Huberman Lab
Dr. Becky Kennedy: Overcoming Guilt & Building Tenacity in Kids & Adults
Mon, 13 Jan 2025
In this episode, my guest is Dr. Becky Kennedy, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist, renowned expert on parent-child relationships and founder of Good Inside, an educational platform for parents and parents-to-be. We discuss how to learn, embody, and teach better emotional processing, leading to healthier relationships in parenting, work, romantic partnerships and friendships. Dr. Kennedy shares practical strategies for managing guilt, building frustration tolerance, and nurturing emotional intelligence, as well as the impact of technology on emotional processing. This conversation aims to empower listeners to cultivate resilient, loving and supportive connections across all areas of life. Read the episode show notes at hubermanlab.com. Thank you to our sponsors AG1: https://drinkag1.com/huberman Wealthfront**: https://wealthfront.com/huberman Our Place: https://fromourplace.com/huberman Joovv: https://joovv.com/huberman LMNT: https://drinklmnt.com/huberman Eight Sleep: https://eightsleep.com/huberman **This experience may not be representative of the experience of other clients of Wealthfront, and there is no guarantee that all clients will have similar experiences. Cash Account is offered by Wealthfront Brokerage LLC, Member FINRA/SIPC. The Annual Percentage Yield (“APY”) on cash deposits as of December 27, 2024, is representative, subject to change, and requires no minimum. Funds in the Cash Account are swept to partner banks where they earn the variable APY. Promo terms and FDIC coverage conditions apply. Same-day withdrawal or instant payment transfers may be limited by destination institutions, daily transaction caps, and by participating entities such as Wells Fargo, the RTP® Network, and FedNow® Service. New Cash Account deposits are subject to a 2-4 day holding period before becoming available for transfer. Timestamps 00:00:00 Dr. Becky Kennedy; LA Fires 00:03:13 Emotions, Parents & Kids, Information, Tools: Story; “Right to Notice” 00:11:24 Sponsors: Wealthfront & Our Place 00:14:25 Empathy, Kids & Parents 00:18:33 Sturdiness, Pilot Analogy, Tool: Parental Self-Care 00:26:34 Emotions, Rigidity, Moody vs Steady Kids, Siblings 00:32:51 Emotion Talk, Crying; Eye Rolls, Tools: Not Taking Bait; Discuss Struggle 00:39:26 Parent-Child Power Dynamics, Tools: Requests for Parent; Repair 00:48:50 Sponsors: AG1 & Joovv 00:51:39 Power & Authority, Tools: Learning More; Parent Primary Job & Safety 00:59:16 Statements of Stance, Actions vs Emotions; Values, Behaviors & Rigidity 01:05:59 Guilt, Women; Tools: “Not Guilt”, Tennis Court Analogy & Empathy 01:15:46 Sponsors: LMNT & Eight Sleep 01:18:41 Guilt, Relationships, Tool: Naming Values Directly 01:26:06 Locate Others & Values; Sturdy Leadership; Parenting & Shame 01:31:36 Egg Analogy & Boundaries; Tools: Frame Separation; Pilot & Turbulence; Safety 01:39:30 Projection, “Porous”; Tools: Gazing In vs Out, Most Generous Interpretation 01:45:51 Tools: “Soften”; Do Nothing & Difficult Situations; Proving Parenting 01:51:05 Gazing In vs Out, Scales; Self-Needs & Inconvenience 02:00:05 Stress & Story, Nervous; Relationships vs Efficiency 02:08:46 Technology, Relationships, Frustration Tolerance, Gratification 02:15:18 Slowing Down, Phones, Frustration, Capability 02:21:42 Immediate Gratification, Effort & Struggle, Dopamine 02:29:25 Confidence, Board Games, Parental Modeling 02:34:04 Ultra-Performers & Pressure, Emptiness 02:41:29 Trying Things, Unlived Dreams, Frustration Tolerance, Tool: Learning Space 02:51:08 Learning & Building Frustration Tolerance, Tantrums; Feelings & Story 03:03:00 Tool: Using Story; Shame, Punishment 03:12:55 Leadership & Storytelling, Tools: Asking Questions; Songs & Learning 03:23:21 Miss Edson, Momentum, Tool: Small First Steps 03:30:15 Tools: Parents & Starting Point 03:36:29 Good Inside, Zero-Cost Support, Spotify & Apple Follow & Reviews, YouTube Feedback, Sponsors, Social Media, Neural Network Newsletter Disclaimer & Disclosures
Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Becky Kennedy. Dr. Becky Kennedy is a clinical psychologist and one of the world's foremost experts in parent-child relationships.
Now you may or may not have children. If you do, today's episode is absolutely for you. If you don't, well, you were once a child. Perhaps you're even still a child. Today's episode also will have valuable knowledge and tools that you can apply to your life.
Today, Dr. Becky Kennedy teaches us an immense number of extremely valuable tools for the workplace, for romantic relationships, for family relationships of all types, not just parent-child relationships, and of course, also for parent-child relationships.
We discuss themes that have not been discussed previously on the Huberman Lab podcast, topics such as guilt, which Dr. Becky Kennedy offers a completely unique perspective on, one that I've never heard before and that frankly, I don't think anyone has heard before. In fact, she distinguishes between what most people think is guilt
and an entirely different set of emotions and offers you very useful practical tools for when you experience guilt and how to work with guilt. We also extensively discuss frustration or what she calls frustration tolerance.
Frustration tolerance is an extremely important theme for everybody to understand and apply in their lives because frustration tolerance, as Dr. Becky Kennedy so aptly points out, is central to the learning process of anything at every age.
If you can understand this concept and you apply some of the very simple rules and tools that Dr. Kennedy explains during the podcast, I assure you, you can learn many more things much more quickly and with much greater satisfaction, if not during the process, certainly at the end when you master that learning. And those are just a few of the themes that we discussed during today's episode. Again,
Whether or not you have children, I assure you that today's episode is going to be immensely beneficial for all of your relationships. You will notice during today's episode that our studio backdrop is different. You will notice that for once, I was not wearing this particular style of shirt.
The reason for that is that this episode was recorded during the LA fires, what was initially called the Palisades fire, and then spread to multiple fires throughout LA County. So we were not able to access our normal studio.
So I want to express extreme gratitude to Rich Roll, our good friend in the podcasting space, who allowed us to use his podcast studio, which is where I'm seated now and where I held the discussion with Dr. Becky Kennedy. First off, our entire team, our homes and our studio are fine. I can assure you of that.
But most importantly, our thoughts and our prayers go out to the people who have lost their homes, lost pets. And sadly, there have been fatalities during the L.A. fires. So our thoughts and prayers are with them and their families, and we hope everyone remains safe. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.
It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero-cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Dr. Becky Kennedy. Dr. Becky Kennedy, welcome back.
I'm so happy to be here.
Grateful to Rich Roll for lending us his studio under the duress of fires in Los Angeles. I'm praying that his home is okay. It's unclear at this moment, but in any event, Let's talk about emotions, both theory and practice. And if we can place it in the context of parenting, that would be great, but I'm certain that this has a broader theme that pertains to everybody.
So I love the theory of emotions or how we would theoretically respond to something, but then there's the reality. So as a parent, let's say you have a stance in your home and in your family that it's okay to be sad. Like sadness is normal, it happens, it passes, et cetera. But let's say you're feeling particularly sad about something.
Mm-hmm.
Do you express that and show that in front of your kids? Because I've also heard that young kids in particular, younger than eight or nine, perhaps shouldn't be aware that their parents are experiencing, say, extreme sadness because it can be scary to them or they might feel like their world is destabilizing. And then we also hear a lot about kids feeling like they had to parent the parents.
And then this whole thing becomes pretty complicated. So while there's no perfect world where one knows what to do every single time, How do you look at this business of modeling emotions and also encouraging kids to be able to experience and express their emotions?
Yeah, and I think everything I'm about to share applies, you know, in the workplace, right? Like, can a boss be, you know, really upset in front of the person they manage, management, right? So it's all the same stuff. So I guess zooming out is a start. Emotions are normal. Emotions are unstoppable. You can't not feel sad just because you have your five-year-old in the room, right?
And I think the other thing that kind of forms my perspective is it's really hard to not show someone that you're sad. Like, you might think you're doing that well, but kids are extra perceptive. They are actually built to be more perceptive than we are because their survival depends on adults. So they have to always notice, is my adult around? Is my adult okay?
So they really attune to what's going on for us, right? And so I think... The kind of question is less, do I show my emotions to my kid or not? And it's more, okay, if I'm sad, my kid is going to notice. What do I do then? And as a principal, one of the things I think about often is information doesn't scare kids as much as the absence of information scares kids.
So let's say there's something really awful. I don't know. As a parent, you're a family member. Someone died of cancer. I don't know. There's something really horrible that you just found out, right? There's wildfires right now. Let's say you evacuated and you found out your house burned down. You're sad. Your child is going to notice that and you want your child to notice that.
You don't want your kid to be a teenager and adult who goes around the world unable to pick up on emotional cues from other people. That's not adaptive. And so the patterns we set with our kids when they're young inform their view of the world when they're older. And so here I am, let's say it's the situation of somebody dying and I'm upset.
First of all, as a parent, tell yourself, it's not my kid seeing me sad that's going to destabilize them. It's seeing me sad and me making up a bogus story or denying it because then my kid goes, pretty sure my mom was upset. Oh, she's not? Oh, she's pretending like nothing happened? Oh, she looks sad, but she's saying she's not sad. That is really upsetting.
It would be like hearing your boss say, oh, yeah, 20% layoffs. What are we doing? I don't know. Oh, hi. Everything's great. How are you?
Scary.
What you'd want is your boss to say, you just heard something. You were right to hear that. We are about to go through a really tough time. I'm stressed about it. That's why I yelled. You might be stressed. Here's what I know. This is going to be hard and we're going to get through it together. Now, all of a sudden, that emotional experience has a container. It has a story. Humans need stories.
We like stories. And so often we think it's the emotions that dysregulate a kid. It's the lack of a story to explain it. So let's say this really did happen. People always say to me, okay, but... Dr. Becky, my kid is four. I'm going to say that their aunt died. They don't even know cancer, right? We don't have a better alternative.
I can't even tell you how many parents I've seen whose kids have all of these issues because of the made-up stories. I just said she went to sleep for a while. Six months later, my kid has a lot of trouble sleeping through the night. Yeah, they haven't seen their aunt who went to sleep one time. You know, it creates a huge issue no matter what bogus story you make up. Kids can handle the truth.
And they can handle the truth when it's told to them from a loving, trusted adult. It's kind of like me and you. Someone can tell us a hard truth, but it's from someone you feel safe with and that you feel like also believes in you and says that honestly, it might be hard, but it doesn't feel awful. So... It's about saying to your kid, you saw me crying.
One of my favorite kind of sentences to say to kids around this, because I think it really builds their confidence, is just, you were right to notice that. I was crying, and I'm feeling sad. And look, you saw that. I'm going to tell you why. Making this up, Aunt Sally died. Do you know what dying means? Dying is when someone's body stops working.
Then I'd pause, write something, just be a monologue. I'll see how my kid responds. I might add... I'm not dying. Kids actually really need to hear that in hard times. I'm not dying. No one else is dying. I'm safe. And you know what? I'm sad. And I'm still your strong mom who can take care of you.
That sets the stage for such resilience and is kind of the opposite of everything's fine, my kid keeps seeing me crying, they keep hearing words they're not used to hearing, die, cancer, Aunt Sally, funeral, whatever it is. That situation is what makes kids feel really, really uncomfortable and unsafe.
So it's the absence of information that causes the harm.
Yeah.
And it's the lack of coherence between what they're observing and feeling and kind of this like open loop. If I kind of place it in neuroscience-y terms, I feel like the brain does think in terms of stories. Stories have a beginning, middle, and an end, and they kind of want to know where they are in that story.
That's exactly right. And the terms I would use to match your terms are coherent narrative. What is therapy? Why does therapy help people? It's interesting. Therapy doesn't change what happened to you. Therapy doesn't change your past. Therapy does not take away the pain. But the pain was never the thing that really got in our way. It was the pain plus a lack of a coherent narrative and support.
And so early on, when kids have painful experiences from witnessing you or something else, giving them a coherent narrative is what they need. And without that, the way I think about it is they have what I call unformulated experience. It's just affect and experience that kind of free floats in their body, unformulated. That tends to later show up as triggers. right?
And kind of other things in adulthood. And so, yeah, that's what we want to try to avoid when we can.
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I can't help but put this neuroscience lens on this because I find it so interesting that what you're basically saying, if I understand correctly, is that until we can place things into a story, which is really a sense of beginning, middle and end, a sense of time, it just reverberates in us. I mean, I think I can't help myself. You know, we've
I don't want to give the impression we've got fires burning all around us in terms of this building, but with some distance between us and the fires, that's actually true. And I think one of the things that's so destabilizing for kids and adults in this kind of circumstance is that we don't know how this is going to work out. We just don't. And of course, none of us have a crystal ball.
We can't peer into the future. But it's the not knowing that, you know, really extends our brain resources. And I can imagine that for a kid, seeing their parent upset and then hearing, well, no, I'm okay, I'm okay, would create this kind of open loop where then the kid has to worry about it. Like, when will this come to an end? Yeah.
One question about expressing sadness in front of a child, and if, let's say, somebody expresses why they're sad, is it okay to accept consolation from the kid? Because we hear so much that we shouldn't have to parent as children, we shouldn't have to parent our parents. And this is a big theme, especially on social media nowadays. Like, were you the parent to your parent?
You know, were you the one that took out the trash when someone else should have done it and therefore you took on more responsibilities? I don't want kids to think they shouldn't take out the trash, but you know what I mean? But if you're consoling a parent about a lost job,
If you're the kid, rather, that is sort of the go-between between the parents, sort of acting as therapist, we hear about this a lot, a lot. And I think a lot of people peer into their past and say, yeah, I grew up way too fast.
So on the other hand, I think we would all agree that being an empathic person, teaching our kids that if somebody's crying, you want to walk over to that person, perhaps, and just say, you know, Do you want me to sit with you or maybe do nothing at all? Maybe offer a solution, maybe not, but at least, you know, provide some sort of support that seems healthy.
But the basic question is, should parents accept consolation from children when the parent is sad or experiencing some other negative emotion?
I think this is a great question. There's a couple of things that are coming to mind. So first of all, all of this is a matter of extent and patterning. Yes, we do not want our kids to feel like it is their job to take care of our emotions. It's not a good situation. And I think the difference here actually comes down to what the true definition of empathy is.
To me, empathy is noticing someone's feelings and caring about them. It's not taking care of them. That's a big difference. So let's say I'm crying and my kid comes over and this whole situation, maybe somebody died. And they're like, oh my goodness, mom, can I give you a hug? And do you want me to get you a cup of water?
Okay, I just want parents to know, you don't have to say, no, no, I do not want you to be a parentified child. Like, that is so, that is so kind. Yes, that would feel great. Okay, that's totally fine. I think the line is, and every parent just knows this for themselves, where it might get to, oh, you know what? I love that you're noticing I'm sad. And I love that you care about that.
And I also want to let you know those are my feelings, not yours. And I am really able to take care of them myself with whoever is a friend. And you're still really allowed to be a kid who can go play, who can go have fun. who can even not listen to me once in a while when I say it's bath time, that's actually your job. So let's go do our jobs well.
And to me, that comes down to what empathy is, the delineation of like, what is a parent's job and what is a kid's job? But also, I think all of this can get misrepresented in social media. And I don't want parents to think that they always have to chastise their kid for acting in a caring way.
I feel like kids are, as you said before, kids are so perceptive about what their parents are experiencing and they'll create or move towards all sorts of emotional gymnastics in order to work with that. Years ago, I saw, I think it was a YouTube video with Jim Carrey, who basically revealed that he became funny. as a way to make his sick mom laugh.
That he grew up with a very sick mom, which is chronically ill. And so he would throw himself down the stairs and try and make her laugh. And he was an incredible world-class physical comic, among other aspects of comedy. But that his whole career was born out of this childhood tendency to notice that his mom was really hurting and try and basically make her laugh, make her feel something good.
And, you know, now I'm thinking about this because it's just incredible the way that kids can pick up on something and then try and find a solution to it.
Yeah.
You know, I could imagine that for kids who have a sick parent, it could be mental challenges or physical challenges, that they've got to notice. Yes. And in the case of Jim Carrey, one could argue whether or not it was adaptive or not adaptive. He had this, you know, meteoric career, but eventually just left it, decided that wasn't what he wanted to do.
But leaving that extreme example aside, let's say a parent is sick with the flu or is grieving the loss of, God forbid, a spouse or... Or something really major. Yeah. At what point does the parent need to say, listen, I'm really hurting. This is bad. And I can handle it. When that might not actually be true. So the question is, you know, how much information to give kids.
Yeah.
Because you don't want to lie to them. On the other hand, you don't want them to feel the burden of... Yeah. of needing to worry about a circumstance. And I'm framing this in the context of sick parent, but I'm also raising this thing of financial worries. I have a close friend who told me that growing up there,
parent was like constantly dealing with you know moving from one job to the next it was like this issue of whether or not we're going to have enough resources to get through the next year was a constant question and this person is now in their mid-30s and you can tell it still haunts them and it's completely shaped their relationship to work and finances yeah yeah i mean i think we can we can think about this compared to what would i want for my boss
I have a boss who's, I don't know, going through a really hard time or having a really hard time at home. And I kind of notice it. I'd probably want my boss to level with me and say kind of, again, you're right to notice I'm going through a hard time. But at what point would it feel like, ooh, am I safe in this organization, right? I think we probably all have a point there.
And I think it's the same thing with kids. Kids really do need to feel like they have sturdy parents. Again, I always go back to pilots because I think airplane examples are so powerful because there's very few times in adulthood that we actually feel like our safety is truly dependent on another adult, like 100%.
When you're a passenger in an airplane, you are 100% dependent, so it's kind of the closest dynamic. And you can imagine what it would be like if the pilot was saying, going through a really hard time, who wants to come in and give me, you know, I don't know, you know, tell me a nice story.
Like, oh my goodness, like I get you're going through a hard time, but this is really not feeling great, right? And what that means and which is, you know, kind of even a larger point is if you're a pilot, you need to make sure you're really doing a lot of self-care more than the average person because of this outsized responsibility you have. This is what I think about parenting.
And it's why from, you know, the bigger theme here is this is what gets me out of bed, you know, every morning. So motivated is not just to help parents understand tantrums or emotions or, you know, the latest struggle in their house. Although I actually love that.
It's to say, hold on, we've been really sold an awful story about what it really means to be a parent and how parenting really, first and foremost, is a journey of self-care. How can I be the sturdiest person possible? Who do I need in my life when things go poorly so I don't lean on my young children and give them a responsibility that is not theirs?
You know, I was just saying to someone the other day that when you have kids... All of the unhealed parts of your childhood come right before your eyes. They are just triggered over and over and over with your own children. Like, you know, oh, my kid's whining. I can't deal with that. Oh, well, whining is probably triggering because it's kind of representative of helplessness.
What was it like in my family if I kind of felt helpless? Was that allowed? Did I grow up in a... You know, if you don't stop crying, I'll give you something to cry about family. Okay, if I don't resolve that, I'm going to act that all out on my children and pass that along. So all of kind of...
These situations where parents are feeling all these different emotions from a trigger, from something in their life. I think it goes to what I always tell parents, you know, you have a first and foremost job of self-care and taking care of yourself. That doesn't mean traveling to Europe for the year and leaving your kids alone. It means what is going on inside you? What skills do you need?
What networks of support do you need? What do you have around you to help you on the hardest journey of your life and the most rewarding one of being a parent so that you don't have to say to your kids, you know, oh, you know, can you kind of take care of me?
Paul Conti, who came on this podcast to do a series about mental health, not just mental challenges, but also mental health, which is an interesting concept in its own right, has been quoted as saying that, you know, that if you were to list out the 100 most important things for romantic relationships, it would be self-care and communication repeated 50 times.
And I'm thinking about that now because it sounds like a pretty good model for pretty much every relationship.
Yes.
Self-care, communication. And I must say, the first time I heard him say that, it wasn't on my podcast. It was on a different podcast. I was sort of surprised. I thought, self-care first? But the way you're framing it seems to me that if self-care comes first, or at least very high on the list of what parents should do, It frees up the kids to live and experience life with a lot more ease.
