Alain de Botton is a philosopher, author, and founder of The School of Life Healing yourself is one of the most transformative journeys you can undertake. From nurturing your inner voice to improving relationships, how can we embrace healing to not only grow personally but also show up better for those around us? Expect to learn where bad inner voices come from and how to hear a negative voice, why we struggle to connect with our emotions, if there is a danger of intellectualising challenges of emotion for smart people, Alain’s advice for obsessive people who want to let go a little more, advice for an anxious person dealing with an avoidant one, why we get stuck in unhappy relationships, how to improve your self worth and much more... Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get $350 off the Pod 4 Ultra at https://eightsleep.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with your first purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom Get a 20% discount on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom Get the best bloodwork analysis in America at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: Where do bad inner voices come from?
Thank you so much. Where do bad inner voices come from? If that sounds too weird, think of language, right? All of us arrive in the world not speaking any language. And by the age of three, four, five, six, seven, you know, we'll have learned a lot of words. But the fascinating thing about human beings is we don't know we're learning.
So we can be doing other stuff like doing handstands in the garden or drawing buttercups in the kitchen. And we're becoming expert grammarians. Hundreds of words are entering our minds. Complex grammatical constructions are entering our minds. Now, the way I like to think about it is that that language analogy holds true for emotional life as well.
So at the same time as we're learning a language of words and declensions, we're also learning a language of emotions. We're learning things like, what's a man like? What's a woman like? What happens if you give something to someone? What happens if you're vulnerable? What happens if you want to play? What happens if you say no? What happens if you say yes? All of these are...
The syntax, they comprise the syntax of our emotional lives. And it's an invisible syntax just as our grammatical syntax is invisible. But it's there and it will operate throughout our lives and it will be immensely hard to change. I mean, you know what it's like if you grew up speaking English. And then you want to learn a foreign language. You suddenly want to learn Italian.
Well, good luck to you. You're going to be learning a long time. It's not impossible. It can be done. But I think it's helpful to think of how hard it is because sometimes people get very impatient in their attempts to change things about themselves. They go things like, you know... I want to change how I relate to people in relationships, say.
And I've read a book and I've been to three therapy sessions and I'm really annoyed. Nothing works. You want to go, okay, imagine this was Italian. So you've looked at a book on Italian, you've taken three classes and you don't speak fluent Italian and you're complaining. So we do need some modesty here. Yeah. Just in order to be properly ambitious.
I mean, as you know, the root cause of early despair and early retirement from things is a false picture of what success demands in an area. And I think in the area of emotional improvement or maturation, we sometimes let ourselves down by thinking it's going to have an ease which it won't have.
It's interesting thinking about how language shapes our experience of emotions and our experience of the world that German, for instance, has a colorful number of ways to describe certain emotions that you can't in other. He said, well, does the fact that we have the word for it almost unlock that emotion in a way that allows us to do self-investigation? Yes.
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Chapter 2: How can we improve our emotional vocabulary?
I think philosophers watching this, philosophers of language may have arguments prone. It's a big thing. But I definitely feel that the more words we have, the more we can attend to what we feel, and in some cases, the more we can feel. I remember learning the word anxiety when I was a teenager and thinking, wow, that's a really useful word. Probably nowadays people learn anxiety a lot earlier.
But in those days, it was a fascinating word to learn. And the more one's vocabulary stretches, the more you're able to put a flag in bits of your psyche that are perhaps painful. And I think...
If you think about why people go to psychotherapy or even frankly, what motivates a lot of friendship, it's somebody else helps to give you a vocabulary for bits of your mind and bits of your experience that have not till now, that have eluded definition. And that definition is not merely, you know, It's not really a fancy thing.
It's a life-saving thing because the more you can define, the easier life gets. Freud speculated that the origins of language lie in an ability to bear frustration. So that if a child can think, you know, I'm currently frustrated, but, you know, mummy's coming back. and the person's got those words, then that can help you to bear missing and also bear excitement or all sorts of things.
Things can become more bearable the more you can put them into language. And I think adults know this when we go about journaling, right? Why is it so helpful to journal? Because we know it is, all research shows that it is. What is it about translating a feeling into a word for that feeling that's helpful? And I think it tames, it contains, and it narrows the spread of difficult emotions.
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Chapter 3: What is the significance of journaling for emotional health?
It's very ephemeral, right? You've got these thoughts up here moving around, floating about, and then they have to be concretized. And it almost feels like it squeezes it through an aperture of some kind. You say, okay, this is what I meant by that. It's not this notion. It's not this sort of ambient sound. It's somebody shouted a noise in the next room. It's like, oh no, it's here.
I can touch it. You can see it. Yeah.
Yeah. That's right. And, you know, think of relationships, couples. The more their vocabulary for what they're going through increases, the more they can say, you know, I'm feeling this. I'm feeling, you know, when you do that, I feel this, et cetera. And the enemy, you know, The sort of normal word is people say communication, but it's really language. It's putting language to feelings.
And so much goes wrong in life because we're unable to do it. It starts with ourselves. We can't do it with ourselves. There's a useful phrase that psychotherapists use, disassociation. It's a fascinating concept. What would it mean to disassociate? And the way it's understood therapeutically is that you could feel an emotion, it's so difficult, tricky in some way, and you then stop feeling it.
You disassociate from the feeling that's in you. It's still in you, but you're no longer registering it. Tricky, tricky. And the argument is always the more you can associate and the less you can disassociate, the better off you will be. But look, there are many bits of life that are unbearable to us. Let's remember this.
