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Jan. 19, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
38:01
Episode 792 Scott Adams Part 2of2: Some New Reality Filters to Ease Anxiety

Rewiring your brain to release anxiety --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-adams00/support

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I know what you want to talk about.
Yesterday, at the end of my Periscope, I ran, those of you who are here, I ran you through an exercise to reduce your anxiety in life, whatever the source of your anxiety is, whether it's an actual mental problem, something temporary, something you're worrying about, and I wanted to reinforce that.
So I'm going to give you a little bit of reinforcement on top of that.
This is a cumulative process.
The first time you're exposed to it, you might not have a deep feeling of change.
Some of you actually did.
I heard from a lot of people yesterday who told me that the exercise immediately released their anxiety.
Now, I assume that's temporary.
But if you can find a way to temporarily release your anxiety, do it as often as you can, because that's how you get to eventually a place where you have a stable lack of anxiety.
I'm going to give you some more tricks and tips on this in a moment, but I did want to tell you that, based on the feedback, it was completely successful.
Now, completely successful doesn't mean it worked with every person, because I told you it wouldn't.
You're all different. But completely successful in that a lot of people said it changed something.
It changed something deeply meaningful to them.
So I'm going to do it again.
And the big thing I introduced...
And by the way, I cut out just the part of my periscope from yesterday and made a separate clip that's just the last part of the periscope so you can just see the anxiety...
So that's on YouTube right now.
Just search Real Coffee with Scott Adams on YouTube.
It'll pop right up. So just look at the quick one if that's all you want.
What I talked about on that, and it won't make as much sense unless you saw the other video, so I saved this for the end.
If you need to see it in order, see that first, come back to this.
I talked about seeing the world through different filters, and I'm going to give you some more filters so you get, let's say, a deeper understanding of how this concept works.
One of the things that people ask me about is how do you deal with the fact That you know you're going to have some bad news in the future.
You don't know the details, but you know, for example, that somebody's going to die before you do.
You know that there will be various problems in life.
I'm going to give you a technique that I use.
I've had a lot of pets, and I've had a lot of pets who passed.
And I get very attached to my pets.
And so when a cat dies, for example, it's a big deal.
I had a cat for 19 years.
It was my constant workplace companion.
And when she passed, it was a big deal.
I have now a dog, most of you know Snickers, who's at that age where if she's got another two years in her, I hope she has more, but average for that breed would be A couple more years.
She seems to be perfectly healthy now.
But here's how I deal with the fact that when she passes, it will be like losing a limb.
I've heard that analogy before.
I've heard people who won't get a second dog after the first one because the trauma of losing it is so extreme that they can't go through it again.
I see a lot of you talking about the pain.
And you see on social media people posting their painful situation if they have an animal that's about ready to pass.
So let me tell you the filter I put on this.
If you focus on the loss and the badness of it, You will feel anxiety and you will feel bad.
But you do have the risk, you have the option of reframing this.
And let me tell you how I reframe it for my pets.
And how I reframe it for Snickers so that I don't spend the next two years worrying about how I'm going to feel when her natural life comes to an end.
And here's how I reframe it.
I reframe it as a privilege.
And an honor.
For me, the ability to be there at the end of her life, my dog, Snickers, is going to be an honor.
It's going to be a privilege, and I wouldn't have it any other way.
And when I think of it that way, it changes how I process it.
Now, I know I'm going to feel terrible when the day comes, but until then, I'm just honored.
I actually feel a sense of duty at a very deep level and commitment.
And I felt the same way with my cats.
In their final moments of life, I felt honored that I could be part of it.
So I give you that.
Let me give you a couple other filters.
Have you ever worried that there's something big that you need to do that is really giving you anxiety?
Let's say you're trying to buy a house, but you've never done that.
You're like, ah, how do people buy a house?
How do they afford it? How do they work out all the details and the repairs and the contracts and all this?
Or are you thinking about moving?
And you think, how do people do this?
Like, moving, let's say, to another state, it's a big deal.
You think about getting married, you think about having families, you think about...
And any one of these things you think about, they seem, like, really hard.
If you've never done those things, they seem really hard.
Here's the filter I put on that.