Yeah.
A lot more peace.
Yeah.
And to basically unburden them of about 50,000 jobs.
That's exactly right. And I think self-care... has gotten, you know, misrepresented. It doesn't mean getting a manicure every week. It could if that does it for you. But when I think about self-care and I really think about the work we do with parents at Good Inside, we always say Good Inside and like our app. It's not parenting. It's for parents.
It's for the journey of what it means to be a parent. It's for your own stuff. It's for your triggers. It's for finally learning how to set boundaries. It's about finally learning that it's okay to get your needs met. even when they inconvenience others. It's learning that your relationships are strong enough that they can get through hard moments where people are upset with you, right?
It's about finally saying to, if you need to, your mother-in-law, we can't have any visitors on Saturday. And the reason I'm finally able to do that is because I understand my self-value and all this stuff. This has nothing to do with the fact that your kid isn't sleeping at night, but that is the foundation.
for intervening in the way you're proud of when your kid is waking you up at two in the morning, right? So that is the self-care. It's really like a, not just self-care, it's self-establishment. It's self-growth, really.
I don't know the psychology literature or clinical literature around this, but I'm thinking about speed of emotional shifts.
Mm-hmm.
In my own experience of life, I've known moody people and I've known not as moody people. I define moody as people whose moods fluctuate quickly and sometimes spontaneously. But this idea that some people are like steady as a rock is a great concept, but we also know that we need to feel our emotions, express them to some extent.
And yet there are people where if we were to plot this, it would look like a high frequency wave where some people are really upset, then they're feeling better again. They're upset, then they're feeling better again. I'm not talking about extreme pathology here. I'm talking about, you know, someone cuts them off in traffic and they're pissed, but then they're fine.
They're very, very happy about something they see. So it doesn't always have to be negative. But then they're kind of like flat affect and then they're into something negative. I think that experience of emotions is so far and away different from the experience of emotions emitted from somebody who... You can kind of see the emotion coming. It's like a slow swell.
It's like a expansion and then a contraction again that you have time. And I feel like I keep coming back to this theme of time perception. Anytime we have time or we hear about like in all the Buddhist traditions, like space, like you're trying to create mental space and you know, this gap between stimulus and response. It all sounds great, but with some people...
you have to really be on your toes or perhaps you disengage. And so I've never heard a satisfying answer to this, probably because I've never asked it out loud. If you're a kid or if you're a parent and somebody is experiencing something, let's say they're really angry or really happy, You can imagine riding that wave in with them. You could also imagine sitting back from it.
And some of this is probably what we'd call temperament. But maybe you could talk about this a little bit in the context of having one or both parents. It's kind of like a high frequency shifts between emotions versus kind of a slow expansion and then settling of emotions. Because I feel like those are two completely different experiences of life.
Yeah. I mean, I think you're speaking to how differently we feel emotions. I mean, you know, I think about one of my kids who I call a deeply feeling kid, right? So my image is always she's just more porous to the world. And so if you think about someone who's more porous, that their pores are literally wider, a lot more is going to come in. And guess what? A
She's a kid who, by the way, you're in a certain area in New York City. She's like, I can't be here. The smell. For me, I'm wired differently. I was like, I literally don't smell anything different. Now, does that mean she's wrong? No. I actually bet knowing her, she smells things. And then she lets me know how awful it is and she can't stand on that corner.
And for me, in that moment at least, because we're probably all volatile in different ways, I look steady as a rock. Right. I have another kid who, yeah, is pretty steady. until he feels like his authority and power is threatened, and then he better watch out, you know?
And so in one moment, someone might see him as, oh, wow, that kid's really volatile, but in probably 90% of other moments, he's kind of cool as a cucumber. So I also think it's important to categorize kids not as, like, always one way or another, but we all feel emotions differently. None of them is wrong or right. To me, the goal... is to not be locked into any one thing.
That, to me, rigidity is always the enemy. That's what holds us back in adulthood, if we're always one way. I can never handle someone cutting me off in traffic because the emotion takes me over and I have road rage. Yeah, that's not good. That's a very rigid, limited way of living life. But it's probably also limiting. to say, I've never really gotten riled up about anything.
Forget road rage, but it's kind of amazing to get riled up once in a while and to feel really passionately about something and to feel something enough that you want to go do something about it, right? So there's no morality on it. I think what's tricky, I can even say as a parent of three kids,
is each of my kids, I always kind of imagine this, if I have all these different parts of me, they each need a different part of me to kind of lead. Like they almost need different lead parents, right? So my kid who is my deeply feeling kid, I know what's so important is that I believe her experience and I better be ready with certain boundaries because she feels things so intensely.
especially when she was younger, I have to step in more often. There's more difficult behavior, right? My kid who's really, really steady, I try to sometimes, even though it's convenient because he's so easy, you know, there's definitely a lot going on in there. And sometimes I wonder...
Does he almost feel like all the emotional space is taken up by his siblings and the only thing left for him is kind of steady as a rock? And that can lead to a rigidity later in life, right? So I think these are like moving systems. So much of how we experience emotions growing up is also dictated by the system and kind of the roles our siblings play.
And so I don't know if that kind of gives you enough of an answer, but I think- That's very, that's informative. Yeah, I think the thing I'd really want parents to know is I think we place a lot of morality on it. And if we're honest with ourselves, we're probably just comparing our kid to how we do things. So if you're someone who's pretty steady, you're like, my kid is crazy. They're dramatic.
right? If you're someone who's a little more out there, you're not as bothered by that kid. And then you have another kid, you're like, that kid's kind of boring, right? Because they're so flat. And so, I mean, I think this is true in couples too. Whenever we're fighting, we're probably just saying, why can't you be more like me?
When we're triggered by our kid, we're like, why can't you be more like me? Right? That's probably what we're always saying to each other, going back to communication. But if you take a little different perspective of, hold on a second, there's no wrong or right way to feel emotions. Some behaviors are not allowed, but all the emotions have information.
And what might my kid need right now instead of, oh, my goodness, is my kid messed up? Or why is my kid not just a little bit more like me?
How useful is it to talk to kids about emotions when they're not happening?
I mean, to me, this is something like I always just say, I always phrase it as emotion talk, right? Just emotion. Knowing that emotions live within you, knowing that there's names for them, that they're normal, that they make sense. To me, it's like the ultimate leg up in life. It's like it gives your kids such resilience because we can't beat our emotions.
I feel like we've been trying that for generations. Like if I just only didn't feel so angry or so jealous or so sad. Our emotions are so primal in our body. And I really do believe emotions, they're information. That's what they are. Why would we ever want to not get the information our body is giving us? And sometimes it's almost dramatic what happens in an amazing way.
So many people, I think about so many times I have people in a room for therapy, they start crying. I'm so sorry. you're feeling something so intensely that your body is producing water from your eyes to get your attention. Like that's, that must be really important information. Why are we saying sorry?
And as far as we know, a uniquely human thing, I could be wrong about this, but a colleague of mine at Stanford and psychiatrist called Dicer off talked about this, um, that humans are the only species that we are aware of that sheds tears for sake of emotion.
Yeah.
Other animals, they have lacrimal glands. They produce, you know, water, so to speak, salty water that comes out of their eye region, but not as it relates to emotions. At least we don't think so.
So that's a great example. Like I even think about a conversation I have had with my kids and I like to just have these moments here and there. Whenever I talk about good conversations with my kids, I think people think I have these 45 minute. No, they're usually 10 seconds. I say one thing, my kids say, can I have a snack now?
And I think that's a great conversation because I know it gets in there. Do you know that tears have really important information for us? I'm going to be like, what? What did you say? I'm just thinking. So many people think tears are bad. Tears are kind of amazing. It's like our body is trying to stop us and it's like asking us to pay attention to something really powerful.
I just think it's kind of an amazing thing. Our body does. And my kid goes, can I have pretzels? Oh, sure. I'll get you pretzels. That to me is a win. I just want to tell everyone.
I love it.
That is a 10 out of 10. I'm bragging to people about that. I'm like, I had the best conversation because I know this is seeping in. Because in the moment, my kid is crying. You think it's going to be helpful when my seven-year-old is crying, tears are amazing. Or like, F you, mom. No one wants to hear that.
My reflex would be to tell them the biology of tears. Noam Sobel, who was on the podcast, told us that tears contain hormones that signal to other people, pheromones, excuse me, that literally change the biology of the people around you. We can actually smell tears. We don't realize we're doing it. See, here I go. So I realize I spend enough time with kids that if you tell them that, they're like,
Whatever.
But you know when that's a great conversation? Around the dinner table. And again, your kids will roll their eyes. Kids roll their eyes about everything. I always think rolling their eyes or stop is kind of a kid's way of saying, there's a lot coming at me. I'm my own person. I just need to push it away a little. So that on my own time and under my own control, I can take it in.
And we take eye rolls or whatever it is so personally that then we end up getting into a power struggle. Why are you rolling my eyes? And we miss this opportunity. If we just say nothing, then our kid is going to take in what we just said. Just walk away. Let the whole process happen.
You know, it's kind of like if your boss comes in and says something like, oh, look, that project really wasn't as good as it, you know, could have been. And I really need these things done. And then imagine, you're rolling your eyes at me. If your boss just leaves the room, you probably think, I didn't do that as well as I could. I'm going to go work on it, right?
So I feel like not taking the bait is a very important parenting tool. But I think those moments with our kids to talk about emotions and to talk about our own, especially when it comes to struggle, right? Yeah. One of the things I think a lot about, I try to be intentional with my kids, especially when they're younger. I just think kids are flooded by their parents' capability.
And it is so hard to learn in environments where someone's capability is so far beyond your own. I'm not a good cook, but if I was really learning to cook, I would want to learn from someone from here or there, you know, burnt some garlic or messed up the broccoli. And then it was like, okay, well, I guess I could do this next time. Okay.
But if I'm learning to cook from someone who is whatever celebrity chef, that person's like way too far from me. And I almost feel shame. So I think about this with our kids and how this relates to emotions, where when your kids are younger, especially if you just think about the first 10 minutes of their day,
Like they're trying to figure out maybe how to brush their teeth, how to go to the bathroom, how to turn on the sink, how to wash their hands. They always put their shirt on the wrong way. They can't get on their socks. There's so many things. And you come out dressed perfectly. And then I can't get on my socks. And you go like this. Okay, one, two.
And kind of in those moments, I always think that I'm just kind of saying to my kid, I can do everything easily. And they don't know our history. They don't know. We struggled to put on socks for five years too. I put on my shirt backward, you know, until college. They don't know that.
And so I think, again, in these calm moments, you have this opportunity to say something like, I cannot finish this crossword puzzle. Or like, I love New York Times games, right? And it's so fun with my kids now that they're older. But my connections was really hard today. I just, I really struggled with it. And I was like, oh, I can't do it. I can't do it. And then I took a deep breath and I...
tried it a little more, and maybe I said, and I did it, or I didn't do it, whatever it is. And it gives my kid, first of all, it gives my kid an opportunity to just notice that I struggle too. It gives my kid, again, kind of an arc and a story of, oh, someone I admire so much. Every kid admires their parents. They've had hard times. They still have hard times. They work through things.
They burn garlic. They can kind of talk themselves through it. That is such a more powerful kind of lesson in emotion regulation than teaching your kid kind of directly.
It also seems that here we're not defining the age of the kids, but if one presents themselves as perfect or close to it in any kind of relationship, work, romantic, parenting, et cetera, sooner or later, you're going to fall from grace because they're either going to be looking for the mistake or the moment you make a mistake, it's going to be this fracture in the picture that people see.
had of you. And I have to say, and I think some people might get irritated or even, dare I say, triggered by the language I'm about to use, but I feel like the real ninja move in all of this is to acknowledge that there are power dynamics between parent and child, but then to try and dissolve the power dynamics.
And I say this in the context of having run a lab for a long time, which is very different than raising small children. But you have people who are coming into your laboratory. They are, if they're your graduate student or postdoc, they're staking their whole career on your ability to teach and mentor. And a lot is at stake. Nothing is for certain. They might not get a job.
The papers might not work out. And so there's just so much tension around it. And so as a PI, as a principal investigator in our lab, I remember feeling that pressure of like, it's gotta work out. And one of the best things that ever happened to me as a graduate student was that my first paper took forever to get accepted. And we almost got in and then it didn't get in.
And then finally it got in such that every paper after that felt like a breeze because it took so damn long the first time. And I got to see that my advisor couldn't like make magic happen. And fortunately, that's the way the scientific process is supposed to work.
And I think about this in the context of parenting, like if you're seen as invincible, you know, we hear about this, like people say, I thought my dad was Superman. I thought my mom was Superwoman, you know? And then, but you can imagine how disappointing it must be when they discover anything about a lack of capacity or a break in emotional stability, et cetera.
So how does one present themselves as both powerful in the positive sense of the word, such a thorny word, but powerful in the positive sense of the word, but human and vulnerable to making mistakes in a way that... you don't give up the essential, let's just call it what it is, a power dynamic with your kids so that the kid then doesn't feel they have to parent you.
I love this topic because it's so interesting. Right now, it's kind of review season at Good Inside because I also am the CEO of a company. And to me, the things I talk about with parenting and my kids... and for other people parenting their kids, they are the exact same principles, exact as leading a team.
And so when I think about review season and the way we get feedback and the right and back and forth, it brings us all together and I'll explain. So the other day I said to my kids, I love resolutions. I actually do love resolutions, right? Because I love just the opportunity to say, what is one small thing? I'm like, I value and I'm going to hold myself accountable to do.
What I said to my kids was, I want you to come up with one thing, just one thing for now. And it has to be something like manageable and real that I could do that would really make me a better mom to you.
You asked your kids this.
I asked my kids this. I actually asked my kids this relatively frequently. It's like a review, right? Because it's something I do at work all the time. And what I say at work is because often my direct reports say nothing. I said, I just want to tell you something. I need one thing from you by the end of the day. I need it because like, I know, I know I can get hot.
I know I can get a little reactive, right? I know I'm always go, go, go. And there probably is a moment that, you know, I need to pause. I know, I know I have a lot of issues. So if you don't tell me one thing, I don't trust you as much. So here's what happened with my kids. At that point, it was only two of them. It just happened the other day. My son says, my seven-year-old son says,
Sometimes when you're trying to get some work done at home and I want to get your attention for something, this is what you do, mom. One minute, one minute, one minute, and then you still don't give me full attention.
He's clocking. He's clocking.
I'd rather you tell me five minutes and then give me your full attention. That's literally what I would do. I was just like, that is a really good suggestion. And I really needed to hear that. I can do that. This was a couple days ago. Okay. I have to admit, two days ago, he was trying to show me something. And he just goes, you're doing it. You're not really giving me your attention.
And I said, you're right. Thank you. Change is hard. I actually do need about two minutes. Is that okay? And then I'll put my computer down because I'll sometimes look at him and kind of look at, you know. And he goes, okay. It was kind of, it was so beautiful. My daughter said, At night, she goes, it's so interesting when you give people this opportunity, how generous they can be with you.
I think it's been true at work and home. I know when it's my bedtime at night, I always want to do one or two extra things. I know. I always have to get my water. Mom, it's just how I am. That's what she said. And you get this rushing voice and you go, come on, it's bedtime. And that's like the last voice I hear before bed. And I really don't like that voice.
And so can you just know that I always need to do those one or two extra things and not use that voice? And again, I said, you know what? I wouldn't want to hear that as the last voice. You know, and I think at night especially, it's a little digression. I always feel like I'm in a rush. I don't know, an extra two minutes with my kids. Like, my kids are getting older.
They're not even in my house for that much longer. I just have to remind myself, I'm not in a rush. Like, this is the best use of my time. So I said, and that one I've been really good at. And So how do we show our kids that we're fallible? One way is actually like asking for feedback, especially when you have older kids.
When you have a teenager, this is the number one thing that can change things around. You know what I'm thinking about? It's hard to be a teen. And I'm definitely not a perfect parent of a teen. I'm sure you have a long list. But for right now, can you name one thing that I could do? That would make me a better parent to you.
And I want to follow this through because what a lot of teens will do or parents will say, my teenager tells me something ridiculous. They'll say, well, you know how you make me charge my phone at 9 or 10 p.m. out of the room? You could let me sleep with my phone, which maybe his parents are like, I'm just not going to do that. Or they'll say, you know what you could do?
You could give me $1,000 every week for an allowance, right? And so parents will say, my kid doesn't take it seriously. This is where, like to me, one of the most important life skills, parenting, management, friendships, it doesn't matter. is differentiating someone's words on the surface from their needs or their feelings or their fears, whatever it is, underneath.
And not responding to the words, but kind of cutting under them. Let's even say I can say the phone thing. What would be so great about having your phone? Just help me understand it. I know in my head I'm never going to do it, but... We don't realize just because we're not going to do something someone asks, it doesn't mean we don't owe that person the right to try to understand why they want it.
Right? So I might just ask questions. It might probably end with, look, I actually hear what you're saying. All of your friends are on Instagram until midnight. It sounds like you legitimately do miss out on conversations. By the time you get to school, you feel out of them. Like, I'm not even joking. I feel like if I was your age, I'd be like, that's like basically the worst thing ever.
I believe you. Having your phone after X time is just one of my non-negotiables. It's actually just because I love you so much that I feel like my job is to protect you. I wonder if there is some other way that we can figure that out. Or my kid says $1,000. I might say, what would you do with $1,000? Oh, you want to go to more concerts. Oh, your friends all get more allowance. Tell me more.
No matter what your kid says to you, there's information. So I think feedback is one. I think repair is another way. Repair is the most important relationship strategy to get good at. And I just hope everyone hears the duality in that and realizes what that means. Because if you're going to get good at repair, You have to mess up. The only way to repair is to mess up.
And so if I'm telling you, get good at repair, I am telling you, you have to accomplish step one, which is yelling at your kid. You have to. And you're going to do it anyway. I do it. But if you then tell yourself, wait, I'm getting good at repair. Step one is messing up. I crushed it. Amazing. I'm half the way there.
Then when you repair, which is when you take ownership, hey, I'm sorry I yelled, just like you. I'm managing my emotions. Emotions are really tricky. Emotions are really hard. And do you know what?
Even though you're going to have a leg up on this compared to most people when they're adults because you're learning how to regulate emotions, you're still going to be practicing that when you're my age. That is my responsibility to work on. It's not your fault. And I love you.
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Again, that's Juve, J-O-O-V-V.com slash Huberman to get up to $400 off. I love, love, love this thing about asking for a request. It's different than asking for feedback, which could quickly lead to a list of all the things that one does wrong as opposed to a request for how one could do better.
Yeah.
I think there's an important distinction there. And it seems that the question that the parent or who knows, the boss or whatever, maybe it's with a romantic partner, needs to ask themselves is, what is this request really about? Like what's underneath it? I'm just paraphrasing essentially what you said. And what's it really about?
Is it a request for more autonomy, for more social connection with other people? And then one starts to realize, certainly in this example that you gave of a child asking for more time with their phone late at night, is that it actually has nothing to do with your relationship to them. It's really about their relationship to their friends.
Yeah, could be.
And the fact that they might feel as if they're missing out.
Yeah.
And that leads me to another question, which is what if you as the parent, partner, boss, et cetera, keep your phone close to you until midnight? And they know that. Yeah. So one of the worst things that I believe anyone can say is, you know, do as I say, not as I do.
It's just such a blatantly arrogant stance of you're supposed to do what I say because I say so, but I'm not going to do it because I don't want to. And yet there are times like in parent-child relationships or boss-employee relationships where you're telling somebody to do something and you yourself are not going to do it or no longer do it or choose not to do it. And
in reality you don't have to yeah and maybe there's a good reason why you don't or don't have to that's the nature of that's why i use these uh words um power dynamics yes which which everyone hears and goes oh boy here we go but but it is an issue of power dynamics you have more power than the than the kid so what you're doing is you're giving the kid power to express where they want more agency i like the word maybe agency more than power yeah um
Did you grant your son the right to use his phone later into the evening?
My son, my son.
Not to pry into your personal.
My son did not ask me that. And he knows that our phone rules are non-negotiable.
I didn't mean to pry into your family dynamics.
