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Podcast: Why We Can't Shake Life's 'Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda' Moments

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Podcast: Why We Can't Shake Life's 'Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda' Moments

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Why We Can’t Shake Life’s ‘Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda’ Moments

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Amy Summerville runs the Regret Lab at Miami University in Ohio. She says regret is pervasive — but it doesn’t always have to be a negative emotion.

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The paradox of choice : why more is less

Schwartz, Barry, 1946-

New York : Eccoc 2004
On display, 1st floor. Call number: BF611 .S38 2004

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Schwartz, B. (2004). The Tyranny of Choice. Scientific American, 290(4), 70–75. SCSU login link

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"Only about 6 percent of applicants will get good news." McCooey, S. (2019). Yale admits 5.91 percent of applicants. Yale Daily News, 3/28/19 "In the last five years, rates of college mental health problems have skyrocketed nationally."
* Rates of college students feeling anxiety and overwhelmed:
American College Health Association. American College Health Association-National College Health Assessment II: Reference Group Executive Summary Fall 2018. Silver Spring, MD: American College Health Association; 2018.
* Depression rates doubling in the last decade:

Twenge, J. M., Cooper, A. B., Joiner, T. E., Duffy, M. E., & Binau, S. G. (2019). Age, period, and cohort trends in mood disorder indicators and suicide-related outcomes in a nationally representative dataset, 2005-2017. Journal of abnormal psychology.
"So I decided to develop a new class on the science of happiness" Shimer, D. (2018). Yale's Most Popular Class Ever: Happiness. New York Times. 1/26/2018. "She wrote two classic texts on the science of well-being."
Lyubomirsky, S. (2008). The how of happiness: A scientific approach to getting the life you want. Penguin

Lyubomirsky, S. (2014). The myths of happiness: What should make you happy, but doesn't, what shouldn't make you happy, but does. Penguin.
"Researchers have checked the validity of scales like these in lots and lots of ways."
* Self report scales correlate with emotional experience:
Krueger, A. B., & Schkade, D. A. (2008). The reliability of subjective well-being measures. Journal of public economics, 92(8-9), 1833-1845
* Self report scales correlated with family reports and smiling:

Sandvik, E., Diener, E., & Seidlitz, L. (2009). Subjective well-being: The convergence and stability of self-report and non-self-report measures. In Assessing well-being (pp. 119-138). Springer, Dordrecht.
"Feeling happy leads to good life outcomes."
* Happiness is correlated with higher income later in life:
De Neve, J. E., & Oswald, A. J. (2012). Estimating the influence of life satisfaction and positive affect on later income using sibling fixed effects. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109(49), 19953-19958
* Happiness is correlated with better relationships later in life:
Harker, L., & Keltner, D. (2001). Expressions of positive emotion in women's college yearbook pictures and their relationship to personality and life outcomes across adulthood. Journal of personality and social psychology, 80(1), 112
* Positive mood leads to catching fewer colds:
Cohen, S., Doyle, W. J., Turner, R. B., Alper, C. M., & Skoner, D. P. (2003). Emotional style and susceptibility to the common cold. Psychosomatic medicine, 65(4), 652-657
* Happiness leads to later job interview success:
Burger, J. M., & Caldwell, D. F. (2000). Personality, social activities, job-search behavior and interview success: Distinguishing between PANAS trait positive affect and NEO extraversion. Motivation and Emotion, 24(1), 51-62
* Happiness in nuns correlated with longevity:
Danner, D. D., Snowdon, D. A., & Friesen, W. V. (2001). Positive emotions in early life and longevity: findings from the nun study. Journal of personality and social psychology, 80(5), 804. "Identical twins are much more alike in their happiness levels than our fraternal twins." Bartels, M. (2015). Genetics of happiness, satisfaction with life, and wellbeing; a review and meta-analysis of heritability studies. Behavior Genetics, 45(2), 137-156. "I direct a study called the Harvard Study of Adult Development." "Bob's study showed that the keys to happiness don't involve what we often put time into to become happier." Vaillant, G. E. (2008). Aging well: Surprising guideposts to a happier life from the landmark study of adult development. Little, Brown. "There's no quick fix for happiness. But science shows there is a fix, if you put in a little time and effort." Kurtz, J. L., & Lyubomirsky, S. (2008). Towards a durable happiness. In S. J. Lopez & J. G. Rettew (Eds.), The Positive Psychology Perspective Series (Vol. 4). Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group. 21-36 "The ones that I tend to focus on are gratitude and kindness." Lyubomirsky, S., & Layous, K. (2013). How do simple positive activities increase well-being?. Current directions in psychological science, 22(1), 57-62. "Science shows us lots of really simple habits we can add to our lives to feel better" https://www.adultdevelopmentstudy.org/ Diener, E., & Seligman, M. E. (2002). Very happy people. Psychological science, 13(1), 81-84
* The importance of social connection:

* Positive mood and connecting with random people on the street:

Epley, N., & Schroeder, J. (2014). Mistakenly seeking solitude. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(5), 1980.

* Reducing choices and well-being:

Schwartz, B. (2004, January). The paradox of choice: Why more is less. New York: Ecco.
Emmons, R., & McCullough, M. (2003). Counting blessings versus burdens. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84(2), 377-389
* Count your blessings and happiness:
Baer, R. A. (Ed.). (2015). Mindfulness-based treatment approaches: Clinician's guide to evidence base and applications. Elsevier
* Becoming more accepting of emotions:

* Becoming more accepting of obstacles:

Oettingen, G. (2015). Rethinking positive thinking: Inside the new science of motivation. Current;
Kohn, A. (1999). Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. "There are now hundreds of such studies." Lyubomirsky, S. (2008). The how of happiness: A scientific approach to getting the life you want. Penguin
* Focusing on the end goal and think more about the journey:
"We put the class online completely for free." https://www.coursera.org/learn/the-science-of-well-being "The specific one we used is called PERMA." Butler, J., & Kern, M. L. (2016). The PERMA-Profiler: A brief multidimensional measure of flourishing. International Journal of Wellbeing, 6(3).
Lyubomirsky, S. (2014). The myths of happiness: What should make you happy, but doesn't, what shouldn't make you happy, but does. Penguin.

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Episode 1: You Can Change - The Happiness Lab

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"Only about 6 percent of applicants will get good news." McCooey, S. (2019). Yale admits 5.91 percent of applicants. Yale Daily News, 3/28/19 "In the last five years, rates of college mental health problems have skyrocketed nationally." * Rates of college students feeling anxiety and overwhelmed: American College Health Association.

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Lyubomirsky, S., & Layous, K. (2013). How Do Simple Positive Activities Increase Well-Being? Current Directions in Psychological Science, 22(1), 57–62.  SCSU login link

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Podcast: The Tiny Habits that Change Everything

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Podcast: The Tiny Habits that Change Everything

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We're a month into the new year now. How are you doing on your resolutions? Have you already fallen off the wagon? Maybe the goal you set for yourself was just too big to successfully tackle. You need to think smaller. Tiny, even.

That's the argument my guest makes. His name is Dr. BJ Fogg, and he's the founder and director of Stanford's Behavior Design Lab, as well as the author of the new book Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything. Today on the show, BJ walks us through the three components that drive our behavior, including the simple yet overlooked relationship between motivation and ability. He then explains how to build habits that feel easier and require lower levels of motivation by picking behaviors that are good matches for you and breaking them down into smaller parts. We also talk about the need to tie your habits to turnkey prompts, the importance of celebrating your successes, no matter how small, and the way tiny habits can lead to bigger changes. We end our conversation with why you should think about the process of getting rid of your bad habits as untangling them rather than breaking them.

Resources Related to the Podcast

Connect With BJ
BJ's website TinyHabits.com BJ on Twitter
Listen to the Podcast! (And don't forget to leave us a review!)
Listen to the episode on a separate page. Download this episode. Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.
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Read the Transcript

Brett McKay:
If you appreciate the full text transcript, please consider donating to AoM. It will help cover the costs of transcription and allow others to enjoy it as well. Thank you!
Welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. We're a month into the new year now. How are you doing on your resolutions? Have you already fallen off the wagon? Maybe the goal you set for yourself was just too big to successfully tackle. You need to think smaller. Tiny, even.

That's the argument my guest makes. His name is Dr. BJ Fogg, and he's the founder and director of Stanford's Behavior Design Lab, as well as the author of the new book Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything. Today on the show, BJ walks us through the three components that drive our behavior, including the simple yet overlooked relationship between motivation and ability. He then explains how to build habits that feel easier and require lower levels of motivation by picking behaviors that are good matches for you and breaking them down into smaller parts. We also talk about the need to tie your habits to turnkey prompts, the importance of celebrating your successes, no matter how small, and the way tiny habits can lead to bigger changes. We end our conversation with why you should think about the process of getting rid of your bad habits as untangling them rather than breaking them.

After the show is over, check out our show notes at aom.is/tinyhabits.

All right, BJ Fogg, welcome to the show.

BJ Fogg:

Hey. I'm happy to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

Brett McKay:

I'm really excited to have you on because I have been following your work through other people, students you've had on your classes that you teach about behavior design, and I was so excited to see you have a book putting this all together in one place. You've spent your career researching developing what you call behavior design. How did you get involved with that?

BJ Fogg:

Well, if you rewind about 25 years, I was really interested in the overlap between technology and persuasion or influence, which hadn't happened yet, but I in some ways just sensed that computers would be designed to influence our attitudes and our behaviors, and I wanted to study this. That's what I did in my doctorate work, ran a series of laboratory experiments to show this could indeed happen, and then predicted it will, and then set out some warnings and some guidelines for this. I called that persuasive technology.

About 10 years ago, my labs work at Stanford shifted away from persuasive technology. We just really weren't interested in that anymore, and we thought we'd really done what we needed to do there. Then it became what we now call behavior design, which is different than persuasive technology. It still has to do with human behavior change, but doesn't have to do anything with technology directly.

The interest is a long-held interest, and I think it actually goes back to my Mormon roots. I was raised Mormon in California, and probably most people listening understand that that culture, that religion is a lot about behavior change. There's a lot of restrictions, a lot of things you can't do. When people become Mormon, they have to make a lot of behavior change. At least the way I see it in retrospect, I grew up very, very young talking about behavior change and doing behavior change things and helping other people change their behavior.

Brett McKay:

Well, and your work with persuasion technology, this has been used by... This shaped a lot of the apps we use today, Instagram, Uber. The companies that developed these apps, they used insights that came out of your research.

BJ Fogg:

Yeah, I think the biggest takeaway from my work is simplicity. Simplicity is the thing that I saw early on that made technologies that engaged people. Unless you were forced to use it like an Office suite that was complicated, yeah, you were forced to use that complicated thing, but everything that people were choosing for themselves and using, the overriding pattern was simplicity. That's really what I taught and advocated at Stanford and elsewhere. It's one of my maxims today that you'll find in Tiny Habits, is simplicity changes behavior.

Brett McKay:

As you said, you shifted focus more towards behavior design. It's not just tied to technology; it's about designing behavior, making new habits, untangling habits you don't like. We'll talk about why you call it untangling, not breaking habits. In this model of behavior design... First off, the behavior design, you have a model that explains human behavior and methods that you can use to change behavior. Let's talk about this model first, because I think it'll help people understand why we do what we do. Part of that model, you mentioned simplicity. Walk us through the Fogg model of behavior.

BJ Fogg:

Yeah, so there's various models in behavior design. The cornerstone is just this one, called the Fogg Behavior Model, and it goes like this. Behavior happens when three things come together at the same moment, motivation to do the behavior, ability to do the behavior, and a prompt. That model describes any type of behavior. It can also be used to understand how to stop the behavior. You remove motivation or you remove ability, in other words, you make it harder, or you remove the prompt. I write it out as B, B is behavior, equals MAP, Motivation, Ability, Prompt. It's a model, not an equation, but I still write it out with the equals sign.

Brett McKay:

Walk us through a behavior that can highlight this connection of motivation, ability, and prompt.

BJ Fogg:

Oh, wow, there are so many. Let's say that your son is sitting around playing video games, and you fix dinner for him. Your son is motivated to eat and is capable to eat, but until you prompt your son, say, "Hey, time for dinner," he's not going to come to the dinner table. In that case, there's motivation because he's hungry. There's ability because he's just sitting around, he's not busy, and it doesn't cost anything for dinner, so he has ability. In that case, the thing that he's lacking to do the behavior, come to dinner, is the prompt.

As you look at any behavior that you do, you will always have some level of motivation, there'll be some level of ability, and there will always be a prompt. You can look at any behavior you do, whether it's opening a certain email or answering your phone or texting your mom or eating an apple for lunch, all of those behaviors can be understood in terms of those components, behavior, motivation, ability, prompt. It also helps you design for behaviors. That's what the Tiny Habits method is all about. You're hacking those components to make the process and method of habit formation really, really easy to do and really reliable.

Brett McKay:

Your behavioral model was really eye-opening. One of the things that I got out of it, that really hit me hard, was this connection of motivation and ability. If something is really hard to do, well, that means you're going to need more motivation to do it. But if something is easy to do, you don't need as much motivation to do it.

BJ Fogg:

Yeah. I am so happy that in my book Tiny Habits, I unpack that. For the first time, I really dive into the behavior model and I talk about the components, and I show that relationship between motivation and ability. You summarized it well. There's a graphic. Yes, there's a written version of the model, but there's also a graphic. There's a curved line on the graphic that shows that relationship.

It's embarrassing to say that it took me eight years to figure out the right word for that relationship, but I'll share it here. It's kind of geeky. It's a compensatory relationship. They can compensate for each other, like teammates. If motivation is low or weak, then ability has to be high. It has to be really, really easy. In other words, if you're not super motivated to do something, the only way that you'll do it is if it's really, really easy to do. On the flip side, if a behavior is hard to do, the only thing that puts you above the action, the only thing that gets action is if your motivation is high,

Understanding that motivation and ability... I used to talk about it as trade-offs. It's not really a trade-off. They compensate for each other. Actually, it was that insight that led to developing the Tiny Habits method. As I looked at my own graphic, the two-dimensional version, I saw in the lower right-hand corner a space where, if the motivation is low, you could still do the behavior if it's easy enough, if you make it radically easy. Boom, there's some motivation. It's not zero. And you make it really easy. That means the only thing you're lacking is a prompt. There was a moment when I figured out how to hack the prompt, and then they all came together. That then became the Tiny Habits method. It got derived from looking at my own graphic going, "That's a really interesting space right there."

The opposite is people picking something hard to do. If you pick something hard, like "I'm going to work out for two hours every day" or "I'm going to do CrossFit from now on" or I'm going to save $1,000 a month," that means your motivation has to be high and stay high. You have to sustain motivation. That's really unrealistic. We don't have that much control over our levels of motivation, and that means, by setting yourself up for these hard behaviors, these hard changes, you somehow have to magically find a way to keep your motivation high, and that doesn't work very well. Tiny Habits acknowledges that and says, "No, scale it back, make it really easy, so you don't have to mess around with motivation and you don't have to rely on willpower."

Brett McKay:

Well, let's unpack this idea of motivation, because I think you're right. When people decide they want to change a behavior, start a habit, they think, "I have to do something really hard, and then I've got to motivate myself." Motivation is an interesting part of psychology and behavioral science because you see different definitions of what motivation is, and there's a different definition for the layperson. I think a layperson thinks, "Well, motivation is like reading quotes and telling myself mantras." How do you define motivation in your behavioral model?

BJ Fogg:

Well, it's a driving force. It's something that energizes you to do a specific behavior. I don't think of motivation as something that is generalized to everything in your life. Your motivation shifts context by context, in some ways, minute by minute. Say I'm in a context where I'm a researcher at Stanford. That means I am more motivated to do things that are in line with that identity. But if I'm at a family reunion with my family in Idaho, I have different motivations at that time.

What had not been studied academically, and this is a huge surprise to me, I'd already mapped out and understood that motivation shifts over time. Along with some of the bootcampers I work with, we named that fluctuation. We called it motivation wave. I really like that phrase. Basically, I like it because waves don't always stay high. They come and go. There are big ones; there are small ones. They shift.

The academic work on this had not existed until, oh, there's some early sense of it in 1999, and then more work in 2007, in other words, from an academic perspective, really recently. That may not sound recent to people listening, but work goes back decades and decades, so it's just in some ways very surprising that there was no acknowledge or research around shifts in motivation until relatively recently. The fact is we've all experienced that in our life. People get really motivated in early January, and the motivation drops off. We get motivated for something else around February 14th. We get motivated for something else around April 15th, which in the U.S. is taxes. We have different motivations that shift over time.

One of the key, what shall I say, challenges is that when people sit down, and you said this well, and said, "Hey, I'm going to change, and I'm going to do these big things," at that moment when they're making those decisions and making the plan, yes, their motivation is high. In that moment, they can do hard things. Well, we seem to be terrible, as human beings, is projecting our future levels of motivation. Even though we've seen that, oh, two weeks from now, I may not be so motivated, we seem to make the same mistake over and over and over, and we just assume that we'll be able to sustain high levels of motivation, which doesn't work.

That's what Tiny Habits is... In some ways, in the book, I... Attack is too strong a word. I dismantle that. I'm just like, "Hey, people, be realistic about what happens with human motivation. There's no magic way to keep it sustained. There's a much better way to create habits that doesn't require you to rely on high levels of motivation."

Brett McKay:

The other problem you talk about with motivation is that people get motivated towards abstract ideas. It's like, "Lose weight." It's like, well, okay, but are you motivated to do the things to lose weight. You have to look at behaviors that will allow you to achieve that goal.

BJ Fogg:

You're right on. What doesn't work is trying to motivate yourself toward an abstraction, like lose weight. That is an abstract thing because you can't in this moment lose weight. You can drop down and do 20 or 30 or maybe 50 push-ups in this moment. That's a behavior, but lose weight is not a behavior. It's an outcome. It's a result to other behaviors.

One of the methods I developed over the years was a way to take that outcome or the aspiration, that vague, abstract thing, and then break it down into specific behaviors that you can then design for. That's a couple methods put together that I explain in Tiny Habits that can be really liberating and insightful.

