Q&A with Stoicism Expert & Psychotherapist Donald Robertson
Drink
Speaker 2:and eat. We got one and thirty two ks is coming up.
Speaker 1:That's a lot.
Speaker 2:Big turnout coming in here tonight.
Speaker 1:It's good. There's nothing on TV tonight.
Speaker 2:Nothing on TV tonight, it's Monday. There's no Love Island on yet. You've been the next Love Island with our shirt on.
Speaker 1:Do you think so? Is that what? Yeah, maybe, might get spotted.
Speaker 2:You might get I think got some
Speaker 1:I'm spotted for Love Island.
Speaker 2:I'd love if you went on Love Island just really It's
Speaker 1:not gonna happen.
Speaker 2:Spoke to them all about philosophy, it just ruined their minds. I think they would just leave, you would actually make them all even win the show.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'd ask them the fundamental question of metaphysics. There's this thing in philosophy called the fundamental question of metaphysics. Heavy is that? So I think people should ask it on Tinder, or whatever, you know, when they're trying to think, what should you say to people on Tinder? Like what questions do you ask?
Speaker 1:Ask them the fundamental question of metaphysics? Because if they can answer that, then that's really something. And it is right. It's very, it's a short question. It's why is there something?
Speaker 2:Why there something
Speaker 1:as opposed to nothing?
Speaker 2:What do you think?
Speaker 1:I don't
Speaker 2:know, I didn't even know the answer. What do you think about this then? So obviously we are the universe, We're made of the universe. So are we not the universe becoming conscious that it exists?
Speaker 1:I know that is an interesting idea. Actually, stories talk about that. They literally have that same kind of idea that if bits of the universe are conscious, does that mean that in a sense, the universe as a whole has conscious bits, has conscious parts. It's an interesting idea.
Speaker 2:We must be, because we are made from the stars. Got carbon atoms inside us, Donald. We're made from dead.
Speaker 1:Literally, Scott, what you're saying, buddy, is that we are the children of stardust.
Speaker 2:Yes, we are. I think I think it makes us feel special.
Speaker 1:When you say it like that, you should it feels like you should break any song or something about it. It's like have you seen that musical hair? Why you're probably too young for that. It's like a 60s thing about the hippies and stuff, the age of Aquarius, you've maybe heard the song. It's very kind of like, you know, like
Speaker 2:I would have loved to be the chat around in the 1960s and 70s would have been good, whether the LSD psychedelic storm in the California, where everybody was like hippie central, the battery they came up with some wild ideas. Well, as Steve Jobs took LSD and said it was one of the most fundamental things he ever did for his thinking. I'm not saying everybody going to a class A whatever drugs it is, but these people thinking different.
Speaker 1:It's not going to make you the CEO of the most profitable company in the world. I think that's coincidence.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think so.
Speaker 1:It's not the cause. It's not a cause effect relationship.
Speaker 2:We start somewhere next week now, I'll call it orange and you see me in about fifteen years now, the CEO of One Bill. That's good. We've got a good turnout, 200 people, Donald. So this is good news. I'd like people to comment first is in the thing, so we know where we're at.
Speaker 2:How many people have heard of stoicism and how are you familiar with CBT or whatever, those types of stuff? If you're familiar, say yes. If you're not familiar at all, say no. And then we know where we're at.
Speaker 1:Don't Google CBT if you haven't heard of it because it comes up with something completely unrelated.
Speaker 2:You'd just be doing something wrong.
Speaker 1:It's a kind of sexual fetish or something.
Speaker 2:Probably Greek as well. I'm not gonna say, you can look it up afterwards, Scott. I'm acting like I don't know, but
Speaker 1:I'm you know
Speaker 2:what I mean.
Speaker 1:Have no You're an expert.
Speaker 2:I have no idea you're on, that's what I've been talking about for ages. They think they're talking about that, but we're
Speaker 1:hit on the other The chilling in for the other type of CBT conversation. But that's yeah, so it's cognitive behavioural therapy. Did you say that or did you just say CBT? Cognitive behavioural therapy.
Speaker 2:Cognitive behavioural therapy. There's a mixture, there's no nos and there's yes from book club, which is good from reading your book actually.
Speaker 1:That's good. Somebody read my book, that's good.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's some of them who write your book here, they're all thinking like Roman emperors here.
Speaker 1:Able to retire soon. Keep going, a few more Q and A few more books.
Speaker 2:Someone who has heard of Donald's work on CBT, you have a friend called Marcus, of course, Marcus. Yeah, so do you want to run through what this hour is going to look like a while or in a bit it's going to look like Donald for these?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I've got some slides. I'll throw those up in a bit, Scott, if that's okay. But we'll just do a little kind of preamble now. Feel like you've maybe still got people joining and all that. But I thought today we'd kind of do a little bit of an introduction to stoicism, and how it relates to CBT.
Speaker 1:And mainly I want to talk about worrying and how to stop worrying. And this thing that we call cognitive diffusion or distancing. So kind of interesting way of overcoming worry. So we'll start off with stoicism and then what stoicism can do to help with that particular problem. I think it's something that everyone can benefit from because Scott, who doesn't worry?
Speaker 1:You. Me, oh, that's right. Don't, apart from me though. And you, you don't worry,
Speaker 2:it's bloody I can tell.
Speaker 1:What worries have you, Scott? What worries could you possibly have?
Speaker 2:Donnell, I actually used your technique last night, the watery postponement technique at 2AM.
Speaker 1:Spoiler alert.
Speaker 2:Yeah, spoiler alert. I was just saying these tools are very handy.
Speaker 1:At 2AM, what were you worrying about
Speaker 2:at 2AM? I woke up because the wind was insanely strong last night
Speaker 1:and I went
Speaker 2:outside my room and my front door was on the latch. So I thought someone's in the flat. Ghosts. I thought I can't sleep now because someone's waiting to come in. You think-
Speaker 1:Bothered you in your sleep.
Speaker 2:Come and kill me, yeah. But they didn't.
Speaker 1:It's annoying when that happens.
Speaker 2:So I thought- I I'll worry about someone killing me tomorrow.
Speaker 1:We don't have that we have these postpone it till tomorrow. I will worry about it then. Then suddenly it doesn't seem as important anymore. Why in the cold light of day. We had that I had these horrible noises outside my window, it sounded like someone was trying to break in and then I realised it was the pigeons.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of pigeons outside the camp, they make an amazing amount of noise banging against the window and stuff. Pigeons are deadly, Come on. You get bored, Scott, that's the problem. And then they start kicking off, just causing drama for the sake of them.
Speaker 2:So I'm doing make, but we're actually on this six week challenge, we've got two martial arts lessons a week. So we're actually learning to kick ass as well as protect the mind with you.
Speaker 1:I better watch what I say then. Yeah, watch out because we're
Speaker 2:going to learn tomorrow how to kick in the nuts.
Speaker 1:I'm 5,000 miles away, don't know that, but like a few hundred miles away. Well, I'll be on my best behaviour then.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you better be. Or you'll have to be putting that worry postponement on every day.
Speaker 1:Is it Jeet Kune Do?
Speaker 2:Jeet Kune Do, yeah, Bruce Lee's philosophical way of fighting, yes. But good, it's actually his philosophy is really good. Because have you read up about his philosophy at all?
Speaker 1:My friend Graham gave me his book when I was like 16 or something, like when I was really young, like I had that book and I read it and I thought this is like philosophy. Yeah, Bruce Lee.
Speaker 2:He studied philosophy in university.
Speaker 1:It's alright, I didn't know that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he kind of combined, he liked the Eastern philosophy, but he born in San Francisco. He kind of merged the first guy to kind of, he's a Chinese guy, but Western kind of outlook as well. It's quite good. But yeah, a lot of it crosses over with stoicism in a way. So you've got all the techniques are similar.
Speaker 1:Well, I haven't read it for three decades. So maybe it's time
Speaker 2:to go back and dig out and read
Speaker 1:that again. But I remember I liked it, I thought it was good.
Speaker 2:Well, isn't it true that all philosophy come from the East, right? Obviously, the Eastern Frontier Greece and stuff, isn't it? Didn't they all kind of come over?
Speaker 1:Yeah, from, I mean, actually, like, you know, most of what we call Greek philosophy, a lot of it came from modern day Turkey. So the Middle East, like stoic philosophy, a lot of it comes from the Middle East, maybe even as far away as Iraq. The guy that founded that it came from Cyprus, which is like, in between really. I know? Yeah, like, so yeah, like it's exciting to learn about ancient philosophy.
Speaker 1:We say that was in Athens? I'm in Athens. So we're, I'm surrounded by philosophy.
Speaker 2:Have you come across any moments whilst in Athens? Like, shit, I didn't notice I was then read something or no?
Speaker 1:About philosophy? Probably. Actually, like about all the time, Scott, like, I mean, I'm in my life, it just went constant moment. Like, so I've got that kind of a world of look sometimes. But there's a couple of things all the time, like I figured out, I'll tell you
Speaker 2:a cool thing I figured out actually, this
Speaker 1:is good, because I'll come back to this at the end of the talk. So there's this thing in stoicism called the view from above, where you try and picture things from really high above. And there's a famous quote in Marcus Aurelius, where he said the mind free from passions, right, the mind having overcome unhealthy passions is like an impenetrable citadel. And I'd read that a lot. And I wondered one day, what was the Greek word then that he uses for citadel?
Speaker 1:And I looked up, and it's Acropolis.
Speaker 2:And I thought,
Speaker 1:boom, he literally says, it's like the Acropolis, which is just down
Speaker 2:the road from where I'm just now. It looks over the city, right?
Speaker 1:Looks over and actually the Agora is at the bottom, it looks over the Agora and he says in another passage, imagine you're looking down on Agoras and where people are buying and selling things, get married and divorced, and arguing in law courts and stuff that all human life is there down in the Agora. It's also where Socrates was executed, right down there. So all the drama happens down there, Scott. And then what's up on the Acropolis is the temple to Athena. Like it's one of my favourite, she's essentially like the ancient equivalent of Wonder Woman.
Speaker 1:So she's the goddess of wisdom. And so that's a kind of sacred space you got there. And it's very spiritual, very first off course dedicated to goddess of wisdom, every ancient Greek would have been up there for a little bit of walk. On a Sunday afternoon, they'd have a look down and see Socrates being executed down there and all the other drama unfolding and stuff. And they'd feel themselves spiritually elevated above all the worldly affairs that we could see unfolding below them, give them a perspective, a sense of equanimity.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, that the exact same place? Yeah. So where you stand, you've everybody else would have stood?
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's weird actually. I mean, could say that anywhere in the world but obviously in Athens sometimes if you're interested in history, you might just stop and think maybe Socrates stood in this very spot once. Or there's this theatre, the remains of an ancient theatre where Socrates allegedly went and you think maybe Socrates's bum was on the seat. On this very seat, right that I'm sitting on.
Speaker 2:He was about walking about causing havoc. Was questioning,
Speaker 1:he asked too many questions and he rocked the boat. And they didn't like of them, people loved it. Other people got a wee bit upset, wee bit annoyed, wee bit put out because he was asking too many questions about powerful people. And then they made them drink hemlock.
Speaker 2:That's the thing, well, he what was a typical Socrates question?
Speaker 1:Would say what he would say things like what is justice? What is friendship? The way his conversation about friendship is an interesting answer. Asked all these questions. What is friendship?
Speaker 1:He says, do opposites attract? Or does like attract like? Or is friendship like love and friendship? Is it like you're seeking another friend who's like a remedy for a weakness, something that needs healing within you? So what makes a good friend is somebody who heals your own weakness or vulnerability.
Speaker 1:And then, but Socrates says, there's a problem with that, because then if it is like a medicine or a therapy and someone is your friend because they help you, then once you're better, you no longer have a motive to remain friends with them. So he says, maybe that can't be right. So he asks all these kinds of tricky questions about familiar concepts. He says,
Speaker 2:On that point, I raised that point to the friend earlier, he said, many friendship groups have broken down since COVID because they only relied on each other for going on nights out together?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Gone,
Speaker 2:is there a friendship anymore?
Speaker 1:It's changed, My times are changing. I wonder like when the lockdowns are all over, if everybody's going to go back out and spend so much, I think people aren't going to spend as much money in restaurants and stuff. People got in the habit. Maybe it won't be long before they get back into the habit though. Yeah, it's going
Speaker 2:to be a slow go back, think. There might be the first weekend back and everyone be like, yeah.
Speaker 1:I wonder if people are looking in their bank accounts, they can save them a lot of money
Speaker 2:by not eating out as much. You'd be surprised, mind people have been spending as well. Just whatever, maybe home improvements, who knows? Do you know a view of the philosopher Krishna Mukti? Yeah.
Speaker 2:I read his book the other day, he came up with an interesting thing, were talking about friendship and is it for your benefit of them? He says, when people die, people cry not for the person who's died but for their own selfish loss. I was like, shit, I know it's quite deep, it's like, that kind of is true in a way But you talk about
Speaker 1:that as well. Yeah. So they talk about that. They say, well, how does mourning or weeping benefit the person that's gone? Like they ask that and these consolation letters, like they get people to really reflect on what mortality and what bereavement are really about.
Speaker 1:And the ancient world that was a common thing. Like nowadays, we send someone a little card, like but in ancient Rome, they send you a big long letter that was about a kind of a lecture almost on like how you should snap out of it. That was a common thing to do. Seneca did that all the time. He was like a pro at it.
Speaker 1:He sends people long winded letters about how they should get over it.
Speaker 2:Why do you think people now are scared to address the fact that life isn't forever? Do you think that a lot of problems would be solved if people actually realised it and lived or not?
Speaker 1:Well, nobody likes it. So we try and avoid it. And then we live in quite a sheltered existence, Where fewer of us are directly caring for elderly people or sick people in our homes. And we don't slaughter animals for our own food. So death in general is kind of because it makes us uncomfortable, we find found out ways as a society to screen it off.
