in our anthropological past. So we thrived on
these short, occasional bursts of novelty, and they might have triggered,
you know, kind of spike, a moderate spike in dopamine,
and that motivated us to seek us seek this out again. Hey,
(20:46):
I've got a mate with this person, or bond with
this birth. This is what love is all about. Love
is all about trying to get more dopamine and or
maybe like, hey, I want to be able to eat
more fruit, so I've got to keep moving so I
can find another orchard, et cetera. But what we do
with our day today is, believe it or not, we're
(21:07):
not spending enough time working on survival. We're spending a
lot of time online shopping, binge watching shows. I'm going
to tell you my secret guilty pleasure. I go on
to Amazon or Wayfair and I just start putting stuff
into my shopping bag. It's usually decorating rooms, rooms that
(21:28):
I don't have to decorate by the way, maybe redecorating
or whatever, and I'll say, okay, well that lamp goes
great with that end table, and in the bed is this.
I should get that du Vey cover. And oh, there's
that little rug that's really cute. Oh I could have
that little side credenza. Maybe I could put some pretty
little candles on it. Right, And I put the whole
(21:48):
thing in my shopping bag, my little shopping cart, on
the app, and then I turn it off. That alone
gives me enough dopamine. Then later I go back days
weeks and I look at my shopping cart and I'm like,
why did I pick that? I get to get rid
of that. No, I don't want that, And most of
the time I don't even buy it. Although of course
(22:09):
those apps know that we've walked away from our dopamine rush,
because I do get little pings saying, hey, you've abandoned
your cart, or remember this, or we found another cheaper version. Oh.
I do want to say that everybody should know this.
I don't know if this is true, but it's worked
for me. Maybe I just imagined it. But did you
know that if you start putting stuff in your carts
all over the internet and it's kind of a similar thing.
(22:30):
They will start to give you, Oh she didn't like that,
she might like this one, and they'll give you sometimes
the same thing cheaper. So if you just wait it out,
you'll get the same thing cheaper. It's just my little
shopping trick. Thrown it in there. Okay, So that's how
I get my dopamine. All right. You might get it
by binge watching shows, playing gaming right online, scrolling through
(22:54):
social media, but you get used to it. So what
do you need to do. We need to stop chasing novelty,
and we need to focus. We need to take up
a hobby, something that takes a long time to focus on.
I don't care if you're quilting, knitting, gardening, volunteering, but
(23:16):
you've got to train your brain to find joy in depth,
not just novelty. And I've mentioned I have a farm
in southern Oregon and I spend some time and when
I go up there, I sit in nature. Sometimes I
just bring my coffee down by the river and sit
in my Adirondack and just listen to the nature before
(23:39):
the world wakes up. Sometimes I do gardening and yard
work that is physically exhausting, but it's focusing my brain
and I am not looking at any screen during that time. Right,
There is some research to show that simple behaviors like
moderate exercise, sunlight exposure, real world social interaction can actually
(24:03):
help your brain restore a healthy dopamine balance. So please
find a hobby, one that you can focus on in
the real world and get off those screens. Everybody, please,
please please Digital health, digital health. I actually you know,
I teach psychology of health counseling, and this upcoming semester
I added a lecture on digital health. Maybe I should
(24:26):
talk about some of this stuff too. Okay, when we
come back. Are you a complainer? I know complainers. I
know people who are complainers. I am a moderate complainer.
I'm not a heavy duty complainer. But did you know
that complaining regularly is rewiring your brain? Yes, just like
that dopamine debt, complaining becomes a freeway to negativity. Let's
(24:50):
talk about how that works and what you can do differently.
When we come back. You're listening to The Doctor Wendy
Wall Show on KFI AM six forty Live everywhere the
iHeartRadio app. Welcome back to the Doctor enty Wall Show. Okay,
five AM six forty live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. Okay,
I'm gonna get back into your relationships. If you are single,
(25:11):
stay tuned because coming up there is a new dating
trend called ghost lighting. Ghost lighting. Yeah, that's exactly what
it sounds. Not good. I'm gonna tell you what to
do about it. I'm also going to be answering your
social media questions a little later in the show. But
I want to finish my rant about how we're ruining
our brain chemistry. Please allow me that privilege. Just let
(25:33):
me rant for a little bit. Okay, Ah, that's something negative,
isn't it. Oh my gosh, I'm venting. This is not
the thing to do for my brain. Okay. I have
to say that I have been accused of being a
bit of a Pollyanna. And when I meet people who
are pessimists who look at me and think I'm an optimist.
