The One You Feed: A Conversation With Lisa Feldman Barrett

Based on your past experience,

Your brain is creating concepts as guesses of what's going to happen next.

Welcome to The One You Feed.

Throughout time,

Great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have.

Quotes like,

Garbage in,

Garbage out,

Or you are what you think ring true.

And yet,

For many of us,

Our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us.

We tend toward negativity,

Self-pity,

Jealousy,

Or fear.

We see what we don't have instead of what we do.

We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit.

But it's not just about thinking.

Our actions matter.

It takes conscious,

Consistent,

And creative effort to make a life worth living.

This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction.

How they feed their good wolf.

Thanks for joining us.

Our guest on this episode is Lisa Feldman Barrett,

PhD.

Lisa is a university distinguished professor of psychology at Northeastern University with appointments at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital.

Dr.

Barrett has published over 200 peer-reviewed scientific papers appearing in Science,

Nature Neuroscience,

And other top journals in Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience,

As well as six academic volumes published by Guilford Press.

Her new book is How Emotions Are Made,

The Secret Life of the Brain.

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Thanks again for listening.

And here's the interview with Lisa Feldman Barrett.

Hi Lisa,

Welcome to the show.

Thanks so much for having me on your show.

Your book is called How Emotions Are Made,

The Secret Life of the Brain.

I'm always interested in how the brain works and how emotions and the link between thinking and emotion and all of that.

And I will say,

I was saying to you before the call,

Your book legitimately is a bunch of new ideas that I have not been exposed to before and I'm excited to cover.

I've been a little bit flummoxed as to how I'm going to cover all the great stuff that's in the book in the timeframe we have,

But I will do my best.

So let's start like we always do with the parable.

There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson.

He says,

In life,

There are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle.

One is a good wolf,

Which represents things like kindness and bravery and love.

And the other is a bad wolf,

Which represents things like greed and hatred and fear.

And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second and looks up at his grandfather and he says,

Well,

Grandfather,

Which one wins?

And the grandfather says,

The one you feed.

So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

Well,

I think in the work that I do,

The parable reminds me immediately of our theory of human nature and that really comes from ancient Greece.

So it comes from ancient Western civilization,

The idea being that deep inside us,

We have appetites like hunger and thirst,

The desire for sex and so on.

We have emotions,

Which Plato referred to as the passions.

And he depicted these as two wild beasts,

Wild stallions that were controlled by our rationality,

Which he depicted as a human chariot driver who controlled these wild beasts.

And throughout the last several thousand years,

Pretty much all of our ideas about the human mind,

The human brain,

Human nature more generally,

At least in this Western tradition,

Have been based on this idea that buried deep inside of us,

We have these animalistic urges,

Instincts,

Emotions that often lead us to do very bad things.

We have also as humans,

This virtuous rational ability,

Which,

You know,

At the best of times,

Controls our inner beast and but sometimes fails to do so.

And that's when we behave very badly.

This idea is you can find it in US law,

You know,

The legal system is founded on this view of the human mind.

And you can see it in neuroanatomy,

For example,

For many,

Many years,

People believed that the neocortex,

What's called incorrectly,

Actually,

The neocortex,

The cortex in the brain was the home or the seat of cognition or rationality and controlled emotion.

So for many years,

It was believed that we had some kind of lizard brain.

This is where our instincts live and surrounding that was a limbic system,

What's called a limbic system,

The amygdala and so on,

Which is where emotions live.

And then surrounding that and controlling that was the cerebral cortex,

Which is the seat of rationality.

And this idea that the human brain evolved in sedimentary layers and that really the human mind is this battle between battleground between rationality and emotionality with emotionality standing in for these animalistic emotional instincts,

Which causes to do terrible things and rationality,

Which is,

You know,

Virtuous.

This idea was sort of tattooed on the brain as a theory of or a model of human brain evolution.

And it's actually completely incorrect.

