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Many nutrients and amino acids in your brain can affect the way you feel. You may feel alert after eating something with high amounts of protein, or calm after carbs. Eating certain foods can give you long lasting energy where you can feel good for a long time, while other foods can give you a quick burst of energy and then go as soon as it came leaving you feeling down or tired.

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Anxiety is a common response when you are facing problems in life in different situations. A lot of people face anxiety but it is a lot easier to overcome than anxiety disorder, because it is not as lasting compared to it. On top of that Anxiety disorder causes irrational decisions, heavy mood swings, feeling anxious more often and with more effect.

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You consume a variety of nutrients in the food you eat, and the types of nutrients help certain systems and parts of your body. However, when theres too much of one nutrient and not enough of another, it can reduce our brain efficiency. We can improve our brain function and boost our mood by being more conscious of what we eat and what nutrients are in it.

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There are 2 types of anxiety that I would like to talk about. One is normal anxiety and the other is anxiety disorder. Normal anxiety can occur when your anxious about daily events such as friends, test and sports. These are known as direct stressors and is very common and occurs in all human beings on a day to day basis. Anxiety disorder is diagnosed when someone is always anxious and is in an anxious state often. The symptoms for these are fidgeting, lose of sleep and feeling hyperactive. The amygdala is being activated because it feels as if it is in danger. Overall we should look out for people with anxiety and do what we can to help.

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Anxiety is a constant part of life that occurs anytime we feel threatened or discomforted, however, anxiety is a more severe and complicated form of anxiety that negatively impacts your life and hurts you long term.

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Anxiety disorder will happen more often and the anxiety will last longer than it would for a person without the disorder. However anxiety is a natural reaction that will happen when you are nervous.

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The brain is nutritionally composed of fats, proteins, amino acids, micronutrients, and glucose. Omegas are fats that are essential to maintaining optimal maintenance of cells, while trans and saturated fats are capable of hindering the brain. Proteins and amino acids control a person's emotions, micronutrients produce many benefits for the brain, and carbohydrates supply the energy for the brain to function. A balanced diet that includes all these nutrients ensures that your brain obtains an equal share of all the advantages, and that your mood does not become susceptible to fluctuation. Your choice of diet has a long-lasting effect on the health and preservation of your brain.

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Normal anxiety can just be day to day worries about direct stressors such as tests, friends and other things. Anxiety disorder is often diagnosed and is when someone is in a constant state of anxiety where they might avoid certain people or situations to avoid triggers. Both types of anxiety can cause symptoms such as trouble sleeping, tense muscles, fidgeting, feeling hyperactive or hypoactive, mind racing, procrastination, etc. It is the amygdala being activated where it thinks you are in danger. The difference is for anxiety disorder, it is constant and regular anxiety is not.

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60 SECOND BREATHING:

this technique helps to calm down a person because when someone is having anxiety they tend to breathe faster and worry a lot but when you do deep breathing, you clam down the frequency you breathe in.

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Anxiety is your body reacting without you knowing it, often a reaction from a shoking event, a news or a threat, but it's ment to be evolutionarily advantageous, but it can regularly, in that case it is likly to be a disorder, if anxiety became often, and without defined triggers, it can be a problem when you are preforming everyday tasks. Anxiety disorder can cause worryng thoughts to apear out of no where, with no order and patterns, some time it can be worrying throughs, itm ight leads to urgancy to do a certan event. Normal anxiety often is temporary, but if left untreated, an disorder can linger long past the accually truama.

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Anxiety disorder is very frequent, uncontrollable, and more intense than common anxiety. Common anxiety is a normal reaction to huge events that occur in your life, such as conquering a fear or speaking in a huge crowd because you think people are judging you all the time. Anxiety disorder feels like there is a constant crowd staring at you judging you, insulting you, and yelling at you.

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Anxiety is fear or worry about a threat or a problem and it can last as much as the worry is happening but the anxiety disorder lasts a bit longer but has the same reasons

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Everyone can experience anxiety, and most people can control it. However, it may be a sign of an anxiety disorder when it gets frequent, uncontrollable, and intense, to the point where it distracts and lingers in your daily routines.

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normal anxiety is that sometimes because of something you felt nervous. anxiety disoder is that you always felt nervous.

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When you eat different types of food, your brain reacts differently. For example, if you eat lots of bread, it gives you sudden bursts of glucose which will elevate your mood for a short period of time but then your mood will drop suddenly giving you mood swings (not good for mental health). On the other hand, if you eat carbohydrates like oats and grains, it gives you a steady increase in glucose which can increase your attention span making it easier for you to concentrate.

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Depending on the nutrients we consume, our body can do and feel different things, but when the amount of different nutrients is not balanced our brain may not work as good. If we get enough sleep and enough of each nutrient, it can help our brain work better and increase our mood.

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Omega-3, omega-6, and amino acids play important role on maintaining our cell membranes. Proteins and amino acids can control our feelings and behaviour. If you don't consume enough carbohydrate, eventually there will be change on your mental functions.

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Food contains nutrients that are essential for our physical and mental health. Different food provides us with different nutrients. This is why having a variety of nutrients and a balanced diet help cope with our brain.

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Normal Anxiety classifies as a normal occurrence in our daily lives. It can occur when we have exams, meet new people, competitions, etc. The symptoms of normal anxiety are temporary. The symptoms consist of anxiousness, difficulty focusing, lack of sleep, and constant fiddling.

Severe Anxiety classifies as a disorder and must be dealt with immediately in the appropriate manner. The symptoms consist of anxiety attacks and sudden behavior change. This type of anxiety can occur over serious incidents/events.

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Eating omega-rich foods for cell membrane and brain health, while long-term consumption of saturated fats may compromise brain health, also amino acids contain the leaders to neurotransmitters the chemical messengers that carry signals between affecting things like mood and sleep.

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Based on the types of food your body takes in, it would help you in different ways and can help your brain function better. When you are feeling anxious, many people struggle with breathing. When we breathe our lungs expand.

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Normal anxiety is a response caused by stress. They are more common and are short-lasting. Whereas anxiety disorder is when anxiety is experienced daily. It can have a long lasting effect and may cause one to overthink.

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Anxiety is a normal, day-to-day reaction to things that make us feel worried or scared, while an anxiety disorder is when you start feel that way more often and it becomes an obstacle for your everyday life.

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Normal anxiety is part of our daily lives. It makes us be cautious about the potential dangers around us. On the other hand, anxiety disorder is where you have high-intensity anxiety or almost like a panic that affects our physical behaviour.

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Anxiety is a natural reaction to things that make us feel uncomfortable or stressed, most of us can move on from anxiety and get over it easily. But anxiety disorder is when you experience these symptoms frequently.

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Based on the nutrients in the food, it helps our body do different things but when theres too much of one nutrient and not enough of another, it can decrease our brain efficiency. When we are more deliberate in our choices with food and sleep, it can enhance our brain function and increase our mood.

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With anxiety, our bodies react to "threatening" stimuli, including life events or unanticipated changes. Everyone frequently encounteres these. But anxiety problems are common and severe, interfering with day-to-day activities. The overactivity of the amygdala leads to several illnesses.

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fats, proteins, amino acids, micronutrients, and glucose are essential components of brain health. Omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids are important for maintaining cell membranes and preventing degenerative brain conditions. Proteins and amino acids influence neurotransmitter production, affecting mood and behavior. Micronutrients like antioxidants and vitamins B6, B12, and folic acid are crucial for brain function and protection against diseases. Carbohydrates provide energy to the brain, with different types affecting blood sugar levels and attention span differently. Opting for a varied diet of nutrient-rich foods is emphasized for sustained brain power and overall health.

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When we consume food, it affects our brain to release chemicals like dopamine. It is why we feel differently after eating. certain foods. Different food causes our emotions to be different. Our diet choices can also have serious affects on the health of our brain.

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The difference between normal anxiety and anxiety disorders: Normal anxiety usually goes away after some time, while anxiety disorders last longer. Anxiety disorders happen when the part of the brain called the amygdala becomes too active and leads people to make decisions without thinking carefully, which might cause them to have the feeling of involving a persistent feeling of anxiety or dread.

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anxiety is a common feeling of unease that occurs when you react to stressful situations throughout the day. However, an anxiety disorder is excessive worrying which can disrupt your decisions and performance in daily activities

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Anxiety is explained as a natural response related to fear that is due to the amygdala and hippocampus and triggered. but in some individuals, it becomes chronic and disruptive, that's when anxiety become a disorder. Normal anxiety and anxiety disorder can put the body into a panic and fight or flight, but anxiety disorder occurs very frequently often over small things.

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Anxiety is when people are worried about money, people or family problems but anxiety disorder is like a temporary worry or fear. Anxiety disorders don't really get better but get worse over time. The symptoms are mostly the same.

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The difference between normal anxiety and anxiety disorder is the level of emotion you feel and how long it lasts. Normal anxiety is temporary and your anxiety is towards something specific. Maybe you're anxious about a test or a competition. However, an anxiety disorder is when you are constantly anxious and your emotions can be so severe that it can affect your behaviors and everyday life.

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Anxiety is our reactions to a possible threat but when itrs a constnt state of worry that doesn't go away and can affect daily function.

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Anxiety is a response to a uncertain threat, it is common to experience it and people recover over time. However an Anxiety disorder occurs more frequent, they experience intense emotions that they cannot control. These will affect their daily lives.

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Anxiety is the bodies response to something "threatening", such as life events or unexpected changes. Everyone experiences these. However, anxiety disorders are frequent and severe, which disrupts daily life. These disorders happen when the amygdala is overactive.

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Normal anxiety is a normal emotion humans feel when they are in a stressful situation. When you have normal anxiety the brain sends defensive signals to the body and puts your brain into high alertness ( flight or fight response). However, anxiety disorders are when your normal anxiety goes overdrive. With an anxiety disorder, the anxiety will always be there annoying and pestering you which can disrupt your work, schoolwork, relationships, etc. Since the anxiety is always there, you will feel more worried even when there is nothing to worry about.

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The difference between normal anxiety and diagnosed anxiety is that normal anxiety is a normal emotion that everyone feels at more than once in their life, but diagnosed anxiety is a mental condition where you are extra anxious a lot

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The difference between normal anxiety and anxiety disorders is that normal anxiety fades away and does not persist as long as anxiety disorders. Anxiety disorders occur when the amygdala becomes hyperactive and causes people to make mindless decisions.

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Normal anxiety is a normal emotion, and we feel it in a stressful situations. It is also a response to more uncertain threats.

An anxiety disorder is not all uncommon, and there are different types of anxiety disorder.

There may be difference between how their brain works.

- Riko

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The difference between normal anxiety and anxiety disorder is that normal anxiety is a normal emotion everyone experiences once in their life, it doesn't last long and anxiety disorder is a mental condition.

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an difference between normal anxiety and an disorder is that normal anxiety does not really last but with a disorder it stays.

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The difference between anxiety and an anxiety disorder is that their amygdala is overactive, they avoid things they like, anxiety impacts daily functioning, and they sweat and feel tense.

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Anxiety is a reaction when there is a perceived threat, but this is only for a short amount of time. Anxiety disorder is frequent, and it can disrupt daily activities.

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an difference between normal anxiety and and an anxiety disorder is that normal anxiety goes away after some time but of you have an disorder it does not go away.

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anxiety disorders is where the amygdala goes into hyper drive, avoidance of situations or people, and impacts your daily function.