Somebody might have motivation to reduce their stress, in fact, probably everybody listening to this. Stress is a massive issue right now in our world and, in some ways, just getting worse. Just motivating yourself to reduce stress, as you can tell, isn't the best answer. Then some people might guess at the solution, and I'm against guessing. There's a systematic way to do it, but the guess might be "Oh, I'll meditate for 30 minutes a day. That's how I'll reduce my stress." Well, that might be a good match for people, or it might not. For some people, it's a terrific match. For many people, it's a very challenging habit to wire in, especially meditating 30 minutes.

Instead of having people go the wrong direction and just focus on these abstract things, and instead of having people just guessing, I love systems, even since I was a kid. Let's systematize it. That's what behavior design is. It's a system step by step, so you don't have to guess. By following the steps, you can derive what is the best new habit for you that will help you reduce stress or lose weight or be more productive, or whatever you want. That means that you can move forward with confidence that you are figuring out the right behavior. I call that the golden behavior, or a set of behaviors, gold behaviors. Then you can make those a reality in your life much more readily than a guess like meditating for 30 minutes.

Brett McKay:

I thought it was interesting what you said there. You're looking for matches in behavior. You're trying to find something that you would already want to do. That's one of your principles throughout this, help people do what they already want to do.

BJ Fogg:

Yeah. It comes down to three criteria. If you're looking for a habit or behavior change to help you reach whatever aspiration, the best matches, the golden behaviors have these three characteristics.

Number one, it's a behavior that you want to do. If you want to be more active, don't pick an exercise that you hate or a behavior you hate. Find something you want to do. In my life, when I'm in Maui, it's surfing. I am just crazy passionate about that. Not everybody has that available to them, but dancing or group activities.

Number two, make sure it's a behavior you can do. Again, surfing is not available to people who don't live by waves, and dancing may not be available to people who don't have any kind of dance resource, if they want to dance with other people.

Then the third criterion, this is important, it needs to be a behavior that will have impact, that will actually take you toward your aspiration or outcome. A negative example of this, or a bad example, and some people are going to hate me for this, is people are set up to believe that taking 10,000 steps a day will lead to weight loss. I challenge that notion. I don't think 10,000 steps a day is very effective at weight loss. It's great at other things, and it's great to do, but weight loss is primarily a function of nutrition, and then after that, in my amateur opinion, I would say strength training.

But people have believed the media or the advertising around 10,000 steps, and they may match themselves with that. And as they do it, they're not seeing the weight loss. What it's lacking there is that third criteria of it being impactful, of it being effective.

I've done this, too. On my journey to lose weight and keep it off, I somehow thought that popcorn was a healthy snack. It turns out it was an awful snack. But that's what I thought. I thought that nonfat yogurt was a great snack. It turns out it's exactly wrong for me. Matching yourself carefully matters. Again, it's behaviors you want to do, you can do, and that will be effective, that will have impact.

Brett McKay:

Instead of relying on motivation, pumping yourself up, the idea is match yourself with behaviors you want to do. That connects to ability, too, because you want to find behaviors that are easy to do. You want to make it easy for yourself, not harder.

BJ Fogg:

Right. Or if you already have... We'll go back to surfing. My motivation for that is pretty darn high. That means it can be a little harder to do. I don't have to just walk out to the waves. I drive about 12 minutes and get my board off my little Honda Element and get in. However, here in California at my home gym, I can't surf. I have an air assault bike in my home gym here in the garage.

Brett McKay:

Those are terrible.

BJ Fogg:

Yeah, I don't love it, but it's okay. That is 15 feet away from me. Okay, I'm exaggerating. It's 20 feet away from me. It's so easy to just go get on the air assault, because I know there's going to be days when my motivation is not that high, so I've designed my context so it's just so easy.

Then I further trick myself. On the days that I'm feeling too tired to go work out, I make it even easier. I just say to myself, "BJ, just do four minutes on the air assault, and you don't even have to go hard. Four minutes and you're done. You don't even have to dress out. Just wear whatever you're wearing."

What I've found in my life, and other people have found this too, is at about three and a half minutes, yeah, I'm not motivated. I'm like, "Okay, I'm getting this done, getting it over. I'm not going hard like at CrossFit," but at about three and a half minutes, something changes in me and I want to keep going. Even though I know when I say I'm just going to do four minutes, yeah, odds are I'm going to keep going, sometimes I stop, but how do you make it so easy that low motivation won't tank you? You'll still do it, or in this case, with tricking myself on the air assault, you'll still get started. Scale it back. What's four minutes? I can do that. As a result, I get the workout here in California.

Brett McKay:

With ability, you're jiggering with things like time. Reduce the amount of time to make it easier, or just put the stuff closer to you so it's easier. You were talking about food. Weight loss is driven by what you eat. Well, just make it easy to eat good foods, or make it harder to eat bad foods.

BJ Fogg:

To eat bad foods. Yeah, exactly. There's a model, not the Fogg Behavior Model, but a different model, and it basically has these components. Something can be difficult if it requires time and you don't have time, so the way to make it easier is to shorten the time frame, like four minutes rather than 30 or 60. It can be difficult if it requires money and you don't have money. On the flip side of getting people to drink less soda, when they put a tax on soda, it decreases consumption by making it harder to do, more expensive. Third is how much physical effort something requires. For me, knowing here in California there's going to be moments where I'm not so motivated to work out, guess what, the gym is 20 feet away, so I've reduced physical effort.

The last one I'll talk about is mental effort, how much you have to think about stuff. Let's say you want to stop using social media. You can tweak your ability by making your password really difficult and not allowing your app to save the password. That doesn't mean you can't launch social media. It just makes it harder to do. You have to think harder, and it takes more time.

Those things together would... If I ran an experiment on that, it would reliably show that people are less likely to use social media if they have really hard passwords that their system didn't store. There's a systematic way, even that ability component. Then there's a system underneath that that allows you to hone in on what to tweak in order to get yourself to do the behavior or get yourself to stop doing a behavior.

Brett McKay:

We talked about motivation. If there's high motivation or it's easy to do, you're more likely to do it, but there has to be a prompt. You said you figured out something with your 20 years of doing this, that you hacked the prompt. What are some insights that you've figure out about prompts that make them more effective to get us to do the things we want to do?

BJ Fogg:

There is another model for this. I love models and systems. I'll be brief. There are three sources of prompts. One source is, I call it, person prompt. It just comes from you. You just happen to remember or something happens internally, like "Oh, I'm hungry" or "I have a headache." Those are prompts. They just come from you. Those are not reliable for most kinds of habits people want to form, like "I'm just going to remember to go to work out" or "I'm going to just remember to do my weekly expense report." Bad idea, but they do happen.

Next, you have prompts that I call context prompts. We're surrounded by these. Context prompts are things in your environment, whether it's a Post-it note, an alarm, a notification on your app, somebody else reminding you. There's tons of these.

Then the third type, and this is the hack, this is what Tiny Habits leverages, it has to do with your existing routine. I call it an action prompt. A routine you already do can serve as your prompt for a new habit. Brushing, which pretty much everybody does, can be your reminder or your prompt to floss. Sitting down in your car and turning it on can be your prompt to turn on your audiobook, so you can listen on the way to work. Now, notice you're not just relying on yourself to remember or you're not having Post-it notes everywhere. What you're doing is designing your routine, and you're finding something you already do that can serve as your prompt for a new habit.

Brett McKay:

Well, tell us about your pee/push-up prompt.

BJ Fogg:

Oh my. Yes. An odd example, but it totally works for me anyway, is after I pee, I do two push-ups. In Tiny Habits, that's the recipe. After I pee, I will do two push-ups. Well, today I did 25 and 12 and 20. I've peed three times already. I guess that means a lot of water and coffee.

You can do more than two, but the tiny habit is very small. For me, because I work mostly from home, that works really well. It's really after I flush the toilet, I do two push-ups. I can do as many as I want, but if I'm rushed or tired or sick, I do two, and I chalk it up as a victory. Then, of course, I wash my hands and I go about my day.

That seems probably odd to a lot of people, but it allows me to "Well, it's not even noon, and I've done 50 push-ups." It allows me to get some strength training in throughout the day, at least when I'm working at home, and it allows me to almost seamlessly put a new habit into my routine, so it doesn't feel like something that's just bolted on.

If you find the right place for new habits, they just feel like, "That's what I always do." I always, after I go to the bathroom, I do push-ups. Now, if I'm in a public space, I'll do squats. In hotels, I don't really like getting down on the floor, so I'll just do push-ups against the sink. It just has become really wired in to do that.

I know that example is really quirky, but some things make total sense, like after you brush, you will floss one tooth. That makes total sense that you would floss after you brush.

Brett McKay:

Well, I just like that example because it takes something people do every day multiple times a day, and you build a habit into it. It's very illustrative of that idea.

BJ Fogg:

Well, and do you know what, I'm sure many people listening to this know this, push-ups are such a good gateway to other kinds of exercises. Even if you can only do a couple wall push-ups or knee push-ups, there's something about it, and I've heard from lots of people on this, that makes you... I think there's probably... This is my opinion, not my research. I think there's something physiological that happens, and then you do see gains quickly. You do see your arms get stronger and your chest get stronger. There is something pretty great about push-ups. For people that can do them safely, if you don't have that habit, figure out where push-ups fit in your life, and lower the bar to two or just wall push-ups, and you can do more when you want to, but you don't have to do more. Just focus on consistency of the habit, not size of the habit.

Brett McKay:

We talked about the model, and throughout this model, you can start using the Tiny Habits method. We've been talking about this throughout the thing. You look for a prompt. When I brush my teeth, I will do X. It could be floss. But the Tiny Habits thing is you don't have to floss all your teeth. You start really, really tiny, just one tooth.

BJ Fogg:

I know, and that sounds crazy to people. As we talked about my model, by making it so easy and tiny, then you're not affected by fluctuations in your motivation. That's the hack, is you make it so tiny that this thing about us as human beings, the fluctuating motivation, won't get in your way.

Also, and this surprises people maybe even more, as you progress, you will naturally do more push-ups, you will naturally floss all your teeth, but what you don't do is raise the bar on yourself. That's the old not-very-effective way of thinking. It's like "Oh, two push-ups, then I have to do five, then I have to do 10, then I have to do 20," and you raise the bar. What you're doing there is you're setting yourself up to fail.

The bar always stays low, but you can do more when you want to. Then, and this is part of the mindset of Tiny Habits, any extra you do, like I did 25 out of the gate this morning... I only had to do two, but it was like, "Good for me. Awesome. I did 25. I got extra credit. Look at me." There is this thing that happens when you keep the bar low, that when you go above it, that feeling of "I'm the kind of person who overachieves" then affects you in other parts of your day. It shifts your identity.

Brett McKay:

Also, as you do this starting small, your ability increases, right?

BJ Fogg:

Yeah.

Brett McKay:

When you first start out, you're not going to be able to do 50 push-ups, but as you do two push-ups every day, you're going to get stronger, which will allow you... It'll make it easier to do more push-ups.

BJ Fogg:

Exactly. As it gets easier to do with the same level of motivation, you can do more push-ups because now they're easier to do. That's right-on. It's a little bit of a technical point, and it might be a little subtle, but yeah, that's how it works.

For most behaviors, not all, but for most behaviors, the more you do it, the easier it gets to do. Push-up is a great example, because you get better at form, you know exactly where to do them in your home, and you get stronger.

Brett McKay:

What I love about the Tiny Habits method, it's basically a recipe. After I do this, when I do this, I will do this one really small thing, and that's it. In the back of the book, I love it, you have just this giant list of tiny habits recipes you can do if you want to be more productive, stay organized, business travel. It's like after I walk in the door, I will hang my keys on the key hanger, which you're supposed to do, but make that connection to that anchor of walking through your door.

BJ Fogg:

Yeah. So glad you brought that up. Yeah, in Tiny Habits, I have an appendix that has 300 recipes for tiny habits, and there's topics, like Tiny Habits for Busy Moms, Tiny Habits for Dads Who Work From Home, Tiny Habits for Travel, and so on. There's 20 each. Those weren't random guesses. I did some work to figure out what are the most important topics, including topics like Tiny Habits for Caregivers, which can be crushing emotionally and physically.

I wanted to do 1,000, and I had 1,000 ready to go. My publisher was like, "Oh, BJ, this is like 60 pages. There's no way we're putting 60 pages of recipes in the back of the book. We'll give you 300." I was like, "Okay, I'll take it."

Brett McKay:

That's book number two, the 1,000 recipes.

The other insight that I got from this that I've been incorporating with myself and my kids from Tiny Habits is not only, okay, you make it easy, the thing you want to do, the habit easy, but also connect it to something you already do. But the one thing that I've been doing and teaching my kids is this idea of celebrating what you do. Why is that so important that you celebrate that you flossed one tooth or that you did two push-ups? I think people hear that and they're like, "I'm going to feel silly celebrating myself." What's going on there?

BJ Fogg:

Let me give the psychological explanation. I would love to hear how you guys are celebrating. Celebration is anything that you can do that will fire off a positive emotion, especially the feeling of success. For me, a go-to celebration is to do a fist bump and go, "Awesome," or raise my hands over my head after I do push-ups and go, "Way to go, BJ," the self-cheer, and it helps me feel successful. Now, what works for me may not work for you. There's a wide variety of approaches. In Tiny Habits, I list 100 different ways to celebrate, and I also give some exercises, really simple ones, where you can figure out what is the natural celebration for you.

The reason it matters is this. The emotion you feel as you do the new behavior is what wires it into your brain as a habit. In other words, it's emotions that create habit. If your brain does push-ups and it knows, "Wow, I'm going to feel awesome after I do these push-ups," it's going to remind you and it's going to want to do push-ups in the future. There's actually a physical restructuring of your brain that happens because of the emotion.

This goes in contrast to what probably everybody has heard about repetition. It takes 21 days and 66 days, and repetition creates habits. That's not true. If you look at the research carefully, it correlates with habit formation, but there's no evidence in that research that shows that repetition causes the habit to form. What causes it is the emotion that you feel. If you're really good at...

Let's say you want to drink more water. Really good at pouring the glass of water. I've got a glass of water here in front of me. And as you're doing that, you put it down on your work desk, so that's my habit. Fill a glass of water, put it down. If I can cause myself to feel positive, to feel successful, what I'm doing is making my brain take note of that and wiring that into my brain. The more effective you are at celebration, the faster you can create habits.

Brett McKay:

My son, he's nine. He does the fist pump in the air. He's like, "Yes."

BJ Fogg:

Yeah, good.

Brett McKay:

Mine is silly, but it works for me. I just make the noise for the intro guitar riff of Back in Black by AC/DC.

BJ Fogg:

Love it. Do you want to give us a demo?

I have some songs too. I have Eye of the Tiger. I have "Hey now, you're a rock star," whatever that is. I don't know what the words are, but just-

Brett McKay:

Smash Mouth.

BJ Fogg:

... calling up the music. Yeah, Smash Mouth. Those work for me, and sound effects sometimes. I use different celebrations for different things. If I'm in public, I'm not singing a song or I'm not going "Doot doo doo doo." If I'm in public, then it's just more of a quiet "You nailed this beach. Good for you."

Brett McKay:

I'll just imagine in my head AC/DC.

BJ Fogg:

That's great. Now, your nine-year-old son, I am so glad you're teaching him. If I could, and I won't ever do this work because I don't work with kids and don't do research on kids, it's a lot more complicated, but I'm hoping somebody will do an intervention where they teach kids, fifth grade, nine and 10 years old, how to celebrate in order to wire in habits, that age before they get all skeptical and all teenager-like, where they have that skill and they learn to apply it.

I would just be... Wow. I would just love... I know some parents have done that with their kids, like you, but there's not a systematic program for that yet. Delighted to hear that you've shared that with your son, and he has a celebration that works. Do you ever find that you celebrate together, that he sees you or you see him, and you both go, "Yeah, good for you"?

Brett McKay:

Yeah, we started to do that. I see him do it, and I'm like, "Hey, all right, you did it. That's cool." We're having fun with it. At first, he was a little... He's getting to that age where he's becoming self-conscious a bit. He was kind of, at first, like, "This is kind of dumb." I'm like, "No, that's fine. Go do it." And he does it. We've gotten him to do it.

BJ Fogg:

Do you know what to show him? Just go online, find videos of athletes-

Brett McKay:

Yeah, that's where he got it from. "I'm doing the Tiger Woods fist pump," he says. That's what-

BJ Fogg:

There we go. Find athletes he admires, and then show videos of them excelling. They almost always will celebrate. Just watch what happens when Caeleb Dressel the swimmer nails it in the 50 free, and watch what Serena Williams does when she nails a key serve. I have found that's a helpful way for guys who are skeptical or kids that think they're too cool. It's like, "Look at what these athletes do. That's how they wired in these high-performance habits."

Brett McKay:

The Tiny Habits method, people are probably thinking, "Well, how is this going to lead to bigger changes?" As you said, as you do the stuff more and more, you're working on consistency, your ability increases, and so you'll be able to start adding more. You don't have to force it, though, but it's just going to come, like "Today, I'm going to do 10 push-ups instead of two."

BJ Fogg:

Yeah. You naturally will do more. The habit that was designed as tiny, you naturally will do more, so it grows. Also, people naturally do other habits that are related. There's this ripple effect. I've seen this in my data since the beginning.

I started teaching tiny habits in 2011, five-day program online helping people, and then measuring it week after week after week, because I'm that kind of person. Of course, I want to measure stuff. What I've found from the beginning is there are these ripple effects. People make other changes in their life naturally.

For example, let's say somebody wires in the habit of taking three calming breaths. After I sit down for my morning lunch break, say they're at work, after they sit down, I'll take three calming breaths, just try to keep my mind free and clear. Once they feel successful doing that habit, what they will find is they start taking those three calming breaths at other parts of their life, even without designing an explicit habit for it. It generalizes.