Speaker 1:So that in the ancient world, people slaughtered their own food, like, you know, they saw people dying at home and things that they cared for the elderly and the sick. And so they were far more exposed to death. And they thought that they were forced to think about it. But I think the pandemic has made a lot, not everyone, but a lot of people have confronted their own mortality and their issues about death because of the pandemic. And, you know, for some people that's overwhelming, and it could be distressing.
Speaker 1:For other people, it's very liberating. You know, it makes you think, you know, you could get hit by a bus tomorrow. And, you know, that scary thought, the next thought that people often have is all the stuff that you spent your life doing, did you have your priorities right? Maybe you were running about after all the wrong things, Yeah, like cigarettes, whiskey and wild women and you know, like, whatever it was that you squandered your life on. But when you have a brush with death, you kind of think, geez, you know, maybe I should have been doing something more constructive with my time.
Speaker 1:And that could be good, could be healthy, if you kind of get through it. And it's a wake up call.
Speaker 2:Yeah, for sure. I think it's not something that people really say much about, but I definitely, when I've raised it with people, it's kind of like, why are you speaking over that? And I'm like, no, I find it useful. I find it good to tell myself to make sure I make the most, but it is hard. Some people just want to forget about it.
Speaker 2:So it's a tough one to talk about, it?
Speaker 1:About What
Speaker 2:do think is the bigger So if we talk about people's main concerns, is it, do you think worry or would you consider worry, anxiety in the same kind of, like does sorting of one knock on effect the other
Speaker 1:or? Worry and anxiety. Now, I'll tell you something. Let's do a deep dive Scott for a minute, into something, some therapy stuff, right? I think one of the biggest hindrances in personal development, and in life in general, is that we have a very simplistic way of understanding our emotions.
Speaker 1:Right? And sometimes psychologists call it the lump theory of emotions, right? So we talk about anxiety or depression as if it's just a kind of homogenous thing, there's just a thing called depression or anxiety. And first of all, that's wrong in two ways that number one, there's lots of different types of anxiety. And so as a therapist, that's more obvious, you have to recognise that because there's things like animal phobias, there's PTSD, there's social anxiety, there's obsessive compulsive anxiety, there's generalised anxiety, and they work differently and affect people differently and respond to different types of treatment.
Speaker 1:Whereas people normally just kind of mash them all together. And also even within your anxiety, your anxiety is composed of thoughts and actions and feelings that are all going to go together to make up the big ball what we call anxiety. But if we don't distinguish between different types of anxiety, and if we don't distinguish between different aspects of anxiety, then we don't have as much control over anxiety or as much insight into it. We just go to that thing over the why rather than go no, there's different bits to it. And I'll talk about that in a minute, because there's one distinction in particular between these bits of anxiety and these bits of anxiety, you know, very baby steps, simple, simple distinction.
Speaker 1:That's absolutely essential, in my view, in my experience, in terms of actually doing something about anxiety and coping better with it. So I think we live in a culture where actually our vocabulary for talking about our feelings is primitive. That's a kind of hindrance to us, a handicap to us.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that makes sense. Does it because emotion Yeah, like once you start labelling something, box it in, didn't you? I think I've viewed of Robert Sapolsky, by the way, a bit of him? No, thanks. He's an expert human biology stress, he talks about depression, he talks about how we put things into categories all the time as humans and the kind of like in between the categories, there's nothing, it's either this or that.
Speaker 2:It's an interesting thing that talks about the mind in our way that we haven't got those in between, you've got colours, for example, red and blue And in between, what is that color? I don't know. What's it called?
Speaker 1:Between red and what?
Speaker 2:Well, red and blue. He says, We got colors. And he says, We need to be more wider view of stuff and not try and box anything into a word.
Speaker 1:I get that but I also think that it's important sometimes categories and labels can be also be useful as long as we put things in the right category, not in the wrong category, Yeah, it could be potentially you like you might say a lot of people say, in mental health, we attach diagnoses to people, and that's labelling. So boxing people in, that's a bad thing. Actually, in my experience, a lot of people with mental health problems feel very liberated when they get a diagnosis, because they go, Ah, I've got PTSD, now I understand and I can find a treatment for it and stuff like that. So, you know, and there's pros and cons to labelling, like if it's used in the right way, like for many people, it can actually be beneficial. And, you know, in depression, like people being able to label their problem as depression, sometimes gives them a way of getting some distance from it.
Speaker 1:So if they're feeling very self critical, they can say to themselves, that's just my depression talking. And being able to say that allows themselves to kind of snap out of it a bit, gives them some cognitive distance. And so it can be helpful sometimes to use labels in the right way.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but how so what's your experience on people being able to self label accurately? Is that possible?
Speaker 1:In terms of diagnosis or other stuff? Is possible, but it's kind of tricky, like sometimes, and sometimes professionals disagree about the right diagnosis. And sometimes they kind of overlap a bit anyway. So people, yeah, people often misinterpret, it's easier now that people have access to the internet. There's misinformation on the internet, but also they can potentially look up some reliable sources like the NHS.
Speaker 1:There's loads of really good information about mental health on the NHS website, right. And so people can sometimes get quite good information and self diagnose and then maybe they can, that helps them find a therapist or discuss it with a doctor or a psychiatrist or whatever, if they need to. Yeah, there's mislabeling as well.
Speaker 2:It's a tricky one, isn't it? Because obviously label people are saying no, that they've been able to sometimes diagnosis can have to accept reality, which is good, which is very important. I had a me too self diagnosed as bipolar and then he became a self fulfilling prophecy and he said,
Speaker 1:Oh man.
Speaker 2:Manic episode. It's like when he went to get checks, was just kind of it wasn't then well, you might still be, you might have diagnosed it wrong by kind of lived too long.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that also happens a bit more with certain personality types. And people actually have kind of obsessive compulsive personality traits, like might become kind of obsessed with a particular labour or a diagnosis, maybe for a physical health problem. So there's people that can go well, like sounds like maybe I've got this and it's not like a big deal, but that might be useful to know. And there's other people that become fixated on the label rigidly, and then it can backfire, it can become a self fulfilling prophecy. So I think it depends how you take it.
Speaker 1:You know, it's like Epictetus said, everything has two handles, good handle and a bad handle. So diagnosis is two handles, you know, like either you treat it rigidly, you get kind of tunnel vision, it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy, or you interpret it more flexibly, like in a more pragmatic way and then it can be useful. I told my wee girl that actually that I tried to teach her about stoic philosophy, she's only nine. I told her, Epictetus says everything has two handles. And she said, Daddy, that's not true.
Speaker 1:She actually took her back literally. But one day, I think she'll remember that. And she thought that was a good metaphor, Daddy.
Speaker 2:So what do you say to, so obviously, there's a stigma to mental health, mental health, obviously, that needs to go over time. And I'm sure it will hopefully happen. What were the stoic saying about mental health? Were they openly more discussive about these things?
Speaker 1:They talk about it. They talked about psychotherapy. People think Freud invented psychotherapy, but that's not true. Freud actually trained in psychotherapy, he went to two different schools in France under Charcot and Bernheim. Even psychotherapy, modern psychotherapy had been around for like fifty years before Freud.
Speaker 1:But in the nature world, had psychotherapy, they call it a therapy up. They had whole books about it. And so they were kind of, in some respects, more
Speaker 2:pragmatic about
Speaker 1:it than we are. They didn't think it was all repressed castration anxiety or whatever Freud thought it was. Like they just thought it was faulty thinking and bad habits. So they had this more kind of like, like cognitive therapist who did, that was pretty down air, matter of fact, of understanding it. Definitely in stoicism, this idea is quite central really.
Speaker 2:That's good. It's no wonder that they did have so many breakthroughs in kind of all this stuff back end because they were openly discussing it no matter, Epictetus had all types of people coming into his classroom, didn't he? So he would have had a huge amount of data from that. Yeah. Yeah, I didn't see they would say, from Echbeck Titus's books, it looks as if he would take no shit.
Speaker 2:He was
Speaker 1:No, he definitely has a unique voice as people say, like he comes across as very distinct character, savage, like he's calling them slaves for a start, which is ironic, because he was a slave, right? Yeah. But he calls all the students slaves, but most of them are aristocrats. So he's this crippled ex slave. And all these students are wealthy Roman nobles, most of them are and stuff.
Speaker 2:And he keeps going slaves, why? Because he means that metaphorically, thinks you guys are
Speaker 1:all enslaved to your passions. And somebody, you know, even if they're poor, or if they are a slave in Roman society, might be more free than you guys are. Marcus Aurelius says that, but the Emperor Nero, he says he was the biggest slave of all, because he was enslaved by his egotism and his greed and stuff like that. Whereas someone like Epictetus was free by comparison.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's good. I like it. Is it possible to control our thoughts? I know we can't really control our thoughts and emotions, but how in control can we get? Is it like possible to turn them off as they just come in?
Speaker 2:Is that what we have to do?
Speaker 1:No, actually, well, one of the things I'm going to talk about is to distinguish between voluntary and involuntary types of thought. So there are types of thinking that we can control. And then there's other types that are automatic, we can't really control them, we can have a bit of indirect control over them over time. But arguably, in modern therapy, we tend to say we don't really need to control your automatic thoughts anyway. Funnily enough, they're not necessarily that harmful.
Speaker 1:The problem is the way that you respond to them more than the actual thoughts themselves. So that's the key really, I Do
Speaker 2:you create the conflict in the mind if you decide to meet these thoughts all the time? Is that like what's happening? And the importance that you place on them, it becomes a
Speaker 1:self fulfilling prophecy, like the amount of attention that you give them, the extent to which you dwell on them, that's far more important than the actual thoughts themselves. It came as a revelation to psychotic, we in the 60s and 70s psychologists taught clients in therapy to keep a record of their automatic negative thoughts. And then they talk about it in the therapy session. And it came as a surprise to them. They thought all these people who are depressed and anxious, they have a lot of automatic negative thoughts that pop into their mind.
Speaker 1:Nobody asked how many automatic negative thoughts do non anxious, non depressed people have? They just kind of assumed that maybe they didn't have that many. And then they did surveys of college students, and they found out that they had loads, like hundreds and hundreds of automatic negative thoughts every day. And they thought, hang on, this doesn't really make sense. Because we kind of thought maybe the automatic negative thoughts, nobody likes me, everybody hates me, whatever that's popping out in people's minds.
Speaker 1:That's what was causing their problems. But it turns out everybody has those. So the difference must be not in the number of the thoughts or the content of them necessarily, but it's more in the way that we respond to them, how we deal with them and the importance that we attribute to them.
Speaker 2:What about recurring negative thoughts, the same old over and over?
Speaker 1:They're not necessarily harmful as long as we respond to them in the right way. They don't have to, a lot of people have recurring negative thoughts, but they gain distance from them, detachment, they don't necessarily have to be a big problem. And also the more detached you are in a roundabout way often the thoughts become less recurring in the future. Anyway, the thing if you really want to give yourself a problem, the thing to do would be to try really hard not to think about something, right? Because obviously that's impossible, right?
Speaker 1:So if try really hard not to think of a panda, can maybe do it if you put a lot of effort in by concentrating on something else, but you can't do it permanently. And the more you try not to think of a panda, more recurring the thought is going to become. There's going be what psychologists sometimes call a rebound effect. So you'll end up thinking more and more about pandas as a result. And also takes a lot of effort to try really hard not to think about PANDAS.
Speaker 1:So if you have a recurring negative thought and your way of dealing with it is to try and block it from your mind, it's not going to work buddy, it's the wrong strategy, it's going to have the opposite of the desired effect. And that's a very common thing that people do, though. Often that's what people with mental health problems are driving themselves kind of crazy trying to do.
Speaker 2:Makes sense. What do you think of this kind of reminds me, so Doctor. Mark Maltz who wrote It's kind of interesting. He says that human beings are goal machines because we were hunter gatherers back in the day. And I'm not sure if this is right, that we're able to, if we do actually specify the goal, we can laser in on it.
Speaker 2:If we're very just, we like when, but if we always focus on the negatives, he says, it's the same thing. You'll keep going and basically achieving those negatives because we are basically hunter gatherers, hunting and gathering.
Speaker 1:So like a lot of self help literature, it's not dated that well because there's modern psychologists that kind of say the opposite. And he's half like a of people, he's half right. Being half right sometimes is a problem. That's like, you know, a little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing. And so he's kind of right that if you have clear goals, clearly of course it makes them easier to achieve.
Speaker 1:That's what his thing is, you have a clear self image and a clear idea of who you want to be makes it more achievable. And that could be healthy, but there's a downside to goal focused thinking. And that is that it tends to keep your mind in a state of suspense. Why? Because you become focused on the, you know, what's the expression I'm looking for, you become dissatisfied with your current condition if you become too attached to future goals.
Speaker 1:And so that we now know that that can actually be quite unhealthy. So people with generalised anxiety, and people with depression are often quite goal focused. And sometimes they set unrealistic goals. So depressed people like one of the many very simple things that depressed people do, and just knowing this alone can be helpful, right? Like over the years, some of the things I've found that have helped me the most personally are just really simple little moments or insights.
Speaker 1:So one of them is I used to keep a record every day of what I spent my time doing every half hour segment within the day. And I'd look at what my goals were for the day and what I actually spent my time doing. One of the first things I noticed is that pretty much every day the goals I was setting were unrealistic. I always kind of was aiming to get more done each day than I ever achieved, than it was realistic. It's always kind of ended they felt quite frustrated.
Speaker 1:And people with depression do that, they set unrealistic unachievable goals for themselves often and then beat themselves up because they don't achieve them. And you maybe find that in fitness as well. You get this with all or nothing thinking. So some clients that went to therapy, and maybe depressed clients in many cases, you know, they kind of want to be cured after the first session is a common thing. And so then they're not cured after the first session, they get disappointed and throw the towel in on the whole process.
Speaker 1:And you think if only you're a little bit more patient, and took it in steps and stages, then you would have achieved progress and achieved a goal. And it might be like that with people that go at the gym and if they don't achieve their goals within a week, then they quit, perhaps. The
Speaker 2:valley of despair. Yeah, go down there and go back to step one. You need patience. It's interesting. What do you think about thoughts versus beliefs?
