Want to Be Happy？ Give Yourself Reasons to Admire Yourself
Episode Stats
Summary
In this episode of the Art of Manliness podcast, we discuss the missing third dimension, virtue, and how it can help us make better sense of life. In his new book, "Becoming Who You Are," author and systems designer Ryan Bush lays out a new theory of self-esteem, human greatness, and the opposite of depression, called the virtue self-signaling theory.
Transcript
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brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast
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happiness and depression can feel like slippery and befuddling things we can do the things we've
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been told to make us happy while still not feeling satisfied or on paper our lives can look great
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yet we still feel depressed and the advice that's out there about these states doesn't always seem
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to correspond to our lived experience ryan bush has created a new map he thinks can help us make
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better sense of life ryan is a systems designer with a long-standing interest in psychology and
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philosophy the founder of designing the mind a self-development organization and an author his
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latest book is become who you are a new theory of self-esteem human greatness and the opposite of
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depression today on the show ryan explains the two dimensions along which we usually plot our
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happiness and what he thinks is the missing third dimension virtue ryan then impacts his virtue
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self-signaling theory which he thinks can heighten happiness and reduce depression and which is
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premised on the idea that if you want to live a flourishing life you have to give yourself reasons
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to admire yourself i really think this is a valuable idea that everyone can get something from and
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recommend listening through after the show's over check out our show notes at awim.is become
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all right ryan bush welcome to the show thanks for having me brad i'm excited to be here so in your
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new book become who you are you lay out a theory for human happiness and you start off the book talking
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about that most ideas or theories of happiness focus on two dimensions what are these dimensions and how do
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they interact with each other yeah it's a sort of spatial visual metaphor that i think could be
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really useful for navigating our lives and so if you imagine there's a chess board sitting on the table
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in front of you you can imagine there's an x-axis and a y-axis the sort of left and right on the chess
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board is pain and pleasure so further to the right means more immediate pleasure further to the left means
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pain discomfort suffering then on the y-axis sort of moving closer to you or further away on the chess
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board you've got loss and gain and so this one's all about you know long-term success and striving and
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achievement or loss and and setbacks and that kind of thing and so when we're children we're all sort of
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navigating just using this x-axis we want more immediate pleasure and less pain and this is what most
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you know non-human animals pretty much spend their lives doing and when we get a little older we learn
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how to bring this y-axis in we learn how to say okay i can put my you know pursuit of pleasure on hold
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i can delay gratification i can go after this long-term success and gain and so we we essentially go back and
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forth throughout our lives between chasing immediate pleasure and chasing long-term success at least by default
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that's our innate wiring that's the map we're using to navigate our lives the problem with this is that
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sometimes the map doesn't really correspond to the territory sometimes we will achieve something in our
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lives that should be good according to this map it should result in the ultimate happiness and it doesn't
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really work that way we end up kind of just shrugging saying oh why why am i not any happier now or we'll go
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through a loss and end up saying it's the best thing that ever happened to us there's been a lot of studies
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of this where you know daniel gilbert writes about a lot of them in a book called stumbling on happiness
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where he points out that lottery winners and paraplegics have the same levels of happiness a
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year after their incidents and that that's just such a like what what's going on here when we spend our
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lives pursuing things that seem good on paper and look like positive external circumstances and then
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we achieve them and they don't actually make us any happier what's actually going on and so i've used
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this dimensional framework to suggest okay there's there's actually a third dimension which is
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actually pulling the strings this whole time as we're running around chasing pleasure and success
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and gain actually something else is determining whether we're happy or not and it may relate to
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those things but it's not directly pleasure or gain and i've argued in the book it's not meaning
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it's not love exactly even though it relates to all these things but this is really what's you know
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driving our well-being under the surface okay so you make the case that there's a third dimension
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that's going on in our lives that determines our happiness or flourishing that we typically ignore
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don't even know that's there and that third dimension is virtue what do you mean by virtue
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yeah i tend to introduce it using the term admirability because that connects a little more
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immediately to the modern listener i think virtue has this really outdated sort of preachy connotation
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and that's really unfortunate because it's got this rich philosophical history going back to the
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ancient greeks and confucius and all these you know brilliant thinkers who have made very similar
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arguments to the one i'm making now just without this sort of fancy three-dimensional framework right and
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without a lot of the data backing up and explaining why this is actually the case but the ancient greeks you know