In my own life, the way that's worked is even when I'm sleeping and there's all these things going through my head, like "Oh my gosh, I got this. I have that. What's going on here, my students and my class?" there's this reaction. Once you start thinking and knowing that three calming breaths can shift your level of anxiety, I guess, or increase your calm, you will naturally start applying that elsewhere in your life. There is this ripple effect that happens to almost everybody.

Brett McKay:

You're talking about creating new habits, but you also talk about, well, people would say breaking habits, but you don't actually like that. You say untangle bad habits. Why untangle bad habits instead of using breaking bad habits?

BJ Fogg:

Yeah, when it comes to stopping behaviors, one phrase that people often use that takes us in the wrong direction is breaking a bad habit. I think that's a bad word to use, or maybe not the optimal word, because it implies that it happens in a moment. If you just apply enough force in one moment, it's broken, you're done. You're not smoking anymore. You're not drinking. You're not gambling, whatever. That's not how these habits work.

Instead, I outline how you should think about it or can think about it as untangling a bad habit. That sets up a much better expectation in three ways. Number one, it's not just one behavior; it's a whole bunch of different snarls, whether that's smoking or drinking or snacking or what have you.

Let's take snacking. If you think, "Wow, I really got to stop the habit of bad snacking," there's probably a variety of times during the day when you snack, and so think of each one of those as a tangle on this big knot. What you do is you find the easiest tangle, and you get rid of that one first. You don't start with the hardest one. You start with the easiest one, then you go to the next easiest, and so on.

The other reason I really like untangling is that it sets up... When you see a big tangle, even if it's just with your phone headset, it's all tangled up, you look at it and you have no idea how to solve it instantly, but you know if you just untangle one thing, then you know you can get it done. I think for a lot of these bad habits, that's how people feel. They look at something, they're overwhelmed, "How do I stop this smoking habit or this snacking habit or snapping at my kids?" and it might just seem like, "I don't know how to get this undone." But just like untangling a cord, it's a process, and if you just start with the first thing and then do the next thing, you can do it.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, so that involves using this behavioral model again. Going back, okay, the thing I want to do is stop spending too much time on social media. Well, that's sort of abstract. There's a lot of behaviors associated with that, so you do a brainstorm. What are all the behaviors that I do that cause me to surf on social media all the time? Then you go for the easy one. Stop the easy one first.

Then you use this stuff of, okay, I can make it harder. If I make it harder to do, I'm less likely to do it. Or increase my motivation. Then also find a prompt there. Find out what the prompt is and maybe eliminate that prompt. I imagine as people start working with this model and the method, it's a skill that they get better at. It actually gets easier to do behavior change.

BJ Fogg:

Yeah. I think the best... This is not in the book. The best analogy is maybe driving. Before you learn how to drive, it's like, "Oh my gosh, how do I do that? It feels so complicated. I'm scared to do it." Now, once you've learned how and you've done it, it's easy. You don't even think about it.

Behavior change seems complicated, overwhelming. People are afraid of it. But you can learn the skills and change, to the point where it's no big deal. If you want to create a new habit, you do it. If you want to design a habit out of your life, you do it. You don't make a big deal of it, just like you don't make a big deal of driving to the airport.

Brett McKay:

It all starts with a single flossed tooth.

BJ Fogg:

Bam. It can. I like that, not only because it's true. That's how a big part of the method back in 2010, when I was goofing around with myself, that was a big deal. Next, your dentist will love you, or your hygienist will love you. But it's the same process. The way that you wire in the habit of flossing one tooth is the same way you do all of the other habits. If you're not flossing, start there, and learn how the method works, skill up, and then as your skill increases, you can tackle harder and harder things.

Brett McKay:

Well, BJ, where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

BJ Fogg:

Well, tinyhabits.com about the book. You can buy it at Costco. You can buy it at your independent bookseller, which would be awesome. You can buy it online. Then more generally about me, bjfogg.com.

Brett McKay:

Fantastic. Well, BJ Fogg, thanks so much for your time. It's been a pleasure.

BJ Fogg:

Thank you so much.

Brett McKay:

My guest today was Dr. BJ Fogg. He is the author of the book Tiny Habits. It's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find out more information about his work at his website, bjfogg.com. That's Fogg with two Gs. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is/tinyhabits, where you can find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AoM podcast. Check out our website at artofmanliness.com, where you can find our podcast archives as well as thousands of articles we've written over the years. A lot of them are about habits, so check that out.

If you would like to enjoy ad-free episodes of the AoM podcast, you can do so on Stitcher Premium. Head over to Stitcher Premium, sign up, use code MANLINESS when you sign up to get a free month trial. Once you're signed up, download the Stitcher app on Android or iOS, and you can start enjoying ad-free episodes of the AoM podcast.

If you haven't done so already, I'd appreciate if you'd take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher, whatever podcast platform you use. It helps us out a lot. If you've done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think will get something out of it.

As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the AoM podcast, but put what you've heard into action.

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Podcast #581: The Tiny Habits That Change Everything

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We're a month into the new year now. How are you doing on your resolutions? Have you already fallen off the wagon? Maybe the goal you set for yourself was just too big to successfully tackle. You need to think smaller. Tiny, even. That's the argument my guest makes.

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Tiny habits : + the small changes that change everything
Fogg, B. J. author.
Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2020
On Display, 1st Floor. Call Number: (BF335 .F56 2020 )

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Fogg, B. J., & Euchner, J. (2019). Designing for Behavior Change—New Models and Moral Issues: An Interview with B.J. Fogg. Research Technology Management, 62(5), 14–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/08956308.2019.1638490 SCSU Login Link

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Join Pushkin+

Gain access to ad-free versions of 20+ podcasts from the Pushkin library along with exclusive bonus episodes and other member benefits.

From school grades to fitness trackers, we're all being ranked and rated on a daily basis. This is having a huge impact on our happiness and preventing us from living our lives to the fullest. Can giving up on grades radically improve our well-being?

To learn more. . .

* The Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale

* Emma Lord's FitBit article

* The Good Life Center at Yale

* Alfie Kohn's website

Links to references from this episode. . .
"Back in 1785 all that changed." For more on Ezra Stiles inventing grades, Morgan, E. S. (2014). The Gentle Puritan: A Life of Ezra Stiles, 1727-1795. "This is Emma Lord. She's writes for Bustle.com" Lord, E. (2015). 19 Very Real And Emotional Struggles Of Having A Fitbit (Or Does Your Fitbit Have You?). Bustle.com. February 11, 2015. "Back in 1961, Robert Bostrom and his colleagues surveyed more than 200 students on a couple hot-button issues." Bostrom, R. N., Vlandis, J. W., & Rosenbaum, M. E. (1961). Grades as reinforcing contingencies and attitude change. Journal of Educational Psychology, 52(2), 112. "Back in the 70's, child psychologist Susan Harter tested 6th graders on anagrams just like this." Harter, S. (1978). Pleasure derived from challenge and the effects of receiving grades on children's difficulty level choices. Child Development, 788-799. "Today, Tracy is the founding Director of The Good Life Center at Yale University." "We are facing a real epidemic." American College Health Association. American College Health Association-National College Health Assessment II: Reference Group Executive Summary Fall 2018. Silver Spring, MD: American College Health Association; 2018. "Over a thousand students enrolled the first time I taught it." "Credit/D is the Yale version of Pass/Fail."

https://advising.yalecollege.yale.edu/sophomore-advisers/test-link

"Alfie's classic book - Punished by Rewards - was just reprinted to mark its 25th anniversary." Kohn, A. (1999). Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

The Host

Dr. Laurie Santos is Professor of Psychology and Head of Silliman College at Yale University. Professor and podcast host Dr. Laurie Santos is an expert on human cognition and the...

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Making the Grade | The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos

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Skip to Main Content Gain access to ad-free versions of 20+ podcasts from the Pushkin library along with exclusive bonus episodes and other member benefits. From school grades to fitness trackers, we're all being ranked and rated on a daily basis.

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Punished by rewards : the trouble with gold stars, incentive plans, A's, praise, and other bribes
Kohn, Alfie.
Boston : Houghton Mifflin Co. 1993
On Display, 1st Floor. Call Number: (BF505.R48 K65 1993 )
Book reviews (4)

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Kohn, A. (2012). The Case Against Grades. Education Digest, 77(5), 8–16. SCSU Login Link

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AARTI SHAHANI, HOST:

When it comes to taking care of yourself, there is no shortage of advice, especially if you're a woman. Drink green juice. Go to spin class. Organize your house - really organize it. At work, lean in, not too far in. Feel like too much? Twin sisters Emily and Amelia Nagoski agree. They've written a new book that asks us all to step back and really look at how women are pushed to the breaking point. It's called "Burnout: The Secret To Unlocking The Stress Cycle." The sisters told us why they decided to write this book. It was after Amelia landed in the hospital twice.

AMELIA NAGOSKI: I was in doctoral school getting my doctorate of musical arts in conducting. I was also working two part-time jobs. And I'm the mother of three people who were teenagers at the time. And I was commuting 65 miles each way. And the stresses of my life were overwhelming. And I was totally in denial about how hard I was working and how much challenge I was actually having.

I had no idea how much my body was suffering. So it took me totally by surprise when in the middle of one night, I woke up in such pain that I had my husband drive me to the emergency room. And I was in the hospital for four days. And they didn't come up with a diagnosis. They just said well, it's stress. You just need to relax.

And that is not an evidence-based strategy for coping with stress, it turns out. So I spent about the next year - I called Emily, of course, who brings me a big stack of books because this is the way she shows her affection is peer-reviewed science.

SHAHANI: Oh, wow. That's the sister to have.

E NAGOSKI: Yeah. So it was very supportive and convenient to have a twin sister who has a Ph.D. in public health. So in the next year, I started working on doing the actual things that the science says will combat burnout. It was too late. And a year later, I ended up back in the hospital. And they removed my appendix, which had been inflamed.

SHAHANI: Wow.

E NAGOSKI: Inflammation is a result of extreme stress.

SHAHANI: So, you know, Emily, when your sister is in and out of the hospital, and you're bringing her books, you talk about teaching her about emotions. Can you just give an example of what you mean by that? Like, what is a conversation you had to have with your sister?

EMILY NAGOSKI: Well, it mostly happened, like, your emotions are biological events that happen in your body. It's physiological, real. Emotions are not just in your head. They are all over your body, in your chemistry. So she's reading these books, and she sees the word rage on the page and spontaneously bursts into sobs. And she calls me on the phone, and is like, your book here says that feelings are physical.

I was like, you're a choral conductor who expresses emotion through your body. You practice yoga. And she still, sort of, had not put it together that just because you've dealt with the stressors, that doesn't mean that you've dealt with the physical event of the stress in your body.

SHAHANI: One of the lessons in your book is about completing the stress cycle. I loved this analogy of yours, this idea of a lion. Explain the concept of completing the stress cycle through the lion, Emily.

E NAGOSKI: So this is the foundation of it all. Our physiological stress response is very well designed to help us survive short-term acute stressors, like being chased by a lion. When you see the lion, your body floods with adrenaline and cortisol and glycogen all in preparation to help you engage in a behavior to help save your life. In this case, it's going to be running.

So here comes the lion. You start to run. There's only two possible outcomes. Either you get eaten by the lion - in which case, none of the rest of this matters - or you manage to make it all the way back to your village. And somebody sees you running and opens the door and waves you in. And you both stand with your shoulder against the door until the lion finally gives up. And when that happens, you look at the person who just saved your life. And you are flooded with this sense of gratitude, connection and peace. And that's biochemically the complete stress response cycle.

Because we are, alas, almost never chased by lions now, our stressors tend to be things that are not actually going to threaten our lives. The jerk at work, traffic, these things are not going to kill us, but they do elevate our stress response in a similar way, but they don't offer us the same opportunity to complete the stress response cycle. So we're walking around with a couple decades of incomplete activated stress response cycles in our bodies that are just waiting for us to go ahead and do the thing we need to do.

Physical activity is the most efficient. Affection is really powerful. One of our favorite recommendations is the 20 second hug. If you hold someone that long, it communicates to your body that you have a person in your life whom you love and trust enough and who loves and trusts you enough to stand this close together. And your chemistry shifts into a state of I have come home, which is the end of the stress response cycle.

SHAHANI: At the end of each chapter, you have these little TL;DR recaps - it's internet talk for too long; didn't read. So what is the TL;DR for this conversation? What's the one thing you really want people to take away, Emily?

E NAGOSKI: It's that wellness is not a state of being. It is not a state of mind. It is a state of action.

SHAHANI: Amelia, what would you add?

E NAGOSKI: That the cure for burnout is not self-care. It's all of us caring for each other.

SHAHANI: Emily and Amelia Nagoski are co-authors of "Burnout: The Secret To Unlocking The Stress Cycle." It's out now. Thank you both for joining me.

E NAGOSKI: Thank you.

E NAGOSKI: Thank you.

Copyright © 2019 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

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Beating Burnout: Sisters Write Book To Help Women Overcome Stress Cycle

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AARTI SHAHANI, HOST: When it comes to taking care of yourself, there is no shortage of advice, especially if you're a woman. Drink green juice. Go to spin class. Organize your house - really organize it. At work, lean in, not too far in. Feel like too much?

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Podcast: Brené with Emily and Amelia Nagoski on Burnout

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Podcast: Brené with Emily and Amelia Nagoski on Burnout

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Brenè Brown: Hi everyone, I'm Brené Brown, and this is Unlocking Us. In this episode, we're talking to doctors Emily and Amelia Nagoski about their really powerful book, Burnout. And let me tell you something, burnout is, I know, I'm with you, it's... All of us are in it, I think right now, and it's no joke. We talk about what causes burnout, what it does to our bodies, and also how burnout, really an emotional exhaustion, comes down to the neurobiology of emotion. What happens to us when we get stuck in an emotion? Did you know that there's a beginning, middle, and end? And one of the things that causes burnout and emotional exhaustion the most is when we get stuck in that tunnel? We don't complete the whole cycle. This is just... This made so much sense to me. And I'm recording this intro probably... Barrett, what do you think? 10 days after? Two weeks after I've done the interview. I've put these strategies into practice in my life; it has made a difference. We're going to talk about the seven easy ways to work through and complete the stress cycle. And again, I've been doing it and has made...

BB: Wow, it's... I can't believe I didn't know this, and it's so tactical and helpful. And burnout is my middle name, sometimes. So, this is a conversation that you will not want to miss. Okay, let me tell you about our guests before we get started. So, Emily Nagoski, Dr. Emily Nagoski is a sex educator and author of The New York Times bestseller, Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life. Best title ever, PS. Her job is to teach people to live with confidence and joy in their bodies. Amelia Nagoski, DMA, which stands for Doctorate of Musical Arts, is an Associate Professor and Coordinator of Music at Western New England University. Her job, as she describes it, which I love, is to run around waving her arms and making funny noises and generally doing whatever it takes to help singers get in touch with their internal experience. In that way, her work is very much like Emily's. Emily's master's degree is in counseling, Amelia's is in choral conducting. One day, they realized they both got graduate degrees in basically how to listen and feel feelings, which, they say, may say something about their childhood. They both live in New England with a variety of cats and dogs and spouses.

BB: Yes, they are twins. Yes, they are identical twins. And yes, one time they did pretend to be each other, and it did not go well. And as the older sister of twins, I can tell you that plan only works on TV shows. Alright, let's jump in. Burnout. Alright, let's just jump right in. The name of the book is Burnout. It graphically repeats itself, so I like to call the book Burnout, Burnout, Burnout, Burnout, Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle. Here's what I want to say to all my listeners. Do you know all the times where I've said things like, "Yeah, I was doing this interview and it was kind of weird because he turned it into a personal coaching session and I was like, 'We should get more specific'?" Well, forget all that shit right now. I need this work. I've got a million questions for you. So, let me start with this question before we dig in to my multiply tagged and highlighted book. What led you to writing a book on burnout?

Emily Nagoski: Yeah, it's a very specific story. I wrote a book about the science of women's sexuality called Come As You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life. It was a sex book. But because the best predictor of women's sexual well-being is, surprise, her overall well-being, there's a chapter about stress and emotion processing. And in the six months after that book came out, I traveled across the country, and I would give all these talks about the science of women's sexual pleasure, and I kept hearing from women after the talk, they'd come up to me and be like, "Yeah, all that sex stuff is great, Emily, thanks for that, but you know, the one chapter that changed everything for me was the one about stress and emotions." And I was surprised. I had worked really hard on the sex science part of it. So, I brought this story to Amelia.

Amelia Nagoski: Yeah, and I was not surprised at all, because I was a conductor, and I had been to a conservatory. And in musical training, you are specifically trained in how to feel feelings and process them and express them on stage, so I know that it's a learned skill. And I also know that when you learn that skill for stage, that doesn't necessarily translate into knowing how to do it in your real life, and I had to. And Emily is the one who got me started on learning how to do that. So I reminded her of that and said, "Yes, of course people... That changes their lives; it changed mine. It actually saved my life twice.

EN: Which, insert the long story about Amelia being in grad school and hospitalized twice with undiagnosable pain, they ultimately removed her appendix. She was in a doctoral program that I'm just going to brag because I know she won't, she is the only woman who has ever finished this program.

BB: Damn.

EN: That's how misogynist the field of classical music is. And so imagine your identical twin crying in a hospital gown and you're a professional health educator and you don't know what's wrong. So I started giving her books about stress management, [chuckle] because it's what I had, what I had with peer-reviewed research here. And she started reading it and she called me on the phone crying, like "This book says that feelings exist in your body. Is that true?" How could you not know that? How?

AN: Literally, I'm a conductor and my job is to express emotions with my body. But look, if I had recognized that emotions are in my body all the time, oh, that's a lot of emotion from my whole life that's in my body, and if I had been... If I have been recognizing that, that might have led to some suffering. Turns out, what I learned is that you need to turn toward that difficult stuff, and that actually it feels hard in the moment, but it, in the big picture, alleviates suffering.

EN: So we have this experience with her in grad school and she said, "Yeah, remember that time that it saved my life and... Okay, so we should write a book about that." And so that's how we got started. That was in October of 2015.

BB: I absolutely... I'm almost speechless, and y'all have to know that that's very rare for me, I study affect for a living. I have 400,000 pieces of data. And I'm understanding things about myself for the first time, reading your book.