There's a wonderful quote in Middlemarch, George Eliot, big fat 19th century novel, where she says, if we could properly register the sounds, the full sounds of life, we would lose our minds from the full richness of existence. In other words, if you were sensitive to everything that's around you, you would sort of go mad. And I think
If we think about what madness is, what's colloquially called madness, if you think of people with severe mental illness, very often what has happened is that their ability to sequence thoughts has gone. Everything is coming at them, and they can't grade thoughts. They can't say, this thought must go away now. So they'll go, I made a mistake 15 years ago.
And if you're balanced, you'll go, well, that was 15 years ago, and it's not a problem. We don't have to have it pressing down. And if your reason is buckling, often everything that is alarming comes at you at once, everything that is difficult at once. And so, in a way, I'm sticking up for the ability sometimes to take distance from our feelings.
So, you know, I started off by going, it's really important to know what you're feeling. But let's also remember, at points… The ability not to feel the full force of everything also belongs to health. So it's a double-edged sword there.
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Chapter 4: How can obsessive individuals learn to let go?
One of my favorite sayings by the Stoic philosopher Seneca, he goes, what need is there to weep over parts of life? He says, the whole of it calls for tears. And everyone who hears that sort of gets a smile on their face. And you think, the guy wasn't trying to tell a joke. He wasn't trying to make it funny. He was just trying to be bleak, which say how it is.
And then it makes us smile out of relief. And the relief is, phew, it's not just me. Arthur Schopenhauer, another great pessimistic German philosopher, said, today it is bad, tomorrow it will be worse, until the worst of all happens. Yes. Totally bleak. And you read that and you think, I feel a bit better about today already. I'm starting to cheer up.
I think we really get it wrong, but we think the only way to cheer someone up is to tell them something cheerful. I think the Brits have understood this. This country's got lots of problems, but one thing it understands is melancholy and the relief available in
dark humor um and and you know bless our american friends but they don't get it um as much you know if if you pitch up in la and someone goes how are you and you go you know it's bad today tomorrow your life in los angeles is not going to take off you know what i mean Yeah.
I've heard you refer to melancholy as tragedy well handled. Absolutely. Tragedy well handled. I adore that. I think it's so great. Sam Harris says something very similar. You have to smile at the absurdity of life. These situations, just as things were smooth, something comes along and completely sideswipes what you had planned. And an interesting insight, I suppose, that
The volume that you complain is probably proportional to the amount that you're unable to see life for what it is, which is not at your whim. Life is going to have problems thrown at you.
Yeah, but Chris, let's not do down complaining. I mean, it's one of the great pleasures. It's one of Britain's great pastimes. Well, you know, it's one of everybody, you know, and, you know, being able to complain to a loved one. And, you know, you'll have to listen to their complaints too. But to complain without expectation of a solution.
I mean, the big complaint that every mortal, you know, directs to the sky ultimately is why do I have to die? And, you know, and then you work your way down from that to why do I have to go to work? You know, all these things. But yes, life would be a poor thing if we weren't allowed to spend a good deal part of it complaining.
I've heard you say that adult relationships are a litmus test of our emotional development, that they're a moment where your past catches up with your present. How so? Why is that the case?
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Chapter 5: What advice is there for anxious and avoidant attachment styles?
geniuses don't have thoughts that are categorically different from the ones everybody has. What's different is they hold on to them. They look at them. They feel them. You could say in the minds of artists lie feelings that, you know, lie our own neglected feelings. In other words, artists, geniuses, et cetera, they're just paying more attention to the stuff that's in everybody's mind.
It's not that their stuff in their mind is completely radically different, which is why often when you... When you hear a great song or a great piece of poetry or whatever, or read a great book, sometimes you think, I kind of knew that that was already in me, that I'm merely being put back in touch with something that's in me already.
Because what the so-called clever person has done is just pay it more attention. So let's not deify these people. And let's also open up, you know, quickest way to become a genius, pay more attention to your own neglected thoughts.
I'm interested, you know, having followed your work for a very, very long time, and it's been one of the most reliably influential things, I think, on my intellectual journey. So I want to thank you for parasocially guiding me through an awful lot of situations.
I'd like to say that I remind myself of your work when things are good, but it does tend to be the sort of thing that I go to when I need a little bit more guidance. I'm interested in what drives you, the sort of primary motivating forces that are behind your studies and sort of thinking over the years.
So it's brutally and horribly simple just to help me get through the day. It is extremely personal and motivated entirely by a desire for self-help. If it helps anybody else. I mean, people sometimes say things like, gosh, you must have studied a lot. How did you know that about me? And I'm like, Frankly, I have no clue. I was just doing my stuff.
And it's beautiful and lovely that it should echo in somebody else. But that's not how I started. It started always with me. And I became a writer. I wrote my first book when I was 22. And it was not... it grew out of writing a diary. It grew out of trying to solve my own confusions. It was a way of trying to stay afloat emotionally, psychically.
And it had nothing to do with a career in that sense. Later on became some of the accoutrements of a career. But as I say, it began, and it still is to this day, an emotional necessity, I would say. It's a way of coping. I am... I'm an intellectual, not a sort of fancy, fancy thing, but I'm an intellectual in the sense that I intellectualize pain.
If something horrible happens, my immediate impulse is not to jog or drink or do all sorts of things people do, but it's to try and think about, well, what is this thing? What can we... What lesson is there here? And that lesson is being fished out for me. If it helps anyone else, fantastic. But I do it anyway. That's how I operate.
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