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the stoics for example they said that virtue and eudaimonia which was sort of the ultimate happiness
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these are fundamentally tied together the more virtuous you are the more satisfied you ultimately
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are in your life and virtue didn't just mean the kind of moral purity that we tend to think of
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the word arete that it was originally used as can be translated as excellence or strength or greatness
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and so there are a lot of different levels that this can play out on right we we can talk about moral
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strength and moral virtue but we can also talk about courage and creativity and charisma uh you know
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humor even all these traits that we basically look at other people in our lives and say like i admire this
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person for this and we observe this throughout cultures there are certain traits that you know psychologists
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like martin seligman have observed are pretty much valued in every culture around the world and that
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tells us something very important about our psychology and and what's deeply embedded in it which is that
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we have these deep impulses of admiration around these certain traits and so there must be some reason why
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it is so deeply embedded in our minds and why the ancients were right i argue in thinking that it is really
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connected to our happiness and when we are depressed we are in some ways not able to see for one reason
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or another those virtues that we pride ourselves on and when we're deeply satisfied it's because
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we are achieving a high level of virtue exercise in our lives and we are seeing that fact and observing it
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and admiring ourselves for it okay so i like that idea that virtue is admire being admirable it's
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excellence and it could be things like you said courage temperance wisdom humor but even things
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like your ability in a sport or your ability in designing or your ability in programming you can
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be virtuous in those those tasks as well potentially i will say some of them i think are not as deeply
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ingrained because they're not they're not things that our ancestors necessarily had so like my my skill
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at you know cad design on on the computer doesn't necessarily translate our ancestors would have just been
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like what is that but from an evolutionary standpoint i think there are reasons why honesty and kindness
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and courage are things that we really deeply admire and so those hold a special weight in our minds
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i also think that our values can vary from one person to another and so really it most requires inquiring
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into our own values what do i most admire in other people who are the people i admire most and what are
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these traits and how can i incorporate them into my own life and behavior and lifestyle so you have
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this idea of a virtue portfolio what's a virtue portfolio it's essentially just a collection of
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your top signature strengths or virtues that you know potentially you've always been good at since
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you were a kid you really pride yourself on them and if you found yourself in a situation in life where
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you started to doubt that you had these virtues you started to think you were no longer good at these
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things it would really crush you you can imagine that despair and if you've been depressed you you
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may have had a period where you really did feel like you lacked those signature strengths and this is
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very often the case people who are depressed typically describe themselves as incompetent worthless
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unlovable if they're severely depressed and vice versa for those who are deeply satisfied and so your
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your virtue portfolio is this collection of strengths that you're sort of constantly trying to balance and
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bring out in your life or at least i argue you should be as you look at the different areas of your life
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you should be saying like how can i exercise my ingenuity more how can i exercise my wisdom more in this
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situation and and really it's going to vary for each person there's a test that i recommend that
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martin seligman developed called the signature strengths test or the brief strengths test which is much
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quicker if you don't have as much time that'll essentially tell you what your top five virtues
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are that make up your virtue portfolio i think it's really just a starting point because there are a lot
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of ways you can sort of define what it is that you're best at and value most but i think you need to be
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paying very careful attention to these traits when you're navigating your life when you're making
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transitions you don't want to allow these to get neglected for long because your brain will notice and
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according to this theory that i'm proposing it's going to affect your mood your behavior your your
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long-term well-being you also have this idea of virtue domains what's a virtue domain yeah this is
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essentially just an area in your life a vessel that allows you to bring out a certain strength
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so work for people is often a major virtue domain there are certain positive traits that we don't really
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get other opportunities to exercise in our lives besides through our work or at least if we've designed
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our career well and allowed ourselves to bring out those traits your relationships would be other
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virtue domains you may have a particularly important relationship in your life that allows you to bring
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out your sense of humor or your creativity or your your loving affection in ways that you don't have
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another outlet for so these are going to be really important virtue domains for you you might have a hobby
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or a you know non-profit you volunteer at or something else these can all potentially be
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virtue domains and this is really crucial to crafting that strategy to exercising your virtues and achieving
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greater happiness or eudaimonia so how does this virtue dimension interact with the pleasure pain
