The Curse of the Self
Episode Stats
Summary
In this episode, Dr. Mark Leary unpacks exactly what the self is and its benefits, before delving into the downsides that also come from having a sense of self. Dr. Leary is a professor emeritus of psychology and neuroscience and the author of The Curse of the Self, Self-Awareness, Egotism, and the Quality of Human Life.
Transcript
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I'm Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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What a gift the human self is. It enables you to sense and reflect upon your own existence,
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examine the past and plan for the future, check certain impulses in order to reach for other
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aims, and conceptualize how others see you, allow you to better connect with them. But
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my guest says the blessing of the self also comes with a curse, one we need to get a handle
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on if we're to live flourishing lives. His name is Mark Leary. He's a professor emeritus
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of psychology and neuroscience and the author of The Curse of the Self, Self-Awareness,
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Egotism, and the Quality of Human Life. Today on the show, Mark unpacks exactly what the
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self is and its vital benefits before delving into the downsides that also come with having
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the self. Mark then shares how people can make the most of the advantages of the self while
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mitigating its disadvantages, including the practice he most recommends for quieting the
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kinds of self-related thoughts and ego-driven behaviors that can make us miserable. After
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the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash self.
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So you are a psychologist who has spent a lot of time researching, thinking about, writing
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about the self or our sense of self. And this is something I think a lot of, I think most
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people take for granted, the idea that they are a self, that they have a self. And I think
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if you'd ask most people on the street, like, what is the self? They'd be kind of hem and
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haw and be like, well, the self is a self. So in psychology, how does psychology define
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That is a great first question and a very important one, because the word self is one of the more
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problematic terms in psychology. It's used in lots of different ways. It's often very poorly
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defined. And ironically, given that I've studied this stuff for about 40 years now, I've argued
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that we should stop using the word self and use more precise terms. So it's hard to answer
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your question. People use it in a lot of different ways. When I think of the self, what I'm talking
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about is I'm thinking about the ability, the mental apparatus in our brain that allows people
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to think consciously about themselves. You know, we have cognitive systems in our brain that do all
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kinds of thinking. We have systems that allow us to do math problems or to assess risks or make
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inferences about other people. Well, the self is just that mental system that allows us to be
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self-aware, to be able to think about ourselves consciously in very explicit and abstract and
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symbolic ways. So psychologists who study the self are interested in this system and how people think
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about themselves. And more importantly, from my standpoint, to study the consequences of those
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thoughts about ourselves for our emotions, our motives, and our behavior. Almost everything we do
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is affected to some extent by how we think about ourselves. So in general, the self is the thing
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that allows us to think about ourselves and to give us that sense of self that you mentioned.
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And we can talk about that as we go. So I mean, was Kierkegaard right? He said,
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famously said, the self is a relation that relates itself to itself. Did he kind of get it right?
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Yeah, to an extent, that's right. If you think about the self as sort of being the person,
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it's our ability as a person to relate to ourselves as a person. We can interact with other people. We
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can think about other people. We can have beliefs about other people. We can do that in a very odd
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way with ourselves. We have beliefs about ourselves. We talk to ourselves, have conversations with
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ourselves. So yes, a self is a person relating to him or herself. So there's some debate as to whether
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animals have a sense of self. There's some evidence that some animals do. The great apes can recognize
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themselves in the mirror. Elephants can recognize themselves in the mirror, but no species has a
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sense of self like humans do. It's something unique to us. So are there any theories as to why we
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developed a self? Are there any adaptive qualities or advantage of it? Absolutely. I mean, it evolved
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for some reason. And the two primary explanations, and we don't know if these are true, one has to do
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with planning. Planning is so important to survival. Most animals just live in the moment, just moment by
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moment. They're just responding to what's happening. They're not thinking about what can I do now that's
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going to make my life better a week from now. Planning allows us to do that. But planning allows
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us to be able to imagine ourselves in our own minds in order to do something now to improve life in the
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future. So one possibility is for planning. The other possibility is for interacting with other people,
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that our interactions improve if we think about what we're doing, if we have social goals,
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if we can imagine what other people are thinking about us, so that we became more effective interacting
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with others to the extent we can think consciously about what we're doing. Those are the two main
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theories, but we really don't know. All right. So the benefits of the self, one idea is that in order
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to plan for the future, you have to have an idea of yourself. And I think what psychologists, they call
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this the analog eye. Is that what it is? The analog eye, yeah. It's sort of the image you have of
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yourself in your mind. If you think about planning for retirement, let's say, you sort of imagine in
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your head, this little image of you, what's that going to be like? You're thinking about it. And you
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can move that around in your mind, sometimes seeing it like you're watching a little movie.
