The Power of Family Stories

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. Many years ago, when I was a child, my mother told me a family story. It had to do with her brother, my uncle. He was an extremely creative man with varied interests and books and music and art. He could also be a little, how shall I put this? Disorganized. My uncle was the kind of person who was always ready to reminisce and he was an amazing storyteller. He could spend the tiniest events into funny stories that had you laughing until you cried. Anyway, the story my mother told me had to do with my uncle's wedding day. On his way to the wedding venue, my uncle suddenly remembered he had forgotten to invite a dear friend and fellow storyteller. His barber. So he took a detour and went to the barber shop to make sure his friend came to the wedding. When he got to the shop, the barber was busy with his customers and asked my uncle to wait while he finished. My uncle happily settled down and he and the barber traded funny stories as the scissors went snip-snip. All this time, of course, the guests at the wedding and the prospective bride were getting increasingly alarmed. Had something happened to the groom, had he gotten cold feet, was the marriage called off? When my uncle finally showed up, his barber triumphantly in tow. He had no idea why everyone was upset. I've always loved that story because it perfectly captured my uncle's attitude toward life. Live in the moment, be present. Deadlines and appointments can wait. This week on Hidden Brain, we explore the world of family stories, how these stories shape who we become, and the fascinating signs that demonstrates why telling certain kinds of stories can make us happier, healthier, and better people. Support for Hidden Brain comes from hotels.com. Make your next trip work for you. Hotels.com's new Savioway feature lets you choose between instant savings now or banking rewards for later. It's a flexible rewards program that puts you in control with no confusing math or blackout dates. Book now at hotels.com. Savioway is available to loyalty members in the US and UK on hotels with member prices. Other terms apply. See site for details. Cultures around the world have occasions that are designed for people to gather, chat, and reminisce. This can happen on birthdays, on anniversaries, and at funerals. Family members remind each other about the ties that bind them together. Disputes break out over half-remembered events from decades ago. At Emory University, psychologists Robin Fiveush studies the psychological effects these stories can have on our lives. Robin Fiveush, welcome to Hidden Brain. Robin, when you were very young, your family was struck by two terrible tragedies more or less simultaneously. It changed the course of your life. Can you tell me what happened? Well, my father died when I was quite young and my mother was in a very bad car accident. She went through the passenger side window with the windshield, was thrown out of the car, and she was actually in a coma for six weeks. So she was in a coma when my father died. Oh my God. And she had a lot of bodily fractures, as you might imagine. She was in a body cast, but she also had a lot of cognitive damage and was essentially in and out of hospitals for a number of years. So my grandparents raised me and my sister for most of my childhood. And during that time, we spent, frankly, quite a lot of time in hospital waiting rooms and not spending time doing many of the typical activities of childhood. If I could ask you what happened to your dad, how did he come to pass away at an early age? He died of cancer. I see. And how old were you at the time, Robin? I was three years old. Oh, so you were very young. You probably had very few memories of your dad. You know, it's interesting. It's one of the things that actually got me interested in studying memory is I was very young. And most people can't remember things that happened before they were about three or three and a half. That's a very strong research finding. When you ask adults to recall their earliest childhood memories, they almost never remember anything that happened before they were three. But I have this unfortunate marker in my childhood. I know if I remember my father, it had to be something that happened before I was three. And I actually have two memories of my father. They are very strong images and sense perceptions of being with him. Can you tell me what those two memories are? One is actually we were visiting caverns. Underground caverns in upstate New York. I believe they're called house caverns. My sister is about three years older than me. My mother, my father, and I was on my father's shoulders. And I remember the feeling of being on his shoulders. And then suddenly things going very dark. Because they turned off all the lights in the cave. And feeling safe. And that's it. That's the whole memory. And you felt safe, of course, because you were sitting on your father's shoulder. I was sitting on his shoulders. Yeah. And of course, obviously, that's a super meaningful memory to me because I have so little of my father, so little of that security of having my father there to protect me and support me. The other memory is much more mundane. I remember him giving me a bath. The twin tragedies of her father's death and her mother's injuries devastated the family. Of course, Robin was too young to fully understand what was happening. I'm sure it was devastating. You know, I was three. So my experience was just my life was yanked out. But I didn't have a full cognitive understanding of the context and what was going on. And so my memories from that period are very fragmentary and really not very coherent. In the way and frankly, my family, their way of dealing with it was just never to talk about it. I mean, I can imagine at one level, this must have been so painful and even recollecting these events must have been so painful. And perhaps they were worried that you were very small and talking to you about something that was painful might have hurt you. So I can imagine that those might have been the impulses that caused people to say, let's not talk about it. I think that is part of it and I want to come back to that. I think for my family, that was definitely part of it. The other part of it was just frankly my grandmother's personality. So she went through a lot of hard times and her way of dealing with it with all of it was, let's just don't revisit that. We just don't go back there. It's not worth revisiting. Quite frankly, when I would ask her questions about her past, my past, my family's past, the answer was always, why do you need to know that? It's over. It's past. In time, Robin would come to study the role that family stories play in the psychological well-being of both children and their caregivers. But that was much later. As a child, Robin wasn't comparing what happened in her family to what happened in other families. I didn't really notice it until I didn't notice it until I met my first husband's family. I started to spend a lot of time with them and they were a huge family, a family story telling