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and loss gain dimensions of happiness that's a good question you know there are some thinkers who would argue
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that basically the pleasure and the gain in your life are completely irrelevant the stoics would have
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said don't even worry about those they don't affect you and you know other thinkers like aristotle and i
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would say myself have argued that well they matter but not in the direct sense your your achievements
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your career these things are not going to improve your happiness in themselves but they can increase or
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decrease the amount of virtue that you're able to exercise in your life so for example you know we talked
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about winning the lottery i sort of do an exploration of this in the early chapters of the book where i
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say okay so you might win the lottery and you might say okay well now i don't have to work so i'm going to
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quit this job that a big part of my self-esteem was previously tied up in i'm going to just kind of sit
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around now and do whatever i feel like and uh you know kind of adopt this passive effortless life and spend
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the money on immediate pleasures in that case the lottery is actually going to be a bad thing for you
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and your well-being because it's going to decrease the amount that you're exercising your virtues in
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your life and your brain is going to notice so to speak you're going to cease to admire yourself as
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much as you did before on the other hand you might win the lottery and you might say oh this is going to
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be huge now i can quit this like mindless job that i had and actually create a new opportunity for me to
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do a lot more creative interesting things i'm going to start this organization i'm going to become an
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angel investor i'm going to you know invest this money responsibly so it you know it doesn't go to
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waste and in that case you know it could result in a much better life for you so it's not so much
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you know it's not so straightforward that money doesn't buy happiness for example it's that all
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of these circumstantial gains or losses in our lives have an indirect relationship and really this
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is best viewed in this sort of three-dimensional model because you can be moving you know up in the z
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axis that sort of three-dimensional axis which you know i didn't fully flesh out earlier but
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essentially you you can imagine that chessboard we mentioned turning into a topographical chessboard
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where you've now got mountains and valleys on top of the chessboard and and it's really the mountains
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and valleys that determine what's good for you and what's going to make you happy so you want to
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navigate your two-dimensional existence so as to increase that third dimension first and foremost
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so maybe maybe taking that job with the higher salary or the greater status really will allow
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you to climb up that mountain that corresponds to that but it also might mean creating a new kind of
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passive comfort that might actually hurt you it might actually move you down into those valleys of
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depression and make you less happy even though something seemingly good happened to you yeah i have an
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example from that i have a friend who sold his business for lots of money allowed him to retire
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so that's a that's gain pleasure it was awesome didn't have to work and for the first couple of
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months all he did was like sleep in because he hadn't done that in a long time but then after a
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while he got depressed he's like i gotta do something so he started another business so he could exercise
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his virtue like he's good at certain things and he he needed he needed an outlet for that
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yeah that's a very common story and and i talk about my time in high school and how like summer
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breaks were kind of like mini retirements in a way you know i would get to the end of the school year
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and be like oh i'm so excited i'm gonna do nothing i'm gonna sleep in play video games all day and uh
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you know inevitably i would end up feeling kind of terrible after like three weeks and and almost be
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ready to go back to school by the end of the summer and at one point i kind of realized okay i can
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prevent this from happening next summer you know i'm going to set big goals and ambitions i'm going
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to structure my days so i'm actually doing things that i'm proud of and i i ended up turning those
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later summers into like some of the best periods of growth in my life and you know really satisfying
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but ultimately that idea that you know when we finally are able to just stop doing the things that
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our self-esteem really is built on uh that we're going to somehow be thrilled it often has the
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opposite effect so we need to give ourselves reason to admire ourselves and we don't ever really get to
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stop we don't ever get to ride off into the sunset and stop doing this it's a lifelong process of
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earning your own admiration i want to dig deeper into this idea of how do we know when we're being
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virtuous and you developed a theory called virtue self-signaling theory he walk us through that
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theory because i think it's like the linchpin of your idea of happiness and even depression
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yeah so the big question that that led me to sort of develop this theory was why about all this stuff
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that i was observing uh about the connection between virtue and and well-being and depression i was
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saying why from an evolutionary and like neurological standpoint would this be the case you know it
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doesn't naturally make sense that we would you know one that we would get depressed at all because
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that seems like a genetically kind of crippling state two that that our self-esteem and self-evaluations
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would play such an important role and would be so central to the functioning of our minds and uh you
