How to forgive with Dr. Fred Luskin

some some q a going so bear with me and i will get us started just making sure that we are live which we are okay right hello everyone and welcome to this live recording for the braincare podcast with dr frederick luskin now if you're joining for the first time then my name is dan i'm the co-founder of heights we're a brain care company and we're on a mission to get people to take better care of their brains with our mix of nutritional supplements for brain health clever content with world leading experts and community with one goal in mind to help you do more of what you want for longer in life by making brain care simple so this is going to be an interview in two parts split up into how to forgive yourself how to forgive others and then actually the second one i was talking to uh fred earlier about this we're going to do the second one on managing stress because did you know as of tomorrow it is stress awareness month so i thought this would actually be you know some people call it april some people call it stress awareness month what can i say so we're gonna we're gonna we've got an expert that's literally written a book on stress it would seem a shame not to focus on that a little bit so um if you've got questions please do feel free to ask them in the chat and our community manager emma is going to make sure that i get them towards the end we've got time to do q a so i'm going to get on with today's interview and we will get cracking i'm joined today by the author of multiple books dr frederick luskin who is a world leading expert in the arts and well the science of forgiveness as the director of the stanford university forgiveness project he is here today to teach us how to forgive both ourselves and others so frederick welcome to the show how are you firstly i'm doing fine thank you and as i mentioned i was relating to your you know your gym sitting in the corner of your home as we all adapt to this um very different life uh circumstance yeah exactly got to get everything in the living room i've got a full a full set up all here you know you know it's go ahead no no no go on i want to hear what you have to say you know i i was thinking of how you introduced um both me and your program in terms of brain health and and and i don't want to make more of this than it is but but people's getting pissed off and frustrated and and feeling like a victim which is the consequence of not forgiving i mean i've never really had anybody interview me much about the relationship of that to the health of the brain but i don't think it's pretty profound um if you if if one looks at life with mistrust from past injury or with real shame or criticism of oneself for what one has done that's that that can't be optimizing one's um cerebral function i totally agree well we'll get into that won't we i mean i think just before we get into the nuts and bolts let's say um let's just start with a bit of context so what drew you to the work of forgiveness what drew me um i was really hurt by somebody very close to me a good number of years ago and um really suffered for years and had no clue how to how to improve my life and it was a it was a betrayal by a very close friend and i was a mess and embarrassingly enough i i was just about a licensed therapist at that point and um didn't have a clue and and it was only when i think it was my wife who said you know fred um this isn't who i signed up to be married to like you're too bitter and it's not working and and that spurred me to to think of well what did you get rid of this stuff when the you know the person who did it showed no inclination of remorse or anything and it forced me to confront that that unattractive little word called you forgive them and and i didn't like that word but it was exploring that word that allowed me to move on from the injury and it spurred me because i was at that point just entering my doctoral studies to get a phd at stanford and i decided to do my dissertation on a forgiveness intervention and use what i had used to like crowbar myself out of pretty deep pit so you know that it came out of my ignorance and then my ability to do you know they say those who can't teach so that was my next step since i can't do what i mentioned try by teaching others so usually um you well usually before i had any practice of doing that i would jump straight into some questions and especially when i speak to scientific experts or academics they would always pull me back and ask this question so i'm going to start here which is shall we define forgiveness properly so that we can understand what we're talking about you know with any of the deep ineffable human qualities it's not fully definable like you can't fully define love or you know or happiness and psychologists and people like struggle to nibble around the edges with it but we started with the definition of it means to take the offense less personally so instead of like personalizing it it was there to harm me and they did it to harm me to de-personalize some of it to um take responsibility then for my reaction to the heart which is to calm down change my story like stop blaming so much and to create a better story around what happened that wasn't so crippling to my well-being that's where we started with our forgiveness work what we added after that was forgiveness is making peace with the word no that is a long ago hypothesis or freudian hypothesis that frustration is at the heart of aggression um what what we came to see after looking at all the myriad of people who have gone through our trainings was they were they were all upset because something in life didn't work out the way they thought it should or it didn't accord to the picture they