How To Deal With Negative Thoughts & Feelings - Jordan Peterson

[Music] please thoughts about yourself are indistinguishable from negative emotion that's how heavily tinged they are with negative emotion as soon as you become self-conscious as soon as you start thinking about yourself you're instantly anxious and miserable they're the same thing Becker didn't read Young by the way even though he wrote a book on the psychology of religion and he said in the intro that it was unnecessary to read you which was exactly wrong given what he was doing but Becker basically posited that we had to create Fabrications to defend ourselves against negative emotion that's the essential message of that book and what that means in some sense is that the whole Corpus of of human endeavor is an attempt to escape from the realization of mortality and I think well wait a sec no we're also escaping from mortality yes right it's not just the thoughts of it and and it isn't obvious to me at all and I think almost all of Clinical Psychology would suggest that this is true is that falsification as a defense is actually counterproductive in the final analysis and most of the great clinical theorists Rogers say perhaps in some sense foremost among them but perhaps not insisted that it was the truth that set you free not the web of defenses that you were directed by necessity to deal with your neurotic death anxiety that's actually counterproductive yeah so one of the things you do in clinical work all the time especially in the cognitive behavioral field is you help people identify those thoughts in some sense as as objects that yeah to no longer identify with them and say you know just because you think that it's not necessarily true it's not necessarily you and it's not necessarily helpful right now we can check and see if any of those three you know propositions were true maybe it is you maybe you do believe it maybe it is useful but we're going to start by hypothesizing that some of these automatic thoughts are actually what's driving your misery right and I really also see that as a tremendous danger of totalitarian ideologies because their thought systems that are almost entirely foreign in some sense to the individual person that invade that cognitive space that you're describing and then manifest themselves as unquestioning identity and if they're blinding the person to some underlying reality that's actually revivifying and nourishing and an antidote to suffering then they're a tremendous block to exactly that process you know one of the things that people might want to know who are listening is that if you have a memory that's older than about 18 months and it haunts you and when it comes up involuntarily it produces a stress reaction what that means is that as far as your nervous system is concerned and so as far as your body's concerned that danger hasn't gone away and what's happening is an unconscious alarm system that's looking for pitfalls and holes is warning you that the map that you're using is incomplete in a manner that might might enable you to fall into the same hole and so one of the things that people can do that's very useful is if you have memories like that that plague you is to bring them to mind voluntarily instead of waiting for them to come after you involuntarily and then to Think Through what has changed and what might not have but also to come up with a plan so that if a similar circumstance arose you'd be in a better position in one way or another to deal with it there's no other way of getting the memory to go away like merely re-contemplating it in the same manner over and over won't do it and allowing it to plague you unconsciously it'll do that forever until you solve it it might show up in your dreams it'll show up in your fantasies it'll trigger you so to speak when you're talking to other people if they happen to discuss a topic that's related to it and it's because that the narrative is one of failure and defeat the event was one of failure and defeat and if there isn't a map to allow you to transcend that that's functional then the part of your brain that is concerned with identifying danger is never going to let you go if you run then the signal that the story you're acting out is that the thing you're running from is bigger than you and that you have to hide and that's just a recipe for anxiety now it's not necessarily that easy to turn and face something but you do detail out a variety of strategies in your books that might help people do that you can you can differentiate the problem like you might you might have been traumatized at work let's say or let's not use that sort of jargony that jargony phraseology you may be having tremendous difficulties at work you might be dealing with people who are tyrannical at work and find it very meaningless and so and that's bothering you constantly it's disturbing your sleep for example and It's haunting you and you're you tend to try to push it out of your mind when the thoughts come and partly that's because the thought of how getting a new job is so daunting that you can't face it and one of the ways of re-calibrating that is to break down the problem into small and manageable steps well okay so let me run something by you in relationship to emotional regulation and Status tell me what you think about this so the terror management theorist types tend to think that our cognitive beliefs inhibit our anxiety and they drill that all the way down to anxiety of death taking a page from Freud that's Becker's book basically and there's a whole field of psychology that's worked on that I think it's I don't think it's right I think it's more indirect so imagine this imagine that the degree to which your negative emotion is regulated is dependent on serotonic serotonergic output fundamentally so as your serotonin levels rise you're more emotionally stable so you feel less anxiety despair the whole panoply of negative emotions which are pretty tightly clumped together and so then you might say well your emotional emotional regulation is dependent on your status and I think there's truth in that now let's say I do we're at an academic conference and I stand up and I ask you a question and it's a mean question but you can't answer it so your status is devalued but here's what I've actually done it's not exactly that I've devalued your status what I've done is undermined the claim that you have a valid claim on that position yeah right and then that's going to disregulate you because if that's true then well you've been shown to be an imposter let's say and or at least the threat is there and then that would take you out of that hierarchy and your negative emotion would rise and then the reason it would rise is because if you are removed from that hierarchy and now you're alienated and isolated everything has become way more dangerous yes and so right and you know you know the people at the bottom of a hierarchy are much less much more likely to die from all cause mortality this is not nothing why have a goal well it's easy no goal no positive emotion because you experience positive Emotion by noticing that you're moving towards a goal and so you don't have a have a goal well you can't have any positive emotion so better have a goal and so you might say well what should the goal be well we could start by saying well any goal is better than none and then we