But that kid, if that's a rule, you would never give it to them. But I think so many times, and then we'll get back to power. We shouldn't be afraid to learn more. I actually just think that's what it is. Our kid says, all my friends get this. That's not true. Why don't you just learn more? Oh, they do?
It's like learning more about what someone says doesn't mean you ever have to change your boundary. Most of conflict is about a lack of understanding anyway. When you learn more, you're trying to understand. You understand your kid, understand someone wants to raise and you think it's ridiculous. You can learn more. Tell me what's been going on. What have you been doing?
Learning more about someone's position does not weaken your position. And I think that's really, really important in any form of leadership. Now, in terms of the power dynamics, There is something about the word power that like, you know. Isn't that weird? Yeah.
I mean, I think the way I think about it and what we do at Good Inside a lot in terms of our leadership and parenting style, I don't use the word power, but I think it's about embodying your authority. Parents have authority. Pilots have authority. Bosses have authority because they're the ones... kind of who have the job of setting up the whole system for success. That's their job, right?
My job isn't to make my kid happy. My job is to help create the conditions for my kid to be like a real functioning, confident adult. That's what I believe, right? A pilot's job is definitely not to keep passengers happy. It's to get everyone safely on the ground. A boss's job is not to keep everyone happy. It's to set up the conditions for health and success of the business, right?
Now, if you know that's your job, it's no one else's job but the CEO. I mean, to some degree, all the management, but that is their job. And so there's a difference where if the CEO believes a job needs to be done a certain way, it's not that they have power. It's just their role involves having that authority. And if someone else disagrees, it's up to them to say you can keep the job or not.
It's just you have different roles. And I actually think owning that very outright, it's actually something I recently said at work. in a review around something I really wanted and kind of owned like in my role as a CEO. Like that is under my role to decide this is important. And now we have to figure it out. Let's see. I would love some input on how we're going to get this done.
Same thing for a kid. One of the lines I said over and over and over to my kid when they were younger, and I see so many good inside parents tell me that their kids reflect back to them later, is my number one job is to keep you safe. So what does that mean? That kind of relates to power. It can mean, why am I not letting my kid, I don't know, jump up and down on our kitchen counter?
It's not because I'm pissed that my kid isn't listening. I'm not letting them jump up and down on my kitchen counter where there's a light above their head because my number one job is to keep my kid safe. Is that power? I mean, I guess I think it's authority. How would I embody that authority? I would say, it looks hard for you to get down. I'm about to pick you up and put you on the floor.
Because I have authority, right? We get to this phone discussion, let's say, and I really do believe that the phone has to be charged out of the room at a certain time. I'm going to understand. I'm going to understand. I'm going to listen. Hopefully I'm connected to my kid and they feel respected by me in a million ways. And it might lead to me saying, look, my number one job still
is to keep you safe. And that really means making decisions that I really believe are good for you, short-term and long-term, even if you're upset with me. This is one of those times. And so I love you. This might be a point of conflict. I know we're going to get through this. And that is my role as a parent. And it comes from a place of wanting to protect you.
And I think when you embody your authority in that way, kids never say thank you, and they will roll their eyes. And kids always feel loved and protected. They really do. I hear it from my kids. You know, maybe this is so true. Sometimes things happen with my kids, and I'm like, no one's going to even believe this.
But I was walking with my 7-year-old the other day, and I said, what does it mean to be a good parent? What does it really mean? I'm curious. He really thought because... It means you're kind of strict. And I said, what do you mean strict? He goes, you have certain rules that you think matter. And he goes, but it also means like you also have to be loving and fun.
And my heart, like, hurts hearing myself say this, like, in a good way. They know. I think kids know. And maybe he says that because that's what we are. But I think kids know. And I can't even tell you how many kids I used to work with, and teens especially, the pain of their parents not embodying their authority was so clear. They knew that they shouldn't be out at a certain time.
They knew that they were hanging out with kids who were like bad news and their parents had no idea. And they felt unanchored. Like they really, really knew not that their parents weren't exerting power. That word isn't their parents weren't embodying their appropriate authority to protect their kids.
I had something come to mind, which is not a phrase that I've ever used before or heard before. But what comes to mind is kind of statements of stance.
Yes.
I feel like statements of stance in parent-child relationships, families, workplace, romantic relationships, et cetera, are great when they're about actions or about sort of overriding themes. Like, no matter what, I'm trying to keep you safe. I might not get everything right, but like that is like non-negotiable internally. And I'm going to try and make it non-negotiable externally.
Like it's a statement of stance about actions like or, you know, keeping you healthy and safe is my number one priority. Those are facts. Those are things that one can really say and believe and understand. you know, until the end of time, be trying to incorporate into one's behavior. But I feel like statements of stance about emotions are very dangerous. Like, um, we don't yell in this house.
Um, you know, uh, it's okay to cry, right? There's always a caveat. Of course it's okay to cry, right? But there are times when crying is less appropriate. There's times when yelling might be appropriate. There's times when emotions need to be expressed or not expressed in a particular way because I, look, I don't think I'm alone in thinking that, you know, the kid tantruming in the
in a public environment is an embarrassing thing for them, for their parent, for people around. And it's not the end of the world, right? It's a tantrum, for goodness sake, right? Like people will survive. But I feel like statements of stance about emotions kind of hold us to this standard that we'll never be able to meet. But that statements of stance about action... Mm-hmm.
are, you know, until we fail and, you know, hope we don't, we can say things like, you know, my job is always to keep you safe. I'm always going to try and make the best decision for you and for your sister, for instance.
But I think that many people, I'm not just speaking from my own experience, but in talking to friends and others that they grew up in homes where like there were these philosophies, these like statements of stance. And the moment that things didn't match that statement of stance, like the whole concept of what parents and children are supposed to be about just kind of started to dissolve.
Yeah.
And it creates that underlying fear. Like, do they even really know what they're doing?
Yeah. Yeah.
Or maybe they don't know what they're doing, but maybe they're trying. So in any case, it's just something that maybe we could talk about for a moment.
I have some reactions to that. I think, I mean, I kind of think you're talking about values and principles, right? And so I think there are, in my house, to be honest, it's not like we have some wall of like, these are our family values. I've seen those in people's homes. Yeah, that's not.
Yeah, on the refrigerator.
Not organized enough to do that. But if I thought about a couple that come to mind, like my job is to keep my kids safe. By the way, safe does not mean they're never in a situation without risk. That's not what I mean. You know, but in general... That's its own form of danger. Exactly. The minimization of risk is also not safe, right? So, but in general, my job is to keep you safe.
I'm not going to let you do things that, you know, endanger yourself or others. So that's one. Another principle I think about is... I will always tell you the truth, even if it's uncomfortable. Like you can always count on me for that. We call that kind of, I call that truth over comfort, right? So if my kid says to me, how are babies made? That value is useful, right?
Another thing is like all feelings are allowed. Not all behaviors are okay, right? Stuff like that.
What about we don't swear in this house? So what I was about to say- And then you're on the phone and then you screw up and then the kid goes, you swore.
To me, what's very different is these kind of rigidities around behavior. Mm-hmm. We don't swear. Swearing is a behavior. We don't cry in public. Behavior. We don't tantrum here. That's a behavior. Behaviors all the time are a manifestation of feelings that overpower skills. So saying we don't do certain behaviors, to me, it doesn't even make logical sense.
Well, what if I'm in a situation where I have a really intense emotion and don't have the skill to manage it? The behavior is going to happen, and then I feel like a bad person. That's very different than values around intention. I want to be truthful with my kids, even if things are uncomfortable. I might fumble around with the words, right?
I might even sometimes lie because I didn't do that value in action. But what I can come back to is, okay, nobody lives their values 100% of the time. So I think we're talking about actually something core to what we think about at Good Inside, which is I'm a good person with values who is totally imperfect and sometimes acts in ways I'm not proud of. Both are true.
When families have values that are very behavior-based, what ends up happening in the kids is they start to equate certain behaviors with morality. These are good behaviors that make me loved in my family, and these are bad behaviors that kind of make me feel like I'm not the right part of my family, and they even make me wonder, like, Am I lovable? Am I good inside after all? Am I worthy?
That's not good. Because whenever we tie behavior to identity, that's shame. And we've tried to motivate kids with shame for hundreds and hundreds of years. And it does not work and causes a lot of problems. I think another one, which is interesting, especially as my kids get older, I said this to my teen recently. I said, this is really tricky.
One of my jobs, as always, has been to create guidelines and rules with you. You know, it's always going to be kind of collaborative. Some, because of my authority, will be directive that I believe are going to keep you safe. I think this really relates to a phone. I want to tell you another part of my job that might sound contradictory, but I actually think we just need to hold them both at once.
Another part of my job is to be there for you when you inevitably go against those guidelines. And I want you to know that we have rules around what can and cannot be done online.
And I'll say this here, like, and like, if you do kind of become part of a really inappropriate text conversation, if there is bullying, if you do come across some images online that make you feel really uncomfortable and you're like, I shouldn't have seen that. You're not getting in trouble with me. I'm not going to throw you a party. I will be there for you to help you through those moments.
Those things sound contradictory. And in our family, we know two things can be true. And those are both true, right? To me, that's a really important thing for a teenager to know.
Let's talk about guilt and shame.
Yes.
I've heard some kind of catchphrase-y stuff, not from you, but like, oh, you know, guilt is about the thing you did and shame is a feeling about who we are. And, you know, while I'm not against those sort of 1990s, early 2000s kind of psychology-isms, I feel like they're not very useful.
Mm-hmm.
in the same way that hearing that there's a gap between stimulus and response. And if you identify that gap, well then goodness, you're gonna be the kind of person that can feel stressed, but not be reactive. You're gonna be responsive, not reactive.
That's just a bunch of words that doesn't, here I'm a biologist, so I'll just say, doesn't take into account the fact that the biology of stress changes your perception of time and a whole bunch of other things that basically make that gap between stimulus and response much, much smaller.
And I think once people understand that, they go, oh, so like the kitchen refrigerator magnet or the poster on the wall that says, you know, like there's a gap between stimulus and response. It was supposed to save me, but it didn't. Of course not. We're just in different states of mind at different times. So how do you define, no pressure here, but how do you define guilt versus shame?
And what about guilt and shame?
Great. Two of my favorite topics. I have a couple different ways of defining things. I'm like you. To me, I like defining things in ways that are very concrete and very usable. That's all. And if there's multiple ways of doing that, that's great.
So the way I think about guilt, and this will probably set us off in a direction about what is not guilt also, is guilt is a feeling I have when I act out of alignment with my values. And in that way, guilt is a really useful feeling. Real useful. Because it makes me reflect on, wait, I didn't act in line with my values. I wonder why. What would I have had to do differently? What got in my way?
Wow, I'm so glad I have that information from my body to have this deeply uncomfortable feeling to set in that process, right? So if I yell at my kid... I'm going to feel guilty, right? I think about a time when my kid told me, you know, I lied to you. I did take that eraser from that kid in school and I feel really guilty. And I said, first of all, I'm so glad you told me that.
I'm so glad you're feeling guilty. That's the right way to feel. Now, there must have been something so hard about seeing something so shiny and fun that you don't have. I totally get that. And you're right. That's not in your values to take it. So that's a useful feeling. That feeling is going to help you not do something like that again. Let's figure out what you can do. Not just to say sorry.
This is what parents miss. You know what's going to happen another time? You're going to see something else pretty cool. Someone's cubby. And you know what most people think? You're going to have the thought again. I would too. What can you do the next time you have that thought? All of this comes because of guilt. Useful feeling.
Guilt is a feeling you have when you act out of alignment with your values. Now, to me, guilt is one of the most misunderstood feelings because what you hear all the time, and you'll hear how much it kind of conflicts with this definition, is something like this. I haven't seen my friends in years. There's finally a dinner. but it would require me not to put my kid down to sleep.
You know, and if I'm talking to someone, I'd say, okay, well, I'm guessing you're not leaving your kid alone. Now, again, my husband or my mom, someone who's a totally safe adult, Becky, I told my kid and she was clinging to me like, no, mommy, I needed to be you. I need to be you. And so I'm not going to dinner. Do you know what I'm going to say, Andrew? Because I feel so guilty. This is right.
Oh, someone asked me to be in the PTA meeting. I'm so busy. I can't, but I can't do it because I feel so guilty. Okay. Again, I'm just curious. I say, well, it sounds like you really want to go to dinner with your friends. She's like, oh, I do. All I do is parent these days. I literally haven't seen these friends in years. They're in town. And I said, tell me about your friendships. Yes.
I know that I'm kind of more than just someone who puts down my kid for bed. And I love doing that. But this matters, too. So I said, this is really interesting. You really value your friendships. your life right now feels out of balance and that your friendships, that part of your burner of your stove is like really low. Okay. And you're not going because you feel guilty.
I just want to share an idea. Guilt is a feeling you have when you act out of alignment with your values. It seems like going to dinner would be in line with your values and almost, it's like, yeah, it's true. So what is this feeling? And here's what I think the feeling is. I call it not guilt just because I haven't figured out a more sophisticated term. But here's what I think is happening.
A lot of us, especially women, when we were growing up, we learned to notice everyone's feelings around us. And we learned that our value, really, and our worth, really, and we were kind of best and good girls when we took care of everyone else's feelings except for our own.
I think so many young girls especially become expert at what people need of them by becoming distant from what they need for themselves.
The picture I get in my mind is sort of like having antennae cast in every direction. That's right. Except perhaps at the exclusion of paying attention to the antennae that are inward. Exactly. And we are, you know, attentional resources are finite. I mean, we just don't have the capacity to... That's right. Like...
respond to other people's emotions and feel at the same time to the same degree that we would if we just concentrated on theirs or our emotions. I mean, that's just a fact of how humans work.
Yeah, and kids are oriented by attachment. They have to learn with their families, how do I become the most lovable, safest version of myself? So I have a friend who, it's true, I remember her, even in middle school, I can't come. My dad's traveling and my mom really needs me to stay home and watch a movie with her, right? And I know this mom well. It's like, oh, you don't love me.
You don't, right? I mean, this was so she became expert at always noticing other people's emotions and not only noticing them, taking the emotions from them, kind of like taking them into their body and almost metabolizing them for them. That's not guilt. That is taking someone else's emotions and taking them into your body at the expense of taking care of your own needs.
And so I have a visual for this because I think it's really powerful where let's say it's the situation where a mom is saying, I really want to go out to dinner, but I feel so guilty. First thing is just powerful to say that is not guilt. It is something else and it is real and it is powerful, but it is not guilt. What is happening?
I'm on one side of a tennis court, like me and you, Andrew, but let's say it's a tennis court, and you're on the other side, and in between, instead of a net, it's like a glass table. Over here, I am here in my desire to go out with my friends because I do value my friendships. Okay, over there, you're upset about it, and let's say instead you're my daughter. You're like, no, no, don't go.
No one else can put me to bed. That is definitely hard to deal with, but that is... daughter's feelings. Those are not your feelings. Those are your daughter's feelings. And some of us slash a lot of us have developed this tendency where we're on this court and all of a sudden, all those feelings from your side somehow go through that wall and they come to your side and you call it guilt.
It is not guilt. And to me, one of the most liberating things, and this actually relates to empathy, is to give that feeling back to its rightful owner. Because what that means is if I really give it back, Now I have a boundary. That's my kid's feeling. That's not mine. And I can now actually empathize. People said, no, I was empathizing. I wasn't going out. No, no, no, no. That's not empathy.
You weren't going out with your friends because you couldn't handle the distress in your body. You just made your daughter's feelings your own. You just engaged in something almost selfish. This has nothing to do with your daughter. In those situations, that's why we say weird things to our four-year-old. Like, don't you want mommy to have friends?
I feel like Ford's like, why are you asking me that question? It's like a pilot being like, don't you want me to make an emergency landing? Like, if you need to make an emergency landing, don't ask me for permission. Because once I give it back to my daughter, I can do this. I can say, you really wish I would put you to bed tonight. You're right. It feels so different when grandma does it.
Oh, it does. I'm going out. It's okay if you're upset. I'll be back and I'll kiss you and I'll see you in the morning. And then this next part is so important. When you walk out, I don't want any person having any illusion that the daughter's going to be like, yes, you go girl. No, she is going to scream. That's okay. Going back to the boundary. You're allowed to take care of your needs.
And other people are allowed to be inconvenienced and upset by it. It doesn't mean your needs are wrong. It doesn't mean their feelings are wrong. And it definitely doesn't mean you feel guilty.
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Go to 8sleep.com slash Huberman to save up to $350 off their Pod 4 Ultra. 8sleep currently ships in the USA, Canada, UK, select countries in the EU and Australia. Again, that's 8sleep.com slash Huberman. Wow. I say wow because I think the lens that you're looking at guilt through and the way you're defining it is so very different than the way it's been discussed ever.
And I think this is a super, super important topic. So I'd like to lathe into it a little bit more. Yeah. In some ways, the way that I think many people experience guilt, at least according to your definition, which by the way, I love, it's when we've act out of alignment with our values versus feeling pressure
I think about, I mean, Lord knows I don't have the best reputation as having a short text response latency. It's variable. Sometimes I'm quick on the draw and other times I'm like, oh goodness, it'll be days or weeks. I mean, over the holidays, I was spooling through it. I would respond to people like a week later.
And, you know, I do my best, but I do often feel, quote unquote, guilty about not being as responsive in text to a number of people because I care about them.
Yeah.
I value them. Yeah. But I get overwhelmed by text messaging very easily to the point where I have to put my phones out of the room when I work, etc., etc. So the way I experience a bunch of text messages coming in is as pressure that then I feel guilty. I'm not trying to make this about me.
No, I want to. Let's go into this. I have a lot to say.
I feel quote unquote guilty. But what's interesting is I believe in cognitive dissonance. And then what I notice is that then my brain tries to bridge that gap. I come up with these like justifications with like, well, when I text people and they don't respond for like two weeks, I don't get upset, which is true unless it's in a particular sort of category of circumstances.
So how come the way they view this whole dynamic is not the same as the way I view this dynamic? Maybe this is a more male-centric view as opposed to feeling porous, like I feel they're upset. But I will say, you know, in fairness to all the chromosomes and their arrangements, I do feel upset. bad. Yeah. Like it sucks.
Like I love these people and they're reaching out to say whatever, happy new year or something. And I'm feeling pressure as opposed to feeling how wonderful it is to have people in my life.
So here, this is such a beautiful example where I'd ask myself or I'd ask you to ask yourself, okay, I already, you already named one of your values, which is interesting. I really value my relationships. You said that. Okay. That's one value. And I think this is, I'm going to ask this question. Do you value quick responses all the time from you on text message? Is that a value of yours?
From me or to me?
From you. Do I value always responding to people on text right away?
The truth is, if I'm really honest, I hate shallow exchange of any kind, except maybe a fist bump to somebody you just kind of feel some kinship with on the street and you have that connect and you just give them the fist bump. Great. But I like... more in-depth, lengthy connection.
Like three-hour-long conversations?
Three-hour-long conversations or drop... A friend came by the other day for New Year's. He was on my list of people that... And yes, I made a list of people that I want to deepen my friendship with in the new year. He came by. We had a two-hour lunch. We chatted. And I feel like It was awesome and worth a million single line text messages.
And I'm also the kind of person where like I'm good to not see him for a while, not because I'm tired of him, but because I also have other friends and things to do.
Right.
So I'm more of a depth, not breadth kind of guy.
This is to me, this is such a powerful process. And then after this, I kind of want to link it back to how I've actually told my kids about. why I do go out to dinner with friends, right? So I value deep relationships. I value relationships. I value deep relationship. And if I'm honest with myself, responding to someone right away, that's actually not my value.
But again, we can hold multiple things at once. That doesn't mean I don't care about those people. I just laid out all my values. What I think is so powerful as a not guilt diffuser is naming this directly to the people. So it doesn't have to be on text, but you're seeing person X and you know, I'm never that good. I just want to tell you, I really value our friendship.
I really value these times we have together. Something I just also want to get off my chest is going back and forth quickly on text. That's not something that's easy for me that I do very often. And so you might text me and it might take me a while. And I just wanted to name that to you. Now, look, someone else always has the right to say, well, that's interesting. That doesn't work for me.
One of my top values with friends is someone who's always getting back and forth. To me, that's actually great. Great. Now we know, OK, what are we going to do about that? That's fine. You know where someone stands. And the reason I relate this to the situation with going to dinner is I remember early on. When my daughter said, why do you have to go to dinner with friends? Or why do you and dad?