had of what they wanted their life to look at and they couldn't forgive the fact that the picture of reality was different than the picture that they had in their head of how it should be and it all came out to you want one thing you got another you make peace with no that was our evolution from what i just shared with you prior that makes sense so i mean there's there's two sides of forgiveness really as i see it anyway don't let me put words in your mouth you're the expert but you know just on a a human level on a student level let's call it you know there's forgiving ourselves and there's forgiving others so my question would be why do we struggle to forgive ourselves and um have you got any good examples that you've seen of this over the years that you can share and how they managed to do it i'm going to start by saying something that may be provocative to you but i think the world's problem is that we forgive ourselves too much that um human beings on the whole tend not to take responsibility enough for their actions tend to blame other people for things that go wrong and tend to give themselves passives for bad behavior while too often holding other people hyper accountable for what they do so if i had to list in in the forgiveness world that i've lived in that generally speaking individuals are too forgiving of their own bad behavior and you know they can they can participate in genocides and and and give themselves absolution they can do all sorts of things racism sexism i mean and and be very justifying of their behavior so that's that's the biggest thing that i would say but underneath that there's a selection of humans who for whatever reason whether early childhood experiences of certain kinds of rejection or whatever they tend to be harder on themselves then they might be towards others that they might you know take more responsibility in a relationship take more of the blame for what went wrong and and have a very hard time being their own friend for that percentage of the population which is relatively small self-forgiveness is a big issue and um you know in particular here in the united states because of black lives matter like there's a there's a question is like what do you what do you need to do because before your self-absolution makes some sense and and part of the self-forgiveness the necessity of it is one you have to truly admit that you did wrong like self-forgiveness is not like cheap it's not a cheap pass it's i made a mistake i did something diabolical or i simply screwed up but one it was my behavior that two caused harm to others like that is the core of self-forgiveness that i did x in harm's way i make that deliberate link and then i recognize that i have to do i'm going to say three other things before forgiving myself means something one is i apologize where i can two i make amends where i can and three i do what i can not to repeat the behavior but when those conditions are met i believe human beings have not just the right but the necessity to forgive themselves and move on like like they would they got it you know they the judge said okay you got two years you're in jail you got to pay the price when you get out of jail you're good like you know you paid your debt to society in that way i think for self-forgiveness is a really important quality both for individuals and a culture like there has to be a pathway to absolution and and a pathway to mercy that's merited but not cheap so it can either be done culturally or individually but that's the crucial aspect of self-forgiveness okay so am i right i'm thinking this is a guess as well as a stab in the dark but um in order to forgive others it helps if you're able to forgive yourself is that a crucial step no not at all um as as let me ask a better question how should we forgive others i'm definitely going to stop second-guessing you now because i haven't got one right yet i do i feel like i'm in class which is correct well let me just say one of the one of the freedoms that i'm taking with your interview is the freedom to give you honest answers and not just respond to your question yeah we want them we're here to learn we are a community of learners and uh i'd much rather i'd much rather that you spoke up and told us after all that the part of your first answer was all about taking responsibility right as well so let me there there are some people who really struggle with forgiving others and and for those people forgiveness is essential because if you don't let go of either your bitterness blame or self-pity um you know i i believe they will show that it does real brain harm um like you know unregulated anger is is not good but um it also allows one as as deadman 2 2 says you know without forgiveness there is no future and so without forgiveness you're living in the past and re-litigating the past and and the world has moved on and so you're stuck in a reality that's internal but not no longer relevant externally and and it creates a good degree of suffering dysregulation and it also serves to torture relationships you know if you keep on bringing up what somebody did 19 years ago or nine years ago it's painful the key pieces of forgiveness if you're asking like from a just a layperson's question are one um you need to self-regulate you need to quiet yourself down when you're upset so taking a few deep breaths any kind of meditative or prayer uh experience looking out the window and noticing how beautiful it is remembering somebody you love any of the the short-term mind-body practices will work but they are a key piece of forgiveness because when you're upset at something you need to down regulate two you need to put your hurt in context of a life that is generally much more abundant than people