(upbeat music) - All right, Jesse, I think we have time for one more call because I'm running late today, but let's get one more call in. Who do we have here? - All right, sounds good. We got a question, a call about living a deep life. - There we go.

- Hi Cal, this is Karan. And I took a break from my 33 jobs to retreat to a cabin in the woods and think about who am I? What is identity and how is it crafted? And I came up with this heuristic that I would love your thoughts on.

And I have a question that I put a lot of thought and research into. First part of this heuristic that I came up with is identity. Who am I and how do I live a deep life? And I go very descriptive into that area. Next is philosophy. Digital minimalism helps back up that identity.

Then we have framework. We use digital minimalism as that framework for living a deep life, but we also have the atomic habits by James Clear. And I use that as part of the framework category. After that we have behavioral techniques and this is like where like the nitty gritty.

I leave my phone at home and I go for a walk. I enjoy solitude. And then we have outcomes, which is really important because we got to know how do these behaviors, what outcomes do they have? I back on how my anxiety goes down. Now I'm reading Brad Stolberg's book on this idea of how I wanted to keep improving and this idea of always trying to optimize everything.

And this is where my question comes in. 'Cause the last part of my heuristic is feedback. I wanna make sure I do better at living the deep life. But this compound 1% interest that you and James talk about and that this idea that Brad talks about, it can be like, how do I, if I keep trying to optimize living a deep life, how do I get rid of this background of anxiety?

- Well, Karan, I appreciate the thought you put into this. And let me just preface my response by saying just the fact that you were putting this much intentional thought into how you want to structure your life is 80% of the battle. Most people don't do that. Most people go from one distraction or moment of chemical pleasure to another and hope to string along enough of those to get later on in life.

It's not the way to do it. You need a plan, you need to be intentional. The second thing I'm gonna preface it is these type of plans evolve over time and that's great. The goal is not to figure out the one true plan that's absolutely optimal and then you have it all figured out, then you execute it.

You don't want paralysis by analysis here. You come up with something, you live with it, check in twice a year, checking at your birthday to make changes. So you wanna make sure that you're spending a lot of time living life and not just thinking about how you're gonna live life.

So those are some prefaces. All right, now let me start with your last point about beating back the background anxiety so that you can live a deep life. These are unrelated. Anxiety will do what anxiety does. You will feel anxiety sometimes, other times you won't. There will be periods where it's heavier, there'll be periods where it is not heavier.

Your goal is not to make that go away. Your goal is to live a deep life even though you live in a world in which you sometimes feel the physical symptoms of anxiety. Constriction of the chest, a little bit difficulty of breathing. There's very specific physical symptoms. That comes and goes.

Great, what's next? How do I still build a deep life? I don't want you to think about banishing that which you cannot fully control from your life as a precondition for it being good, for it being enjoyable. I'm gonna recommend the book here. So there are, I don't know how much you know about modern psychotherapy, but there's, roughly speaking, people think about there being three waves of modern psychotherapy.

You have the first wave where you have talk therapy, which sort of came originally out of Freudian modalities. Let's talk things through and try to understand the source of issues. Largely, this was non-evidence-based therapy modalities. Then the second wave really is like cognitive behavioral therapy. And this was one of the first major approaches to issues like anxiety in which they were using studies and evidence and saying this type of thing worked.

In the core book, the canonical public-facing book in second wave psychotherapy is feeling good. And I believe this came out, so the '70s or '80s, and it introduced cognitive behavioral therapy to a larger group. Third wave psychotherapies is built more around what is sometimes called acceptance commitment therapy or ACT, A-C-T.

There's some other things in there, but it pulls more from some Eastern philosophies as well. This is where I wanna turn your attention, and I wanna turn your attention to a book that popularizes ACT, and that is the book, I believe it is called The Happiness Trap. Actually, Jesse, can you look that up and tell me what the author's name is?

I wanna make sure I got that name right. But it's a book that introduces acceptance commitment therapy to a broader audience. And this is a evidence-based methodology. It's something that's studied pretty well, and I like it a lot. I think it's what I wanna preach to you right now.

Because at the core, I can tell you what's at the core of acceptance, if you'll excuse this digression into psychotherapy, but at the core of this is this notion that, oh, we have a name here? Yeah, Russ Harris, that's right. And it is The Happiness Trap, Jesse, did I get that right?

- Yep. - That's right. So at the core of acceptance commitment therapy is they look back at cognitive behavioral therapy, and cognitive behavioral therapy directly addresses ruminations. Ruminations, these insistent, hard-to-control conversations you have with yourself in your head are at the core of both major anxiety and depressive disorders.

Because if you're obsessively worried about, so you have these talks, these conversations in your head about bad things that could happen, it's anxiety. And if you have these hard-to-control, consistent voices, conversations in your head about what you've done that's bad and why you suck, that's the foundation for depression.

So it's the same thing as the voices. And cognitive behavioral therapy, again, if you'll excuse the lecture here, focused on directly confronting ruminations. And so you would say, wait a second, this is the thing I keep talking about. Let me actually point out the ways in which that thinking is distorted, because often in anxiety and in depression is very distorted thinking.

There's names for the distortion. This is black and white thinking. This is predicting the future. And you call it out and you push back at it and say, this is the problem with this rumination. And over time, that can actually diminish the power of that rumination to keep cycling faster and faster.

And this can be quite effective for a lot of things. In fact, I used this quite successfully, if you want a personal story, when I was first having bad insomnia problems early in grad school. And there's a whole backstory to that, but basically there's very little I get anxious about in my life, even as I do pretty ambitious, big things that should be scary.