might say well it should be a goal that other people will let you pursue because otherwise it's going to be kind of difficult maybe they'll be even happy to help you pursue it that would even be better and maybe it's a goal that would enable you to learn how to pursue other goals while you pursue that goal boy that would really be good and so you can see that your goal is parameterized but that doesn't mean that any old goal works it means there's some goals that work nicely and some not so nicely there are playable games and non-playable games that's a good way of thinking about it and you want to have a playable game and there's a lot of them lawyer plumber you know actor whatever their their playable games and and it's not obvious which one's better but it's certainly obvious which ones are sustainable and which ones are worse so there's a set of playable games and you need to extract from that set of playable games a game that suits you and that would be partly due to your temperament you know because the extroverted people want to play an extroverted game and highly neurotic people want to play a safe game and agreeable people want to play a generous game and disagreeable people want to play a game that's highly competitive so they can win and you know fine but they're all within the realm of playable games and that means they're socially acceptable as well and so that means it isn't just arbitrary it isn't just relative what you decide to do it's heavily parameterized there's only a there's a set of playable games and it's large the set is large but it there are commonalities within it and that's why there are commonalities that's why morality has a common basis fundamentally and so that's partly what we're trying to investigate is like what's up what does OP mean what does it mean is there such a thing now one thing to remember is that if you don't erect a hierarchical structure with something to aim at you got no positive motivation because you experience positive motivation in relationship to a goal not from attaining the goal that's satisfaction besides it's fleeting you know perfectly well you graduate from University poof next day you have a problem which is what do you do next and that's a that's a tough problem it's not like you've solved your problems by winning that game you just introduced the problem of having to introduce another game so it's unreliable as a source of positive emotion but what's reliable is you set a goal and you try to attain it and then that gives your life that literally provides your life with meaning that's what meaning is now it's more than that but that's that's what it is so let's say you're conceptualizing your own failure you know and you meditated on it and you come to the conclusion that God forced Cain to hey not only have things not been going very well for you but it's actually your fault and not only that you brought it on yourself and not only that you knew it all the time well then you might think you'll wake up and fly right right you'll get your wings in order and fly right but there's no reason to assume that at all and that's not what happens to Cain that just makes him more bitter right and you can understand that if you think about it just for a second it's like bad enough when something horrible happens to you but then to have to swallow the additional pill right to have to take in the information that you could have done something different it was avoidable and you knew it at the time and you decided to do it anyways and I think people are in that situation a lot more often than every anyone is willing to admit you know you have that little voice in the back of your head that says do it and you override it and you know it's arrogance that makes you override it it's always arrogance you know it always warns you it's always arrogance yeah I can get away with it it's like no you can't I don't think you ever get away with anything so and maybe your experience has taught you different but my suspicions are it hasn't and if you think it has well the other shoe hasn't yet dropped so Cain doesn't take the opportunity to let God's wisdom reorient his character and that that could have been the outcome he could have gone down on his knees so to speak and said oh my oh my god I've been wrong all along I've been living improperly I've been making the wrong sacrifices Abel deserves everything he has and I got exactly what was coming to me you know could I possibly now straighten myself out and and and and and and and live in Repentance and improve my position but that's not what he did at all he said all right fair enough I get it it's like I'm going to go after the thing I most admire and I'm going to destroy it and I'm going to do that despite its cost to me and I'm going to do that just to spite the creator of being there's this idea in the New Testament that Christ was he who took the sins of the world unto himself it's a very complicated idea but part of it part of it part of it is associated with the idea that he met the devil in the desert as well to take the sins of mankind unto yourself is to understand that within you dwells exactly the same spirit that commit the atrocities that Columbine or that ran the camps at Auschwitz and to actually understand that that's part and parcel of your makeup and then to take responsibility for it and I think that in the aftermath of the terrible 20th century that's what we're left with we're left with the necessity to take responsibility for the most terrible aspects of ourselves and that way perhaps we can stop those terrible things from happening again in reference to The Starry Night for example there's this series of Renaissance paintings which are quite magnificent that show an image of Mary with her with 12 Stars around her head and with her foot on a serpent and that's that's an allusion to the Garden of Eden because um well Eve crushes the serpent beneath her foot and so and this is relevant to your discussion and our discussion earlier about the deepest of all evils right because that that's a concern of yours it's been a concern of mine what's the darkest possible place well the that snake in those paintings represents that and that's why in Christianity the snake which is a predator is associated with Satan right as the as what would you say the Emissary of evil or malevolent something like that and so because Mary has her head in the Stars she can have her foot on the Serpent and that's part of that meditation and while she does that before she listens to your meditation but that's where I see the the psychological link let's say because you want to put your psyche in the highest possible place whatever that is and we don't know what it is exactly but it's something like what happens when you look up at the night sky it's something like that and if you do that that means that your foot is simultaneously on that serpent if you want to stabilize people psychologically and if you want to imbue them with courage then what you do is you help them expose themselves voluntarily to the things they're afraid of that they're avoiding it's a very powerful technique that's exposure therapy and what exposure therapy seems to do is to make people braver foreign

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Id: Mg5eE0OdLr0

Length: 15min 20sec (920 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 23 2023