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know three that that happiness would work this way and that we would experience these highs of
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well-being when we're being virtuous specifically and so i draw from a lot of different areas this is
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like four chapters of dense research so i'll do my best to summarize it here but i think potentially
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the best place to start with virtue self-signaling theory is to look at self-esteem and this sort of
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central role that it plays in our minds we are constantly sort of evaluating ourselves we are
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constantly thinking about our own worth and our you know we're criticizing ourselves in many cases
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uh it's kind of a constant stream and if we look at you know the neuroscience behind this there's a
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network in the brain called the default mode network that is really lighting up like any time we're not
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engaged in another activity like by that's why it's called the default mode network by default this is
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what our brain is doing and it's been found to be really closely linked to self-referential thoughts
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and self-ruminations and social comparison essentially the evaluation of our own virtues
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and our social strengths it's been proposed by some evolutionary psychologists that self-esteem
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is essentially a fuel gauge for the fuel tank that is social esteem so it's there as this internal
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indicator to help us optimize our social standing if you think about our ancestors the tribe was
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everything to you if you lived you know 10 000 years ago or more you really needed to be on your
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tribe's good side you could be ostracized or killed or worse they could talk about you behind your back
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if you didn't uh do well and that would affect your social status your mate prospects your alliances
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ultimately it has major genetic outcomes so what i've argued in this book is that this system in the
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brain the default mode network the sociometer whatever you want to call it is essentially
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there to regulate our mood up or down right towards eudaimonia or toward depression based on what it
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sees based on the virtue that it notices when when it's observing our actions so our own brains are kind
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of constantly evaluating us to say well are you highly approvable are you someone that your tribe is going to
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like that your friends and mate prospects are going to you know approve of if so let's get out there
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let's be active right let's display those strengths and and put them out there and capitalize on this
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opportunity or your brain is saying no i'm not seeing those traits that i approve of i'm not seeing
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evidence that i'm the kind of person i would admire and hence that people in my tribe are likely to
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admire right and that means i need to be in a state where i'm going to withdraw socially i'm going to be
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socially risk averse i'm going to lie low essentially and not damage my social status and so this mechanism
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that i'm proposing essentially evolved as a social protection tool but it has much greater implications
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for us and it's almost kind of cruel to think that this awful crippling state that we know as depression
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would just have come about to sort of optimize our social standing but i think that's where its origins
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lie and so the question for us is not how can we you know do what our genes wanted us to do which was
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to maximize social outcomes the question is how can we earn our own respect how can we appeal to this
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social simulator in our heads for maximum well-being and so i think that ultimately comes down to
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trying to signal the most virtue to ourselves and that's that's why the name is virtue self-signaling
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theory we are as happy as the virtue that we signal to our own brains and that we give ourselves
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evidence to believe that we are exhibiting and what's interesting about this sociometer in our head
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it's only turned on to things that are important to our identity so for example if you don't think of
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yourself as a soccer player if you're really bad at soccer and someone makes fun of you you're not
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going to care right but like in your example you're a designer that's a big part of your identity if
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someone says yeah i don't think you're that great of a designer or you get bad feedback on that that's
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probably going to hurt you more than if someone says you're a bad soccer player exactly yeah it doesn't
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affect our self-esteem all that much when someone doubts us on something that isn't in our portfolio
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in our virtue portfolio right if we haven't built those serotonin pathways associated with those
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particular traits you know it's not that big of a deal i already didn't think i was good at that
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but when it attacks our identity directly that's when it can really affect our self-esteem and our
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happiness when we look at people who are depressed very often they've got a broken identity in fact i
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would argue this is the kind of the essence of what depression is it's not a you know chemical imbalance
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like is often argued fundamentally it's a identity failure issue you have a broken identity in some way
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your virtue portfolio has had a market crash and so you are now in this sort of state of disrepair in
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your identity and that sort of calls for a reshaping or re-strategizing of the state and of our general
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virtue strategies but yes it does fundamentally center around our identity or our virtue portfolio
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i want to talk more about depression because you went in deep on this section we've had a lot of
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people on the podcast psychologists come on talk about depression there's lots of different theories
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out there for what causes depression and a lot of research is being spent on it because it's one of
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the you know big mental health issues in america and in the west and for a long time there's this idea
