Episode #070 - Transcript

Thank you for wanting to know more today than you did yesterday, and I hope you love the show.

Oh, look at this episode! Isn’t it neat? Isn’t it wonderful that it is complete? Wouldn’t you think that a girl, a girl would want at least something? That’s The Little Mermaid. That’s what I chose to do with the last 10 seconds of my life. This is what I do with my time, by the way. I make horrible renditions of songs that have to do with whatever I’m thinking about in that 10-second interval of my life. And just be fortunate that you don’t have to be annoyed by me constantly. It’s only half an hour a week.

That said, this week has been a really tough week for me creatively speaking. This episode that I’ve been agonizing about for weeks now has proven to be very difficult to make into something interesting that anybody cares about. If you remember from last week’s episode, it’s on Kant, Hegel, and Schleiermacher: their respective views on the philosophy of religion. But I’m cursed, you guys, I’m cursed with an illness, a disease of sorts. I care a lot about the quality of this show that I give you guys every week. I feel like the episode just is not done yet. It’s not there. And while I know I’m disappointing a few people out there—I’m sure there’s a few people that wanted to hear exactly about that today—look, please be understanding of me. Please be patient, because I have to contend with the fact that if I release an episode that isn’t great, that episode isn’t just out that week. It lives in infamy forever.

I mean, just think about it from my perspective, alright? If I release a bad episode, two years from now when all of us listening to this have long forgotten about it, there may be some starry-eyed kid out there writing a term paper or something, struggling with Schleiermacher’s philosophy of religion. And they may turn to me for clarity on that subject. And I would fail them in that case simply because I was impatient. I released an inferior product, and I wanted to get an episode out. I don’t want to just make good content with this show. I want to make great content despite any crazed New Year’s resolutions I make to myself about getting one episode out per week. And if it takes away a couple weeks from our original programming, I think that’s a small price to pay, especially when there are so many other interesting discussions to be had.

See, because lucky for me, all week long I’ve been getting tons of feedback about the moodiness episode that we did a few weeks ago. And by the way, just want to make it clear how grateful I am for the discussion, you guys. Thank you for writing me. It’s so fun to talk with people about this stuff. And the only reason I do this show is to get people to think about why they think and act the way they do, to get people talking about that stuff. And it feels great getting so much response for one of these episodes.

But that said, throughout reading all of this feedback that I’ve gotten this week, I realized there was some commonality among the questions that people were asking, things that I probably should clarify. And that’s what I’d like to address in this episode. Hopefully we can continue and broaden this discussion a bit. I’d like to keep talking to you guys about it because, quite frankly, there are many more interesting conversations to be had. So, let’s do it. What do you guys say?

Alright, it seems to me—correct me if I’m wrong—that one common thread among the responses and questions that I got over Twitter and email seems to be that, generally speaking, most of us seem pretty comfortable continuing this conversation accepting the premise that somebody being a moody person has at least something to do with them lacking tactics or skills in the area of dealing with extreme negative or positive emotional states. Now, if we’re accepting that as a premise, then I think a really good criticism of me—a really good criticism on the first episode on moodiness—is that I talked about these people out there that we call non-moody people. I talked about a plethora of different examples of these systems that these people use to try to mitigate these emotions that they don’t want. But what I didn’t do is I didn’t give any details about these systems. Or specifically, if you were using them, what actionable tips or techniques would these systems recommend if you were a person, ostensibly, that wants to try to be less moody?

So, if there’s anyone out there like me, someone who’s constantly trying to hone their skills of being better at this, being better at being a master of their emotions, then this episode is for you. It’s going to hopefully clarify a lot of the things that we talked about on the non-moody side of the argument last episode. It’s going to give you a few of these systems that might pique your interest and cause you to look into them more. And then we’re going to talk about how why which system that you choose eventually to help you on this quest—it might not matter in the slightest bit.

Let’s start with the one that we referenced multiple times last episode, stoicism. Hellenistic age, death of Alexander wreaks havoc among the life of the average citizen. Adversity and grief becomes an ever-present part of someone’s life in the Mediterranean Sea region. And schools of philosophy start to develop that concern themselves with dealing with the negative emotions that come from this rootless, often tragedy-filled existence. Stoicism is one of the most popular.

Now, a stoic would listen to the episode on moodiness that we did two episodes ago, and they would, well, pretty much think of me as a moron. I mean, they would lambaste me for just wantonly throwing around this word “emotion” as though it’s that simple, as though it’s self-explanatory. They’d probably criticize me and say, “Is it even useful to use a term as broad as emotion? I mean, what is emotion, Stephen West? What is it? Do you even know? Is that maybe talking about a range of feelings that’s far too broad to ever make real progress on understanding it?” A stoic might ask me, “Look, if you want to learn more about basketball, do you study all of sports? No, maybe the term ‘sports’ can be broken down into multiple parts that might focus our attention on the right things. And in that same way, maybe the term ‘emotion’ can be as well.”