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There you are sitting on the beach, sometimes seeing it through your own eyes. You're looking out of the
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beach in retirement, but you can sort of move this little avatar around in a very hazy, funny kind
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of way in order to plan for the future. Other times we just imagine there's something we have to do. I
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have to stop and get the laundry on the way home from work, but all planning for the future requires
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self-awareness. And if you think about, if your life's anything like mine, it's just nothing but a big
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list of plans. My to-do list is just crazy. And it's all based on my ability to project myself into the
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future. So that's one of the very important functions of being able to be self-aware.
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Well, another one too is decision-making. So you make these plans and you have to make a decision
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and then self-control as well. In order to make decisions, you have to exercise, well, I'm going
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to do this and not that. And that requires a self. Absolutely. Yes. Self-control requires a self.
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Decision-making not only requires me to think about the future or what will happen if I make this
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decision versus if I make that decision, but then I have to pull from a storehouse of information
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in my brain about myself and what I want to do and what my abilities are and how likely I am to be
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able to execute certain behaviors. And all of that requires self-awareness. Self-awareness also does a
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couple of other things that allows us to imagine how other people perceive us. And if you think about
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how important that is in life, what a mess we would make out of our lives if we couldn't think about
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how other people are looking at us. I mean, the horrible things we would do and how we would act and how we would
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look and how we would smell if we couldn't imagine what other people thought. The self is involved in
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that. The only way I can think about what you think about me is to think about myself and then try to
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extrapolate somehow. So self-awareness is involved. Self-awareness is involved in introspection. Other animals
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have emotions and urges and goals, but they don't seem to think about them consciously. You and I can think
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about, well, why do I want to move to this other town? How do I really feel about this person I'm
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romantically attached to? Why was I so angry in that meeting yesterday? We introspect on our emotions
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and motives and intentions. Can't do that without a self. And self-evaluation. So many of our decisions
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are based on our own view of ourself and what our capabilities are and what we like and what we don't
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like. And to the extent we can figure that out, we can make better decisions and move forward with
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life. So self-evaluation is involved. So really, I think of five things that self-awareness does.
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It allows us to plan, to introspect, to evaluate ourselves, to figure out what other people think
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about us. And as you said, put all that together, it allows me to at least within limits control my own
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behavior. Because if you think about what self-control is, it's thinking about yourself in the future.
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And thinking about what can I do now? Boy, I'd be happier in the future if I lose weight.
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I need to eat less. So I'm evaluating myself. I'm thinking about the future. And then I'm trying
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to talk to myself in order to keep myself out of the cookies every night. And all of that requires
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a self. I think what's really impressive, if you think about human civilization, the things that make
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human beings different than every other animal, things like we have philosophy and we have religion and
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we have government and education and science and technology and healthcare, every bit of that
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requires self-awareness. So I think the reason humans are so incredibly different in good and
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bad ways from other animals is that we have this capacity that allows us to plan and evaluate and
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control ourselves that other animals don't have.
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So those are the benefits of the self. And you wrote this book called The Curse of the Self,
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where you focus on, well, there's some benefits, but there's always, everything's a trade-off in
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life, right? There's always trade-offs. But I want to talk about those trades. Before we do,
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here's kind of another bigger question that might be hard to answer. Like, where does the self come
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from? Like, how do we, how do we get this, this self that's able to relate to itself?
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We have no idea. It's all tied up in big questions about consciousness. We are consciously aware of
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ourselves, but we're also consciously aware of our environments. Researchers don't even know what
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consciousness is. How is it that you can take a five pound piece of meat, the brain in your head
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and have it have personal experiences and emotions and thoughts and visual perceptions and hear things
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is a very fundamental question. I mean, for me, that is really, that's the most important question
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any science can answer at this moment to understand the sources of consciousness. Only when we understand
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that, then we can say, well, okay, we're conscious of all kinds of things. How is it that we, unlike most
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other animals, can be conscious of and think about ourselves? So, I mean, there's lots of theories,
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there's lots of speculation. It goes back hundreds of years in philosophy, people saying, how do people,
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how do human beings do this thing? But we really don't know, don't have the slightest idea.
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Okay. So we don't know, we don't know what makes, why we have a self. Yes.
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Or science, you know, science says there's theories from philosophy and I'm sure religion has ideas of
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what the self is or why it's there. And neuroscientists are working on it in terms of
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trying to understand what could be happening in neurons in the brain that would produce consciousness
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and self-awareness. And, you know, again, they're speculating, but nobody knows.