EN: You don't know what's happening in my heart right now. So, here's the way I write; I write a chunk, I print it out, I walk around my house reading it out loud to a specific audience. And sometimes I'm thinking of a specific student who I had this conversation with. Sometimes I'm thinking of Beyoncé. And there were days when I was like, "Would this really make sense to Brené Brown? Like if she read this book, would she feel seen and understood? Would she feel like she was gaining insight?"

BB: The answer would be, "Oh hell yes." Like, "Yes." And I'm working on new research on emotion right now and I just... The way you write about... I don't know. It is a little bit of a love affair, I have to tell all of our community listening, because not only is this swirl of peer-reviewed research, amazing synthesis, music and pop culture TV references, it's like all good things are right in here. Let's start with Herbert Freudenberger. Okay, so Herbert Freudenberger in 1975 gave us a definition of burnout. Tell us about the three components.

AN: So the three components of burnout are emotional exhaustion, decreased sense of accomplishment and...

EN: Depersonalization.

AN: Depersonalization. I'm just going to lay this out here that I'm a COVID long hauler, and the brain fog is real. So sometimes I'm staring at things and I don't remember what I was doing. Okay, so there's...

EN: I'll pick it up when you fall away.

AN: When those happen... And that's why I have a sister to be the rest of my brain for me.

BB: Yes, sisters that pickup things. I'm so glad you're on this side of it, and I'm so sad that it's a long haul because I've got a couple of long hauler friends that it's just people do not understand what's involved.

AN: So those three things. Herbert Freudenberger with the decreased sense of accomplishment, emotional exhaustion and...

EN: Depersonalization.

BB: Okay, so emotional exhaustion, I think we... I love this definition that you put in here, which I guess is Freudenberger's: the fatigue that comes from caring too much for too long. Depersonalization: the depletion of empathy, caring and compassion, and then decreased sense of accomplishment: the unconquerable sense of futility, feeling that nothing you do makes any difference.

AN: Yeah. And in particular for women, it's the emotional exhaustion.

BB: Okay. So that's the thing that killed me. So, burnout, super high across everyone. I would imagine now in the time of COVID that burnout is at an all... Do we have any data that's telling us what's going on with burnout right now?

EN: Not to my knowledge specifically. Most of the research on burnout, it began about professional burnout and it stayed about professional burnout for a really long time. The ICD-10's definition is about professional burnout. It's only in the last five years or so that work on parental burnout has begun, though you can imagine exactly how this shows up for parents and caregivers of all kinds. And we know for sure from journalistic reporting that's been done that women are being laden with the lion's share of the adapting that has to be done when people are working from home, when people lose work, when schooling has to happen at home, whose job is all that stuff? Even in the countries where it is the most fair, and that includes the United States, it's still massively increasing women's workload and not men's.

BB: So we've got the unpaid second shift and the unpaid third and fourth shift now.

EN: Exactly.

AN: And COVID for sure, like a pandemic and all the other...

[vocalization]

AN: That's going on in the world are chronic stressors, and there's a lot of new writing about compassion fatigue, because people who aren't sick are always worried about the people around them getting sick and yeah, it's a perfect storm for burnout.

EN: And vicarious traumatization, I'm really worried about the caregivers and the medical providers who've been exposed to just emergency rooms and ICUs packed with people, and witnessing death on a scale that is just not something we've seen in the United States ever before.

BB: Yeah, I agree. So when I read people helping people, just high, high rates of burnout, and you write here, "In the 40 years since the original formulation, research has found that it's the first element in burnout, emotional exhaustion, that's most strongly linked to negative impacts on our health, on relationships, and work, especially for women." So then you take us into a primer on emotion. I think it'd be helpful for folks here to... What is emotion?

AN: This is the part of the book that 20-year-old me needed to hear, because when I was 20-ish, I was not convinced 100% that emotions were like a real thing. I sort of had this image of emotions is like an airy-fairy somewhere out there feeling...

BB: Very gauzy and... Yes.

AN: Yeah. And I needed science in my mid-30s to prove to me that emotions were real, even though I was literally a professional musician and expressing emotion was my job. I guess the performance aspect of it made me able to separate myself. Okay, emotions are cycles that happen in your body. They are neurological events, and when I say neurological, I mean not just happening in your brain but your whole nervous system, the intelligence of your body extends to your nervous system from the top of your head to the tip of your toes and also beyond your skin. Emotions are an involuntary neurological response. They have a beginning, a middle and an end.

BB: I just found that so helpful.

EN: The metaphorical version is feelings are tunnels, you have to go all the way through them to get to the light at the end.

BB: I have that double-highlighted here. I have a couple of things. "Just about every system in your body responds to the chemical and electrical cascade activated by emotion. Emotion is automatic, instantaneous, it happens everywhere and it affects everything." It's so funny to me in my work, how much time I spend trying to help people understand, people really want to believe, and myself included, and I think my 20-year-old would have liked your 20-year-old, that we are cognitive rational beings who on occasion feel, when the truth is, and we know this now from PET imaging for the last decade, we are emotional beings who on occasion think. So, I'm going to quote this from the book. I just want everyone to take a deep breath, like everyone... Lots of walkers and runners listen to the podcast and a lot of people driving. So, pull over, you might have a moment here, or just step up on a curb. "In short, emotions are tunnels. If you go all the way through them, you get to the light at the end. Exhaustion happens when we get stuck in an emotion." What the hey-ho?

AN: I know, right?

BB: Okay, I've got to keep... Can I keep reading here for just a second? Can I read y'all to you? "We may get stuck simply because we're constantly being exposed to situations that activate emotion: our crush is here, and all day every day, if only in our thoughts, and so we're trapped in our own longing for our crush. Or we return to a stressful job every single day, which is no wonder the helping professions are so exhausting, you're connected with people in need all day, day after day. Sometimes we get stuck because we can't find our way through. The most difficult feelings, rage, grief, despair, helplessness," I would probably maybe add shame to that, "may be too treacherous to move through alone, we get lost," I love this, "and need someone else, a loving presence to help us find our way through. Many of us are trapped in this way because of a problem we call Human Giver Syndrome." So, I want to go back to this, "Exhaustion happens when we get stuck in an emotion." Oh my God.

EN: Emotions have a beginning, a middle, and an end. A lot of us are taught to believe that if we fix the problem that caused the stress or the emotion, then we will have dealt with the emotion itself. It turns out, no, there is a disconnect in the world we live in now between the behaviors that deal with the things in our lives, like the crush across the room. There are things we can do to deal with that, and almost none of those things, like when you bravely go up and you're like, "Hi, here's my name. How are you?" And then you leave the room, and do you suddenly feel like peaceful, relaxed, "I dealt with the situation, I feel like I took a step forward"? No, you have to go scream in silence in the bathroom and call your friends because you still have to deal with the feeling, which is a separate step from dealing with the issue that was activating the emotion in your body. Most of us are taught to believe other people's opinions about our bodies more than we believe what our bodies themselves are trying to say to us. And so we believe when we are told that, "Well, I mean, you dealt with the issue, so you should be done feeling by now."

EN: "So why do you still have all these feelings? We don't want to hear about your feelings anymore. Your feeling should be done because the situation is done, so let it go, we are so tired of hearing about you and your feelings." And you're like, "I must behave myself emotionally so that I do not interfere with anyone else's well-being, and so I am now officially done with my feelings." And you smile and you shove it down into some organ system, I don't know which one, and then it lives inside you.

BB: And it metastasizes, right?

EN: Oh yeah.

AN: It's not necessarily the worst choice you can make in that moment. In some moments, smiling and being polite and walking away and containing and shoving it all down and hiding it can make you safer. You don't want to confront every douchebag on the side of the road who yells, "Hey baby, nice tits." That would not be safe. So you squash it down and you hide it, and then you get home and you're like, "I'm such a strong badass, I just ignored that guy." No. I mean, yes, but now finish that feeling, go back and revisit it and go through the whole cycle.

EN: Complete... Get the rest of the way through the tunnel.

BB: Get through the tunnel, okay. Okay, before we start talking about this piece around separating stressors and stress, let's talk about what Human Giver Syndrome is. Damn this syndrome.

AN: Human Giver Syndrome... Yeah, absolutely. It's a phrase we adapted from a book by a moral philosopher named Kate Manne. The book is called Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, and it's an intense dark read of moral philosophy, but it's short and readable. I highly recommend it, it's fantastic. But she does lay out in that book a moral system where a world contains two kinds of beings: human beings whose job it is to live, to express, to be their humanity, and they have a moral obligation to acquire whatever resources it takes in order to accomplish their moral obligation. And on the other hand, the human givers whose moral obligation it is to give their humanity, their time, their lives, their bodies, their feelings to the human beings. Guess which one the women are. This is a cartoon version.

BB: Yeah, I'm like, "No, ma'am. No, ma'am." Yes, this is terrible.

AN: Emily and I are both married to men who are givers. They turn towards our needs with kindness and compassion, they do not feel entitled. So absolutely there are men in the world who do not feel this way. In the large scale though, a lot of us have Human Giver Syndrome, men and women alike, where we honestly do believe that it is the moral obligation of women to be at all times pretty, happy, calm, generous, and attentive to the needs of others. And if we at any time fail in our moral obligation to be pretty, happy, calm, generous, attentive to the needs of others, then we deserve to be punished. And if there's no one around to punish us, we will just go ahead and punish ourselves.

EN: And that includes if you're married like we are, to fellow givers who are not going to punish us for falling short of it. But as people with Human Giver Syndrome, if our partners won't beat us up, we'll just go ahead and start whipping ourselves for the ways that we fell short of being able to save humanity and everyone in the world.

BB: Yeah, so this is part of, I'm thinking about this in kind of gender non-conforming terms. I think this idea, when I was reading it, the Human Giver Syndrome, anyone who finds themselves wanting to be aligned with feminine cultural norms, this is a part of that syndrome. It goes back to the research that I found probably, I don't know, maybe six or seven years ago, where it still said cultural norms for femininity in the US are still nice, quiet, and spending all resources on appearance. It's really just, "stay quiet and small and just take care of other people" basically.

EN: Yeah. And Kate Manne is clear that this is an intersectional issue, so for people of color, they're expected to be human givers to anyone who is white. And one of the grotesque ways that this plays out is that white women, feeling so trapped by human giver syndrome take on the role of human being and feeling entitled to take anything they want to from people of color, from people with disabilities, from immigrants, from poor people. In her new book, Entitled, Kate Manne uses the language of leaning down instead of leaning in. White affluent women lean down on immigrant and Brown and Black women in America. So one of the most important things we can do is recognize it for what it is and heal the damage that it is doing to us so that we don't take that damage out on anybody else.

BB: So we don't lean down.

EN: Right.

BB: Okay. So, what we understand so far...

EN: We're still in the introduction, by the way.

BB: Yeah, no, we're still on the introduction, but I just want to... I want to lay this out because the way the book is laid out, I have to say as a writer, is really smart, and it really walks people through this. So, we know that emotions are real, they're science, they're neurobiology, they're in our body, they affect everything we do all the time. We know that they have a beginning, middle, and end. And we know that we have to move all the way through them in order to... What happens when we get stuck in the middle of the emotion tunnel? What is the outcome of that?

EN: You end up in the hospital like Amelia. And the reason that happened, so if we take stress as the exemplar emotion, you think about all the things that... Let's take just the example of the cardiovascular system which we do in chapter 1, your blood vessels are designed to tolerate like a steady sort of pulsing stream of blood flow. And when your adrenal level goes up your blood pressure goes up and it's like a fire hose spraying in your blood vessels. And your system is competent at dealing with that when it lasts as long as it's supposed to in the environment where we evolved, which means it's going to last maybe 10 minutes and then be over.

EN: But we stay in this state of chronically elevated stress for hours, days, weeks, months, years at a time, and this causes wear and tear on our blood vessels, which causes weak places for plaques to develop, and this is how stress causes heart disease, and that's just one of the systems. Take your endocrine system as another one, your digestive system. Your digestive system is one of my favorites because it is so common for stress to show up in people's digestive systems. Complicated, fascinating things happen where your upper digestive system slows down, but your lower digestive system tract speeds up, and then you get IBS.

BB: God. It just totally makes sense. Okay. So let's start with the chapter on Complete the Cycle. I just need everyone to get it and read it. Well, it really is... I'm not like a journalist where I just, any book that comes out I have to talk to the people. I'm a podcaster, I just get to talk about books that make a difference, and so this is one of them. Tell me, define, and differentiate stress and stressors for me.

EN: So your stressors are the things that activate the stress response, they are... Most of them are external, so this is like work, kids, money, white/cis/hetero patriarchal, rapidly exploitative, like capitalism, small things that activate the stress response. Some of them are internal things like body self-criticism and trauma history, and they activate the stress response. The stress itself is what happens in your body, it's this chemical stew that gets activated in response to it, and it's designed to help us evolutionarily survive the stress like being chased by a lion or charged by a hippo. Amelia's favorite animal is hippo so I always make sure to say that hippos are the most dangerous land mammals on earth except for humans, so you could be trampled by a hippo. And when you're being chased by a hippo, what do you do?

BB: I run.

EN: Yeah, you totally run. Absolutely. And imagine you managed to run away from the hippo because hippos actually don't have a lot of stamina, so you run all the way, and somebody waves you into through their door and you close it and you shut it and the hippo gives up, and it's like, "Never mind," and just runs away. And you look at this person who just saved your life and you feel this rush or just exhaustion but this joy to be alive, and it seems like the sun is shining brighter and you love your friends and family, and you're so grateful to be alive. It's easy to think that it is the hippo going away that made that happen, but it's not, it's the running and the connection. Your body only knows what those behaviors are. Those behaviors are what say to your body, "You have escaped from this stressful situation and your body is now a safe place for you to be." It is the behavior, it's not the change in your environment that triggers the physiological change.

BB: So here's where I think we need to go into slow motion, and walk people through this. Removing the stressors does not mean the stress cycle is complete.

AN: Yeah. It means two things. It means that you don't have to wait for all the stressors to go away before you can start to feel better, but it also means that when the stressors do go away, it means you have to deal with the stress itself separately. I want to tell a story about when we were... When the book was first released in the United Kingdom and Ireland, we talked with a journalist in Ireland who had been part of the movement to legalize abortion in Ireland. And it had just recently passed, and she was telling us that she read this part of the book and she thought, this explains a lot because they had invested so much in their activism and going door-to-door and working so hard. And the good thing happened, the stressor went away, they were all done and they thought they would feel amazing, but no, they all collapsed, they all got sick, they all felt terrible. Even though this terrific news had happened, they felt bad, and it was because all the stress of that work, even though the stressor was gone, they hadn't dealt with the stress in their bodies.

BB: So this is so interesting, because I mentor a lot of women, MSW students, Master's in Social Work students who are getting PhDs. And so, I always warn the doctoral students that when you turn your dissertation in, and you're really done with your re-writes and everything, you're going to hit a wall and it's going to be painful, and they're like, "No, I'm not hitting a wall, I'm going to the Caymans." And you know what? They all get sick. And so, okay I want to read this, geez, in the book we're on page seven you all. "You have to do something that signals to your body that you are safe, or else you'll stay in that state with neuro chemicals and hormones degrading, but never shifting into relaxation. Your digestive system, immune system, cardiovascular system, musculoskeletal system and reproductive system never get the signal that they're safe."

AN: Because your body speaks body language, your body doesn't know that filing your taxes mean that you've accomplished something, your body doesn't know that a change of legislation means that you now have autonomy over your body's choices. You need to speak body language and fulfill the thing that it's intended to fulfill.

BB: People do not get that we cannot separate the body from affect emotion, it's why we call it feelings, right?

EN: Right. Exactly, exactly. And it's actually with the... Especially when it comes to illness and stress there's an extra layer of complexity. Your central nervous system only has a limited amount of bandwidth. If you're super stressed, there's a lot of noise in the highway of your brain and spine, and your immune system communicates with you through your nervous system via symptoms. So, if your symptoms are like, "Hey, you have a headache, hey, you're exhausted," your brain is like, "What? I can't hear you over the noise of all this exhaustion and stress. Are you trying to tell me something? What? Let me finish this project and then I'll listen to you." So you're sick all along, you hand in your dissertation, you're walking home, this is not a personal story at all, you're walking home from having turned in your dissertation, and you're like, "Oh, I'm really feeling not well," and you get, you have a fever by the time you get home and congestion headache by the time you lay down, and then you spend the next two days in bed, but you were... It's not because you all of a sudden got sick, you were sick all along, but now your immune system can finally get its voice heard over the noise of all the stress.

BB: "The stress itself will kill you faster than the stressor will, unless you do something to complete the stress response cycle. While you're managing the day's stressor, your body is managing the day's stress, and it's also absolutely essential to your well-being, the way sleeping and eating are essential, that you give your body the resources it needs to complete the stress response cycle that has been activated." Okay. So, why we get stuck? Number one, tell me about chronic stressor, chronic stress.

EN: This is the straightforward, like you're working on a big work project and you work on it really hard and you know you've got to complete the stress response cycle that was activated by this big project at the end of the day, so you get home and you do whatever the thing is. Do you have a thing that you know completes your stress response cycle, like when you do it, you're going to feel better, Brené?

BB: Yes, walking.

EN: Yeah, so you do your walk and you're like, "Oh, I feel so much better," and you hang out with your family and you eat something great, and then you get a good night's sleep and you wake up in the morning, and there's the big project for you to work on again. And so, you have to do the same thing to drain off the stress again. And if your stress level outpaces the resources you have available to drain off the stress, it will keep accumulating.

BB: I'm just going take a deep breath here. Okay, number two, the second reason we get stuck: social appropriateness.

AN: Yeah, yeah. The expectations, in particular for women, are that we never show anger, never express any intense emotions at all. Remember, we have to be pretty, happy, and yet calm, generous, and attentive to the needs of others. So in order to be safe in the world, in order to meet people's expectations, in order to not get fired from our jobs, we have to smile and be nice to the asshole. And the smart, safe thing to do in those moments is to bury that shit down and save it for when you get home.

