PsycHacks

Episode 146: Emotions are living things

A metaphor I often use with clients is that emotions are living things. Like little creatures, they have their habits, and their likes and dislikes. And like any other living thing, more than anything else, they want to continue to exist. They want to keep living. This is important to understand, because the impulses you feel when you're emotional may better serve the emotion in question than your own best interests. I'll explain more in this episode, using concrete examples.

 

#emotions #selfaware #therapy

Episode 145: The game of small talk

Some people enjoy small talk. I'm not one of them. I like my conversations to be interesting and meaningful. The problem is that you generally need to pass through small talk in order to get there. Over the years of working as a therapist, I've learned many tools to quickly open conversation partners. One of them is treating small talk like a game. In this episode, I'll discuss similarities between the game of small talk and the popular word game, Wordle.

 

#wordle #communication #smalltalk

Episode 144: The fundamental game of human relationships

In a previous episode, I defined a game as anything with rules and a goal. If this is true, then human relationships are definitely a game. In this episode, I will discuss the fundamental game of human relationships: the game that exists beneath all negotiated interactions. It's called the game of please-no. I'll briefly discuss the rules of the game, and some of the general strategies that people have developed to achieve their goals.

 

#game #relationships #negotiation

Episode 143: Life and the concept of the game

In this episode, I introduce the concept of the game as a framework for understanding reality. I define a game as anything with rules and a goal. Life is a series of nested games, and all of us are playing many games simultaneously. A large part of the share of human suffering on this planet derives from the fact that at any moment we are forced to choose which of several games we want to win and which of several games we are willing to lose. I illustrate this with a concrete example.

 

#game #life #relationships

Episode 142: Here’s a simple anxiety reduction technique

Most of us use the words "need" and "want" interchangeably. However, there are important psychological differences between the two concepts that differentially impact our emotional experience. Since "need" is associated with survival, it carries with it the threat of extinction. As a result, "need" can transform a mundane task into a life-or-death struggle. On the other hand, "want" is associated with growth and life. If you suffer from generalized anxiety, you may want to examine your uses of these two concepts.

 

#need #want #anxiety

Episode 141: Beware of attraction proxies

An attraction proxy is anything a person uses to secure love, sex, or commitment by indirect means. A common example of this is a man who believes that women will be more attracted to him if he were rich. In this case, the man is using money as an attraction proxy. While access to resources increases attractiveness in general, it is neither necessary nor sufficient to do so. The only reliable way of increasing attraction is mastering the game of attraction and the art of seduction.

 

#attraction #money #seduction

Episode 140: You do not need to justify your life

Many folks I talk to experience existential uncertainty. Not only are they unsure as to why they exist, they often doubt whether they deserve to exist at all. In this episode, I extend the Disneyland metaphor used in a previous talk ("The reason why you exist") in order to argue that your existence is already justified by virtue of the very fact of that existence. It's very hard to sneak into Disneyland; it's even harder to sneak into being. So if you're in the park, you must have a ticket.

 

#Disneyland #justified #spirituality

Episode 139: Applied stoicism - Good and bad

This is the first in a series of short talks on applied stoicism, which is what I call my adaptation of stoic philosophy for the practice of clinical psychology. In this episode, I'll discuss the egocentric nature of the concepts of "good" and "bad." While this may slaughter a sacred cow, it also leaves open the possibility of always receiving the good and never experiencing the bad. And who wouldn't want to know how to do this?

 

#stoicism #good #mastery

Episode 138: The reason why you exist

"Why am I here? And what should I do with my life? What's the point of all of this?" One way or another, we all have to grapple with these existential questions. These existential questions lie at the heart of the human experience. While I can't offer definitive answers, in this episode I offer one possible way to approach the meaning of life, namely: the purpose of life is to experience life. In this way, life is like Disneyland. It serves no other purpose than to allow people the opportunity to experience itself. There is no "right" or "wrong" way to do it. You get your day in the park, and then you go home with your memories.

 

#Disneyland #existentialism #why

Episode 137: We learn about ourselves in relationships

There's a notion of identity that assumes that -- deep down -- who we are is a sort of unchanging, crystalline entity. But I think this idea is betrayed in the practice of our everyday lives. Our experience of self changes significantly, based on where we are, who we're with, and what we're doing. This is because relationships "pull" latent aspects of self out of our personality structures that may otherwise have remained long dormant. I'll discuss more in this episode.

 

#relationships #identity #selfdevelopment