(25:54):
They say, when I say, you're a pessimist, they say,
I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist because they really
believe their negative thinking. I, on the other hand, liked
to think of myself as an optimist, and I always
did until I met my husband Julio, because he's the
ultimate optimist, to the point that when things don't work out,
(26:18):
he's so shocked and so devastated because he only plans
for the best. He only assumes the best things are
going to happen. It's a great way to be with
somebody because he always makes me feel up and excited
and optimistic. But I have had some chats with him,
and I realize I'm not such an optimist. I'm a
(26:40):
little bit of a pessimist because I told him that
I always literally plan for the worst, and if something
good happens, I get really excited because it was so unexpected. Right.
I remember the actual day and moment as a child
when I began to program my brain this way. It
(27:00):
was cold, it was winter. I was walking to my
friend's house. I was only, these are the days where
you could be seven and eight and walk out on
the street by yourself, because it's a neighborhood and she
only lived a couple houses down. And I went around
to the back door that's usually where I entered. I
knocked at the screen door and I was holding in
my hands my invitations to my birthday party, and it
(27:24):
was for her and her sister, and I literally said oh,
are they going to be home? Are they going to
be home? If they're not home, then what do I
do do? I just walk home with these invitations in
my hand, but I want to see their faces when
I give it to them. And I remember going through
this mental wrestling about what I should imagine is going
to happen, And at that moment, I said, I'm going
(27:46):
to imagine that they are not home, that no one
will come to the door, and I will feel sad
and I will walk home and I will solve this
problem later. Literally, I was seven years old. So I
get to the back door, I knock. I hear some movements,
some rustling, someone's coming to the door, some footsteps. I
get a little bit excited. The door opens. It's the dad.
(28:10):
You know, when you're a seven year old girl, you
don't really talk to dad, like who are these people? Right?
And I didn't know what to say. I was so shy.
I just said, ooh, these are for the girls, and
he goes okay and just takes them in the screen
door and closes the door. I didn't know what to
think about that. I remember walking home, going should I
feel sad or happy? They got the invitations? But I
(28:30):
didn't get to see their happy faces and but sad
because I h I don't know. Anyway, this was the
beginning of me wiring my brain for negativity, literally planning
for the worst. Hey, it's kind of worked for me,
But I do want to say this, Somewhere along the way,
I also learned. I think it was in my first
year of graduate school that probably the most dangerous thing
(28:53):
for our psychology is what I call the victim motif
or the victim I identity. This feeling like the world
is against us and things are only going to go
bad and we are going to suffer. Now when I
meet victims, and victims are very good at getting people
to feel sorry for them, because they make it seem
(29:15):
like it's all the world's fault and they're just this
innocent person in all the negative things that are happening
to them. Now, I do want to say that sometimes
bad things happen to good people. Sometimes things that are
completely out of our control happen. But it is what
we do with those moments that is important that talks
(29:40):
about our inner strength and our self esteem. Those that
don't crumble and say, wow, look what the universe is
giving me now whoow is this going to be some
work to solve? How I'm going to figure this out?
Those are the people that actually do better as far
as mental health is concerned. But the ones who do
Why me? Why always me? I just can't catch a break.
(30:04):
Right if you start, if you go down that pathway,
if you start thinking like that, that's falling into the
victim identity, And victims are so good at attracting caregivers,
people who are who's their identity is I have to
take care of some poor person. Right, So, if you
do find yourself thinking negatively a lot, I want you
(30:29):
to understand that you're actually strengthening negative neuropathways.
Speaker 2 (30:35):
Right.
Speaker 1 (30:35):
So the more you repeat thoughts, whatever the thought may be,
like I'm a bad person, nobody likes me, I'll never
get promoted. The more this becomes a reality, it is
like a self fulfilling prophecy. In fact, one study out
of Stanford University found that when people regularly focus on
negative information, it actually shrinks a part of their brain
(30:59):
called the hip campus, and that is the part needed
for problem solving and emotional regulation. Look, bad things do happen.
We're not in completely control of everything. That happens. But
what's important is when they happen, do we have an
ability to control our emotions? Are gonna lash out at somebody,
(31:21):
We're gonna blame somebody when to hit somebody. Are we
gonna just crumble down into a ball and cry, or
are we gonna say, you know what, this is sad
and I feel grief about this, or this is really
frustrating because it's not what I had hoped. And then
you're going to kick in your prefrontal cortex and you're
(31:43):
gonna start saying, what can I do to fix this? Right? So, also,
it's not just hurting your brain if you aren't negative,
Complaining is highly contagious. One study from the research journal
the Journal of Applied Psychology that means they do research
(32:03):
and they posted in there. It showed that people's emotional states,
including negativity, spread through social networks via something called emotional contagion.