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All right. So there are benefits to having a self. It allows us to plan, allows us to make changes in
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our lives for the better, but there's also downsides. And one of the downsides you talk about is that
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having a self can distract us from the world around us. How so? What does that look like?
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Well, we talk to ourselves in our own heads an awful lot. Sometimes that's very beneficial.
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We have to sit down and plan, you know, we have to figure things out, but research suggests that
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the majority of the thinking that we do about ourselves is not beneficial. It's not actionable.
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It's just ruminating about things, worrying about things, just remembering things from the past.
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Well, that would be okay, except all of that chatter in our heads interferes with our ability to pay
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attention to the present situation. And we've all had that happen many times. Think about the talks
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that you've sat in or meetings you've been in, where suddenly you realize you've lost track of what's
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going on because you've been wrapped up in your own thoughts about yourself. Or you're supposed to
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be picking up the laundry on the way home from work. And you're so wrapped up thinking about the
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day and worrying about something that's happening on the job. That's not until you're pulling into
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your driveway where you go, dang, I was supposed to pick up the laundry. I found this when I had small
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children, is I often found that when I was playing with them, I was only playing like I was playing
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with them because my mind was somewhere else wrapped up in some problem I was thinking about.
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So these self-thoughts are distracting. Ideally, what we would like to have is a self that turned
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on when we needed it. When we had to think consciously about ourselves, it would turn on and we'd use it.
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Then it would turn off again and be in standby mode until we need it again. But our self-thoughts
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don't work that way. We think about ourselves way too much. So we're distracted by it. We're
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preoccupied by it. It makes us unhappy sometimes because we're sitting in a meeting thinking about
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the problem we had with our partner that morning at breakfast. And it's not doing any good for us
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at the moment. It's just making us miserable. We also know that thinking too much about yourself
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interferes with memory. You get so caught up in your own thoughts, you're not paying enough attention
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to what's going on at the moment to be able to encode that event. We have that happen a lot when
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we meet people for the first time. We're introduced to some stranger. And 30 seconds later, we don't know
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that person's name, even though we just learned it. Why don't we know it? Probably because we were
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thinking, well, what am I going to say? Who is this person? Oh, this is a nice looking person. Oh, I wonder
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if I can trust this person. Our mind is abuzz with self-related thoughts. In extreme cases, our minds
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are so abuzz that we really can't perform the behaviors we need to perform. We're so distracted.
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I mean, many of us, we're trying to work on something. We're at the computer, but we're ruminating
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about a problem, a financial problem, a relationship problem, our kids, whatever. And we're so distracted,
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we're having trouble devoting our attention to the task we're on. We see that when people choke under
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pressure, when athletes choke in games, what's really happening? What's really happening is
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that their self-thoughts are interfering with those automatized behaviors they've learned so well. They
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can shoot that basketball great. But when they start thinking about their problems or how the game's
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going, or, oh my God, we're losing the game, those conscious self-thoughts can interfere. Or students
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experiencing test anxiety. When students have test anxiety, yeah, they're anxious and that's a problem.
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But the big problem is they say their mind goes blank. I was so nervous, I couldn't think about
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the test. My mind went blank. Their mind didn't go blank at all. Their mind filled up with catastrophizing
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self-thoughts that made them unable to pull out the information they needed. So I had a student once
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who characterized this very well. I would encourage your listeners actually to try for the next three
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minutes. If there's someplace where they can safely do this, just sit down and say, I'm not going to
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think any thoughts about myself for three minutes. It's my brain. I can control it. I'm going to sit
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here and not think a single thought about myself for three minutes. And I think they will be amazed if
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they've never tried that, that they can't do it. You can't get past 15 seconds. And then you think
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about the thought and, oh, I wasn't supposed to think that thought. Let me try it. And it's just a
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cacophony of chatter. I had a student say, after I asked my students to try that for three minutes,
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she said, I didn't realize how much my brain thinks without my permission,
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which I think really captures it beautifully. Yes. Your brain thinks without your permission
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and it's distracting and preoccupying. That's a tough thing to do because you have to use the self to
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not think about the self, which is like fighting fire with fire.
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That is, that's exactly right. Exactly right. It's a problem and it does impede the quality of
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our lives by interfering with what we're trying to do. And another way that thinking about the
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self or the self can get, can make our lives, you know, distract us and make life harder is insomnia
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is often just the self thinking that I can't sleep. This is a problem. Why can't I sleep?