There are a lot of idiots in the world, and they can do all of those things.
The world... It is built for people of average capabilities.
So if you're average or above average, and most of you are probably above average, if you're listening to this Periscope especially, and just tell yourself there are millions and millions of idiots who figured out how to buy a house.
Millions of idiots who learned how to move to another state.
Millions and millions of idiots who had kids, got married, You know, change jobs.
Millions of idiots learn to do a job that you wish you were smart enough to do.
Guess what? You are. You are smart enough to do it.
Because millions of idiots did it.
The million idiot filter on life immediately removes your anxiety about things you haven't done before.
Now, if the only people who had done the thing you want to do were geniuses, well, I guess you should worry about that.
Unless you're a genius, like, well, the only people who can pull this off are geniuses.
Do you know how many people pulled off buying a house?
Not just the smart ones, right?
So that's a filter I like to use.
It immediately makes me feel comfortable because almost anybody can do these things that look scary.
Here's another one, you've heard this one before, the Adams law of slow-moving disasters.
Throughout history, when humans can see a problem coming from far away, we have a 100% track record of solving it.
For example, we're all going to run out of food because our population is growing.
Well, we figured out birth control, we figured out fertilizer, we figured out better farming methods.
We got food.
We're going to run out of water because Well, turns out we drilled for more water, we built more canals, we figured out how to get water to everybody.
We're certainly going to run out of oil, and no, we figured out how to frack, we figured out how to make windmills and stuff.
So, if you're looking at something such as the threat of climate science, I think a lot of you on this periscope are not worried about it, but let's say you were.
Remind yourself that society is genius as solving problems it sees coming from far distance.
This will be no exception.
Whatever problems come from climate change could be little, could be locked.
I'm no scientist, and I don't believe anybody can really predict that stuff.
But no matter what you think about it, the worst-case scenario is that it is a problem, But we're really, really good at solving this stuff.
We have companies coming online that can scrub CO2 out of the air, if it ever becomes necessary.
And then others, if you say, wait, we can't be scrubbing the CO2 out of the air because it's plant food.
It's plant food.
You'll destroy the earth by scrubbing all the CO2 out of the air.
No, you won't. You'll just unplug them.
If you get too much CO2, just unplug it.
So don't worry about these big problems that we can see coming from miles away.
Those are the ones we solve every time.
The ones you need to worry about are the ones that came out of nowhere.
You didn't see it coming.
So we're very consistent about that.
Here's another one. Sometimes when I feel really down, and it happens, I have to admit it hasn't happened in a long time, But in my past, there have been times when I just felt beaten down by life and sometimes you just don't want to wake up the next day.
Here's a filter that I put on my life that I find really useful.
Curiosity. It turns out that we humans are really motivated by curiosity.
Some more than others.
It's the reason that a good author will We'll put at the end of a chapter a little mystery.
It's like, and then someone knocked at the door.
And it's the next chapter, and you're like, ah!
I've got to read a whole other chapter about another character before I find out who was knocking at that door.
So, it turns out that curiosity is a tremendous motivator for people.
And here's a filter I put on things when I'm feeling depressed and down.
My purpose for life seems to be extinguished temporarily.
I say this.
I wonder how this is going to turn out.
And I just treat it as a curiosity.
What if I'm just watching this life like a spectator?
I also combine this with the no free will filter.
Now, I believe that we don't have free will because I think physics, the laws of physics, don't stop when you get to your skull.
Whatever's happening inside your skull is also subject to the laws of physics, so whatever causes and effects are coming into your head, there's only one thing that's going to come out of that because of the structure and the exactness of your brain and its architecture.
So sometimes when things are not going my way, I just sit back and say, what if I just watch?
Now I still do all the things that I would do.
I still brush my teeth, go to work, get in my car.
I still do everything. But instead of saying, I'm deciding to do this, I say, I'm not deciding to do this.
I don't have free will.
I'm actually a spectator in my own life.
I'm just watching. I'm watching myself brush my teeth.
I'm watching myself go to work.
I'm just watching. And I wonder, how does this game end?
What happens tomorrow?
Given this current situation, where am I going to be next week?