This is it. Why do you and dad go to dinner without us? I know the couple you're going out with. You both have kids. Why can't you bring us? Right? And this is where we say we feel guilt, but we don't because I'm like, time out. she's feeling this feeling, not me. And also, I don't need her permission or approval. That's the real parentified thing.
We like go to our seven-year-old and we're like, don't you want me to have adult conversations?
Again, not- It's not an atypical response. I've heard parents do that.
Say that.
Like, don't you want me to have a social life?
But you know what it is? It is asking your kid to do your job for you. Again, can you imagine a pilot say, do you think we should make an emergency landing? You'd be, that's how a kid feels when they're asked that. They're like, why are you asking me that? Here's what I said to my daughter in that situation. I really did. I want to tell you something. I love being your mom. I really do.
It's one of the most important things in my life. I also really like being married to dad. And I really like the times we have when it's just us and other adults. That's really important. I remember saying this, maybe I was really trying to double down. We actually, we had that before you guys were here.
And they're like, what?
And so one of the reasons, I want to be honest with you, why do we go to dinner without you? It's not so much we go to dinner without you. We think of it as going to dinner with each other and just adults. Is that something we really enjoy? It's really important to us. It's a really important part of us. And that's why.
Being really vocal about your values as opposed to looking to your child unconsciously to give you permission to have those values, if you want to use power, that's a power move. And it's amazing. This is true at any time in life. The more you can locate someone, the more you respect their boundaries. I use that word a lot, you know, like locate. I'm sure you know people in your life.
Like, can I locate them? You kind of know who they are. You know what they value and you respect them, right? When you can't locate someone, You feel very uneasy around them. You're kind of like, where are you? Who are you? What do you stand for? And as you can see with my daughter, I wasn't saying something mean. I was saying something true.
And so I think with the friendships and when you say, is this guilty? It's like, well, maybe my step and my action is just actually being honest with this person. I'm not very good at responding right away. I want to let you know I deeply care about our friendship. I'm not very good at responding to kind of small talk over text conversations.
And I just wanted to let you know that so you didn't misinterpret it. Like, I wonder what would happen. I wonder if people would kind of respond really positively.
I love it. And I can't help but recall when I was a kid, after dinner, my dad would sometimes take a walk by himself. Now, granted, he's a physicist and he's a theoretical physicist, so he's like all his experiments were in his head. I mean, he did work on paper, too, but...
So he would take these walks and occasionally I'd see him coming back from these walks and he'd be smoking a cigar, something he doesn't do anymore, fortunately. I'm grateful that he's very robust. He was actually a guest on the podcast recently, talked about science and life, et cetera. And one of the things that I remember thinking and still to this day think and feel is that
It's kind of awesome how he takes this walk and he looked like so happy with the cigar and his thoughts and he'd walk. And I wanted to be on those walks with him. He was very, very busy. In fact, I wanted a lot more time from him than I got. It's kind of interesting because now it's oftentimes that I'm the busier one. The tables turn, kids.
But in all seriousness, I didn't think of it as self-care, but it was so clear that that was his time.
Yeah.
That was absolutely his time. And I knew when I could and should join for things and when I didn't. And so when you say the more you can locate someone, the more you respect their values, I feel like bells go off. It's like exactly that. And there are other examples of my mom, et cetera. But it's kind of interesting when we see somebody
adult or child, like really in their element of their thing, it's almost like we love them for it and through it. And it fills us, I think, with a healthy sense of safety. Like they're right there. Kind of like the pilot flying the plane really well. We're like, actually, we don't really want to know about the pilot. I want to hear the thing at the beginning. We're about ready to take off.
I actually don't like it when we're landing and they say, we'll be on the ground in just a few moments. I'm like, we're at 10,000 feet. Can we make it a little bit longer than that? But you get the point, which is that I don't want to hear from the pilot. I just want the pilot to fly the plane.
You want the pilot to do their job. And again, in these, you know, I think I have so many pilot metaphors around sturdy leadership. And I think it really is such a metaphor for how we teach people the skills they need to parent. Because again, no one becomes a pilot overnight. No one becomes a CEO overnight. No one becomes a lawyer overnight or a professional basketball player.
You know, I think we actually laud CEOs these days who say, I don't know how to do leadership as well as I'd want to. I'm getting executive coach. You all want to work for them.
person right the amazing athletes in the world get amazing coaches and they go to amazing training camps because they're amazing right and so I just somehow with parenting it's like the last area where people think I should become an amazing parent overnight I shouldn't have to invest in skills or education even people who invest in skills and education for every other area of their life that they probably care about less there's so much shame we've internalized that we should be able to do it naturally
And you do become a parent overnight.
You become a parent overnight. You do. Yes.
I'll remember my graduate advisor had two kids while I was working in the lab saying that there were all these books back then about pregnancy. And she was like, it's wild. There are all these things of what you should eat and shouldn't eat and how you should, you and your partner and how you should prepare for the birth and all this.
And then they're like, and then at the hospital, they're like here. And you're like, Now, granted, that was in, you know, the early 2000s.
That's still what it is. And they're like, what do you need? And they go, you need a car seat to leave the hospital, which, by the way, you definitely need. That's all? Like, just a car seat? Like, how am I supposed to manage this?
Because the thing I want parents to know, because there's just so much shame, and maybe we should talk about shame, right, is the only thing that comes naturally when it comes to parenting is how you were parented. That comes naturally. That lives in your bones. That lives in your circuits. And there might be some people who say, amazing, I have the greatest privilege in the world.
Then what will come naturally is exactly what I value and what I want to do. I would say more often people would say some version of definitely not what I want to do or parts I'll take, parts I want to do differently. And to me, it's kind of like if you were brought up speaking English and you really want to speak Mandarin or you want to speak Mandarin half the time to your kid.
And someone said, are you going to learn Mandarin naturally? I feel like someone would say, how does one learn Mandarin naturally? You would, I don't know, you'd probably sign up for, you know, Duolingo. You'd find an app or something or a course. And you'd then practice and practice. And you'd be able to make progress because you actually learned something new.
And so I just think big picture, like parents are, they're so under equipped and set up to feel, and this is I think has to do with shame, that when my kids are struggling or when I'm yelling a lot, it means something is wrong with me or something is wrong with my kid.
I feel like these days in almost every area, if a CEO is saying, I feel like I'm struggling, is it my fault or my employee's fault? They probably say, I don't know. There's probably people around. Who can help me? Who can teach me? Why do I keep yelling, right? And same thing with almost every other field.
And to me, more than like if there's any legacy I get to leave in this world, it's not even the approach itself, even though I think our approach to parenting is very different. I just want parents to know like there is no shame in investing in learning and growing in parenting. And to look at that like they probably look at every other area of their life.
I assure you that your legacy extends far beyond that, but includes it as well. You've had a tremendous impact and continue to. I mean, it wasn't long ago that, you know, the power dynamics of parent-child relationships where, you know, you do what I say and I'm the parent, you're the kid and like that kind of thing. And I grew up in a different era.
I'm 49 now and I've been wanting to say I'm 49 now so that I can actually say something with having had some experience when things were truly very different. They were just so different.
Yeah.
It was like you... Took what you got and you worked with it and, you know, things are so different thanks to your part in all of this. And one thing I do want to return to, because I realize I took us off track with it, is this idea of kids, but perhaps adults as well, feeling isolated. or thinking they feel someone else's feelings, taking that on. Yeah.
This difference between real guilt and, gosh, it's really hard to come up with a word for it. At one moment I thought, well, maybe it's faux guilt. But, no, you're not pretending. You're actually feeling something, which feels like guilt, smells like guilt, tells you it's like guilt.
Someone said codependence. I don't know that much about that word, but something like that.
Yeah, it's a whole landscape.
Yes, exactly.
It's a whole landscape. But, you know, one practice that I'm familiar with that I know exists in a couple of different realms of let's call it modern psychology tools is this idea of creating a frame separation. So like after you come together with somebody, say, to like do therapy or something or you've had sort of an emotional break. bind or entanglement doesn't have to be negative.
That one way that you can learn over time to differentiate their needs and wants from your needs and wants is this idea of in your head, I know it sounds kind of corny, but there's a clear neuroscientific basis for this, at least to my understanding, of in your head, you say, for instance, like if we had just done this, like we had some resonance around something, maybe an argument.
Okay, like Dr. Becky and I got into a fight. that in order to really be able to move away from that and see it clearly, how much of that was yours, how much of that was mine, there's this idea that you tell yourself, okay, what are five ways in which you and I are clearly distinct entities? So you say, and I know folks might chuckle at this, but you say like, okay, I'm a man, you're a woman.
I live in California, Dr. Becky lives in New York. You could even make it, like, first person. You could say, like, or third person, rather. You could say, I, Andrew Huberman, am wearing, you know, a black shirt and a black over shirt, and Dr. Becky is wearing black and white. Okay, so some people might think, like, what's the use of that?
But to me as a neuroscientist, whoever came up with that, and it wasn't me, is... nothing short of brilliant because the brain organizes emotions in these broader schemas of physical objects and physical distance and distance in time. And that's the way that we can differentiate between ourselves and everything around us.
And there's a whole discussion to be had about this, but so it's something that, um, I've been playing with a little bit, um, because I don't claim to be this ultra empath, um, or anything, but I think, uh, It's clear that sometimes we take in our thoughts and feelings about what other people are feeling, sometimes accurate, sometimes not. And it can become very difficult.
Whether or not someone's a one of these, I guess you call it deeply feeling. Deeply feeling kids. Deeply feeling kids or not. I mean, anytime you get into an emotional resonance, good or bad.
Yeah.
I think we're porous. We're porous, and that's part of what makes humans so beautiful. But I've found that practice to be very useful, even if it's just in my own head. Like they're over there and I'm over here, but not even necessarily pushing off them, but thinking like, oh, like I'm me and you're you. And there are a bunch of ways in which we differ in time and space.
And I think the nervous system – comes to understand that as a felt thing, as opposed to just a statement like, hey, like you own your emotions, I'll own mine. That's just a statement. Is this any of this?
I've never heard of that, but I love that. And it is in parallel, I think, with so many of the things I teach parents. So even the idea of locating someone, to me, like my version of people in my life that I know and love, even if I don't agree with anything they say, that I can locate They're like an egg with a shell. They have a shell. There's a boundary. We're really talking about boundaries.
We all have different levels of porousness to the external world. And I think if you know, and there's pros and cons of both. Like, I really mean this. I am not terribly porous to other people's experiences. I really have solid boundaries. There are definitely moments in my closest relationships because what people will say to me, okay, like, I know these are my feelings and not yours.
Like, we're in a close relationship. Like, can you be here a little bit more with me? And that is true. Like, that is what I want to do, right? And sometimes it can be a little distancing, right? And a little separate. People on the other end of that spectrum, if they know I'm very porous, I tend to, to me, one of the ways of also thinking about it, I think I gaze in before I gaze out.
And I think a lot of people gaze out before they gaze in, right? They spend a lot of time in other people's brains and less time in their own, right? What do they think of me? What do they think, right? If that's what's going on for you, then the shell to your egg is, isn't always intact. And so there's a spillover. It's like, whose feelings are whose? Whose thoughts are whose?
I'm spending so much time worried about what that person thinks of me. I almost like, what am I, what do I, what do I think? Right? And so the exercise you're naming is actually just a resetting of a boundary, right? And things that are absurdly concrete are are necessary for the most primal parts of our brain to actually understand. My name is Becky Kennedy.
To me, what I say, I don't usually say that. I'll say, my feet are on the ground. When I do a grounding exercise, everyone in our community knows this, my hand is always on my heart. I think there's some amount of having contact with your body. My hand is on my heart. Sometimes I used to do this with clients, especially after an emotional experience, going like this.
Name five things in the room is probably another way. There's a red clock. I'm wearing a white shirt. They're very, very, very basic as a way of kind of coming back into your body. Two mantras that I find help parents a lot actually make me think about this exercise. One is I am the pilot, not the turbulence.
In our kids' turbulent moments, when they are that turbulence, what so easily happens is we merge into that with them. And then it's no wonder our kids can't calm down or episodes last forever because we're just turbulence and turbulence together, right? So I'm the pilot, not the turbulence. Also...
One day I'm going to do a partnership with some airplane company because I feel like airplanes are just so beautiful because the pilot gets a cockpit. They get a boundary. Like, it's, right? That's what parents need. So that's one. And the other one, when your kids are upset or after there's an argument, some people get very dysregulated just knowing someone's upset with them, right?
Which is, again, kind of whose feelings are whose. I find one of the most effective mantras, and again, these sound cheesy, is just, I'm safe. This isn't an emergency. I can cope with this because our body, if you tend to be porous, you get activated just by other people being activated, even though it wasn't your feeling in the first place.
And your body actually needs the reminder that you're safe to not kind of add to that turbulence.
I love it. Can we talk about projection for a second? One of the things that drives me insane, people close to me know this, because of this issue of porousness versus non-porousness, is when people tell me how I feel. And so I've talked to a few people very qualified psychiatrists about this, and it's called projection. Sometimes it's, if in anger, it's evacuative projection.
Like, you think I'm crazy. Someone will say, like, you think I'm crazy. Or you're upset with me or something like that. I feel like projection is one of the kind of litmus tests of how porous we are. Because in theory, somebody should be able to tell us that we feel whatever. And if we first look inside, and by the way, I love this concept of do you first look inside or outside?
Do you listen to what's inside or outside first when something kind of arises emotionally outside you? Love, love, love that. It's something I'll have to explore. But if we don't do that, then you could see how projection would be very effective. And I'm not accusing anyone of using this in any kind of diabolical way.
I think people just do it because it worked and they're doing it because they've always done it. But if somebody says, you know, like, you don't care about me as a friend or... you know, telling someone how they feel is so very different than telling someone how we feel. Duh. All right. It's kind of an obvious. And yet once you start watching for projection, you see it all the time.
Yeah.
Not just at you, but like in between people. Right. Like, you know, like I know this stresses you out, but you know, people start doing it all the time.
And it's very interesting to see how people kind of divide into a couple of different groups on this, maybe two or more groups in terms of whether or not it affects them and if it gets in their head or somehow they're like, no, no, it's ridiculous. I don't, I don't feel that way. And for me, it's very context specific, but I love your thoughts on projection, both towards kids and from kids.
So, all right, I'm going to respond to that. And you just cut me off. You're like, Becky, that's not the direction I want you to go in. Because I guess MGI, which is I call most generous interpretation, is to me the embodiment of not what I do all the time. Definitely not because I'm imperfect. But what I think is just a useful framework to try to employ as much as possible.
Because the idea of what is the most generous interpretation of someone's behavior, like projection, counteracts our very natural human tendency, which is just what is the least generous interpretation, right? We all come up with the least generous interpretation of people's behavior all the time. And it's just quick. It's easy.
And I think it's because in our brain, if we see something bad or annoying, it's just easy to think that that's the whole, right? So I can't even tell you how many times every parent I know We'll say, my kid doesn't listen. They hit all the elevator buttons. They hit other people. And then I said, and I know what you're thinking. They're a sociopath.
They're like, that's literally what I'm thinking. I was like, I know. I have that thought too.
You know, when I was a kid, I used to push every button in the elevator.
Right.
Does that mean I'm a sociopath?
No. It means you are a good kid who has not yet learned the skills to regulate urges. That's all it means. That would be the most generous interpretation.
No, I'm kidding. You just want to push them. I'm joking. I'm joking.
I have a kid like that, too. He wants things for himself, and he derives a lot of joy from things. Those types of kids are going to do things. Okay. That's my resilient rebel. Okay. But... Projection. Why am I bringing that up? So what's my most generous interpretation of why this projection would happen? Why would a kid say, you're mad at me? Or, you know, I can see how mad you are at me.
Or why would someone even say in adulthood, you seem really, really stressed out, right? Again, the gazing in versus gazing out. I think it comes back to in our childhoods. I mean, that's what often a lot comes back to. Were we taught that we have an emotional life that lives inside of us? Then were we taught how to understand that emotional life?
Then were we taught how to manage and cope with that whole emotional life? Most people were not. So it becomes this very, very complicated conundrum. The emotional life is happening inside me. Again, like you can't beat it. It's happening. Our feelings can't get rid of them. And they're very powerful. They're sensations.
But if your framework was always you're getting punished, you're getting ridiculed, you're being a baby, then you develop a very conflictual relationship with your feelings. Like they can't be real. They almost can't be mine. That's really what they can't be mine.
people like this often blame other people a lot for things they never did when they're really frustrated and upset because it's almost like, this can't be mine, so, like, Who did this feeling to me? You know, there's a lot of that in the world. Who did this feeling to me? Who put this in me? Right? It's so fragile and so sad almost. And so, you know, toxic.
But projection, in a way, is the only way that I can understand my emotional life. is by imagining you having an emotional life. I don't know. Like a lot of these things, I hear myself say this. I like Mel, I was like, what a vulnerable way to go about the world. What an awful way to live in your body that you're so overwhelmed and almost so self-abandoning
of the information in your body that it must be someone else's. So that's what projection is, right? So what do we do when we see it, right? I don't know, what's an example, right? Like you're so stressed out, you've been so stressed and you're thinking, maybe you're thinking of partnership, like I feel like you're the one who's stressed, right? never helps in the heat of a moment to be right.
I've tried it a million times. I don't know about you.
To be right in an argument?
To be right in a heated moment when you're like, I'm going to be right.
Not if you want an effective outcome, no.
No, but it's a very hard urge to resist.
It took me many years to learn, but someone taught it to me in one hour. I feel very grateful that she taught me this, that she didn't tell me to do it, but I just realized if you just like, I don't have any word other than just like soften. If you just kind of like, um, imagine becoming more like a noodle than a, like a rigid bar of iron. I just like go.
And I actually, I think of, um, the way that like my, he always comes up, but my, I had this bulldog mastiff Costello and he was like super lazy. The contract with him was he would protect me with his entire life. But if my life wasn't on the line, noodle.
And I remember just thinking, like, if I just go there, then the basic contract of, like, I care about you, I'll protect you with my life is still there. So I guess I learned it from my bulldog, but it sort of played out in a romantic relationship. And it was just really beautiful. It was one of the best things I learned from the two of them.
Is how I just, like, literally, like, physically softened. then, like, everything becomes apparent. Somehow, for me, it allows me to get back into my own eggshell.
Yep.
But still have optics out. Now, that's me. I realize it's, you know, and that doesn't mean in the heat of the moment I'm not, like, feeling like I want to be reactive.
Right.
But for me, a physical change to my body, self-directed physical change to my body, is what just kind of, like, changed everything.
Yeah, and I think, you know, this is so true in relationships, definitely at work, and definitely in parenting, is... You don't have to represent everything you believe in in, like, a given moment. Like, we're not so fragile, like, to be like, no, and you're projecting, like, I have time. Like, this is a heated moment. I can kind of chill out. You're so stressed, and I think I'm not.
I think there's projection. I might say, like... Oh, I am? Who cares? Just like get through the moment, right? And then maybe after, if it feels important, I say, I feel like this thing happens sometimes where when you're stressed, you say, I'm stressed. I don't know. Like, let's talk about this. That's when that happens. I think this is really true with kids too, right?
This happened the other day. And in some ways, it's the same strategy, which I jokingly on Instagram called do nothing with a capital D and a capital N. Because so many times in hard situations, especially when you're accused of something that's not true, people will say to parents, oh, so you're just going to do nothing. I'm like, take away the just.
Like doing nothing in a heated moment is a very sophisticated technique because really what you're saying is you're doing nothing on the outside and you're being an adult and managing your feelings on the inside.
Amen to that.
Versus doing nothing on the inside and just yelling or reacting on the outside. So the other day my son came to me before school, my youngest. And he goes, my sweatshirt's still dirty. And I was like, oh man. He goes, you promised me you would wash my sweatshirt before school. Between us, he never asked me that, okay? And here's my fork in the road. It's like, we all know what it would be easier.
By the way, I wanted to say back to him, 99% of me was about to go, you never asked me. And then he'd say, I did. No, you didn't. And now you're lying to me. And all of a sudden, it's like, okay. You know what he was saying to me? I wish my sweatshirt was clean. That's what he was saying. That's what we're all saying. And I'm so upset about it.