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The difference between normal anxiety and an anxiety disorder is that normal anxiety doesn't last as long as an anxiety disorder where the amygdala is overactive and tends to make irrational decisions to avoid feeling anxious and triggering the feeling

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A difference between an anxiety disorder and normal anxiety, is basically, anxiety disorder is when you have anxiety, but worse and it lasts more longer, than normal anxiety would, normal anxiety would just come and go when someone gets anxious.

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When faced with stress or a perceived threat, anxiety is a common and often adaptive reaction. It's a normal aspect of life that everyone encounters to some extent. Anxiety can appear as uneasiness, trepidation, or worry.

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Anxiety is a normal reaction to major life events. While we all experience stress or anxiety from time to time, most of us recover. Anxiety disorder is so frequent, intense, and uncontrollable that it disrupts daily activities that may indicate an anxiety disorder.

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Practice :)

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The 5-4-3-2-1 Method: A Grounding Exercise to Manage Anxiety

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Grounding Exercise for Anxiety and Overwhelm: Calming Raindrops with Dora Kamau

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Kwik Brain: My 10 Favorite Brain Foods (Episode 5)

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10 BEST BRAIN FOODS | Improve Alertness, Focus and Memory

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CHOOSE 2 VIDEOS TO WATCH. ANSWER QUESTION.

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CHOOSE 2 VIDEOS TO WATCH. ANSWER QUESTION.

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Using details learned from the videos you watched, how does our body respond to food, breathing, and/or exercise? How does being more deliberate in our choices improve our emotional/mental health?

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How the food you eat affects your brain - Mia Nacamulli

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How Does Food Impact Mental/Emotional Health?

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How Does Food Impact Mental/Emotional Health?

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Wendy Suzuki: The brain-changing benefits of exercise | TED

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How does breathing impact the brain? How can we use breathing to calm our stress and anxiety?

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A Neuroscientist Explains How Breathing Impacts the Brain

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Every weekday, TED Talks Daily brings you the latest talks in audio. Join host and journalist Elise Hu for thought-provoking ideas on every subject imaginable -- from Artificial Intelligence to Zoology, and everything in between -- given by the world's leading thinkers and creators. With TED Talks Daily, find some space in your day to change your perspectives, ignite your curiosity, and learn something new.

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About › Programs & Initiatives › TED Talks ›

Every weekday, TED Talks Daily brings you the latest talks in audio. Join host and journalist Elise Hu for thought-provoking ideas on every subject imaginable -- from Artificial Intelligence to Zoology, and everything in between -- given by the world's leading thinkers and creators. With TED Talks Daily, find some space in your day to change your perspectives, ignite your curiosity, and learn something new.

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TED Talks Daily brings you the latest TED talks in audio. Join host and journalist Elise Hu for thought-provoking ideas on every subject imaginable, given by the world's leading thinkers and creators.

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Will and Mango have lots of questions. Will we ever live without sleep? How do rats keep outsmarting humans? Join these Part-Time Geniuses as they dive into ridiculous topics... and discover some pretty smart stuff along the way.

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Will and Mango have lots of questions. Will we ever live without sleep? How do rats keep outsmarting humans? Where are the sunniest tax havens to hide your money? Join these Part-Time Geniuses as they dive into ridiculous topics... and discover some pretty smart stuff along the way.

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Why Doesn't Our Heart Hurt When We Exercise? 

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Why Doesn't Our Heart Hurt When We Exercise? 

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From Ten Percent Happier: The Dalai Lama’s Guide to Happiness | Part 1 - The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos

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Here’s a preview of another podcast we love, Ten Percent Happier. Host Dan Harris flies to Dharamsala, India to spend two weeks in the orbit of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. This is the first installment of a five-part audio documentary series. Over the course of the episodes, Dan talks to His Holine…