Speaker 2:And do our beliefs reinforce our thoughts? Or is it that our beliefs make us react to these negative thoughts?
Speaker 1:I think it's a circular relationship between our beliefs and our thoughts. I think the thoughts that we have potentially reinforce our underlying beliefs and the underlying beliefs that we have give rise to individual thoughts that pop into our mind. And then also, Metacognitive. I'm just going to drop that one, it's got a mic drop. Metacognitive.
Speaker 1:So cognitive means to do with thinking and metacognitive means thinking about thinking basically. So you can have beliefs about beliefs right, you have beliefs about a lot of things Scott, you've got beliefs about Scotland, you've got beliefs about kebabs as we know, you've got beliefs about exercise, like your favourite football team, but you also have beliefs about the very nature of belief itself. So we're talking about it right now. You've got beliefs about how much control you have over your thoughts. You've got beliefs about whether thoughts are harmful or not and those are metacognitive beliefs.
Speaker 1:So actually in therapy we spend a lot of time talking about beliefs about beliefs, metacognitive beliefs and so you can have beliefs about the nature of thought. So if I've got obsessive compulsive disorder and have thoughts that pop into my mind like know someone with OCD might have thoughts wouldn't it be terrible if I suddenly shouted out a swear word in the middle of the street? They might think right. And then they might think if I keep having that thought, maybe eventually I'll do it. And I could get myself into trouble.
Speaker 1:So now they think these automatic thoughts about yelling crazy stuff out in the street. Those thoughts could be dangerous. Maybe those thoughts could influence my behaviour. Circular because if you believe the thoughts are dangerous, you believe they could influence your behaviour, then potentially you make the thoughts more problematic, more troubling. Whereas if you have a different attitude, you think so it's just a thought doesn't mean anything.
Speaker 1:I could just ignore it. Like probably most people do. Like you might walk down the street and think what if I shout out bollocks at a policeman? And you might think that's not going to make me do it. I'm not going to do it just because thought popped into my mind, right?
Speaker 1:But someone with OCD panic, maybe think maybe I'm going to do it, maybe I'm going to do it. I have to suppress that thought and kind of try and control it somehow. And the difference is metacognition. Like there's one guy that thinks intrusive thoughts about crazy behaviour are dangerous. And there's another guy that thinks they're trivial, they can't harm me.
Speaker 1:And it's the metacognition that's really the underlying problem in many cases. So we have a whole type of therapy that was developed in sunny England, in Manchester, I believe, by a psychologist called Wells, Professor Wells. Forgot the guy's first name was David Wells, forgotten I'll come back to me in a second. Adrian Wells, Adrian Wells. And it's called metacognitive therapy.
Speaker 1:And it's a state of the art. We're not mucking about here, we're doing state of the art. CBT here, this is state of the art in CBT now, over the past like fifteen-twenty years. That's relatively modern though. So looking at those underlying beliefs about the nature of thought and belief itself is, is seems to be where it's at in many regards.
Speaker 2:What do you think about thoughts come from memory? If you had no memory, you'd have no thoughts.
Speaker 1:That's kind of true, I guess, but everybody has memories pretty much.
Speaker 2:Doesn't it then mean for you to have different thoughts, maybe you need to have different positive memories? Are we saying that? Can we say that?
Speaker 1:We change our memories. You can change, memories change. Actually, one of the things that we know is when if people keep reviewing their memories, they tend to kind of, how would you put it, like the more you think about events in the past, this is a big problem, actually, a kind of notorious problem in psychology and in policing. It's a big problem. So it's a problem of repeated review.
Speaker 1:So if you go over events in the past over and over and over again, you'll tend to kind of rewrite it a little bit each time, as your memories get distorted through frequent recall. That's a big problem for police interviewing, if they're interviewing people about events that have happened a long time ago. So you have to interview people to gather information. But the more you interview them, the more you tend to distort the information you're gathering. So it's kind of tricky.
Speaker 1:It's a big problem in psychotherapy, because psychotherapists used to believe that if they kind of hypnotised people and regressed them, or if they just asked them a lot of questions about stuff that happened in the past, they could recover memories about past events and actually what the research generally shows is that that's very unreliable and often by doing that you're more likely to distort memory or even for people to recall things that never actually happened. So you can really mess up people's memories in psychotherapy if you're not careful. And that's one of the reasons that often we take a simpler approach to memory now or we tend to just focus on how people are coping in the present moment. Yeah,
Speaker 2:this is a good question, Natalie. What about thoughts based on events that never happened? So thoughts about a thought that never came
Speaker 1:to be
Speaker 2:become in the memory?
Speaker 1:Are not like the usual run of the mill questions we're getting tonight, Scott. We've got all the philosophers in the audience, thoughts about things that didn't actually happen. Is that the question?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a hard thought. Because can you form a memory of something that didn't happen, you thought
Speaker 1:Yeah, you can. There's a famous, like actually, there's a bunch of weird, there are many weird research studies that psychologists have done weird experiments, right? You wouldn't believe some of the stuff that psychologists do. But there's one where they got people and they interviewed them about whether they met certain characters at Disneyland. And one of the ones they asked them about was, I can't remember who it was exactly, but it was like Scooby Doo or something, right?
Speaker 1:And they kind of led them to believe that they'd seen Scooby Doo at Disneyland and asked some questions about it. Did you ever see Scooby Doo when you were at Disneyland? And what was that like? And they were like, I'm not really sure. And I think about it, yeah, maybe I did, maybe I did.
Speaker 1:But Scooby Doo wouldn't be allowed anywhere near Disneyland, Scott, as you know, because that wasn't that was a Hanna Barbera, or whatever they call it, like it wasn't a Disney character, right? He would be marched off of the premises in summery fashion, like if he ever set foot within the sacred precincts of Disneyland. But people, a large percentage of people came out of the experiment thinking, I think I did see Scooby at Disneyland. Like even though we know that that's impossible. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Unless they were taking those drugs that you mentioned earlier. Maybe those drugs will do that to you.
Speaker 2:They wouldn't become Scooby Doo in that regard, probably.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So people, what psychologists know is that you can get people to believe things and remember things that never happened for sure. And that again, is a problem in psychotherapy.
Speaker 2:There is a problem, mind isn't it? That is
Speaker 1:a big problem. Especially with hypnosis, right? So if you're doing things that make memories more vivid, you can create false memory, we call it false memory syndrome. It's like a well known problem. There was a bit lot of scandals about it in the 1980s because therapists used to do this a lot more and then people started suing them.
Speaker 1:Why? Because they were like, I now remember stuff that never actually happened. So yeah, like Scooby Doo.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, there's a good question here because I know you've written an article on this, how to be a stoic on social media. So there's a question on how would Donald, how do you view how to deal with the anxieties fuelled by social media?
Speaker 1:Well, first of all, I would say the thing not to do is don't avoid social because people are like, well, off the social media and for sure, you know, moderate the amount of time that you spend on it. But if you avoid going on social media because it upsets you or whatever, the problem with avoidance as a strategy is that you will never actually develop the coping skills that would allow you to deal with the thing that's upsetting you. And so on the one hand, don't overwhelm yourself by putting yourself in a situation that's causing you stress or doing something that you don't want and making you angry or whatever. But if you just avoid it, you're missing an opportunity to strengthen your character. And so the thing to do, I think fundamentally the thing to do is to see it as a kind of training opportunity, almost like you're picking a sparring partner.
Speaker 1:And that could be people trolling you or it could be, mean, to be honest, the news media are pretty much like now are pretty much trolling you. They're just trying to freak you out a lot of the time with alarmist news and propaganda left and right all across the board. The news outlets and the social media, you get distorted fake news and you get alarmist stuff. I did a search the other day actually in CNN and Fox of how many headlines there were, where it was Don Lemon is shocked or Tucker Carlson disgusted or whatever. They're all reacting to stuff.
Speaker 1:Love saying that something's shocking. So they're encouraging alarmist thinking rather than what we actually do about this thing, like problem solving thinking. And so the trick is really, it's like view it as an opportunity for developing your skills. You have to go into it with the right attitude with the goal of becoming better at coping with it. I think that's a fundamental thing.
Speaker 1:The motivation has to be there to treat it as an opportunity to develop your own coping abilities. And that's the starting point. And then you've got to think about how will you develop those coping abilities? Like what's a better way of dealing with these people and media outlets and stuff that are provoking you. And some of the techniques that we'll talk about, cognitive diffusion and things like that can help the view from above can help, I think.
Speaker 2:So would you say something like go on social media at certain time periods and if you go on it, or would you say every 15 you must practise coming off or would you?
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's one way of doing it. And the other thing I like to do is people are going to think this is weird. There's many things I do that people think are a little bit weird, but I time a lot. So I tell myself to my best friend is my stopwatch. Right?
Speaker 1:I'll tell
Speaker 2:you lot of your writing.
Speaker 1:Do a lot of timing things like it's my kind of like behavioural psychology coming out. Like so I think if you're kind of like watching how long you're spending on social media, and kind of like just with one eye on the number of seconds or minutes that are passing, that kind of stops you from getting as immersed in it. You start doing this for like ten minutes now, that's actually a really long time. Whereas if you're not watching the time, you could spend hours getting engrossed in irrelevant crazy stuff. People lose one of the most interesting and understudied phenomena, I think in psychology is the human ability to lose track of time.
Speaker 1:Right? Everybody knows it, everybody does it, Scott. Like sometimes time slows down, like you're in the dentist's or whatever. It seems like the minutes are dragging, or you're bored. Other times it flies past.
Speaker 1:But the ability to lose track of time I think is something that we could study more. And an example would be worrying. When people are worrying for sure that's a perfect example of a brain state when people tend to lose track of time. Minutes turn into hours when people are engrossed in worry or morbid rumination. But noticing how much time is passing, here's just a little tip, it doesn't work for everybody but for a lot of people simply timing it like noticing how much time has passed kind of snaps you out of it.
Speaker 1:That alone, like you can have spent three and a half minutes worrying now. That alone could make you disengage from your worry. Whereas if you don't notice it, it could go on for hours.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you're right. When you say that about timing, probably heard of the Pomodoro technique where you do twenty five minutes timers. When I do that for writing and stuff, it goes by quite slow because I'm like, I got to type for twenty five minutes. Twenty five minutes on social media is literally ten seconds. Is crazy.
Speaker 2:Don't you think though, isn't going on social media playing with fire because it's so addictive, especially TikTok, for example, that's built to keep people-
Speaker 1:It is playing with fire, but we have to play with fire, Scott.
Speaker 2:I like
Speaker 1:life is warfare, Scott. And we're surrounded by these things. So you won't get anywhere by avoiding temptation and avoiding provocation and avoiding threats. But you have to know your limits, right? It's like the sparring analogy.
Speaker 1:Like, so if you never go in the ring and spar, you're never really going to develop your fighting skills, because you guys are doing martial arts and stuff, right? You know, you're not going to get that good at martial arts, like if you never actually spar anybody like, you know, that's when you're going to test your ability and improve it. But if you pick people that are twice your size and much faster faster and better than you, you're just going to get your bum kicked every time. You need to kind of, and how do you figure out what your limits are? Well, on your previous experience, like sort of trial and error, and everyone's different.
Speaker 1:So what's overwhelming for me might be easy peasy for you. But you learn that by studying yourself through trial and error and looking back and reviewing your past experience. That's what the Stoics say. And so you need to, because they say this, obviously the Stoics say you should expose yourself to challenging situations and rather than running away and hiding from them, you shouldn't bite off more than you can chew. So with social media, like a limited amount of controlled exposure.
Speaker 1:So if you're playing with fire and you find you go on it and you're just getting sucked in and getting addicted to it, then maybe you're doing it too much. And in that case, you should limit it. But learn to limit it in such a way that you can do it more mindfully, and with greater self control.
Speaker 2:I like it. Moderation is where I'm here.
Speaker 1:Moderation and everything. As you say in Greece, nothing in excess I remember the Greek first thing, that means nothing too much.
Speaker 2:It's true, easy but so hard at the same time. It's one of those things that we know is There's a good question here for you. What do you think about social comparison theories? Since existence, humans have tried to establish their own position in hierarchies. People often get stuck in thinking about this when comparing themselves to others on social media and lose time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, 100%. I mean, don't know so much about psychological research in general and social psychology, but I know insofar as that impinges on my little area of cognitive therapy, people with generalised anxiety disorder, and I think also clinical depression, if I remember rightly, are known to engage more in what we call upward comparisons. So to compare themselves to people who are more successful, better off than them or wealthier. And it's arbitrary, right? Because you could be comparing yourself to Steve Jobs or whoever, you might think, I'm lucky, at least I'm still alive.
Speaker 1:But as someone like Jeff Bezos saying, why you might say, I'm never gonna have as much money as him. Elon Musk's got loads of money. And that's an upward comparison. But you could be making downward comparisons and think, geez, there's a lot of people in the world that can't even read their write. And they don't have access to medicine, you know, and they're much worse off than me.
Speaker 1:Like, people have to live in Scotland.
Speaker 2:Imagine what that would be
Speaker 1:like, rains all the time. The West Coast Of Scotland where I grew up. Actually, it's been a long time since I've been there. I'm looking forward to go back.
Speaker 2:There's statues there for you and stuff now, I heard. There's a big statue there for you. That's me. Biggie.
Speaker 1:I should go back then shouldn't I?
Speaker 2:You can't compare your statue to other statues though because then you're gonna be, it's about this big, it's just all.
Speaker 1:Okay, inferiority complex then. You can make yourself like those things that we do habitually generally across the board, and then and the Stoics were aware of this, then you can do the opposite. But it often takes just a little, maybe just a modicum more effort, right? So we're always making up with comparisons. But if we can learn to make a little bit of effort, if we notice that's a problem, it may only take a little bit of effort to pause and go, what if I make a downward comparison?