BB: And then take it out on your husband, is that...

AN: Hopefully not, hopefully you go for a walk and eat something delicious and hug your family and, yes, but that is what would happen unless you deal with it separately.

BB: So number three is kind of tied to number two in some ways, so social appropriate. So the reasons we get stuck, one, chronic stress, two, social appropriateness, and three, safety. And this is the guy that's yelling, yelling at you from the street, and you just can't turn and confront that.

AN: "Hey, baby, why don't you smile?" And you want to punch that guy in the face, but would punching him in the face actually make you safer? Probably not, it'll probably escalate the situation. So the safe choice is to hang on to that for a minute 'til you get someplace safe and then deal with the stressor. Deal with the stress on its own separately.

BB: Okay. I want you to... And I realize I'm acknowledging going into this, we're going to get through the first three chapters of this book, but I think this is enough to change your life and then you can get the book. I want you to walk us through fight, flight, and then parasympathetically freeze. Can you tell us about that and how that relates to all of this?

EN: So, fight and flight are the things we're used to hearing about when we were in high school, we learned from Mr. Twilley, our science teacher, about the fight or flight response, which is the sympathetic "go" action. In less than a second your brain assesses a potential threat as something that you're most likely to survive by running away, in which case you get the flight emotions. So this is everything from worry, to anxiety, to fear, to terror, all the different fears, depending on the intensity of what's happening. And these are the avoid responses. So, it motivates you to be active and running away. And then sometimes in that split-second assessment it'll think, "This is a threat you can survive best by fighting." And this is an approach motivation, that's like everything from irritation and annoyance up through frustration and anger, and ultimately rage that pushes you to move toward the threat so that you can destroy it.

EN: And these are both, so they're action-oriented, either move away or move toward in order to deal with the stressor. And then under life threats circumstances, so your brain assesses the threat and it's like, "Nope, you are too slow to run, you are too weak to fight. Your best chance of survival here is to slam on the brakes in the middle of all this and play dead." So when you see this in the wild, the gazelle is running away from the lion, the lion's teeth chomp into the hip of the gazelle. And what does the gazelle do? It can't keep running, the lion has its teeth in her, so she flops to the ground. The lion feels all smug and wanders away to go get her cubs to feed on the gazelle, and this is when the glorious thing happens, so the gas pedal, the sympathetic nervous system has been pressed down hard and right in the middle of that big gas pedal stress response, bam, the brake slams on, everything shuts down.

EN: When the threat goes away, that brake begins gently to come off, and when you're watching the gazelle lying there, it will start to shudder, and its paws will shake in the air, its hooves will shake. And what's happening is, all the motor patterns that were activated but got interrupted as the brake comes off, they're completing their cycle, they're moving through what was already activated in the central nervous system, and it's just finishing out what was already there, so it purges. And then the gazelle stands up and it shakes itself off and goes, and it trots away, that's when the threat goes away and the brake can unlock, and the animal moves through the rest of it. And this happens for humans often in the case of trauma. One of the best examples of it, there's a brilliant book called, In An Unspoken Voice by Peter Levine, who is the originator of somatic experiencing.

BB: Yeah.

EN: He tells the story of being hit by a car, he's a pedestrian on the road, he's hit by a car, and he very vividly recounts the experience of feeling the parasympathetic brake. Sympathetic means with emotion, parasympathetic means beyond emotion. So everything shuts down, this is a life threat situation, he lies there, and as he's in the ambulance, he notices that he can feel the brake unlocking because he does this for a living, and he lets his shoulders shrug up and he lets his hands push flat out, and these are these small movements of allowing his body to release the thing that it needs to do. A lot of people who have surgery, when they come out from under anesthesia, which is medically induced freeze, will shiver and shake and they feel like they're cold, and they might be cold, but a lot of it is that shivering is part of their brake releasing and allowing them to shift back up into a healthy state.

AN: All of that is fine and good, and it works in gazelles and it works in human beings too, but there is a barrier that gets in our way. We all know about fight and flight. Most of us even know about freeze.

EN: Anybody who reads the book does, yes.

AN: Yeah. But the problem is that there's a kind of a hierarchy, a social ranking system, where we think that fight is better, and if you can't fight, well, at least you could flee, and if you freeze that means that you're weak and you fail. They're all morally neutral, they're all things that happen because your nervous system, in its wisdom, made a decision. And it's not that when you freeze, you're weak or you failed. When you freeze your body saved you, freeze is just as heroic as fight or flight. And the shame that's associated with flight and especially freeze is a thing that stops people from recovering from trauma because they don't allow themselves to feel a thing because they're ashamed.

BB: It's really interesting. I think that's true because shame often hijacks that same system, and the shame often can move us into flight, fight or freeze. And then people will always say, "Yeah, I'd rather respond to shame with shame, I'd rather respond to aggression with aggression, I'd rather walk away, but when I do that whole like bunny in the headlight thing, and I can't think of anything to say until later because my brain shuts down, that's just weak." So there is that hierarchical sense of the tough folks fight, then they run, but only the weak people freeze. It's the deer in the headlight kind of thing, when... This is, our body knows best what to do in these circumstances, it's just... It's hard. And then can you get stuck in that?

EN: It's always better to respond as if we're a predator. If we do something that a prey animal would do, then that's not ok, no. This by the way is how we wrote the book, is I would be like, "Here's the thing that happens in your body," and Amelia would be like... "And then there's all these cultural barriers to us actually using this information, so let's make sure we talk about the barriers so that people can get around them."

AN: Which goes back to that original question, which is, Emily was like, "How do you not know this?" And I'm like, "Nobody knows this." And there's really good reasons society is telling us that this information is forbidden and that we're not allowed to look at it and that if we do, then we're unveiling something dangerous, which is that we're human beings. And what we tried to do in the book and the thing that I learned most from writing the book is, the real answer is turning toward the difficult feelings with kindness and compassion. So whether you fight or flee or freeze, and if you have feelings about which one your nervous system chose to do, that's all fine. Turn toward that with kindness and compassion and let yourself finish the feelings and complete the cycle.

BB: So let's talk about that. And I love that, I love that... As a social worker, that's my training. So it's psychological, it's sociological, it's cultural, it's biological, it's systems of oppression. So to me, the context around everything you do is what makes the book so good. Let's talk about the most efficient ways to complete our cycles.

EN: Most efficient - physical activity.

BB: What kind of physical activity?

EN: Literally any movement of your body. For me, it's walking these days. When I was younger, it was running and long-distance cycling. It has also been rock climbing, I am a natural athlete, I absolutely have had the runner's high experience. Even on the days when I don't feel like it, I look at my shoes, I just don't want to. I know that if I just put on my shoes and I go, by the time I get back, I'm going to feel so much better. Amelia thought I was making it up when I said that. She's never had that experience. So it can be any form of physical activity. It can be dancing it out in your living room. It can be just standing up from your desk, tensing every muscle really hard, every muscle in your body until they're shaking and begging for you to stop and then you go...

[vocalization]

EN: And you flop down, put your hands on the ground and let your body soak and release. And that, even by itself, is going to begin to release the physical chemical stuff that was happening in your body with the stress. Any movement of your body.

BB: Alright, so number one is physical activity. Number two, breathing. Let's talk about breathing.

AN: Breathing down-regulates your nervous system, especially when you can take a slow breath in and especially a slow, long breath out. All the way to the ends of your abdominal muscles contract. That's how you know you're engaging the parasympathetic nervous system to down regulate the central nervous system. It is the gentlest way in to completing the stress response cycle, so if you're a person who has survived trauma, neglect, abuse, you have a significant history of adverse childhood experiences, a great place to start so that you don't get overwhelmed, is just with tuning into your breath, like a minute and a half worth of like breathing in and letting your breath go out.

AN: And your thoughts are going to go all over the place while you are doing this. That is normal. That is the point. You notice that your thoughts went all over the place, and you return your attention to the breath coming into your body and the breath leaving your body. When you don't have time to do anything else, it can also just siphon off the very worst of it, so that you're well enough to continue through the situation.

EN: Yes, if all you do is breathe and you don't attend to your thoughts, you don't do the mindfulness aspect, if you just physically breathe, that is highly evidence-based strategy for completing the stress response cycle, for down-regulating the nervous system. It doesn't have to be any work at all, it doesn't have to be any effort, you just breathe.

BB: I just... It's so hard because not only am I a super stressed out person, I'm a breath holder.

EN: Yeah, you are not alone.

BB: Yeah. So this is really helpful. We really underestimate the power of breath, don't we?

EN: Yes, yes, yes. Even when I first started learning the stuff, like everything, I underestimated how powerful it was, it sounded too easy, it sounded like it was kind of just like a hippie, made up thing.

BB: Totally.

EN: No. It's absolutely, it's how your biology works, it's how your body functions.

BB: It's just so funny too, because I write about breath in one of the most recent books, because I was really studying it around how to regulate and identify emotion. And the people who teach it the most, there's just two camps that I learned, yoga instructors do a lot of breath work, and special forces military.

AN: Really?

BB: Yes, it's probably I'm sure about completing the stress cycle, but it's also about being able to focus and recognize fear and emotion, so really interesting to me. Okay, so we got physical activity, breathing. Number three, positive social interaction, how do we complete the stress cycle there?

EN: The part of the story where the hippo is chasing you and somebody lets you into their place and the hippo gets held back because somebody welcomed you in and the first thing you do when you feel safe is you jump up and down and hug each other and high five and fist bump, that natural inclination to connect with other people tells your body that it is somewhere safe. Even if you are not physically in a place that is your actual home, your body can get the feeling of home because it's with someone who is your home. And that can be lightweight, it can be a positive social interaction with your barista. "Hey, I like your earrings." You know, just that much, tells your body the world is a safe place.

BB: Okay, I love the next one. Laughter.

AN: Yeah, the caveat with this is it can't be... Most laughter is social, posed laughter, it serves a function of lubricating conversations and making everybody... It can't be that fake laughter. It has to be the slightly embarrassing, mouth hanging open, belly jiggling, uncontrolled, ridiculous laughter that really takes over your body, you can't stop laughing. That laughter will take you all the way through the end of a stress cycle.

BB: Oh my God, I just think that is so good.

EN: It can even help just to reminisce with someone about a time that you laughed that way.

BB: I just know this is true. I love this, you quote Sophie Scott, who's a neuroscientist here, that "laughter is an ancient evolutionary system that mammals have evolved to make and maintain social bonds and regulate emotions." You know, it's true, it comes up in my shame work a lot too, because shame is a universal affect or experience, and laughter is a universal language. And so it's really weird, even my therapist friends who run very difficult groups like sexual assault survivor groups or incest survivor groups, always tell me they can measure the progress of the group by the amount of laughter, and it's not a kind that's like posing or the social lubricant, it's also not that uncomfortable pained like laughter as self-deprecation or deflection, it's knowing laughter. It's almost sometimes laughing at the absurdity that we think we're the only ones. It's just... Laughter is just important. Okay, next, I love this, I love this, and I love what you write about it. You write affection is the next one. "A warm hug in a safe and trusting context can do as much to help your body feel like it has escaped a threat as jogging a couple of miles and it's less sweaty."

EN: Yeah, the 20-second hug, which is... There's a lot of different research disciplines that this comes from. I heard about it from Suzanne Iasenza who's a sex therapist in New York City. She calls it hugging until relaxed, where you hold your body against someone else's and you're not leaning into each other sort of one person step back, the other person will fall down, you're both holding your own center of gravity, you wrap your arms around each other and you stay there, breathing together until you feel the shift in your chemistry. And that's your body going, "I have come home to a place of safety, and I know that because my body feels safe with this other person pressed against it."

BB: God. Let me just read this, "the research suggests a 20-second hug can change your hormones, lower your blood pressure and heart rate and improve mood, all of which are reflected in the post-hug increase in the social bonding hormone, Oxytocin."

EN: And it's not about the 20 seconds.

BB: It's not about the time, it's about leaning in, maintaining your own center of gravity, and just the vulnerability and intimacy of that.

EN: It's a potentially awkwardly long time to hug somebody.

BB: It really is, but I like it. I like it.

EN: Of all the tips we give, it's the one people are most likely to say that they incorporate into their life.

BB: Yeah, I believe that. Okay, the last two, a big old cry. "Anyone who says crying doesn't solve anything doesn't know the difference between dealing with the stress and dealing with the situation that causes the stress." Say more.

AN: Yeah, it's pretty rare that crying will solve a problem or eliminate a stressor. That's true that it doesn't solve that, but what it can do is when the emotion takes over your body, that's a physical expression of stress, of emotion. And when you allow it to complete, it's completing a stress response cycle and letting the emotion go all the way to the end, so it's not getting trapped in your body. And there is a kind of a trick to how to do this if it's hard for you. It was hard for me, I had to learn how from a therapist, how to cry, which is to whatever is overwhelming you and flooding you and causing you to cry, you set that information aside for a moment and you turn toward the physical experience of crying. How many tears, how hot do I feel? Where's the tension in my body, how much snot is pouring out of my nose? And you just pay attention to the sensation of the crying itself without feeding it more thoughts about the thing that sparked the crying, and it ends. It's a cycle, it begins on its own, it has a middle and it ends on its own.

EN: Usually just takes a few minutes too. People are afraid that if they let themselves cry it will last forever. But if you don't continue feeding it thoughts about the cause of the stress, really five minutes maybe.

BB: Okay, the last one, I'm such a fan of this one. Creative Expression.

AN: Yeah, me too, me too.

BB: Says the conductor.

AN: Yeah, I mean, so many people go into the arts in the first place because they discover sometime in their youth, they just intuit their way to feeling how good it feels to take whatever is inside you and put it outside you in paint, or in yarn, or in sketching, or in designing and engineering a process to make something work. Look, there's only so much energy in the world, right? It can neither be created nor destroyed. Everything you make that's made out of your energy is partially made out of you, and it's made out of whatever experiences you've had. And so you can knit little booties and they can be made of your rage, and you can get your rage out of your body by creating something and putting it in a safe place outside of yourself or maybe you could even do somebody some good.

BB: Man, we had a very good family friend die, and he was in high school and just a freak accident, and his mother was a dancer, and so her therapist had her choreograph an entire dance around his death. And she would say until she died, she just died recently, that it was the only thing that kept her alive, and not because she kept doing the dance, but that single effort of that dance took her...

EN: The act of creation.

BB: The act of creation.

AN: Yeah, you take something difficult and put it outside yourself.

EN: Carrie Fisher, "Take your broken heart and turn it into art."

BB: Oh, Carrie Fisher. Say that quote again?

AN: "Take your broken heart and make it into art."

BB: Yeah. One of the stressors in my life right now is we just have a lot of hard family stuff going on, we've had a lot of illness, a lot of... And so, I thought it was coincidence until I read this book that I'm doing this massive family photography project right now, and that's one of my great creative loves, is editing photographs and making albums and stuff. And so, it has been so healing for me. Let's review them really quickly. So, these are ways to complete the stress cycle: Physical activity, breathing, positive social interaction, laughter, affection, a big old cry and creative expression.

AN: I want to say one more thing about creative self-expression, because that's directly connected to imagination. You don't necessarily have to take your feelings and put them into a thing that you make or do, you can also just think your way and imagine your way through a story. This is how I learned to do this initially, which is physical activity didn't work for me, never did, but I would get on the elliptical machine and imagine myself as Godzilla tromping the state land grant institution where I was getting my doctorate. And for the first time, I'd get to the end of a workout and feel elated, and powerful, and ready for anything, and it's not because I did anything with my body different, it's because my mind went through the cycle.

BB: God dang, that's powerful. How do we know that we've completed the cycle?

EN: You feel it in your body, your body will tell you, which is the kind of sentence that I say, and Amelia is like, "What does that mean?"

AN: "How does your body... Your body doesn't talk to you, that's bullshit. What do you... No." It turns out your body does tell you; you just have to learn how to listen for it.

BB: Yeah, because given the world that we live in right now, like I can't stay this stressed out because I can't control the stressors.

AN: Yeah. Thank God you don't have to.

EN: And thank God you know how to begin to feel better because if you can't stay well enough to continue dealing with the stressors, you are going to burn out and stop trying to make the world a better place, and we need... Everybody... The world is in a bad enough state right now, we need everybody on board, which means we need everybody taking care of themselves. And if there's anything we learned in the process of writing the book, it is that the cure for burnout isn't and can't be self-care, it has to be all of us caring for each other.

EN: What we realized is that self-care is the fallout shelter you build in your basement, because apparently, it's your job to protect yourself from nuclear war. So we talk about sleep, we talk about stress, get physical activity. Well, that's not going to work if you live in a household where you're the only person who prioritizes your well-being. It requires everybody in the household agreeing that your eight hours of sleep is a priority, and we are going to cordon off that time and space and protect it, so that you can have that time. Self-care requires a bubble of protection of other people who value your well-being at least as highly as you do. So the cure for burnout must ultimately be...

BB: God, that's right.

EN: All of us caring for each other, and right now more than any other. We don't do lean in, we don't do lean down, we do lean on. Lean with. Pick each other up.

BB: I love that you write here, "Don't worry if you're not sure you can recognize when you've completed the cycle, especially if you've spent a lot of years, like your whole life maybe, holding on to worry or anger. You've probably got a whole lot of accumulated stress response cycles spinning their engines, waiting for their turn. So it's going to take a while before you get through the backlog. All you need to do is recognize that you feel incrementally better than you felt before you started. You can notice that something in your body has changed, shifted in the direction of peace. If I was an eight, at an eight on the stress scale when I started and I'm a four now, you can look at yourself and say, 'That's pretty good.'"

BB: So I love that that incremental progress is still massive progress, and a lot of us have been, I don't know, holding on to this stuff forever. Can I read one more thing to you that just blew my mind? "The good news is that stress is not the problem, the problem is that the strategies that deal with stressors have almost no relationship to the strategies that deal with the physiological reactions our bodies have to those stressors. To be well is not to live in a state of perpetual safety and calm, but to move fluidly from a state of adversity, risk, adventure or excitement, back to safety and calm, and out again. Stress is not bad for you. Being stuck is bad for you."