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I'm sure, you know, cats don't think, oh man, I can't sleep. They just,
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no, they don't even think about it, but we make the problem worse by thinking about the fact that
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we can't sleep. Perfect example. Yeah. Why do we lie awake at night? It starts out thinking about
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the day, thinking about problems, maybe just ruminating. Sometimes they're not even problems
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might be something positive. I've got to decide tomorrow if I'm going to go vacation in this
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location or that location. That's not a problem, but that's me lying awake at night, trying to make
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a decision with these self-relevant thoughts. Then, as you say, it turns from staying awake
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because those kinds of thoughts are intruding to thoughts coming in about the fact that I got to
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go to sleep. I got a busy day tomorrow. Why can't I go to sleep? What's wrong with me? You got to relax.
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And you know, the old classic advice for insomnia is count sheep. Well, that's cliche,
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but the general idea is if you really could count sheep and stay focused on counting sheep,
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it would crowd out all of those self-relevant thoughts. Now that's hard because the self-thoughts
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are more powerful than the images of sheep jumping over a fence or something. But the general idea is
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if you can start thinking about something neutral, not self-relevant, then you'll quiet down all that
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self-chatter and go to sleep. We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.
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And now back to the show. All right. So besides distracting us from the world beyond our head,
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the self can also distort the way we see reality. How so? Well, these thoughts we have about ourselves
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have content of various kinds. And one thing we know is that our thoughts about ourselves are not
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necessarily reality. They're just inferences or hypotheses, which means that when we base our
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behavior and our decisions and our emotions on our beliefs and our thoughts about ourselves,
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those beliefs and thoughts about ourselves are sometimes wrong. Now, if they were just sort of
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randomly wrong, that would be sort of a problem. That means we're not being accurate and are accurate
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in our self-perceptions. But we know that our self-thoughts tend to be biased in a favorable
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direction. And that shouldn't surprise anybody. When you ask people to rate, you give them a list of
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characteristics and abilities, and you ask them, do you think you're below average on this characteristic
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or average or above average on this characteristic? Things like, how good of a driver are you?
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Are you below average or above average as a driver? As a lover, are you below average or above average?
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Are you more moral than average or less moral than average than the average person? So we're asking
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people to rate themselves compared to everybody else on these positive and negative characteristics.
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Well, if people knew the truth, half the people would say I'm below average and half the people would
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say they're above average. That's the way averages work. Half the people are below and half the people
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are above in some normal distribution of driving ability. But that's not what happens. What happens
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is on almost all characteristics, 70% to 80% of people say that they're above average. When it comes to
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being a good employee, if you ask people in your organization, you think you're above average as an
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employee or below average as an employee? Again, if people really knew the answer, if a big voice came out
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of the sky and told you the truth, half the people would say they were below average. Only 13% of
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people say they're below average at work. We have this strong bias to perceive ourselves too positively.
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And that creates all kinds of problems. It creates problems in our decision making. We're making
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decisions based upon false assumptions about how good we are at things. And that's not good. It creates
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conflicts with other people because if you think you're doing better than most other people,
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you rightfully feel entitled to higher salaries or more respect or more compliments. But if we're
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overestimating how good we are at things, then we're not going to get as much pay or attention or respect
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or deference as we think we deserve and we're going to be disgruntled by. So this better than average
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effect is so robust. I did a study a few years ago where I asked a very large sample. I said,
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I want you to think of all the disagreements you have with other people. It could be trivial
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disagreements, not unimportant things or major disagreements. In what percentage of those
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disagreements you have with other people, do you think that you are the one who's correct?
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And again, the average person, the average should be 50%. Now, some people may be more correct than
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others. But if a disagreement has one wrong person or one right person, then on average,
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the average person should be right half the time. That's not what you get. The average person thinks
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that they are right about two thirds of the time. Well, that creates a lot of conflict when we disagree
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with other people. We think we are more correct than we statistically and logically can be.
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And so the over positivity of our self thoughts create a number of problems in our lives. And there's
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not much we can do about it, except realize, however you feel about yourself, it's probably
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too positive. That's kind of depressing and demoralizing. Even if you say I'm not above
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average, I'm below average, chances are you're probably even more below average than you think
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you are. We just have this tremendous tendency to self enhance.
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All right. So we have this bias to think that we're awesome. And besides thinking already that
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we're great, we also evaluate events in our lives that happened to us in a positive light,
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typically. So if we get a, I don't know, if a project turns out great that we were working on,
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we think, well, that was mostly me and everyone else. Yeah, they didn't really do anything on that
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project. It was me. Probably not the case. Or if something, but here's the flip side is if
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something, if it turns out poorly, what we do is like, well, that wasn't my fault. It was like,
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everyone else is a bunch of dum-dums and I did everything right. And it's their fault.