Speaker 1:I can do that. That's easy, easy peasy if I remember to do it. So if you can set up cues and remind yourself to do it and practise doing it, becomes a bit of a habit. And it really is powerful, it balances things out. It reminds me of another thing that the Stoics say, Marcus Aurelius said, if you imagine absent things as if they were present, right, so you don't have a Ferrari but you imagine what it would be like if you did have a Ferrari, it makes you desire things and he says that kind of causes craving and suffering because you think I don't have this thing but imagine what it'd be like if I did have it.
Speaker 1:And Marcus says, you know, we all do that instinctively, we're always imagining things that we don't have and how it would be better if we had them and stuff. But he says what if you did the opposite, which requires just a little bit more effort and you imagine the absence of things that are present in order to experience gratitude. So you imagine what it'd be like if you didn't have electricity, or a fridge, or central heating or a roof over your head. It seems kind of trite in a way, I do that. One of things I've most personally, I find most helpful in life is literally just imagining what it'd be like if they didn't have a house and a roof and stuff like that.
Speaker 2:What about if you didn't have that shirt?
Speaker 1:If I didn't have that shirt and I had to just wear a grey kennel.
Speaker 2:I think that'll be it.
Speaker 1:That would be my whole personality gone in a flash. I depend on the shirt. You depend
Speaker 2:on it. I like thaw dogs, nobody actually does that. So people say, this is a problem with the grateful stuff, I'm grateful for, I'm grateful for, but they don't actually think about if they did lose what they say and they're grateful for, they're just saying, I'm grateful for clothes and then they go, what if you wouldn't know clothes you woke up? What would it be like if you didn't have them? I used to
Speaker 1:think about this all the time when I lived in Canada, in the winter and we had feet of snow outside and I think geez man, it was only like one hundred years ago when people had to live in a lot of wooden shed with a candle and nothing to read except the Bible. You know, and I went along, like with the snow outside, I can't imagine what that would be like. Maybe now we have the internet, and Netflix and stuff like that. You know, it's not really, you're so used to see people say, well, winter is quite long. It's quite severe in Canada.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you've got Netflix. So you know, you just stay indoors, you've got the internet, you've got the world's libraries at your disposal. It's not really a big deal, actually, but it would have been in the past. Even fifty years ago, it would have
Speaker 2:been a lot harder to cope with that.
Speaker 1:So I think about that and think, geez, we're so lucky.
Speaker 2:We are very lucky. I keep saying this to people, speak to real life stuff, I do go extreme and I'm like, I could be in a concentration camp trapped and I could literally have no control, but I'm trapped in flat and I got the internet and I'm speaking to the Scottish Socrates, you know I mean? Yes.
Speaker 1:I imagine if you didn't have me, Scott, you'd be having this conversation on your own. That, talking to yourself.
Speaker 2:I'd be making stuff up, proper making theories and stuff, think I'll coming up with a load of books, I reckon after this. Think you'd
Speaker 1:be rich.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'll be like the next Freud, Fleer, the next Freud, let me see what happens.
Speaker 1:So I had some slides about worrying stuff. Do you want me to too much? Do you want me to go through that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, you think it's going to be useful?
Speaker 1:I think so. Like, will I throw them up?
Speaker 2:Whilst you're throwing them up, want to answer, do stoics believe in karma?
Speaker 1:No, they don't.
Speaker 2:They don't.
Speaker 1:They believe a lot of things, but they don't really believe in karma, actually. Interesting. Well, they don't mention it anyway.
Speaker 2:Let me put you on. Are you on full screen now? Hold on. What am I doing?
Speaker 1:One day I'll tell you a lot of the other crazy kind of metaphysical beliefs that the Stoics had. Some of them are really interesting, but not that one. Have you got that first slide, Scott?
Speaker 2:I can see the bird's eye view. Yeah. So everybody, you paying attention to the slides?
Speaker 1:Not anymore.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I can see the main screen now live like Louise getting ready to stoicism and stop worrying. Like it.
Speaker 1:Stop worrying, get ready to say some, stop worrying. So I'll do a little intro and talk about what is stoicism and then we'll talk about stoicism and worrying. So Batman, obviously. So that's not what we mean by stoicism. Like the first thing to say about stoicism is what it isn't.
Speaker 1:So a lot of people all over the internet, there's a lot of misinformation about stoicism. And that's because we use the word stoicism with a lowercase s to refer to this idea of suppressing or concealing emotions, like being unemotional. So we call that lowercase stoicism. And capital S stoicism, like in the Oxford English Dictionary, I will tell you, refers to this ancient Greek school of philosophy then founded by Zeno of Citium. And so they're two different things.
Speaker 1:One's an unemotional coping style, like having a stiff upper lip. The other is an ancient Greek school of philosophy. And that's important because there's a body of research that shows that lower case stoicism is actually quite unhealthy. It's the opposite of resilience, it's bad for you psychologically. Whereas capital S stoicism is the inspiration for cognitive therapy, which we know from large body research is actually very good for you.
Speaker 1:So the founders of cognitive therapy said Albert Ellis and Aaron T. Beck. Ellis said many of the principles incorporated in the theory of rational emotive psych therapy, the first form of cognitive therapy in the 1950s are not new. Some of them in fact were originally stated several thousand years ago, especially by the Greek and Roman stoic philosophers and Beck who kind of founded the more scientifically validated form of cognitive therapy in the 60s and 70s. He said the philosophical origins of cognitive therapy can be traced back to those pesky stoic philosophers.
Speaker 1:And who were they? Well, the three most famous ones were Seneca the younger, John Malkovich, I like to throw in a lot of trivia, like make this a bit more interesting, but you won't get this in your average academic lecture. But John Malkovich is making a movie about Seneca. I think it's called On Earthquakes because he wrote a book about earthquakes. That's coming out maybe in the next year or two.
Speaker 1:So Seneca was one of the finest writers of antiquity and he was a rhetoric teacher and speech writer to the Emperor Nero. Epictetus is the most famous Roman teacher of philosophy. He was a former slave. So the opposite end of society, he became a famous teacher. And then Marcus Aurelius was the Emperor of Rome and yet he was a follower of the writings of Epictetus.
Speaker 1:He never met him in person. Epictetus died in Greece, when Marx Aurelius was about 12 or 13 years old at Rome. So they hadn't met, they just missed each other. But Marx Aurelius read writings and he followed them religiously. And there Scott knows what movie that is, I think.
Speaker 1:Gladiator.
Speaker 2:On, let me have a look.
Speaker 1:You see it?
Speaker 2:It's Lord of the Rings.
Speaker 1:That's not Glaudevilles.
Speaker 2:That's Claus, is it?
Speaker 1:It's Santa Claus. That's Marcus Aurelius played by Richard Harris. And there's Russell Crowe. Russell Crowe now looks more like Marcus Aurelius. Because I don't know how long ago was Gladiar must have been like
Speaker 2:twenty years
Speaker 1:ago or something like that. So I think Russell Crowe's like turning more into Marcus Aurelius now. No offense, you know, he just happens to look more like Marx Aurelius. Socrates was the inspiration for Saucism. So let's do a little quick deep dive into Socratic philosophy.
Speaker 1:There's this argument in Socrates that's the inspiration for really the core of Stoicism. So in one of Plato's dialogues, Plato writes these dialogues about Socrates who was his teacher, and it's called the Euphidemis. And in it Socrates asks his friend, his interlocutor, the guy he's talking to like Scott here is my interlocutor. He says to him, what is good fortune? And Socrates was known for asking these kind of rhetorical no brainer questions, it seemed so anyway.
Speaker 1:So the guy he's talking to says that's a silly question Socrates, good fortune is having a beautiful wife or girlfriend, having lots of money, having the fanciest columns in your house, having the best job, all of these things, having health, good looks, that's good fortune. Everyone knows what good fortune consists in. And Socrates says, well, let's take each of those things in turn and let's start with wealth. And he says surely wealth is a good thing if it's in the hands of somebody who's wise and virtuous and then he could do lots of cool things with it, right? Says, Yeah, sure.
Speaker 1:But what happens if you give lots of money to somebody who's foolish and vicious? Like what happens if you give it to a genocidal tyrant? Surely that would just allow them to do lots of bad things, right? So his friend reluctantly agrees with this. And Socrates says surely, therefore money is simply an opportunity to exert more control over the world.
Speaker 1:And whether it's good or bad, depends on the use that you make of it. So in itself, it's neither good nor bad, it's neutral, like what matters is the character of the person that's using it. So his friend says, well, guess you're right, Socrates says, Well, I've got a surprise for you, buddy. The same thing is true of everything else that you mentioned. Save you going through the entire list, like he says, you've listed a lot of external goods or advantages, but none of them are intrinsically good.
Speaker 1:Like they're only potentially good if used well. And so Socrates says, the missing ingredient that makes them all good or bad is your attitude and character. So therefore, perhaps the only truly intrinsically good thing is moral wisdom, or the strength of character to use things consistently well in life. And he goes even deeper into this paradox, Scott, he says even the deprivation of these external advantages could be good if they're used well. So even in some cases, someone might suffer poverty, they might lose their job, might be the best thing that ever happens to them, if they learn how to use it to their advantage.
Speaker 1:So maybe hardship, suffering difficulty and persecution like Socrates did, may actually be something he learns from and uses to his advantage if he's very wise and self disciplined and has strength of character. So stoics say it's kind of smoke and mirrors, it's an illusion that people think that all the things we run after are what life is all about. But it's kind of a big con in a way. And really, you have to look within happiness comes from within and what matters is the way that you use your experiences. And so everything except wisdom, they say in a sense is indifferent or neutral matters is the use that you make of it.
Speaker 1:And so that's really the cornerstone of stoic philosophy. And that leads on to a lot of interesting observations about how we learn wisdom and how we learn to use things well in life. So I'm going to mention some other things that Socrates says just as a little digression in a way to show you that Socrates kind of preempted the Stoics and he was the kind of forefather of them. So in the Republic, he's talking about the Greek tragedies in Plato's Republic. And he says to his interlocutor, this time it's Plato's elder brother Glaucon, and he says, look, the wise man is resilient, wise man or woman is resilient in the face of adversity.
Speaker 1:And so Glaucon says, well, how is that? Okay, Socrates, what does he do? And Socrates says there's four things that make someone who's wise more emotionally resilient in the face of adversity. And Glaucon says, well, what are they? And Socrates says, well, number one, the wise person tells themselves when they lose their job or their partner breaks up with them or something bad happens, they stub their toe, whatever it is, we cannot be certain whether events that befall us will turn out to be good or bad for us ultimately.
Speaker 1:Because number one, there are many reversals of fortune in life. You might lose your job, but then you end up getting a better job. Or your partner breaks up with you, then you meet someone even better. So the Greek tragedies were all about this, you might win the lottery and think that's amazing. But then you blow it all on hard drugs, like you can get surrounded by hangers on maybe the worst thing ever happens to you.
Speaker 1:So there are many paradoxes in life and many reversals of fortune. Socrates says a wise person reserves judgement about whether something is ultimately good or bad until we've seen the bigger picture. And number two, as we mentioned a moment ago, whether something's good or bad depends on the use that you make of it. So Socrates would say, well, these events that befall us, we can't be certain whether they're good or bad, because it depends how we use them also. So the wise person says, we can't be certain whether something's going to benefit us or harm us, we need to keep an open mind about that.
Speaker 1:And that prevents them from freaking out, complaining, getting anxious and worrying prematurely about things. And Glencone said, what's number two then? And so he said, the second thing is that the wise person tells themselves we gain nothing by grieving excessively, but we merely add another layer or level to our suffering by doing that. So something bad happens, it's already painful. Like when we grieve and worry, we're just adding even more suffering on top.
Speaker 1:And so a wise person would tell themselves, why would we suffer even more than we are already? Why would we amplify our suffering? It doesn't make sense. And Glaukner says, well, what's the third thing Socrates? You said there were four.
Speaker 1:And Socrates says, well, number three, is that the wise person tells themselves that no individual setbacks are all important in the grand scheme of things, because they're always only one event within a bigger picture, like the view from above. And so a wise person always looks at the broader context, the bigger picture. So you know, there might be something bad that happens, but there's other good things going on in your life at the same time, or there will be in the future. But when we get really upset, we tend to respond as if the individual event is like the whole story, like it's all or nothing. So he says nothing, no individual event is that all important, no individual event is the whole story.
Speaker 1:And we view the whole story, it's more mixed, it's more balanced, right, so our emotions are more complex and nuanced.
Speaker 2:And so Glaucon says, Socrates, you said there were four things.
Speaker 1:And Socrates said, Well, actually, number four is the most important of all. And Glaucon says, what's that Socrates? And Socrates says, Well, the wise person tells himself that getting really upset, grieving is the grease, anachronistically we can phrase it grieving or complaining or freaking out as we say today, prevents us from doing the thing that's most important in the face of a crisis. And what's that? And Socrates says, it's to think clearly and rationally, in order to solve the problem in front of us, because we're freaking out, we can't think rationally.
Speaker 1:So actually, the most important thing we can do when we're faced with a genuine problem is to keep rational, calm and rational, if we're going to solve the problem, and not allow our emotions to blind us. Because we know that when we get really upset, anxious or angry introduces lots of cognitive biases. There's lots of research that shows that we become poorer at problem solving when we're angry or anxious.
Speaker 2:Well, yes, is shown to stop, inhibit your front, am I going to get this right, inhibit the frontal cortex in a way, not inhibitor completely makes it less sharper and We
Speaker 1:tend to think in generalisations and we jump prematurely to conclusions and all these kinds of thinking errors that we tend to occur when we're under stress. Especially when we're getting wound up about it while worrying and stuff. So the main technique of stoicism is this thing called the dichotomy of control. And it says some things are up to us and other things are not. So you may think that's obvious, that's like saying some things are big and other things are small.
Speaker 1:Seems like a platitude. But the stories think that people forget this and they blur the distinction between what's up to us and what's not. So just to refer back to something we were talking about earlier, I said, when we're anxious, or depressed, we have this lump theory of emotion, we just talk about anxiety, depression as if it's one thing. But maybe there are bits of anxiety that are up to us, and other bits that are not. And we'd want to kind of draw a line down the middle and separate sort like sorting the wheat from the chaff.