AN: We hear from a lot of women that they... They feel like they need peace and they're aiming for the sense of peace and completion, and they want ideas for how to achieve that. As if wellness is a goal, a state that you reach, but in fact wellness is not a state of being, it is a state of action, it's the freedom to oscillate. There is no gold at the end of the rainbow. The rainbow is the gold.

BB: That's right, I love that. I love y'all. I'm just saying, I'm just saying, y'all are incredible. This is just... This information is just such a gift to us, for all of us that are looking for grit and discipline, this book, Burnout is help and compassion.

EN: Well, that was... That was a nice thing to say. Thanks.

AN: That's exactly what we were hoping to achieve. Yeah.

BB: Well, you did it. And we're grateful for it. So, do you all both have time for a two-minute apiece, rapid fire?

EN: Sure.

AN: You bet.

BB: We'll take one question a time and do both of you. Vulnerability is, fill in the blank.

AN: Worth it.

BB: Emily.

EN: A choice.

BB: Number two, you're called to be really brave, but the fear is real. You can feel it in your throat. What's the very first thing you do?

AN: Usually, when called upon to be brave, I just dive the hell in, maybe because I'm repressing fear or like, I don't know, maybe it's a good thing or a bad, but I just...

EN: Yes, because you're repressing fear, Amelia.

AN: Yeah, it's because I'm repressing fear, but I just dive in, unless there's a bug involved, if there's a bug involved...

BB: I was going to let your sister answer it. I was going to let your sister address that one.

[overlapping conversation]

AN: I scream like a third grader and call my husband.

BB: Okay, what about you, Emily?

EN: Oh, I breathe.

BB: Number three, Amelia, something that people often get wrong about you?

AN: They think that I'm an extrovert because I'm super high intensity and high energy, but no, I'm a strong introvert.

BB: Emily.

EN: Because I'm a sex educator, people assume I have a sex life that looks like a porno.

BB: Got it. Yeah, I could see how that assumption would happen. Four, Amelia, last show that you binged and loved?

AN: Staged on Hulu with David Tennant and Michael Sheen.

BB: Emily.

EN: Oh Schitt's Creek. Got to be.

BB: Favorite movie.

AN: The Color Purple, it's that grab the tissues, I know I'm going to cry movie.

BB: Emily.

EN: Lately, Rogue One, Rebellions are Built on Hope.

BB: Yep. Six, a concert you'll never forget.

AN: Singing the Brahms Requiem with the New York Philharmonic at Avery Fisher Hall.

BB: Emily.

EN: Amelia's doctoral recital. Shit. I'm not crying, you're crying, stop it.

BB: We're all crying now. So yeah.

EN: Amelia's doctoral program put her in the hospital twice. She had a massive panic attack and called me in desperation right before... I was driving to her recital, and I got there...

AN: I had to go on stage and I couldn't stop crying.

EN: She could not stop crying. She was crying when she walked off the stage at end of her recital. I don't remember a single piece of music that she played, but I remember watching her and thinking that I had never been prouder of anything or anyone in my life.

AN: Aww.

EN: Shut up.

BB: I can't take much more of you all. You all have me on the edge. Okay. Number seven, Amelia, favorite meal.

AN: Blue crabs, outside on a picnic table where it's covered in newspaper and everything's crusted in Old Bay, and like a cold beer that's like dripping, condensation and Old Bay. Yeah, crabs and beer.

BB: Emily.

EN: That will work for me, too.

BB: Eight. What's on your nightstand?

AN: Crabs and beer. No, I'm just kidding.

[laughter]

AN: I have a humidifier on my nightstand because I'm a singer.

BB: Makes sense. Emily.

EN: Earplugs, and eye mask, and a book.

BB: Okay, nine, Amelia, a snapshot of an ordinary moment in your life that brings you true joy.

AN: Sitting on the back step watching my dogs romp and play in the yard.

BB: Emily.

EN: Similarly, watching my husband in the backyard playing with the dogs when he doesn't know I'm watching him. He speaks in complete sentences to the dogs.

BB: Sweet. Okay, last one, 10. Amelia, what are you deeply grateful for right now?

AN: Right now, this conversation here, this has been so amazing and the chance to go through all of this stuff with you. I'm grateful for Brené Brown right now. Oh, my hand hit my keyboard, but I'm grateful for this right here.

BB: Me too. What about you, Emily? What's something you're really grateful for right now in your life?

EN: Right now, my whole body is like the most important thing, the most powerful thing to be aware of is sisterhood. So not just Amelia, my actual sister, but the experience of sisterhood, you being with your sister, and the idea of the ways that our book can facilitate a feeling of sisterhood among women.

BB: Okay, last thing I've got for y'all, you both gave us playlists, I'm looking at them right now. We're going to make little mini mix tapes on Spotify with your playlist. They made me laugh so hard. Amelia, you have to tell me what your five songs... What is one thing that your five songs say about you?

AN: Oh, well, the Brahms. See...

BB: Amelia, you have to go from Brahms and Bach to Tom Waits.

AN: Okay, so the Brahms, the second one the Brahms, it's about despair and hopelessness. The Tom Waits is also about despair, get behind the mule in the morning and plow. Ring of Keys is about discovering, you're recognizing yourself in someone else, and I forget what the last one is.

BB: "How can I keep from singing."

AN: Oh now, okay, so my whole place is like a journey from despair into hope. I didn't do it on purpose, but I made a little journey from despair to hope.

BB: You did. Emily, "Sing, sing, sing", Naughty" from Matilda, and then "Make Our Garden Grow", and then the "Disney Polynesian Village Resort Loop". What does your playlist say about you?

EN: The Pierogi song, and "Sing, Sing, Sing" are about my family connections. "Naughty" might as well be my theme song, and "Make Our Garden Grow" definitely is my theme song. "The Polynesian Village Resort Loop" is what I listen to when I'm on a plane, because it is the opposite of being on a plane. So, all of them take me to a psychological place that I periodically need to go to for very specific reasons.

BB: I just love you both, and I'm so grateful. The book is Burnout. I'll let everyone know where to get it and find it. We'll read it together. We'll change the world.

AN: Thanks.

EN: Let's do it.

BB: Bye y'all.

[music]

BB: So, I'm going to keep talking to Emily and Amelia about what we can learn and how we can do this because we are... As we come up on this election cycle, it's just... We're so fried. There's this great quote that I heard in an AA meeting one time, that "if you don't want to burnout, quit living like you're on fire." Yeah. It spoke to me, obviously. Alright, you all, we've got to breathe, we've got to move, we've got to listen to Disney Polynesian Resort music, which just cracked me up because I could hear the soundtrack in my head when they talked about it, and you need to check out Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle by Emily and Amelia Nagoski.

BB: You can find them on Twitter, which they have the Feminist Survival Project 2020. It's Twitter.com, their handle is SF as in feminist, S as in survival, P as in project 2020. Also, in the fun news department, don't forget that I'm launching a second podcast, Dare to Lead, coming October 19th. We're going to dig into big topics, trust, accountability, hard conversations, feedback, giving it and receiving it. And you know, receiving feedback is not easy because not everyone that gives us feedback is trained to do it well. I can't wait for us to do this together. Number two, make sure you have a voting plan, my friends. Thanks again. Hang in there. Breathe, move. Stay awkward, brave, and kind. And I'll see you next week. Unlocking U s is a Spotify original from Parcast. It's produced by Max Cutler, Kristen Acevedo and Carleigh Madden and by Cadence13. Sound design is by Kristen Acevedo.

© 2020 Brené Brown Education and Research Group, LLC. All rights reserved.

Brown, B. (Host). (2020, October 14). Brené with Emily and Amelia Nagoski on Burnout and How to Complete the Stress Cycle. [Audio podcast episode]. In Unlocking Us with Brené Brown. Cadence13. https://brenebrown.com/podcast/brene-with-emily-and-amelia-nagoski-on-burnout-and-how-to-complete-the-stress-cycle/

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Brené with Emily and Amelia Nagoski on Burnout and How to Complete the Stress Cycle

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Burnout. We're all experiencing it and we're all desperate for a way through it. In this episode, I talk to Drs. Emily and Amelia Nagoski about what causes burnout, what it does to our bodies, and how we can move through the emotional exhaustion.

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Burnout : the secret to unlocking the stress cycle

Nagoski, Emily, author. ; Nagoski, Amelia, author.

New York : Ballantine Books [2019]
On Display, 1st Floor. Call Number:   RA785 .N35 2019 ; Online with SCSU Login

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The Library Exhibit will be up for May 2022. Books in the exhibit are available for perusal, reading, and check-out. All podcasts have QR codes that link directly to the online resource, so you can start listening or reading right away! More links are available on this web exhibit. This online exhibit will continue to be available after the in-library exhibit is removed.

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Scroll right to see more topics, scroll down to see more resources within a topic.

Click the main link for the podcasts. Books have links to the Library Catalog (SouthernSearch) which will show if the book is still available for checkout. Ebooks and Articles may have 'SCSU Login Links' that require logging in with the SCSU Campus login.

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About National Mental Health Awareness Month

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About National Mental Health Awareness Month

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Mental Health Month | NAMI: National Alliance on Mental Illness

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Show support with NAMI by participating in several annual mental health awareness events. Learn more about the events.

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Heather McGhee || What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together

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Today we have Heather McGhee on the podcast. Heather is an expert in economic and social policy. The former president of the inequality-focused thinktank “Demos” McGhee has drafted a legislation testified before Congress and contributed regularly in news shows including MBC’s “Meet the Press”. Sh…

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Racism makes our economy worse -- and not just in ways that harm people of color, says public policy expert Heather C. McGhee. From her research and travels across the US, McGhee shares startling insights into how racism fuels bad policymaking and drains our economic potential -- and offers a crucial rethink on what we can do to create a more prosperous nation for all. “Our fates are linked,” she says. “It costs us so much to remain divided.”

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The sum of us : what racism costs everyone and how we can prosper together

McGhee, Heather C. author.

New York : One World [2021]
On Display, 1st Floor. Call Number:  E185.8 .M38 2021

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"These were the words uttered by Billie Bob Harrell, Jr..." McVicker, S. (2000). Billie Bob's (Mis) Fortune. Houston Press. February, 10, 2000. "People were asked "how much money would you really need to be happy?" Lyubomirsky, S. (2008). The how of happiness: A scientific approach to getting the life you want. Penguin Press, p. 44. "Kahmeman and Deaton found..."
Kahneman, D., & Deaton, A. (2010). High income improves evaluation of life but not emotional well-being. Proceedings of the national academy of sciences, 107(38), 16489-16493.
"This is Dan Gilbert. He wrote one of my very favorite books on human psychology." "In one famous study, he asked young professors at the University of Texas to forecast how they'd feel when they got tenure." Gilbert, D. T., Pinel, E. C., Wilson, T. D., Blumberg, S. J., & Wheatley, T. P. (1998). Immune neglect: a source of durability bias in affective forecasting. Journal of personality and social psychology, 75(3), 617. "Lovers predict they'll take a long time to recover from a sad break-up but bounce back far quicker."
Gilbert, D. T., Pinel, E. C., Wilson, T. D., Blumberg, S. J., & Wheatley, T. P. (1998). Immune neglect: a source of durability bias in affective forecasting. Journal of personality and social psychology, 75(3), 617.
"Student drivers believe they'll be devastated if they fail to get their license..." Ayton, P., Pott, A., & Elwakili, N. (2007). Affective forecasting: Why can't people predict their emotions?. Thinking & Reasoning, 13(1), 62-80. "The same is true for job applicants who are passed over."
Gilbert, D. T., Pinel, E. C., Wilson, T. D., Blumberg, S. J., & Wheatley, T. P. (1998). Immune neglect: a source of durability bias in affective forecasting. Journal of personality and social psychology, 75(3), 617.
"Even patients guessing how they'll feel about a positive or negative HIV diagnosis." Sieff, E. M., Dawes, R. M. and Loewenstein, G. F. 1999. Anticipated versus actual reaction to HIV test results. American Journal of Psychology, 112: 297-311. "This is a phenomenon psychologists call hedonic adaptation." Frederick, S., & Loewenstein, G. (1999). 16 Hedonic Adaptation. Well-being: The foundations of hedonic psychology, 302-329. "Rafaella Gunz is telling me how she met the man of her dreams." Rafaella Gunz, R. (2016). Getting herpes was a gift. Ravishly.com, 4/21/16. "Dan has observed we're worse at predicting how we'll feel after a bad event."
See review in Wilson, T. D., & Gilbert, D. T. (2013). The impact bias is alive and well. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 105, 740-748.
"Dan calls this capacity to overcome adversity our psychological immune system."
Gilbert, D. T., Pinel, E. C., Wilson, T. D., Blumberg, S. J., & Wheatley, T. P. (1998). Immune neglect: a source of durability bias in affective forecasting. Journal of personality and social psychology, 75(3), 617.
"J.R. Martinez had just finished high school in a small town in the South."
Martinez, J. R. (2012). Full of Heart: My Story of Survival, Strength, and Spirit. Hyperion Books.

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Episode 2: The Unhappy Millionaire - The Happiness Lab

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"These were the words uttered by Billie Bob Harrell, Jr..." McVicker, S. (2000). Billie Bob's (Mis) Fortune. Houston Press. February, 10, 2000. "People were asked "how much money would you really need to be happy?" Lyubomirsky, S. (2008). The how of happiness: A scientific approach to getting the life you want.

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Stumbling on happiness

Gilbert, Daniel Todd.

New York : Vintage Books2007, c2005

On Display, 1st Floor. Call Number:  BF575.H27 G55 2007

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Ayton, P., Pott, A., & Elwakili, N. (2007). Affective forecasting: Why can’t people predict their emotions? Thinking & Reasoning, 13(1), 62–80. https://doi.org/10.1080/13546780600872726 SCSU Login Link

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"The Harvard psychologist Dan Wegner was interested in these effects, which he referred to as ironic processes." Wegner, D. M. (1997). When the antidote is the poison: Ironic mental control processes. Psychological Science, 8(3), 148-150. "Wegner created a version of Dostoevsky's polar bear challenge as an experiment with college students." Wegner, D. M., Schneider, D. J., Carter, S. R., & White, T. L. (1987). Paradoxical effects of thought suppression. Journal of personality and social psychology, 53(1), 5. "A topic that's usually verboten for golfers to speak of... The Yips." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yips#In_golf "College students told not to think about a particular person before bed end up dreaming about that person more often." Wegner, D. M., Wenzlaff, R. M., & Kozak, M. (2004). Dream rebound: The return of suppressed thoughts in dreams. Psychological Science, 15(4), 232-236. "And soccer players told not to shoot a penalty kick to a specific location tend to look at that exact forbidden spot, which is a problem since players tend to aim where they look."
Bakker, F. C., Oudejans, R. R., Binsch, O., & Kamp, J. (2006). Penalty shooting and gaze behavior: Unwanted effects of the wish not to miss.
"Dan Wegner- who devised the white bear experiment - also studied these ironic effects on the golf course." Wegner, D. M., Ansfield, M., & Pilloff, D. (1998). The putt and the pendulum: Ironic effects of the mental control of action. Psychological Science, 9(3), 196-199. "It's April 11, 1961 and Adolf Eichmann has just entered his bullet-proof dock at a special tribunal in Jerusalem." https://www.yadvashem.org/holocaust/eichmann-trial.html "He joined a project that invited survivors to give videotaped testimony of what they had endured at the hands of the Nazis." https://fortunoff.library.yale.edu/ "Immediately after telling these awful stories, survivors felt... better." Pennebaker, J. W., Barger, S. D., & Tiebout, J. (1989). Disclosure of traumas and health among Holocaust survivors. Psychosomatic medicine. "Those who wrote about traumas ended up going to the doctor at about half the rate as people in the control conditions."
Pennebaker, J. W. (1997). Opening up: The healing power of expressing emotions. Guilford Press.
"Since his initial research back in the 1980s, many scientists have seen the same effects of setting traumatic memories down on paper."
* Pennebaker, J. W. (1997). Opening up: The healing power of expressing emotions. Guilford Press.

* Pennebaker, J. W., & Smyth, J. M. (2016). Opening up by writing it down: How expressive writing improves health and eases emotional pain. Guilford Publications.
"The Stanford neuroscientist James Gross showed his poor test subjects graphic medical footage of a patient's arm being amputated." Gross, J. J. (1998). Antecedent-and response-focused emotion regulation: divergent consequences for experience, expression, and physiology. Journal of personality and social psychology, 74(1), 224. "In one study, subjects were asked to stick their arms in very, very cold water for as long as they could take, and then rate the experience on a scale from 0 no pain at all to 10 maximum agony." Cioffi, D., & Holloway, J. (1993). Delayed costs of suppressed pain. Journal of personality and Social Psychology, 64(2), 274. "But as researcher Wendy Mendes and her colleagues have found out, that's pretty much the worst thing we can do." Karnilowicz, H. R., Waters, S. F., & Mendes, W. B. (2018). Not in front of the kids: Effects of parental suppression on socialization behaviors during cooperative parent-child interactions. Emotion. "The Buddha himself realized that these are not going away. In fact, the continued existence of pain- or what Buddhists call dukkha- is so important that it is considered the first of the four noble truths." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Noble_Truths

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Episode 6: Don't Think of a White Bear - The Happiness Lab

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"The Harvard psychologist Dan Wegner was interested in these effects, which he referred to as ironic processes." Wegner, D. M. (1997). When the antidote is the poison: Ironic mental control processes. Psychological Science, 8(3), 148-150. "Wegner created a version of Dostoevsky's polar bear challenge as an experiment with college students."

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Book: Opening up - the healing power of expressing emotions

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Book: Opening up - the healing power of expressing emotions

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Opening up : the healing power of expressing emotions

Pennebaker, James W.

New York : Guilford Press c1997
On Display, 1st Floor.
Call Number:  RC455.4.I54P46 1997

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Screenshot 2022-04-28 at 14-53-10 Opening up the healing power of expressing emotions Pennebaker James W Free Download Borrow and Streaming Internet Archive

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Opening up by writing it down : how expressive writing improves health and eases emotional pain

Pennebaker, James W., author. ; Smyth, Joshua M., author.