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The transcript below may be for an earlier version of this episode. Our transcripts are provided by various partners and may contain errors or deviate slightly from the audio.
Shankar Vedantam: This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. At the Olympic Games in 2021, one athlete arrived in Tokyo with a mountain of expectations on her four foot, eight inch frame.Sports announcer 1: Five medals in Rio, four of them gold, and could do even better than that this time around here in Tokyo.Sports announcer 2: If you don't think that that's hard, then you really don't understand gymnastics.Shankar Vedantam: People didn't just expect her to win gold medals in gymnastics, they expected magic.Sports announcer 3: So I mean, she has just set herself so far apart from the rest of the field and not just on the competition floor.Sports announcer 4: Simone Biles, representing the United States of America.Sports announcer 5: Simone Biles' pursuit of history starts tonight.Shankar Vedantam: Four days into the games, Simone Biles pulled out of the competition.Simone Biles: I've just never felt like this going into a competition before and I tried to go out here and have fun. And warm up in the back, went a little bit better, but then once I came out here, I was like, "No, mental is not there."Shankar Vedantam: The world was stunned. An athlete with seemingly otherworldly powers was struggling. From the outside looking in it seemed hard to understand and it raised a question, if a world champion can be toppled by these emotions, what is does it mean for the rest of us? This week on Hidden Brain, the strange psychology of the voice inside our heads that says the world may think you are amazing, but you are really just a fraud.Shankar Vedantam: It's hard to see ourselves clearly. This is true in all manner of situations, but it can be especially true when we are confronting a challenge. At such moments, many of us start to doubt ourselves. We think we are unequal to the task. At the University of Texas at Austin, Kevin Cokley researches the psychology of self doubt. He studies the corrosive effects these doubts can have on our wellbeing, but also how we might turn our internal misgivings into an ally. Kevin Cokley, welcome to Hidden Brain.Kevin Cokley: Thank you for having me.Shankar Vedantam: Kevin, you're a psychologist who studies the phenomenon of self doubt, yet you yourself have not been immune to such doubts. I want to take you back to when you were 29 years old, you had just completed your PhD, you had begun teaching, can you describe the fears that went through your mind as you prepared for class each day?Kevin Cokley: Yes. I was a young assistant professor at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale and I can recall very vividly the feeling that I had walking the hallways of the psychology department there and seeing on the walls these publications by my new colleagues, very accomplished colleagues and I had come out of graduate school with having only one publication. I believe that I was hired on the basis that people saw potential in me, particularly in terms of my teaching, but I knew that I had a lot to prove in terms of research. And so when I was walking those hallways I had this sense of, wow, can I do this? And it was incredibly stressful. It sort of had me doubting whether in fact I belonged, whether I deserved to be there, and I was aware that I was one of only a few black professors at the university. And so I did not want to do anything that would result in students seeing me or believing me to not be qualified to be the professor. So I made sure that I wore sports coats and wore ties to class every day. I had a briefcase that I bought because in my mind a professor carries a briefcase. And so I was really working hard to project an image of expertise and authority that I imagined professors needing to represent.Shankar Vedantam: I understand that one way your self-doubt manifested was that you were worried about misspeaking in class, saying something wrong. And I'm wondering when you imagine making a mistake like that, what was the worst case scenario that ran through your head?Kevin Cokley: Speaking in front of a large introductory class, psychology class, I thought, man, I cannot stand here and misspeak. I need to make sure that I'm conjugating my verbs correctly. I need to make sure that I'm enunciating every word exactly correctly. And so for me, the worst case scenario would've been to be lecturing and to say something incorrectly and then to have my students questioning my authority and ability to be an effective professor, and so for me that was a worst case scenario.Shankar Vedantam: You've been a professor for a while now, you clearly know what you're doing, you have a lengthy publication record, have your self doubts gone away?Kevin Cokley: That's a good question. It depends on the day that you ask me the question. When I'm speaking to people and when people are introducing me and they're reading my accolades, on the one hand I feel pretty good about what I've been able to accomplish, but there are still some days when I find myself doubting: would I have the expertise to be able to speak in front of people. And when I talk to my students about this, they find it amazing because they have Dr. Kevin Cokley on somewhat of an academic pedestal. And when I tell them that even Dr. Cokley sometimes still suffers and still wonders about my deservedness to be in the position that I'm in, they are surprised. So I do still have those experiences.Shankar Vedantam: So Kevin, it looks like you yourself are a walking example of this phenomenon that you have studied for many years, in popular culture it's called the imposter syndrome. Now, you think that term is overly clinical, you prefer the term imposter phenomenon. Can you describe for me what the imposter phenomenon is?Kevin Cokley: The imposter phenomenon is basically the sentiment that one is being intellectually fraudulent. It's the idea that individuals who are very accomplished, very competent, very intelligent people, nevertheless feel like they are fooling people. They believe that they are not nearly as smart and competent as their accomplishments would suggest.Shankar Vedantam: So we're going to talk about the factors that produce these kinds of self-doubt and what we can do about these misgivings, but I want to start by looking at the different dimensions of self-doubt because when you start to peel this onion, it turns out to be a really complex phenomenon. I want to play you a clip of the actress Viola Davis talking to the CBS program 60 Minutes.Viola Davis: I don't know if it's healthy or not, I'm just saying that it's something that I recognize in all the artists I've worked with. It's in all of them. So I know the language of the artist and the language of the artist is someone's going to find me out. I may not be as great as people think I am.Shankar Vedantam: "I may not be as great as people think I am." So one dimension of self-doubt here is that you worry that others might have an inflated sense of how good you are, that you might not be able to live up to those expectations?Kevin Cokley: Yeah, that is one of the hallmark traits of imposter feelings. When you have friends and colleagues telling you how great you are and saying all of these nice and wonderful things about you, you find yourself just wondering, can I live up to these lofty expectations? And you can't help but sort of feel that I can't live up to that. So when Viola Davis made those remarks, it really sort of represented some of the classic hallmark signs of imposterism.Shankar Vedantam: Mm-hmm (affirmative). So I'm wondering if this might be especially acute for an actor, but I think all of us might experience some version of this. When you're shooting a movie, they don't show the audience all the takes when someone flubbed a line or made a mistake, so Viola Davis thinks that we, the audience, associate her with the perfection of the role she's playing on the screen, what we see on the screen. She, on the other hand, knows the whole picture, all the mistakes, the off days, and she worries that our picture of her and her picture of her might not match.Kevin Cokley: You are absolutely correct. What we see is the sort of perfected version of who she is as an actress. What we don't see are, as you said, the many outtakes that I'm sure she's had to go through in order to get, finally, the perfect scene. Again, I mean, it's the idea that one needs to try to be perfect because you believe that people sometimes see you as being perfect when you know that to not be true about yourself.Shankar Vedantam: Mm-hmm (affirmative). So Viola Davis was asked to play the role of Michelle Obama in a Showtime series titled, The First Lady, and she described Michelle Obama as a goddess. I want to look at the next dimension of self doubt and play you a clip. Here is Michelle Obama talking about a question that goes through her own mind all the time.Michelle Obama: Am I good enough? That's a question that has dogged me for a good part of my life. Am I good enough to have all of this? Am I good enough to be the First Lady of the United States? And I think that many women and definitely many young girls of all backgrounds walk around with that question. I still feel that at some level I have something to prove because of the color of my skin, because of the shape of my body, because of who knows how people are judging me.Shankar Vedantam: So I feel like Michelle Obama is speaking to another dimension of self-doubt, and perhaps this is similar to your own experience with self-doubt as a 29 year old assistant professor, and this form of self-doubt is not that other people think too highly of you, but the fear that other people might think that you're a fraud.Kevin Cokley: Yeah, and I found myself smiling because that is the exact clip that I use in every imposter phenomenon talk that I give. I was actually saying the words along with her as she was saying it, but yeah, no, you're right in this instance she's talking about the feelings of self-doubt that she has about herself, but that are really rooted in, I would argue, societal views about people who look like her, people whom she would represent.Shankar Vedantam: Now, you might think that one form of self defense against these feelings is to just simply prove you are very good, but it turns out that doesn't always work. The poet Maya Angelou won three Grammys for her spoken word albums. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. If she had never written another word in her life, her reputation would've been secure, but you've talked about how she was also plagued by self-doubt.Kevin Cokley: Yeah, she talks about having published 11 books and still finding herself wondering, uh-oh, they're going to find me out. And when I talk about her, I say, "Look, she is Maya freaking Angelou. She is one of the greatest poets that we've ever experienced and yet, even Maya Angelou has had these feelings of being found out, that she is somehow fraudulent and fooling people." And so she is a beautiful example of someone who has achieved at the very highest level, nevertheless still feeling as though they are fraudulent.Shankar Vedantam: I'm struck by the similarities between self-doubt and conspiracy theories, go along with me for just a second here. On the surface these are very different ideas, but one thing that unites them is that if you're plagued by self out or you subscribe to a conspiracy theory, the evidence does not disabuse you of your belief. So in the case of a conspiracy theory, you find ways to discount the evidence that contradicts the theory and in the case of self-doubt, as with Maya Angelou, no amount of past evidence that you're talented seems to convince you that your fears are not warranted.Kevin Cokley: No, I mean, that's absolutely right and in fact, it almost kind of reminds me of that social psychological concept of confirmation bias. You are more oriented toward finding evidence that supports the contrary, that would support the idea of you not being competent, even though again, your accomplishments would suggest otherwise. So I can actually see the connection.Shankar Vedantam: Yeah. There's one last dimension of self-doubt that I want to place on the table. The actor Tom Hanks has long been one of Hollywood's biggest stars, but like Viola Davis he has said that he also worries that he is soon going to be found out.Tom Hanks: No matter who we are, no matter what we've done, there comes a point where you think, how did I get here and am I going to be able to continue this? When are they going to discover that I am in fact a fraud and take everything away from me? It's a high wire act that we all walk. And I do this in the work that I do because there are days when I know that three o'clock tomorrow afternoon I am going to have to deliver some degree of emotional goods, and if I can't do it, that means I'm going to have to fake it. And if I fake it, that means they may catch me at faking it. And if they catch me at faking it, well, then it's just doomsday.Shankar Vedantam: What strikes me in this clip, Kevin, is another dimension of self-doubt, and we've discussed this elsewhere on Hidden Brain, many of us subject ourselves to the kind of scrutiny and criticism we would never dream of aiming at other people. Can you talk a moment about the harshness of our inner critic? Are you yourself harder on you than you are on other people?Kevin Cokley: Yeah, I think that's a really good question and I know that certainly I can see elements of that in myself when I've done something that is noteworthy and for which I should be proud of, and nevertheless I can still find reasons to be critical of it, to find reasons to not be as happy about it, or excited about it, or to sort of embrace it as a worthy accomplishment. And so being our own harsh critics that's something that I see, that I can hear in what Tom Hanks said, and certainly I can see elements of that in myself.Shankar Vedantam: Yeah. There's a theme that runs through many of the examples of imposter phenomenon that we have discussed. Maya Angelou, who's sort of written 11 books thinks that she's a fraud. The writer John Steinbeck is supposed to have once written something very similar. He wrote, "I'm not a writer. I've been fooling myself and other people." And even the physicist Albert Einstein is supposed to have once called himself an "involuntary swindler." Now, on the surface all of this seems incomprehensible. If you've written amazing books, if you've reinvented the world of physics, how can you think of yourself as a cheat and a swindler? Why do you think it is that people who are plagued by self doubt cannot see the brilliance that is plain for us to see when we look in from the outside?Kevin Cokley: I think that's the million dollar question. I mean, that's something that we are still in many ways trying to figure out. But what I will say is that if you've come from environments where you were sort of complimented on things unrelated to your intelligence, let's say that you were someone who was very socially skilled, let's say you were someone who was very sort of athletic and all you ever heard from people, family, and friends was about your prowess in those areas, but you never receive feedback about your intelligence, then part of that can result in you internalizing this idea that, maybe you're not that smart, maybe your talents lie elsewhere. That's part of the origins of these feelings.Shankar Vedantam: Even the most successful people among us doubt their abilities from time to time, self-doubt can be so powerful that it makes us feel like frauds in our own lives. When we come back, the origins of self-doubt and what we can do about that negative voice in our heads. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.Shankar Vedantam: This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Lots of smart, talented, accomplished people harbor self-doubt. They worry they are frauds and imposters even when they have ample evidence there is no need for such fear. At the University of Texas at Austin, psychologist Kevin Cokley studies the psychology of self-doubt and the imposter phenomenon.Shankar Vedantam: Kevin, the psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes first used the term imposter phenomenon in a 1978 study. They focused on high achieving women. Can you describe that study for me and what they found?Kevin Cokley: These were women who came from very diverse backgrounds, some of them came from the world of corporate America, some of them were academics, some of them were graduate students, but what they all had in common was they were all incredibly accomplished women. And it was interesting because when they worked with them they kept repeatedly hearing these feelings of self doubt in spite of the accomplishments that they had as individual women, and so it led them to theorize that this idea of the imposter phenomenon was something salient among women, because again, this was the population they were working with.Shankar Vedantam: Now, the examples of people like Tom Hanks, or Albert Einstein, and you yourself, Kevin, might suggest the imposter phenomenon doesn't just affect women. Is there data to back up the anecdotes?Kevin Cokley: That's absolutely true. I mean, in my own work I have published studies where in one study imposter feelings were certainly more prevalent among women than men, but in another study that I published there was no difference between men and women. And what we know from the accumulation of work that's been done in this area is that there has not been any consistent findings of women experiencing higher imposter feelings than men. Now that being said, and I talk about this a lot, I do believe that with women the implications of imposter feelings are a bit different than among men. And I point to one of the studies that I published where I was looking at factors that predict GPA, and what I found in that study was that even though there were no differences between men and women in terms of their imposter feelings, imposter feelings had no link to GPA for men. It did not impact their grades at all, but for women imposter feelings were in fact linked in very sort of clear ways to their GPA. So you can say on the one hand that there were no differences in the reporting of imposter feelings amongst both groups, but the implications of those imposter feelings were quite different for men and women.Shankar Vedantam: Mm-hmm (affirmative). What about racial differences here, Kevin? We've talked about several prominent black people who experience self-doubt but you've conducted studies looking at racial differences in self-doubt and some of the result are both revealing and surprising. What do you find?Kevin Cokley: So in the initial study that I published we had a very diverse sample of college students consisting of Asian Americans, African Americans, and Latinx Americans. And we went into this study thinking that we would see evidence of higher imposter feelings among African Americans and Latinx Americans and we believed that because of what we understand to be some of the ideas and beliefs surrounding African-American students and Latinx students around intelligence and around their deservedness to be in some predominantly white educational spaces. But what we found in fact was quite the opposite, we found that Asian American students in our particular sample reported higher feelings of imposterism than both African American students and Latinx students and this was counterintuitive to what we expected to find. And we tried to explain that somewhat speculatively on the idea that Asian American students have to sort of deal with that modern minority myth in ways that sort of exacerbate those feelings.Shankar Vedantam: Mm-hmm (affirmative). I mean, it might be a little bit like what we discussed earlier about Viola Davis basically saying other people think that I'm perfect, but I know I'm not perfect, and that creates a kind of dissonance in my mind.Kevin Cokley: Yes, absolutely.Shankar Vedantam: You hinted at something a moment ago and I'm wondering if we can explore this a little bit more, which is there seems to be a connection between highly competitive environments and the internal generation of self-doubt. You talk for example about walking down the corridors at your first job and seeing the publications of other professors on the wall and in some ways having this be a reminder for you that you had not done as much. Can you talk about the link between being in a competitive environment and the experience of self-doubt?Kevin Cokley: When you are in environments that are stressful and that are particularly competitive, these always become incubators for these imposter feelings. Again, if I use myself as an example, the story that you shared about me being a 29 year old professor straight out of graduate school, it was a competitive environment. Part of it I think may have been just my own internalization because it wasn't like I had my colleagues coming to me and constantly reminding me, "You know you are in a competitive environment, you know you have to do this." No, it wasn't anything so explicit.Shankar Vedantam: Yeah.Kevin Cokley: But it was just the subtle reminders that you are now a professor in a very productive, competitive environment and they didn't have to say anything to me.Shankar Vedantam: Right.Kevin Cokley: I was reminded by those publications that I saw on the walls.Shankar Vedantam: You've talked about another idea about how we communicate with young people, especially in educational settings. If you communicate to a young person, I think you are a genius, I think you're a prodigy, I think you're special, in some ways we might think that we are communicating encouragement to the person, but we're also putting expectations on that person. So when that person doesn't do well in a study or doesn't do well in a test I mean, they're now comparing their performance with what they believe you think of their performance and they feel like they're falling short. Is there a risk in some ways in over-inflating