The feeling is so big that it's like too overwhelming in this moment as a seven-year-old to be mine. So like, I kind of have to make it your fault to try to make sense of it. So what did I do in the moment? I literally did nothing. What I... You promised me you'd watch my sweatshirt. And I went like this.
I kind of was just like looking at him like I knew what it was like to want something and not be able to have it. And he's like, you did. And the moment I go, I did. Oh, my sweatshirt is dirty. You really wanted it to be clean. He's like, I really did. I was like, that's the worst. Not joking. And then he, by the end, by five minutes later, I didn't say anything. He got another sweatshirt.
We moved on. I didn't say, I wasn't going to like ruin the moment by being like, see, you could cope or you never asked me. But I think in both these moments, whether someone's saying you're stressed or my kid's accusing me, I think about this a lot in parenting. I don't have to prove my parenting in a moment. I don't have to prove it to my kid.
I don't have to prove it because my mother-in-law is watching. Like, I trust myself way more than I trust one single moment to represent everything about me. And I think when we can gain a little bit of that confidence, we have a lot more freedom to just be effective parents. And two, also know there's a moment to do nothing.
And then if something's a chronic issue, if my son's chronically blaming me, when things are less heated, I'm going to say to him, you know, something and, you know, a calm moment.
These are super important and novel approaches to things that I think everybody deals with, kids in the picture or not. My audience sometimes gets angry with me when I – I ask very long extended questions, but could I just share with you something I learned about an experiment? Because I think it blew my mind. I won't take long. There's a imaging experiment.
So you put people in a scanner, they image their brain, see which areas are active, fMRI. There's a really wild experiment where they bring people in for the scan. They don't tell them why they're there. And they tell them they're going to be paid $30. And they set out three $10 bills. Maybe you know this experiment. I don't know. And they go into the scanner. And then they come out.
And then the researcher leaves. And there's a discussion, et cetera, et cetera. And at some point, one of the $10 bills is removed by the researcher. And people are told at the end of the experiment, you took one of the $10 bills. And they're like, no, I didn't, because they didn't. Nobody says you're right. But then they reimage them.
And they compare that to a condition in other subjects where people actually did a little sneaky steal during a money game. And the same areas of the brain light up that we think are associated with guilt. In other words, if somebody is told that they did something, Even if they know they didn't, there are aspects of brain circuitry that reflect a quote unquote feeling of guilt.
It's like it introduces this question about reality. And so they can know with 100% certainty, you can know with 100% certainty that you did not do something. And yet it starts to introduce these questions about how you gauge reality.
Simply because somebody you just met a few minutes earlier, yes, in a position of authority, they're the researcher, you're the subject, et cetera, told you that you did it. I think this has huge implications for parent-child relationships, for romantic relationships, workplace relationships, for... real bias in the outside world.
You can imagine if you're told your whole life that you're a piece of garbage or that you're part of a bad group or something like this. I'm not trying to get political here. You could come to believe that at a level that is biological, even if cognitively doesn't make sense.
So this is where I think about this challenging boundary between knowing what we know, being a container, staying in our frame, pick your favorite lingo around this, And the fact that words and the emotions of other people really do have the capacity to rewire us on the inside.
You know, a question I'd have about that study, I'd be really curious if there was variation among subjects where some people that guilt part lit up a lot more.
Okay, so you reminded me. So this is the wild part.
Okay.
The distribution of kind of like people who have this... By the way, folks, there aren't single brain areas for whole emotions, but let's just for sake of simplicity here. That have the guilt area activated even when they didn't take the money.
Yes.
The entire population of subjects doesn't experience that to the same degree. You have these people for whom it's very high amplitude response and others who aren't.
Now, I don't recall, and I need to go back and look at the study, if it divided according to male-female because earlier you said that this tendency— I would bet a million dollars that if I got to know those people, the people who really light up—
have a lot of focus on gazing out and determining their inner reality by what other people think about them. And the people who do not light up as much are the people who gaze in and have a deep sense of themselves even in the face
of kind of a lack of validation or even in the face of criticism i would bet my money on that psychological kind of is that a moderator a mediator i don't know you would tell me so i'd be very curious about that great well i have no skin in the game like i didn't run this study and i'll go back and check it out it's a collection of studies and i hadn't known about this i mean i read the neuroscience literature but i hadn't known about this i find it fascinating
like a complete yes, of course, on the one hand, and also super surprising on the other. Yeah. And just oh, so cool. Yeah. In the sense that it's informative. And it's making me think that some people really need to do the work of paying more attention to other people's emotions and feeling them a little bit more. And other people probably need to do the exact opposite.
That's exactly right. And to me, like, I always, I say this to people I manage, I say, like, I think about this in general with adults. Like, I think such an empowering thing as an adult is just to know where you are in any given scale. So for me, as a leader, I'm always gas. I'm like, go, go, go. We can do this. We can get this accomplished. I'm probably like pretty far in that.
And given that, I know it's really important for me to have people around me who sometimes say like, whoa, let's look at this first, right? Yeah. I also know that sometimes if I do have a like, maybe I should slow this down. I should like really listen to that because that's like not right. But knowing where I am on a scale is important.
I talk about someone that I manage who she really needs to be more direct with the people she manages, just like, you know, like sometimes ask questions when she really wants statements and can have a little higher standard.
And I think it's helpful to know where she is in that scale because I remember saying, like, I want you to go as far as you can toward the other direction without being disrespectful because it's almost impossible to do that, right? right? And so I think for adults to know, let's say I gaze in or I more gaze out, neither is better or worse.
Probably again, mental health and resilience is about having just a lack of rigidity. And so to say, what is my starting point? Like anyone listening, what is my starting point? There's no morality. It's literally not better or worse. It just gives me information about which direction to experiment with. And I like to make this a concrete experiment, right? So
Let's say you are someone who tends to gaze out before you gaze in. And you're always like, I can't do this thing I want to do because it would inconvenience someone. I told this story the other day on my Instagram and people went bananas about it. I was at the airport and I got a cup of coffee in the morning. And I like my coffee with just like a really little bit of milk. Right.
And I know to specify it if I'm asking someone else. I went to the counter and I said, hey, can I get a medium coffee? Not black, just a little, little bit of milk, pretty close to black. Sure. No problem. I go, I wait in line, then it's on the counter. I pick it up, Becky. And it's like light as can be. I got back online. I brought the coffee. And I said, hey, I asked for this.
I know there's a lot of people probably got lost. I asked for this, you know, darker. Could you pour out a good amount of this and then refill it with coffee? The person, you know, who knows if it could have gone differently a different day. Oh, right. No problem. Here you go. This happens with things that are so much bigger than coffee.
But the coffee example is such a good one because what I'm doing in that moment is is I'm saying I'm allowed to have my coffee the way I wanted it and asked for it, even if it's awkward or inconveniences the other person. Now, can people be on the opposite extreme? And can someone hear this and be like, I probably need to do a little bit less of my own needs. That's what I'm saying.
You have to know you are. But what I have found, at least with moms, is the idea of, ooh, you know, I asked for almond milk and this is whole milk. Or I always, I used to give my clients this experiment who had this struggle. I said, I want you at the grocery store. I have to be basically done checking out to say, oh, you know what? I actually don't need those paper towels. I can't even tell you.
People are like, I can't do that. I can't like return it. Like, oh my goodness. It was like a panic attack. And the panic, the panic feeling is that would be a completely new circuit. That would be me saying, I'm willing to do something to meet my own needs. I actually don't need that paper towel. Even though it could get an eye roll or inconvenience temporarily someone else.
Those little experiments, and it might be the opposite. It might be saying to my partner tonight, you know what? We always sit down and talk about my work. And I actually did have a stressful day, but you know what? I wanna hear about your day. You go first. That's also an experiment. And for someone who's on that extreme, they're gonna also have a panic attack.
They're gonna be like, this is deeply uncomfortable. But just knowing where you are in the spectrum gives you the information you need to get a little bit of balance.
Yeah, I think there's clearly a distribution and whether or not it's a binary distribution or it's kind of like a normal distribution, I don't know, but there's clearly variants here from one person to the next and probably even depending on how well rested we are and all the rest. But I do think that
we do kind of fall into phenotypes of prone to reacting to other people's emotions without hearing and listening to and responding to ours first, like truly ours first, versus people who are just really out there.
I realize it's very different than any other kind of relationship, but when I first went from being a postdoc to having my own laboratory, the chair in my department, my chairman in one department anyway, he said, you know, you should get a great big desk that's like really thick I was like, yeah, like, why? I mean, I get it.
You don't want to be sitting, like, right next to your employees or something, but, like, why so? And he goes, so that when they cry, you won't feel like you need to cry or take care of them. You'll just slide the Kleenex across the desk. And I was like, are you kidding? And he was like, no. And then... Years later, I looked back and I realized I understood what he was saying.
I mean, he didn't know me at all, but he was just saying probably something about himself, which is, people are gonna come into your office, they're gonna cry, it does happen, and you're going to need to be the boss.
which is to be supportive and empathic, but like you can't get pulled into it because they might be crying about something they don't like about the lab or about something not happening the way they want it. I mean, who can imagine any other reason to cry in your boss's office? But maybe they have a family issue and, you know, so you have to remember you're the boss.
And I thought, oh, that's interesting. I ended up with a desk that was kind of medium in width. But I think that nowadays there's a lot more – kind of bleeding of roles. And, you know, it used to be that everyone got really dressed up for work. Now dressing down is like common in certain circumstances and not others. I think that there's a lot of kind of lack of clarity about
here we go again, you know, power and authority and, but also kind of staying in our own frame versus taking on someone else's frame.
Yeah.
You know, I have a friend who runs a pretty large business and he did the same experiment that you did of asking people, you know, how he could do better. But First, he unfortunately made the mistake of asking people how they felt about being there. And they ended up making one of these emotion clouds where they took, everyone filled out a thing and wrote what the most dominant emotions were.
And then he told this story, like, call me late at night. He sits down and they're going to present this as data in front of everybody. And this emotion cloud comes up and the biggest bubble in the middle just says stress. And he was mortified, right? But he learned that they all feel really, really, really stressed. That sort of exercise would never have happened 10, 15 years ago.
It's like, yeah, like I won't say what profession he's in for sake of privacy, but like it's a profession where stress is part of the process and you don't kind of get the certificate at the end, so to speak, if you don't experience stress.
But this actually relates to what we started with in a way. I'm going to circle it back there, which is... And because I hear this a lot, you know, kind of some kids these days, they don't, They don't know how to tolerate stress or they're always overwhelmed. But part of it is, again, maybe this is my MGI, maybe they haven't been told the right story about stress or anxiety.
This came up with my kids the other day. My older son had his first basketball game of the season. And he goes, oh, I'm really nervous, feeling a little anxious. And it's just so interesting, like, the way we respond in little ways to our kids in these moments form... Like, the way they end up thinking about those feelings later on. I said, well, of course you're nervous.
Being nervous means you care. You really care about basketball. Right? And obviously we've had many conversations about what feelings mean. But it was so interesting. I watched him go... Yeah, I do care. Kind of in that little sentence, being nervous means you care. I mean, think about it. You're never nervous about anything you don't care about, right?
If being nervous means I care, I have a story to understand it. I now inherently feel like the feeling is normal. I'm almost like proud, you know? Like, yeah, I do care, right? My relationship with that feeling is going to be so different than if my parents are like, why are you nervous? There's nothing to be nervous about. Or, oh, you're nervous? Oh, does that mean you're not going to play well?
Oh my goodness, are you going to miss your foul shots? I mean, so in the first, right, my kid feels like being nervous is wrong. So I just set them up to... I feel like they're feeling the wrong feeling when they're feeling nervous going on. And the second, I'm lingering on my anxiety to their nervousness. Not a great combo. But the stories we tell matter. So in the workplace, you're stressed.
Yeah, you know, actually, this makes me think, maybe not right now. One more time. It would be really helpful to talk about what is stress? Why do we feel stress? How do we talk to ourselves when we feel stress? Does anyone here know the way you talk to yourself when you're stressed has the power to make stress feel a little smaller or a little bigger? That's really interesting.
I wonder, does anyone here use a session? Should we do something in the workplace about how to deal with stress? Because you're right. this is a stressful job. And this is where I don't think about power, but authority. And I want to own that and let you know that. Stress comes along with this type of job. I'm making this up. And this is why you get paid pretty well.
And this is why, you know, whatever else could be true. But one of my jobs is not just being honest, but actually helping everyone develop the best skills that maybe no one ever taught them before to manage stress. Let me know if that's of interest. I just think about that. The whole mood just changed. You kind of own your authority and you own the story.
And I think whether you're talking about being a CEO or being a parent, it's actually all the same.
That makes sense. I have a rule, which is if my pulse rate goes above a certain limit, my thumbs stop working, meaning I won't allow myself to text. I don't talk on the phone. I'll just go in the bathroom and just sit for a second if I have to. But that's rare. Typically, I just I'm like, I have a rule. My heart rate goes up. My thumbs don't work.
What do you do?
I just do nothing. I follow the do nothing thing. I just wait. I mean, I also have a rule, which is unless somebody's hemorrhaging right in front of me, it usually can wait. Drives people crazy, but they thank me later. Like unless somebody is literally hemorrhaging, like I can pause my response. Because I'm a kind of like move fast, get things done person.
And actually it was taught to me by a chairman of a major university in your home city of New York City. He said, there's always more time. And I said, that's ridiculous. He said, unless somebody's hemorrhaging right in front of you, there's always more time.
Going back to my daughter, it's one of the mantras that's been really helpful for me as someone who, again, just knowing myself, I always like to go, go, go. I get so much pleasure, probably identity, value from doing things. And so a byproduct of that is I always kind of feel like I'm in a rush because my body craves movement and checking things off.
But being in a rush is never terribly helpful in close relationships. No one likes to feel like, come on, you get to the end of the story or it's not good. So sometimes I think efficiency and relationship building are like antithetical.
I, amen, a thousand times over. No, I, I don't think we can be efficient in relationships. It's like efficiency and other things is beautiful. Um,
Well, it's a unitary experience being efficient. And so like when I can be in efficiency mode a lot and it's something that I have to really think when I'm going home to my closest relationships. And it's interesting now that I work so much more than I used to, it's almost reinforcing the efficiency mode.
So I really know I have to, you know, my own therapy, like really work on like that's not a value of mine. All the time. At work, maybe sometimes. Even there, sometimes you got to get out of it to connect to people, right? And so that is something, again, where like knowing where I am on that scale, asking people to call me out. Oh, mom, you're rushing me at night.
Becky, I want to tell you the whole story. I'm not just trying to give you the TLDR. I want the experience of telling you the story. I'm like, right, I'm doing that thing. Mm-hmm.
Yeah, slowing down is rarely a mistake. That's really true. I guess occasionally, but rarely a mistake. Really true. I'd like to talk a little bit about technology. I know this is a growing interest of yours.
I've been thinking a little bit based on our earlier discussion about people who are in their own container or sensing what's going on inside them prior to paying attention to and sensing what's going on in other people, because clearly both are important. I don't like this idea that it's like one or the other. Yeah.
But with the advent of text messaging, so here I'm not going to talk about social media. This is not about social media. With text messaging, first of all, this is the first time in human evolution that humans have written with their thumbs. That's weird, been kind of quirky reflection.
But the other one is this is the first time in human evolution, meaning very recently, that we are aware of what's going on with so many other people and we're expected to at least know it and perhaps even respond to it. I mean, it's just, I know people younger than 30 are probably going, wait, no, it's always been this way, but it wasn't always this way.
Clearly our brain has adapted to this new format, but it did not evolve in this format, whereby you're getting on a plane and you look at your phone and you are aware of the movements and requests and maybe kind statements, et cetera, from other people. We're tethered.
in so many ways, and that means that our brain is really tethered to the states of others, their emotional states, their physical states, where they are. You said, and I'll keep repeating it because I love it so much, the more you can locate somebody, the more it reflects their values.
So being able to locate somebody in space and time and understand how bounded they are or not to their own emotions or yours, fantastic. But the fact that you have 10 people in your phone that you're aware of, you're not even supposed to be aware of 10 people at once, except the 10 people perhaps around you on the, you know, boarding a plane.
Yeah.
So we're being forced to navigate a new landscape with all this.
Yes.
After this conversation folds, we'll look at our phones. You couldn't have that many... I guarantee you one thing, no matter how many text messages or few text messages you have, it's far more conversations, if you will, than you could possibly have by phone at once. Yep. So in the old days, you left messages and you'd get on the phone when you could.
I'm not saying we go back to that, but I think we might be asking ourselves to do something that is impossibly hard and maybe even bad for us.
Yeah, I don't know how... apocalyptic you want me to get about this. But I think I actually, you know, my husband and I were talking about phones and text and social media and AI. And I brought up something to him. He's like, I don't think I've, in all the arguments I've heard, I haven't heard that, where I feel like we're changing in a dramatic way our basic evolutionary drive around attachment.
in a way where attachment has always been the primary evolutionary drive of humans. And with all the different technological shifts there have been, because people always say, oh, there's been this, there's been this. What's never been shifted is kind of the nature really of one-to-one human attachment.
We're entering into something really new where let's even say text messages, 20 at once, 10 at once. Our bodies will always crave what's immediately gratifying over what is long-term good for us. Another way I think about it is our bodies will always choose convenience and ease and gratification over what's good for us long-term. So you think about all these pings coming in.
It's a lot of information, this text, that text, this text, this text. And what you're doing in your circuitry and over time evolutionarily is getting used to the multiplicity of relationships, the multiplicity of information. It's just more gratifying than one-on-one. To the point that one-on-one conversation over text or even in person is
is going to have so much more of a gap than it ever has been in terms of how slow, how low stim, and how boring and awkward it is compared to, especially for kids who get this early, the constant information flow and gratification and stimulation. I think that's going to have a profound impact, not right away, but over time.
And if you add in social media and then if you add in AI, I mean, on the way humans just are even able to relate to each other. So, yes, I think like this advancement in technology and what's happening now. I think there's always been a tradeoff, always, between how short-term gratifying something is and how long-term good something is for us.
Because the things that are really good for humans long-term are the things that involve humans to tolerate frustration. I would say that is the most important skill, I think, for kids to learn. But the world more than ever is built now with insanely low frustration tolerance because we're built for so much information, so much consumption, and so much media gratification.
This is actually, I think, the thing that isn't talked about with technology. It's why parenting has changed. It's why so much of parenting is about making kids happy and their lives easy because there's never been a generation of parents like my generation where our lives are just so much easier.
We have so much less tolerance for our kids' tantrums because we're on our phones wanting our life to be easier. So we stop the tantrum. We make their life easier. We make them anxious. We make them fragile because of our lowered frustration tolerance. So I don't know where we're landing here, but, and by the way, I text like I'm not like a purist here. You know, I am a realist.
I live in the world, you know. But I think it's profound how it's changing human interaction and expectations and gratification.
And my colleague Anna Lembke, who wrote Dopamine Nation, cited some data that humans have more free time now across socioeconomic groups, more free time for everybody than ever before, more expectation of immediate gratification. And it's not just the texts that we're getting. It's, for some people, the texts that they're not getting.
They're thinking about the people that they haven't heard back from, etc.
Like you.
The number of tethers. Right, exactly. The number of tethers is just astonishing. I had a conversation with somebody recently that popped to mind where it was a little bit, it was like a low friction one that ended in a really good place where I said, you know, the problem is, you know, I was talking about, there's a little bit of an age gap.
And I said, you know, the problem is you think slow is low. Like, what I was saying was I like to just chill. This is something I haven't done enough of in my life, because I'm a pretty ambitious person and always have been since I was little about everything. But I've learned that, like, slow isn't low. Like, I love just, like, sitting down and, like, hanging out with the dog or just...
It's like slowing down. And it used to feel like slow was low. It used to feel like, oh, nothing's happening or this is depressing or it's boring. And I think in recent years that became more and more the case as I got more and more pulled into technology. And then I did a little bit of a technology distancing experiment, if you will.
I have this wooden box that someone made for me and I put my phones in there. And it's so amazing how once you put the phone in a different container, it's it like completely changes the relationship to it. I don't get it, but anyway, again, physical barriers to take emotional steps, always a good idea. And I just realized like slow isn't low, like slow is awesome.