You know,

The human brain didn't evolve in sedimentary layers.

It's not organized in this kind of tiered way.

Nonetheless,

This is,

You know,

Remains a really popular view of how the brain works,

Both in the popular media and in industry and so on.

So the parable is a beautiful illustration of that,

I think.

And I think I probably have perpetuated that myth a little bit because of other people we've had on the show who share that idea of you've got this animal brain,

The lizard brain,

The amygdala is,

You know,

Blamed for all kinds of things,

Right?

And a key part of what you're saying in the book is that emotions don't live anywhere in the brain.

Emotions are,

Well,

We'll talk about what emotions are,

But more generally,

That the whole brain is involved in nearly everything that happens and that neurons are multipurpose.

We use them for lots of different things.

We use the term degeneracy,

Which is not,

We'll use it degenerate youth.

That's not what you mean in this case.

In this case,

What do you mean by degeneracy?

Yeah.

So let me just say a couple of things.

First of all,

The idea that we have some kind of lurking inner beast,

Which is controlled by rationality,

That model of the brain has been disproved,

I would say,

In the last hundred years in the study of evolutionary biology and neuroanatomy,

People have known for a really long time the brain's not organized that way.

So this is not just hearsay.

This is backed up by a tremendous amount of evidence.

An individual neuron doesn't do everything,

But it certainly does more than one thing.

And this is important for,

As you say,

The concept of degeneracy,

Which I think is a super unfortunate name.

I didn't make up this name.

This is an idea that has existed in biology for a number of years,

And it's the idea that any function that is performed in your body or in your brain can be performed in more than one way.

So you might say it's kind of like,

There's more than one way to skin a cat,

You know?

Or there are substitutions that can be made in recipes to make sure that the recipe proceeds as planned.

Or there's like 15 different ways to get to your house.

There's the roads that you take,

But there are so many others that will get you to the same place.

Exactly.

And so degeneracy is not the same as redundancy.

Redundancy is where the same solution,

The same mechanism is built in in lots of different ways.

But degeneracy is the idea that there's more than one way to create a behavior or a feeling or a thought.

So here's an example.

In neuroscience,

Sometimes scientists will breed animals like rats,

For example,

That are missing a gene.

They knock the gene out so that the animal doesn't have that gene so they can study what happens to behavior when the gene is missing.

And in about 30% of laboratory animals that have a gene knocked out,

The characteristic that is supposed to be dependent on that gene still appears,

Which means that there is more than one set of genes for every characteristic.

And this is why,

You know,

In genetics,

The study of genetics is really complicated because you can have a characteristic like height or weight or some personality characteristic like being really gregarious or really introverted.

These characteristics can be highly heritable,

Meaning they have a strong genetic component.

But no one knows what the genes are,

Because first of all,

There are groups of genes that will cause a characteristic,

Not a single gene.

And second of all,

There are different groups of genes that can cause the same characteristic.

That's the idea of degeneracy.

And it turns out that every biological system that's ever been studied,

From your immune system to your genes to your behavior and so on,

All have degenerate causes,

Meaning there's more than one cause for any physical or mental characteristic that you have.

I'm always struck by this idea of nature versus nurture and how obvious it is that it's both.

And what you're saying is taking that several steps beyond that very simple idea.

And it seems to me that all these things that we characterize very easily as two things I suffer from,

Depression and addiction,

Right,

We characterize them as if they're this thing.

And they seem so complex to me,

And there's so many causes and reasons and factors.

And everything that you're saying in the book really speaks to that at an even more fundamental level that not just a problem like depression or addiction,

But down to our very emotions themselves are not this simple little thing.

So if emotions aren't what we think they are,

They live at a place in the brain,

And they are this very specific thing,

Then what are emotions in your mind?

Well,

It's not just in my mind.

Let me rephrase that.

In your studies,

What have you found from emotion?