A classical stoic would tell me that they divide what I regard as emotions into two categories: passions and feelings, both of which are in their own respective ways inexorably connected to the value judgments that we make about things going on in the world around us. For example, let’s say you called in sick to work. And the next day you find yourself in a really bad mood because you’re stressed out about the fact that your boss is going to be mad at you. He’s going to chew you out. He’s going to fire you. And oh my god, wouldn’t that be horrible if I lost my job? What am I going to do if I lose my job? You start to worry about it. It starts to wear on you. You start to be in a bad mood, right?

Well, a stoic would say that the root of that bad mood that you find yourself in is that you are inappropriately concluding that losing your job would be a bad thing for you. Can you really say that that would be a bad thing for you? Who are you to say that? See, to a stoic, freedom from being rag-dolled around by these “bad” things that might happen to you is really just freeing yourself from making that value judgment that things are bad altogether. They would say that you have really no business creating your own set of values, your own set of what things in this world would be good or bad for you if they happened to you, that to do so is dishonest, and that a true stoic sage, if you could become one, wouldn’t care either way. They wouldn’t care whether they got fired for calling in sick or they got a promotion for calling in sick because they understand the truth to the stoics, which is that the only things that can be said to be good or bad are virtue and vice, and that to make these grandiose proclamations that some thing in the external world is bad for you is just wrong.

So, for us as modern people looking at this system, I mean, this is a pretty interesting tactic, right? It’s a pretty interesting approach at quelling these negative emotions that might put us in a bad mood. The stoics, their strategy in this is just to sort of cut the legs out from underneath the whole exercise. They say that to even make the value judgment at all that anything is good or bad is not your place. So, obviously, if you’re not engaged in the process of judging things happening around you as good or bad and you’re just accepting your fate, as the stoics would say, well, you’re obviously not controlled by these “bad” things. Things are not good things or bad things in that world; they’re just things. They just are.

And the stoics realized that not everyone would ever get to this point. The stoic sage, the embodiment of good character, is mostly just a paradigm to strive for, not necessarily something that anyone would ever actually reach. So, this isn’t all they have to say about improving your emotional state. They give all sorts of techniques for even us little people, well, that is if you’re the type of little person that’s interested in using stoicism to get better at being a happier and less moody person.

So, another tenant of stoicism is that, fundamentally, when you just think about what you are as a human being navigating this planet, what are you really? What is this concept of “I?” See, to the stoics, you are not your body, really. You know, it’s kind of interesting to think about. Whatever you are, you don’t begin and end where your skin begins and ends, right? Like, you don’t begin and end where your epidermis begins and ends. You’re not a collection of skin and bones to the stoics. What you are is a mind, a mind that is temporarily occupying this physical body. And the significance of this, if you want to be a less moody person to the stoics, is that you can’t control anything that happens to you in the world around you. Starts to sound familiar, right? You can’t control if the guy cuts you off in traffic. You can’t control if the guy at the supermarket was mean to you. The only thing you can control is how you interpret and respond to that information in your mind, hence the statement that fundamentally we are minds and not our bodies.

Now, there are several exercises the stoics give us that try to help us control this interpretation and response to the things we can’t control in the world. One of the most famous and, I think, the most effective is the preemptive pessimistic meditation at the start of your day. And it goes like this. A quote by Marcus Aurelius, “Begin each day by telling yourself: Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness—all of them due to the offenders’ ignorance of what is good or evil.”

Now, what Marcus Aurelius is advising you to do in this quote is to cultivate lower expectations about stuff. If regularly people cut you off in traffic and you get mad about it, or if your coworker steals your lunch and it gets you mad all the time, begin the day by telling yourself—Marcus Aurelius would say—“I will be cut off in traffic today. I expect it. That lazy, inconsiderate person at my office will take my lunch today. I’m expecting it.” Well, the thinking is, by doing this, when you’re on the road and someone cuts you off in traffic, you’re going to frame that experience entirely differently. You’re going to look at it and say, “See, I called it. I knew it. Standard practice, people cut you off in traffic.” And when it doesn’t happen, it’s a pleasant surprise, by the way, as opposed to the alternative, which is navigating life with this covert expectation that everyone’s always going to drive perfectly all the time.

So, in that world you drive to work and no one’s cutting you off in traffic, and you say, “See, standard. This is how it should be. People should never cut you off in traffic. They should just pay attention.” And when it doesn’t happen and someone does cut you off in traffic, well, you’re furious about it. By having high expectations of these things you can’t control, the only two outcomes are either neutral—this thing met my expectations—or I’m mad at it. Whereas the alternative, having low expectations of the things you can’t control, the two outcomes are either neutral—what I expected happened—or I’m pleasantly surprised. Which do you think is a better recipe for being a happy person?