So I totally agree that the circuits of our brain have now adapted to expect immediate gratification. I like to think, and maybe this is a false wish, but I like to think that there are components of our brain that are hardwired enough through tens or hundreds of thousands of years of evolution
that might be able to recognize and appreciate the slow moments and not feel like slow is low, meaning slow is depressing. But I do think that if one is weaned in, raised in an environment where you expect things quickly, well then, you know, it's going to feel like the horse and cart compared to the car at some level.
I think that's right. And I think for parents who have young kids, I think these are such powerful and empowering things to think about when your kids are young. Because I think it's easy to think, okay, so I'll deal with this when my kid gets a phone.
It's the circuits around even how your kid will use the phone, how much you're going to be able to set boundaries with your kid when they get a phone. All these have to do with the patterns early on, right? So if we go back to slow learning, is good, frustration and frustration tolerance is the name of the game.
It requires a lot of inconvenient moments that matter so much for how not only your kid learns to tolerate the frustration inherent in life, but I think this is really important, how your kid learns to feel capable. Kids only develop capability from watching themselves get through hard things. They don't develop capability by being successful ever.
In some ways, it builds up this pressure and a fragility if that's been the only thing they have. And when we think about this whole generation who's so anxious, kind of so fragile, I really believe the antidote to anxiety is capability. And we, and I'll give you an example, like we steal our kids' capability all the time when they're young in the name of short-term convenience for everyone.
So here's an example. Like I remember this day, my oldest who's now 13, he was like three and he was really into puzzles when he was three.
puzzles are like really hard right he was working on it something like i can't do it you know the classic wine which i just want everyone to know like no part of me is like i love that sound no like nobody likes whining okay but to me those are our like bang for our buck moments You know, they're not our easy moments. They're our bang for our buck.
My kid is going to learn something about how to deal with situations they don't think they're capable of completing. That is such an important lesson. And I have a fork in the road. I can either do the puzzle for him, which gives me short-term convenience, stops the meltdown. But beyond frustration, tolerance.
Like one of the things I really remember thinking when my kid was young is if I do it for him, I'm stealing his capability because if he can get through this and kind of get to the point where he says, I did a puzzle I didn't think I could do, that's incredible.
So I remember this because it felt so, he's still whining, but there are these moments as a parent, and this is what I like to help parents with, our wins are not based on our kids' reactions. Our wins happen when you just know there's this amazing feeling you have as a parent I know that was important. I know it.
And I remember saying to him with this puzzle situation, sweetie, I'm not going to do the puzzle for you. And I want to tell you why. The feeling you get when you think you can't do something, kind of take a deep breath, maybe take a break, maybe even the next day, watch yourself do that thing is literally the best feeling in the world. It is the best feeling. It becomes addictive.
And I will not take that feeling away from you because I believe you're going to get it. I could cry. And one of the things... I feel like people hear the story like, okay, Becky, great. I do not do that all the time. Sometimes I finish the puzzle. But when we think about what we want for our kids later in life, it might be, no, I'm not getting you a phone yet.
How a kid reacts to that situation, it's not just about a phone. It's kind of, well, have you always just done the thing for me? Have you always just given me what I want? Do I have any ability to feel like I can tolerate frustration and wait and figure things out?
That all layers into how kids react to not getting a phone, how kids approach hard math problems, how kids do or do not sit down to start their English essay. That is difficult to do. And all that stuff, you can start building those skills in the teenage years, don't get me wrong.
But the leg up your kid has at 14 when they've been basically building those life and academic skills from the start and they've built their identity around capability, like that's what I want to give every parent and every kid in the world.
Yeah, it's awesome. You know, I said it last time we spoke, I'll say it again. You know, if you're thinking of adopting, I'd be happy to put myself up for adoption. It's such a beautiful philosophy and stance to take around effort and frustration. I mean, again, this isn't about my life, but I feel so blessed that I came up in science where things take forever.
You can work two years on a project and then discover you do the right control experiment and you're like, we got nothing. Like literally, we have nothing. Yeah. There wasn't and there still isn't a tendency to publish what are called negative results, which aren't bad results, but where you basically got nothing. You can find a flaw in the reagents you're using. You get nothing.
You're starting again. And to have that, you know, a few times and to have some papers take two, three, four years to get accepted, other papers six months. I'll tell you, the six months feels really short. But these days we get so much immediate gratification. The other day I was staying at a hotel and I ordered food in. I don't do it that often. I was like, I really want like a poke bowl.
There's that poke bowl place. I ordered it. It was there in 11 minutes. Wow. I was like, whoa, like, this is so wild. I was like, I got to be careful. Not because I'll overeat pokeballs. You can only have so many pokeballs. But it's like, you just, it's there.
Convenience.
Yeah. It's so, you know. It's incredible.
I remember.
And sad and scary and exciting and all the things, you know. So I think having variable durations of effort, reward in one's life. And being able to see where like the latency is very short. Yes, social media, but, you know, other things that where you have longer duration effort to reward contingencies.
I'm sounding kind of, this is like nerd speak, but I've gone on record saying before, and I'll say again that, you know, dopamine that is achieved without, you know, effort preceding it is just be really careful. Doesn't matter if it's amphetamine, cocaine, social media or anything else. You get used to the schedule.
That's right.
And I think we need to be able to tolerate and enjoy and lean into and savor variable schedules of effort and reward.
It's so interesting you say that. I have two thoughts. Number one, when I think about the puzzle situation, that's like effort, effort, effort, effort, struggle, deep breath, effort, effort, nope, that's not it, effort, effort, and then you get the dopamine. That circuit, I just always think, that is such a benefit to my kid later in life.
It's kind of the opposite of, you know, which we all do sometimes, but if it's the only circuit, being on your iPad all the time as a little kid and eat no effort, all the dopamine.
Well, I think about it as a friend used to call it years ago, birthday money. There's one time each year, okay, maybe a couple because of the holidays, when you're supposed to get presents just for being you. It's called your birthday. Or if you're a kid, you know, or whatever holidays are where we celebrate kids by giving presents or we celebrate each other.
But every other day, you're not supposed to get rewards necessarily just because, not just for being you. The rewards are out there in life and appreciating things. I'm not trying to be too stoic here. But there's only one day each year where you get literally presents just for being you. The other stuff is supposed to require effort.
Yeah, and struggle. I think, you know, it's really interesting. My second had a lot of speech issues when she was younger, and I kind of noticed it. Like at a certain age, you're supposed to be building sounds and words, and she was replacing. Like as soon as she had a new sound, she lost one and had a sense something was going on. She had a pretty serious speech apraxia.
She had to go to speech therapy three days a week, right, for probably a year. She now, you wouldn't know. But it was interesting. I remember that time, my older one, probably five, maybe she was two or three and six. And I remember someone saying to me like, oh, about my daughter, like, oh, poor her, kind of, you know, it's like a lot. And I don't think I said this, but it's so interesting.
I remember thinking, she's way better off than my son. If I'm going to worry about one of my kids right now, which I'm not worried about either, I would worry about my son. His early years were so linear, so without struggle. Like, she's going to have an early experience of struggling, working hard.
She won't remember it with her words, but that circuitry, which are our important memories, the ones we don't remember with our words, the ones that our bodies remember, she has such an early experience with watching herself struggle and get to the other side. Like... I would wish that for every child.
And so I also think I want to also share that story because I think parents who have kids who have those early issues, it's so easy. Oh, I actually think it's really empowering to do a complete 180, to be like, wait, I'm not going to fix this right away. I'm going to support my child. I'm going to let them know I believe in them.
I'm going to let them know I see a version of them that's going to get through this. They're going to still struggle. And that is actually going to be like the best foundation and almost like the best leg up.
Now, I have a friend, very, very successful, who told me that he wasn't until, you know, until he was in his 40s that he had like kind of a major difficult life, a major business disappointment. And it almost crushed him. Like, you know, but he had never had that before. He had been so successful over and over again.
You know, it was fun for me to talk to my dad recently on the podcast because we haven't had a conversation like that ever. And we were talking about sort of mistakes that one makes in the context of, you know, work and et cetera. And he said, it's still ringing in my ears. He said, well, you know, those humiliations are actually good for us. He called them humiliations. I was like, really?
And he was like, yeah, you know, they, they humble us and they keep us thoughtful about what we're doing next. And I was like, yeah, but it was kind of wild to hear that. I don't know why I need to hear it externally because I know it's true. I knew it was true, but yeah, it's not just making mistakes.
Like sometimes, listen, I'm fully against bullying where I understand how that can be very destructive, but Like, there are going to be times when we're going to feel humiliated. And to be able to bounce back from that is pretty awesome. I actually think that builds character strength. I do.
Yeah, and I think, you know, this is like a great lead into parenting. I hear this all the time where someone will say, I don't know if my kid's being bullied, but like they're, you know, they were told, you can't play basketball with us. You're the worst basketball player in the grade, something like that, right?
Where the way I work with parents, right, is, again, assuming this isn't chronic, I don't think step one is calling the school. I don't think step one is calling the other parent. right? If you zoom out, you're right. Like, I don't think a kid's going to be called the worst basketball player, you know, over and over in the course of the next couple decades, but they will be called something.
They'll be left out. Or even if nothing happens, you know what's going to happen? They're going to feel less than in a group. Like, Probably a million times. I do, right, still. So we have this almost opportunity of like, okay, well, what skills would be useful when my kid is 18 and 30? And actually the struggle, again, is my opportunity. I always think my kids are in my home for 18 years.
I, it sounds like sick and I don't know if I really mean this, but I'm going to say it. I almost hope they have all the variations of struggles they're going to have later on because then at least I can kind of get in it with them and like build some skills and help them see that they can manage. And then I feel like those bumps are going to happen. Right. I guess it is like pilots, don't they?
When they have simulations, there's no way they simulate perfect flights and say you're ready to fly. They simulate all the issues so that a pilot can learn the right controls and then they're really prepared. They don't take away the issues.
Right. Now, I love the analogy of flying because I, you know, I'll never forget driving in really thick fog for the first time. This happens if you grew up in the Bay Area. Just being able to see one reflector at a time and being terrified. Now, like driving in fog never feels great, but I've been there.
It's a familiar feeling.
Yeah. Yeah, I've been thinking a lot these days about this whole thing about proficiency and our expectation of kids nowadays, you know, that we have been told for a long time that we need to guard against kids feeling terrible about themselves. On the other hand, we want them to be proficient.
And what you're really talking about here, if I understand correctly, is proficiency at being human, at being really good at certain things, less good at others. I can also tell any kid, because I was this kid, like in a group of musicians, I'm the least proficient. I mean, you really just don't, talk about wanting someone to do nothing. I'm best off not even playing the triangle.
Okay, like just doing nothing would be the best thing I could do to any musical effort. It's just, but I realized that at some point, even though every kid in my school played an instrument, they had like the youth symphony and all that kind of stuff, because it was also a time when I could just kind of relax. Like you don't have to be certainly best at everything.
But I also believe that in order to really find what you're kind of quote unquote meant for, you have to try a bunch of things and find out what you're never going to even approach partially skilled at. You still have to try. I guess that's the point. So on the one hand, I guess I'm saying do nothing. On the other hand, I'm saying you still have to try.
I guess you have to try to find out that you're really as bad at music as I found out I am.
Maybe.
I'm good with it. I'm good with it. I love music, but I don't need to play it.
But I think then what you're saying is you're able to separate your identity from any behavior. Being bad at music doesn't mean you're a bad person. And I think anyone hears that and they're like, obviously. But we conflate those two things 90% of the time. Right.
That's why we really care about winning at Scrabble is like to some degree we think it means we're smart and everyone's like, you know, versus I'm probably the same level of smart whether I win at Scrabble or lose at Scrabble. Right. And to me, that's what confidence is. It's not feeling like you're the best at something. It's feeling like it's OK to be you when you're not the best at something.
Right. It's feeling at home with yourself. And to me, feeling at home with yourself is. is, first of all, it's an amazing internal motivator because you get to also figure out what you're really passionate about, right? And yeah, learning to participate in things and even have joy in things that you're not great at.
Again, these are things I think our kids really can learn, not from lessons, not from a textbook. not really from a teacher. They learn it from what we model. It's actually interesting. We play a ton of board games, my family. And I'm just, I think they're like the antidote to everything on a screen. So we have a million board games. I'm the resident. If anyone ever needs a recommendation.
What's your favorite board game to play as a family?
Okay. I love Sushi Go.
I don't know it, but I'll check it out.
So She Go Party is the better version. It's actually a really great adult game, too. It's very strategic. We play code names. We play a lot of word games. We play Boggle. We play Ghost. We play Scrabble. We play Rummy Q. But the game I was going to say that we also play a lot of that I love is Scattergories. Okay. So have you ever played that? Yeah.
That's a fun game.
I whatever part of the brain is good at generating a lot of different things from a single letter is must be very small in my brain. I am so bad at categories. I mean, my kids are all pretty quick. I lose to everyone. My seven year old included. I'm horrible. It actually is a game I suggest often. I'm like, let's play categories. And I think that's actually so powerful for our kids.
I mean, I think a lot of us, if we look back. We think like it's one of the reasons my parents didn't really play with me or do things like they felt like they weren't good at it. You know, like probably right to demonstrate to your kid, I can choose something. I can have joy in something. I can want to do something that I'm not good at.
That is, again, going to be more powerful to your kid than sitting down and saying, this is what we think is going to help kids. It's okay to do things that you're not good at. That's like logical words in the brain. That's not an experience they're building or internalizing. Kids learn from stories, from experiences.
And so I think that's one way in terms of how do I help my kids be confident, but also just be at home with themselves and do things they're not best at. Probably the best way to do that is to model it over and over to your kids.
I love it. We're back to theory versus practice.
Yes. I'm big on practice. Maybe on both.
I feel like as long as there are kids and adults that seem, I want to emphasize seem, to do everything well, the athlete, academic, musician, good dancer, charming with other people, as long as those people exist or seem to exist, we're going to have to all overcome our sense that we should be at least partially good at a wide variety of things, maybe not everything.
Do you think those people exist?
No, I know they don't exist. I know that there are people that apparently are like that. They're fakers. Well, I don't know. I will say that, and this is, I don't get paid to say positive things about the university I work for or not, but I will say occasionally I'll meet a student from Stanford And I'm like, goodness gracious. Like this kid, right, can apparently do everything.
Like they're an athlete and they're a musician. They have all these things. There are those people. And I will say, but this is important, the pressure that the perception of those people creates on them Without fail brings them to immense challenge in their life, if not then, later. I've seen it every single time.
I know because I grew up in the town where I'm now a professor and I went to school with many people who ended up there or, you know, other places like that. And of course, there are people like that in every environment. They are outliers. They tend to be very salient. We tend to notice them. And they create this, you know, false internal pressure. This is the reason I raise it.
And I want to say it's not like they eventually, you know, fail and dissolve into a puddle of their own tears like that. Hopefully they're resilient and they push forward in life and some of them do amazing things and some of them do less amazing things. But the point is that there are people among our species that seem to do many, many things very, very well.
And I think when we hold ourselves to that standard, we suffer and we hold ourselves back. I think that, I believe, I just have a central belief that we all do have some unique gifts that we're meant to bring to our life and to the world, and it shows up in different forms. And one of the worst things we can do in trying to find that and express it is trying to be really good at everything.
I just think that's the most poisonous idea in the American mindset that we're supposed to be really good at everything. On the other hand, I personally believe that we should try a variety of things so that we experience frustration and fail and eventually find what it is that is, you know, we're quote unquote meant to do. I do.
But I feel also very fortunate that I was never really pushed to be excellent at everything. I have terrible hand-eye coordination. But I'm pretty good at sports with my feet. But when I say pretty good, I mean passable.
Yeah.
So I gave up on the idea of becoming a professional athlete very, very young. So I think we have to know that we have to play games with our hands and our feet in order to figure that out.
Yeah. And I guess, you know, we were talking about this maybe before we started, but I don't know. I'm trying to think why this is, but I tend not to put anyone on a pedestal.
Mm-hmm.
I feel like, and maybe part of it is in part of my private practice for years, I saw, maybe I saw the Stanford grads who were then living in New York. And they weren't literally from Stanford, but I'd have all these late 20-year-olds and their pedigree, like all look the same, top of their class, Ivy League, Goldman Sachs, this MBA. And like so many of them had the same
insane anxiety and emptiness. I still remember the way one of them described how they felt and she was brilliant with her words and she said, I walk around and it's like when I'm with people and doing things and at work, it's like there's a ton of color. When I'm alone, I feel like I am an empty room with white walls.
Oh, goodness. And it's very sad.
Very sad.
Very sad.
It actually has a happy ending, which has a nuanced ending, but a happy ending where... I was actually saying this to a friend because it actually relates to my own childhood. I feel like I've grown a lot, had my therapy, and I feel like when I was younger, I was really hard-driving and really somewhat people-pleasing. And me and my friend who were both like that
were like that have kids who aren't really like that. And they're amazing kids and they do so well and they have this internal confidence. But sometimes we joke, we're like, but there's nothing that will drive you like feeling not good enough. There's nothing that drives you like feeling like every test score defines your self worth. And it's so sick, right?
Because we're almost like conflicted with our kids. Like they're all great kids, they're responsible, but they almost have a little bit more inner contentment, right? But I think about that young woman I saw and how at work she felt amazing until it didn't happen until she was 28. She didn't get the promotion she thought she was getting. And then, I mean... She never failed before.
And it's not only the never failure when your internal sense of self is built outside in, which you actually can do if you have a lot of accomplishments. It works for a while. But as soon as that stops working, if you have nothing, you feel like in an empty room with white walls.
What's really compelling about the therapy over the course of a number of years is I still remember over COVID, we were then Zooming and she'd had her own place and she actually went through this process and she was very artistic of painting the walls in her actual room, talking about making something concrete.
And, like, kind of in the way that she was feeling a lot more lit up inside out instead of outside in.
That's great.
But I just think—I guess I know myself, too. And maybe this is part of why I try not to put people on a pedestal. Maybe it's as I'm talking. People are like, oh, Becky gets it right with her kids, and she's doing this. And, like— Whatever I can share, that is part of my story. I also yell at my kids. I also feel like sometimes I'm on my phone too much. I feel like my life is out of balance.
I don't get to see my friends nearly the way I used to. They probably often are like, where's Becky? Why is she not, you know, not only responding to texts, but remembering my birthday or whatever I forget. And that doesn't feel good to me because I used to do more of that. And so... No one has it all figured out. Like, humans, I think, are remarkably complicated, remarkably imperfect.
We all have parts of us that feel really good, and maybe some of us play up those parts more than others. And we all have parts of us that feel confusing, maybe have some shame, feel, you know, I don't know, just more complicated. And so I at least want to get that out there about myself.
Oh, I really appreciate you sharing. And I want to be clear, if I was at all unclear, that I certainly don't hold up these ultra performers in all domains on a pedestal. I think they're in a very precarious place inside and outside. They've essentially given up all their power and agency to one incoming failure. And maybe they never experience it and they get to the end without having done it.
But what a terrible way to live anyway. I've always looked up since I was little to people that really took a unique path. I've always found that they, yes, accomplish tremendous things and they have interesting, sometimes painful flaws. Like I'm a huge fan of the late neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks. Very, very incredible man. Very complicated life.
Incredible.
You know, if you read his books, his autobiography, which I highly recommend everybody do if you're interested in science and just animals and a life uniquely lived. He's a really good example. And there are a bunch of other examples that are meaningful to me. Certainly not somebody who, you know, he... couldn't do an experiment to save his life.
He was moved out of multiple universities and places, you know, very, very complicated character, had a methamphetamine addiction, was a closet homosexual, came out later in life and was then long periods of time on his own. And anyway, had a great relationship later in life. Very interesting person.
became that way and found his passion by realizing how terrible he was at certain things, including certain branches of medicine. So I think that trying many things and being really realistic about whether or not something's for us or not, but is the key.
But then I guess the question becomes, and this must be so hard from the perspective of parenting, but also just in terms of guiding ourselves through life is, you know, how much friction do we experience before we say, you And I'm cool with that. I love music. But I'm going to put my efforts into these other things. And, you know, this thing comes more easily for me.