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you just mentioned it that well depressions it's a brain chemistry problem if you have low serotonin
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low dopamine you are going to have depression but what the research shows is that even if you give
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someone a antidepressant where it increases you know serotonin for example it might alleviate
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depression a bit particularly in people with really severe depression but for people with mild depression
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it doesn't do much what's going on there yeah there are a couple of problems with this sort of view
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on depression one is just kind of explaining you know why it's there and and why it operates the way
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it does if we look at normal pathologies and diseases and disorders there are certain traits that they tend
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to share and a big one is getting more common with age right heart disease gets more common with age
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most of these awful diseases that we experience as our organs get older and start sort of deteriorating
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we get more likely to get these conditions well depression most people experience their first
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bout of depression who who have depression at some point in their like early adulthood so it doesn't
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operate like a normal pathology it also you know while there are genes that are associated with
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depression um you know a greater likelihood of it ultimately we all have depression genes in the sense
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that all minds seem to be capable of getting depressed under certain conditions and so this is not just
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something that made it through the sort of filter of natural selection in some people this is kind of a
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staple of human existence you put people in certain conditions certain beliefs about themselves and they're
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going to get depressed and vice versa you know the other issue is that this view of depression as a
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chemical disorder fundamentally really isn't that well supported it's really bleak when you look at the data
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on things like antidepressants people sort of assume and have really been marketed this idea that there
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are pills you can just take that fix the problem that is depression and really there's no reason to think
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that's the case i just uh you know sometimes i say to myself well i'm not technically a like a medical
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professional i'm not a psychiatrist should i be sharing this with people but the fact is like i have the
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same data in front of me and this is really what the experts are saying too like there is no evidence
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that antidepressants at least the ones we have now actually fix depression in most cases they rarely
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outperform placebos and in fact a cognitive behavioral therapy works both at least as well in the short term
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and much better in the long term and has none of the really awful side effects right so really it's kind of
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this misleading belief that we ever had these tools and that fundamentally depression was caused by this
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weird imbalance in the first place i think serotonin and many other neurochemicals do play a role in this
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state but i think ultimately the start of this cycle is the low self-esteem that when your belief about
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yourself when your identity starts to decline that's like the fuel gauge in your car when it's running low
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and that little light that turns on at the end is depression you get depressed as a way of saying
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okay things are not working your identity is broken you don't need to be going out and bring a lot of
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attention to yourself so stay home stop socializing it's the red light essentially and it's a natural
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mechanism i think for doing that and so it is an adaptation from a genetic standpoint i believe that
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doesn't mean that we want to experience it and in fact if we can avoid it i think by all means we
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should but i think that means attending to our virtues and our identity and making sure that we
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maintain a positive view of ourselves through our genuine actions not just through manipulating our
00:25:59.020
views but actually taking the actions that we would be proud of whenever we can yeah so the decreased
00:26:04.920
serotonin the decreased dopamine that's a result of depression you you feel bad about yours yeah it's a
00:26:10.600
symptom and the problem of just treating the symptom like increasing it artificially with
00:26:15.500
antidepressants you might feel good a little bit but then if you're not doing things that make you
00:26:20.160
admire yourself create a strong identity you're just going to feel bad again right away exactly and
00:26:26.200
that's why you know another tactic known as behavioral activation by some studies works even better than
00:26:31.820
cbt and it certainly outperforms antidepressants it seems so simple and so easy that it wouldn't work
00:26:38.720
but it actually really does it essentially is just getting you to go out and do things even if you
00:26:44.220
don't feel like it and specifically doing things that that gradually work towards embodying your values
00:26:50.720
starting small and climbing your way up gradually until you are doing things every day that you're
00:26:56.160
actually proud of yourself for this is a really huge underrated practice i think and there's a lot of
00:27:02.260
data suggesting it works as well as just about anything there's reason to think it might even
00:27:07.420
be a big part of why exercise seems to work so well it's not just that you're you know doing something
00:27:13.300
that's good for your body it's that you're doing something that's good for your own self-perception
00:27:17.740
you are giving yourself a reason to admire your own discipline if you're going out and working out
00:27:23.120
or it could be reading a book or going on a walk you know all these things that give you reason
00:27:28.220
to see oh i am an admirable person i do have these traits that i you know that i admire in others
00:27:34.280
and so really wherever you're at you need to start from there and then take baby steps and ask how can
00:27:40.880
i bring out more of my virtues how can i give myself more evidence of the kind of person that i am
00:27:46.220
we're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors
00:27:49.560
and now back to the show so i want to dig more into how we can use this virtue self-signaling theory to
00:28:00.420
create a flourishing life for ourself and you've mentioned some things already behavior activation
00:28:05.700
uh cognitive behavioral therapy but i think someone could see this thing as okay well look if
00:28:10.100
depression or our eudaimonia or flourishing is determined by this you know sociometer in our head
00:28:16.840
why can't we just hack it and just say why can't i just tell myself i'm awesome just tell your brain
00:28:21.900
like i'm awesome i'm great i'm you know like the stewart smallie i'm good enough i'm smart enough