Now, I could talk about stoicism all day, but I got to move on. Let’s talk about another one. Let’s talk about another tactic someone might use to mitigate negative emotions. How about mindfulness meditation? Personally, this one has been lifechanging for me. It has its roots in Buddhism or Vedism. But it would be kind of misleading or wrong to think of mindfulness meditation as a Buddhist thing because, well, there are tons of variants of it that have nothing to do with Buddhism. And quite frankly, Buddhism is a much more complex and beautiful thing than a single tactic that someone might use to not be such a baby all the time like I am.

Now, what mindfulness mediation would ask, if you wanted to be a less moody person, is what exactly is the problem when we find ourselves in a bad mood? What caused that? Well, negative moods are really just a byproduct of negative thoughts arising, right? It’s pretty genius. I mean, we often think of a bad thing happening which evokes in us a bad mood. And then our task with these systems, if we want to be a less moody person, is to find something that makes that bad mood go away. Mindfulness meditation would say that it’s not like a bad mood just arises out of nowhere. A bad mood only happens after several other steps have already taken place. Not the least of which is that we have had negative thoughts that have fueled this bad mood.

Now, if you’re just starting out with mindfulness mediation, what they say is that the goal is not to judge your thoughts. It’s not to judge whether a thought is good or bad at first. It’s just to observe your thoughts. And that eventually what happens after enough practice is that you become almost like a third-party observer of your thoughts, sitting on the sidelines watching—watching them rise, watching them fall, watching new ones rise. And that eventually after cultivating this skill for long enough, you can identify a negative thought as soon as it arises and just choose to observe it, watch it float past you. By doing these mental gymnastics every day, eventually you gain the skill of being much more mindful of what is going on in your head. And that gives you a tremendous amount of control over what goes on in your head.

As far as exercises go, there’s tons of them. The exercises they usually give at first to start this gym membership for your brain is usually just to sit quietly for 10 minutes, trying to be present, paying attention to your breathing, trying to calm the mind. And just sort of watching. Not judging, just observing your thoughts.

So, another system somebody might use to be a less moody person is positive thinking. Now, I’m going to guess that most of us listening to this don’t need some lengthy explanation for this one. There are hundreds of different books you can buy with slight variations of this theme. But the general theme is, look on the bright side of things. That no matter how seemingly dire or tragic or hopeless a situation may seem, there is always some positive spin that you can put on it. There’s always some great opportunity that you can take out of every situation and choose to focus on instead of the negative feelings.

Exercises widely vary here, of course. But they may include maybe something as simple as just going throughout your day practicing this skill of pointing out the positive spin on things. I’m at the grocery store. “Oh, yeah, yes, this person may be taking 12 years of my life to buy 3 things at the self-checkout. But, wow, what an incredible opportunity to practice the virtue of patience that I’ve always wanted to work on. You know, I should be thanking this person for taking so long, because without them I would have never been able to practice this and become a more virtuous person.” Or maybe, “Oh, yeah, my car broke down. Yeah, I just took it to the mechanic, and the problem that he said he fixed—car broke down again. I have to walk three miles to the nearest payphone. But wow! What a great opportunity to exercise, right? I’ve been needing to lose a few pounds. This shoddy mechanic that I could be mad at but I’m not—he has just made it possible for me to not let my dreams be dreams. Make your dreams come true!”

Anyway, there are thousands of these systems out there: cognitive behavior therapy—another really good one—Epicureanism, visualization, Christianity, Islam. There’s no shortage of these systems that may bring us comfort. The reason people are moody people is not for lack of information, really. I mean, really, you could go on Google right now and literally for the rest of your life spend every second just reading about all of these different tactics and techniques that people use to try to make the quality of their emotional states better. There’s tons of information out there. The real problem that we need to consider—and in my opinion, the more important side of this discussion—is how do we implement these systems?

You know, what stops someone from making sustainable change in any behavior that they want to change is rarely a lack of ideas or information as to how to stop it. It’s the execution of that plan. You know, I’d compare it to diet and exercise. Let’s say you want to go on a diet and lose 50 pounds. What stops someone from making lasting change is not that they have a shortage of diets to choose from. A simple search on the internet—you could do the Atkins diet, South Beach diet, paleo diet, ketogenic diet. There are thousands of diets out there just like there are thousands of systems for becoming a less moody person. And invariably, by the way, if you went to any one of the websites for those diets, you would find dozens of testimonials on each one of them from people telling you about how it worked. “I lost 50 pounds in 7 weeks!” “I lost 12 inches off of my waste! I’m in the best shape of my life!” You would see that on every website.