And my theory has always been, all these things I'm doing that should be really anxious, anxiety producing, all that anxiety just got funneled into this random weird thing, which was I got very anxious about sleep and I felt physical anxiety every single day. I was sleeping, but the anxiety about not sleeping was every single day.

And I read "Feeling Good." I read the book about cognitive behavioral therapy. And this was a case where that worked really well, because the ruminations that were creating this anxiety about not sleeping were disordered. They were clearly exaggerating. And I could call out the distortions. And I had a system where I said twice a day, in the morning and in the evening, I'm gonna address these thoughts and point out the distortions, but not in between.

And in between, my mind's like, let's think about sleep and why we're worried. I would say, I thought about this, went through it in the morning and wasn't that impressed, and I'll do it again in the evening. So just wait till then, and then we'll get back to it in the evening.

And that actually worked. And the day-to-day anxiety, and for this particular anxiety, it took a long time, but it went away, it was very effective. ACT came along and said, there's certain things for which that doesn't work. Because what if the thing that you're anxious about, what if the story there is accurate?

What if it's not distorted? And the key thing that really, the key thing that led to the divergence of ACT, my understanding of ACT from cognitive behavioral therapy, were panic attacks. So even with panic attacks, you get a rising sense of panic, leads to a place where you kind of tip over an edge and have your heart goes, it feels like a heart attack, you can become faint, and it could be like a really just disturbing public thing.

And what the ACT people pointed out was, that's not a, if you're anxious about that happening, you're gonna go on stage, you're anxious about that happening, it's not a distorted thought. Like it really could happen. And maybe this has been happening to you quite a bit. So you can't look at yourself and convince yourself, oh, it's just distorted, of course you're not gonna have a panic attack.

I just had three, I very well could. So cognitive behavioral therapy didn't work as well for panic attacks. And so acceptance commitment therapy was about, okay, you're not trying to challenge the thought, you make space for the thought, but instead of getting into it, like let's really get into it, you say, despite that, I'm gonna go commit to doing something that's value-driven.

Because what matters is living true to your values. Like that's ultimately what matters, I'm gonna commit to do that, even though something bad could happen. And ACT is all about, and you'll read this in "The Happiness Trap", you're able to separate from the feeling of anxiety. It's there, it's the Eastern part of it.

But it's just a sensation, it's just physical. Great, I'm feeling that, it's like my knee hurts. Great, what's next? And you learn to separate from the part of your mind that wants to tell the stories. We gotta think about this, but what if there's a panic attack? And what if this happens?

And what if this or that happens? And you say, I see that story there, and I'm not mad at that part of my mind, and it's like a character and I give it a name, and maybe this is the patron of panic attacks. And I'm not mad at that person, that character in my mind, but I'm not gonna get into it with them.

What I'm gonna do is this thing right here, because it's important to me, and I wanna live true to my values, regardless of what happens. And so you go do it anyways. And so when they would deal with people with severe anxiety, they'd say, you go to the party anyways, and you give the talk anyways, and you do whatever.

And I like that. And I would say this is a very long way around the saying, the deep life is about living in a value-driven way, despite everything else that happens. Not about creating a life that these specific good things happen and there is no bad. That's called the fantasy life.

That's not a life that you're gonna achieve. No one achieves that life. We all have our issues. I had to deal with the anxiety with the sleep thing. I don't have, I have not classic panic attacks, but I've gone through, I have weird stuff happens to me I have whatever, autonomic nervous system, panic attack style reactions.

I've had this all the time. Faint, I'll have like a severe sort of, I'll get lightheaded and like my whole body will break out in sweat. Like, look, man, I've been through all this stuff. And you wanna talk about high stakes. How about like, okay, you're about to go on air on this network, or you're on stage in front of like a huge number of people, or you're here sitting next to the Dean.

And so I've gone, so we all have this stuff we go through. And because the point is, our goal is not to avoid bad things from happening, avoid bad sensations and have only good things happen to us. The goal is to live deeply, to live true to your values despite it, it's the ACT mindset.

It's the mindset that Russ Harris talks about in "The Happiness Trap". So that's the piece I really, Karan, wanted the focus on here. Is focus on what you can control in building this good life. The stuff you can't control will come and go. It'll do what it does. Whatever, and you can't, a lot of that you can't control.

Be happy when it's, hey, I'm not feeling this thing I don't like, great, I'm happy. But when it's there, don't be devastated. Be like, crap, but I'm still doing this thing I really find important. So I think that's good. Now onto your framework. I mean, look, I nerd out on this stuff all the time.

So yes, I like what you're doing here. You're building out a system of different layers. You're thinking things through. I think of what you're doing as called a personal operating system that has these different stack layers that meet together. My only word of warning would be, make sure that the fiddling of the knobs doesn't take over the actual living.

In the end, you actually, life is hard and complicated and some days you're anxious and some days you get sick and you're out of commission for two weeks and you can't follow your system. And you wanna make sure that in the end, you're present and have gratitude and you're doing interesting things and enjoying good moments and that you're not spending all your time thinking about your system.

But I'm glad you're thinking about it. I like your heuristics, try them. If they don't work, change them. Feel free to simplify them if you feel stressed by just the complexity of your system. I think that's all fine. But let's go back to this original point is the goal of the deep life here is not to avoid the bad.

It is to live good even when the inevitable bad comes and goes. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)