Yeah,

I think the important thing,

It's a scientific theory,

Which means not that it's a set of ideas,

But that it's a set of ideas that are backed up by a tremendous amount of scientific evidence.

The general description goes like this.

Your brain contains a set of networks that you can think about them like they are all purpose ingredients.

So if you go into your kitchen,

You can find flour and water and salt,

And you can make lots of recipes with flour and water and salt.

You can even make some things that aren't food,

Like glue with flour and water and salt.

In the same way,

Your brain has these multipurpose networks that you can think of as basic ingredients for making all mental states,

Not just emotions,

But also thoughts and perceptions and beliefs and memories and so on.

Part of what these networks do is they don't react to the world.

They actually anticipate or predict what's going to happen in each moment.

The reason why this is the case is that your brain is actually predicting.

It's predicting every sight and sound and smell and internal feeling from your body.

It's making these predictions.

They're kind of like guesses.

It's using your past experience to guess at what's going to happen in the next immediate moment.

Then it uses the information from the world and from your body to confirm those guesses and then they become your experience or to correct those guesses.

Sometimes when the evidence from the world doesn't match your guess,

You even just ignore the evidence and you just go with your guess and your belief becomes your experience.

Some of these guesses are emotions.

This is how emotions are made.

Some of these guesses are emotions.

When the brain makes a guess,

It's not making a single guess.

It's making a whole slew of guesses about what particular sensations might arise in the next moment and what they mean,

Where they come from,

What you should do about them.

In science,

We call these guesses concepts.

Based on your past experience,

Your brain is creating concepts as guesses of what's going to happen next.

And fundamentally,

Your brain is trying to make sense of sensations in your body and from the world with these guesses.

And it's doing this mainly because it's far faster and it keeps us safer and it is far cheaper metabolically.

Absolutely.

So one of the major constraints on our health actually and the functioning of the brain,

The evolution of the brain and so on is metabolic efficiency.

Our brains are super expensive organs,

But it's the most expensive organ in our whole body.

It takes up about 20% of our total metabolic budget.

And it's really important that the brain function efficiently and also regulate the body efficiently.

It's just much more efficient to guess in advance and correct that guess than it is to react to the world.

Engineers know this.

This is partly,

For example,

Netflix works like this,

Streaming video works like this,

MP3s work like this.

It's just much more efficient to predict and correct than it is to react.

And the main thing your brain is trying to do is trying to keep your body's budget in balance,

Your body's energy use in balance.

And it does this predictively.

What this looks like then,

To some extent means that what's coming in through my senses,

If it meets my predictions and simulations,

I may not process it any further than that.

So to a certain extent,

We're really not seeing the world as it is.

We are seeing it to a certain extent as we expect it to be.

Now again,

New information can come through and we can do things differently.

But this strikes me so much like the Buddhist or Zen concept of how we never really see anything.

All we're seeing are our concepts of things.

And that if you could actually pierce through that to see the moment freshly,

It would be a very different experience.

Absolutely.

If there's one thing that we can say that we pretty much know for sure at this point from a neuroscientific standpoint,

It's that we see the world as we believe it to be.

And oftentimes our beliefs correspond well enough to what's out there in the real world.

But we can't just pull back the curtains and see the world the way that it is without our concepts.

If we have no concepts for something,

If we can't make a concept on the fly,

Then we're experientially blind to that input.

So for example,

There are people who are born either congenitally,

They have cataracts or they have some kind of congenital problems with their corneas,

For example.

So no light enters the retina and can't make it to the brain.

So these people are functionally blind for their whole lives.

And then as adults,

They have corneal transplants or they have their cataracts removed.

And so for the first time,

Light enters the retina,

Makes its way from the optic nerve to the brain.

And all hell breaks loose.

Yeah.

So you would imagine that they'd be able to just see,

Right?

Right.

They'd see objects,

They'd see,

But that's actually not what happens.

What happens is they are experientially blind.

They see flashes of light.

They don't know what the flashes of light mean.