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Absolutely. Those are called self-serving attributions. The attributions, the explanations
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we make for event events in our lives are very self-serving. You're right. We take more credit for
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the positive things and less credit for the negative things than, than we should. And again,
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that creates conflict among people because we have disagreements about who was responsible for this,
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this argument that you had with your partner this morning. It was whose fault was it?
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I don't know, but it wasn't mine. So yeah, self-serving attributions are a problem as well.
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So another way the self can make us miserable and be a curse is that it can exacerbate negative emotions
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like sadness and worry. I think there's research that suggests that animals have emotions like fear.
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They experience that, but they don't, they don't think about their fear. So what does the ability
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to think about our emotions, how does that make them like worse?
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We conjure emotions on our own that have nothing to do with our situations. I like you bringing up the
00:24:06.620
animals there because yes, animals have emotions. They have negative emotions when there are threats
00:24:11.580
or challenges in their environment at the moment. And they have positive emotions when good things are
00:24:17.420
happening, benefits and opportunities. That happens with us as well, but we can conjure up, we create so
00:24:24.740
many emotions for ourselves by just how we think about ourselves and our lives. Nothing has to be
00:24:31.280
happening. I can be having a perfectly nice evening, sitting, watching television, relaxing, my life
00:24:36.520
at the moment is fine. And I can make myself miserable replaying that argument I had with my
00:24:41.660
boss a week ago, or worrying about the medical procedure I have to have two weeks from now,
00:24:46.560
or starting to think about my retirement account. We create an awful lot of negative emotions in
00:24:53.860
ourselves, sadness, anger, anxiety in particular, worrying about things that we don't have any control
00:25:00.420
over, but we sit and worry. And you're right, the animals aren't doing that. You don't get the sense
00:25:04.780
that the owl sleeping in its tree is worried about what it's going to do tomorrow, what might happen
00:25:12.300
to it. Now, let me point out, sometimes those negative emotions we create for ourselves can be
00:25:16.880
beneficial. That worrying about that thing, I worry that I've got some weird symptoms here. Well, that may
00:25:24.520
motivate us to go to the doctor. So sometimes our negative emotions we create are actionable.
00:25:30.720
There's something we can do about them. And they're, they're motivational and that's fine.
00:25:34.820
The vast majority of times when you make yourself feel badly, it's not actionable. You're just feeling
00:25:41.100
badly and it's not improving the quality of your life at all. So a lot of human unhappiness is generated
00:25:46.740
by the way we think about ourselves and our lives and has nothing to do with the situation we're in at
00:25:52.280
that moment. Well, a big emotion that people experience that can really get in the way of
00:25:57.860
having a flourishing life that's caused directly by the self is social anxiety, right? It's like this
00:26:04.800
social anxiety is caused by you thinking too much about how you are engaging in that social interaction.
00:26:12.120
So you're just thinking about yourself. And as a result, it just makes you anxious and want to avoid
00:26:16.840
social interactions completely. Exactly. You nailed it. Social anxiety is me worrying about
00:26:22.680
how I'm coming across to other people. I've got to give that talk tomorrow and I'm worried about it
00:26:27.920
and anxious, got to get up in front of the audience or I'm meeting new people or I'm going on a job
00:26:32.220
interview or a date with someone for the first time. And I'm upset and anxious and ruminating about
00:26:37.600
it. And that's solely my concerns with what the other people will think. And again, there's nothing
00:26:43.080
wrong with being concerned with making a good impression. That's important for the quality
00:26:46.760
of our lives too. But there's a big downside if it makes you so anxious that you're terrified when
00:26:52.880
you have to get up and give the talk or you have to go in for the job interview. And you've created
00:26:56.760
that in your own mind. Absolutely. And the other thing, the self just makes these problems worse.
00:27:02.220
Okay. The self can conjure up, we have these emotions and then we start ruminating on them.
00:27:07.480
It makes it worse, right? So we think, oh, well, I'm worried about this event that's about to happen.
00:27:12.420
So you start thinking coming up and you start worrying more, but then yourself can also be
00:27:16.920
like, why are you worrying about this? You're such a dumb, dumb. And so you just make things even
00:27:22.520
worse. You start beating yourself up for the self having an improper response to your emotions.
00:27:30.780
Exactly. And that's that introspection function I was talking about. We analyze ourselves and we get
00:27:37.060
upset at ourselves because we're not as happy as we should be, or we're more anxious than we should
00:27:41.860
be. We beat ourselves up and get depressed about the fact we're depressed. You know, life's tough
00:27:47.020
enough. There are real challenges we all have to live with that create anxiety and sadness and anger
00:27:53.700
and other negative emotions. Those are real things. There's nothing wrong with that. The sad thing is
00:27:58.740
that all of us heap a whole bunch of stuff on top of that that's not necessary. And we created it.