Speaker 1:We'd want to sort them into two categories, so that we can think more clearly about how to deal with our emotions. That would be a really simple, basic thing that would make a big difference. So Epi Titus, when he says this, is really talking about a distinction between what we do, our voluntary actions and what merely happens to us or everything else basically. So who's that? That Robbie You didn't expect to see
Speaker 2:Robbie Williams today, did you? Oh my God, he's looking handsome.
Speaker 1:He's a handsome fellow that Robbie Williams. And he's got
Speaker 2:this is too much for a Monday night.
Speaker 1:He's got a lot of tattoos. And so one of them says, grant me the serenity. So it's a reference to the serenity prayer, which I think I saw the thing he was repeating on before he went on stage. So serenity prayer is used in Alcoholics Anonymous and other related organisations. And it's very similar to stoicism.
Speaker 1:Says God grant me the serenity. Or he says Elvis grant me the serenity, but God grant me the serenity to accept the things that's what his tattoo says, to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference between what's up to me and what isn't, or what I can change and what I can't change. So wisdom to know the difference between the bits of anxiety that can change and the bits of anxiety that are involuntary, not on the microtrobe would be one example of that. But really, it's a very general idea. This is a plug, Scott.
Speaker 1:I like it. Shameless plug for my graphic novel that I'm working on. Am I featured
Speaker 2:at all or what?
Speaker 1:You could be like, I've got some people, I've got like, so some of my friends are in it. The illustrator doesn't like it when I do that because he says it's harder to draw people from like, he's not as good at that. Like he's better just making up the faces. But I've got a long list of people like I want my auntie in it and my friend in it and my buddy's going to be a centurion. So there's a long list of people that want to be in these graphic novels.
Speaker 1:But this is a bit of a story about a stoic philosopher who was on a ship that nearly sank. It's told by a Roman author called Aulus Gellius. And this guy was on a ship and he saw this stoic and they all nearly drowned and everyone was freaking out like crazy. They were all running around waving their arms like that, going woo, woo, woo, right? And then they were lucky and they got to shore and they all survived.
Speaker 1:This was a common hazard in the ancient world, sailing between Rome or the port on the Italian coast and sailing across the Adriatic from Brundisium to Greece, to Nicopolis, I think is where they arrived. And so they would get caught in storms and it was risky. And Aulus Gellius says to this Stoic philosopher, famous Stoic philosopher, and he says, Listen, I saw you on the boat and you're a Stoic, I recognise you. But you weren't running around going woo woo woo and screaming and praying to Poseidon for mercy and all that kind of stuff. But you did look kind of pale.
Speaker 1:And you were turning a bit green at one point and you were kind of shaking and you weren't very quiet, buddy. So I thought you stoics were meant to be impervious to stuff like that. So people say, I thought you were meant to be unemotional, but you were kind of freaking out there. And the guy said, well, to be fair, even a seasoned sailor would be stressed under those conditions because it looked like we're all about to die. And he said there are automatic emotional responses that are reflex like and natural.
Speaker 1:And Stoics accept those, they don't struggle against them, they view them as indifferent. But what they don't do is amplify them, add to them or perpetuate them unnecessarily. So this guy was giving a very nuanced theory, he was saying those involuntary emotions and voluntary aspects of emotion. And the Stoics changed the voluntary aspects while accepting the involuntary aspects. So you're right, I turned white and I was shaking.
Speaker 1:And that's not a big deal to me, I see that as natural. Like, you know, the sailors were shaking as well. I'm not bothered by that. But what I'm not going to do is dwell on it, or complain about it or freak out about it. So I'm not going to add to unnecessarily.
Speaker 1:So he made a clear distinction between the automatic or involuntary aspects of emotion and the voluntary parts that are under his control to change. That's very nuanced emotional thinking for a guy that was living two thousand years ago. Yeah, real good. So the Stoics distinguish between these good, the bad and the ugly three types of emotion. So there's bad emotions that they want to get rid of, like worrying or ruminating.
Speaker 1:But they're really talking about the voluntary aspects of bad emotions like dwelling on things like revenge fantasies if you're angry and stuff like that. And then there's the good emotions that they want to replace them with. So they don't want to be unemotional, they want to have healthy emotions, like love and friendship and stuff like that. The Stoics talk about good emotions a lot. And then there's also the indifferent emotions.
Speaker 1:And these are the involuntary ones, they call them the propatheiae in Greek. So these are like the startle reflex, if someone runs up behind you and goes boo, like you can't stop that, it's a natural response, or blushing or crying or your heart pounding or trembling or your blood rising. Seneca says these emotional responses are as natural as he puts it and it sounds very modern when Seneca writes this, although he was writing two thousand years ago, he says if someone comes up and they poke their finger towards your eye, you'll blink. He's describing what we would call a reflex, he didn't even have a word for it. He was like you know that thing where someone puts a finger and you blink, like he says that's what these emotions are like shaking, crying, like if somebody suddenly tells you some terrible thing has happened, you'll turn pale.
Speaker 1:That's normal. But what matters is what you do next. How you then choose to respond to that initial flush of involuntary emotions. So in worrying, this is very important. So there's involuntary parts, it's kind of the initial response.
Speaker 1:And that could be the physical side of sweating, nausea, shaking, blushing, heart racing, and also muscular tension, headaches, tensing of muscles, you can influence those things over time. But the more at the time that they happen, they're largely reflex like and automatic. What matters is how we then respond to them. But also there's the automatic thoughts that pop into your mind. And these things can also be seen as triggers for then a process of thinking.
Speaker 1:So you have an initial automatic thought, actually can be something you hear on TV, it could be something that Scott says to you or somebody says to you, like Scott could say Donald, what if you get out by bus tomorrow? And I could go, no, you've got me worrying about that. Scott. Right? So someone could say something that triggers a chain of worry.
Speaker 1:Or could you see something or be reminded of something? Or I could just be lying in bed and for no reason suddenly pops in my head spontaneously, an automatic thought, and it starts a chain of worrying. So then what happens next, the voluntary response. So Scott said Donald, you could get out of my bus tomorrow in Greece, there's lot of fast buses there. And I could be oh you're right, so I could now be analysing that arguing with myself about it, arguing with Scott about it, worrying about it.
Speaker 1:I could engage in prolonged perseverative thinking about it. And because that thinking takes place over a prolonged period of time, the clue is you can interrupt it, because it goes on over time. It's a process, it's a system of thinking rather than just a spontaneous thought. Because it's a prolonged series of thoughts, we can interrupt that series of thoughts, you can exert control over it. Or I might go, I need to block this out, I'm going to go and drink a lot of beer, I'll take some drugs, or I'm going to watch Netflix to distract myself from Scott telling me that I could get hit by bus tomorrow.
Speaker 1:Like he's upset me now. Like I'm going to go and watch Netflix and down a bottle of wine. And so that's I could self medicate, I could self comfort as a way of trying to distract myself from the worry. And that would be unhealthy. That's a form of avoidance, or complain about it or repeatedly seek reassurance.
Speaker 1:And those are also unhealthy ways of coping with the distress. Right, potentially, I mean, I could claim a bit complain about something in an assertive, constructive way, or I could just keep going on of bingeing about it in an unhealthy way. So it's good and bad types of complaining basically. So the way these are voluntary, either complaining is voluntary, the reassurance seeking is voluntary, the drinking the bottle of wine is voluntary, watching Netflix, these are all the things that happen next are things that I could choose not to do. But the initial automatic thought that pops into my mind or the thing that someone else says to me, I maybe don't have voluntary control over.
Speaker 1:So worry postponement would really follow on from this distinction. So first of all to spot the initial trigger, could be something that I see or hear, or it could be just a thought that pops into my mind. So we call those early warning signs of worry. Like it could be that I noticed that I'm starting to get into worry because I noticed I'm frowning or tensing up. So catching worry early is the key either but noticing the automatic thoughts or automatic feelings, like the beginning of the sequence.
Speaker 1:And for some people that alone is all they need to do. There are many people if they catch their worry early enough, then they're naturally able to nip it in the bud and step out of it. That alone is a very powerful behavioural psychology technique, actually an old technique. And you know, you can train yourself to get better at catching worry and rumination at an earlier stage. And I would sometimes ask people to keep a tally and just count how many worries that they have each day, how many initial thoughts they have each day that are triggers for worry.
Speaker 1:And that act of taking a step back and counting it can also be something other than engaging in worry. So even the very fact of counting it sometimes can be enough to kind of snap you out of the trance as it were, like it can cause you to kind of take a step sideways and kind of notice your worry rather than just getting sucked into it and swept along with it. But then the main technique that we want to get people to do often, common technique anyway, is worry postponement. It's actually in technical jargon, this is called the stimulus control method of managing worry. And it was developed certainly researchers in the 1980s were the first to do studies on it.
Speaker 1:And they found that it's one of the simplest techniques, could write the instructions on the back of a business card. So notice when you're beginning to worry, write down in one or two words what the topic is, fold it, put it in your pocket and tell yourself you're going to come back to a specified time and place later in the day. So postponing it of deferring thinking about it until a time of your choosing. So you're saying I'm not going to allow that automatic thought to suddenly propel me into worry. I'm going to say I might have a think about that but I'll do it when I choose.
Speaker 1:And the easiest way to do that is to have a specified worry time so it could be 08:00 every evening when you're in the bath with your rubber ducky or whatever. Or it could be in a certain armchair, you might even wear a special worry hat, do see my worry hats? It's pretty open, pretty thick, it's quite faded. My day. Do I look more Canadian already?
Speaker 2:I do, do you
Speaker 1:know what
Speaker 2:I need to get you, Donald? Got some, I got the official Cobra Kai headband. Oh my God. So I think you should You
Speaker 1:should get one of those.
Speaker 2:I think you need to put this on.
Speaker 1:A worry headband. So I could put this hat on, could say I only do worrying when I'm wearing this hat. Not worrying, worrying, not worrying. So it's conditioning like Pavlov and his dogs, you can train yourself to say like at 08:00 every night, I put my hat on. I sit down in my favourite chair, I put on whatever, what are we listening to these days on the playlist Scott?
Speaker 2:What song? Don't know, could have got EPs maybe, total after
Speaker 1:EPs erasure, I put on erasure, I put on my special worry hat and then that's when I do my worrying and when erasure stops, when the hat comes off, it's over, it's time to go back to work, there's no worry behind. So your training is conditioning yourself to associate process of worrying with a specific time and place. Because when people do that, they'll go well how much time per day do you think you should spend on worrying? What would be a reasonable amount of time? And a lot of people say this, people who have severe GAD will say I spent all day worrying or many hours.
Speaker 1:But if I say well how much time do you think it would be reasonable to spend worrying? They might ten minutes, twenty minutes, I don't know. If you're thinking about a lot of problems, it's hard to generalise, but many problems you might think, if I haven't figured out a solution after like twenty minutes or half an hour, then maybe I'm just going round in circles. I might be as well to leave it and come back to it the next day or something. So you put a time limit on how long you're going to spend wearing your worry hat, listening to a razor and sitting in your worry chair at that time of night.
Speaker 1:And so you postpone to a specific worry time. There's a couple of reasons why this works and by the way, Burkovec is one of the leading, he's retired now I think but he's an American psychologist, he's an expert in the psychology of worry. And when they did these initial experiments on American college students, they found that these instructions alone, like very simple instructions led to a roughly 50% reduction in the frequency, intensity and duration of worry episodes. That's a significant reduction in worry. So this strategy, there are many different protocols or methods in CBT for treating pathological worry or generalised anxiety disorder.
Speaker 1:But as far as the last time I looked, all of them include this technique, right? Because it's the most reliable, most robust technique that we know of for coping with worry. And actually, we now know you can use it for other stuff as well. So not only worrying, but you could use it for depression, when you're doing what's called morbid rumination, or you could use it for anger when you're kind of ruminating angrily about something and getting more and more wound up about it. And so one of the reasons that this works is it forces you to make a clearer distinction between automatic involuntary thinking.
Speaker 1:So you'll notice the initial thought, and you go, I'm not going to respond to that right now. Fair enough, I just thought, oh, shit, what if I get hit by bus tomorrow? I don't have to continue thinking about it. Okay, I'll come back to it at 08:00 tonight when I put a razor on. And then I'll sit down and think about what if I get hit by bus tomorrow, right?
Speaker 1:And I probably put the Smiths on for that, to be honest.
Speaker 2:Oh, I like the Smiths.
Speaker 1:Smiths would be better. I'd listen to the Smiths if I was thinking about getting that bus tomorrow. But when you do that, like what happens is usually when you're tense, you're anxious when worry begins, right? And so your brain is in a different state of functioning. It's an anxiety mode actually we sometimes call it in psychology.
Speaker 1:And so when you're anxious, all sorts of stuff happens, right? Your brain's in a different gear, different mode of function. Even the way you allocate attention is different, you narrow the scope of your attention so you can't entertain as many thoughts at once. You get more tunnel vision, you'll make generalisations, you'll jump prematurely to conclusions. There'll be a bunch of cognitive biases that you experience.
Speaker 1:You're not in a good frame of mind to think about problems and solve them. So one of the things that happens if you say I'll come back to this later, anxiety will naturally abate over time. Right? So probably at 08:00 when you put a razor on, you put your hat on and you sit in your chair, apart from factor maybe you can feel a lot bit silly or whatever, right? You're not in the same neurological state that you were in earlier when you started worrying.
Speaker 1:So now you're probably going to feel different. And you're probably going to be thinking differently about getting hit by bus tomorrow. So earlier, I might have thought, but what if I do get hit by late, you know, that's all I can think about. Now I'm getting quite worried about that, I can't really see a
Speaker 2:solution to this problem. But when
Speaker 1:I'm calm down, and I'm chill, I think that is the sort of thing that's got me say though, why that's, it's not worth paying attention to that guy. So then when I've calmed down, I'm more able to detach from it. And actually, the first question I would ask, there's some disagreement, I think most psychotherapists now would say, when you sit down in your worry time, your first question is, is it still worth thinking about this thing? So you might sit and go, okay, it's time, put my worry hat on, we sit down and think about getting in by bus tomorrow. Does it still seem important?