the students sense of how good they might be or how good they ought to be?Kevin Cokley: I think there is a risk and certainly there is nothing wrong with offering encouragement. I think all students need encouragement, but to your point, I do think that one could go overboard with the praise and set students up for struggling with these sort of feelings of self-doubt if the level of praise exceeds what they either believe about themselves, or maybe even exceeds what they have actually accomplished. I mean, I think that the deliverance of praise should be appropriate to the level of accomplishment and not do so in an exaggerated manner.Shankar Vedantam: Mm-hmm (affirmative). So sometime ago we had the psychologist Claude Steele on Hidden Brain, it was in an episode titled How They See Us, and he talked about the phenomenon of stereotype threat. When you believe you're the target of stereotypes, those fears can be a source of worry and that worry can undermine your performance. There seems to be some overlap between your work on the imposter phenomenon and Claude's work on stereotype threat.Kevin Cokley: I was having this conversation two days ago and I was asked this very same question, so it's something that I've thought about for a while. And the way that I describe it is this, when you think about Claude Steele's work around stereotype threat, it's this idea that individuals are aware of stereotypes that exist about a particular social identity group, whether that's based on race, or gender, or whatever. And you don't necessarily believe the stereotypes that exist about the group, but you are aware of them and it's the awareness of that stereotype that ends up disrupting your performance.Shankar Vedantam: Mm-hmm (affirmative).Kevin Cokley: That's different from imposer feelings, because with imposter feelings we talk about individuals who have internalized these beliefs that sort of lead to self doubt.Shankar Vedantam: You found that self-doubt can be a predictor of stress, especially for minorities in educational settings. Can you talk about that work?Kevin Cokley: Yeah, so one of the most common types of studies that you see done with the imposter phenomenon is looking into outcomes related to mental health and I tend to look at symptoms of depression and anxiety as my outcomes. And what we have consistently found is that individuals who experience imposter feelings have elevated symptoms of depression and have elevated symptoms of anxiety, they are certainly linked consistently.Shankar Vedantam: And is it accurate to say that women and minorities in the workplace or in educational settings might be especially prone to this correlation?Kevin Cokley: I believe that to be the case, absolutely. And I approach my work with the belief that for women and for BIPOC individuals that this sort of association between mental health and imposter feelings is especially prevalent.Shankar Vedantam: Self-doubt can keep us from seeing ourselves clearly. It can prompt us to downplay our accomplishments and underestimate our skills. It can cost us in terms of mental health and in terms of our willingness to take on new challenges. But there is a deep paradox here, even as lots of people suffer from needless self-doubt, many also suffer from an absence of self-doubt. Many people who ought to doubt themselves, seem filled with blithe self-confidence. When we come back, how to combat the imposter phenomenon, but also how to make room in our lives for the gift of self-doubt. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.Shankar Vedantam: This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Even the best of us can sometimes feel we don't know what we are doing. We worry that we will fall short of other people's expectations. We worry that we will be called out as frauds and charlatans. At the University of Texas at Austin, psychologist Kevin Cokley studies the imposter phenomenon and what we can do about it. Kevin, one technique you've suggested that people use to reduce self-doubt is to remind themselves of their accomplishments. You say that you sometimes stalk yourself. What do you mean by this?Kevin Cokley: Yeah, so one of the things that happens with people who experience imposter feelings is that we don't acknowledge accomplishments to the extent that they should be acknowledged and so we sometimes just minimize them.Shankar Vedantam: Mm-hmm (affirmative).Kevin Cokley: I somewhat half jokingly said that I stalk myself, but what I mean is that, and I hope people out there listening don't judge me too harshly, I go on Google almost every day and I Google myself. I look up my metrics surrounding my publications, how many times I've been cited, how many publications I have. I mean, those numbers don't change day to day, but I find myself looking at them every single day because I need to remind myself that people think that you're kind of a big deal for a reason, that you actually have done something of note as a scholar.Shankar Vedantam: Yeah.Kevin Cokley: And so that's my way of just sort of reminding myself that you are deserving of the attention and the accolades that you have received. And if I didn't do that, then it would be easy to sort of forget that I have accomplished this as an academic.Shankar Vedantam: Yeah. I mean, I suppose there's a way you can Google yourself every day in order to stroke your vanity, but I think what I'm hearing you say is actually something quite different. It's almost like sort of a cognitive behavioral therapy intervention because your mind is not automatically remembering all the things that you've done well or your mind is coming up with self-doubts. By actually going and looking at the evidence every day, you are in some ways telling your mind, look, the belief that I have that I'm not worthy or that I'm not up to this task, this belief is untrue. So in some ways it feels almost like a form of therapy that you've come up with on your own.Kevin Cokley: Well, it is and I'm so glad that you mentioned the word vanity because I fear that what I just said could come across as just someone obsessed with himself and seeing what he's accomplished, and it's really not that, although I can understand how it might sound that way. Because in my case, I really truly sometimes find it hard to accept the fact that I am somewhat of an authority on the imposter phenomenon. And so when I go and look up sort of what I've done, I sometimes actually forget how much work I've done in the area. And I hope that people don't sort of take that to be someone who's just unduly vain about his work and read me that way because I'd like to think that it is not that.Shankar Vedantam: Yeah, I'm not hearing that at all, Kevin. You said a second ago that you find it hard to accept sometimes that you're an authority on the imposter phenomenon. You do see the irony here right, Kevin, which is you are an expert on the imposter phenomenon who finds it difficult to accept that you are an expert on the imposter phenomenon.Kevin Cokley: I do see the irony in that statement, yes.Shankar Vedantam: There's another idea that in some ways is a related idea, which is there are people whose accomplishments are not public. They don't have publication records, they don't have awards, but in some ways these people can mine the same idea that you're talking about with something called a work diary. Can you explain that idea to me?Kevin Cokley: Yeah, so one of the other suggestions that I give to people is to keep a work diary where you essentially document those successes that you've had in the work environment. What ends up happening for people who experience imposter feelings is that it becomes very easy for us to just sort of either forget, or to minimize, or marginalized those things that we've done well during the course of a day, during the course of a week. And so sometimes we have to be intentional about documenting those little successes that in the aggregate are pretty impressive.Shankar Vedantam: So Kevin, we've talked about ways that individuals can manage their self doubt, are there things that organizations can do that can also reduce self doubt?Kevin Cokley: Yes, there certainly are things that organizations can do. And the example that I like to give involves individuals who are managers or supervisors, and what you can do as a manager or a supervisor to really sort of mitigate these sort of feelings of imposterism amongst your subordinates is being transparent in your own vulnerabilities and to be open in sharing this with their employees. It really helps individuals who are afraid to own up or to sort of say, "I've made a mistake." It makes them feel like, you know what, If my manager or if my supervisor can talk openly about making a mistake, then it's okay for me to make a mistake and I don't have to be perfect. And I think that that goes a long way towards helping to assuage any feelings of imposterism that an individual might be experiencing.Shankar Vedantam: Researchers have also looked at ways to dismantle the imposter phenomenon in schools. At Stanford University, Greg Walton looked at the problems that incoming freshmen were facing and he found that when they experienced setbacks many of them drew global conclusions like "I don't belong here" or "I don't deserve to be here." And he felt like blacks were especially likely to feel like they were frauds and so he set up an intervention that helped black students see setbacks in the proper perspective. So a bad test result or a bad interaction with a professor didn't mean that they were frauds, it didn't mean they were impostors, it just meant that they were having a bad day or a bad week. Here's a clip of Greg describing the effects of his intervention.Greg Walton: What the intervention did was it prevented students from feeling that they didn't belong in general when they had negative experiences. You can then imagine how if you're feeling less vulnerable to threats you are better able to connect with other people, to peers, to teachers and build the kinds of relationships that actually sustain performance over a long period of time.Shankar Vedantam: Kevin, I'm wondering if you can weigh in on this. Is one solution to self-doubt in some ways not blowing things out of proportion, blowing setbacks out of proportion?Kevin Cokley: I love that and thank you for sharing that study. As a counselor psychologist I would sort of refer to that as almost like I'm simply reframing it and not sort of internalizing it as being indicative of a trait about yourself.Shankar Vedantam: Mm-hmm (affirmative).Kevin Cokley: People aren't perfect and we have to sort of get beyond this idea that making mistakes is somehow indicative of you being not smart, not competent, not belonging. The most accomplished people in the world have all experienced failure at some point. And so we need to sort of help students in particular understand that when you fail a test, and I could have benefited from this when I was a student, it would've been so helpful if I would've had a professor who would've pulled me to the side and to help me sort of manage the feelings that I was having around my initial sort of early poor performance. It's okay. Just don't let it be defining of who you are and what your potentiality is, and I think we don't have enough of that taking place in schools.Shankar Vedantam: Kevin, we started this conversation talking about some of your own insecurities and self-doubts. When you are plagued by self-doubt, even today, you say that you have a go-to solution and it involves effort. Can you explain what you do maybe with a specific example?Kevin Cokley: Yeah. Well, and I'll start off by going back to Michelle Obama. Michelle Obama says that what she does is essentially she works hard, she works harder.Michelle Obama: So whenever I doubted myself, I just told myself let me put my head down and do the work and I would let my work speak for itself, and I still find that I do that.Kevin Cokley: And I really identify with that because that has been the way that I try to address my feelings of imposterism. When I think about those early days of my being an assistant professor, I would work late in the evenings. I found myself working on the weekends because I needed to prove to people, and I think probably most importantly to myself, that I belong. And so I just... I worked incessantly. Now, I will say that hard work without having a way to sort of balance that with play is not necessarily a good thing, but what I will say is that hard work oftentimes can result in achieving accomplishments in ways that you would hope would help mitigate whatever feelings of imposterism you might be experiencing.Shankar Vedantam: Do you still do that even today, Kevin? Is this your response when someone asks you to give a talk or you have to make a big presentation and you're plagued with self doubt? Do you respond to that by doubling down on the amount of time you're spending in preparation?Kevin Cokley: There are elements of that. When Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes, and I think it was really Pauline Clance, she talked about the imposter cycle and she talked about these two pathways that people take, the pathway of over preparedness and the pathway of procrastination, and I'm the person who goes through the pathway of over preparedness. And for me, what that means is, when I am giving a talk on the imposter phenomenon, a talk that I have given more times than I can count, I still prepare as though I have never given the talk before. And it's because I want to make sure that when I give the talk that people hear me and experience me as being an expert and leave no doubt in their mind that I know what I'm talking about. So yeah, there are still elements of that in me even today.Shankar Vedantam: I'm struck by what you just said, Kevin, because when I listen to that clip of Viola Davis talk about feeling like an imposter, I didn't play the whole clip for you, she goes on to say something really interesting, which is she doesn't say woe is me, I have all these insecurities, feel sorry for me. She talks about how she uses her insecurities as a driver, as motivation.Viola Davis: Anybody who even wants to be great has that, anybody, any filmmaker, any writer, any actor, but what it does on a healthy level, it keeps you humble and it keeps you working.Shankar Vedantam: I'm hearing almost exactly what you said to me a second ago, Kevin, which is that in some ways not believing the good press about you turns out to actually be a powerful motivator for you to actually put your nose to the grindstone, if you will, and not take anything for granted.Kevin Cokley: Viola Davis is so insightful. I mean, and she is absolutely correct. And I would say that what she has said definitely applies to me. I think humility is very important and if I ever got to the point where I lost my humility, I would be brought back to earth by my wife who is also an academic. She would quickly remind me of, "I knew you when". And I think that's necessary because I never want to get to the point where I have forgotten that I was that young assistant professor with one publication and full of self-doubts starting my career. I never want to forget that person because that person is still inside of me and it continues to fuel me and motivate me to being the best academic that I can be.Shankar Vedantam: I'm wondering in some ways, Kevin, whether this might be at least a partial solution to the paradox we identified in the first part of our conversation. We looked at how many brilliant people like Maya Angelou or Albert Einstein have been plagued by self-doubt. From the outside that looks bizarre, but is it possible that we actually have mixed up cause and effect? They are not plagued by self-doubt in spite of being great, their greatness is being driven, at least in part, by the fuel of self-doubt.Kevin Cokley: No, I think you're right. I think that is very much a possibility that their self-doubt in part fuels their greatness. I think there's an argument to be made for that.Shankar Vedantam: I'm wondering if it might be helpful almost for a moment to think about what would happen if we lived in a world without self-doubt. I'm thinking back to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Bush Administration said the invasion was necessary because Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction and at one press conference Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was told that the Iraqi government had denied possessing weapons of mass destruction. Let me play you a clip of that press conference.Journalist: What do you make of the statement made by the Iraqi government yesterday that Iraq has no weapons of mass destruction and is not developing any?Donald Rumsfeld : They're lying. No, they have them, and they continue to develop them, and they've weaponized chemical weapons. We know that. They've had an active program to develop nuclear weapons. It's also clear that they are actively developing biological weapons.Shankar Vedantam: So as we know, Kevin, Iraq did not possess those weapons and I'm wondering if you can talk a moment about what seems like this paradox, how is it that some of us are plagued with self doubt while others could use a little more self doubt?Kevin Cokley: That is a very good question and it immediately sort of reminded me of the saying "pride falleth before the man," and I think about what happens when hubris gets in the way of our ability to make reasoned and reasonable sort of decisions. And I think that having a bit of self doubt could save us from really bad situations such as unnecessary wars, among other things. And so it certainly would've been nice if Rumsfeld had exhibited a bit more humility than his response indicated, but no, I mean, I like the way that you sort of connected that to real world implications. And to me, it does sort of go back to this idea of people not feeling so overly confident in themselves in ways that are unhelpful and are unhealthy. I can't say enough about how in my own life the need to be humble to even have feelings of self doubt have been helpful, because if I did not have those feelings of self doubt, then I think that that would one, make me probably an unbearable person and not very pleasant to be around, but it also has kept me, I think, hungry to continue to work hard to prove myself. And I think when you get to the point where you stop wanting to prove yourself, and when you're no longer hungry and motivated, I don't think that's a very good place to be.Shankar Vedantam: So I feel we're in very deep waters here, Kevin. I mean, on the one hand we've seen how experiencing discrimination, being an outsider, this can increase the risk that you will experience the imposter phenomenon and that's clearly unfair. Feelings of self-doubt can cause people to drop out of school, cause them to quit professions that they would be great at. On the other hand, lots of people also turn their insecurity into a superpower, like yourself, and they use it as fuel. And a lack of self doubt, especially when you wield great power, can produce terrible harm. So I guess I'm left wondering, is self-doubt a bad thing or a good thing?Kevin Cokley: Self-doubt can be a good thing when it is used as a source of motivation to achieve, to excel, but it could come at great cost to one's mental health and to one's physical health. And so the challenge then is to sort of figure out how to use one's self-doubt in ways that don't result in there being any sort of compromises to your mental health or physical health. And so the example that I sometimes share with people comes from African American psychology where we talk about the John Henryism hypothesis, and this comes from a folklore story of an individual named John Henry, who was a steel driver, who was essentially put in a situation where he was competing against a machine to perform. And the short version of the story is that he wanted to prove that he could outperform this machine. Well, he worked, and he worked, and he worked and he eventually did beat the machine. And so his achievement was quite high because he won, but it came at the cost of his life because he ended up dying from the exertion of effort that he gave. So we want to be careful that we don't achieve such incredible feats of accomplishment that also we result in harming our mental health and our physical health.Shankar Vedantam: In your own life, Kevin, have you come to think of self-doubt as a friend or as an enemy?Kevin Cokley: Oh my goodness, you ask really difficult questions. Self-doubt, I think for me, I would say probably has been more of a friend than an enemy for me. I do try to take care of myself. I work out, I try to be healthy, but I have certainly used self-doubt in ways as a constant source of motivation to make sure that I am not complacent. So I am aware of the things that I need to do to provide this sort of balance and that I continue to strive to be the best academic that I can be. So I think in my case, it has probably been more of a friend than an enemy.Shankar Vedantam: Kevin Cokley is a psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin. He's the author of The Myth of Black Anti-intellectualism: A True Psychology of African American Students. Kevin, thank you for joining me today on Hidden Brain.Kevin Cokley: Thank you for having me.Shankar Vedantam: Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our production team includes Brigid McCarthy, Kristin Wong, Laura Kwerel, Autumn Barnes, Ryan Katz, and Andrew Chadwick. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. Our unsung hero this week is Juana Merlo. Juana is a graphic designer who created the Hidden Brain logo in 2015. When we recently launched our new podcast, My Unsung Hero, we knew we wanted to work with Juana again. She has an amazing eye as you will see when you take a look at the My Unsung Hero logo. More than anything, Juana cares deeply about what she does and that shows in her work. Thank you so much, Juana. If you like our work, please consider supporting it. You can do so by going to support.hiddenbrain.org. Again, that's support.hidden brain.org. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.