And as a consequence,

They have to learn to see.

And one fellow that I spoke to who has had this experience talked about it as learning a second language in a sense.

So all of his senses other than vision,

So smell,

Smell and hearing and touch,

And even the feelings from his body are all integrated into a unified whole.

And then vision stands apart like a second language.

So you could think of it like literally learning a second language in a sense.

When you hear a language that you've never had experience with before,

It just sounds like noise to you.

You don't even know where the word breaks are.

You have to learn that.

You're developing concepts.

And this is something that I explain in the book,

That concepts are necessary for our normal experience of the world.

Let's talk about the concept of interoception.

Did I say that correctly?

You did,

Yeah.

This more than anything else in the book is probably what blew my mind more than anything because the thought that emotions maybe don't live in one place and they're constructed and they're complex is certainly interesting.

It doesn't strike me as completely out of left field,

But the way that interoception works and the role that that plays in how we actually feel was one of the most interesting parts of the book to me.

So could you explain that process?

I can.

I think this is one of the most important aspects of the book in the sense that you talked about depression and addiction and there are a number of experiences or phenomena that we have every day in human life that are intimately tied to interoception.

So here's the way to think about it.

So one set of ingredients,

Let's say,

That your brain networks make are concepts that are important for making emotions and actually making every experience that you have.

The other thing though that those networks do is they control the systems in your body.

So you have an immune system,

You had an autonomic nervous system which controls your cardiovascular system,

Your respiratory system and so on.

You have a neuroendocrine system,

So this is hormones that control metabolism and all sorts of other things.

And these systems are also controlled predictively by your brain.

So for example,

If your brain is going to stand you up,

Before it does that,

It raises your blood pressure so that oxygen can get to your brain.

If it doesn't raise your blood pressure in advance of standing you up,

You'll faint,

Which would be very costly to you.

So the way to think about it is that your brain is trying to anticipate what your body needs and meet those needs before they arise.

Now when your brain is keeping your body's systems in balance,

It also has to track how well it's doing this.

And so your body sends sensory information to your brain.

This is what we call interoception.

So scientists make a distinction between sensations that come from the world,

Which they recall as exteroception,

Like external to you,

And the sensations that come from your body,

Which they call interoception.

Now if you look around the room or wherever your listeners are,

They look around,

They can see things in very high dimension.

They can see lots of detail,

Color,

Sharp edges,

And so on and so forth,

Shadows,

Bright light,

Et cetera.

But your brain is not wired for you to feel the sensations from your body in very high detail.

If you felt every sensation that came from every movement of every artery and nerve and muscle and cell,

That symphony of feeling would never allow you to pay attention to anything else in the world.

Philosophers sometimes call this tragic embodiment.

It's what all of us feel every time we have an upset stomach or a problem with our GI tract.

All your attention goes to the place that hurts and you pay attention to nothing else in the world.

It's a great concept.

As a consequence,

Most of the time you don't feel sensations from your body in a very precise way.

You sometimes can,

Like if you run up the stairs,

For example,

You might feel your heart beating.

But the interesting thing is that you're not actually,

That's not so much an interoception because the reason why you feel it is that your heart is beating against your chest.

So you're not feeling the heartbeat itself,

But you're feeling the feeling of when your heart is slamming against your chest wall.

So most of the time we experience the sensations from our bodies as simple feelings of feeling pleasant or feeling unpleasant,

Feeling comfortable or feeling distressed,

Feeling worked up or feeling calm.

And scientists call this affect.

So these simple feelings of affect when they're very strong,

When they're very intense,

We typically use that as an ingredient to make emotion.

But when they're less intense,

They are ingredients usually in other experiences like thoughts or perceptions.

So for example,

I should say sometimes even intense affect is a perception.

So when someone cuts you off on the highway and you know your experiences,

That guy is a total asshole.

That's a perception of the world that is infused with very strong affect.

The interesting thing is that most of the time we don't experience affect on its own.