New York, New York ; London, England : The Guilford Press 2016
Online: SCSU Login Link

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Podcast: Surprising Truths about the Human Brain

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Podcast: Surprising Truths about the Human Brain

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Lisa Feldman Barrett || Surprising Truths about the Human Brain - Scott Barry Kaufman

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In this episode, I talk to renowned neuroscientist Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett about emotions and the brain. She reveals what the true function of the brain

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Seven and a half lessons about the brain

Barrett, Lisa Feldman, author.

Boston ; New York : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt [2020]
Online: SCSU Login Link
Book Notes

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Research papers by Lisa Feldman Barrett | Lisa Feldman Barrett

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Scholarly articles on the science of emotion, mind, and brain

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Episode 3: A Silver Lining — The Happiness Lab

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Winning the lottery can ruin your life, while contracting an incurable disease can be ‘a gift’.

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A guide to the good life the ancient art of Stoic joy

Irvine, William Braxton, 1952-

Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press 2009
On Display, 1st Floor. Call number:
E-Books SCSU Login Link

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Koo, M., Algoe, S. B., Wilson, T. D., & Gilbert, D. T. (2008). It's a wonderful life: mentally subtracting positive events improves people's affective states, contrary to their affective forecasts. Journal of personality and social psychology, 95(5), 1217.
Open Access Manuscript
SCSU Login Link to Publisher Version