When you complain, you not only reinforce your bad mood,
but you drag down everybody around you. But you know what,
(32:24):
you can also do the opposite. You can flip it around.
You can raise the temperature in a positive way in
the room that you're in, and sometimes it convinces your
own brain that you're happy if you can ask yourself
when you enter a room, or a family, or a
dinner or with your loved one or whatever, what can
I do to make this person happier? You know? I
(32:46):
was talking to a friend of mine recently, and she's
a very positive person, and I asked her about it,
and she said, I like to believe that my purpose
in life is to find the joy in everybody. Can
you imagine getting up every morning and making that your
purpose find the joy in everybody? I love it. I'm
(33:06):
not Pollyanna. I'm a realist and I really know that
life is hard and we can still get through this
with joy. All Right. If you're single, I need you
to listen up when we come back. A new dating
trend that I think is kind of cruel. You're listening
to the Doctor Wendy Walls Show on KFI AM six
forty live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app.
Speaker 2 (33:28):
You're listening to Doctor Wendy Walsh on demand from KFI
AM six forty
This is doctor Wendy Walsh and you're listening to k
I AM six forty the Doctor Wendy Walsh Show on
demand on the iHeartRadio app. Welcome to the Doctor Wendy
Walls Show on a KFI AM six forty five everywhere
on the iHeartRadio App. I'm doctor Wendy Walsh. If you
are new to my show, I have a PhD in
clinical psychology. I'm not a therapist. I'm a psychology professor. Oh,
(00:25):
but I'm obsessed with the science of love. So I
talk a lot about our interpersonal relationships and have I
got a story for you? You know, I've always said that
relationships are an exchange of care. Now, when you're looking
at somebody's relationship from the outside, you might be like,
I would never be with that person. They don't do this,
(00:46):
or I need my partner to do that. It doesn't matter.
It feels fair to the people inside the relationship, assuming
they have a happy relationship. Generally, we're not supposed to
be happy all the time, you know that, right anyway,
So the kinds of care that couples might exchange might
be emotional care, where they offer empathy and understanding when
(01:07):
someone's upset, or they might actively listen to their partner
and not judge them or validate their feelings like oh,
I can totally see you while you're so pissed off, right,
or just expressing affection with words you know, I love you, you
know I'm proud of you. Sometimes it's physical care that
might include dopamine rushes that you get from non sexual touch. Obviously,
(01:29):
it could be sexual intimacy. It might be comforting physical gestures,
just stroking someone's hair or rubbing their back or something right.
And then there are those practical cares. I call it
the labor of life, sharing those household chores and errands.
I have to say, I've been married just over a
year now, Julio and I have been together five years,
(01:51):
But my life feels so easy now. I always say, like,
I used to have three people in my house, and
two of them did nothing, were my kids, Because you
know what, I was a busy, tired, working single mother,
and I would come home and by the time chores
and dinner and cleaning up and all the things you
had to do for me to sit there and train
them how to be good house cleaners. I just didn't
(02:13):
have the bandwidth. I didn't have the time. I could
do it so fast myself and better. So yeah, I
raised messy kids and I had the work of three
people to do. And now that it's just Julio and
I I feel like ohing on, I'm doing dol like
the work of half a person. Right, it's really really wonderful.
So that might include sharing those household chores, managing bills, budgeting,
(02:38):
organizing schedules, cooking meals, making coffee, all that stuff. Then
there's social care, and this is really important. People forget
the value of social care. You know, I've been watching
The Gilded Age. I'm all the way through it now.
I hope they get picked up for another season. You
know why I think they are If you've ever seen
The Gilded Age on HBO Max, I think it's about
the early age of New York City, the building of
(03:00):
the railroads and the bridges, and the huge industrialists who
tried to adopt It's about old money, new money with
the old English and the new whatever, and you know
the upstairs downstairs life with the maid's lives and what
have you. But you see the division of labor when
it comes to social care. In that series, because the
(03:23):
wives are out there using their social capital, organizing their
charity events and their balls and getting tickets to the
arts programs and deciding who's going to be in and
who's going to be out, and their husbands ultimately benefit
because they do business. And it works the other way too.
Sometimes in a business meeting, they'll be like, if you
want to do this business, you better bring your wife
to my wife's ball, right, And so it's important that
(03:47):
you work together as a social unit and sometimes defending
or supporting your partner socially. One of the worst things
anybody can do in a relationship is disagree with their
partner public in a way that puts them down. Now,
I'm not talking about you know, you're out with a
bunch of friends and they say something and you go,
(04:08):
I don't know, do you think that's true? Where to
read that? Honey? I don't. Oh yeah, I'm gonna have
to look that up. I'm not sure that's different from no,
you're totally wrong, because here's what I know. You do
that in front of people and embarrass your partner, you're
probably not going to be in that relationship very long.