And what you'll find is that can immediately take you out of your depression and into a mode of curiosity and a mode of just feeling like you're a spectator and you don't have to have Great stress because things aren't going the way you wanted them to go.
Instead, you can say, well, they were going to go that way.
There's no free will.
I'm just along for the ride.
I wonder how it turns out.
Now, until you try it, you might not believe that that will take you into a different mindset, but my experience is that it does.
Here's another filter on life.
God. I told you that one of the reasons that The hallucinogens might be so effective for curing a whole range of mental problems, most of them anxiety-related, I think, is that the hallucinogens take your ego out of your worldview.
And once you feel that you personally are not that important or that you're just part of the whole, then you stop worrying so much about what you and your ego are going to experience tomorrow because you're just not that important.
You're not the main reason of the universe.
It's just little you, and you'll be fine.
And another way to get there is by belief in a higher power.
Belief in a God of one type or another.
Because the God model, the way most people practice it, is that God is great, and you're not.
It kind of puts you in your place.
Believing in religion...
It puts you in your place.
It takes your big ol' ego, well, I'm pretty special, and it just says, no you're not.
God is special, you're just a follower.
Yes, it teaches you humility by giving you a contrast to something that needs no humility.
An omnipotent power, humility would make no sense at all, because it would just be a lie.
So when you compare yourself, and contrast is one of the great principles of managing your psychological state and persuasion and everything else.
Anytime there's a contrast, it helps focus you and understand things in their place.
So believing there's a God who is great puts you in your place.
So I think that could be a good filter.
Somebody just said exactly what I was going to say next.
Alcoholics Anonymous uses this technique.
So if you go into an AA meeting to try to quit alcohol or drugs, there's a drug version of it, they recommend that you sort of put yourselves in the hands of a higher power.
Now, they're not too specific about you don't have to be a Christian, you don't have to be a specific...
But whatever you believe is a higher power.
If you're not a believer, you could say, well, the higher power is physics.
I don't have free will.
I just release myself to free will.
Or if you believe in a God, you say, I just release myself and let sort of God work through me.
Now that's a filter. We don't need to decide whose religion is right.
Or if God even exists, you don't need to.
It's a filter that works.
Because the Alcoholic Anonymous process, apparently, from everything I've learned, is one of the few things that does work.
And I think that the active part of the process is removing your ego by putting yourselves in the hand of a higher power.
The other thing that that does to remove your ego is that part of the process, part of the steps, is And again, if somebody knows more about this than I do, just chime in.
But part of it is essentially apologizing to all the people you hurt.
Which again, is ego.
It's all ego. If you go into any kind of a rehab situation, you give up sort of all the other parts of your life.
You're stripped down to just your biological entity.
You're put in your place.
Your ego is removed, or at least reduced.
So that's one filter, belief in the higher power.
Here's another filter, optimism.
The way you should see optimism, in other words, simply just telling yourself that there are some good things ahead, because you can dwell on the bad stuff and it can change your whole mental state, or you can do what Tony Robbins suggests in his own way and I'm going to suggest in my own way.
Same idea.
That your brain is only capable of thinking about so much in any single time.
We're not real good multitaskers.
If your brain is focused on one thing, it doesn't have much left for other things.
You can find out if there's a train coming at you while you're doing your taxes, but mostly you have a certain amount of shelf space, I call it, in your brain.
You have some control, actually a lot of control, over what's on the shelf.
If you don't take control of it, and you just say, well, I'm just going to wake up today and go on with my life.
All I'm going to do today is, whatever comes up, I'll do my tasks, I'll do my job, I'll know what I'm supposed to do.
Your shelf space will fill up.
Without your control.
It will just fill up with whatever thoughts were going to bubble up.
What kind of thoughts tend to bubble up if you don't manage your shelf space?
The good ones?
No. You can probably confirm this from your own experience.
If you are idle and you don't have much to think about, do you automatically drift into happy thoughts?
Sometimes. But far more often, the negative is what bubbles up.
Because we're designed that way.
Humans are designed to find problems and then fix them.
We're not designed to dwell on things that are going well.
Look around your atmosphere or your environment.
How much of your environment are you actively processing?
Very little of it.
Because it's going well.
I've got a table over there that's not bothering me at all.