family. They told stories like many, many families all the time, but they had all the kinds of family stories. They had the everyday, tell me about your day-to-day, what happened, sharing their home. Remember, this is like when we went to the beach last summer and they had the big iconic stories. Every Thanksgiving, every Thanksgiving, the story about how one of the uncles crashed the car through the trees when he was a teenager had to get told. And it had to get told the same way with the same punchlines every year. And I started to realize how important that was to keep that family cemented as a happy, healthy family. Yeah. Yes, it's not the information in that uncle car crash story that was important because everybody knew the facts already. Everybody knew every detail of this story. If you told it the wrong way, everybody would correct you. And what went through your heart when you saw that? I mean, you must have been happy to be part of this family that had this rich family lore. But was there a part of you that sort of said that noticed that you didn't have that? I mean, is that how you, was that made aware to you? I think it was obvious. I mean, it was such a contrast that it was so different than the way my family interacted. As Robin became a researcher, she was to learn that family stories are not just family stories. They are much more than dinner table conversation or fodder for Thanksgiving table punchlines. Family stories turn out to play a crucial role in the mental health of the people who tell the stories and the mental health of the people who listen to the stories. They can serve as anchors for identity and self-esteem. Told right, they can change the direction of our lives. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. Robin Fiverrish is a psychologist at Emory University who studies the way parents and children communicate. Early on in her career, she spent extended amounts of time with families listening to how parents talked with children. I was interested in how families, particularly mothers, talked with their three, four, five-year-old children about the events of the child's life. So we did a lot of work where we would visit families in their homes and hang out with them. And then we would explicitly ask mothers to sit down with their child and talk about some things that have happened. Some special occurrences. We gave them very few instructions and we looked at how the past got reconstructed. And we discovered that this was really an important part of children learning how to narrate their own past. And also that it actually helped children increase their ability to remember the past. We found that different mothers do this in different ways. And it has a lot of consequences not only for how children remember things, but how they feel about themselves. So mothers and children who are more elaborate and detailed in these kinds of early memory conversations have children who have higher self esteem, even very early in development. They also have higher emotional understanding because so many of the events that we talk about are emotional. So I was talking with my colleague, Marshall Duke, talking about the power of these early conversations. And how important it was for children to build up their own narrative story, the story of who they are. Marshall is a clinical psychologist. And he said, yeah, that's totally important. But I bet that what's equally important is how families talk about the family past, the family history. Coming from the family idea, I was like, I don't think that matters as much. I really think that that's not as important. So we had this conversation and we were part of a big funded research program. We had the the means to do this. We said, let's use our resources to figure this out. So that's when we decided to just tape record families talking over the dinner table to see what they talk about. So we tape recorded these families and we simply asked them, you know, just tape record a few dinner time conversations. We were not there. We just, this is all technology, was literally a physical tape recorder, one of those cassette recorders. Families tell stories all the time. Some reference to a past event occurs every five minutes in a typical Tuesday night spaghetti dinner. Wow. And we know from other research that 40% of all human conversation is referring to past experiences. So that's what human beings do. We talk about what happened to us. And we ask other people what happened to them. We tell stories, we listen to stories all the time. Most of the stories, and we're talking about, you know, a 35, 40 minute dinner time conversation, most of the stories are what are called today-eye stories. So most of these table conversations were four, five people. So you're coming back together at the end of the day and you want to weave yourself back together as a family. So a lot of it is, tell me about your day, what happened. And, you know, we got what we expected. How was your math test? Did, you know, did you make up with Jenny after your fight yesterday? But what also surprised us is that the parents also talked about their day with their children. They talked about what happened at work or what happened in their social life. So they're starting to open up the world for their teenagers. This is what an adult world looks like. This is the world you're going to be developing into. It's not just your perspective on the world. I'm telling you stories about my world. So it's really opening the world up for them. So that's a lot of it. But then about a third of the stories are these family stories where the family is talking about something is said and somebody says, and it's just as frequently the child as the parent, that's like when we went to grandma's last Thanksgiving and then they start talking about that. Or that's like when we went to see jaws and embedded in those conversations, you get family history where parents will start talking about when they were children or their grandparents lives. And then it turns out the families that told more of these everyday stories were in fact doing better. But what really predicted good functioning both for the family and for the child were the family stories. So in other words, can you talk a little bit about that when you say that the fact that children were doing better, they had better well-being. How so? So families that tell more stories show more trust and community within the family. Then specific to the child, children within families that tell more of these stories, and particularly tell them in a certain way and I do want to come back to that, have higher self-esteem. They have higher academic competence, they're doing better in school. They have higher social competence. They are more socially skilled. And in later research, because of course we follow it up on this first study with lots and lots of research. As they get older and you can start to assess more mature aspects of well-being, like a sense of agency, a sense of maturity, a sense of meaning and purpose in life, all of that is higher for children and adolescents and young adults who know more of these family