You know, I do think we have a lot of natural tendencies. And I feel like, especially in the United States, there's been this complicated relationship with parenting and education whereby...
we we don't want to push people to their own you know like suffering and demise but we also have to avoid not pushing them because then they don't ever find what they are proficient in and they don't learn that overcoming friction thing um so it's it's tricky i do believe everyone has a unique expression of themselves in life whatever that is doesn't have to be in professional life but to try a lot of different things and you know how at what point you uh you bail out
I mean, I've had few in my lab, but I've spoken to graduate students and postdocs where I had to say, you know what? I actually had this conversation with a postdoc. I was like, you know what? You're a really good scientist. You're never going to be a professor. Let's get you a job in biotech. And they were like, oh, they thought their whole life they were going to be a professor.
I'm like, you're not. And the data are the following, which point to that. And it's kind of devastating. But then years later, they thanked me or they thanked me in that case.
Yeah.
A few others probably cursed me, but yeah. So how do you know when to keep pushing your kid to even engage in something? Like maybe they're the kid that always is picked last for the team, but you know they should play sports.
So I guess my first reaction is I'm reacting to the word pushing because I'm not sure that's the... Like, the verb I would think about. Because I think the idea of pushing your kid, even, like, how much do I push? There's a lot about us there. It's like, is that my desire?
I guess I grew up in a town where a lot of kids got pushed.
Oh, I mean, I grew up in a town where every kid got pushed. So maybe that's why I know something about it, right? I mean, I think we see this all the time. And it goes back to actually what side of the tennis court. Like, whose feelings are whose? Like... Is this my unlived dreams as an athlete in my youth, or is this actually about my kids' soccer skills?
You know, I think parents watching their kids playing sports is a prime example of, am I living out my unfulfilled dreams and projecting that onto my daughter? Or does my daughter like soccer? And, like, how can I really differentiate those, right? I think actually, though, making it back to that, a lot of this actually goes back to frustration tolerance and why it matters so much to me.
Like my approach to teaching frustration tolerance, which is like a hidden gem we have here at Couldn't Side, I really want to be in every school. I think it needs to be in every school. And I want to describe it to you, okay? So I literally have this graph. It's helpful. And I know you like to write things down too to make it concrete. We're like point one is not knowing how to do something.
Okay. And point two, which is very far away, is let's say knowing how to do it or being very proficient. This could be soccer. I think a good example is reading. Okay. Like everybody starts out not knowing how to read. And let's say not everybody, but a lot of people learn how to read. The space between not knowing and knowing I call the learning space.
It has a name and it's helpful to know where you are in a map. And the learning space has one feeling that you're supposed to have, frustration. That is the feeling you're supposed to have. And we have this idea that we shift from not knowing to knowing Like this?
It's because of those damn Star Wars movies. Oh, no, actually, Star Wars incorporated some frustration, but it's because of movies. Boom, you're supposed to just have the skill because you picked up the rock or the sword or the pen or the wand.
Well, and now it's because if you think about the circuitry that kids get used to with dopamine and the space between wanting and having in general is low because when you don't know something, you want to know it. Here, you do know it.
Our tolerance and our kids' tolerance for wanting and not having is so low that what's so sad is the learning space has gotten massively compressed and people fear frustration. This image, when I've gone over this with kids and even teachers, I know teachers who teach this in their class, okay, today we're going to learn this new thing.
We're going to learn whatever it is, you know, how to read a short word. Everybody in this class is here, not knowing. Everybody in this class is going to get here. And probably today, most of us, and you can actually do it now, are going to be right here. What does this say? The learning space. How are we supposed to feel when we're in the learning space? The class can say, frustrated.
Okay, here's an interesting assignment, different than you think. The goal today is not to tell me if you can read the letters that are in front of you. I want you to raise your hand when you feel frustrated, which feels like this. Oh, I can't do it. Because I'm going to come up to you and I'm going to give you a high five. And I'm going to say, you are in the learning space. You are learning.
How amazing is that? Like, Andrew, I really believe this has the power to change learning. Because then when we talk about proficiency or when we talk about years from now, My kid is saying this happens all the time. I get questions about this all the time. My kid says they want to do whatever it is. It could be a coding class. It could be a lacrosse class. And they do it once.
And then they always come home and they say, I want to do it. I quit. Or maybe they're on a swim team and they want to quit. Do I let my kid quit? Right? To me, the question is actually like, most likely, none of our kids are going to be Olympic swimmers or like professional basketball players. I think about this a lot with youth sports.
The whole goal in my mind for most people with youth sports, not everyone, but most, is learning how to deal with frustration, learning how to do things you thought you couldn't do, character, sharing, being a good teammate, sportsmanship, right? All those things are hard skills to learn.
So the reason I'm signing my kid up for basketball is actually just because it's like a good medium for all those things. And so I want to be sure that if my kid is quitting, it's not because they're escaping the very, very natural learning space that is so important to be in in life. And this happened. Actually, my oldest wanted to quit baseball. He'd played for years and he wanted to quit in...
The conversation we ended up having was, look, let's wait to the end of the season. Like, and this goes back to values. It's not we don't quit, but like in our family, we really value and try as much as we can to keep our commitments. And not just to ourselves, to each other. And so the rest of the season, you might be thinking all the time, I don't want to be doing this.
And again, in my head, I'm thinking, good. That's like a good life experience to watch yourself go through that as long as it's not toxic. And at the end, you know, we'll talk about it. Interestingly enough, he had the best baseball season he'd ever had. He had a grand slam, which no shade to baseball. That's as exciting as youth baseball ever gets, right? And still...
He was like, I think I'm done. Like, I just want to... And I felt really good about that. I was like, look, you ended on, like, you're playing really well. It wasn't just because you got moved down in the batting order. Like, if that's the reason why I could get moved down to the batting order, they're not starting on basketball. I hear this all the time. Now they want to quit.
I don't have any rigid rules. But if that becomes a pattern, that worries me. Or not worries me, but... Forget youth sports. That's just not a great circuitry that would be conducive with kind of resilience and confidence in adulthood.
Look, I love, love, love this concept, which I believe to be entirely true, that the learning space between unskilled and skilled, if you will, is characterized by the feeling of frustration in mind and body. Yes. I don't want to rattle off another experiment, but there is just oh so much data. I'll share this with you offline.
The papers that is showing that brain plasticity changes in neural circuitry only occur when the chemical milieu of the brain is different than it normally is. Otherwise, how would the brain know it should change? So what sets the context for... massive change in our neural circuitry is when there's a lot of adrenaline in the body. Sorry, folks, it's true.
Adrenaline, also called epinephrine, and norepinephrine released in the brain. Now, you don't want to be in a state of panic or stress to the point where you're debilitated, but that shift in the chemical milieu sets the stage for rewiring of connections between neurons. I mean, this is known at the molecular level, it's known at the cellular level, it's known at the circuit level.
And I'm excited to share that literature with you because it just basically is a bunch of nerd speak and numbers to support the fact that you're nailing it right in the bull's eye, which is without frustration, there is no rewiring of the neural circuits. And if you think about it, it had to be that way. Otherwise, why would the circuits change?
So that the error signal is what sets plasticity in motion. Now the actual rewiring occurs during sleep. So this is my reminder to make sure that your kids get enough sleep because that's when the actual, this is the phenomenon of not being able to do something coming back a few days or weeks later. And you're like, can do it.
Well, it's because it happened in sleep, the final portion of the rewiring.
That's why phones shouldn't be in the bedroom for kids.
I think 75% of people between the age of 7 and 18 are massively sleep deprived. And, you know, there's the neural rewiring deficits associated with that are serious. And these are what we call sensitive periods. I like sensitive periods more than critical periods because critical periods imply an open and shut. Sensitive is there's a tapering, but it does taper. So, yeah.
This unskilled to skilled and frustration in the learning space model, this is part of something that you're putting together now. Could you expand on that?
I already have it. I mean, our frustration tolerance program, it's a workshop. It's within our membership, right? So it's one of 30 workshops. To me, it's one where, you know, the thing is no parents say, Dr. Becky, what I'm really dealing with is low frustration tolerance.
You know, they'll say I have my kid is having tantrums or they won't do their homework or kids with ADHD tend to have low frustration tolerance. Right. So to me, it's like one of the first things I recommend to new members where I say, OK, you might like this is the thing. This is like the key thing that underlies a lot of tantrums that underlies entitlement. It underlies not sharing.
It underlies why you throw the board game when you're about to lose. It underlies quitting. It's not homework. And again, the MGI, the most generous interpretation is, wait, right, the commonality in all those situations is my kid is frustrated.
And if what they're learning or what they've practiced is when I feel frustrated, it's so intense that sometimes I think, like, do our kids learn that their emotions operate on a dimmer switch or an on-off switch? We want our kids to operate on a dimmer. Like you said, if you're at a 10 out of 10, you can't operate.
But if every time—and I'm so interested in this literature you mentioned because I was thinking, what would happen in the first number of years of a kid's life if every time they're frustrated— Well-intentioned, but again, just under-resourced parents, turn it off.
then what I think would happen, and I'm wondering, is then something that could be like a five out of 10, I feel like would feel like a 10 out of 10, because you never had a dimmer, right? Because if you only operated when a light went on with always going off, then even if over time, years later, the light was at a five, it still could feel blinding, right?
And so this idea of a dimmer, you want your kids when they're frustrated, that's what frustration tolerance is. Nobody says I'm frustrated. I can't read. Yay. No one says that. But if it kind of comes up, oh, there's that light. We want their bodies to think, okay, all I need to do and I have skills to get my 9 out of 10 to an 8, an 8 to a 7. When I'm at a 7, that's where learning happens.
That's very different than it's at a 9. and kind of like, who's gonna turn it off for me? Or the reason in those situations could say, I'm not doing my homework, is they don't have the skills to bring it to a seven. And so their choice is to stay at a 9 or 10 out of 10, which no human can do, or walk away and bring it to a zero.
And so what I'm saying is our frustration tolerance workshop, which I want every parent to take, but I also just want to get into schools, is literally the thing that helps you teach your kids how to get frustration tolerance, how to... You really can do this. It sounds sick, but, like, you can get your kids to like being in the learning space, to be like... I'm going to thrive here.
The good feeling is eventually going to come. I'm relatively comfortable here because I just have watched myself survive it that many times. And so the benefits of that workshop and just the program is not only tantrums, but actually it is a lot in academics. So many times when kids have issues in school, ADHD is real. Dyslexia is real. That definitely can be a component.
But so many times, it's actually an issue of frustration, tolerance, and that's often not kind of labeled for parents.
I'm realizing as you're saying this, that the literature that I'm aware of about stress and trauma is actually relevant here in an interesting and perhaps surprising way whereby, you know, this thing I said earlier, you know, the brain only changes under conditions where norepinephrine and epinephrine are released.
You know, there is such a thing as one trial learning and it's associated with negative experiences. And the reason negative experiences create such robust learning in only one trial is because there's a massive amount of epinephrine and norepinephrine and other neurochemicals released. So it's stamped into the nervous system. But learning of things we want to learn
relies on the same neurochemicals. I mean, there's a wild and really cool literature from a guy named James McGaw who showed that like if you spike adrenaline before learning, the learning is much faster and much more durable. If you spike adrenaline after learning, turns out the learning is more durable.
Now, we can't start getting into kind of, you know, biohacking experiments on kids or themselves, but the adrenaline is supposed to come during the learning itself, which is what you're saying. But the problem is if we stop once we're frustrated, we get the increase in adrenaline and norepinephrine and, again, other neurochemicals as well. Right.
Then the perception is that the plasticity loop is closed there. So what did you learn? When I do hard things, I get frustrated. When I stop, the frustration goes away. That's all you learn. In the same way that somebody exposed to trauma, this underlies the basis of almost all modern trauma therapies. It's in the right setting. Take people back through it sequentially.
Let them experience that and start to desensitize to it so they can complete that loop.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
And so I think it's so important to push through frustration. And I think it's so important, I'm disagreeing with you here clearly, but that oftentimes that frustration can last more than just the learning session. It can be weeks or months or in some cases a year of a really challenging course or a sports course.
sports uh participation and so that's where it gets tough because as empathic creatures one hopes we hate to see members of our own species suffer especially our kids and so it becomes this thing of like do you let them opt out like what did they learn by opting out and that's where it gets really complicated because we also got a forebrain which can set all these different rules and so um
But I don't know about frustration for a year. I guess I always think how we experience a feeling is the feeling plus the story we tell ourselves about the feeling. And the feeling kind of is at a certain level, but the story we tell ourself about the feeling and what it means about us or how capable we are of coping with it, that can make a feeling that was here go to here.
Something about frustration of a year, like... It's interesting, we're talking so much about stories, but again, if one of the things I try as a parent is when my kid is saying, I don't know, what would it be to quit? You know, I...
I hate gymnastics right and you're thinking okay like first of all quitting is not always weak or wrong sometimes quitting is a very brave awesome great thing to do definitely sometimes the absolute best thing to do a hundred percent but as a parent sometimes and I get this a lot like I'm conflicted like I don't know what's right first of all there's probably not a right and again our parenting never hangs on one decision so just let that go
But I think what I would be curious to just experiment with, again, maybe it's because I'm so obsessed with frustration tolerance, especially in this world that is so working against frustration tolerance. I feel like it's like even more of my duty as a parent to help. Okay, let's just have an experiment where I would say, okay, talk to me about why you want to quit gymnastics.
And I might know in the back of my head, maybe they're not as good as everyone anymore. Right? Or maybe they just don't like it. Who knows? But I might say, you know, look, maybe this isn't relevant. I'm thinking about when I did, you know, I'm thinking about a different sport. When I did track growing up. And there were like whole years where I was like, I love track. I love track.
And I don't know if I ever told you this, but when I was 11, I hated track. I went from love to hate it. And part of it was, and again, say something kind of relevant to your kid. Part of it was there was a new kid at school and I was kind of the track star until she came in. And then I was like second and that just kind of stunk. And no, I didn't tell myself it's okay.
I kind of told myself this stinks every day. And part of it was all my friends were doing soccer and I kind of felt left out. But I finished the year and the next year something interesting happened. And this is what a kid will say. I'll go, oh, what, you love track again? You know, and it's this amazing moment because they're always going to say that to be like, no, no.
I ended up deciding that next year was my last year at track, and I stopped after that. But I can't explain it. It just felt like I came from, like, a different place. Almost like I felt more settled, I think, after. Like, I really knew. And I don't know if that's relevant to gymnastics. I do know you've loved it for a while. It's kind of new to not like it.
And sometimes when something's new and you don't like it, you just got to go. But other times when something's new and you don't like it, you want to like figure it out. And I don't know, I'm wondering if we should give it a few more weeks to try the figuring it out thing. And again, maybe your kid says, no, I want to quit. And you're like, fine.
And in some ways you've already had the experience, no matter what they do. But I think that's what I think about playing around with with kids way more than I think what parents say is, so should they quit or not? It's so binary. It's so rigid. And I think we're missing the nuance of the story and the process that matters more than the eventual decision.
I love your use of story in narrative with your kids. It seems like you use that a lot.
I do.
Like instead of saying, you know, and forgive me for, I'm not, I'm not an analyst, but I feel like it starts with an observation like, okay, you're behaving this way. Maybe what's behind the behavior or you're expressing this, what's maybe deeper to that. But
when talking about your own experiences towards your kids, as you've been doing here in these pseudo hypotheticals, I'm sure some of them exist. We'll interview your kids later and find out. No, I'm kidding. It's clear that you use story as a way to kind of share genuinely, but also probe for what might be going on with them.
And I have to say, I find it really delightful because it raises lots of questions. that I think anyone would have. And I think it's part of your gift, clearly, because so many people, you know, follow your advice. But the advice you give is also, it's interesting, it's like an observation. Like, frustration is key. I want to increase frustration tolerance.
But then you're not like, okay, you're going to hammer... down their throats, frustration tolerance in the following way. It sort of becomes a question like, where's their frustration in your life? And then you put it into your own narrative as opposed to necessarily asking them questions. I think asking kids questions or asking people questions generally is great. Like, hey, how can I do better?
As you pointed out earlier. But it's really, I don't know if the word is disarming, but it's really in an entirely positive way. Like you use your own narrative to allow people to start going, oh yeah, like where am I experiencing frustration? Where can I tolerate that better? And so I think that there's this incredible triad of like, or tripartite narratives
of like observe, consider, like the deeper layer, and then offering a narrative that's really a bunch of questions where you're speaking from your real truth. It's really elegant, I have to say.
Thank you.
It's spectacular. I hadn't realized it until right now.
I don't know if I realized those parts, but you know what is interesting is it brings up the word we kind of mentioned before but didn't talk about, and maybe it'll be surprising that I say this, is shame. And I think shame...
is the biggest blocker to learning and shame I think could be defined like a lot of things in many ways but it's the experience of aloneness I think shame is the feeling you have when you kind of feel like a part of you is not attachable so for a kid that's an existential threat to not be in attachment with someone and in that way when you're not attachable you're alone you're alone
And so, so many of the things that happen with our kids, because I'll model another story and maybe I'll get some flack for this because it's probably counterintuitive. But I think about like one of my kids, my resilient rebel, who was in a hitting stage when he was younger. hitting. And he was just also in like a, it was in like a couple of weeks he was hitting.
And then, and there was this one, there was this one time where we were doing a family puzzle and he was younger. He was probably like three. It was really hard. It was more for my older kids. He was kind of doing his own thing. I think he was playing with blocks on the side. We leave, we come back and like, A couple of the puzzle pieces were missing that were in. And I just knew, I knew it.
He saw it. I know most generous interpretation. He felt like, oh my God, I can't participate in what the rest of the family is doing. And so you know what I'm going to do? Because I'm a smart kid. I'm just going to stop them from participating. And so I'm going to take the puzzle pieces and hide them. I knew it. I know him. So we come back and we'd worked really hard on this puzzle.
Of course, you're angry. But again, I can either do nothing on the outside or do nothing on the inside. In that moment, not always, but chose to be an adult. And I was just like, I know you took the puzzle pieces. I just want, you know, and he's like, what are you talking? No, I didn't. You know, maybe he's four. No, I didn't. And I was like, we're working on this puzzle. I get that.
It's probably frustrating, but like you need, I'm not, I didn't have the puzzle pieces. That was not working. And then this is truly going back to stories and going back to shame. If you feel like you're the bad kid who's doing bad things and you're the only one who's like that, you are shut down from learning.
So I went up to him on the couch and my husband, I remember watching me being like, what are you doing? And this is how I started. I go, I don't know if I can tell you this, which any kids would be like, I don't know if I can tell you this. When I was probably about seven, I did something really bad. That's what I said. And he was like, I can't even tell you.
He like every part of his anger like diffused. And you can really draw a kid in by just saying to them, And I go, okay. And this is true. I go, my sister was two. And she had these, like, oily stickers. And I really wanted them. And I asked my mom. And she said, no, we couldn't go to the store. No, those are, you know, my sister's stickers. And you're never going to guess what I did.
I took them.
But that's not the worst part. He's like, what? And I go, my mom asked me if I took them. I knew I did, so you know what I told her? And he said, you told her yes? And I go, no. I told her no. And he literally goes, And I feel like in that moment what's happening is he's saying, like, so many things that you can never say didactically. Like, Mom, like, you're my mom. I love you.
I hold you on a pedestal. And, like, even you. did something that wasn't so great. There's like so much hope and goodness. And then I didn't, in that moment, I did not say, and you cannot say in these situations. So now you can tell me that you just have to like trust. Because I think the shame of the badness, shame freezes you, right? As an animal defense state, right? Shame freezes you.
So a kid who's lying to you is always in shame, right? And you can't get a kid to unfreeze and move to a different place of telling you the truth if you're adding more shame through fear. Like, the math doesn't work. But you can through stories. Now, true story, he did not right after that say, you know.
I was just like, I remember my husband who, okay, when he's saying this, he was like, we have to punish him. We have to, you know, we have to punish him. I was like, in the moment, that's going to feel very cathartic to us. That's what punishment does. It makes you feel very powerful. It makes you feel very cathartic. It doesn't work.
It just doesn't, especially not with kids who are strong-willed. I was like, just give it a couple days. It's probably a good three days later. And he brought me the puzzle pieces in a bag. And he just said, I took them. And he truly started crying. And I did not lecture him. I feel like the whole arc, the whole lesson had basically already happened. Honestly, like the day after.