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Success 2.0: The Psychology of Self-Doubt | Hidden Brain Media

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We all have times when we feel like a fraud. Psychologist Kevin Cokley studies the corrosive effects of self-doubt, and how we can turn that

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Being Kind to Yourself | Hidden Brain Media

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Self-criticism is often seen as a virtue. But psychologist Kristin Neff says there’s a better path to self-improvement — self-compassion. She says people who

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The transcript below may be for an earlier version of this episode. Our transcripts are provided by various partners and may contain errors or deviate slightly from the audio.
Shankar Vedantam: This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. For generations, across nations and cultures, parents and teachers have read Aesop's fable, The Ant and the Grasshopper. It teaches children the importance of hard work and delayed gratification.David DeSteno: It was a beautiful summer and the grasshopper wiled away its time dancing and frolicking with its friends.Shankar Vedantam: This is psychologist David DeSteno.David DeSteno: While the ant went out to the fields and toiled to grow and to harvest food for the winter.Shankar Vedantam: "Why don't you stop working so hard and come play?" the grasshopper asked. The ant replied, "I can't. I have to collect food for the winter. You should too. Otherwise, you won't have anything to eat when it gets cold." The grasshopper just laughed and kept playing.David DeSteno: When winter came, the poor grasshopper had nothing to eat and starved. The ant, who had worked all summer, had a wonderful winter snug in his den and had ample food to live on.Shankar Vedantam: Now, the story has a harsh moral to it. The ant, who refuses to share, comes across as mean-spirited, but the underlying message of the story is one we all wrestle with. All of us have something of the ant inside us and all of us have the grasshopper too. Study for the test, or play video games? Exercise regularly, or relax on the couch? Save money for retirement, or spend it on something you want right now? This week on Hidden Brain, we explore the importance and limitations of self-control and we examine how a habit that is within easy reach can help us achieve our goals. That overlooked habit? The practice of gratitude.Shankar Vedantam: David DeSteno is a psychologist at Northeastern University. He studies how we can enlist emotions to become better people. Better to others, better to ourselves. Some of David's ideas grow out of the story of The Ant and the Grasshopper, and also a psychological experiment conducted 50 years ago by Walter Mischel at Stanford University. It's an experiment you've probably heard of, it was called the marshmallow test.David DeSteno: The way the test would work is Mischel or one of his research assistants would bring in a child and they'd sit them down at a table.Speaker 4: What is that?David DeSteno: They'd put down a marshmallow or other sweet in front of them and say,Speaker 5: You can either eat this marshmallow now or wait until we come back and you'll get two.David DeSteno: And they left and what they would do is wait and see -Speaker 6: Please come back.Speaker 3: If the child was able to engage in self-control. And there has been video since that time, reproductions of this and it's wonderful if you watch, you can see the kids peeking through their hands.Speaker 7: I wonder what's taking him so long?David DeSteno: You can hear the gears in their minds turning to try and resist.Speaker 8: And I smelled the marshmallow. I thought I would eat it, but I didn't.David DeSteno: What he found, right, is that over time, the kids who were able to resist, to have the self-control to not gobble the first marshmallow, had better academic and social outcomes in many domains.Shankar Vedantam: So there have been concerns that have been raised about the marshmallow test. Some have pointed out that the kids that Walter Mischel studied came from a very narrow and privileged slice of American society. But the central idea of the importance of self-control, we know that, not just from Aesop's fable, but from our lives. We know that it matters when it comes to doing well in school or learning to play a musical instrument or learning to play a sport or saving for retirement, eating healthy, getting exercise. Doing well in all these domains comes down to the same question as Walter Mischel was asking these kids: can you do the difficult thing now in exchange for a reward that is down the road.David DeSteno: Exactly. It's saving for retirement, it's eating and exercising and true, there are some socioeconomic differences. So if you grew up in a culture where you weren't sure that the future was going to be a beneficial one, then why sacrifice for it? But in general as you're saying, there is just ample evidence that sacrifice in the short term in many domains of life is required for future success. Giving into temptation for immediate gratification often leads to problems.Shankar Vedantam: You ran a version of the marshmallow test with adults. You gave them a choice between pleasure now versus a bigger reward later, but you decided not to use marshmallows but something else. How did you run this experiment, and what did you find in terms of people's ability to hold off on a reward until a later date?David DeSteno: Yeah. That's true. Most adults don't like marshmallows but all of us like cash, and so we ran an analog to the marshmallow test where we replaced marshmallows with money. The way the experiment worked is, people would come in and we would have them answer a series of questions of the form, "Would you rather have x dollars now or y dollars in z days, where y was always greater than x and z varied over days to weeks to months." From that, we were able to extrapolate a sense of impatience or a lack of self-control. What we found was the basic result was people were pretty impatient. People were willing, as an example, to accept $17 now and forgo $100 in a year. So another way of saying this Shankar is, "I guarantee you $100 in a year, but would you be willing to give that up if I gave you $17 now?" I don't know about you, but given what the banks are paying, unless you need that $17 to survive, giving up the opportunity to quintuple your money in a year is a pretty foolish financial investment, but that's what our subjects said.Shankar Vedantam: So, when we tell people to exercise self-control to do the hard thing now and get the payoff later, we usually ask them to exercise willpower. You cite the children's television show Sesame Street and specifically the character Cookie Monster who regularly has to confront temptations.Cookie Monster: (singing)Shankar Vedantam: Describe this model of self-control to me, David. What does it ask us to do?David DeSteno: Yeah, who better to talk about self-control or teach it than the walking talking id himself.Cookie Monster: Cookie!David DeSteno: In that season of Sesame Street, Cookie Monster basically was teaching the model that has been in existence in psychology for decades and in philosophy long before that, which was our emotions lead us astray, and the way to persevere toward your goal or to delay gratification or resist temptations is to either rely on your willpower to tell you why you shouldn't do this. And so we see Cookie Monster using willpower or to use kind of tricks like to distract yourself, that we see Cookie Monster kind of covering his eyes or looking away.Cookie Monster: (singing)David DeSteno: But unlike Cookie Monster, most of us kind of don't do very well at this. If you look at the stats on average, about 20% of the time people are trying to resist a temptation, they give in to it. For things that are difficult and important it's even worse. If you look at New Year's resolutions, 8% of them are kept to the year's end, 25% of them are gone by mid-January, and so if this strategy of relying on kind of logic and willpower was the best that we had to offer, it's pretty poor because we're failing.Cookie Monster: Okay. Me waited long enough.Shankar Vedantam: Most of us think of self-control in the context of personal goals, things like health or exercise, David, but you also need self-control to be a good person, to act with integrity. You once conducted an experiment that tested the relationship between self-control and people's willingness to act with integrity. You asked volunteers to choose between a difficult task and an easy task, using the equivalent of a coin flip. Can you describe the experimental setup to me?David DeSteno: Sure. Subjects would come in and we told them there were two tasks that needed to be done, a long and onerous one or a short and fun one, and then we gave them the opportunity to flip a coin to decide what they were going to do. If you ask people what should you do, people will say, "Well of course you should follow what the coin says." It's the only time we get kind of unanimity in a psychological study that I've ever seen. Yet the vast majority of people, when they believe they're alone and no one can see what they're choosing, either don't flip the coin and just give themselves the easy task or they flip the coin, get the wrong answer because of course we have rigged the coin so that it comes up such that they should do the hard task that's a virtual coin. I keep flipping it until it comes up with the answer they want.Shankar Vedantam: What were these two tasks David? What was the difficult task that people wanted to avoid?David DeSteno: Sure. The difficult task was presented as a series of 45 minutes of long and onerous logic problems, so things that you might have to do on like the GRE or the SAT, and the short task was [inaudible 00:10:04] about 10 minutes, it's a fun image hunt on a computer screen.Shankar Vedantam: I see. So you found I think upwards of 90% of your volunteers succumbed to the temptation of cheating?David DeSteno: We did. Yes, we did. These were normal people, just like you and me, but in those moments where we think we can get away with something, people will. But the most interesting part about it was when you asked them later how fairly did they act, most of them just created a story for why it was okay for them to do that this time. "Oh, I really didn't want to be late for something." My favorite story was, and I kid you not, they said, one person said to me, "Well, the guy who was sitting out in the hall who I thought was going to be coming next, he looked like an engineering major and I thought he would like the logic problem."David DeSteno: The tricky part about this, right, is if we're willing to rationalize away our need for self-control, then we're not going to try and exert willpower in the first place. We're going to say, "I deserve to spend money on the new smartphone. I deserve the extra piece of chocolate cake."Shankar Vedantam: Movies and TV shows have explored the idea of why we give in to temptation. The cartoon character Homer Simpson is a personification of this idea.Homer Simpson: Donuts. Is there anything they can't do?Speaker 11: Dad, you're a hero.Shankar Vedantam: Homer Simpson knows he needs to resist junk food, but he just can't do it. David says this idea, that our emotions often get the better of us, this is the way most of us understand why willpower fails.David DeSteno: There is this idea that's been around since the time of Spinoza or before where people look at the passions, at their emotions as something that wants immediate gratification, and sure we experience it that way at times, we can feel desire or lust or anger, things that make us want to do things in the moment, and there's this idea that we have to rely on kind of our rational thought processes to kind of change our view of what we should value and to tamp down those cravings. That requires self-control to do the right thing.Shankar Vedantam: Now there's been other work that shows that fighting your desires, fighting your temptations with willpower, it's not just difficult but it's actually stressful, right?David DeSteno: It is. If you think about it, your body is in a state of stress. Part of you is wanting to give in to whatever the temptation is for short-term pleasure and part of you is trying to overrule that sense of desire and so when you're trying to come back in and exert executive control, which is a fancy word we psychologists use for trying to overrule kind of our more intuitive responses, your brain feels like ... And I'm not saying this is what's going on in the circuitry, of course, but it feels like you're in a battle. And that results in stress. There is great work by a psychologist Gregory Miller at Northwestern and he was trying to work with kids from disadvantaged backgrounds, showing them, teaching them executive control strategies. And over time, yes, those strategies worked, but the stress level that those children and adolescents were under began to manifest itself physically.David DeSteno: So if you kind of expand that out, the upshot is yes, if you're always trying to exert self-control, you can achieve your goals, but your health is going to suffer. You're not going to be around as long to enjoy the fruits of that.Shankar Vedantam: You also cite a study by Christopher Boyce about people who in fact are very good at exercising willpower but what happens to them when they fail. Do you remember that study, David?David DeSteno: Yeah. So this was a study looking at the trait of conscientiousness, which is the ability to kind of put your nose to the grindstone and persevere in pursuing your goals. People who do that, yes they succeed, but when they do fail, and they do fail less because they're working really hard, but when they fail, what he shows is the hit to their well-being is 120% greater than the rest of us. Although the data doesn't show exactly why that is in that study, personally I believe that one reason that is is because these individuals haven't been focused on cultivating the social relationships that are there to catch us when we fall and to make us more resilient.Shankar Vedantam: Psychologist David DeSteno argues that the model we have, that willpower is the key to self-control, and that our emotions often undermine us, this model misses something crucial. Emotions might not be the enemy. In fact, some emotions can play a powerful role in generating self-control. How? That's when we come back. You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam.Shankar Vedantam: This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Think back to the last time you made a resolution and failed. Maybe the resolution was to get your finances in order or to exercise more. Maybe it was to eat healthy. You even made a list of all the reasons you should order more salads. But those reasons failed you when you smelled French fries at the next table. Your emotions got the better of you. Many of us see our emotions as the enemy when it comes to carrying out our resolutions, but we often forget something. Emotions can also be enormously constructive and powerful.Shankar Vedantam: David, it might make sense to back up and see the big picture for a moment. Many of us think that something makes us angry so we feel angry, something makes us sad so we feel sad, something makes us happy so we feel happy. We think emotions are about looking back, at reacting to the past. You say there's something wrong with this picture. What is it?David DeSteno: Yeah. Emotions are not about the past. They are about the future and what I mean by that is if you even just think about the brain metabolically, what good would it be to have a response that is only relevant to things that have happened before? The reason we have emotions are to help us decide what to do next. When you are feeling an emotion, it's altering the computations your brain is making, your predictions for the best course of action.Shankar Vedantam: Some years ago you started to explore an interesting idea. If emotions are a mechanism to help us navigate the future, not just an accounting system to tabulate the past, that might explain why some emotions seem to help us do difficult things. You tell the story in your book of one of your students who would wake up early each morning to go rowing on the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest. What did she tell you?David DeSteno: Yeah. This was my student Lisa Williams, who is now a professor at the University of New South Wales in Australia and she told me it was very difficult to wake up before the sun rises and to go out in the cold damp of the Pacific Northwest and to get on the Columbia River and row. But she felt pride for being accepted onto the rowing team and pride for how well her team was doing, and not wanting to let her team down. And so it was that sense of pride for the accomplishments they made each day and the anticipated pride for what was going to come next that helped her do