It requires no attention at all.
It's not my consciousness.
So, actively learn to fantasize and imagine positive outcomes in a variety of ways so that whenever you feel your shelf space is starting to get a little room in it, fill it.
Fill it consciously, directly, intentionally.
Fill it. Never let your shelf space fill itself.
You control that. You get to think about what you want to think.
I mean, if you have some terrible tragedy, it's going to be hard to keep it out of your head.
But for most of us, our just daily life, you can fill that thing with anything you want.
In my 20s, trying to crowd out bad memories of my childhood, which was pretty horrific, I would fill it with work.
So I would just work myself to exhaustion and Fall asleep and then get up early in the morning and work myself to exhaustion again.
And it really worked.
Now, not everybody can work themselves to exhaustion for year after year, but I filled my shelf space and whenever I felt it starting to fill on its own, I would very actively crowd it out with optimism.
You see President Trump operating on this principle and he got it He came to it honestly, and really exactly the same way I did, through the impact of Norman Vincent Peale, who wrote the book The Power of Positive Thinking.
Coincidentally, or not, was the Trump family pastor or minister, I forget which is the right word, at their family church.
Where they went to church, they saw the king of positive thinking, the most famous positive thinking promoter in the United States ever, And you see Trump do it all the time.
He's very much filling his shelf space with optimism, and ours too.
Here's another technique.
If you want to work on your ego, put yourself in situations in which you embarrass yourself often and survive.
How many times have you seen me embarrass myself right here on Periscope?
And then the next day, well, I'm back again.
Here's my coffee. Tastes good.
Have you ever seen embarrassment change my behavior or even my attitude?
Probably not. And I wasn't always that way.
I used to be easily embarrassed.
And it would ruin my whole day, ruin my week, ruin my month.
The feeling of embarrassment is like, oh, I'm reliving it in my mind.
That time I did that. But how many times have you seen me have to like Blow my nose on camera, because, you know, I just had to.
How many times...
I was re-watching one of my Periscopes.
I watched some of them just to see what I'm doing, to make sure I'm doing what I want to be doing.
And I'm replaying it, and I realized that I went in this extended discussion of Iraq, but I kept referring to it as Iran.
And when I watched it, I was like, ugh...
I can't believe I had this extended discussion of the wrong country, just because my mind mixed up the words.
My first thought was just sort of a flash of anger.
I was just mad that it happened, so sort of mad at myself.
But I never once felt embarrassed.
Not even a little. And it takes a lot of practice to get there.
So I recommend putting yourself in situations, maybe join Toastmasters where you have to talk in front of people.
Do something that's outside of your comfort zone.
Just embarrass yourself. And then find out.
Just track it. Wake up the next day.
Hey! Food tastes the same.
Have the same friends.
Nothing really changed.
So the embarrassment filter...
It's a good one. Just practice embarrassing yourself until it just doesn't feel like painful anymore.
It's very doable.
Here's another filter that's more similar to the one that I talked about in my prior Periscope.
Every now and then, I like to imagine that I'm in a video game.
Now that's very much what I was telling you to visualize.
Visualize that you're sort of in a virtual reality rendered What that does is it puts you in the moment because you're forced to think about your immediate situation because you're imagining it rendered.
And that takes your ego out of things because you're not focusing on yourself and your needs for a while.
So it helped a lot of people relax.
But here's another way I think of it.
There are days when I say to myself, today was just like a video game.
And I feel like I... I captured a resource or I learned something that allowed me to go up to the next level of the game.
And here are a few levels which I would like to suggest that some of you have already passed through.
One of those levels, toward the bottom, is understanding that people are fundamentally irrational.
Now I wrote my book, Win Bigly, to reinforce that idea.
If you are going through life thinking that other people are rational, You will be frustrated and unhappy every day.
Because people are not rational.
And if you try to imagine that they are, your understanding of what should happen next won't match what happens next.
Because you'll say, well, here are my ten good reasons why you should agree with me.
And then you think, well, now you'll agree with me.
But then you don't.
Because we're rational.
So expecting people to act rationally is a formula for stress and anxiety.
So the first time that you move up a level in this, let's call it the video game of life, you can't move up a level until you get that.
