- One of the most common questions I've received over the years is on YouTube in particular, is how to stop intrusive voices. And occasionally when people ask these questions, they'll highlight that some parent or an ex or something will kind of a judge voice in there. And they don't know if it's their voice or the other person's voice, but it's in their head and it's very unpleasant.

Presumably this circles back to childhood traumas or other forms of traumas, but irrespective of the origins, are there any tools specifically to deal with intrusive thoughts and thought patterns, maybe even OCD like thought patterns? - So a couple of responses to that. So first of all, I think step one is recognizing that if you are hearing another voice, like if you can hear your dad's voice in your head, it's not your dad who is in your head, that is a simulation that you are engaging in that your brain is capable of producing.

And so that I think can be informative for people who are curious about these inner worlds. - I'm not referring to auditory hallucinations. I'm referring to the language of somebody, maybe not in that person's voice, but they're hearing like, maybe not you're a bad person, but like you're never good.

You're not good enough. Like it's not enough, or just feeling like, so they can't enjoy the good things in life because of these intrusive negative voices. - Here's something that I hope listeners and viewers will find exceptionally liberating, as I have found liberating from just knowing the science. So actually I talk about these intrusive thoughts in "Shift." They are incredibly normative.

And so there's research which looks at like, how frequently have you experienced an intrusive thought over the past week or a month or two months? The proportion of people who experience these dark thoughts is exceptionally high. I don't remember the exact percentage, but it is in my book and it is like near ceiling.

I will do an exercise with my classes, my undergraduate classes, where I will ask them to anonymously describe whether they've experienced like a dark thought over the past week. Almost all of them are capable of generating them. And some of these thoughts are really, really dark. I will often experience a very dark intrusive thought when I'm exercising at the gym.

You're looking at me with curiosity and a bit of concern right now. - No, I'm not concerned, I'm just fascinated. You know, I have ideas about why this may be, but I'm just fascinated. I don't know that I've had dark thoughts in the gym, but it's interesting. - Here's my dark thought.

Watch out if you see me in the gym from here on. So if I'm carrying like a heavy dumbbell from a bench to a rack, I will sometimes have a thought of dropping it on the face of another person on a mat. - Oh my goodness. - It's terribly dark.

It's a terrible, terrible thought. So why am I experiencing that? It is most likely the brain's simulating worst case scenarios to prevent me from doing it. Of course, I don't want to drop a dumbbell on someone I never have. And so that's one explanation for why this is so normative.

It's your brain's way of constantly, there's a theory that we're constantly simulating all sorts of possibilities for what could happen. And most of these simulations, the probability of them coming to fruition are exceptionally low, infinitesimally small. But on occasion, some of the wacky ones do escape into awareness. And that's when we get the dark thought about harming someone or doing something illegal in a pretty aggressive, you know, egregious way, or in my case, dropping the dumbbell on, you know, the person stretching on their face.

And so here's what I find liberating. Me understanding that this is just how my brain works. Well, that doesn't mean now that I'm something wrong with me as a human being, right? That I'm morally corrupt in any way. My brain's gonna sometimes produce these kinds of dark thoughts. I'm not gonna act on them.

And as long as I'm not acting on them, it's all good. It's almost like when people learn about the physiological response to anxiety, before they know what is happening, that can often be an incredibly distressing experience. Like all of a sudden your stomach is churning, your palms are sweating.

But in research, which shows like if you, if you communicate to people, "Hey, this is just your body preparing yourselves to adaptively respond to this uncertain circumstance you face." All of a sudden you are totally flipping the frame. And now this is, I'm a Lamborghini, right? I am rising to the occasion.

My body's doing what it should be doing to allow me to excel here. That's the kind of flip that I think understanding the frequency and origins of intrusive thoughts can have for folks. So step one is just recognizing if you experience intrusive thoughts at times, again, welcome to the human condition.

It's a little blip in how our brain operates. But a lot of these tools have also been shown to be useful for nipping repetitive thinking in the bud. So when you're curtailing chatter, you are also curtailing the likelihood of perseverating. The reason why we often perseverate on problems we're experiencing is we are, we're highly motivated to make sense of these circumstances so we can move on with our lives.

And our brain, this wonderful problem-solving organ that we possess, it just keeps churning until we've solved that problem. And that's surfacing all sorts of related thoughts here and there until you get there. And so when you solve the problem, those thoughts tend to subside too. - I have two points, both of which are essentially questions.

I think it's relatively common for people when they go to a bridge or a dam or something like something very high with the potential for essentially a fatal fall, were they to jump off, to have the thought, what keeps me from jumping off when in fact they absolutely don't want to jump off.

And it seems like it's another example of like, it's registering the danger and the severity of the consequences. It also, I realize helps us understand the level of risk. - That's right. - You know, I think Alex Honnold, who famously did "Free Solo" to El Cap, a remarkable movie, by the way, just along the lines of what we're talking about, the way the movie is constructed, and I think Jimmy Chin and colleagues who made that movie did such an incredible job, not just with the cinematography, but you know he survives from the very beginning of the movie, and yet it's terrifying to watch the whole thing.