We experience it as a part of an emotion or a part of a thought or a part of a perception of the world,

Perceptions of other people,

Perceptions of food.

And many of the illnesses that we have,

That we suffer from,

Are illnesses of our body systems being imbalanced and therefore us feeling a lot of distress,

A lot of discomfort.

And that discomfort can be experienced as depression or anxiety or other types of mood disorders.

Yeah,

I found that idea very interesting.

To go back to Buddhism again,

It really struck me if you look at Buddhist psychology,

There's this concept of there's sort of a core underlying feeling.

Feeling is probably not even the right word,

But it's kind of pleasant or unpleasant or neutral.

And that's exactly what you're talking about,

That our intero.

.

.

I can't say it right.

Say it for me again.

He did.

Interoception.

Interoception is sending us these basic feelings of generally pleasant,

Unpleasant.

And when they get a lot stronger,

Then we start to construct emotion.

But a lot of what you're saying is we get these feelings and then we interpret them.

So if I've got a stomach ache,

I have to try and figure out why I have a stomach ache.

So I'm going to make some guesses.

I'm going to try and figure out what it is.

I'm going to compare that against previous experiences.

I'm going to make a prediction that my stomach hurts because I'm hungry or my stomach hurts because every time I have to do an interview,

I get nervous or whatever the various things are.

And I just find that fascinating that we are taking very basic bodily sensations and those are the cause of a lot of what we think and feel.

Absolutely.

So the basic message here is that emotions don't happen to you.

Your brain makes them.

Emotions aren't your reactions to the world.

It's your brain making sense of your body in the world.

Your brain has to guess at what's going on inside your body,

Just like it has to guess at what's going on outside the world.

It makes those guesses slightly in advance and then it's either corrected or confirmed those guesses and they become your experience.

Those guesses,

Those concepts,

Their job really is to make sense of sensations so that you know what caused them and what to do about them.

So it's exactly the way that you described it.

You have a dull ache in your stomach.

That dull ache could be an indication that you're getting the flu.

It could mean that you're hungry.

It could mean that you're tired.

It could mean that you feel disgusted by something.

It could mean that you feel anxious.

It could mean that you feel longing for someone.

Your brain is able to make a prediction using concepts about what that ache in your stomach means in this situation that you find yourself in because you've had years and years and years of experience where that ache has occurred in different situations.

And so it's able to use that knowledge in order to make a prediction about what is the cause of the ache in this situation.

And that allows your brain to plan your behavior in an efficient,

Effective way so that you solve the ache and get your body systems back into balance.

I'd like to kind of shift direction here to talk about some of the practical applications of this.

But before I do that,

I just want to encourage listeners like we have really skimmed over a lot of really fascinating concepts,

A lot of really strong science that most of us just aren't exposed to.

So if you're interested in this sort of thing,

I strongly encourage you to get the book because we have really,

Really skimmed.

The number of pages and notes I have is staggering for this.

But I do want to turn some of this to like,

Okay,

Well,

What do I do with this?

So we're going to kind of cut this part a little bit short,

But it's all in the book.

I encourage people to take a look and kind of talk about what does this mean for us.

Because emotions for us at the end of the day,

We're very interested in controlling our emotions or adjusting our emotions.

And I want to start with what we were just talking about,

Which is that how much of this is physical and a couple things I think back to recovery in AA and there's a phrase in AA,

Halt,

Don't get too hungry,

Angry,

Lonely or tired.

And certainly two of those symptoms,

Hunger and tired are completely physical symptoms.

And yet they manifest themselves as emotion or they can manifest themselves as emotion very strongly.

I know like if I'm somewhere and I suddenly feel like I really want to drink,

It's most often that I'm either thirsty or hungry.

That's exactly right.

And the way that I would say it,

I would elaborate on what you've said is is something like this that every waking moment of your life is simultaneously physical and mental.

Every experience that you have has a mental component and a physical component.