And you really have to get it.
And I don't mean saying that sometimes other people are irrational.
I mean that it's the base code of our existence.
It's our operating system.
We operate on confirmation bias and a subjective kind of reality.
Which leads me to the next level.
It's one thing to say that people are irrational, but it's next level, in terms of a video game, it's next level thinking to say that maybe our entire reality is subjective.
Which doesn't mean there isn't something real, but understanding that our human evolution was never directed at giving us understanding of reality.
We did not evolve, or at least there's no reason to believe we evolved, To understand the nature of reality.
It wasn't important.
A clam can reproduce without understanding reality.
A cat can reproduce without understanding nearly as much as we understand.
Understanding reality, and like really understanding it, completely optional, and maybe even unproductive, for evolution.
So we did not evolve with that capability, and indeed you can see that we don't have it.
Just observe how people act.
So once you realize that we're all in a different movie, that we're looking at the same document and seeing a different reality, you've got a different religion than somebody else, once you understand how subjective our experience is, you move up to the next level.
So the first level is understanding that people are fundamentally irrational, and the level after that is that that irrationality is related to the fact that We're not even seeing the same world.
We exist in it and we interact, but we keep getting confused and tense in our interactions because we don't understand why you're not seeing what I'm seeing.
And the reason is different realities.
Here's the next level above that, because I believe a lot of you have already passed through those two levels.
The level above that is to understand that your brain is programmable.
And not just a little bit.
You all know that you can learn something, and in a sense that's programming your brain, but it's much deeper than that.
You can fundamentally change your preferences.
Yes, you can change your preferences.
I have experimented with this over the years.
I'm not going to give you examples because I don't want to get into the details, but I have actually experimented trying to like something I didn't like and to see if I could do it.
Until I loved it.
And I've also experimented taking something I loved, let's say eating Snickers candy bars, and turning it into something I didn't like, and I can succeed.
It's completely doable.
You can rewire your preferences.
Now, you have to understand that.
If you think the only thing you can do is add memories, or maybe you can add a little skill, You don't get to go to the next level.
You have to understand that you can change your basic personality if you know how to do it.
That's the highest level.
I've done it a whole number of times.
I've watched other people do it.
And it takes a little trial and error to do it.
But what we're talking about today is exactly that.
It's reprogramming your brain.
Let me give you my favorite example of programming a brain.
I've been watching Christina, my fiancé, well, not learning, but recovering her piano skills from when she was younger.
She took piano lessons when she was younger.
And I've watched her recently go from somebody who had some basic piano skills and knew how to play the piano, better than most people, but just sort of a good piano player, To the last two weeks, she learned one of the most complicated Chopin pieces that you've ever heard in your life.
And if you don't play the piano, Chopin apparently is extra hard.
Extra hard in terms of where your fingers go at what time is just really hard.
If you hear somebody playing the piano on, say, a rock song, they're doing something called an accompaniment.
By the way, I just learned this.
So if somebody's playing an accompaniment with other instruments and a singer in a band, that's relatively easy piano playing because that's sort of bing-ba-ding-ding-ding, bing-ba-ding-ding-ding, you know, somewhat simple patterns.
That's all you need to accompany a band.
If you're a solo artist and you're playing Chopin, both of your hands are operating completely independently, each of your fingers is operating independently, and you're putting together Hundreds?
Thousands? I don't know how many notes there are in a Chopin piece.
Thousands? But at least as many hundreds, right?
And I'm walking by, and I'm hearing her practice, and just in the last few weeks, she got to the point where she's memorized the entire piece, and now she's just honing it.
And I think to myself, What the heck happened inside her actual physical brain?
She rewired her brain in two weeks.
I mean, a pretty substantial rewiring, because none of the skills that she is demonstrating at a near virtuoso level didn't exist two weeks ago.
We call it muscle memory, but of course it's in the brain, it's not in your muscles.
And so when you see people fundamentally rewiring, I mean, something insanely impressive, in two weeks, you know, she practiced a lot, but it's just two weeks, you start to realize how programmable your brain is.
So everybody who's got a A loop in their brain that's not working, you might be able to reprogram that.