I've actually seen people do that and I've been like,
whoh crazy, So defending them in public is really important too.
(04:31):
And then there's intellectual care, which Julio gives me very
well because he's a brainiac and he challenges me and
I challenge him, and we ask about our ideas and
we give thoughtful feedback on things. And I will say,
of all the relationships, long term, serious relationships I've had
in my life, he's definitely the smartest. And I love that.
(04:52):
I love that. It's a very important kind of care
that I need. And then it's that health and well
being care. When we say the word care, we say
we often think like, you mean someone's sick. Well, that's
part of it. So let me get to my point.
This week, I had an emergency room visit. It turned
(05:12):
out to be nothing. It turned out to the I mean,
it was something, but it's treatable with medication. It's fine.
And the best news of it all was that I
got to have a cat scan of my entire you know,
from my shoulders down to my hips, and they looked
through with a fine tooth comb and they didn't see
any cancer cells. I'm like, hey, it's like a reset.
I get to start over. Now you know, when you
get through a test like that, you're like, wow, okay, great.
(05:36):
But they did find the thing, and the thing is
very treatable and I feel better now and everything's fine.
So but it was Julio that kept begging me to
go to the er. Let me take you, let me
take you. And I had this pain and it was
going on for a couple of weeks, and finally I
woke up one morning at four in the morning and
the pain was clearly there talking to me, going, you
got to figure this out. And Julio jumped out of
(05:57):
bed and he goes, are you're finally ready and takes
me to the hospital. Go I've never had a boyfriend. Now,
he's a husband now, but before I had boyfriends who
would do that, who would come into the room and
take notes from the nurse or the doctor and hold
my hand when they put me on the machines and
all that kind of stuff. And on the way home
from the hospital he said something that shocked me, because
(06:20):
of course I'm worried about him the whole time. I'm like,
you should eat something. I know they have no food here,
Just go go eat, Go answer your emails, go make
a phone call. It's okay, you know, because I'm just
worried about him. On the way home in the car,
he said, I'm finally going to get a great night's
sleep tonight, and I said, why, because you've been up
since four in the morning, and he goes, no, because
(06:41):
I've been losing so much sleep worrying about you. I
was just so touched that there's this other human on
the planet who worries about my well being. And I
hope that for all of you. By the way, the
psychological theory I'm talking about is called the social exchange theory,
(07:03):
and it basically says that, whether you like it or not,
quietly in the back of your mind, you're naturally tracking
a kind of balance of what you give and what
you get, and it's not always equal, right. What it
is is perceived fairness. That's why it's easy to judge
other people and go, oh, that doesn't look fair. It
feels fair to them, and that is all that matters.
(07:25):
But I'm telling you, I was over the moon with
this feeling that I am cared for, that I am safe,
that someone will take care of me, and I just
honestly wish that for everybody on the planet. Now I'm
gonna not lie to you. It took me fifty eight
years to not only learn good relationship skills, but find
(07:46):
somebody with good relationship skills to practice on. So you know,
don't worry about timing. But I want it for all
of you.
Speaker 2 (07:53):
So, maybe you are in.
Speaker 1 (07:53):
A relationship, maybe what I've just said doesn't sound like you,
or maybe it did once and now you're getting a
little bored, or you're in adultrums, or maybe your relationship
is just running on autopilot. Well, let's talk about how
so many couples today seem to be doing less and
expecting more from their relationships. When we come back, you
(08:16):
are listening to the Doctor Wendywall Show on KFI AM
six forty. We're live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. Welcome
back to the Doctor Wendywall Show on KFI AM six forty,
Live everywhere on the iHeartRadio App. I know, sometimes after
you've been in a relationship for a long time, you
(08:37):
kind of lose the dopamine high, the big romantic rush. Okay, fine,
that's cool. You know how to deal with that, add
novel to your relationship. I'd say it all the time,
But also too many of us go on autopilot. Once
we have our division of labor, whether it's physical labor,
emotional labor, social labor, intellectual labor, whatever, we just let
(09:01):
them do their piece and then we do our piece,
and then we kind of forget to connect. You know,
there was a recent survey done by the dating site eHarmony,
and they found that sixty seven percent of couples admit
that they put less effort into romance now than the
(09:24):
first year of their relationship. Well, obviously there are researchers
who look at what we call relationship maintenance, and they
like to say that it is all in the small things.
When I hear people say, oh, relationships are work, there's
so much work, I always remind you it's tiny, little
(09:45):
joyful gestures that should happen regularly, a compliment, a thoughtful text,
doing some activity together, even if you're just chopping the
vegetables for a salad. You know what, for lunch today,
I did a really naughty thing. I made homemade French fries.