And it's kind of a hour, 45 minute expedition of exactly what we're talking about. In that movie, as I recall, Alex spells out the assessment of risk and consequence, right, you know, level of risk, level of consequence, and how those are key parameters to evaluate. And he's obviously done that for himself and he succeeded.

And I hope he never does it again, only because he seems like a really delightful person when it'd be nice to keep him around. And he's doing other important work now. But the point being that I think it's a very natural thing to evaluate risk and consequence in a way that quote unquote feels dark, but it's actually highly adaptive through the lens that we're talking about it.

So that's one point. - Well, just to that point, if I can interject. So just to normalize this further for folks, so my family is very special to me as it is to most people. When my first daughter was born, we used to live in this house that had this, on the second floor, there was a, I don't know if you'd describe it as an overpass, but it was open to the floor beneath.

And I remember having these intrusive thoughts of at night when we'd have to bring my daughter into the bedroom to feed her or change her diaper, whatever, I would have these thoughts of carrying her and then dropping her over into the, you know, and splat, like not pleasant thoughts to experience in the middle of the night.

It speaks to this point that you are raising that was likely my mind's way of homing in on a really, really important issue in my life that I wanna make sure never, ever, ever happens. It is not an indication that I'm morally corrupt or incredibly dark person. It's how my brain is operating, so.

- Yeah, you're assessing risk and consequence in an adaptive way. Yeah, it's fascinating to think about. The second comment slash question that I'd love your thoughts on is, you know, I had this bulldog, I talk about him all the time, this bulldog Mastiff, and he had one default behavior that if he couldn't engage in it, would create anxiety in him.

And that was, he liked to chew, right? He liked to gnaw on things. As a puppy, he actually would teeth on bricks in the backyard. I was like, oh my goodness, it looks so painful to me. And sometimes he'd bite through a lip. You know, the bulldog part of their phenotype is that a lot of the pain receptors have been bred out of their face.

And so they, and I just think, oh my goodness, I go out there and I, you know, I was like distraught at how much pain he must be causing himself. It was obviously less than I perceived. But nonetheless, this gnawing behavior was what was, you could just see it.

It gave him such pleasure, right? You give him something to chew on, and it just, you could just see the anxiety like dissolve out of him. I've known a number of people that are fairly high intensity in terms of, they speak fast, high density of thought, information, et cetera, at least outwardly, who claim that they have got sort of a high RPM internally.

And I vary, and depending on time of day and time of year on this, but I'd place myself more or less into that category. Engaging in an activity that harnesses my full attention, perhaps we could call it flow, but nonetheless, engaging in an activity that harnesses my full attention, feels to me so unbelievably satisfying.

- Yeah. - So unbelievably satisfying. I think it's for two reasons. One is the benefits of doing those activities, studying, learning, podcasting, doing research, connecting with someone in a really directed way, like getting into that tunnel with them, as we're doing now, there's a positive feature. And then there's also the removal of a negative, like that those RPM are not humming in the background.

And I think for a lot of people, like ultra runners, and I know a lot of former addicts that start running marathons and get sober and stay sober. - Yeah. - It's remarkable how physical activity or cognitive activity can kind of take us into that plane of focus that both makes us productive, makes us fitter, but also relieves this inner voice.

It kind of like lets the tension out the same way that I observed Costello letting the tension out through gnawing on these bricks or rawhides or whatever it was. And so my question is, is there, as I'm assuming, a relationship between the physical and the mental? Do we basically have a certain amount of energy in us and it varies between people and we need to harness and/or adjust that level of energy and to do that in ways that hopefully make us a living or bring our social relationships more closely together?

- Well, it certainly plays out in physical context as you're describing, but it also, as you alluded to, plays out in cognitive contexts. When there is this match, this sweet spot between the demands, like you're in a situation that is actually challenging, either physically or cognitively, and the resources that you bring to that situation perfectly match the demands.

So it's a taxing situation, but you are able to engage with it completely. That is the formula for getting, stuck is the wrong word, for getting immersed in these kinds of flow states, which are, for many people, the goal that they have in their lives, both recreationally and professionally.

And so you, as someone who is ideally getting into these flow states with your guests, I would hope and imagine, and that's always the aspiration, that must feel really good. I mean, you talk for a long time with people. Does it feel like a long time when you're having those conversations?

- No, time perception completely changes. When I do this for two or three hours a week, and then when we do a solo episode, sometimes the recording's longest ever yet is 11 hours edited down. But those can be anywhere from 90 minutes to four hours, or a live event.

And I couldn't tell you. It just seems like time just passes. Time dissolves away. - And when, that is because you are so absorbed in the moment and meeting the challenges of that situation that all of your attention is commanded to that point in time, that moment. And that doesn't leave a whole lot of room for all of the chatter to percolate in the background.

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