these difficult things, that helped her get up at a morning when many of us might just want to roll over and hit the alarm for snooze. It's because sometimes we do hard things because we think we should, but I think more often than not we do hard things because we feel we should. Emotions are a source, a huge source of motivation.Shankar Vedantam: So this is an example of how emotions can help us meet our resolutions rather than undermine our resolutions. So rather than see all emotions as the enemy of reaching our goals, you started to ask if some emotions could in fact help us reach our goals.David DeSteno: That's right.Shankar Vedantam: In the case of the student it was the pride she felt being part of the team and not pride at the level of arrogance or hubris, but taking delight in a job well done, in team work.David DeSteno: That's exactly right.Shankar Vedantam: So you decided to explore how emotions might shape self-control and long-term decision-making. You gave adult volunteers the grown-up version of the marshmallow test, the one that used money, but this time there was a twist. You mentioned differences between people in terms of how much they experienced the emotion of gratitude. Was there a correlation between gratitude and people's ability to delay gratification?David DeSteno: There was. What we found was when they were feeling grateful when they were making these decisions, because they had just reflected on something that they were grateful for, it basically doubled their self-control. Suddenly, they weren't willing to give up $100 in a year for $17 now. It would take about $31 for them to do this. But the important thing was to show that it wasn't just that we were distracting them or it wasn't anything about just feeling good. When people were feeling happy, we asked them to describe something that they thought was funny and amusing. They were the same as people who were neutral. It was $17. So what this tells us is that when you feel gratitude, it alters the computations your brain is making about how valuable a future goal is.Shankar Vedantam: I mean what's interesting of course is that you are not actually telling people anything about self-control here. You're not telling them, "Here's the right thing to do, exercise willpower. Here's the rational thing to do." You're just asking them to reflect on something they felt grateful for, maybe someone in their life who was good to them or a colleague or a mentor who had helped them, and this indirectly seemed to change the way they thought about the present and thought about the future.David DeSteno: That's exactly right. Emotions set our expectations for how we should react in any given situation we're in. And so simply by making people feel grateful, it alters the way their brain assigned value as a function of time. Suddenly rewards that were delayed, that were further in the future, seemed more attractive than they normally would, without them having to engage in any type of corrective strategy to kind of make themselves or will themselves to see the logic of that.Shankar Vedantam: Now you wanted a stronger test of the idea that there was a connection between gratitude and long-term thinking. And rather than simply have people remember a time when they felt grateful, you artificially induced them to feel grateful. Now that's not very easy to do in a lab and you came up with a rather, I would say cruel way to engineer gratitude. How did you do it, David?David DeSteno: The way it worked is you would come to the lab and you would sit in front of the computer and you spent about 15, 20 minutes doing this god awful task and it was designed to be god awful and boring and hard and right at the end, when the experimenter said they were going to come in and record your score that would have been put on the computer screen, we rigged the computer to look like it crashed. So when it crashed, the subjects would be like, "Oh my goodness. Oh this is terrible," and the experimenter would come in and say, "Oh. This has happened once before. Let me go the tech. You're going to have to do this all over," and of course they were not happy.David DeSteno: We also had in the room another person who was a confederate, which means they were an actor working for the experimenters. But the participants thought they were just another person in the experiment. This confederate would get up and say, "Oh. I have to leave, I'm running late, but this is really terrible. I'm pretty good with computers. Let me see if I can help you." So she would start futzing with the computer and she would hit a button surreptitiously that would start a countdown and then suddenly the computer would come back on, and 95% of our participants were so grateful that they didn't have to do this task over again, 5% were convinced they fixed it themselves somehow, but they were really, really, really grateful for this. That's the way we kind of induced gratitude in real time.Shankar Vedantam: So when you induce gratitude in this manner, David, do you see that it changes people's ability to think about the future differently?David DeSteno: Yeah. So what we find when we use this paradigm and we used it several times, is it makes people more willing to pay it forward. That is it makes them more willing to ... We'll have them leave the lab and go out and suddenly somebody who's another actor will come up to them and ask them for help, and if they're feeling gratitude, they're more willing to help this person. Other times when they're engaged in financial decisions with other people, they'll make decisions that are a little costly to them but benefit those around them, so they're more willing to share profits than take profits selfishly. All of these kind of bring us back to the point I want to make which is we're seeing people who are willing to sacrifice in the moment to help other people, to give them more money, to do things that don't benefit them in the moment, but that we know from every evolutionary model out there brings gains down the line. So by willing to sacrifice now, what you're doing is making sure that when you need help in the future, there are going to be people who will pay you back and by cementing those relationships, you're going to have a lot of aggregated gains over time even though in the moment it's kind of costly to you.Shankar Vedantam: All of us have felt in some ways in real life what people experienced in the experiment. Someone goes out of their way to help us and you feel this sudden rush of gratitude. It almost feels like something physical. You once had the experience of a colleague going above and beyond when your family was expecting a child. Tell me what she did and what happened, David.David DeSteno: Yeah. We had just been at my new job at Northeastern for a year or two and we were expecting our first daughter and we went to this ... What we thought was kind of just an end of the year celebration. It turned out that it was a surprise baby shower for us, which was just heartwarming, and one of my colleagues gave to my wife and I this beautiful baby quilt that she had handmade. And in that moment, I had the exact experience that you're saying, Shankar. I just felt this welling up of emotion. Sometimes we get gifts and we're like, "Oh great. Now I have to give you something." This wasn't that. This was like, "Oh my goodness," and in that moment, my heart just felt like it was warming and swelling and what it did is it made me feel really valued by this person.David DeSteno: So much so that it made me think of our relationship in a whole different way. It made me feel in some ways bonded to her and to want to go move forward and do things for her and that's the beauty of gratitude, right? It is the sense that someone went out of their way to do something that was costly to them. Not always financially, it could be time, it could be just care, but it's a mark that they value you and that's what cements relationships and makes you want to pay it back, and suddenly you're in this upward spiral of building relationships.Shankar Vedantam: I want to just dwell for a second on the point that you just made David, which is, it's not always the most expensive thing that generates gratitude. If your colleague had gone out and bought you something worth several hundred dollars, that would have been an extravagant gift but in some ways it was the personal effort that she put it into the quilt, making the quilt that communicated to you, this person is someone who really cares about me, I'm truly grateful, and I feel like in some ways reciprocating or spreading this to other people.David DeSteno: That's right, and if you think about it, the argument that I always make is self-control didn't evolve so that we could save for retirement and get good grades. Self-control evolved so that we would have good character, that we would be fair, that we would cooperate, that other people would want to work with us. And sure, now we can pivot it so that instead of sacrificing to help someone else I can sacrifice to help my own future self, but the origin is really one of morality and that's why we look at emotions like gratitude and compassion as virtues. Shankar, if you gave me $10 right now and I didn't pay you back, I would be ahead, but if I don't pay you back or if you help me move my furniture and you need help moving yours, if I don't come and sacrifice to pay you back, that relationship is now going to end and I'll lose all of those gains going forward. So it is a sacrifice in the moment for future benefit.Shankar Vedantam: I'm wondering when ... When you received this wonderful, heartwarming gift from your colleague, whether you made a direct connection to the research that you were doing. Was this in some ways like an aha moment for you?David DeSteno: Yeah. In psychology there has been a lot of work on ordinary emotions, things like fear and anger, but not on these more socially oriented ones and because of that experience and how powerful it was, it was just another push for me to say, "There's something important here that we need to investigate."Shankar Vedantam: You cite a study by Robert Emmons on the role that expressing gratitude has on stress. Do you remember what he did and what he found?David DeSteno: I do. This was a great study because it was an experiment that was actually done in the field so to speak. Emmons would ask a certain percentage of his subjects to engage in daily gratitude reflection, so he was making them basically count their blessings as kind of an experimental intervention. What he found is that over time, the individuals who did this reported that they were better able to engage in exercise, again a type of sacrifice in the moment for future gain. They reported better quality of their relationships. They reported less symptoms of illness and so taken together what this kind of signifies to me is that practicing gratitude is enhancing people's well-being and kind of reducing the stress that comes from illness or feelings of loneliness or disconnection.Shankar Vedantam: You also cite a study by Wendy Mendes I believe at the University of California at San Francisco looking at the relationship between gratitude and stress, or at least how gratitude can buffer the effects of stress.David DeSteno: Yeah. So Wendy did this really interesting study where she used a technique called the Trier of Social Stress measure, which is used in psychology a lot, and think about it like this: pretend you're going for a job interview and you're going to stand up in front of three people and kind of give a little speech. The people are instructed to be very stone-faced, to give no feedback and you can imagine if you're doing this, and you see no smiles, it's not a very rewarding experience and it causes a spiral of stress and that's been shown many times.David DeSteno: What Wendy found was that individuals who were regularly more grateful in their life, individuals who practiced more gratitude and in some ways what that basically is is it's an intervention, right? People who are daily thinking about feeling grateful, cultivating it in their lives. She found it was basically like a booster shot for stress reduction.Shankar Vedantam: What's remarkable here is that the effect seems almost effortless, right? So if I induce gratitude on myself, it's almost like I've made the task easier. It's not like I'm actually working harder to accomplish the task.David DeSteno: That's right. It's not building your self-control by giving you more willpower. It's basically working from the bottom up by changing what you value and if you value something more than you normally would, if you value a future reward, your future health, your future savings, doing the right thing for your friends more than you normally would, then it just becomes easier to persevere toward it.David DeSteno: There's a lot of work these days on habits, right? Build a habit so that you can achieve your goals. Study more, build a habit to save and that's true but the problem with most habits is they're focused on one narrow outcome. If I build a habit to study more, it's not going to help me save money. But if you build a habit to cultivate gratitude, it's going to play out in many different domains. Domains of exercise, domains of health, domains of dieting, domains of saving money, domains of studying. Any time that it requires you to value the future more than the present.Shankar Vedantam: You say that many Americans miss the point when it comes to a festival like Thanksgiving, David. Most people think it's merely a chance to express gratitude for close friends and family. Keeping in mind what you just told me, that in some ways gratitude has this superpower, if you will, to affect many dimensions of your life, what are we getting wrong when we think about Thanksgiving merely as an occasion to look back and merely as an occasion to recognize those closest to us?David DeSteno: Yeah. People get angry at me when I say this, so don't get angry Shankar, but I often say gratitude is wasted on Thanksgiving. It's not that it's a bad thing, but what I mean is really the benefits of gratitude are important on all the other days of the year when we need to delay our gratification to gain our future goals. So, yes, it's important on Thanksgiving but what you want to do is cultivate it more regularly on the other days because by doing that, you'll ensure that when Thanksgiving comes next year, you will have more to be grateful for.Shankar Vedantam: Many years ago when you were a kid, you had the experience of having conflicts with your dad, which is of course exactly like every other child in the history of the world. But tell me about the conflict that you had with him and how you've come to think about that conflict in more recent times.David DeSteno: Yeah. So when I was an early teen, my dad decided that every summer I should engage in some type of academic activity. I had just finished a year of school and I did not want to go and do an academic activity during the summer, I wanted to have fun, play sports with my friends or do anything. So he would put me in a computer camp or something like this, and it would cause strife because I would get annoyed. Like, "Dad, why do I have to do this?" But later on I realized that his doing this was his way of trying to ensure that more doors would be open to me in the future. My family, I came from a background that was very humble in terms of educational background and in terms of economic background. I'm a first-generation college student and he felt so strongly about this that he was willing to put up with my kvetching about it and not wanting to do it. But more than that I also found out that because we were from such humble financial backgrounds, he went to other members of our family and asked for help for money so that he could provide me with these opportunities.David DeSteno: So I wasn't grateful for it at the time, but when looking back on it, when I learned about this and I saw it as a parent myself, I became incredibly grateful.David DeSteno: So Buddhists talk about the difference between true compassion and idiot compassion and idiot compassion is doing something that allows somebody to feel good in the moment and happy in the moment, even though it's not good for their future outcomes. Wise compassion is helping them to do things that are hard in the moment even if they don't want to do it, and because my dad had that wise compassion at the time and was willing to put up with my arguing, it led to something that I'm much more grateful for in the future.Shankar Vedantam: It's a little sad though, isn't it? Which is that if we could remind ourselves to be more grateful to people in the moment, even when it seems as if they are working at cross-purposes with us, presumably a) it would help us see the value of what it is they are telling us, which is a good thing in and of itself, and second, it probably would bind us to them more closely than it would otherwise.David DeSteno: Both of those are true, and that's why I think there's not an emphasis on gratitude, I think, anymore