(10:06):
You know. I just they were like little discs, right.
I sliced these little potatoes real thin and threw them
in some healthy oil. I help avocado oil to boil
them in some nutritionoust are right to me and tell
me that's not the one for high temperatures. I don't know.
The robot told me it was the one for right
temperatures anyway. And Julio's not a cook. But there he
(10:26):
was over my shoulder, going some of them are sticking together, honey,
let me watch this and you deal with the salad
over there, and it's those are the moments. Those are
the moments. Really, it's important that you don't wait for
a special occasion. You have to add tiny romantic acts
every day, even if it's just a text. I know
it sounds weird. You've been married for decades just to
(10:48):
send a text to your hobby. It says thinking of you.
Keep your emotional connection alive. One of the things I do,
and I think Julio appreciates it. I learned it from
my mother is every night when we have dinner, I
use crystal china, silver, a linen napkin, and I light
(11:09):
a candle and I have little jazz on our regular
Tuesday night dinners are fancy because that's how I like
to do it. It just adds the romantic ambiance. Now,
if you think social media is something like, oh, well,
I'm on with my spouse all day long, I'm sending
them dms or whatever. Well us one study says, and
(11:33):
it was published in Computers and Human Behavior, you know,
there's a journal for everything computers in Human Behavior. They
found that while couples often use social media to quote,
stay connected, heavy reliance on it for interaction was actually
associated with lower in person intimacy and higher relationship conflict.
(11:58):
So passive scrolling is not the same as shared emotional time.
So get off the social media. You know. I talked
in the last segment about the science of reciprocity, this
social exchange theory. There was a study done in twenty
twenty one. This one was published in the Journal of
(12:18):
Social and Personal Relationships, and they found that whenever remember
I said, you know, it may not look fair from
the outside, the exchange of care, but it feels fair
to the partners inside. Well, if one partner feels that
it's one sided, that they're doing all the giving and
(12:39):
the other person doing all the taking while nobody does
all but you know, in their mind they're imagining that,
then resentment starts to build up. Right, So even stable
couples get eroded over time, right, and for this time,
I just want to say this, And it's just so easy,
you guys, it's so easy. But you have to stay mindful,
(13:03):
conscious and aware of your relationship. Relationships shouldn't be work
if you sustain your love with small, consistent acts of care.
If your relationship feels like it's coasting, you are going
to be sliding backwards. You're going to start to become disconnected.
And that's when I hear from people. You know, I
(13:25):
love my husband, but I'm not in love anymore. So
it's really important that every day you say to yourself,
what is a little thing I can say or do?
And sometimes it's just a compliment.
Speaker 2 (13:34):
You know.
Speaker 1 (13:34):
I have always said that we are supposed to water
what we want to grow, not the weeds. What happens
when you've been in a long term relationship with somebody
is you start to water the weeds because you're like,
they know, I love them, we got this down. I'll
just let them know when they're not doing something right. Right.
So that's watering the weeds, giving attention to the things
(13:57):
you don't like instead of the things that you do like.
So I want you to switch your brain. And actually
later in the show, I want to talk about if
you are a negative thinker and you complain a lot,
that it can really really wreck your brain. No, seriously,
you can wreck your brain. We're talking a lot about
brain chemistry and our relationships today, but you know, I
(14:18):
want you to think of your neurochemistry as kind of
like a super highway, a network of super highways, and
the more you travel on them, those highways, the more
they become, you know, the easy way in, the easy
way out. So tomorrow morning, when you get up, I
(14:39):
want you to turn to the person you're living with,
who you love, and just simply say, good morning, darling,
good morning, honey, good morning, babe. Hey, how do you sleep?
Good to see you cuddle them. If one of you
jumps out of bed without doing this, grab them, chase
after them. Literally start with these small acts of care
(14:59):
because ultimately this is going to be the thing that
sustains you. It's the tiny things all the time. And
I used to look at couples that did that and
I thought, oh my god, there's so muchy, so romantic.
I hate that. Ugh, you know why because I was envious,
And now that I have somebody who will suddenly look
at me and go, I don't think I've really looked
(15:19):
into your beautiful eyes today. He'll say stuff like that,
or he'll say have we even kissed in the last
three hours? That's terrible. I mean he's such a romantic.