Speaker 1:And I might go, well, actually it is because I've got a lot of dangerous buses, I think I should come up with an action plan for dealing with it. Or I might think now this is stupid, right? It's like, there's no point even thinking about this, in which case I don't. Right? So maybe it's like fiftyfifty with some people, half the time, it's actually a genuine problem that's worth thinking about but in a calmer more detached way and maybe half the time it just doesn't seem important anymore.
Speaker 1:So just that fact that delaying alone will mean you actually maybe completely get rid of half of your worries because you end up thinking they're not real worries, they're not genuine problems. And if it is a genuine problem, you're probably in a calmer like Socrates said, you know, worry or anxiety prevents you from doing the very thing that's most required, which is to calmly think things through rationally and solve the problem. So when you say, you might write down in a bit of paper, getting hit by a bus tomorrow, fold it up, put it in my pocket, I'll come back to that later. And then return your attention to the present moment because when we're absorbed and worried, we lose track of time and we get lost in our thoughts. You don't hear the doorbell ring, you don't notice that your kettle's boiling or whatever, like because you're too worried about stuff.
Speaker 1:So the opposite of worry would be to come back, lose your mind and come back to your senses, to be noticed the world around you and grounded in the here and now. These are two completely different states of mind. So Birkovec actually was one of the psychologists that would say, getting more tuned into the present moment can help you snap out a worry. So when you've noticed a worry, you postponed it, it's useful then to notice the colors around you. And the sounds that you can hear to bring your attention back into the present moment.
Speaker 1:Yeah, There's a wee technique, this is a clock up. What happened with Rothio? Did you get some, were you going get some thoughts or Yeah,
Speaker 2:let me know when to found, I think moving about some time.
Speaker 1:Because turtles on
Speaker 2:Yeah, with turtles and stuff on it. So we're looking at doing loads of them. Yeah, letting me know when they're redoing them, found a place or something like that. So
Speaker 1:we're talking about this before. So our artists, my graphic designer, Ruffio de Torres made this clock that says pay attention to the instant. It's got a lot of turtle on it. And this exercise you can do, it's an old technique, it comes from Gestalt psychotherapy. And you would just say to yourself, like one way of tricking your brain into paying more attention than normal to something is to put it into words.
Speaker 1:So when you describe something, you force yourself to pay attention for a bit longer than normal. So you would just go here now, I notice the sound of Scott scratching his bum. Or right now, I'm aware of an itch on my left shoulder. Or here now, I'm aware of the light glinting off the windowpane over there. So just kind of like in a very objective way describing the stuff that you could actually hear, the stuff you can actually see or smell or feel or whatever, but in your senses in the present moment, very simply without analysing it, questioning it, ruminating about it.
Speaker 1:So just using descriptions to focus your attention on what's actually going on in your senses, We can call it a here and now meditation. So when you notice worry, you know that you could potentially do that and that would help to do something that's the opposite of worrying. So then when you get to the worry time, mentioned you could put your hat on, you could put your special worry shoes on, special furry slippers, you worry pants, special underpants that you used to worry, whatever floats your boat. And then does it still seem worth thinking about? And then if it's a problem, the way I've over time actually, there's a lot of things I could say about this.
Speaker 1:We'll dig into this a little bit more in a moment. But the simplest advice I could give to clients is if it's a genuine problem and you think I do need to think about it, just try and think about it with greater self awareness and more detachment. So that you notice if your feelings are getting in the way. So that's all think about like say you've got a problem that you have to solve, like you're in debt or something, it's a genuine serious problem, you were worrying about it. But you'd like to choose the time and place where you do it in your worry time so you can do it more objectively.
Speaker 1:Well, first of all, you're probably going to be calmer and more in control if you do this already. But also just making an effort to think about the debt that you're in with greater self awareness of the way that you're thinking about it, and how your thoughts, actions and feelings are influencing one another as you think about it, and maybe putting a time limit on it. So maybe time it and you might put a cap on it depending on how complex the problem is, you might say, if I haven't come up with a solution within twenty minutes, I'm probably just going round the circles. And I'll need to come back to it later. So timing how long you spend on it can be useful.
Speaker 1:So the other main technique of stoicism kind of relates to this is this idea, it's not things that upset us, but our judgments about them. It's the most famous quote from Epictetus or all stoics. In fact, it's such a famous quote from Epictetus that Marcus Aurelius, who's like the generation later, quotes it, In fact, he quotes it more than once. So even Marcus Aurelius was quoting this, like it was just like, you know, a decade later or something like that. And then from that point onwards throughout history, everyone quotes this bit of Epictetus.
Speaker 1:And so the cognitive therapists, this is the only or the main thing from stoicism that they tend to quote. It's not things that upset us, but our judgments about them. So we call that cognitive distancing. Now, in the early days of cognitive therapy, we used to, you know, psychologists went and look, when someone is anxious, it's because, and we'll come back to this in a moment, they have anxious thoughts. So the typical formula for that, it varies, but a generalised template if you want to get anxious is to think something awful is going to happen and I won't be able to cope with it.
Speaker 1:That's called the transactional model like Richard Lazarus's model of stress and anxiety that was assimilated into early cognitive therapy. And so it came out of research and psychology on stress actually, something awful is going to happen and I won't be able to cope with it as a classic formula for stress and anxiety. It's pretty explicit and worry actually, I'll come back to that in a moment. So we have those thoughts and Beck would say, well, we need to question the evidence for it. Like, where is the evidence that something bad is going to happen?
Speaker 1:Where's the evidence against that belief? Where's the evidence that you won't be able to cope? Where is the evidence that maybe you would be able to cope? What would be a more rational, balanced and helpful way of thinking about the same situation? How would someone else think about the situation that you're facing?
Speaker 1:So we can open up this toolbox of cognitive therapy techniques But in order to do that, Beck said you have to gain cognitive distance. So we have to use this jargon term because there's not a good English word for describing this kind of manoeuvre in psychology. But it's actually a very simple manoeuvre and it's incredibly important. So Bek said look, if someone thinks nobody likes me, everybody hates me, I think we'll go and eat worms. Like in order to question is that actually true?
Speaker 1:What's the evidence for it? What's the evidence against it? Is it maybe an over generalisation you're making? You have to have the attitude that that belief is up for debate. Are you not going to tolerate someone questioning the evidence for it?
Speaker 1:If you go I'm just describing, I'm calling it how I see it, nobody likes me, everybody hates me. So the therapist has to say well that's an opinion, it's one way of looking at the situation and maybe there's some truth in it, but maybe it's not entirely true or maybe it's not true at all. What's the evidence for and against that would be another way of looking at it. But someone who's completely fused with that thought, as we say, won't even be able to question it. They just think they're describing reality.
Speaker 1:So Beck said you have to get people to separate the belief from external events and realise it's just an opinion. It's a thought, not a fact. Like, it's like a hypothesis, it could be true, it could be false. And then you can weigh up the evidence. And so he saw this as a precursor necessary to doing cognitive therapy.
Speaker 1:And that's kind of cool. Makes sense. But then a bunch of other psychologists, the next generation, the kids, the young guns came along, and they said, maybe that's all you need to do. If you do it properly, like what happens if you just do cognitive distancing on its own, and you do more of it, and you don't even bother questioning the evidence for and against the beliefs. And so there's a large body of research now that shows that cognitive distancing on its own is not just a precursor to therapy, but it could be a whole therapy approach in itself.
Speaker 1:And it's very robust and you can use it to deal with stress. So the emotional effect of negative thoughts becomes much weaker if you view them merely as hypotheses. So one way of gaining cognitive distance would be to say to yourself, literally say to yourself, I've said nobody likes me, everybody hates me, Scott, I think I'll go and eat worms. I might say to myself this is just a thought that's upsetting me and not the thing itself. Actually reminding myself it's just the thought that nobody likes me, everybody hates me, it's the fact that I'm saying that, telling that to myself that's making me upset.
Speaker 1:So reminding myself of that, just saying that what can be helpful in gaining distance and separating my opinions from reality. Or I could go a step further, these are all cognitive distancing techniques we use in therapy. I could say, I notice right now that Donald is telling himself nobody likes me, everybody hates me. And so I'd slow it down, maybe, and I'd refer to it in the third person. So it's almost like I'm taking a step sideways and I'm looking at myself and Donald is saying to himself nobody likes me, everybody hates me.
Speaker 1:By doing that I weaken, it looks weird if you do, I know it looks weird if you do it in the bus, right? Scott, yeah, but it weakens the effect of the thought. I've now gained distance. I'm looking at the thought, rather than looking through the thought. Likes me, nobody me.
Speaker 1:Go, oh, he's telling myself nobody likes me, nobody hates me. Beck compares it to wearing glasses. If you're wearing rose tinted glasses on and I'm looking at the world and I'm thinking, Scott's pink and my laptop's pink, and the pigeons outside are all pink. Right? And then someone comes along and they knock my glasses off my face.
Speaker 1:And I think, oh, it's the glasses that are pink. See that the lenses are pink. Right? I thought Scott was pink, but it's
Speaker 2:not it's the glasses I was looking at him through. Right? And someone goes here, these blue glasses, I put
Speaker 1:the blue glasses on. I go now Scott's blue. Why and the pigeons are all blue. Right? And but imagine you were wearing catastrophic coloured glasses.
Speaker 1:This is a catastrophe.
Speaker 2:Like my girlfriend's broken up with me
Speaker 1:or I've lost my job or whatever. But maybe I'm just it's the lenses that are catastrophic rather than the event itself perhaps is neutral. And the awfulness of it is because I'm looking at it through awfulness tinted glasses. So looking at the glasses rather than looking through the glasses is what we mean by cognitive distance. I've now separated the pinkness, or the blueness, or the awfulness of separated or peeled away from the external event to which it referred.
Speaker 1:It's a filter, I now realise rather than the event itself. So another thing I could do is I could write on paper, nobody likes me, nobody hates me, or I could imagine it written on a board or on the wall. And the trick to doing that then is to think about the shape of the letters and the colour of the letters. So you're now paying more attention to the thought as an object rather than getting lost in the meaning of it, if that makes sense. So I tell people to do that who have social anxiety.
Speaker 1:So they can think everybody thinks I'm an idiot. I say imagine that everybody's wearing a hat that says Scott is an idiot or Donald is an idiot or a T shirt, they've got badges, imagine they've all got badges on. Let's say Donald is a muppet. Right? And so now, rather than kind of trying to hide from the thought, I'm saying bring it on.
Speaker 1:I can imagine they've got emblazoned across a T shirt. But because it's more explicit, I'm going to habituate to it more easily. As we say in psychology, I'm going to get bored with it. At first of all, oh no, that guy's got a T shirt and says Donald's an idiot. After a while, I'm going to get bored looking at it.
Speaker 1:And it's not going to really bother me anymore. Whereas if it's an abstract kind of vague idea, like maybe he's thinking that minute, then I won't get habituated to it. I won't get bored with it in the same way. It's going to constantly be kind of like niggling at me. Whereas ironically, if I bring it out into the open, I'm going to feel a kind of jolt of anxiety at first, but then that's going to fade permanently.
Speaker 1:So that's why I always imagine that Scott's wearing a badge that says Donald is a muppet. My friend, when
Speaker 2:we used to play rugby, used to be really skinny and every time he played, he used to be smiling and the coach used to be like, you're running against monsters and you're getting killed, why are you always smiling playing? He goes, oh, because I'm imagining all the players as clowns. So he was just imagining them as clowns and just running about. So it's kind of a good way to go against his fear.
Speaker 1:Yeah, people have interesting strategies. And so one of our actually, this is my I'll be honest, this is one of my favourite strategies, right? Like, I really like this. And by the way, the funny thing, like, I say to my clients that worrying is surprisingly fragile. And they start off by saying, What do you mean?
Speaker 1:Because worrying seems overwhelming and out of control. And by the end of the therapy, like most of the clients are like, that thing you said about worrying being fragile, I didn't believe it is. But you're right. Worrying is a complicated process, right? And the more parts something has, easier it is to break, the more things can go wrong.
Speaker 1:Worrying has lots of breakable parts easily, it's complicated right, that's worth knowing. Worrying is fragile, like you can interrupt it in many ways. So try worrying in a Scottish accent or a Jamaican accent or you know try rubbing your tummy and patting your head while worrying about getting hit by a bus or you know there's many things you can do that just make it it seem awkward or silly or ludicrous, right? So you can go I'm going to think about these things that freak me out normally, but now I'm doing something else at the same time, I'm doing it a different way. Like it can lead to diffusion and you can have the thoughts but you're not overwhelmed by them.
Speaker 1:So I could still problem solve it while rubbing my tummy and patting my head or doing it in a Scottish accent or whatever. I can do it. I have to practise my Scottish accent. I do it. It's indistinguishable from Sean Connery.
Speaker 1:I told Scott about my idea before he passed away, unfortunately, I've missed the boat now. But I wanted to have a crowdfunding like a Kickstarter campaign to make, to pay Sean Connery to narrate a documentary about dinosaurs. I thought that would be really popular, because I wanted to hear him say the Triceratops and Brontosaurus.
Speaker 2:That'd make him less scary, wouldn't it?
Speaker 1:If you could worry in Sean Connery's voice, nobody likes me, everybody hates me. You can still problems that you could think about it, but it's not going to be as overwhelming. And actually just slowing it down and thinking about your facial expression, what you're doing with your neck and shoulder muscles, your breathing, the location of the voice, we call paralinguistics, right? All the other stuff that's going on, apart from the content of the words, like it snaps you. It's like being in the here and now, right?
Speaker 1:The tone of your voice is in the here and now. Like your breathing is in the here and now. All the paralinguistics take place in the here and now. So if you pay attention to the way that you're worrying, what accent do I worry with? Like, how is my voice in my head or in my heart or over my shoulder?