So again, and this is what I think we miss as parents. And like, we're almost afraid to like just name the humanness of it. And I kind of gave an example earlier. He's going to want to do something bad again. We all want to do bad things. That's not a bad urge. It's just about having the skills to do something differently when you have the urge. So I think a couple days later and I do this.
I do these little like role plays. They take like 20 seconds. I was like, oh my goodness. Look at the puzzle, because we had still been working on it. What if you want to take it again? He goes, I won't. I go, I know, but I think you might want to. Remember how I took the oilies?
So you're acknowledging that inside him there might be a piece that still wants to do the wrong thing.
Feelings, that's an urge. I teach my kids, an urge means you want to do something. My kids will say, an urge is not a behavior. Behavior is doing the thing. That's not okay. But the only reason your urge doesn't convert into behavior is because you have a skill to manage the urge. And you can't build skills if no one teaches you them. So I said, what could you do instead?
Could you run to me and say, I really want to take the pieces? Could you say, I need time with you? Because at the end of the day, I think he felt left out. And we did. And by the way, this kid, is he like perfect now? No, he, you know, but like it, It brings together so many things. Number one, when we trust ourselves that we have time.
When we realize shame, the fear of being the only one, being bad, being unlovable, being alone is often the biggest blocker for kids. When you really realize that, punishment and sending your kid away makes no sense at all. And you can kind of give yourself freedom to tell stories, right?
Because when we're really struggling with something, you don't want to look at someone, especially someone who's perfect. Right? It's like when you really have a bad experience as an adult, the only thing you want to hear is your friend who I don't like, you know, I'm mortified. I sent this email to my boss.
The only thing that would make me feel better is someone like, let me show you the email I sent. I'm like, oh, wow, that's worse. That's the only thing that makes me feel better. Not because I wish bad upon other people, but because you want to know you're not alone. And other people's stories do that, like vulnerability. It's kind of like, it's like this magic, this magic trick.
I mean, is pretty far away from the parenting dynamic, but the understanding and actual data from like 12-step programs and group therapy generally, including trauma therapy that is of a group therapy nature, fully supports everything you said. Hearing the...
terrible and or humiliating things that people have done or have done to them, as awful as that sounds, is often what underlies people's willingness to recover, ability to recover, and then they become the teachers over time.
Like you said, I think you said so many incredible things there, but right at the end, you said something that I hope everyone internalizes, that when you do something embarrassing, Maybe even humiliating. The last thing you want to hear is, look, it's all going to be fine. The thing that actually helps is somebody who has experienced something similar and is doing fine.
Yeah. And I use that at management. Like we had someone do a presentation at work and it was for a bunch of people and it did not go well. And I met with her and she knew it kind of didn't go well. And honestly, the only thing I said to her, I don't even manage her directly. She's more junior. And I really mean this. We had in clinical psychology grad school, like it's intense.
You do a session when you're first doing sessions and like everyone's watching you. They're like watching you do therapy, which is helpful. But I remember my first one and I felt like pretty okay about it. I was like, this is my first one. I was okay. I got torn to shreds. They were like, that was not good, you know?
And now obviously I'm on the, I feel good about my clinical abilities, but the only thing I said to her is I was like, look, and I shared it with her. And I said like, I've been there. Like, eventually, I look back on that. It helped me learn. That day, I just felt awful. I wasn't like, this is my learning space moment, you know?
And so if you're feeling like that, I just want to let you know, like, I've been there too. This is the starting point to getting better. This is going to, like, make you stronger. I know that. I've lived that. And I think storytelling in that way is probably like a really underutilized kind of quote tool, almost dehumanizes it to call it that, in management and in any relationship.
Love it. And I feel like the story of your son bringing those puzzle pieces back is like, there's so much there.
So much.
And the fact that there was a delay and then he brought it back on his own accord and that you had already kind of let it go. That's I feel like a really interesting piece. It wasn't to like appease you. It was really something internal for him. Like he got the lesson there. for him, it wasn't just about like making mom feel okay about him.
Like he clearly understood you still love him, but it wasn't about like fixing something externally as much as it was about fixing something internally, which I think is the, the addressing and overcoming the shame piece.
I think that's right. And that's the thing. I think sometimes it's like, are we teaching kids what to think or how to think? Like after they're gone from our house, like it's the how to think. And you said questions. I love kind of Socratic questions for kids.
Like, oh, if again, a different version of a story would be like, oh, OK, I know you didn't take the puzzle pieces, but I'm just thinking for me, like. So what would make me take puzzle pieces? Oh, I wonder if I felt left out or I wonder if I was just really trying to get my parents' attention for a while and this was the only way to do it. And what would I do after? And what would I need?
Now I'm going to get emotional. What would I need to know about myself or from my parent for me to share that I did take it? Maybe I would need to know that my parents knew I was a good kid. Hmm. Anyway, sorry, what were we talking about? Like, because your kids eventually make good decisions. Adults make good decisions for themselves because they ask themselves the right questions.
not because they've heard their parents' specific lesson, right? Because they're able to say to themselves, like, what am I feeling right now? What am I really looking for? Why did I do that? So like asking questions, telling stories, asking questions without even answering them actually provokes a much more sophisticated developmental process in your kid than the lectures we all, me included.
Trust me, plenty of times at my kid that I've just lectured them. But again, they're just catharsis. They're not actually terribly effective.
Yeah, if ever there was some core truths about brain plasticity, it's that frustration is associated with the chemicals that foster brain change. We know that. And that questions have a really interesting impact on learning. Which sounds kind of like a duh. Well, of course they do.
But when we ask questions, it creates this open loop in the brain that the brain wants to solve as opposed to hearing a statement. That's why I always felt like those pictures on office walls, like motivation, when you blah, blah, blah, like the motivational statements don't mean much.
in terms of because they're not about verb states when we ask questions that we put our brain into kind of a process of verb states of asking what behaviors are going to lead to which outcomes there's an interesting literature about this that um you know probably isn't fully relevant here but it gets back to trying to learn basic motor tasks and the same things are applied to basic cognitive tasks of like how do i solve this and a puzzle is a great um
example because it's both cognitive and motor like you're fixing these pieces in different ways i have to get back to doing some puzzles i'm realizing and emotional you know i can really embarrass myself but one of my favorite things that i again i've just noticed my kids extending for puzzles because they all did a lot of puzzles when they're young is so funny i remember my kid doing like this puzzle and getting some frustration what i did is i did a puzzle to the side of him
Instead of doing it perfectly, I kind of like mimicked. I was like, oh, this doesn't fit. Oh, it's not that piece. Okay. And one of the things I noticed is when my kid was really young, kids have a really hard time with puzzles and it's kind of a metaphor for life for when a piece doesn't fit.
They keep trying it when what they really need to do is such a metaphor is put it down and pick up another piece, right? But I could tell my kid that, but I'm not, I always feel like just telling doesn't really work. So this is what I did. I'm not joking. I'm going to sing. Get ready, okay? So I was doing it over here and I just go, oh, it's not fitting. It's not fitting here.
It's not fitting here. And I go, if it doesn't fit. Put it to the side and try another piece. And then I was like, oh, right. I can put it to the side. Okay, I'll get this one. And I didn't make it perfect. I was like, oh, oh, oh, that one fits there. Right.
I have heard, not anymore, my kids are too old, but there was a time, I remember me and my husband were like outside the playroom and we heard our son like singing this song. It's just, it's a mantra. It's self-regulation because is it cognitive? Is it physical? It's also emotional.
It goes back to frustration tolerance where our kids need, they need mantras, they need skills, they need songs to actually up-level their skills to regulate the emotions that get in their way of doing great things, right? And, you know, that kid is interesting. Like, not really anymore. Now that I think about it, I want to revive it. He makes up songs through situations. What an amazing skill.
right? But this stuff can like, and if anyone's hearing this, they're like, oh, that's unrealistic. Like, it's amazing. You do it one time. One time. Make up a silly song, model the frustration yourself, make up a song, struggle again, and then get success. Whatever it is. It could be with reading, with a puzzle, with putting on your sock. It could be, oh, it doesn't fit.
I'm taking a deep breath and trying it again. It could literally be
anything because it adds a little play and joy and you probably know what song does in the brain better than i do but probably regulating um i would put money that a parent to me like that's so weird becky you're right didn't take that much time i did it one time and my kids started singing the song and now they put their socks on by themselves
I love it. You taught a process through song, and there actually is a lot of data on music in the brain and how it organizes things, mostly in the form of a story of a beginning, middle, and end. And just the quickest example I can give is when we learn our ABCs, we learn them in song. right? It's A, B, C, D, E, F, G. You never forget that, right?
It's much easier to learn things through rhythmic song motifs than it is through a list of letters or numbers.
Does our brain like encode it differently?
Yeah, so it fragments it into a beginning, middle, and end, and then there's an underlying repetitive sort of wave. A, B, C, D, E, F, G. Okay, here I'm now. I'm singing. So, you know, at risk of you know, inducing all sorts of bad neural responses in listeners. But you get the point. It's a waveform that the brain can recognize. I actually have a friend who's a very accomplished musician.
And I know the lyrics to his songs very well. And I said, remember that song? And he goes, well, I have to hear the... underlying melody and then he can remember all the words. He's a singer. He's a lead singer in a very well-known band. He doesn't even know the words to his own songs if you just ask them for him. But you give him the music and he's just out the gate.
And he can do this in front of tens of thousands of people.
So then it is a cheat code for coping skills if you put it to song.
It becomes a verb process. Sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off there. It's almost like saying like, oh, the mechanics of writing are you pick up, you put the pen between, you know, there's a whole rhythm to writing. There's a whole sequence of a motor sequence that we learn or eating or anything for that matter.
No one who's an expert piano player thinks about playing the individual keys at the point where they've learned it. They've batched it into, it's sort of like chunking, but it has an underlying rhythm that's carried by a neural circuit that allows the expression of the movements of the fingers or the,
the words out the mouth, or in this case, overcoming frustration to just kind of ride on top of all of it. So, um, there's an unconscious genius to, to what you, uh, what you did. And I love it. And maybe, um, as long as nobody hears me saying, I'll need to sing more to get through frustration. Um, I have a question about Ms. Edson.
Yes.
People are gonna be like, what? Before we started recording, you shared with us something I think is entirely appropriate to what we're talking about now, which is learning and learning hard things and frustration tolerance. And... You've evolved these concepts, you know, in the course of your work and through your own parenting child relationships, clearly your own and then yours with your kids.
Who was Ms. Edson and what did she teach you? Because when you told me this, I was like, whoa, that's super valuable. We all need to know about this.
Yes. So Ms. Edson was my second grade teacher. And I remember writing in her class, and I remember something she told us, and it's truly something that shapes me every day. And she said, if something feels too hard to start, it just means that the first step isn't small enough.
And then she really kind of made this even more concrete because what I remember in her class writing, and I still use this in writing today, is, okay, so if something feels too hard to do, the implication is, it doesn't mean it's my fault. It doesn't mean I can't. It doesn't mean I'm stupid. It literally just means the first step isn't small enough. That's very actionable.
And so the way I play around with it now, even in my own writing is, okay, I have to write a new article.
And I'm like, I can't do that.
Okay. So I'm in I can't mode. Okay. If something is in I can't mode, if it feels too hard, I hear her voice. It just means the first step isn't small enough. So I'll make it literally, I'll just make it smaller. I'm going to write a page today. And then often I'm like, I can't do that. Okay. Smaller. A paragraph. No. And I literally do it until, and some days it's a word. And I go...
could write a word. Okay. Now we're not. Okay. Right. And I really think Ms. Edson was ahead of her time. I mean, obviously now we talk a lot about frustration tolerance, growth mindset, but this really is a way of saying when things are hard, it's not your fault. And there's something you can do to build the circuit of capability.
Because I think when we're trying to do something hard, there are like, if you think about it, I don't know, you're on the top of a ski mountain, and on the one side is the I can't, it's too hard, and the other side is I can, we all have natural capability. I really believe this, every person. But it's just about figuring out how to get your skis, like, to the beginning of the ski slope.
And then maybe if we've practiced being on the I can't do hard things slope, our skis keep trying to turn, but we just have to keep getting them back. And so if we tell ourselves, I can't do this, and we just stay there, stagnant. But if you say, wait, smaller, smaller, smaller, smaller. Like I used this with a client a while ago. I can't ask my boss for a raise. I know I deserve it. Cool.
No problem. Let's make it smaller. Okay. What would be smaller? I don't know. Let's get creative. Could you write down what you would say? Okay. No. Could you say the word to me five times out loud? Raise, raise, raise, raise, raise. I remember she laughed. She goes, I can do that. Cool. Let's What I think is so powerful about Ms.
Edson's advice is as soon as we get even our skis a tiny bit into the I can circuit, the I can slope, we're actually just a lot more likely to stay there, or at least that becomes a bigger part of our identity, right? So with this woman that I was working on this with, one of the things we were working on, it was just, okay, so you did that. Amazing.
The next thing I even just had her play around things saying to me, can you say to me, I deserve a raise. It was very interesting. I think this is one of the reasons she had trouble speaking up for it. It was really hard for her to embody that. We said that. She couldn't. I remember a week she said, I'm going to write it down and bring it. She didn't. Again, I like parenting. I didn't punish her.
I didn't send her to her room. I said, okay, that was just too big. Let's make it smaller. Let's write it together. Wrote some things down there, right? I then had her write it as an email and send it to me. And I then had her practice it with her best friend. And then she asked her boss for a raise. Like, I mean, I don't even, this, like, probably no one's surprised.
Yeah, like, that makes sense. She'd gotten through a lot of steps. But it's just applicable in every area of your life. So even anyone listening, we all have something in our I can't category. This is too hard or I can't. And we just stay there. And if you hear Miss Edson, Saying, wait, if something feels too hard to do, it only means that the first step isn't small enough.
And if then the next smallest step feels too hard, no biggie. Like, no judgment. Make it smaller, make it smaller, make it smaller. And then allow yourself to eventually build up from there.
Love it.
Love Miss Edson.
I'm going to thank you and Ms. Edson. Yes, thank you, Ms. Edson. I think the idea of lowering the stakes to be able to move forward is just spectacular in everything. I notice you do that. By the way, I'm not like analyzing. I'm just saying you do that with parenting. I think there's so much tension around this notion of like creating healthy, productive, functional kids.
And I think there is a lot of shame for parents when things aren't going great and people know it or they know it. Yeah. The idea of creating lower stakes in order to be able to make pretty big moves over time where they're required or just do nothing when sometimes that's what's required.
Yeah. And the similarity is so interesting. What I think that the powerful thing about Ms. Edson's advice is she's almost saying make something small enough so you can get your first win. Yeah. Having a win is really powerful. It's kind of addicting. You're like, what's my next win, right? You're on the win circuit.
You know, one of the reasons we want to create so many more resources for parents and when parents come to us and even say, this is a problem, this is a problem, this is a problem. I often just start, I would say, okay, like what is the smallest thing would change that would make you when you go to bed at night be like, today was a better day. there's some bigger stuff. I hear you.
How am I not going to tackle that? We'll tackle that in time. But like, I want to get you a win today. And then all of a sudden when a parent starts to build, it's kind of their own self-efficacy, their own like, oh, wait, I did feel good about that one moment. I did feel more connected to my kid. I said this one thing.
It's momentum, you know, and we have to give ourselves the opportunity to build momentum, which really usually only starts by taking the smallest step anyway.
I think it's spectacular. I was going to ask you, and I never do this, but I was going to ask you if there were one thing that people could start the process of trying to be a better parent, better to themselves, if it's more about emotional containment, et cetera.
Maybe it's this thing of, you know, asking, you know, at the end of today, like, what would be one thing that would allow me to have said it was a better day? Would that be it? Certainly that's powerful.
I'm going to give you two things. One is kind of a one small thing, but it's kind of a bigger theoretical thing. And one thing is very, very, very concrete. So the bigger thing.
I really believe that the single biggest thing that gets in our way of feeling more empowered and capable as parents is that as much as we say we value parenting, and I think parents, people do, or parents are like, yeah, what do I care about more than parenting? It's kind of the lowest on our list in terms of what we invest in. You know, people invest in all types of things.
And I want to be clear. Yes, like we have an offering at Good Inside and our membership, but that's not what I mean. For someone listening, they might be like, there is that parent coach in my town who I've been like saying I'm going to call. Or maybe it's a therapist or maybe it's a parenting group at your school.
Or maybe someone listens to me and they're like, no offense, Dr. Becky, there's someone else I follow on Instagram and they have a course and I like them better. I'd be like, do that today. Like align your even purchasing decisions with your values. Because we're not expected to know this naturally. We're not.
And as long as we don't have the resources around us, a little kind of, someone described it to me as like a onesie, twosie thing. Like it's just not giving ourself what we deserve. It is like a surgeon saying they're not good at surgery when you find out they never went to medical school or residency. Right.
You'd be like, well, I just didn't really get resourced in the way you deserve for this very challenging job. So that would really be the thing, if I'm really honest, because I'm not, as much as I'm about a quick win, I'm not about a quick fix. I think that just sets us up for more like a band-aid. Having said that, I love a quick thing. So a couple of things I think people can do with their kids.
Telling your kid at night, and I'll model how I would say it. I think most people, it's not just me, when you put your kid to bed, it's like, oh, you're like, I just want to be on the couch. But it's when your kid's willing to spend five extra minutes with you because it's the cruel irony at night. You want time without your kids and they just want a little bit more time with you.
If you allow yourself to lean in, And you can just say to your kid, almost like in a whisper, I think whispering to your kid is one of the most underutilized, simplest strategies. Whispers are so sacred. They feel sacred. They feel like they know they're just for you. Whispering to your kid, like, I just want to tell you there's nothing you could ever do that would make me stop loving you.
Or I just want to tell you you're a really good kid. We're in a hard stage, but I will never, ever, ever think of you as anything but a real person. Don't expect your kid to say anything. But just that takes 10 seconds. And if you're like, whispering feels awkward, don't whisper. Just say it. It doesn't matter. If you're thinking you don't know my kid, they're a teenager, text them. Text them.
Sometimes a text to a teen can feel like an unexpected whisper from a parent, you know? And that's it. And that's the single thing.
today and then maybe i'm gonna add a third just do something like that for yourself give yourself credit put your hand on your heart tell yourself it's parenting things really hard like i'm doing enough i'm not messing up my kid forever that's not a thing like and i've got this
Awesome. Well, this whole thing that you've attempted to take on is also really hard and you're doing incredible work, educating people on how to parent. There's so many things that you've said today. I'm not gonna recap them all. You know, we do timestamps and all that so people can find them, but in no particular order.
I mean, you know, this concept of, you know, telling your kid you're right to notice when they notice something important in you or in others or in themselves. That rigidity is the enemy. Asking like what's this really about when they're doing or saying something or expressing themselves in a way that feels confusing or maybe especially when it's irritating.
Encouraging frustration as a route to learning, like incredible. And then you said the more that you can locate somebody, the more you respect their values. which I think is incredible and on and on.
I mean, there's just so many gems in today's conversation and so many actionable gems that you provide on social media, through your courses, through conversations like this and others that you're holding in other podcasts. And I just wanna thank you so much. You're teaching people how to parent others
how to think about their own parenting oh yes that's the other one you said the the only kind of parenting that we do reflexively is the one that was done for us which will evoke um you know feelings of relaxation in some people and feelings of dread in others and um but it all just speaks to the importance of paying attention to this thing that we call parenting and
I think the way that you're merging this with a thoughtful eye on technology, where it's taking us and where there are concerns, as well as, you know, where it can be utilized, it's just fantastic. I can't say enough good things about the work that you're doing, and I'm just so grateful that you're doing it. And I'm saying that on behalf of myself and everyone else.
You're making the world a better place. Thank you. Thank you so much for joining today and for sharing so much. We'll, of course, point out where people can find you, but just keep going. It's awesome. I've learned a ton. I know everyone else has as well.
Thank you. I'm honored to be back here a second time. I love speaking with you and look forward to the next time.
Likewise, we'll do it again. Thank you for listening to today's episode with Dr. Becky Kennedy. I hope you found it to be as informative and as actionable as I did. Right now, Dr. Becky has a 20% promotion going for her fantastic online program on parenting. Becky was kind enough to extend this discount until this Friday, January 17th, 2025 for Huberman Lab listeners.
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