00:28:04.340
And again, if we had a switch and could turn off all of this self-reflection,
00:28:08.740
we could shut down that part of our misery. And when I think about things that upset me,
00:28:13.400
most of them are in my own head. It's, you know, it's not that I'm confronting a problem at the
00:28:17.820
moment. It's in my head. Well, you highlight some research that can show how introspection can
00:28:22.440
mess up relationships or, you know, harm relationships. So this idea, you know, you want to have like
00:28:28.260
evaluate your relationship with a significant other. And then you do this quiz, for example,
00:28:32.660
and it's like, what, how would you rate your significant other on X trait? You never thought
00:28:38.200
about that trait before you were attracted to your partner for some other reason. Wasn't that
00:28:42.660
trait, but then you realize, wait, that my partner, my wife doesn't have that trait. I don't know.
00:28:48.740
I don't, maybe we don't have a good relationship, but if you hadn't even thought about it, it wouldn't
00:28:52.440
have been a problem. Yeah. There's great research on the downsides of introspection. They've shown it
00:28:57.320
with relationships. They have shown it with people's ratings of the tastes of food, how people
00:29:02.900
taste jams and rate how it tastes and why they like it or don't like it changes their perceptions
00:29:09.180
of how good the jam is. What's happening, I think, is so many of our reactions to things,
00:29:14.700
our relationship. Why are we attracted to the person we're attracted to? There's a zillion possible
00:29:20.060
reasons. We are only conscious of some of those things. A lot of it's happening below the level of
00:29:25.800
awareness. We don't know why we were attracted to that person. Why does this jam taste good? I don't
00:29:31.340
know. It just tastes good. When you take something that's automatic, like the fact we like one person
00:29:37.400
or we like this jam, and you try to make it conscious and think deliberately about it and
00:29:42.700
introspect on it, you can start to focus on things. As you said, that we're actually somewhat irrelevant
00:29:48.840
in our attraction to the person initially, but once we start thinking about it, that can actually
00:29:54.220
modify how we think about the person or the jam or something else. So, you know, if you take it too
00:30:00.740
far, it sounds like you're saying, well, don't introspect. Don't try to think about why you feel
00:30:05.100
the way that you feel. And I'm not saying that. I'm saying there's a potential downside. A lot of
00:30:10.760
our reactions are automatic, and if we try to think about them consciously, we're going to get it wrong
00:30:15.820
in terms of why. We just don't know why we like or don't like certain things. We'll come up with
00:30:21.520
reasons. We'll explain it, and they seem right, but are those the real reasons why we like our
00:30:26.440
partner? Is that the real reason this jam tastes good? If we're honest with ourselves, we really
00:30:31.440
don't know. All right. So, the self has benefits, but also comes with downsides. And some of these
00:30:36.720
downsides, these negative aspects of the self can become so overwhelming for people that they try to
00:30:42.140
escape the self. I think Roy Baumeister wrote a book a long time ago called Escaping the Self,
00:30:47.700
where he makes the case that things like alcoholism, extreme sports, addiction, there are
00:30:54.100
ways to sort of quiet the self down. How do we think those things would quiet the self down but
00:31:00.960
actually make us more miserable? Well, we all do things every day to try to quiet the self
00:31:07.920
chatter down. We don't consciously think about it that way. Usually, it's not that we sit down to
00:31:12.600
watch television and say, hey, I need to think less about my problems, so I'm going to lose myself
00:31:17.020
on mindless television. But part of the appeal of leisure activities is that it does get us less
00:31:23.480
focused on ourself, watching mindless television, watching sports, playing sports, socializing with
00:31:32.160
other people, going shopping, sex, things that take our minds off of ourself. Now, all of those
00:31:39.900
activities may be pleasurable in their own right. If you're playing sports or enjoying a television show
00:31:44.380
or socializing, yes, they're pleasurable in their own right. But part of the pleasure comes from the
00:31:49.640
fact that they're taking me away from thinking about my problems. Yeah. Research on alcohol says
00:31:56.040
one of the things that it does, it sort of quiets the self. You become less self-aware, right? And so
00:32:00.840
that's why people tend to be a little more social. They say things they otherwise wouldn't have said
00:32:05.480
because the self is basically, I don't know, taking a break a little bit when the alcohol gets into
00:32:10.840
your brain. Absolutely true. I mean, these general ways we all do sort of quiet the self on a daily
00:32:17.700
basis doesn't work for everybody. So alcohol and drugs is the big dysfunctional way to do that.