Remember his nickname for me is CEO. Apparently I'm the
CEO of the relationship and he's the romantic. All right, tomorrow,
you got it. You got your marching orders, say, Doctor
Wendy said, we're supposed to do some consistent small acts
(15:42):
of care. Shoot him at text and just thinking about you,
compliment them on something. Just do little things and the
romance will come back. All right. Speaking of which, maybe
your relationship is on an autopilot because you're suffering from
something called a dopamine debt. Yeah, a dopamine debt. I'm
(16:05):
going to explain what our iPhones and our computers and
our technology is doing to our brain and why life
now all of a sudden feels boring. Yeah, and I'm
gonna tell you how to fix it when we come back.
You're listening to The Doctor Wendy Wall Show and KFI
AM six forty. We're live everywhere on the iHeartRadio App.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
You're listening to Doctor Wendy Walsh on demand from KFI
AM six forty.
Speaker 1 (16:35):
Welcome back to the Dr Wendywall Show on KFI AM
sixty Live everywhere on the iHeartRadio App. Do you know
why they call dope dope? You know it? Dope is right,
recreational drugs. I think it was usually I don't know
what do they call weed? Dope? No, what do they
call dope back in the day, heroin, major dopey. I
(16:56):
used to think it's because it's a short form for dopamine,
because most recreational drugs increase dopamine, which is a natural
feel good neuro hormone. So I like to say that
what dopamine is, it's a brain chemical, but it kind
of acts like a messenger that creates motivation in us.
(17:20):
So dopamine isn't about actually achieving pleasure. It's the little
messenger that says, Ooh that felt good, I want to
do that again. You ever have you know that is
exactly the feeling you have after the first glass of wine. Right.
I remember talking to a girlfriend one day who liked
her wine, and she had two or three glasses every
(17:42):
night with dinner, and I said, you know, maybe she
just have one glass of wine, and she was just like,
who can have one glass of wine? Right, because that
first glass of wine knocks out the prefrontal cortex, so
to speak. And basically you get this rush of dopamine
that says, hey, that felt good, Let's do that again.
And then by the third glass of wine, you're like,
(18:02):
that felt really good, Let's do that again. And then
you're sick the next day or that night at three
in the morning. So it's motivation to get more dopamine
that makes us do things like want to check our
iPhone a lot, craving dessert even though we know sugar
is not good for us, or I love it this
way sometimes when you feel really excited to start a
(18:26):
new project. I love that I'm writing another book right now,
and I'll get into a chapter and I'll get this idea.
I'm out driving somewhere and I'll be thinking, oh, I
got to quote that study, I gotta say this, and
I'm like rush home with this kind of excitement. That's dopamine. Right.
So if you're not getting enough dopamine, you tend to
feel flat and unmotivated. Right If you get too much
(18:50):
too often, your brain actually gets numb to it, it
gets used to it. So then everyday life starts to
feel dull. And guess what. In our modern society, we
are actually over stimulating our brains with dopamine. There was
a study published in Frontiers and Human Neuroscience, and they
(19:14):
found that constant high stimulation activities like scrolling away on
TikTok and instagram, binge, watching those series rapid Fire, texting,
these activities actually flood our brain with dopamine. Feels good, right,
But if you keep doing it after a while, you
desensitize your dopamine receptors and it makes everyday things suddenly
(19:40):
start to feel dull. So there's a Stanford neuroscientist. Her
name is doctor Anna Lemke, and she wrote a book
called Dopamine Nation, and she goes back into evolutionary psychology,
my favorite area, and she says that our brain is
wired to have a reward system that evolved for survival
(20:04):
environments where pleasurable experiences like hey, finding ripe fruit, spotting
a potential cave man mate, or hearing really good news
from a friend these were rare because mostly we were
just trying to stay alive out there. We didn't take
over the planet, by the way, because we were the strongest.
We might maybe were the smartest, but we were prey
(20:26):
to a lot of animals. So life was a little
rough back in our anthropological past. So we thrived on
these short, occasional bursts of novelty, and they might have triggered,
you know, kind of spike, a moderate spike in dopamine,
and that motivated us to seek us seek this out again. Hey,
(20:46):
I've got a mate with this person, or bond with
this birth. This is what love is all about. Love
is all about trying to get more dopamine and or
maybe like, hey, I want to be able to eat
more fruit, so I've got to keep moving so I
can find another orchard, et cetera. But what we do
with our day today is, believe it or not, we're
(21:07):
not spending enough time working on survival. We're spending a
lot of time online shopping, binge watching shows. I'm going
to tell you my secret guilty pleasure. I go on
to Amazon or Wayfair and I just start putting stuff
into my shopping bag. It's usually decorating rooms, rooms that
(21:28):
I don't have to decorate by the way, maybe redecorating
or whatever, and I'll say, okay, well that lamp goes
great with that end table, and in the bed is this.