And once you learn that the boundary between the mental and physical is porous,

You can play around with it.

You can have some control over how you experience things.

Sometimes when people talk about the connection between the mind and the body,

They're talking about it in a mystical sort of spiritual way.

In the book,

I talking about this in a very biologically real way.

I've explained what the relationship is biologically between the mind and the body just in the same way that I talk about.

Not that everything is a combination of nature and nurture,

But that nature can influence nurture and nurture can change nature in a very,

Very concrete fundamental way.

So for example,

If it's the case that your brain is trying to keep all of your systems in the body in balance,

You mentioned body budget.

And in the book,

I talk about how you can think about your brain sort of like the financial office of a company.

So just like in a company,

There are lots of branches and you have to keep them fiscally sound.

So a financial office will be shifting around resources to keep everything in balance and keep all the expenditures and the revenues kind of in balance.

This is also what your brain does with your body systems.

And when your body budget is out of balance,

You will feel distressed.

You'll feel uncomfortable.

If it's unbalanced for long enough,

You'll really feel very distressed.

This is what stress is actually.

Now you may experience this in many ways.

You don't just experience the disruption of your body budget.

You experience distress and your brain is making sense of what this distress is.

And you have control over how your brain makes sense of this.

So a simple example is many people when they're preparing for a test or a podcast or something where they're going to be evaluated,

They'll have some body budget disruption and they will feel activated,

Jittery.

This is actually a really normal feeling and it means that your brain is actually preparing your body to do something kind of challenging and it can be a good thing.

But most of the time people experience this as anxiety.

That's their automatic way that their brain makes sense of this jittery feeling is anxiety.

But you can teach people to use a borrow a phrase from my daughter's karate teacher.

You can teach people to experience this as getting your butterflies to fly in formation.

You are preparing for something tough and this is a good sign that your body is preparing for something tough.

And in fact,

This kind of reconceptualization of this jittery feeling helps people with test anxiety.

It helps them pass exams.

It improves their scores on standardized tests.

In certain cases,

It even allows them to finish college when they otherwise would have difficulty doing so and this makes a huge difference in their lives.

Here's another example.

People who suffer from chronic pain often become addicted to opiates.

But if they're trained using mindfulness meditation to decompose that painful feeling,

Deconstruct it into discomfort and distress,

They can learn to manage their distress differently without taking the opiates and they can stop their dependence on opiates.

Because opiates really in terms of pain,

What the opiates help you with is the distress part of pain,

Not so much the actual physical discomfort of pain.

Yes,

And hence the highly addictive nature to something.

I'm a former opiate addict so I'm very familiar with the phenomenon.

But we've talked about that before on the show,

This idea that pain is really a couple different things are happening.

There's the actual physical sensation and then there is everything else that you're calling distress that we sort of layer on top of it.

Yeah,

Exactly.

We make the distinction of pain versus suffering.

Pain is kind of inevitable but the suffering can be,

You could work with the suffering.

So the other main thing that this leads to and it's the thing you lead off first with like,

Okay,

I want to feel better,

What do I do,

Is take care of yourself,

Your body.

And like you say,

It's kind of boring and it's not very exciting and it's hard.

It's like,

Okay,

I got to eat right,

I got to sleep,

I've got to exercise.

And it's much more fun to read a book than it is to do those things or it's much more fun to take a pill than to do those things.

And I've just found out through years of trial and error that those very things for me are what moderate my depression more than anything else.

Absolutely.

If I do those things,

I'm relatively in good shape and when I stop doing them,

I just start to fall apart.

I mean,

I just mentally become miserable.

Absolutely.

And in the book,

I explain why this is the case.

If it's the case that your brain is managing your body system,

So it's managing your body's budget and if your budget becomes unbalanced,

You maybe make too much of a withdrawal,

You start to feel a lot of distress,

That's actually really hard to manage.

You're making it harder for your brain to manage your emotions.