00:32:23.720
Alcohol does two things. One, it's a central nervous system depressant. So it does relax you. Even if it
00:32:29.340
doesn't change your self-thoughts, it does produce a little bit more relaxation. But there are studies
00:32:33.880
that show that people think less about themselves when they drink. In general, there are exceptions
00:32:39.880
to that. One thing you mentioned in the book, too, is that religion and philosophy have been aware about
00:32:45.280
this idea of the problems of the self, and they've tried to figure out ways to mitigate the curse of
00:32:53.420
Religion sort of feeds into the self in two ways. One is religion really sort of does two things.
00:33:01.380
Religions differ a lot, but it has two functions. One is to provide answers to the big existential
00:33:07.460
questions. How did all this get here? Who am I? How do I relate to the universe? What happens after I die?
00:33:14.880
And religions, in different ways, provide some guidance, some hints, some answers to those kinds
00:33:21.000
of questions. Well, those questions are all self-generated. All those other animals out there in the woods are
00:33:25.900
not sitting around wondering about how the universe was created or what's going to happen after they die.
00:33:30.640
We do wonder about those things, and the uncertainty and the fear can be problematic for some people.
00:33:36.340
Religion steps in to provide some tentative answers. The second thing that religion does related to
00:33:41.160
the self is it provides a moral code. It says, here's the ways that you ought to treat each other.
00:33:48.000
Here are the ways that you ought to behave. If you look at what most of those moral codes say,
00:33:53.520
they involve not hurting other people. They involve not being selfish, not being too self-centered,
00:34:01.240
treating other people the way you would like to be treated. So religious moral codes are ways to try
00:34:09.000
to get people not to behave in an egocentric, selfish, self-centered kind of way. That if people
00:34:19.220
weren't already self-centered, if people weren't selfish, we wouldn't need moral codes, right?
00:34:24.520
Everybody would behave themselves and get along pretty well, and that would work out fine. Now,
00:34:30.060
the world religions approach the problem of the self in different ways. The Western religions,
00:34:36.360
Judaism, Christianity, Islam, their approach to the problems created by the self, the self-centeredness
00:34:43.000
and selfishness is to provide this moral code and say, here are the rules you really need to follow.
00:34:47.800
You need to become a new kind of person in one way or another, and different religions look at that
00:34:51.580
differently and behave in this way in order to be a good person. The Eastern religions like Buddhism,
00:34:59.440
Hinduism, Taoism, as well as a lot of indigenous religions, they have moral codes, but they focus more
00:35:07.380
on getting to the root of the problem in terms of quieting down the self, removing some of the curse
00:35:14.320
of the self, making people less self-preoccupied through meditation, through rituals, through
00:35:21.660
spiritually related dancing, quiet down all of this stuff about yourself, and you're going to have a
00:35:28.320
happier and healthier and better life and sort of naturally be better without having to just tell you
00:35:35.740
to behave in certain ways. But both sets of religions, Western and Eastern, are both coming
00:35:40.320
at the problem that too much self-thought, too much egotism, too much self-awareness is a problem
00:35:46.860
for people personally, and it's a problem for how people treat other people. Okay, so the self has
00:35:53.060
benefits, there are downsides, and you're not advocating that we just kind of become un-self-aware,
00:35:59.200
because that would cause lots of problems in our life. Not at all.
00:36:00.820
So what does the research say about what we can do to quiet the curse of the self? So we get like
00:36:07.020
the benefits of the self, which is that planning, decision-making, self-evaluation, while mitigating
00:36:12.440
the downsides? Because I imagine you can't eliminate the downsides completely. That just comes with having
00:36:16.860
a self, you're going to have those downsides. I think so. But I think you can improve the quality
00:36:21.940
of people's lives by minimizing them, by mitigating them, and cutting them down by 20 or 30 percent
00:36:27.260
would create a real improvement in the quality of life. Research suggests a number of things,
00:36:33.420
but they tend to fall into two or three large categories. If you're trying to say, how do I
00:36:39.060
minimize the impact of my self-thoughts on the quality of my life and how I affect the world?
00:36:46.620
The first is find some way to reduce the sheer amount of self-thoughts you have. To cut back on
00:36:56.420
the frequency of self-related thoughts, because many of them are useless. They're making you miserable.
00:37:01.440
They're creating conflicts with other people. They're being egotistical. How can we shave that back?