I should get that du Vey cover. And oh, there's
that little rug that's really cute. Oh I could have
that little side credenza. Maybe I could put some pretty
little candles on it. Right, And I put the whole
(21:48):
thing in my shopping bag, my little shopping cart, on
the app, and then I turn it off. That alone
gives me enough dopamine. Then later I go back days
weeks and I look at my shopping cart and I'm like,
why did I pick that? I get to get rid
of that. No, I don't want that, And most of
the time I don't even buy it. Although of course
(22:09):
those apps know that we've walked away from our dopamine rush,
because I do get little pings saying, hey, you've abandoned
your cart, or remember this, or we found another cheaper version. Oh.
I do want to say that everybody should know this.
I don't know if this is true, but it's worked
for me. Maybe I just imagined it. But did you
know that if you start putting stuff in your carts
all over the internet and it's kind of a similar thing.
(22:30):
They will start to give you, Oh she didn't like that,
she might like this one, and they'll give you sometimes
the same thing cheaper. So if you just wait it out,
you'll get the same thing cheaper. It's just my little
shopping trick. Thrown it in there. Okay, So that's how
I get my dopamine. All right. You might get it
by binge watching shows, playing gaming right online, scrolling through
(22:54):
social media, but you get used to it. So what
do you need to do. We need to stop chasing novelty,
and we need to focus. We need to take up
a hobby, something that takes a long time to focus on.
I don't care if you're quilting, knitting, gardening, volunteering, but
(23:16):
you've got to train your brain to find joy in depth,
not just novelty. And I've mentioned I have a farm
in southern Oregon and I spend some time and when
I go up there, I sit in nature. Sometimes I
just bring my coffee down by the river and sit
in my Adirondack and just listen to the nature before
(23:39):
the world wakes up. Sometimes I do gardening and yard
work that is physically exhausting, but it's focusing my brain
and I am not looking at any screen during that time. Right,
There is some research to show that simple behaviors like
moderate exercise, sunlight exposure, real world social interaction can actually
(24:03):
help your brain restore a healthy dopamine balance. So please
find a hobby, one that you can focus on in
the real world and get off those screens. Everybody, please,
please please Digital health, digital health. I actually you know,
I teach psychology of health counseling, and this upcoming semester
I added a lecture on digital health. Maybe I should
(24:26):
talk about some of this stuff too. Okay, when we
come back. Are you a complainer? I know complainers. I
know people who are complainers. I am a moderate complainer.
I'm not a heavy duty complainer. But did you know
that complaining regularly is rewiring your brain? Yes, just like
that dopamine debt, complaining becomes a freeway to negativity. Let's
(24:50):
talk about how that works and what you can do differently.
When we come back. You're listening to The Doctor Wendy
Wall Show on KFI AM six forty Live everywhere the
iHeartRadio app. Welcome back to the Doctor enty Wall Show. Okay,
five AM six forty live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. Okay,
I'm gonna get back into your relationships. If you are single,
(25:11):
stay tuned because coming up there is a new dating
trend called ghost lighting. Ghost lighting. Yeah, that's exactly what
it sounds. Not good. I'm gonna tell you what to
do about it. I'm also going to be answering your
social media questions a little later in the show. But
I want to finish my rant about how we're ruining
our brain chemistry. Please allow me that privilege. Just let
(25:33):
me rant for a little bit. Okay, Ah, that's something negative,
isn't it. Oh my gosh, I'm venting. This is not
the thing to do for my brain. Okay. I have
to say that I have been accused of being a
bit of a Pollyanna. And when I meet people who
are pessimists who look at me and think I'm an optimist.
(25:54):
They say, when I say, you're a pessimist, they say,
I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist because they really
believe their negative thinking. I, on the other hand, liked
to think of myself as an optimist, and I always
did until I met my husband Julio, because he's the
ultimate optimist, to the point that when things don't work out,
(26:18):
he's so shocked and so devastated because he only plans
for the best. He only assumes the best things are
going to happen. It's a great way to be with
somebody because he always makes me feel up and excited
and optimistic. But I have had some chats with him,
and I realize I'm not such an optimist. I'm a
(26:40):
little bit of a pessimist because I told him that
I always literally plan for the worst, and if something
good happens, I get really excited because it was so unexpected. Right.