So I know it sounds really,

As you say,

It sounds really boring.

I sound like a mother really rather than a neuroscientist,

But the neuroscience here is very clear.

If you want to control your emotions better,

If you want to be more of an architect of your own experience,

Then the first thing that you must do is you must get enough sleep,

You must get enough exercise and you must eat properly in a nutritious way.

I'm not saying,

Look,

You know,

I love French fries and I totally love chocolate.

I have a hard,

I would have a hard time turning down a piece of chocolate if somebody offered it to me.

But so I'm not saying don't have any fun.

I'm saying that you have to keep your body budget in balance.

You have to make sure that that you're not running a deficit.

People ask me,

What's the one,

If there's one thing that I could do to control my emotions better,

What would it be?

My answer is get enough sleep.

That's just the evidence is just overwhelmingly clear on this point.

That being said,

You know,

There are still going to be times where the sensations from your body are going to make strong affective feelings that are challenging to manage.

And there are other strategies that that you can that you can use that I talk about in the book.

I think the main thing to realize is that it's never going to be the case that you can snap your fingers and feel differently.

We're just not wired like that.

That being said,

The horizon of control over your emotions is much broader than you might imagine.

There are many,

Many more options that you have than you might imagine.

And the book talks about many of those options.

Yeah,

You've got a line that I love.

And you're talking about,

You know,

You've got to keep your you've got to keep your body budget in line,

So to speak.

And you say if they aren't,

And your body budget gets out of whack,

Then you're going to feel crappy,

No matter what self help tips you follow.

It's just a matter of which flavor of crap.

And that flavor of crap,

To a certain extent,

Is what we are predicting,

Correct?

We're getting these sensations from our body that say,

I feel like crap.

And then our brain interprets what that means.

Absolutely.

And it does this very automatically and with no effort whatsoever.

It's doing it really without your awareness.

So one thing that you can do to improve the control of your emotions is to invest a little bit of effort in the moment to cultivate new experiences.

If it's really the case that your brain is using the past to make predictions about the immediate future,

Which become your present experience,

Then if you cultivate experiences,

New experiences in the present,

It's like seeding your brain to make new concepts or new experiences very automatically in the future.

So that's one thing that you can do.

That's a strategy.

Another one that you mentioned that I'd like you to explain why it's important is that understanding emotion and being more granular,

Being able to describe how we feel in more granular terms versus just bad,

Maybe into being able to deconstruct sad or angry and deconstruct even further,

You say helps.

Why is that useful?

Well,

You've mentioned a couple of things here that are subsumed under the idea of being granular or precise about how you feel.

So creating very precise concepts as explanations.

And here's why this is important.

And I should say there's a lot of evidence that when you're very precise about your feelings,

It's very,

Very beneficial.

People are less aggressive,

They drink less,

They are better able to manage their behavior.

And that's because when your brain is making a prediction about what is going on in your body,

What that's going to feel like and what the cause is of those sensations,

It's also making a prediction about what you need to do about it.

So if all you can feel is bad,

What does that tell you about what you should do?

Nothing.

I mean,

You don't know,

Really.

However,

If your brain is able to make a concept of sadness or maybe even distinguish between sadness and disappointment and dissatisfaction,

And that you do something different in each of these cases,

Then you're able to precisely act in a way that is going to be most beneficial to you in that situation.

And sometimes you don't want to construct an emotion out of a set of sensations.

So when the discomfort that you're feeling is because you're hungry,

You probably should eat something.

It's not helpful to you if you construct a different experience out of those sensations.

If you construct,

Say,

Disgust or if you construct anger or if you construct anxiety,

Those are not helpful guides to your behavior because they're not going to reduce,

They're not going to reduce,

Let me say it differently.

They're not going to lead you to do the action that would reduce the distress that would replenish your body budget.

Yeah.

And you talk about that idea of assigning meaning to physical sensations.

It's obviously something we do automatically.