00:37:07.220
And the most tried and true way is to learn to meditate. And I realize a lot of people look at
00:37:13.260
meditation askance as something really weird. It can be tied up in some odd things, but basically,
00:37:22.780
it comes down to simply a psychological training tool. That it's a way to quiet down the degree to
00:37:29.940
which you are thinking about yourself and to not take your self-thoughts quite so seriously.
00:37:36.420
And there are plenty of things on the internet. There are classes in meditation. There's different
00:37:41.140
brands of meditation. And I know a lot of people sort of feel like it's, well, it's associated with
00:37:46.400
spirituality and religion and some new age kinds of ideas. And it often is, but it doesn't have to be.
00:37:52.580
It can be purely a mental psychological training tool focused only on trying to diminish the degree
00:38:00.460
to which you think about yourself. And people who go through meditation classes and practice regularly,
00:38:05.620
it's clear that they think less about themselves. They still get tangled up in all of the stuff we've
00:38:12.320
been talking about. You're right. The curse of the self does not go away, but they do it less and they
00:38:17.060
report being more relaxed and more happy and more balanced because they don't have all of that
00:38:22.460
chatter going on. So the first thing is to just try to slow down the pace at which you think about
00:38:28.720
yourself on a daily basis. The second is when you do think about yourself, don't trust those thoughts
00:38:36.060
quite as much as you probably do. I call this ego skepticism. We know that our thoughts are often
00:38:44.140
biased. We often, we know that our thoughts about ourselves are incomplete. A lot of the things that
00:38:50.100
affect our behavior are below the level of awareness. We don't think about them. We can't think about
00:38:54.700
them. So don't take your thoughts quite so seriously. They are hunches, hints, hypotheses
00:39:02.340
that are often true and they guide your behavior in fruitful directions, but they're often wrong or
00:39:09.800
incomplete. So if you, if you just sort of don't take your own thoughts quite so seriously and use
00:39:16.700
them for guidance, then I think you're less likely to fall into some of these traps we're talking about.
00:39:21.480
You're less likely to be ego defensive. You're less likely to make bad judgments based upon the fact
00:39:27.880
you perceive yourself too positively. And if you can do each of those things a little bit, and I don't
00:39:33.400
want to hold out too much hope you can do them a lot because we're not designed that way. We were not
00:39:38.420
designed with a brain to live in the environment we've created. That's, that's the irony of all of this.
00:39:45.320
We evolve with a brain that works really, really well. If you're a hunter gatherer living in a
00:39:51.180
tribe of about 30 people, we don't live that way anymore. We've created a civilization and a
00:39:57.600
global economy where we just have to deal with too many people and too many issues and too many
00:40:02.120
choices. I am often amazed we do as well as we do. We have a lot of dysfunction as a species,
00:40:08.000
no question. But the fact that we can live in an environment that's so different from the one that
00:40:12.600
our brain was designed to live in is pretty remarkable. Biologists tell us that our brain is not
00:40:19.240
fundamentally different than it was 50,000 years ago during the stone age, but yet it's coping with
00:40:24.720
all of this. So if we just tell ourselves, we've got to do certain things to promote our ability to
00:40:31.200
cope with our current lives that we've created. And one of those things is to become a little less
00:40:36.620
self-focused, less egoic, less egotistical, and to lower that curse of the self.
00:40:43.480
Well, Mark, this has been a great conversation. Is there some place people can go to learn more about
00:40:46.580
your work? I guess just really two places. One is the book, The Curse of the Self. I guess it's
00:40:51.860
probably still on Amazon and my blog at psychologytoday.com. The blog that I have there is
00:41:00.820
called Toward a Less Egoic World. The idea being if ego and self and identity create all of these
00:41:09.280
problems, what steps can we take to be less egoic and create a less egoic world and lower some of these
00:41:15.920
problems? And I know there's maybe 15 posts on there. I try to keep up with it every month or so.
00:41:22.300
But that's psychologytoday.com. People can Google my name, L-E-A-R-Y, or look for Toward a Less Egoic
00:41:28.840
World. And those are written for the average person. With the implications, what do we do to minimize
00:41:34.920
the curse of the self? Mark Leary, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.
00:41:40.860
My guest name is Mark Leary. He is the author of the book, The Curse of the Self, Self-Awareness,
00:41:45.140
Egotism, and the Quality of Human Life. It's available on amazon.com. Also check out our
00:41:48.720
show notes at aom.is slash self, where you can find links to resources, where you can delve deeper
00:41:53.020
into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast. Check out our website
00:42:04.140
at artofmanlios.com, where you can find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles written
00:42:07.760
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00:42:35.060
this is Brett McKay. Remind you to not only listen to the AOM Podcast,