Now, if every one of these systems that are reasonable have people seeing significant results, then when you’re asking yourself the question “Well, what’s the best diet if I want to lose 50 pounds?” it seems in that case that what the best diet is for you might not be affected by the fact that one of the diets is somehow way better than all the other ones. It might not be affected by the fact that, you know, the Atkins diet is the greatest diet ever. They’ve found it! The people at the Atkins’ pentagon have put their heads together, and they’ve found the secret to weight loss. So, if that’s the case, it begs the question, what makes someone more successful than someone else? How do you ever determine what the best diet is for you?

Well, maybe it’s not a lack of the right information, necessarily. Maybe there’s no secret. Maybe the best diet is just the diet that you’re going to stick to. I think what happens when we try to condition ourselves into being less moody people is we become disillusioned by all the options out there. We read about all of these different techniques to try to bring ourselves into a better mood when we’re in a bad one, but we don’t really think about the how of it. We don’t think about how we’re actually going to implement these techniques in the long term. You know, we’ll meditate one time. It’ll make us feel anxious and uncomfortable just being still. Your first time being still and just present, it’s very uncomfortable. You’ll do it one time, and then you’ll just give up, fall back into your old ways.

We’ll try the positive thinking thing for a couple days, right? And it’s a lot of effort. Then, inevitably, on the third or fourth day we’ll just fall back into our old patterns. We don’t want to try that hard anymore. Just listen to that. Doesn’t it sound just like the pattern of somebody when they go on a diet and fail? They’re on it for three days and then they quit. Can’t we all relate to that? Haven’t we all done that at some point? I know I have.

When you’re trying to change a behavior, when you’re trying to get some momentum and start dieting and exercising every day, it can be really tough to find the willpower to go to the gym every day and eat a kale salad instead of a peperoni pizza. For some people, at each and every one of these decision points—whenever they eat, whenever they’re making the choice of whether to go to the gym or not—it can be a real struggle to conjure up that willpower. They practically have to give themselves a motivational speech like it’s halftime at the Superbowl just to muster up the willpower to get on the treadmill.

And I think from here it would be easy to say to ourselves—I’ve heard a lot of people say this before. I get very sad when I hear it—“Well, I eat bad, and I don’t go to the gym because I’m a weak person. I’ve conceded. I’ve tapped out. Willpower is a finite resource. We’re all born with a different amount. And I just don’t have enough willpower left in the tank every day to muster the motivation to make lasting change of my behavior. These people that go to the gym, these people that do eat healthy, they were born with more willpower than me. They’re just stronger people than I am.” I’ve even heard some people say they’re just better people.

Well, I disagree. I think this is a complete steaming pile of malarky. Hogwash, fiddlesticks! What I’d say to this person, and what I have said to this person, is ask any one of those people—any one of those people that go to the gym every day and they eat healthy every day that are supposedly better people than you—ask them if they go through the same sort of mental struggle that you do. I guarantee you, each and every one of them would say that, to them, going to the gym every day, eating healthy, it’s not an exercise of willpower every day. It’s just what they do. When they eat lunch, when they’re at that decision point, they don’t agonize over the decision of “Well, I guess I could eat this salad, but I could also get a double quarter pounder with cheese!” No, they have salad for lunch every day, and this is just what they do. When it’s time to go to the gym, they don’t sit there and agonize about “Well, I could go to the gym, but I could also sit and home and just Netflix and chill.” No, the gym is part of their daily routine. It isn’t an exercise of will for them. They’re not using up that finite resource of willpower. It’s a habit.

We should all be able to understand this, by the way. Every morning when it’s time to take a shower—or every night, whenever you take a shower—when it’s time to take a shower for the day or put on deodorant for the day, do you have to give yourself the same sort of halftime motivational speech to muster up the willpower to do that stuff? No. No, you just do it. It’s part of your routine. You don’t give yourself the choice not to do that stuff. It’s a habit for you at this point.

Please don’t lose sight of the metaphor here. This is not a diet and nutrition podcast. I’m not Richard Simmons. What I’m saying is, changing the habits of thought that lead to health and fitness is the exact same process as changing the habits of thought that lead to being a person less enslaved by the things that we can’t control around us in the world. And knowing that, it doesn’t really matter so much what “diet” you pick—stoicism, Buddhism, positive thinking. People see results with all of them. The question is, which one vibes the best with you? Which one are you the most excited about implementing so that you can get some momentum behind you and form a habit where meditating each morning isn’t something you have to get up and talk yourself into doing anymore? No, just like taking a shower or putting on deodorant, you just wake up and observe your thoughts.

Momentum, my friends. Momentum is the key to sustainable, long-term change. And in that way, the best system for being a happier person—not being enslaved by the things around you—may not be some magical one where they found the secret to happiness. It may just be the one that you’re going to stick with, the one that you’re going to like long enough for those habits to form.

Thank you for listening. I'll talk to you next time.