I remember the actual day and moment as a child
when I began to program my brain this way. It
(27:00):
was cold, it was winter. I was walking to my
friend's house. I was only, these are the days where
you could be seven and eight and walk out on
the street by yourself, because it's a neighborhood and she
only lived a couple houses down. And I went around
to the back door that's usually where I entered. I
knocked at the screen door and I was holding in
my hands my invitations to my birthday party, and it
(27:24):
was for her and her sister, and I literally said oh,
are they going to be home? Are they going to
be home? If they're not home, then what do I
do do? I just walk home with these invitations in
my hand, but I want to see their faces when
I give it to them. And I remember going through
this mental wrestling about what I should imagine is going
to happen, And at that moment, I said, I'm going
(27:46):
to imagine that they are not home, that no one
will come to the door, and I will feel sad
and I will walk home and I will solve this
problem later. Literally, I was seven years old. So I
get to the back door, I knock. I hear some movements,
some rustling, someone's coming to the door, some footsteps. I
get a little bit excited. The door opens. It's the dad.
(28:10):
You know, when you're a seven year old girl, you
don't really talk to dad, like who are these people? Right?
And I didn't know what to say. I was so shy.
I just said, ooh, these are for the girls, and
he goes okay and just takes them in the screen
door and closes the door. I didn't know what to
think about that. I remember walking home, going should I
feel sad or happy? They got the invitations? But I
(28:30):
didn't get to see their happy faces and but sad
because I h I don't know. Anyway, this was the
beginning of me wiring my brain for negativity, literally planning
for the worst. Hey, it's kind of worked for me,
But I do want to say this, Somewhere along the way,
I also learned. I think it was in my first
year of graduate school that probably the most dangerous thing
(28:53):
for our psychology is what I call the victim motif
or the victim I identity. This feeling like the world
is against us and things are only going to go
bad and we are going to suffer. Now when I
meet victims, and victims are very good at getting people
to feel sorry for them, because they make it seem
(29:15):
like it's all the world's fault and they're just this
innocent person in all the negative things that are happening
to them. Now, I do want to say that sometimes
bad things happen to good people. Sometimes things that are
completely out of our control happen. But it is what
we do with those moments that is important that talks
(29:40):
about our inner strength and our self esteem. Those that
don't crumble and say, wow, look what the universe is
giving me now whoow is this going to be some
work to solve? How I'm going to figure this out?
Those are the people that actually do better as far
as mental health is concerned. But the ones who do
Why me? Why always me? I just can't catch a break.
(30:04):
Right if you start, if you go down that pathway,
if you start thinking like that, that's falling into the
victim identity, And victims are so good at attracting caregivers,
people who are who's their identity is I have to
take care of some poor person. Right, So, if you
do find yourself thinking negatively a lot, I want you
(30:29):
to understand that you're actually strengthening negative neuropathways.
Speaker 2 (30:35):
Right.
Speaker 1 (30:35):
So the more you repeat thoughts, whatever the thought may be,
like I'm a bad person, nobody likes me, I'll never
get promoted. The more this becomes a reality, it is
like a self fulfilling prophecy. In fact, one study out
of Stanford University found that when people regularly focus on
negative information, it actually shrinks a part of their brain
(30:59):
called the hip campus, and that is the part needed
for problem solving and emotional regulation. Look, bad things do happen.
We're not in completely control of everything. That happens. But
what's important is when they happen, do we have an
ability to control our emotions? Are gonna lash out at somebody,
(31:21):
We're gonna blame somebody when to hit somebody. Are we
gonna just crumble down into a ball and cry, or
are we gonna say, you know what, this is sad
and I feel grief about this, or this is really
frustrating because it's not what I had hoped. And then
you're going to kick in your prefrontal cortex and you're
(31:43):
gonna start saying, what can I do to fix this? Right? So, also,
it's not just hurting your brain if you aren't negative,
Complaining is highly contagious. One study from the research journal
the Journal of Applied Psychology that means they do research
(32:03):
and they posted in there. It showed that people's emotional states,
including negativity, spread through social networks via something called emotional contagion.
When you complain, you not only reinforce your bad mood,
but you drag down everybody around you. But you know what,
(32:24):
you can also do the opposite. You can flip it around.
You can raise the temperature in a positive way in
the room that you're in, and sometimes it convinces your
own brain that you're happy if you can ask yourself
when you enter a room, or a family, or a
dinner or with your loved one or whatever, what can
I do to make this person happier? You know? I
(32:46):
was talking to a friend of mine recently, and she's
a very positive person, and I asked her about it,
and she said, I like to believe that my purpose
in life is to find the joy in everybody. Can
you imagine getting up every morning and making that your
purpose find the joy in everybody? I love it. I'm
(33:06):
not Pollyanna. I'm a realist and I really know that
life is hard and we can still get through this
with joy. All Right. If you're single, I need you
to listen up when we come back. A new dating
trend that I think is kind of cruel. You're listening
to the Doctor Wendy Walls Show on KFI AM six
forty live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app.
Speaker 2 (33:28):
You're listening to Doctor Wendy Walsh on demand from KFI
AM six forty
Dr. Wendy Walsh on Demand News
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