uh remember so one of the things we teach people is let's say you were legitimately hurt six months ago so you're at the end of like normal grieving well instead of talking about how the person was a bum which they might have been but talk about how you woke up this morning and you had refrigerator full of food and you were breathing fresh air and that you know your partner was there and they hugged you and you're still dealing with the injury that's more truthful that's a that's a much wider truth that after a while slows down the bitterness and the self-pity so the self-regulation is kind of gratitude they're simple cognitive behavioral cbt principles very simple ones you know like um you know the the most simple one is what i'm telling myself true is it true that six years ago my partner had to make a better decision the answer is no you know just as simple as so we teach a handful of very simple cbt practices and the last piece is is we teach people to stop telling the grievance story and start telling a hearing story so those four qualities are the specific like techniques that foster forgiveness are there any examples of scenarios in which people should be given a pass in terms of forgiveness so have you experienced some kind of pain that's almost exempt from the rule of requiring forgiveness and i guess what springs to mind is you know there's a lot of very inspirational auschwitz survivors that talk deeply about finding freedom in their forgiveness for their captors and stuff so and that's one of the most extreme examples we understand from history right so um if they are able to as usually the marker right if they're able to victor franco's a very obvious one that springs to mind if they're able to do this then aren't we all but do you think that there are examples where forgiveness isn't appropriate yes but let me let me give you a i think a better answer to the first thing you said was you want to look for the average person's nobility when you think about forgiveness um so you want to look at the partner whose ex cheated on them and then um still still treats them decently for the sake of their kids like like the the world is held together in little ways by people like getting over their bitterness in ways and those are the stories that i try to honor because forgiveness is much more important for the people close to you than whether or not you can forgive the very occasional atrocity or terrible thing that happened it's it's it's one of the crucial social lubricants and is um you know one of the things that has been proven to be essential for any long-term committed partnership so that's that's my pushback there forgiveness um it's not that it's not appropriate but there are situations and time when it's probably not skillful so um you don't want to forgive right away you need to you need to sit with your suffering and you need to grieve and you need to deal with the emotional like upheaval and you need to process stuff and grow from it and understand and you even need to contemplate um you know revenge you need to explore your humanity before you decide that no that's not that's not going to get me or the world where i need i need to let this go but you have to have something to let go so that would be the biggest caveat the second is um there are many situations where if you use forgiveness as a like like a greasing towards reconciliation you want to be very careful with that because some relationships are not healthy to stay in or rejoin even though forgiveness is not the same as reconciliation you want to be very careful that you don't use forgiveness to give an abuser or somebody like that an unmerited other chance so those would be the those are the two biggest concerns around forgiveness and and the other thing is you want to be very careful not to forgive too easily for other people like it's like it's it's it's our suffering in our grip that we're dealing with got it okay so uh to crystallize all of those deep learnings down what would be your top three tips for people learning how to forgive better how to forgive themselves um one look in the mirror everywhere you go remind yourself that you're as imperfect as everybody else that that they didn't make a mistake and make you perfect that you're you're just another like person on the planet who's imperfect two as you go through life you're gonna do things that hurt other people in the same way that other people are gonna do things that hurt you therefore you have to be willing to absolve human beings of their humanity and absolve you of your own imperfections and third give you and the whole human race some slack because figuring out how to be a human being is so difficult and the road maps are so imperfect that you know we're basically all like stumbling blind and doing not the best we can but it is really hard to master this game so within those those are those are framings where forgiveness itself is possible amazing thank you fred thank you for your insights you're welcome okay we are done with the first episode so we'll go straight into episode two and if you're listening live then just know that we are coming to q a afterwards so we'll do the second episode on stress now and we will head to q and a so uh obviously start uh preparing your questions and we'll make sure we get them all over to fred's so are you ready fred so did that work for you perfect thank you i mean i i can talk for a long time about this so i wouldn't worry about it not only can i talk for a long time but that's what editing is for so well i i you know that's that is their professor rages yeah exactly we'll uh this is gonna be the uh polish branditis don't worry it'll come together as a perfect podcast episode and i'll be able to