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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. When Saru Najarian was about 10, his pastime was collecting baseball and basketball cards. These were hard to come by in Cyprus where he grew up. So when Saru's cousin pestered him to share his cards with her, he always said no, but she didn't give up. As she pestered and begged and pleaded.Saru Najarian: It came to a boiling point where I got so angry that everything blacked out and I slapped her really hard.Shankar Vedantam: Saru's arm seemed to act of its own volition. A second later.Saru Najarian: I came back into the reality and I saw her crying and had no idea what I had done.Shankar Vedantam: Paula Reed experienced something similar at the same age. She was a budding environmentalist with a peace ecology flag hanging on her bedroom wall. One afternoon, she heard the cracking of trees and a low rumble. She realized that her neighbor was knocking down trees to build himself a shorter driveway. He was using a bulldozer.Paula Reed: This neighbor came up the road in the bulldozer and was pushing over trees and something in my head just snapped.Shankar Vedantam: Paula's dad had bought a machete in his travels to South America. Without thinking, Paula seized the weapon. Its blade was about as long as her arm. In shorts and bare feet, she climbed up on the bulldozer and swung the blade. Metal struck metal. As Paula rained down blows, the bulldozer stopped and retreated. Paula chased after it, cutting ribbons in the air with the machete.Paula Reed: I have no idea where that came from, but I was in a complete wild red rage.Shankar Vedantam: Today on the show, Wild Red Rage. The moments when we suddenly snap, and animal furies erupt within us. Such rage can harm others, it can harm us. It's easy to think we'd be better off without such wrath. But as blind as uncontrollable anger can be, it turns out we would be worse off without it. The deep logic of irrational rage, this week on Hidden Brain.Shankar Vedantam: This is the story of a woman who snapped.Jess Cavender: I would say that I'm a gentle person and that's me putting it optimistically.Shankar Vedantam: Jess Cavender always thought of herself as a timid person, timid to the point of pushover.Jess Cavender: My brother wasn't shy about telling me that I was a doormat for most of my life, and I didn't want to see myself as a doormat, but I also didn't have evidence to the contrary.Shankar Vedantam: In elementary school, for example, Jess saved up years of pocket money and birthday cash, storing her savings in a music box. Her dream, a much coveted trampoline. Finally, one day she had enough money. She and her dad drove to Sam's Club.Jess Cavender: I bought this trampoline and I was so excited.Shankar Vedantam: Until her trampoline was taken over by intruders.Jess Cavender: My two siblings, my older brother and younger sister would bounce on the trampoline as well and sometimes I couldn't get it to myself the way I'd like it.Shankar Vedantam: Jess's siblings didn't just hog the trampoline, they treated her as if she were an unwelcome guest. Jess tried to get her dad to step in. Instead of helping, he offered her some advice.Jess Cavender: My dad suggested to me that I charge them to use the trampoline since it was my trampoline and I had done all the work to save for it that I should charge them a fee to use it.Shankar Vedantam: He might as well have suggested she punch someone in the face. Her siblings didn't even bother arguing with her. They just ignored her.Jess Cavender: I don't know how I would have ever enforced charging 25 cents for my siblings to use it. They certainly would just be like, "No," walk past me and get on the trampoline.Shankar Vedantam: Jess did not experience the slights with fury, she accepted them with resignation. Over the years, there were other moments like this, moments that would have sparked anger in some people, but Jess usually kept her cool until one night years later, when she didn't. She was in graduate school, living with two roommates in off-campus housing.Jess Cavender: It has all of the trimmings of being college living, where you're paying for a lot and not getting very much. And people are packed in.Shankar Vedantam: Late one night, Jess was jolted awake by a sound.Jess Cavender: I hear heavy footfalls going down the stairs.Shankar Vedantam: Jess immediately thought she knew what had happened. Her roommate Kim had torn her Achilles tendon and was wearing a boot. Jess figured that Kim had fallen on the stairs. She leaped out of bed, threw on her robe and opened her bedroom door. Her other roommate, Shelby, opened her door at the same time. She'd also heard the noise.Jess Cavender: She's looking at me and I'm looking at her and Kim's not at the bottom of the stairs. So we both just run down the stairs to see what had happened. Well, the both of us arrive at the bottom of the stairs and a very large man with my kitchen rag held over his face, comes wheeling out of the kitchen with a gun pointed at us.Shankar Vedantam: The first thing Jess took in about the man was his size. He was at least six foot five. He was about a head taller than she was.Jess Cavender: All I could see was his eyes. This glare of his eyes were yellow. And aside from that, really I was staring at the barrel of the gun.Shankar Vedantam: The man yelled, "Where's the money? Get the money, go upstairs." Standing there in her robe with a gun pointed at her head, Jess did not snap. Instead her mind became cool and analytical. What could she do to get out of the situation? Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed a movement. Another man had emerged from a side room.Jess Cavender: I know that they want something valuable, and I have nothing. I'm aware that I have no cash, I have no TV screens.Shankar Vedantam: The man with the gun motioned for the two women to go up the stairs, presumably to fetch their wallets. Shelby, normally a ball of energy, had gone still.Jess Cavender: I discovered that she's frozen, she isn't blinking, she's not looking at me, she's not moving. So I put my hand on her back and I say, "Everything's going to be okay. We're going upstairs. Just give them what they want."Shankar Vedantam: As Jess and Shelby climbed the stairs, the robbers came up behind them.Jess Cavender: One of the guys puts his hand on my butt to push me and that's when it occurred to me that something sexually violent might happen.Shankar Vedantam: Still, Jess felt no rage. The second robber took Shelby into her room. The first man, the one with the gun followed Jess into her bedroom.Jess Cavender: And he's yelling, "Get on the bed." And that's when this thought, "There's no way in hell that I will get on this bed. Not for anything. "It's a second-story building, I probably would have jumped out of the window before I actually got on the bed.Shankar Vedantam: Jess kept thinking, what could she give the man to make him leave?Jess Cavender: And I'm looking around my room and I'm looking for something of value. I have stacks of books, I have dance clothes, I have all sorts of things that I could not possibly in my mind register giving to him. I'm just looking around for something valuable to give to him so that he will leave. And I looked down and I see my camera.Shankar Vedantam: The camera she used for work.Jess Cavender: Now my camera is the main way that I provide for myself, and that's how I was making enough money to really, to feed myself. And so that represented to me my livelihood, my survival. I had a split second emotional response to it, thinking, "No, he doesn't get that." And that's when everything changed.Shankar Vedantam: Jess did not snap when two men invaded her home, she didn't snap when one of them touched her, she didn't snap when she was forced at gunpoint into her bedroom and told to get on the bed. But when she realized the robber might take her camera...Jess Cavender: That's when I realized, this person has no right to come in here and to demand my things or to even be in my space. That was really the first time that I had a strong response to this person violating me. I looked at the gun, just squarely faced him in a way that I don't think I've ever done to anyone and said, "Get out, get out of my house. You do not belong here."Shankar Vedantam: Jess could hear the man's accomplice in the other room shouting, "Shoot her, shoot her." Jess spotted her cell phone. She grabbed it. The robber saw what she was doing.Jess Cavender: And as I got my hand on it, he jumped on top of me and we were rolling on the floor, fighting each other. He's using one hand to try and pry the cell phone out, and I'm using the same hand that's on the cell phone to dig my fingernails into his skin, and then the other hand to try and pry the gun out of his hand.Shankar Vedantam: Something primal stirred inside Jess. She was suddenly consumed by blinding rage.Jess Cavender: His chest is on my back, his arms are around my arms. He's completely crouched over and around me as we're falling on our sides and I'm kicking and scratching.Shankar Vedantam: The one thought flooding her mind, not survival.Jess Cavender: Don't let him win. Somehow that mattered. I was using every ounce of my physical strength and not caring that I was inflicting pain and actually being like, "That's fine. That's the point of to get this phone back out of his hand." I don't know why I was more focused on the phone than the gun, but I was.Shankar Vedantam: The second robber barged into the bedroom. There were now two of them in the room, but she had no thought for risk or danger. Something new had taken over.Jess Cavender: I just started screaming. A full-on, high-pitch, bloodcurdling screech of a scream. And apparently my scream was so loud that I woke up one neighbor who was wearing headphones and then the other neighbor who was asleep on the other side.Shankar Vedantam: The men were so startled by the screams that they took off. One grabbed Jess's laptop on his way out. Jess's scream woke up her other roommate. Unbelievably, Kim had slept through the whole thing.Jess Cavender: And she opened the door and says, "What's wrong?" I was like, "Call the police!"Shankar Vedantam: In that moment, Jess Cavender, who had lived her life as a timid person, had no sense that she had acted out of character.Jess Cavender: All that unfolded was in no way, shape or form unnatural or surprising to me in the moment, it was what needed to happen. I wasn't surprised at myself until a bit later when I was like, "I cannot, for the life of me, believe that I looked at a guy who's holding a gun at my head and decided that I was going to yell at him."Shankar Vedantam: Or fight.Jess Cavender: Yeah. Or fight.Shankar Vedantam: Jess's story reveals a strange truth about our capacity for fury. It often arrives without warning. It seems to have a mind of its own. We can ignore serious provocations for years and then boom, we snap. Only later do we look back at our actions in wonder. When we come back, understanding the triggers that can push even the most mild-mannered among us to see red. Stay with us.Shankar Vedantam: A defining quality of wild red rage is that it often comes out of nowhere. It takes over our minds and deprives us of reason and logic. When Jess Cavender lost it and literally fought a robber who had a gun pointed at her head, she took a very serious risk. She and her roommates could have ended up dead. In retrospect, you can say it was foolhardy and irrational. All this presents a mystery. It's taken millions of years of evolution to produce the human brain. It has an exquisite capacity for reason and logic. Why would natural selection install a circuit breaker to undermine our capacity for logical thinking?Shankar Vedantam: Doug Fields has long puzzled over this question. His interest in rage grows out of his fascination with the brain, but it's also based on an unforgettable personal experience. The story he told me has the ring of a Hollywood thriller, but with a catch: Doug, our leading man is not a muscle-bound hero. He's a neuroscientist and not just any neuroscientist, but a walking stereotype of a neuroscientist. Here's his daughter, Kelly Fields.Kelly Fields: We'd be watching a movie together and there's some car accident or some big scene going on and he'll just chime in and be like, "Wow, you can't see the shadow behind that plant in the corner anymore, did you notice that they changed the lighting for no reason, even though it's the same scene?" And I'd be like, "No, actually I was watching the car accident." So yeah, just a very typical nerd.Shankar Vedantam: Doug is five foot seven and weighs maybe 135 pounds.Kelly Fields: Glasses, thin hair.Doug Fields: Don't think of Sean Connery or Matt Damon, you got to think of Woody Allen here.Shankar Vedantam: In 2007, Doug was scheduled to go to Barcelona, to present some research at a neuroscience conference. He decided to turn a work trip into a father-daughter vacation and took Kelly with him. She was 17, he was 57. Their first stop was Paris. Waiting in line at the Eiffel Tower, Kelly got a new glimpse into how her dad's mind worked.Kelly Fields: A couple came up to us and was speaking perfect English with American accents and they were very nice, and I just noticed they were standing too close to us. I kept glancing behind us like, "Why are you standing so close?" And I noticed this woman's hand near his pants, and then I look again and I noticed his pocket is unzipped and I just whispered to my dad, "I think they're trying to rob you."Shankar Vedantam: Doug was completely unfazed.Kelly Fields: My dad informed me that that was a decoy wallet.Shankar Vedantam: Your dad had a decoy wallet?Kelly Fields: You're just as surprised as I was. I was like, "What?" He had this special wallet that he would keep in his front pocket. It was special because of the way it was cut to fit into his front pocket. And that was his wallet. Sorry, I'm blowing all your covers, dad. And then he had a fake wallet in his back pocket with not a lot of money in it and a few fake credit cards.Shankar Vedantam: Doug came up with a strategy many vacations ago.Doug Fields: When you travel, it's a wise idea not to have all your money and credit cards in one place, you can get robbed or mugged. And so the idea is, if it's a pickpocket they get a wallet that's useless, that doesn't matter. But if you're mugged, you can hand them the wallet or throw it on the ground and run. So that's why I do that.Shankar Vedantam: For anyone keeping score, that's neuroscientist, one, pickpockets, zero. After visiting the Eiffel Tower, father and daughter went back to their hotel and packed their bags. The next day they took the Metro to the airport. This is when Doug broke one of his cardinal rules.Doug Fields: I violated my rule of having money in multiple places because TSA makes that difficult when you have to go through inspections. So I figured we're just going to take the ride to the airport. So I had everything in my wallet.Shankar Vedantam: Everything in one wallet.Doug Fields: We got on the Metro, lots of people, then we came to a stop and everybody on the Metro train left, except one lady who looked very sympathetic at us. And I felt that my wallet was gone.Shankar Vedantam: They had lost their money and credit cards. That's neuroscientist, one, pickpockets, one. Doug and Kelly still had their passports, so they were able to get on their flight to Barcelona where Doug's conference was being held.Doug Fields: If you have your wallet stolen in Europe, how do you check into a hotel? What are you going to do? What ultimately happened is I managed to reach my brother in the United States and he arranged to wire us cash. My brother had picked this place for us to get money at random on the internet.Shankar Vedantam: Doug and Kelly got in a cab and gave the driver the address of the bank where they were to pick up the money, except it wasn't a bank.Doug Fields: So we got in a cab, took us way out of the Barcelona tourist area to the most seedy neighborhood you've ever seen.Shankar Vedantam: As vacant shops and trash-strewn streets, replaced sprawling parks and cafes, father and daughter got more and more anxious.Doug Fields: Our adrenaline is coming out our ears already, because we've just been pickpocketed and had all this stress, and we end up in a seedy part of town at an internet cafe.Kelly Fields: And there was just a small dingy building full of really big men, basically.Shankar Vedantam: The burly men were staring at a TV. When Doug and Kelly entered, the men silently turned to watch. Doug went up to the cashier.Doug Fields: I gave him this receipt. He reaches in his pocket, pulls out this wad of money and starts peeling off a thousand dollars or something.Kelly Fields: And we were just standing there looking at them like, "Are you contacting your friends to come and rob us?"Doug Fields: Kelly and I just know we're going to get robbed again. It was terrible.Shankar Vedantam: They didn't get robbed.Doug Fields: The cab stayed there and we got in the cab and then we went back.Shankar Vedantam: The next morning, they resolved to put the unpleasantness of the previous days behind them. Doug had to give a talk at the conference that afternoon, in the morning, he and Kelly decided to visit a famous Barcelona cathedral. Now, it would seem like too much bad luck to get robbed again, but...Doug Fields: We're coming up the steps of the Metro station, and suddenly I felt this tug at my pant leg and I slapped the zipper pocket above my knee and my wallet was gone.Shankar Vedantam: This wasn't a decoy wallet, it was the real thing with all the cash that Doug's brother had wired him from the United States. Something snapped inside the 57-year-old neuroscientist. He was done being used as a portable ATM by European thieves.Doug Fields: I shot my arm back.Shankar Vedantam: The robber hadn't gotten far. He was right behind Doug.Doug Fields: He started to turn away from me and I snagged him in the crook of my arm.Shankar Vedantam: He had the robber around the neck. Now what? Doug didn't have to ask himself the question. His arm seemed to know what to do.Doug Fields: I flipped him over my hip to the ground on the pavement and jumped on his back and put him in a choke hold. And then this thought bubbles up to my cerebral cortex. "What are you doing?" If you're robbed you should give him the money. But I was just a spectator in this whole thing.Shankar Vedantam: Kelly, who was a couple of paces in front of Doug, turned around to see something she never expected to see in all her life: wild red rage from her father.Kelly Fields: And I see my dad choking this random person. He has this young guy in a headlock and I was just looking at him like, "What is going on?" Then I hear my dad yell, "My wallet." And when he says my wallet, I knew instantly what had happened. Somebody had pickpocketed him again.Doug Fields: So I'm on the ground with this guy and he's in his 20s. I'm just thinking back to watching my kids wrestle and I'm trying to do what they do. I'm thinking hip control, I got to keep this down, keep him pinned and I yell, "Call the police, call the police. I've got him." And there's no reply. And then from my perspective on the ground, all I saw were men's feet circling around me. And I then realized they were all part of a gang.Shankar Vedantam: The thief somehow managed to fling Doug's wallet towards an accomplice. It was now Kelly's turn to do something crazy.Doug Fields: The next thing I see is a woman's hand flying through the air and I recognize it as Kelly. Kelly was captain of the ultimate Frisbee team at that time, and she's doing a full-on layout on solid concrete to deflect the disc and taps the wallet into my outstretched right hand.Kelly Fields: And as I jump up to my feet, and I'm looking around like, "Okay, now what?" And I see these big guys and I watched, I followed the gaze of one of these guys, I follow his eyes as he looks down at the ground, and I see that he sees my dad's Blackberry. And as I'm locking eyes with him, I jumped on my dad's Blackberry, just like a football player would grab a football or something, which is a funny image to me because it was just a Blackberry. So I'm on the ground hugging this little Blackberry and I'm like, "Dad, I got your phone."Kelly Fields: And I'm yelling because there's now a circle of men around me and I can see through their feet, there's a circle of men around my father as well. And he has his wallet and he knew the next move. And that was to let the guy go.Shankar Vedantam: That's neuroscientist, two, pickpockets, one.Doug Fields: When I let the bandit go, that I had in the choke hold, he scooted away on his back, on his butt, like a crab and he pointed at me going, "Crazy man, crazy man." And now I'm staring eye to eye with the ringleader and all these other guys, so what am I going to do now? I had so much adrenaline going, which I've never felt before, I was ready to throw him into his accomplices and knock him down the steps into the Metro station. And there was no question whether I could do that or not.Kelly Fields: And then yeah, a really pretty well-dressed elderly man with a cane just walks up really casually and said, "Yeah, he's no crazy. Go." And they all fled like a bunch of birds leaving a telephone wire or something. They were just like, poof. And I'm just trying to process it all like, "What just happened?" "Oh, my dad must be a spy, of course and he just did some spy things when that guy stole his wallet. He's not really a scientist at all."Shankar Vedantam: Doug and Kelly stumbled away from the scene. Their hearts were racing.Kelly Fields: My dad says, "We have to get a knife." And I was like, "What?" Okay, now I'm concerned, that's a horrible idea on multiple levels. That's a really bad idea. And I couldn't believe that my father, who I had only ever seen use knives for cutting vegetables or firewood was now suggesting like, "We need to go get a weapon." And I was like, "Oh, okay. I need to step in, in the decision making process. That's insane. We're not getting a knife."Shankar Vedantam: Doug was sure that they were being tracked by members of the street gang. And it turns out he was not being paranoid. He and Kelly really were being followed.Doug Fields: Now it turned into a scene out of a spy movie. We're running down, back alleys, we're running through restaurants, going into shops, going in one door out the back.Kelly Fields: And so we go into a different shop and I bought this skirt so we could try and change clothing, which was really bizarre and it's funny that we thought that would help, and we get out of the store. And I remember seeing another person walking towards us on one side of the street and then a group of men walking towards us on the other side. And my dad just goes, "We need to cross the street. Ready, go." No conversation, and we just started booking it across this crowded road and we run across the street, we realized these people are following us for sure.Kelly Fields: We see them now crossing the crosswalk to come to our side of the street again, and we're like, "What do we do?" And he goes, "Let's get a taxi." And we run into the street and he hits the hood of a taxi driving by and he's like, "We need to get in."Shankar Vedantam: When they got out of the taxi, they still hadn't shaken the robbers. They jumped in another cab and asked the driver to get them the hell out of Barcelona.Doug Fields: Then went to the next city with 170 Euro cab fare. I still remember.Shankar Vedantam: It was here far outside of Barcelona that Doug's heart rate started to slow. And as his normal logical brain came back online, he couldn't believe what he had just done.Kelly Fields: He is like, "I should have given them my wallet. That's crazy. Why did I do that? Why was I doing that? Never do that. If this ever happens to you again, give them your wallet."Shankar Vedantam: Doug's behavior disturbed him as a father, but it also disturbed him as a neuroscientist who thought he had a good handle on how the brain worked, on how his own brain worked.Doug Fields: From a neuroscience perspective, how does this happen? That you can instantly do this aggression without even being aware, and it's all unconscious? If something in my environment could cause me to suddenly risk life and limb with no conscious thought, I wanted to understand how that worked at a neuroscience level. What's going on in the brain?Shankar Vedantam: The question again was why evolution, which has sculpted our brains and bodies to be skilled survival machines, would preserve systems in the brain that caused us to act with unthinking haste, and violence. Haste and violence that can place our own lives at great risk. Doug eventually realized that the answer lay in the question itself. It was all about speed.Doug Fields: The conscious brain is too slow and it doesn't have the capacity. So when you're faced with a sudden threat, like a fist thrown to your chin, you have to respond faster than the conscious brain can handle it.Shankar Vedantam: There are lots of things that can be done slowly, but surviving an immediate threat is not one of them. When you're dealing with a predator or some other imminent danger, you have to act fast.Doug Fields: So nature has developed high-speed pathways to the amygdala, all our senses go there before they go to the cortex, which is where we have consciousness. And that so you can have this rapid response to a real threat. Now, we've all experienced this, you're on a basketball court and a wayward basketball comes towards you and you duck and turn and you bat it away. And then you go, "What was that?"Doug Fields: Your unconscious mind detected because visual input went first to your amygdala, that something was in your visual space that shouldn't be there, like a motion detector, but not only that, then put you on a very definitive course with a complex behavior. You think about the behavior where you turn and you intersect this thing and you bat it away.Shankar Vedantam: Rational thought isn't just unhelpful. When that basketball is hurtling toward you, it's actually counterproductive. Being deliberate can end up getting you smashed in the face. But short-circuiting logic creates dangers, especially when you're in the grip of an emotion like rage. You can literally stop thinking about your arm as your arm. It becomes a weapon that can be wielded, deployed, sacrificed.Doug Fields: The brain's threat detection mechanism, which is highly controlled to engage in a violent, aggressive interaction, risks life and limb.Shankar Vedantam: Most of the time we are well-served by being logical and deliberate. But on rare occasions, it's helpful to act with unthinking haste. The operative word here is rare. What Doug has found is that wild red rage erupts in very specific situations, often when you're defending your most vital interests.Doug Fields: The brain controls this response, so that's only tripped by very specific triggers.Shankar Vedantam: Doug says most of these triggers are related to our basic needs. For example, you can easily imagine an animal or a human reacting with protective rage when its own life is in danger.Doug Fields: Life or limb. If you're attacked, you will fight back. There's nothing to lose. All animals will do that.Shankar Vedantam: Another thing most animals will do, protect their young. You know the rule, never get between a mama bear and her cub. And while you're at it, don't try to steal her dinner.Doug Fields: Resources. That was the other thing that was tripped when my wallet got snagged. Even a family puppy will snap your hand if you get too close to the dish.Shankar Vedantam: The list goes on. Don't try to take my mate, don't encroach on my territory, don't corner me.Doug Fields: If an animal is trapped, it will use aggression to break free. I mean, an animal in a trap will chew its leg off, but so will a human.Shankar Vedantam: These triggers remind us of a truth we cannot avoid. Humans, at the end of the day, are animals. But we're also more complicated than this list may suggest. One story that made an impression on Doug involved a man named Ray Young. He was 67 years old and lived in Silver Spring, Maryland, where Doug lived too. Ray was waiting his turn at a post office one day when he saw what he thought was another customer cut the line.Doug Fields: The next thing that happened is unbelievable. He pulled out a knife and started knifing the guy viciously. I went to many of his trials and he had no record of violence, no arrest record, it's completely out of character.Shankar Vedantam: Ray snapped because he was defending something that is of vital importance to humans.Doug Fields: Order in society, this guy broke the rules, he cut in line.Shankar Vedantam: We all depend on a functioning social order. A stable, rule-following society is as essential to our survival as food and shelter. We're willing to fight to maintain such order.Doug Fields: In social animals, in order to maintain order, following the rules, aggression is what is used. That's still what we use, we use violence.Shankar Vedantam: Now, it's not as if every threat produces mindless rage. Plenty of people see the social order breached or get insulted and don't turn into Rambo. The threshold for snapping and the drivers of violence can vary between people.Doug Fields: If you grow up in a hostile inner city, you're going to have a hair trigger because you'll be victimized if you're not. We can see those changes in the brain. But that also means you're more likely to misfire. So sometimes the right thing to do is to be the marine and charge after the threat, and sometimes that's going to get you killed. But as a species, the group as a whole will survive because somebody is going to do one thing and somebody is going to do something else.Shankar Vedantam: Doug says stress is often a factor in sending us over the edge. He sees stress at play in Jess Cavender's response to the armed robber. She didn't scream and dig her hands into the attacker when she first saw him. She tried to appease him.Doug Fields: She had been enduring this for a while and stress was building, and it tripped that trigger.Shankar Vedantam: The resource trigger.Doug Fields: She said that the most valuable thing in her life that she depended on for food and everything was her camera. And they weren't going to get it.Shankar Vedantam: Now, there is a wrong lesson you can draw from this account of rage. You could say, "Look, Jess lost it, and because she became enraged, she managed to save her camera. Doug was furious at being robbed and his rage allowed him to take his wallet back from the Barcelona thieves." These examples suggest that rage always results in good outcomes, that you end up better off when you violently lose your temper.Shankar Vedantam: What this misses is that literally no one in their right mind will tell you to attack a man with a gun or to take on a street gang in a foreign country. Risking your life to save some money or to protect a camera is the very definition of crazy. When we come back, why you can't understand the deep logic of blinding rage by looking only at situations where things turn out well for you.Shankar Vedantam: Mohamed Bouazizi was sick of the police and their demands for bribes. He was a produce seller in the city of Sidi Bouzid in Tunisia, in North Africa. The harassment felt endless. On a Friday morning in December 2010, Mohamed had an encounter with the police. Years later, there are still varying accounts of what happened. According to some, a cop confiscated the scales that Mohammed used to sell his produce. Others said an officer wouldn't let him set up his stand. Some accounts said Mohamed was slapped or perhaps kicked.Shankar Vedantam:The street vendor did what citizens are supposed to do. He went to the authorities to protest his mistreatment. But when he got to the government building to lodge a complaint, he was barred from entry. Mohamed was gripped by an intense feeling of injustice. And then he snapped. He doused himself with gasoline. Standing in front of the government building that had shut the door on him, he struck a match and set himself ablaze. One of the last things onlookers heard from him were these words, "How do you expect me to make a living?"Shankar Vedantam: By the time the fire was dowsed and Mohamed was rushed to a hospital, burns covered 90% of his body. He died a few weeks later. His story shows the self-destructive power of wild red rage, but it also reveals the hidden logic of fury. Thousands of Mohamed's fellow Tunisians showed up at his funeral. On social media, he was dubbed a martyr. Members of the crowd shouted "Farewell, Mohamed, we will avenge you. We weep for you today. We will make those who caused your death weep."Shankar Vedantam: Ten days after Mohamed's death, with escalating protests around the country, the president of Tunisia ended a 23-year autocratic reign and fled the country. Within weeks, protests in Tunisia spread to other Arab countries in what came to be known as the Arab Spring.Speaker 7: It is the end of an era in Tunisia.Speaker 8: President Hosni Mubarak has stepped down.Speaker 9: Libya's ouster...Shankar Vedantam: Neuroscientist Doug Fields has found that we're capable of fury when we want to defend our lives or protect family or guard resources. Rage can be triggered when we want to maintain the social order. It also serves another useful purpose. Rage acts as a signaling device.Amia Srinivasan: If you look at the long history of social protest. It's just clear that powerful emotions like anger and rage have a huge, and have had a huge role to play in galvanizing people, motivating them, bringing them together in movements towards increased justice.Shankar Vedantam: This is Amia Srinivasan, a philosopher at the University of Oxford. Amia recognizes that rage does have costs, but she wants us to remember that it can be useful to communities, causes and individuals.Amia Srinivasan: Anger can play this clarifying role for myself, so it can help me understand what's going on. It can make me come to certain moral and political realizations I didn't have before. I come to realize there's actually an injustice at work.Shankar Vedantam: The benefits of anger don't stop with the clarity it brings to us as individuals.Amia Srinivasan: Getting angry can act as a certain warning signal to other people. And in fact, there's a lot of socio-psychological evidence that suggests that getting angry can be an effective means of changing other people's behavior. Counter to the standard liberal understanding where calm group deliberation is the only way to get people to change, actually getting angry sometimes is an effective social signal to motivate other people.Shankar Vedantam: In fact, Amia argues, it's important when we talk about fury to distinguish between what might be counterproductive or even harmful to individuals in the short run and the usefulness of that fury to movements, groups and causes.Amia Srinivasan: Individual anger can often spread and become communal anger and collective anger. And collective anger has extraordinary forms.Shankar Vedantam: She asked me to think of an example in an interpersonal setting. Imagine this scenario: you're in a romantic relationship and your partner cheats on you.Amia Srinivasan: I mean, it might be that getting angry at your cheating lover just encourages that cheating lover to cheat more. And if your lover were to say to you, "Well, you shouldn't get angry at me because it just makes me cheat more." I mean, that's an infuriating response and it's infuriating because it treats your anger as just an instrument, an instrument for encouraging or discouraging his or her behavior. Whereas in fact, anger like other moral emotions is something that makes a claim about the world.Shankar Vedantam: An angry spouse does more than show her displeasure at infidelity. She's also sending a signal about the kind of behavior we think is appropriate in a society, in interpersonal relationships. Her anger sends a message to other spouses. Obviously, this is not happening at a conscious level. Rage can prompt you to take a stand about something and make you incur personal costs.Shankar Vedantam: By short-circuiting reason, it makes you ignore those costs. Your actions might be personally harmful, but it can help the group to which you belong. This is why natural selection might conserve such behavior.Doug Fields: We have these circuits because we need them, we have violence because unfortunately we need them. We don't call it snapping when the outcome is good. Then we call it heroism or quick thinking.Shankar Vedantam: One example of unthinking rage that can produce personal harms and societal benefits comes from something I've noticed on the road, including in my own behavior. Let's say I'm driving on a highway and the lane is narrowing. There's a sign that says the lane is merging left in a thousand feet. So I follow the sign and merge left, but lots of cars behind me don't merge, they zoom ahead and merge in front of me, basically jumping the line.Shankar Vedantam: I like to think of myself as a cool-headed person, but in situations like this, I sometimes move my car into the side lane and hit the brakes to prevent the side zoomers from cutting ahead. It's crazy. I'm not a police officer. I'm in a tiny sedan with a bunch of SUV's on my tail. But when I block these cars, I'm sending a signal, a costly signal. I'm saying I am willing to incur personal costs to enforce a social norm.Amia Srinivasan: So imagine lots of people were protesting in precisely the way that you protest on the road, then it would have a huge effect on people's driving behavior, a huge positive effect on people's driving behavior.Shankar Vedantam: Rage, in other words, can be productive not because it benefits us or our individual self-interest, but because it helps the groups to which we belong. Rage, in fact, might be one way that nature gets us to prioritize the interest of our groups over our narrow self-interest. By disabling logic and impairing reason, we can be prompted to do things that we would never do if we were only looking out for ourselves.Doug Fields: So somebody violates a social norm and we become angry. And again, anger has prepared you to fight. And as we know, sometimes these turn out tragically. People get into a fight on the road and pull out a gun.Shankar Vedantam: Acting in the interest of a group is not always the right or virtuous thing. Terrorist organizations have long used rage as a recruiting tool for new followers. The anger of partisan politics can cause us to think more about the wellbeing of narrow groups, like our political parties, rather than the wellbeing of larger groups like our nation.Shankar Vedantam: Fury can drive massacres, wars and genocide. All this leaves us in a bind. If we were to eliminate rage or to logically determine when to get angry, we lose the speed and potency of sudden anger. But when we allow our furies to flare unchecked, we can cause senseless damage to ourselves and others. Centuries ago, the philosopher Aristotle said, "Anybody can become angry, that's easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose and in the right way, that is not within everybody's power and is not easy."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'm Hidden Brain's Executive Editor. Special thanks this week to our former producers, Rhaina Cohen, Parth Shah and Jenny Schmidt, who played vital roles in building this episode. Audio mix by Rob Byers, Johnny Vince Evans, and Michael Raphael, at Final Final V2.Shankar Vedantam: Our unsung hero today is Demian Perry. Demian has helped me over the past year with various elements of setting up Hidden Brain Media, our new public radio production company. He has been an invaluable source of support and strategic guidance. I think of Demian as the Swiss Army knife of consultants. He doesn't just come up with solutions to every kind of problem, but is also a constant source of kindness, humor and good cheer. We plan to collaborate with him in lots of ways in the future. Thank you Demian, for your broad talents and deep friendship.Shankar Vedantam: For more Hidden Brain, you can follow us on Facebook and Twitter. Find more information about us at hiddenbrain.org. If you have a great personal story that would make for a Hidden Brain episode, like the story that Doug and Kelly Fields told us today, please find a quiet room and record a short voice memo on your phone. Email it to us at [email protected] Shankar Vedantam: If you like this episode and like our show, please tell your friends. If they don't know how to subscribe to our podcast, please show them. Next week on the show, Beyond Doom Scrolling. In a year full of truly terrible events, we consider what might be going right in the world. Thank you for listening. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

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Neuroscientist Doug Fields was on a trip to Europe when a pickpocket stole his wallet. Doug, normally mild-mannered, became enraged - and his fury turned him into a stranger to himself. This week, we revisit a favorite 2020 episode about the secret logic of irrational anger.

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Video: Exploring New Frontiers in Neuroscience

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Video: Exploring New Frontiers in Neuroscience

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Exploring New Frontiers in Neuroscience | Dr. Douglas Fields | Talks at Google

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Why we snap : understanding the rage circuit in your brain

Fields, R. Douglas, author.

New York : Dutton [2015]

On Display, 1st Floor. Call Number:  RC569.5.A53 .F54 2015

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If you need help, don't wait! Contact Counseling Services

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Counseling Services provides a combination of telehealth and on-ground services. To learn more or schedule an appointment, call (203) 392-5475, or explore this website for more information on our services, including free and confidential online screenings, resources related to mental health emergencies, and support finding referrals to local providers.

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The how of happiness : a scientific approach to getting the life you want
Lyubomirsky, Sonja.
New York : Penguin Press 2008
On Display, 1st floor. Call Number: (BF575.H27 L98 2008 )