in terms of when kids are growing up as much as there used to be traditionally. And I think to the extent that we encourage people, young or old, to think more about what other people are doing for them and how what their intent is and to see opportunities for gratitude. The more we look for those opportunities to feel it, the more we're increasing the opportunity to cultivate it in our own lives.Shankar Vedantam: Did you ever have a chance to thank your dad, David?David DeSteno: I did. I did later on. I wish that I had been more aware at the time but such is the wisdom of age, right?Shankar Vedantam: When we come back, is feeling grateful just something you feel? Or is it something you can learn to do?Shankar Vedantam: This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Our emotions are extremely powerful. There are times when they can lead us astray and cause us to undermine our own long-term goals. But just because some emotions cause us to become shortsighted, that doesn't mean all emotions cause to be impetuous. Some emotions, in fact, seem to help us focus on our long-term interests. They can help us exercise more, eat healthier, and save more wisely.Shankar Vedantam: David, a lot of your work is published in modern peer-reviewed psychology journals but the ideas you're talking about feel really ancient to me. Many cultural and spiritual traditions around the world celebrate the idea of pausing to give thanks. You mentioned in our earlier conversation just the idea of counting your blessings. It seems to me that many of those traditions are arriving at the same underlying idea as the psychological studies, right?David DeSteno: That's right. It's funny you should mention that. I'm working on my next book, which is called How God Works, and it is basically looking at ancient practices and rituals and advice from religions and kind of evaluating them in a scientific framework.Speaker 12: (singing)Speaker 13: (singing)Speaker 14: Bless us oh Lord and these thy gifts, which we are about to receive from thy bounty.David DeSteno: What I found time and time again is that some of these ancient practices, like prayers for giving thanks, even families saying grace regularly before they eat dinner and giving thanks, those are ways that are presented theologically, but what they actually are are actually kind of beautiful nudges to the mind. And what we see is that even maybe though the religious leaders didn't understand the science of why these things worked, they could see the outcomes, and I think there's a lot of evidence for that.David DeSteno: What we're finding time and again is that being grateful, engaging in compassion, these lead to long term benefits for people in terms of their physical and mental well-being.Shankar Vedantam: You've been particularly interested in a group of people who appear to have superpowers when it comes to delaying gratification. They can go long periods without food and water, they're adept at placing the interests of others before themselves. Tell me about the connection you saw between your psychological research and Buddhist monks.David DeSteno: Yeah, so when we first started studying self-control and what role emotions play in it, I also had another group of students who were studying mindfulness meditation, and I thought, "Well who knows more about delaying gratification and cravings and not being attached to these things than Buddhist monks?" So I spent time talking to the Buddhist monks and one high ranking one told me that he said, "You know, when monks first take their vows to be chaste and to not drink alcohol et cetera and to not gamble," he said, "They fail just like everybody else." What he said is, "Over time, through meditation, what happens is it begins to unleash these feelings of compassion. [inaudible 00:37:58] once that compassion starts to be unleashed, resisting temptation becomes much easier," and it's similar to the idea that I was talking about with gratitude. When you feel those emotions, they change what your mind values. It makes you value the long term more and what you find is that just makes it easier to persevere toward your goals and to control selfish temptations.Shankar Vedantam: Now, it's one thing to say that this is true for people who have practiced very difficult meditation techniques for years on end. But I understand that you have studied with the novices, people who know very little or nothing about meditation, can learn these practices. Can you tell me about the study you conducted along these lines in Boston?David DeSteno: Yeah. So we believe that after a few weeks, we might be able to see some changes. So we invited people who had never meditated before from the Boston community to come to our lab and we collaborated with the Buddhist lama who was going to teach them meditative techniques. So half of them came to the lab for eight weeks of meditation and then she created MP3s that they could take home for their daily practice, and there were another bunch of people who were put on the waiting list, so they received no training at all. After that was done, we told them, "Come back to the lab after these eight weeks. We want to measure how meditation affected your memory and your ability to engage in certain types of cognitive activities," which seems kind of straightforward, there's a lot of work on how meditation affects memory. But the real experiment took place in the waiting room. So when they came to our lab, there was a waiting room of three chairs and two people were already sitting in the chairs, these were confederates or actors who worked for us. Then came in the subjects, what did they do? Well they sat in the third chair, waiting to be called.David DeSteno: About two minutes later, we had another actor come down the hall and enter the waiting room. She didn't really have a broken foot but she was on crutches wearing one of those boots that you wear when your foot is broken, wincing in pain, and she came into the room and there were no chairs left for her and so she basically just kind of winced and let out a little painful sigh of discomfort and leaned against the wall. Our two other actors were told to ignore her and so the question was what would the subject do, would he or she be willing to sacrifice his or her immediate comfort by getting up, seeing if he could help this person offering his seat to her, or would he ignore her like everybody else did?David DeSteno: What we found was, in the conditions among the non-meditators about 16% of people did this, they got up and offered their seat and see if they could help this person. But among the meditators, it jumped to 50%, would immediately get up and offer their seat to this person, see if they could give her anything and we've replicated this finding so it's not just kind of a one-off thing.Shankar Vedantam: So one thing this experiment suggests to me is that it might be better to think of gratitude as a skill rather than as a trait or just simply an emotion, something that just pops up unbidden in our hearts.David DeSteno: That's right. We have this idea of emotional intelligence has been kind of percolating for the past decade or more in U.S. culture, and there are several parts to it. One is can you read another person's emotion to know what they're feeling? One is can you kind of keep calm so you're not disruptive, the schools often use this when they're worried about keeping little Johnny quiet in class so he's not a disruption. But there's a third part that people forget about, and that third part of emotional intelligence is learning how to use your emotions as tools or as skills to achieve your goals, and that's exactly what we're talking about. Emotions are tools that you can cultivate in your life. When you meditate, you're building an automatic response to feel compassion more regularly. When you count your blessings daily, you're engaging in an activity, you're curating your emotional states, you're making yourself feel more grateful.Shankar Vedantam: There are periodically stories that you see on local television, David, that are along the lines of this one. Take a listen.Speaker 15: Barista Logan Norris was working the Starbucks window at 9 a.m. when a customer offered to buy coffee for the strangers in the car behind him.Logan Norris: It started out by someone just came up and they wanted to do exactly that and just pay it forward, and it just kept going on.Speaker 15: So how many cars participated?Speaker 17: That was just about 30 more that went through. I know we're at least up to 160.Shankar Vedantam: Talk about this idea, David. You've mentioned it briefly in the past, the idea that emotions such as gratitude are fundamentally contagious, that as you see them, you have a strong impulse to be part of this, as you call it, this virtuous cycle.David DeSteno: Yeah. I mean that's one of the ... So, all emotions are catchy. We're more likely to feel them if I'm sitting next to someone who's anxious, that anxiety can rub off on me. But gratitude has kind of this added element. That is, it makes you want to pay it forward, and we found that in our own experiments when people leave the lab and a stranger comes up to them, they are more willing to help them and you see it time and again, like it's at toll booths or at Starbucks, people do this, and it drives economists crazy, because from a purely self-interested standpoint, "Hey, that guy just bought me something. I am ahead. Why aren't I just taking my extra benefit and running?" It's because it's built into us, this idea that if we cooperate with one another, we get gains down the line. If we pay it forward, those gains come back to us and in all the evolutionary models, that is true. Gratitude is a device to make us willing to do that. So there's wonderful work by a psychologist Elizabeth Dunn and Michael Norton that show giving is perceived in the brain as pleasure. But when we have gratitude, it even amps that up even more. It makes it even more pleasurable, it makes us more willing to do it and it builds these cycles of cooperation in amazing ways, in ways that don't seem to make logical sense but feel really rewarding.Shankar Vedantam: So there are going to be people who listen to this and say, "Look, this is all just pie in the sky. The people who really get ahead in life are the people who are brash and rude and have sharp elbows. Gratitude and compassion are for suckers." What do you say to them, David?David DeSteno: I get this question a lot. People say to me, "Dave, I want to be a success. Should I be a jerk or should I be a nice guy?" I say, "Well what's your timeframe?" If you're a jerk in the short-term, if you're selfish, if you don't help other people, you can get ahead but in the long term those individuals pay a price because people do not want to interact with them, partner with them, work with them. But I do worry about this because ... In some sense is am I making people even in the moment suckers, but we recently ran a study where we kind of tackled this question and the way it worked was simply people were made to feel grateful by counting their blessings [inaudible 00:44:52] normally do that. And we have them watch Person A cheat Person B on something where Person A and Person B were both confederates. They had the opportunity to intervene, and what we found is people who were feeling grateful were more likely to intervene and try and correct Person A's behavior, the person who cheated, even to engage in something we call third party punishment, that is, they'd even pay a little money to have this person told, "Hey, you shouldn't do that," to harm this other individual.David DeSteno: What we take from that is, when you're feeling grateful it doesn't make you a sucker, it doesn't make you willing to be walked all over. It makes you want to do the virtuous thing, but it also makes you willing to stand up for justice when you see someone else not being treated as well. And so the people who are feeling grateful, yes, their impulse is to do the right thing, but when they see injustices in the world, they are also the ones who are going to be more likely to call it out.Shankar Vedantam: Some years ago at Hidden Brain, David, we began a weekly practice of acknowledging our unsung heroes on the show, so these were people who often worked in the background, and one thing I discovered is that once you start keeping an eye out for unsung heroes, they really are everywhere. Even the most trivial things need the help of so many different people. But here's the interesting part that I want to run by you. I've been surprised at how many of our listeners tell us that they love the unsung hero segment of our show. Now, of course, much of the time we are thanking people whom our listeners don't know. What is it, do you think, about seeing someone else express gratitude, even if it is to a third party, someone who you don't know, that makes us happy?David DeSteno: I think two things. I think one, in seeing someone else express gratitude, what it is is ... It's a good type of virtue signaling. It's an index that this person appreciates, that they couldn't have achieved all of their goals in the world on their own. And the argument you're making is similar to one my collaborator the economist Bob Franks makes. We kind of have this assumption that everything good is due to our own efforts. And part of it is, but as you're saying there are many unsung heroes, there are many people without whose help we wouldn't be where we are. And so expressing gratitude is a marker that this person appreciates that fact, and I think it's a marker and a reminder that in some ways, we're all in this together and we are going to be appreciative of that.Shankar Vedantam: You cite a sociologist who says that gratitude is the moral memory of humankind. I love that idea, that's really beautiful.David DeSteno: Yeah, that's George Simmel. It is beautiful and I think what it is is it reminds us that everything we have achieved is not solely through our own effort. And it reminds us to pay it back and to pay it forward. And if we do that, the outcome for everybody is going to be a better one.Shankar Vedantam: I want you to tell me about a moment in your life that occurred some time ago, David, when some of your elderly mother's caregivers did something special for her. What did they do and again what affect did it have on you?David DeSteno: Yeah. So my mom is 99 and living in her house but she requires 24/7 care, and so she has a group of caregivers for women who help her with her needs throughout the day. But what became clear to me is that on her birthday when she turned 99, they organized a party for her so that the neighbors came. They bought her gifts, they made her her favorite meals and desserts, and this is so far above and beyond what they are required to do for their job as caretakers, at cost to themselves in terms of time and effort and money, even. And it was just so heartwarming to me and I choke up ... I choke up and I tear up when I think about it, because it made me feel so grateful because here's my mom, I can't give her the kind of care she needs personally. I'm an only child, I live far away and these people, yes, they're being paid to do it, but they go so far above and beyond that it's just made me feel more gratitude than I could ever have imagined.David DeSteno: Again, it made me want to sacrifice and do wonderful things for them. And so yes it's heartwarming, yes it's beautiful, but it also nudges us, right? It nudges our minds to either pay those people back, or to pay it forward to others, and I think that's the beauty of gratitude. It ensures that there's going to be more blessings to come.Shankar Vedantam: David DeSteno is a psychologist at Northeastern University. He is the author of Emotional Success: The Power of Gratitude, Compassion, and Pride. David, thanks for joining me today on Hidden Brain.David DeSteno: Thank you, Shankar.Shankar Vedantam: Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Midroll Media is our exclusive advertising sales partner. Our audio production team includes Brigid McCarthy, Laura Kwerel, Autumn Barnes and Andrew Chadwick. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I am Hidden Brain's executive editor.Shankar Vedantam: Our unsung hero this week is someone who has helped me think through numerous aspects of launching an independent production company. Very often, the nuts and bolts of the organizations in which we work are hidden from view, but I can attest, it's really important to get the fundamentals right. Over the past year or so, my friend and former colleague Lily Ladd helped me brainstorm how to launch a small business. Her strategic counsel has proven invaluable. It's shaping all the creative work we do on a weekly basis, which makes her a walking definition of an unsung hero. It helps that besides being a smart thinker, Lily is a terrific listener and a wonderful human being. Thank you Lily, I'm truly grateful. For more Hidden Brain, you can follow us on Facebook, Twitter and at HiddenBrain.org. I'm Shankar Vedantam, see you next week.