share it with you so much much the same in episode two um and you were okay with my pushbacks you know most people most decent i'm serious most good interviewers welcome the guests like say i mean i'm i'm very much here to learn as are our audience right so i genuinely i i love doing this so much because i get to learn i get to geek out with all of these random things you know these these very important topics in life but quite you know niche specialized topics and get to speak to world experts about it so if i'm not being corrected then i'm not learning yeah i mean because you know my knowledge is this wide but it's that deep in this slide and that that's what we're here for so this is going to be very relevant because as i mentioned uh we've got a bit of an internal uh joke about it because we found out that you know april is stress awareness month which we thought was a bit much because a whole month focusing on stress might just cause more stress but we will find out when we're when we're talking but i thought once once we established that i thought it'd be very useful for our audience to actually um delve into stress as you've literally written a book on stress so i'm ready so um are they talking about in um britain about just the the real like stress effects of the corona virus lockdown and stuff and so the stress awareness one thing is actually a global thing okay yeah so i and i i i don't know if it's been around for more than a year or so but um regardless let's get into the interview because we're here to learn you're the expert i've got the questions you've got the answers we hope so let's give it a go okay just basically i'm just gonna do a little intro uh and then and then we get straight going into the questions in today's episode of the braincare podcast we're interviewing frederick luskin again the director of the forgiveness project but this time we're gonna learn all about stress as frederick is the author of the book stress free for good which ultimately sounds like the kind of thing we all want so firstly fred welcome back to the show how are you thank you it's good to see you again uh so what drew you to write a book on stress would be my first question i know that many of us experience it but we don't all write a book on it so is there a backstory there beyond just academic curiosity i was a postdoc at the stanford school of medicine and we were doing work with united airlines pilots that's all quite a while ago on how to help them be more cardiovascularly fit to to last their um pilot life before they had to retire i think then they had to retire either 60 or 65 but the the center that i was working on had a contract to work with them and they did multi-factorial cardiovascular work and i was asked to develop very quick simple stress management practices that they could put on little tiny cards if they wanted to in the cockpit or nurses who worked for the company could teach the pilots this stuff in 15 seconds so my my partners and i we developed these 10 very simple stress management practices and you know through stanford taught them to all sorts of nurses in primary care so they could use it as part of their work with patients and then after we saw that it worked my partner and i wrote a book about that just reiterating those ten simple strategies got it so 10 simple but scientifically proven steps to stress less so before we get into that why do we all stress so much why do why do we stress so much yeah i mean just in general is there an academic answer to that question there's a is a like a semi-humorous um thing from like evolutionary people saying that humans are the descendants of anxious apes that the chill apes they didn't make it and the apes that shared their bananas you know whatever you want to say those apes did not did not survive and become people that at some level um the more anxious the more negativity bias the more the more alert danger people are up until recently it kept them safe and so those those people who had that feature of being able to find what's wrong in the environment being able to predict what's going to go wrong in the environment they had an evolutionary advantage and and they were more likely to survive for us it means basically chronic anxiety which is the basic principle of human existence that we're you know we walk around with a with a chronic low level of concern worry anxiety and a lot of that is simply wired in as as part of the species other parts of it come from dysfunctional parenting and and other things but but this this is that core survival basic of like not just sitting in the middle of times square and going like this you know like and and that that that's the core issue of stress but i mean of course there you know what you're describing there there's also a lot of benefits right there are benefits to stress one way or another oh of course and you'd be bored to death if you didn't have stress if you didn't have some challenge outside of your current comfort you would just keel over her in in boredom or you'd sit there going like this all day long i mean it would just be awful so and then and then they do have that that distinction between you know stress the you know difficult stress and you stress some of the eustress pushes us to to accomplish and succeed um the the key the key pieces with stress though are are they episodic and how intense are they so we like short-term stress i mean obviously not getting hit by a bus but but we like things that challenge us or push us or even make us very you know alert for a short period of time what the body doesn't handle well is chronic stress like that and there are limits to how much intensity we can take so if you're at work and your boss gives you a