Speaker 1:Like, could I worry and imagine that the voice I'm using to worry is in my little finger? Not the likes of everybody. Like, could I you know, it makes you do it from a different perspective. And I could still have a you know, I could think
Speaker 2:about it like that. Could get of those things like I forgot about bus tomorrow.
Speaker 1:But it's harder to take it seriously, but also I could have the whole conversation and be diffused from it. It wouldn't be as overwhelming. And it probably be shorter. Why I wouldn't do that for like I was, I'd get a sore finger apart from anything else. And so the other thing that's really weird, but this is work, this was invented by a psychologist, first person to recall this is an English psychologist called Titchener at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Speaker 1:And he was the first person as I understand it to observe that if you repeat a word or a short phrase rapidly aloud, starts to feel meaningless. And we do this a lot in therapy, there are research studies in psychology labs that show that the optimum amount of time for doing it is forty five seconds. And that when people do it, ninety percent of them report cognitive diffusion or a sense of detachment from the thoughts. So if I picked nobody likes me, nobody hates me, I would just go That's like ten seconds or something. And that's already annoying.
Speaker 1:So forty five seconds is a long time to repeat it.
Speaker 2:By the end of it, you'll
Speaker 1:be either drink of water, your lips will feel like rubber, you'll be sick of the sound of it. And but then when you say it, you'll like, it doesn't really bother me anymore. Nobody likes me. It just feels like, know, I can still talk about that. I can think about it, I could problem solve it, but it's not really making me as upset anymore because you've diffused from it.
Speaker 1:Because you're, one way of putting it is you're more aware now of the way that you're saying the words and less kind of tunnelled into the meaning of the words. It would be like, it's a natural phenomenon, Scott. A good way of explaining it is like storytelling. Imagine you're sitting around the campfire back in the day when you were in the girl guides, or the Boy Scouts, whatever. And you're sitting around the campfire and somebody's telling a ghost story.
Speaker 1:And it's pretty scary, right? There's vampires and werewolves in it, and ghosts and everything. So you're getting really into it. And you notice that the hairs are starting to stand up in the back of your neck and starting to turn a bit pale. It's quite scary.
Speaker 1:It's affecting you physically listening to the scary story. But there's another guy sitting next to you and he's listening to exactly the same words, exactly the same voice, the same person telling it. But he needs to go to the loo and he's thinking I wish this guy would hurry up and finish. So he's not really getting his gross done, he's a bit distracted. Or he's thinking it's kind of annoying me that this guy's got a funny Scottish accent, he's telling the story, he's getting distracted by his accent.
Speaker 1:So he's not really getting into it, right? Or it's like if two of watch a movie, and one of you really enjoys it and gets into it, and the other one is like analysing the script. So you're not really getting into the story because you're thinking too much about the way that it's being told. So it's a difference between being lost in the story and thinking too much about the storytelling. And worry is a story that you tell yourself about imagine catastrophes happening in the future, it's a horror story that you tell yourself.
Speaker 1:Worrying is a horror story you tell yourself and so are you allowing yourself to get lost in
Speaker 2:the horror story you tell yourself?
Speaker 1:Or are you going to focus more on storytelling and how you're doing it? Well, the clue is that if like a psychologist or a therapist, you focus more on the process storytelling, you'll snap yourself out of the trance by it won't affect you as badly. So it'll give you this the holy grail of emotional resilience. So there's another technique that we can use that's called worry exposure. So the single most robustly established technique in the entire field of psychotherapy research, trademark, is this thing called exposure therapy.
Speaker 1:We've known about this for at least well over actually half a century now. I mean, I won't label the part but we know for sure that this works incredibly reliably. And so exposure therapy basically means prolonged repeated confrontation or exposure to the thing that promotes your anxiety. So someone has a snake phobia, like Indiana Jones, and you put them in a room with snakes, a pretty reliable index of anxiety is heart rate. So Scott, what will happen to the heart rate of Indiana Jones, if we put him in a room full of snakes?
Speaker 2:I reckon nothing. No, it'll skyrocket. It's going to
Speaker 1:go up, it's going to nearly double within actually just like two or three seconds, as if he was sprinting. It was shot to like 140 beats a minute or something. And so people with anxiety will go, no shit, Sherlock, we know this. And then I'll go like Socrates, like the fabled Socrates of yore, like having asked them a dumb question that they already know the answer to, then I'll say, but what happens next? And they'll go, woah, they usually say the most common answer to that is, and then they a rethink about it.
Speaker 1:So what does happen next? You get used to it, didn't you? Heart rate starts
Speaker 2:coming down.
Speaker 1:Heart rate is going to have to come down, what goes up must come down. It's not going to stay at 140 beats a minute. It'd be great if it did, you wouldn't have to go to the gym. Like we just put in a room for a snake and you'd be burning all those calories off. Like this well known form of weight loss.
Speaker 2:Snake therapy.
Speaker 1:It doesn't work, right? Funnily enough, because your heart will come back down. When your heart rate goes down, your anxiety levels will go down as well. And then they'll go, well, how quickly will that happen? And it could take anything from like five or ten minutes to half an hour, varies a bit actually, like, but it will come down.
Speaker 1:Then what happens if you do the same thing the next day, your heart rate will go up, but not as high, and it will reduce more quickly. And then the day after that, it will go up, but not as high, just more quickly. Abilicus kind of zigzag progressively turning down towards what we call extinction, or habituation of the phobia. Right? But the exposure has to be for longer than normal.
Speaker 1:It's gonna be like five-ten. That's boring. That's a long time. You wouldn't normally stay in a room full of snakes for like ten minutes or half an hour or whatever, unless someone else was persuading you to do it. If you had a phobia, like so that's why therapists make so much money.
Speaker 1:Because like clients really don't want to do the things that therapists are going to think, I have to do it now, I paid that guy like £100 an hour or whatever. Why is he making me stand in this room with snakes and he'd be like bloody right ham because that's going to be the very thing that's going to cure your phobia. But left to their own devices. Phobics have this thing about running away from the things that they have funnily enough, with technical term for it is escape behaviour. Or even better than escape behaviour, which is fleeing the situation is everyone's favourite coping strategy, avoidance, which is not going in the room in the first place.
Speaker 1:Not even going in there, buddy. Why? So that's what most people would do. If you've got a full behaviour, I'm not going in there.
Speaker 2:But you think I'll pay that guy a check.
Speaker 1:So now, okay, I guess I have to go in the room. And that's leads to habituation though. That's what cures focus. But my point is, in childhood, it's your parents that encourage you to get out of your comfort zone and to face your fears. Right?
Speaker 1:But in adult life, we sometimes have to pay
Speaker 2:a therapist like we'd pay a fitness instructor. I don't, Scott, I wouldn't need to pay
Speaker 1:you like I could just stand at home. And I could just, I could do jumping jacks all day long. And I'd be as fit as a butcher's dog. But I get bored. So that's why I have to pay a fitness instructor partly and also, know, maybe for guidance on techniques and stuff like that.
Speaker 1:But is it not true that to some extent, like, you could just read a book or an exercise and go and do it on your own. People aren't motivated necessarily unless there's other people and currently maybe it could be their friends, so they join a running club or whatever, or it could be a gym instructor, fitness instructor, whatever. It's the same as a psychotherapist. It's maybe not telling you anything that's a big revelation. People feel that they need someone to encourage them, to carry on to do just like another five minutes on the treadmill, or just to do one more press up, they just stay in that room with the snakes for another couple of minutes.
Speaker 1:Otherwise, they'll quit, or they'll run away, like and then they won't get the benefit from it as much. So if someone puts themselves in a room full of snakes, their anxiety goes up, and then they run, that doesn't help them, and it can make them worse. But if they stay in it until their anxiety comes down, at least like half the way or two thirds of the way, that leads to habituation about ninety percent, more than ninety percent of the time actually. And now there's another problem, so it has to be prolonged and repeated. And then the other problem is that there's a thing called subtle avoidance or therapists call it safety seeking behaviour.
Speaker 1:And that means that when you there may be other reasons why, like lots of subtle ways that you could prevent habituation from happening. Habituation works on even very primitive life forms, like a hamster. You could give a hamster a phobia and you could cure a hamster's phobia like that. And this is I don't like saying this nowadays, because a lot of early behavioural experiments involve experiments in animals that we might consider kind of unethical today or whatever. But one of the pioneers of behavioural therapy does a lot of experiments on cats, where he induced phobias in them, just by making loud noises or whatever, them electric shocks, mild electric shocks, which I'm reliably informed were harmless, but freaked the cat out.
Speaker 1:Volpe the guy that does this, like defending it says, to be honest, you can make a cat like alarm, you know, clap your hands or something like that. So he would startle the cats and give them a phobia for being in a particular room and then he would cure the phobia by doing graduated exposure therapy basically or his version of it. But subtle avoidance might consist in closing your eyes, clinging on to someone else for safety, repeating a mantra, just trying to block out the feelings, controlling your breathing. So there's a bunch of things that people might do that you might not even be able to see them doing, which are attempts to control their anxiety or block the feelings out. Now, often people think of those as self help techniques, right?
Speaker 1:But actually, in many cases, they prevent natural emotional processing from taking place and they can prevent habituation from happening. So therapists have to usually a lot of the work for therapy is saying to a client to stop trying to control your breathing, stop trying to distract yourself, just allow yourself to feel the anxiety and wait, like to ride out because then your brain will process it like it's chewing over and digesting it and it'll get past it. But if you're kind of trying to block out and struggling against it, then you might remain in the situation but you don't habituate. An animal would habituate but humans complicate it because we have these subtle subjective defensive techniques. So actually, if you're doing exposure therapy at home, you have to be careful you don't pick something that's overwhelming.
Speaker 1:People with certain mental health problems like panic disorder, it might be more problematic for them to do that. But if it takes twenty minutes or fifteen minutes of exposing yourself, you can do it in your imagination. If you have a snake phobia, you could visualise snakes, that works almost as well. But MP3s help a lot, recordings help a lot, because you could listen to a recording for twenty minutes that talks you through imagining snakes or whatever. Otherwise, it's hard on your own to sit and visualise snakes for that amount of time.
Speaker 1:But if you're watching a video or listen to a recording, it can make it easier for to do it for long enough. And the anxiety has to come down sufficiently far before you stop or you won't benefit. Right, so here's an interesting question. So a lot of people would say well surely when you're worrying about snakes or you're worrying about getting hit by a bus or something else, then that's a form of mental exposure. Like so I worry about stuff for hours, clients will say, and the anxiety doesn't go away, in fact, it gets worse.
Speaker 1:So there's an interesting paradox there. If worrying involves prolonged thinking about things that cause anxiety, why doesn't it lead to habituation? And psychologists thought that's a paradox. It seems strange because imaginal exposure works 90% of the time. If we have someone who's frightened the snakes and they visualise snakes, they get bored with that eventually and anxiety wears off.
Speaker 1:But the people come into therapy and they say I've been worrying about snakes or worrying about losing my job for hours every day for years and I'm still just as anxious if not worse. So that seems odd. Like why doesn't anxiety just wear off? Why don't they get bored thinking about it? It's because of the cognitive avoidance model of worry, Scott, which is developed by Borkevec, the psychologist that we met earlier.
Speaker 1:And he also noticed something really cool. Right? So luckily, we used a very convenient example. As you said earlier, if we put Indiana Jones in a room full of snakes, his heart rate is going to go up quite noticeably, it's going go up a lot, like 140 beats per minute, maybe something like 120. When people worry, even if they have pathological worry disorder, like generalised anxiety disorder, Borkovic noticed something and other researchers noticed something weird about this.
Speaker 1:But I remember earlier also call back to something I mentioned earlier, I said there's different types of anxiety. There's PTSD, there's generalised anxiety disorder, there's phobias and social anxiety and stuff like that all different. Berkovec wired these kids up to heart rate monitors and skin galvanometers and stuff like that, respiratory monitors and a psychology department and he said like start worrying And people would say, I'm really worried and get quite anxious and stuff, but their heart rates didn't go up. Or if they did go up, they went up a little bit, they didn't double and it would be very rare for them to increase that Most of just got like 10 beats per minute or something. But actually even weirder, in some cases, the heart rate went down.
Speaker 1:That's paradoxical because it's the opposite of what we'd expect. What the hell is going on? Like this guy's worrying, like he's pathologic, severe pathological worrying. He says he's suffering intense anxiety, his heart rate has actually gone down. And he's not really showing other physiological symptoms of worrying either, except one, which is muscular tension.
Speaker 1:Right? So he and people with generalised anxiety disorder often complain of tension headaches, or pain in their neck and shoulders and stuff like that. And so Borkovic said, well, maybe worrying, although people think when they're worrying, they're dwelling a lot on the problem, maybe they're doing the opposite. Maybe worrying is a form of avoidance. Gosh.
Speaker 1:Worrying is a form of avoidance. All this time you've been thinking I've been thinking about my problems all day long every day, you're avoiding thinking about your problems buddy, by worrying about them. Why? How could that be possible? Like it seems deeply paradoxical.
Speaker 1:Well, first of all, is predominantly verbal, not visual. And for that reason, it tends to be abstract and vague. Whereas for imaginal exposure therapy to work, what we call habituation has to be concrete. It's usually visual, right. And it tends to involve kind of jumping around.
Speaker 1:So I worry about I'm all over the place, a butterfly mind worrying about different aspects of the problem. So I'm not confronting one aspect of it for long enough to habituate to it. First of all, it would be like if you visualise the room full of snakes, but you're really just jumping around picturing lots of different images of snakes, that won't lead to habituation, you need to stay with the same image more or less until the anxiety wears off. But if you're just thinking of lots of different images, or you're just thinking about talking about in a really vague way, won't habituate. So people who worry verbally, their anxiety never goes up as high as it would in a phobia.
Speaker 1:Because of that, it never goes down. It's maintained a kind of threshold level permanently. So it's deeply toxic, right? So you're kind of keeping yourself keyed up and on the edge of it and maintaining the muscular tension, because you're not allowing yourself to feel the other physiological symptoms, which you'd have to do in order to get past them. So worrying is a form of maintaining, permanently maintaining anxiety.