And I have lots of experience of doing it myself.
Now let me give you a fun analogy.
If you're a computer programmer, do you ever write programming code for a computer in zeros and ones?
Do you sit down and say, all right, I'm going to write program 00001, 111000, and then 11100?
Well, no. You don't.
Now, there may be special cases where somebody's doing some deep engineering and they are actually looking at the zeros and ones.
But that's not typically the way you write a program.
The way you write a program is with something that's analogous to but different from a language, like an English language or a French or Spanish or whatever.
You have words with letters, and you use some numbers too, but Brackets and words, and they stand for something that the computer translates into zeros and ones.
Here's my analogy.
When you hear language or you have experiences, the language and the experiences of just hearing things in the spoken word is being translated into your brain into the equivalent of zeros and ones.
Now your brain doesn't work on zeros and ones.
It works on connections that get strengthened and built and some are emphasized and de-emphasized and stuff.
But the point is that when the programmer is writing the program, they don't see the zeros and ones.
They don't know exactly what the zeros and ones are doing.
They just know what the outcome will be.
When a hypnotist or Or somebody doing what I'm doing, taking you through a guided visualization.
I'm having you imagine something that you're imagining in pictures, and you're hearing in words.
But these are symbolic tools that are actually rewiring your brain.
So when you hear me just talking, and you say, how can you rewire my brain just by talking?
Well, the answer is, it's the same way a programmer can program a computer without knowing what zeros and ones are happening.
I don't know which neurons are firing, I don't know which connections are being made, but through trial and error and experience, I can make general assumptions that effectively become the user interface for your brain.
So, find the user interface for your brain.
You're getting close.
You've gone up two levels.
You're on the cusp, maybe some of you are there, of reaching the next level in the game where you can intentionally reprogram your own brain.
And then level after that is you can reprogram other people's brains.
So, check out the anxiety...
Oh, let me ask you here. How many people on here...
I experienced the anti-anxiety exercise and tell me what experience you had.
How many of you experienced something like a reduction of anxiety?
It's going to take a while for the comments to catch up.
So I'll read you the comments as they come in.
It helped. Me.
Nothing but I tried.
Made me feel sad. Remember I said everybody will have a different experience.
There's a yes, a yes, I did, I tried it, nothing happened.
And a body experience.
Some people will have that.
No change. No change.
Somebody said, freed my brain.
Thumbs up. Yep, I did.
Me, totally relaxed.
No. Yes.
Yes, it helped. Somebody said it didn't help.
Yes. No. Yeah, on YouTube is where you'll find the stored thing.
Calming, I definitely did.
I felt like it. I felt like it was being in denial.
It was very unusual.
It reframed things.
Definite reduction. Good.
Good reminder. No change.
Definitely relief. Me, no.
Husband, yes. Felt like floating, etc.
All right. Here's...
Remember what I told you.
Actually, this is actually more of a response than I was actually expecting.
But remember that this is cumulative.
So in the example of there was a husband-wife where I think the husband felt something and the wife didn't.
Remember, you're all at a different starting place.
It could be that the people who felt something profound were right at the cusp of moving up to the next level and just easily moved to the next level.
Could be that some of you need a little more understanding of frames.
And that's what I did for you today.
So you'll find that this needs to be reinforced.
But the more I reinforce it for you, the closer you're going to get to feeling something like that.
But of course, everybody's different.
We should not expect that any solution, medical or physical or otherwise, will work the same way for other people.
Alright, and let me do it for you again right now.
Find a place on your floor, wherever you are, look at the floor and wherever the floor is the largest area.
Now it doesn't have to be, you know, you don't have to get it right, but just look at what it looks to you, in your opinion, like the largest floor area you can see.
Now imagine, using yesterday's technique, that it's rendered.
It's not real. You're in a video game, you're at a level, and everything here is artificial.
Just think about that today.
I'll let you do that on your own.
And when you feel in the moment, because this exercise will just bring you to the moment, you'll feel your environment moving in between being what you thought was real and what you can easily imagine is not.
And that will keep you in the moment, it will reduce the effect of your ego tapping on your shoulder, and it will calm you.
The more you exercise your ability to calm yourself, the better you'll be.
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