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Where Gratitude Gets You | Hidden Brain Media

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Many of us struggle with self-control. And we assume willpower is the key to achieving our goals. But there's a simple and often overlooked mental habit

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We're surrounded by noise. That "noise" can be actual sounds - but also other annoyances and distractions that make it hard for us to concentrate or think clearly. And it's only getting worse - we're all being bombarded with more sirens, more pings, more chatter, more information. And then there are our internal monologues. Silence is just harder to come by.

Leigh Marz and Justin Zorn (co-authors of Golden: The Power of Silence in a World of Noise) join Dr Laurie Santos to discuss the benefits of silence and how we can all seek out more moments of quiet and recognise their value.

The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos

You might think you know what it takes to lead a happier life... more money, a better job, or Instagra...

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The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos

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We're surrounded by noise. That "noise" can be actual sounds - but also other annoyances and distractions that make it hard for us to concentrate or think clearly. And it's only getting worse - we're all being bombarded with more sirens, more pings, more chatter, more information.

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It's Never Too Early to Learn About Happiness

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It's Never Too Early to Learn About Happiness

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Not matter if you're aged three or 103, you can learn to be happier using pretty much the same strategies. Sesame Workshop and its furry friends have been teaching "emotional ABCs" alongside literacy and numeracy for decades. So in collaboration with The Happiness Lab, Elmo and his friends will be helping us present fun and accessible happiness hacks for listeners of all ages.

To kick things off, Dr Laurie Santos sat down to discuss why it's never too early to learn about wellbeing with Sesame Workshop's CEO, Steve Youngwood; the Chief Production and Creative Development Officer, Kay Wilson Stallings... and everyone's favorite furry, red monster, Elmo.

(Sesame Workshop is a non-profit organization with a mission to help kids grow smarter, stronger, and kinder. The work they do is funded by donations big and small - so if you want to become a part of their important mission to improve children's emotional well-being, then visit: sesameworkshop.org/support-us/)

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The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos

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With Elmo's Help... It's Never Too Early to Learn About Happiness

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Not matter if you're aged three or 103, you can learn to be happier using pretty much the same strategies. Sesame Workshop and its furry friends have been teaching "emotional ABCs" alongside literacy and numeracy for decades. So in collaboration with The Happiness Lab, Elmo and his friends will be helping us present fun and accessible happiness hacks for listeners of all ages.

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Yoga To Reduce Stress | 30 Min Slow Flow - Relaxing Stretches + Savasana

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30 Minute Relaxing Yoga For Mental Health | All Levels - Slow Seated Flow

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10 Minute Yoga Stretch for Stress Relief

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10 Minute Yoga Stretch for Stress Relief

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Yoga Stretch for Stress & Anxiety Relief

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Yoga Stretch for Stress & Anxiety Relief

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15 Min. Yoga Stretch for Stress & Anxiety Relief | feel calm and relaxed right away

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Rainstorm Sounds for Relaxing, Focus or Deep Sleep | Nature White Noise | 8 Hour Video

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Sunset Beach | Sounds for Relaxing, Focus or Deep Sleep | Nature White Noise | 8 Hour Video

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Calm | Olympic National Park Soundscape | Nature Sounds for Relaxation, Focus & Sleep

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Calm | Denali National Park Soundscape | Nature Sounds for Relaxation, Work & Sleep

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Practice.

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Breathing Technique for Energy and Calm: Learn Alternate Nostril Breathing Exercise with Dora Kamau

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Practice!

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Practice :)

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60 Second Breathing Exercise for Anxiety | iHASCO

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Practice :)

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Practice :)

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Breathing Exercises To Stop A Panic Attack Now | TAKE A DEEP BREATH

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Practice :)

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What's Normal Anxiety and What's An Anxiety Disorder? 

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What's Normal Anxiety and What's An Anxiety Disorder? 

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Answer the following questions in your response — What is the difference between normal anxiety and an anxiety disorder? How are the symptoms the same? How are they different? Speak to how the brain functions in both.

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What's normal anxiety -- and what's an anxiety disorder? | Body Stuff with Dr. Jen Gunter | TED

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Headspace | Meditation | The Noting technique

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Leaves on a stream: Manage negative thoughts with this meditation exercise - Flow

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3-minute meditation exercise for beginners! Feet, Hands and Forehead - Flow

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3-minute mindfulness meditation for clarity - Flow

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Daily Calm | 10 Minute Mindfulness Meditation | Be Present

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