00:28:27.320
gosh darn it people like me why doesn't that work yeah it seems like the perfect solution doesn't it but
00:28:34.620
um you know ultimately your brain's a little smarter than that i think um that's why it's really
00:28:40.940
primarily oriented around your behaviors i think you know there's a great goath quote that says like
00:28:47.100
if you want to know what kind of person you are never by thinking but always by doing do your duty
00:28:52.360
and and then you'll know what you're worth and so i think our brains really are wired to pay a lot of
00:28:58.580
attention to our actions and and there's a good reason for it because everyone else in our tribe is
00:29:03.440
going to judge us based on our actions if we just evaluate ourselves based on private thoughts that
00:29:09.140
we're having then it's not going to be a good representation of what our tribe thinks about us
00:29:13.640
and so really our brains are centered primarily around action now there are times when you definitely
00:29:19.040
have to go in and and correct distorted beliefs but i think primarily it does need to be about action
00:29:25.320
right you can tell yourself all day that you accept yourself exactly as you are that you approve of
00:29:31.040
yourself unconditionally you're perfect you don't need to do anything different and you may be able to
00:29:36.340
sort of influence a certain part of your self-esteem or explicit self-esteem but the data suggests we
00:29:42.180
can't really influence our implicit self-esteem we continue to feel the same way about ourselves
00:29:47.400
even after we add all these super superficial affirmations and tell ourselves we're the best
00:29:52.900
so our brains you know they're a little better than that they're saying okay maybe you are that kind
00:29:58.060
of person go out and prove it let me see evidence of it and so i think that's a big part of why
00:30:03.620
there's not that much evidence for the effectiveness of affirmations and mantras and and just really
00:30:09.740
you know inflating your self-esteem if anything that's a recipe for narcissism rather than eudaimonia
00:30:15.920
okay so you can't hack the sociometer in your brain through mantras and affirmations another solution
00:30:23.260
to hack this would be like okay well it's there how about i just say it doesn't matter i'll just
00:30:27.400
transcend it i'll you know just meditate and use philosophy to rise above that where it's no longer
00:30:33.020
an issue does that work yeah i mean this is one that's been echoed throughout many ancient philosophies
00:30:40.180
and now you hear it in pretty much every spiritual and self-help book it's all over the place transcend
00:30:45.820
your ego keep your identity small basically get rid of your sense of self if you can and i think there's
00:30:52.140
a lot to like about this approach i think it actually probably is a viable option i think it
00:30:57.360
is possible to essentially disable through gradual practice this part of your brain until you just
00:31:04.100
don't have a sense of self anymore the problem is that the sense of self is essentially the engine
00:31:09.700
behind both depression and eudaimonia it creates this really negative state of suffering when you don't
00:31:16.540
approve of yourself but it also creates this incredible mood state of self-satisfaction when
00:31:22.140
you do approve of yourself this is what we observe in really the happiest people according to positive
00:31:27.580
and humanistic psychology is that they are giving themselves reason to approve of themselves and then
00:31:34.000
they're you know enjoying the benefits of that and this can often be you know very altruistic endeavors
00:31:39.500
but ultimately they're they're self-serving at the same time they give us reason to admire ourselves
00:31:44.600
and that makes us happier so if we just try to disable our egos and escape our sense of self
00:31:50.540
but we're ultimately taking the batteries out of the happiness unhappiness engine in our brains we're
00:31:56.600
not going to be able to experience either of those states and while this essentially middle ground would
00:32:03.420
certainly be better than the sort of self-critical depressive state that a lot of people unfortunately find
00:32:09.380
themselves in i think there's a better state waiting and i've personally experienced it
00:32:14.040
at many points in my life where you really do approve of yourself and you most of those
00:32:19.280
self-referential thoughts in your head really are expressing pride and admiration i don't think we
00:32:25.260
should treat this like it's a dirty word and it's narcissism and we shouldn't like and approve of
00:32:31.240
ourselves because i think fundamentally our view of ourselves is tied to our happiness and we shouldn't
00:32:37.480
uh we shouldn't try to eliminate it i don't think no we've had a podcast about the psychology of
00:32:42.540
healthy pride there's a bad pride there's also a healthy pride that spurs us to do more and more
00:32:48.920
great good pro-social things yeah and pride really it's really two different things that we just use the
00:32:57.100
same word for you can have a kind of pride that's like hubris that's always the fatal flaw of people
00:33:03.220
where they just don't acknowledge their own limitations they essentially blind themselves to
00:33:08.260
their weaknesses and that's not a good thing we want to have a very accurate view of our strengths
00:33:13.020
and weaknesses we want to be able to say yeah i'm good at this and i'm proud of that but also
00:33:17.560
i'm bad at this and i'm not perfect and i should get better at this so ultimately yes when you are
00:33:23.400
living in a way that you would admire in someone else you should feel that pride you shouldn't be
00:33:27.900
ashamed of it but also you shouldn't let it blind you to your genuine weaknesses which we all have
00:33:33.500
so you argue if you want a flourishing life you need to become who you are what do you mean by that
00:33:41.020
yeah so that's a phrase attributed to friedrich nietzsche he talked about becoming who you are
00:33:47.580
in this very vague way that's hard to interpret and and it seems paradoxical at first like i already am
00:33:53.840
who i am you know mission accomplished but i think really what this comes down to is that there's a
00:33:59.620
certain way of thinking about yourself as the sort of conglomerate of your highest values and ideals
00:34:05.680
when you look at the people you most admire when you look at the impulses of admiration you feel
00:34:11.600
and the values that that you hold the most deeply you could say this template of your ideals is more you
00:34:17.920
than you are like you haven't fully become this template yet and ultimately if you're if you're living
00:34:23.760
your life well you you should be sort of saying how can i come to resemble this template in my actions
00:34:30.640
more and more throughout my life how can i bring together my strengths so that i gradually become
00:34:36.420
this person and in some ways that is becoming who you are this process of self-becoming is a process
00:34:42.660
of gradually decreasing the distance between your ideal self and your actual self so you mentioned
00:34:48.640
earlier how we can figure out what our strengths are what our virtues are in our virtue portfolio
00:34:52.980
there's quizzes you can take tests you can take anything that you've seen in your own life
00:34:57.760
that's been helpful in helping you figure out what your ideal self is yeah taking that test is great
00:35:05.700
that's a good way to figure out sort of what your innate strengths already are and generally doubling
00:35:11.400
down on your strengths is going to be better than trying to mitigate your weaknesses in a lot of cases
00:35:16.600
but i also think we need to look at the people around us we need to examine people in our lives
00:35:22.840
examine people you know historical figures even fictional characters anywhere that we can go
00:35:28.480
and find someone that we admire something about we don't have to admire everything about someone
00:35:33.560
we can write down you know specific traits like i admire the way this person handles conflict
00:35:39.260
even though i don't like this that they do and you know i admire how this person deals with
00:35:43.820
this situation and if we write these things down we we sort of gradually can group them
00:35:49.560
together we can create a kind of a blueprint for who we need to become and so we can strategize our