challenging work problem and and you have like one day to it and that may be fine but if the challenging work problem takes this next six months like that that would kill you or if it takes two hours but you're running around with absolutely franticness so that that's also difficult too so within we need some challenge some stimulation something where things aren't going to stay exactly the same but they have to do with some species-wide slash personality limits okay that makes sense um obviously i'm i'm aware that you you know the core crux of your book was these 10 steps so i would love to know what the scientifically proved life skills are to reduce stress and increase happiness so over to you you know there was nothing unusual about these ten and and the science that we did was um doing research that showed that these 10 were very very good but you know here's one and and it's been proven by other you know factors but like if you don't have anything better to do and you're not happy just smile like a real smile like and they've done research to show the different fake smiles and real smiles so a real smile includes the mouth and a little bit in your eyes you know so but those fake frozen smiles are just this but the rest but a real smile will change your mood that's one another one is just take a minute for a second either and remember when you help somebody just stop and remember when you were when your purpose was to be of health for that lower stress or as anybody will have time not just relax your diaphragm take two or three slow deep breaths and you'll be fine um i hope you see what i'm saying these are incredibly simple there are others but they're aimed at being able to be done anywhere anytime by anybody in a short period of time well if you i mean if you can remember to reel them off i still think it's relevant the simpler the better with these things right i think one of the problems is that we over complicate everything so the sim the ten simple steps are very welcome if you can uh if you're happy to reel them off the only caveat i put to that is yes at some level simpler is better but human beings also like to learn so what if you want to teach things like this you do want to break it up into very simple components and you also want to have those components be layered so that people can grow in their development so let me just give you an example one of the others there is learn to say no that's one of the ten stress managements and sometimes you have to say no so the the simplest way to teach that is we'll just say no you know and i'm not i'm you know not from the war on drugs but can you do this no but with a little more practice you can teach people more subtle and sophisticated ways of saying no so the the first practice is just no the second practice is no well maybe we can talk about it later or no um i'm gonna come back and give you my own thinking on it or no please revise what you're asking and then ask me again and then you can teach a decision tree about which might be the best but it all builds on this just being able to say no so that's yep that makes sense said like a true teacher um as well so teaching us how to fish as well what's out of the life skills what's the one that you found the most useful then what is the one that you've had to teach yourself the most what is the one you've had to reinforce the most and practice the most if if i ask you to just stop just stop what you're doing for a moment and just relax your belly really just relax your belly so your breathing slows down just a little and and when you inhale just have your abdomen expand with the inhalation and and your shoulders are like soft enough but you're breathing into your belly and then just for just a moment picture someone you really love and and allow your belly to still sit there that's probably the signature practice that that we have used for 25 years third 20 seconds maybe but it's the the belly breathing and then the affection they can all be shifted and mixed and matched but there's something about the anchoring where the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous systems can regulate each other and then when you think loving positive thoughts you're safe [Music] so you put those together in a 20-minute 20-second practice and and that's the that's the most important practice that we use love that thank you fred um okay well if you had to pick what would be your top three tips for managing stress for people so that would be number one i'm imagining that would certainly be one so i guess the question is what would be another two if i was going to give them tips um you know it's so simple right like wherever you are i go to a window or look outside or take a deep breath and recognize you're part of a big world with a lot of beauty and the whole thing is a mystery so that might be one two just like i asked you to do stop but remember the last time that somebody was kind to you this is a cognitive strategy um if you take a look life is simply not an easy thing so you have to develop a certain heartiness stress heartiness rather than an expectation that it's going to always be easy or go the way you want so those would be three really simple tips for people great thank you fred and as this is the braincare podcast a question we like to ask all guests how do you implement brain care in your daily life so what do you prioritize to look after your brain it's a good question um i mean i know for myself that i do regular exercise uh every day and i i'm 66 so i i i over the years i've read that you know it's very hard to age successfully of being out of shape um second i do try to say thank you um as a practice and i know that that lowers levels of stress and agitation and