I'm curious about your thought as someone who does suffer from depression and does try and treat it a variety of different ways.

One thing that I've done as I've gotten older is I've just started to treat it sometimes like the emotional flu.

Like I'm just like,

This happens to me and I'm not going to cause a big fuss about it.

I'm going to take care of myself like I would if I was sick,

But I'm not going to reevaluate the entire course of my life at this moment.

I'm just going to assume that something is physically happening to me,

Which to me feels like depression.

It feels very physical and I'm just going to do the best I can with it,

But I'm not going to read too much into it or make too much of a fuss about it.

Does that align with what you're talking about here?

100%.

100%.

You have intuited,

I think,

One of the most important implications of understanding the brain in this way.

That is that when you are depressed or when you're anxious,

The distress is not helpful when you personalize it,

I guess is the way I would say it.

For example,

My daughter suffered from depression for some time and one of the things that was most helpful to her was to understand that when you feel fatigued and dragged out and miserable when you have the flu,

Actually I did use the flu as the example,

You don't berate yourself,

You don't wonder what's wrong with your life,

You don't think that you're a horrible person,

You take yourself to bed,

You sleep,

You take care of yourself.

I think it's very important for people who suffer from mood disorders to think in a similar way that the distress that you're feeling is very much physical.

There is very much a physical component to every mental disorder that exists,

Has some kind of very basic physical component.

For example,

In depression,

Depression is many things.

For many people,

It's an immune disorder.

For almost everybody,

It's also a metabolic aspect to it.

There's something that's gone awry in your brain's ability to manage your body's budget and as a consequence,

You will feel tremendous distress and you might feel tremendous fatigue.

It's very clear that even though psychiatrists and physicians don't often think about depression in this way,

Although certainly researchers are coming to think of it this way,

It's very clear that there's a metabolic component.

If you can attempt to address that just in the way that you would with the flu,

You might not always be able to avoid the suffering but you can certainly shorten it.

I've come to start to think of it as once I'm in it,

The best I can do is accept that I'm there and take care of myself but I can be very preventative.

You can.

All the things that we've just talked about help me before I slip into it.

Once I'm into it is when I adopt that,

Like,

All right,

I'm going to take care of myself the best I can and I'm just going to accept that this is going to be here and also remind myself over and over,

It's going to pass.

I think that most of us can be very compassionate with ourselves when we catch a cold or catch the flu.

We're not so compassionate with ourselves when we feel depressed,

When we feel anxious,

When we feel apathy,

When we feel super angry about something.

Those are the moments when our distress becomes very personal.

It becomes about us.

In much the same way that a virus doesn't really care who you are,

All it really cares is that you have a good,

Wet set of lungs.

Your body's budget doesn't really care who you are.

It really cares a lot about whether it's getting what it needs in a physical sense.

Well,

Lisa,

Thank you so much.

We are at the end of time but I could probably ask you a thousand more questions and maybe we will another time.

But I love the book.

Again,

I'll encourage readers.

We'll have links in the show notes and all that.

This book is definitely worth a read.

It's very fascinating.

It's not easy going in certain places but,

Boy,

The analogies you make make it so much easier to understand some of the things.

You've got lots of great analogies and I just found it very stimulating and I found it very nice for me to get some scientific validation of,

Like you said,

A lot of the things I think I've sort of intuited or I've been taught through recovery or Buddhism or different areas.

A lot of those things are sort of,

There's a reason now why those things work.

Yeah,

Well thank you so much.

And I'll just point out that I also,

On my website,

I have videos that explain some of the more scientifically complex ideas.

I also have blog posts that try to handle some of those ideas as well.

So there are resources available to people.

And also people can just email me if they have questions too.

Yep.

And like I said,

We'll have links to your book.

We'll have links to your website,

All that stuff.

So thank you so much,

Lisa.

I really enjoyed the conversation.

It was my pleasure.

Thank you so much.

All right,

Take care.

Thanks.

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