00:35:56.000
life according to this we can say like would this change in my life bring me closer to you know putting
00:36:02.440
myself on this piece of paper or would it move me further away i personally i developed a tool called
00:36:08.920
mindsight introspection cards which are essentially a deck of cards where you take one every day
00:36:15.880
you go on a walk and you write in this little pocket journal and gradually this is meant to sort
00:36:21.280
of answer a lot of these questions i think we have an introspective deficiency in the modern world
00:36:26.720
and most of us don't spend enough time alone with our thoughts and so this is kind of a way of getting
00:36:32.600
a collection of prompts that will gradually reveal more about who you are and who you need to become
00:36:38.540
to you particularly if you yeah if you don't spend a lot of time alone with your thoughts and if you do
00:36:43.620
tend to distract yourself with all the you know endless supply of entertainment that we have today
00:36:48.980
another just great thing to do in general is to ask people in your life ask your partner your parents
00:36:54.860
whoever people who have known you for a long time what do you think i'm best at what do you
00:37:00.160
see as my greatest strengths and very often they'll surprise you they'll tell you things you never thought
00:37:05.260
about and that'll give you some new insights into what you really need to be focusing on and sort of
00:37:12.000
designing your behavior toward yeah another thing that i've done in my life that's been useful for me
00:37:16.600
is looking back childhood high school years college years and thinking of those moments where i felt the
00:37:23.760
most me like the most alive the most invigorated and then analyzing those like what was it about that
00:37:29.600
thing that made me feel so great and usually you can figure out what it is you know for me
00:37:34.440
whenever i'm teaching or explaining things to people i feel really good and so i like leaning
00:37:39.940
into that so i think that's another useful exercise to figure out like reflect on what makes you feel
00:37:45.020
the most alive and the most the most flourishing absolutely yeah you know when we're talking about the
00:37:51.000
virtue portfolio i think going back through those historical charts and saying yeah when when was i at
00:37:57.100
a high when was i at the best sort of most alive most me like you said period and very often you'll
00:38:03.520
find it's when you did having an outlet for those top few strengths and similarly the lowest periods in
00:38:10.120
your life you very likely will find are the times that you really didn't have that outlet for one reason
00:38:14.680
or another those traits were suppressed or you thought you didn't have those strengths for one reason or
00:38:20.200
another so i think yeah thinking about that but also thinking about the times that you
00:38:24.260
really didn't feel like you that you you look back and you're like oh yeah i was i trying to be
00:38:29.360
someone else during that period what traits were you exhibiting what evokes disgust potentially in
00:38:34.980
people that you don't like and and how can you make sure you avoid those traits i think is an equally
00:38:40.720
effective exercise okay so instead of hacking the virtue self-signaling theory with mantras or just
00:38:48.280
trying to transcend it you argue we got to embrace it and figure out how we can make it work for us
00:38:53.240
so that we can put ourselves in situations where we admire ourselves more so we feel like we're
00:38:57.700
flourishing and we can avoid that depressive state and you introduce a tool i think is really useful
00:39:03.040
it's the abc triangle how can the abc triangle help us virtue self-signal to us more effectively
00:39:10.180
yeah so the this is a straight out of cognitive behavioral therapy essentially we've got our affect
00:39:17.480
which is our mood we've got behavior our actions and then cognition our thoughts and these have a
00:39:23.680
sort of a perpetual cycle relationship with one another so if we look at depression for example
00:39:29.940
we see a combination of low mood low activity and motivation and low self-regard or low self-esteem
00:39:38.220
and we can see how these feed into one another because if you're in a bad mood you're not going to feel
00:39:43.240
like doing anything which means you're not going to go out and and take a lot of actions that you're
00:39:47.540
proud of which means you're not going to have reason to admire yourself and you're going to develop these
00:39:52.160
negative beliefs and that's going to make you feel bad and so it's a vicious cycle essentially of negative
00:39:57.260
mood and action and beliefs about yourself so what can you do to reverse this cycle and create a fitting
00:40:04.840
you know virtuous cycle essentially and a lot of it is what we've been talking about here i mean
00:40:10.280
if you go into your beliefs and you identify oh i i thought i wasn't you know a creative person
00:40:17.480
but actually i was exhibiting this cognitive distortion that was all or nothing thinking
00:40:22.280
and actually it's much more accurate to say you know i'm creative in these ways but not this way
00:40:27.700
right if you go through a cognitive restructuring process that can be a really valuable way of sort of
00:40:34.340
a leverage point for changing that cycle but i would advise first and foremost to take the behavioral
00:40:39.700
activation approach and really this goes all the way up it starts at clinical depression and really
00:40:45.180
no matter where you're at even if you're generally satisfied in your life you can still apply this
00:40:50.360
principle of behavioral activation but essentially you want to break that cycle so that no matter how
00:40:56.300
you feel you make yourself go out and actually do things that at least to some degree show you what
00:41:03.580
kind of person you are and and how that aligns with your values so if you are you know severely
00:41:09.180
depressed and you're struggling to get out of bed each day you know you probably feel like there is a
00:41:14.380
million things you need to be doing that you just can't well replace those million things with one
00:41:19.840
thing or maybe two each day you're going to get out of bed you're going to take a shower right you
00:41:25.600
know if you're a little improved from there you can say okay each day i'm going to get out of bed take
00:41:29.800
shower clean up my room and do some dishes and then you can start introducing things that bring
00:41:35.160
out more of these admirable behaviors you can start introducing okay i'm going to call a friend for 30
00:41:40.480
minutes every day even though i don't feel like it i'm going to go on a hike even though i'd rather
00:41:45.040
stay in bed i'm going to make myself stick to this schedule every day and gradually you sort of claw
00:41:50.580
your way out of this vicious cycle and you can create a virtuous cycle in its place you can get to a
00:41:56.680
place where your positive mood is making you want to go out and do things which is making you feel
00:42:02.380
great about yourself and so on the cycle continues and so really we want to extend this all the way
00:42:08.400
up to the point of asking okay i'm already in a great place i'm in a great mood but i want to go
00:42:14.020
even higher how can i bring even more of my virtues together and and you know bring them to a higher
00:42:20.400
level than they've ever been before is that where the idea of virtue convergence comes in
00:42:25.040
yeah that's that's exactly it so essentially building a vessel for yourself where you can not
00:42:31.600
only bring out one or two of your strengths but concentrate a very high degree of them and the
00:42:36.540
best example of this that i know is my own you know designing the mind before i had started this
00:42:42.200
organization you know i i had a few you know good virtue domains i had a creative job i had a healthy
00:42:49.760
relationship but a lot of my greatest strengths didn't really have an outlet my wisdom my rationality
00:42:56.340
a big part of my ingenuity these are things that are really important to me and a lot of them were
00:43:01.280
sort of relegated to like occasional hobbies that i made time for once i built designing the mind i
00:43:08.760
gradually found ways to bring more and more of these things that i was good at together in one place
00:43:13.700
