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
Full Episode
Orlando Botton, welcome to the show.
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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