reduces allostatic load and i know that but thank you um and then there's like you know you have to stay intellectually occupied so while i it's not like i i do anything that says specifically this is for my brain but i know that the general protective factors are crucial for long-term brain well-being yeah i think your spot on uh three that we talk about a lot particularly the second one on on learning right neuroplasticity use it or lose it so staying intellectually curious like you say uh not a surprise to have the answer from an academic professor like yourself but thank you so much for coming on the braincare podcast fred you're very welcome thank you okay great now we can go to audience q a so don't get too comfortable because i've got a bunch of questions so if you're ready i'm just going to go straight to them so tanty says remembering that self-acceptance is the first step in forgiving ourselves is there any healing therapy for people with perfectionist issues to cope with self-acceptance um no in therapy um cognitive approaches to working on the need to be perfect um working on extra high expectations for your own output and and and working on the need to control your environment cbt is excellent for that um in therapy you know directed mindfulness of watching how your own mind does self-attack is really powerful stuff like oh instead of joining in on the self-attack you go oh yeah there i am doing that again and and that's a mindful approach to that and um again just the simplest um like framing of even though i have these flaws i'm still lovable that that is a core um belief that can be um like infiltrated into the the way one looks at things even though yeah i do this i'm still lovable and worthy of love love it okay thank you for that um okay so a question from zandra on stress can you throw some light on how the average parent can help children and teenagers become more resilient during whatever the time of this pandemic might be um the answer that i give to that question not just around stress is one that often makes people uncomfortable because the best thing you can do to teach your children how to do anything is to do it yourself so if you want your kids to become more stress hearty model it practice it show it to them demonstrate it to them um you know if if if if you have children and and you want to teach them how to be stress hearty model it in how you talk to them model it how you react to when they misbehave you're teaching your children all the time by how you behave that's that's that's your lesson that that that's what your kids take from you is you so within that that's that's number one second is you can teach little kids even very simple mindfulness breathing practices um you can teach them a little eft tapping practices and you can very gently um remind them that they have alternatives but the biggest teaching is how they see you um behave and act in particular towards them and in particular towards your partner like they are watching you like a hawk for information on what it is that you recommend for how to be in the world yeah i think that sounds very very fair i think people will relate to that a lot um okay so a question from ruth she asks do you agree that there's a need for a bit of stress to move us forward zero stress can make you too relaxed and do nothing i mean i think you kind of you kind of do definitely agree with that right i'd build on that um slightly then so um where does that like what's your view then on on monks you know meditating for a long time because you know you were sort of saying you know how boring it would be without the stress and the anxiety and stuff but i guess that's exactly what they're training themselves to do right so where do those things align you know that that's too um two two at least two questions in there um you know the the basic practices of meditation are not primarily for stress management they're for self-awareness and and sometimes the extended practice of meditation causes a lot of stress um you know sitting for hours at a time dealing with boredom um no those are not easy and and the biggest thing that happens in in meditation sometimes is is you get to meet yourself which can be hugely stressful like oh my god look at the garbage that's in my mind so short term practices of stress things are are very useful for managing stress longer term they get it deeper things and for periods of time they can destabilize you like you know sitting there and counting your breaths or watching your mind work or practicing your watching your breathing those those those can cause real difficulty as as you work on all sorts of things um it's the the question that's in there too is the question of motivation and and i'm not convinced that the only reason we do things or get stuff done is stress or threat i think human beings can be motivated very strongly by love by service by care by affection by good will and and sometimes when you get rid of the stress the better motivations emerge so when you're not doing things just to get done and rushing around like a chicken without its head sometimes when you sit still for a minute you think wow i want to do this well or i want to contribute to the world by what i'm doing which is very different than threaten stress based motivation and so that kind of motivation does tend to emerge more through in particular meditation or quieting practices okay that makes sense thank you uh okay a question from nikki she says often we hear forgive and forget it might be easy to forgive or so we think we have but not necessarily easy to forget does that mean you're not really forgiven and and when when do we actually know if we have truly forgiven you don't want to forget that's a