and that you know our virtues really become synergistic when we can do this and really
00:43:18.900
amplifies that virtuous cycle so now you know every day i am doing things that are giving me
00:43:25.000
evidence of the kind of person i was and it's a total 180 from you know the period i went through
00:43:30.300
several years ago where i was doubting a lot of these things and living through a lot of the stuff
00:43:35.080
that i'm talking about here with low self-esteem and depression okay so to activate our virtue
00:43:41.200
self-signaling theory in a flourishing way first thing you start off with just do more things that
00:43:47.380
are virtuous do more things that will make yourself admire yourself and that's going to vary from person
00:43:51.780
to person like you said if you're in that really depressed state it's going to be really small just
00:43:55.840
getting out of bed but as you progress it can be exercise every day i'm going to journal every day
00:44:01.120
i'm going to socialize once a week you mentioned it briefly but i want to dig into it a little bit
00:44:06.520
there's situations where you could be doing these admirable things these virtuous things
00:44:10.520
but it's not registering because your meter in your head is off yeah talk about that how can you
00:44:15.900
restructure that cognitive restructure and you've talked about what does that look like
00:44:19.880
yeah i think a big part of this is that we live in a very different world than the one our brains
00:44:26.380
evolved in you know we're getting evaluated sometimes based purely on how much we increase
00:44:32.460
profits at the company we work for or we're getting evaluated socially on social media networks
00:44:37.720
that are totally different from our actual in-person tribes that we had you know really close-knit like
00:44:43.720
lifelong tribes many years ago and so i think what this results in is our brains aren't always getting
00:44:51.220
the correct signals they're not always able to come to the right conclusions and we see this in cbt
00:44:57.240
we see it in the most common distortions that we see in depression pretty much everything that i've put
00:45:03.080
out there i've included this list from david burns is feeling good which is an excellent book mind over
00:45:09.580
mood is another great one for anyone who wants to dive into this process but essentially starting to
00:45:16.120
log your own thoughts starting to write down when you're in a bad mood and say what was i thinking just
00:45:23.180
before this what is the thought that popped into my head that made me go into this really awful mood
00:45:28.920
spiral and once you start doing this once once you've done it for a few weeks and you've written
00:45:33.460
down all of your moods and the thoughts associated with them you start noticing patterns you start
00:45:39.680
saying wow every time i've been in a bad mood this last couple of weeks it's been because i had a
00:45:44.580
thought like this where i was you know feeling like everyone was ignoring me or you know it'll vary
00:45:50.520
from one person to another but essentially finding those patterns in the thoughts that are triggering your
00:45:55.960
negative moods can be absolutely huge because if you find those major thought patterns and beliefs
00:46:02.840
that are causing most of your bad moods and you identify a flaw an error a distortion in those thoughts
00:46:10.020
which are almost always present you can just eliminate a huge chunk of your suffering instantly and so
00:46:17.340
really it comes down to examining those thoughts the way a scientist might and going in and saying
00:46:23.160
okay what's the evidence that this belief about myself is true what's the evidence that it's not
00:46:28.320
true and when you really take a a healthy approach to this you compile the evidence you know very often
00:46:34.440
you'll say actually there's a lot of conflicting evidence with this belief i have about myself i thought
00:46:39.960
i was you know totally incompetent but look at all these examples i have that i am really competent
00:46:45.000
actually i'm only like really occasionally incompetent and so by doing this process and particularly by
00:46:51.960
identifying the top cognitive distortions there's a list of 10 that i think everyone should you know
00:46:58.020
look into you can gradually start catching your brain making these self-critical mistakes now like
00:47:04.980
i've said it's not always a mistake i think there are times when our beliefs about ourselves are true
00:47:09.700
and that's when we have to make sure to change our behavior but there are also times when yeah we have
00:47:15.500
a totally distorted belief and everyone can see it except for us and cognitive restructuring is the
00:47:20.400
process of getting to where you can see it the way everyone else can yeah and that's what a therapist
00:47:25.040
does they're there to act as that scientist that disinterested person like let's look at the evidence
00:47:30.780
here like you say you're a piece of crap but let's look at are you really a piece of crap and then
00:47:34.860
they're going to help you figure out no actually i'm not a piece of crap i mean i'm i do some things
00:47:39.300
that aren't great sometimes but most time i'm a solid guy but you can also do this on your own
00:47:44.480
there's a lot of great books like you mentioned them that can guide you through these exercises where you
00:47:47.920
can do this with yourself and you know journaling can play a role in that so what do you hope people
00:47:52.160
walk away with after they finish your book what's the big takeaway you think there's a lot but i think
00:47:58.460
the biggest is that ultimately there are a lot of people sort of trying to tell you how you should
00:48:03.920
live your life how someone of your group should be living and ultimately i think it's it's safe to
00:48:10.040
pretty much tune those things out and and start trusting your own compass you've got a compass
00:48:15.120
inside your head that points directly toward the things that you admire most that you value in
00:48:21.360
other people and that's telling you how to live and direct and navigate your life you just need to get
00:48:27.600
better at listening to it and doing those things that will actually take you further in that direction
00:48:32.460
so i think you know getting better at listening to and and actually trusting that voice of admiration
00:48:39.100
you know ultimately well-being can be a lot simpler than i think we make it out to be there's a million
00:48:45.580
little habits people tell you to do to to be optimally happy but ultimately i think the big one
00:48:51.820
comes down to doing the things that earn your own admiration and following those ideals that are
00:48:57.980
inscribed in your own brain wherever they lead so we're taking control of that sociometer in our heads
00:49:04.240
that motivates us to do what the tribe values and really thinking about what we ourselves
00:49:10.720
value and admire and in living in accordance with those values sounds like what ralph waldo emerson
00:49:16.800
yeah yeah there's a lot of a lot of parallels there well ryan this has been a great conversation where
00:49:23.400
can people go to learn more about the book and your work yeah i really enjoyed it too um the best place
00:49:28.600
to go is designingthemind.org becoming if you can put that in the show notes that that will give you
00:49:34.560
the link to get the new book for one but you can also get a couple of my previous books for free sent
00:49:40.740
right to your inbox if you go there and you can also get the psychotech sent to your inbox every
00:49:46.100
saturday so uh yeah fantastic well ryan bush thanks for time it's been a pleasure thanks so much
00:49:52.320
my guest today was ryan bush he's the author of the book become who you are it's available on amazon.com
00:49:57.640
you can find more information about his work at his website designingthemind.org
00:50:01.740
also check out our show notes at aom.is become where you find links to resources and we delve
00:50:06.460
deeper into this topic well that wraps up another edition of the aom podcast make sure to check out
00:50:18.220
our website at artofmanliness.com where you find our podcast archives as well as thousands of articles
00:50:22.260
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00:50:25.700
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00:50:36.640
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