Speaker 1:And also, when people are worrying that they're avoiding, it's a form of subtle avoidance that preventing themselves from really experiencing the unpleasant feelings fully. Like so they have some unpleasant feelings, but they're masking it by the constant internal dialogue. They keep distracting themselves over. So they feel like distract, feel distract, feel distract, like they're kind of going round and round and round and round in circles rather than just going in the room with snakes and waiting. So if I worry about losing my job, if I was to do that as a marginal exposure, I would visualise my boss, what is that P45 or something?
Speaker 1:Like I'd visualise my boss telling me that I'm fired. And I would just maybe make a little movie clip and just go through that repeatedly. Or I just focus on an image of it until the anxiety wears off. But if I'm having a whole debate about it goes round and round, then the anxiety will never go away. I'll just perpetuate it.
Speaker 1:So a simplified version of that really simple is if you're worrying about something, an easy thing you could try doing is replace the verbal worrying with visual exposure. So visualise in a more slowed down and static way the stuff that you're talking about until you get used to that. And so one of the things that goes on, this is one of the last things that I want to mention, we'll kind of wrap up in a minute. Also everyone's favourite neologism catastrophising. Worrying is just can be defined as a series of catastrophising thoughts.
Speaker 1:So catastrophising is when we kind of blow a threat out of proportion. And worrying often takes the form of questions. So typically, I said the model for anxiety from Richard Lazarus earlier was what if something awful happens, how will I cope? Basically. So those are the two questions that people ask over and over.
Speaker 1:What if I get hit by bus, how will
Speaker 2:I cope? What will I do? What if I lose my job?
Speaker 1:What if my girlfriend dumps me? I've got
Speaker 2:no idea what to do. What will I do?
Speaker 1:So these questions that involve an overestimation of the probability of a threat and an overestimation of the severity of the threat and an underestimation of my coping resources or coping ability. So because it's framed as questions that are never answered, it keeps going round and round and round as circles. So often we can kind of question, is that actually as likely to happen as I think? Even if it did happen, would it be as bad as I think? And even if it was as bad as I think, would I be as incapable of coping with it and recovering from it as I'm telling myself?
Speaker 1:So this kind of constant sense of looming catastrophic threat and total inability to cope is a recipe for neurotic or pathological worrying, basically. And de catastrophising would be training yourself to view the situation more rationally and realistically, and also to have a more realistic and more constructive appraisal of your ability to cope. So one way of doing that is the fabled decatastrophising via time projection, which sounds like an episode of Doctor Who or something. Decatastrophising via time projection, as I like to call it, notice, when you worry about stuff, it's something in the future that you're thinking about. It's future, it's very future focused, that's partly why it's not grounded in the here and now.
Speaker 1:That's why noticing the colours around you, noticing your breathing snaps out of worry. Worry is all about something in the future, you have to stretch, suspend your mind into the future like in order to worry properly. But when you're thinking about the future, you're thinking about a period of time. There's a weird arbitrariness about that, right? Why wouldn't you think about what happens next?
Speaker 1:Why do you only think about your boss handing you a P45 or sacking you or whatever and not go on to think about what was happening the next day and the day after that and the week after that. So sometimes we call this turning what if thinking, what if this happens? What if that happens? What if this happens? What if that happens?
Speaker 1:That's worrying. Turn it into so what if thinking, so what if I lose my job, so what if my girlfriend dumps me? And when you are able to frame it like that it's easier to then, you naturally feel more like going on and saying well so what if I lose this job, I'll just start a business or I'll find another job. So what if my girlfriend dumps me, there's plenty more efficiency or I'll find someone else. The question we ask in therapy, and this is really easy.
Speaker 1:This is like the easiest thing I do in therapy. It's almost so easy. Like, I'm not sure that I should charge money for it. But this is like an easy thing, things that therapists do that are tricky and require skill and experience. And then there's other things that are piece of cake and any idiot could do.
Speaker 1:Right? And then one of them is to ask people, well, what will probably happen next? So someone will come in and say, oh, my girlfriend might dump you and I'm really worried about it. You can say, well, suppose that your girlfriend did dump you, what would probably happen next? And that's usually bad, They say, I sat home and I'd cry.
Speaker 1:And then you said, well, what will probably happen next? Suppose you sat home and you cried, what will probably happen? Well, I'd just be really withdrawn and depressed for a while. Suppose that happened, what would probably happen next? Well, I guess eventually, I'd go on Tinder or whatever.
Speaker 1:Or what will probably happen next? Well, probably can I knocked back a few times or what else? What will probably happen next? Well, I guess eventually, I'll meet somebody and go, what will probably happen next? Well, maybe I'll have a few dates and don't know what will probably happen next?
Speaker 1:Well, I guess eventually I'll meet somebody. And if you keep going forward long enough, eventually somebody will picture themselves recovering from the setback. So first of all, though I've broadened their chronological perspective, that tends to mitigate the emotional impact of the feared catastrophic event. And secondly, sneakily, that you've forced them to think about coping strategies. What will probably happen next is a roundabout where you say, what are you going to do next?
Speaker 1:So I guess I'll do this, I guess I'll do that. Now your low estimate, your underestimate of your coping ability is going to have to come up. That's part of what causes that, I don't know what will do, what will probably happen next. Well, I guess I'll do this and I'll do that. Now you're thinking about what you're going to do, how you're going to cope and it doesn't seem that crazy.
Speaker 1:It seems pretty straightforward. Actually, I guess it's obvious what I do. If you go from thinking, like, how will I be able to cope to thinking, I guess it's obvious what I'd have to do, then your anxiety will and stress will tend to reduce, right? And one way of doing that is just nudge, nudge, nudge, what will probably happen next, what will happen next, what will probably happen next. Why would you confine it to the worst part of the story and never move beyond that to think about how you would recover from it?
Speaker 1:It doesn't make any sense. We do a lot of things in life, Scott, that don't make any sense. So that reminds me of this technique that we mentioned earlier called the view from above. So one of the things that we know from modern psychological research, and this is our last technique, is that when people are angry or anxious or worried, they narrow their focus of attention, like putting the feared scenario or object under a magnifying glass, and we focus on negative events. And the Stoics had this technique called view from above, where they would imagine broadening their perspective, like looking down from the Acropolis and the Agora below.
Speaker 1:So Marcus Aurelius says imagine from some high watchtower, you're looking down on your life and the events that are unfolding. Basically broadening your chronological and spatial perspective and that allows you to not avoid the problem, you're still thinking about the problem, you're thinking about other stuff as well. So it gets watered down, it gets diluted, so it's not just a bad thing, there's also other things. So now you have a more complex, nuanced, balanced emotional response to the situation, you're not just taking the worst bit of it putting that under a magnifying glass. But we naturally do that when we're upset, and so broadening our perspective for a number of reasons naturally snaps us out of the trance and puts us in a more balanced functional frame of mind, like looking down from the acropolis.
Speaker 1:Asking what next, what next is a little, is a similar kind of technique. It forces us to stretch our perspective chronologically, but spatially as well. We call that the view from above. Or as Marcus Aurelius said, take a bird's eye view of the world. It's endless gatherings and endless ceremonies, many journeys in both storm and calm and the transformations of things coming to be existing and ceasing to be like everything has its lifespan, things coming and going, nothing lasts forever.
Speaker 1:Or as Abraham Lincoln famously said this too shall pass. So when you take the broader perspective it also encourages you to think about the transience of things because you expand your chronological perspective like there's you acknowledge change. If I think I've got really bad toothache at the moment, but it's not going to last forever. Like if I broaden my chronological perspective, and I think that something is temporary, in a sneaky way, that allows me to think about the presence of the toothache, and the absence of the toothache at the same time. And that will tend to moderate balance out my emotional reaction
Speaker 2:to it.
Speaker 1:How weird is that? But just by thinking about a broader perspective, so something really bad's happening, well it's going to be over in the future. So I'm now in a perfectly rational way, exposing my mind to both presence and the absence of the thing. Whereas if I don't do that, and I put it under magnifying glass, I'm only thinking about the presence of the thing. So I get the kind of rarefied, intensified, the essence of it, is going to be emotionally overwhelming for me and it doesn't really help me plan coping behaviour and stuff like that.
Speaker 1:So it's a recipe for disaster doing that. And that ladies and gentlemen is an introduction to stoicism, how to get started with stoicism and how to use stoicism to cope with worry or stop worrying. In a nutshell, what do you think of that Scott?
Speaker 2:Really good. I love it. There's so many techniques that people can take away. We can share the slides with the group. Yeah.
Speaker 1:If nothing else worrying in a Sean Connery voice.
Speaker 2:That's my favourite. I actually really like the finger and then get a finger puppet.
Speaker 1:Get a little puppet, finger bob, go, nobody likes me. Everybody hates me. What if everybody thinks I'm an idiot? What if go on a day and the girl doesn't like me? If you do that for long enough, it just seems ridiculous.
Speaker 1:You go, I can still think about it. But why would they even bother about worrying about something like that? It's just when we are looking at things like I could equally think, maybe it doesn't matter that much.
Speaker 2:It's good. There's something I plucked out from the comments. I think we said by Lee, she's gone now. She said, my little girl has been just asked, mommy, how does this man know all of this stuff? I said that he's learned it.
Speaker 2:She said, right, I'm going to get a book, I want to be that smart.
Speaker 1:That's good. I've an even better answer. Like I used to tell my wee girl, people said Socrates was one of the wisest people that ever lived. I used to say to Poppy, my daughter. And I said, Do you know how he became one of the wisest people in history?
Speaker 1:And Poppy would say, I don't know, daddy. And I said, because he asked lots of questions. He asked all the most important questions he could think of. He was known for asking questions. He listened very carefully to the answers.
Speaker 1:So reading books is good, but also asking questions about things are very important as well if you want to learn a lot of stuff. And also saying things in public, because if you give talks and lectures and speak in public, then you learn. Because people will tell you, they might say Donald, I don't agree with something you said. All this stuff that people hate on the internet, you go on the internet and people said I was an idiot. But maybe you are.
Speaker 1:So maybe you said something and it is wrong, right? And so like, if you retreat from society, from other people, like one of the things you might avoid is getting correction from other people, you know, maybe they've got legitimate questions about stuff that you're saying. So I've been lucky over the years, I used to have to teach psychotherapists around a training school for them. And that's kind of like really, you know, a lot of people, like they'd rather have their teeth pulled, than stand all day long in front of a room, a psychiatrist and psychotherapist to teach them stuff. Like it's a notoriously argumentative, like me, right.
Speaker 1:And, but I got used to it pretty quickly. And after a while, I thought I can't look any more like an idiot than I do already. So I persevered with it. And I got quite good debating things in psychology. I did all day long, do it for like seven days in a row, all day every day.
Speaker 1:And that was the main part of my job. So going out, putting yourself out there and sharing your ideas and not being afraid of criticism and not being unafraid of making mistakes or looking stupid is one of the ways that you learn. You learn by trial and error. You have to make mistakes to learn.
Speaker 2:Yes, I like that. It's an important point to leave on. It's the start of the challenge. You're all going to make mistakes. You're going look stupid tomorrow trying to do some kicks.
Speaker 2:You're going to look stupid trying the worry technique and the first time you might go, Oh, that's a good thing. Yeah, I think a lot of people also, there's a lot Maybe we can leave on this because next week we're talking about values. I want to make sure that people engage in the zoom calls and the breakout rooms on video because they get the most out of it or on the yoga sessions, go on camera. What do you say to someone who is feeling anxious about just getting on the camera and talking because they might not do it?
Speaker 1:When you're talking to other people like social anxiety and stuff like that, again it kind of depends on the nature of their anxiety, but really focusing more on the other person than on yourself is known to often be an important way of overcoming self consciousness and anxiety. Train in modern psychotherapy, we train people to shift their attention more onto other people. And actually, like I said earlier about the here and now technique, and going, now I hear the pigeons outside and I can feel an edge of my shoulder. And one of the tricks we do is to, when you're talking to people just notice what colour their eyes are. And then you know, and actually started paying more attention to them, you know, maybe just kind of like, look at the clothes that they're wearing, like their hair, you know, maybe imagine that later on, you're going to try and draw a sketch of them.
Speaker 1:So you're like trying to pay more attention to the facial characteristics and stuff. And the more you pay attention to other people, especially if you practise that and get used to it, if you can see the other people you're talking to, that'll tend to reduce your anxiety. Or I mean, I suppose even if you can't see them, try and identify what your biggest fear is. I don't know, they're going to think you're boring or they're going to think you're stupid or whatever. And then just do a diffusion on it, like go, everything's so stupid, everything's just erasing on it.
Speaker 1:Just repeat it like forty five seconds until you're bored of saying it and then the words just seem like gobbledygook after a while. Then it won't really bother you as much.
Speaker 2:That's good advice. So next on tomorrow's Zoom for the martial arts day, let's take the advice. But yeah, we're back every Monday with Donald for this challenge. So it's going to be good next week, same time, same place, Donald, you're in.
Speaker 1:The races are
Speaker 2:going to take you, those dogs are not going to eat your life.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of dogs outside. The pigeons, pigeons don't get me.
Speaker 2:Well, a lot of love for you tonight, Donald. Everybody's saying it's been amazing.
Speaker 1:Thanks. That's very nice of them. They're good people, Scott.
Speaker 2:They're really good people in name, really nice people. Yeah. Learning on this in a night, take a diving into stoicism. That's something only 0.0001% of people would do with their time on a Monday evening. So they're in the elites of stoicism right now.
Speaker 1:It's true.
Speaker 2:It's of learning. So it's good. But yeah, we'd be back next week, everyone. Donald, can I share the slides with the gang? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, cool.
Speaker 1:I'll send you a link. Yeah. Can share them.
Speaker 2:Nice one guys, thank you so much for tuning in for the first one. We'll be back next week, so don't worry and I'll be distilling all this wisdom.
Speaker 1:Bye everyone.
Speaker 2:Bye everyone. There we are.