mistake um forgive and forget is bad advice um what you want to do is forgive and remember differently and that is hugely different than forgive and forget what you want to tend to do is remember it with compassion with some degree of absolution kindness mercy tolerance something and what you never want to forget i mean nothing you want to forget ever remember every slight but you know we've done work with people who have had their children murdered so what are we going to do tell them but just forget about johnny you know it's like he didn't really matter it's absurd the key is remembering without the bitterness that that's what forgiveness is moving through that to the other side that's great thank you so question from lori while i realized that forgiveness is a gift i give to myself and it frees me of the harsh feelings and discontent i feel in my relationship where is the line drawn between forgiving a partner and enabling them i mean does forgiveness help those who are forgiven is that it can but it sometimes that doesn't so if i forgive you um and it's legitimate then i've like cleansed out my insight but if i go to you and say i forgive you sometimes the other person doesn't believe they have anything that they're given for they think you're at fault so they might take that as another sign of your insensitivity or stupidity so forgiveness is an inner experience is reconciliation of relationship restoration or you know some other interpersonal qualities which can be important but they're they're not actually what forgiveness is and again you asked me before are there any situations where forgiveness would not be appropriate and this is one of those we want to be cautious that if it's a contentious relationship or with a person who simply can't see anything but their point of view you may not want to share any of it if you're with a person who is amenable to discussion then it can be important to say you know i held a grudge and now i've resolved it but you have to be careful in analyzing who it is you're in relationship with yeah great answer thank you i'm gonna go to our last question now because we're running out of time we've got an hour and uh you've been very generous with your time so a question from calendar why do we ruminate and reopen old wounds even when we'd know we'd feel better if we just let go what emotional purpose does that serve and how do we stop i believe rumination is a really key part of our mental health when it's judicious and and reasonably short-term but and and this gets to my understanding of brain health is when when things don't go the way we want or things go wrong it's a tremendous disruption to our sense of safety and order and it can grow and sometimes part of the process for making peace with that is obsessing with it for a while like it's like life so disrupted me and so challenged me that is all i can do is like play it and play it and play it and play it until i believe my brain again destabilizes around it a changed reality that's different than ocd or people who just obsess about things but in difficult circumstances sometimes our sense of reality is altered and our sense of fair play has been deeply challenged and and to not like how'd that happen what the hell's going on why did he do that i i can't stand this and over and over for really serious things that can be very useful for a modest period of time it also gives you time to assimilate the information it's just when it gets when it gets perseverative over time that you want to be careful with it but to push it away simply because it's uncomfortable it is not in your best interest yeah great okay thank you and i guess uh common sense prevails there um i'm going to ask one final question because actually i sort of pop up from from sandra and i have wanted to ask this myself which is when does one know that they've truly forgiven is there a way to actually know when you talk about it and you don't get upset okay so when you say you know my third grade teacher was not nice to me in fact they hurt my self-esteem for three years and you can talk about it just like anything else then you know you're clean yeah that makes perfect sense actually thank you fred that's been uh brilliant for not just me but for everyone in the audience that's been uh able to get their questions answered so i really appreciate you coming along and for anyone and this might even be interesting to you as well fred but we've just uh just agreed our next youtube live uh with uh dr aubry de gray are you familiar with him i don't know who he is right so he is the uh i guess founding father if you look at up on on the internet but founding father of the longevity movement so i'm sure there's a lot of a lot of energy going into how to help us age slowly um extend our lifespans etc and so our next youtube live event is going to be um in two weeks basically today actually tuesday but still so 13 days away with aubry degray and um it's all going to be about how to live longer and slow our aging with one of the world's leading experts so definitely an interesting topic i hope that you can join us as well thank you so much and thank you for inviting me on well thank you for inviting us into your home with us so really appreciate everything fred and i hope that you have a lovely rest of your day and thank you to everyone that's been uh tuning in bye guys thanks deanna and take care

Channel: Heights

Views: 1,768

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: mental health, nutrition, dietitian, food, masterclass, eating disorders, healthy eating, mindfulness, brain health, interview, rhitrition, expert food

Id: iH3vejWw5wg

Length: 56min 30sec (3390 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 31 2021