stories. So as you were probing the relationship between these family stories and well-being, including long-term well-being, you and a colleague created an instrument called the Do You Know Scale? What is this tool do Robin and what are some of the kinds of questions you have on it? The Do You Know Scale is a 20 item yes, no questionnaire that Marshall Duke and I developed. Simply to assess has a very, very rough index the extent to which families talk about their shared and family history. We ask adolescents and young adults, do you know where your parents met? Do you know where your mother went to school? Do you know what sports your father played in high school? Do you know where your grandmother grew up? Do you know what school your grandmother went to? Do you know how your grandparents met? So we're not getting stories. We're just getting yes, no. But in order to answer yes to a question like that, we're making the assumption you must have been told these stories. And it turns out it's a pretty good assessment of it in two ways. One, this very simple 20 questions yes, no. It's a good index. It relates to self-esteem, agency, meaning and purpose in life, emotional competence. So there's something that this is tapping into that's meaningful. There was one question on the Do You Know Scale that I found very striking. Do you know about a relative whose face froze in a grumpy position because he or she did not smile enough? What was the point of asking that question Rob? That was Marshall and I are both of Jewish heritage. And this I think is something that is culturally Jewish. We both grew up with caregivers, parents or grandparents who would say to us when we would cry or scale, be careful your aunt Linda cried all the time in our face frozen that position. And we both had that story. So when we were thinking about family stories, we would just it was kind of an inside joke to be honest. So we ended up just tagging it on to the end of the question air. But we get asked about that question more than any other question. So one of the things that you pointed out and I think is important to underline is that the key here is not just the knowing of stories in an informational sense, but you discovered there was something powerful about the process of family storytelling. Can you talk about this idea Rob and that what happens that the important thing here is not the facts, but in some ways the process by which those facts are arrived at. Absolutely. The key here is storytelling, not just stories. So yes, it's important that we know the stories, but the process of learning those stories, hearing those stories, sharing those stories, constructing those stories together is what really is important in terms of this positive youth outcome. So when telling family stories, you say that adults might be modeling the regulation and modulation of emotion. And in some ways children are learning from this. How so Robin? I think both of them were constructing stories, helping children understand their own experiences or when we're talking with children about our experiences, the way that we talk about our emotions and how we reacted in the moment and how we dealt with that emotional reaction helps children understand appropriate emotional regulation. That's a very abstract sentence. Let me give you a sense of what I mean by that. One of the really important things about reminiscing about the child's own emotional experiences is the child throws a tantrum in the supermarket and that's the worst time to try and sit down and have you know a calm conversation with them. You just want to get out of the situation. But then later when the child calms down, it's important to sit down and say let's talk about what happened. You know why were you so upset and not to say that was bad. You were wrong. But what happened? You know why were you upset? Okay I understand why that upset you but maybe being that upset was not the best way to get what they wanted and to help them figure out how to recognize their emotions and resolve them and regulate them. So another was a story is helping you name the emotion to understand how it came about to understand what options you might have had in the moment. So it's allowing you in some ways to recreate the event in some ways and ask how could you maybe have reacted differently? I could not have said that better. When parents tell stories about their own childhood, they're of course not talking about their child's emotional reaction. But often those stories are told in moments where the kids are struggling with something. So the the parent story becomes well okay let me tell you how high dealt was something like that in my life and the lesson I took from it. Maybe that will help you think about your life. The world views. Stories are little models of the world. You found Robin that the way in which people tell these family stories is really important and you've identified two common styles that parents use when telling family stories. What are these two styles? So some parents and families are very collaborative or collaborative. So I'll give you an example. It's a very simple example. This is actually one of my favorite conversations with a between a mother and her eight-year-old child and they had gone to Kallowey Gardens which is a recreational beautiful garden near here. They'd been on a long bike trip and the child I'll call her Rebecca was riding on the handlebars of the mother's bike and the mother was a bit of a dare devil and Rebecca was a little scared because some mother was kind of going a little wild and her mother is saying you know oh it's so much fun you know Russian down those cobblestones and Rebecca was saying yeah I was you know I was a little scared and the mother they both left so they're not laughing our Becca they're laughing together. The mother says yeah you were a little scared I was maybe I shouldn't have done that and then you know what else do you remember about it and Rebecca said oh I was getting so tired and you know I wanted to be home and the mother like confirms it's like yes it was a long day and you know what we had but they're laughing and they're having a good time and at the end the mother says we have a good time together don't we and Rebecca says yes we do. So they had different perspectives on that event. Rebecca may not have had as much fun as her mother but they kind of come to an agreement that they enjoy being together and that they accept each other for who they are. Yeah and they're constructing the story together even though in fact they don't exactly have the same story. They don't have the same memory. Yeah but they're putting the two memories together in some ways coming up with something that is a collaborative shared memory. Absolutely and we see that even in the larger families when it's a whole family together and this is also really particularly important. I mean obviously it's important to talk about the fun times, the positive events, laughing, creating those bonds but it's also important to talk about the challenging experiences. Like I mentioned having a temper tantrum if you never talk about it the child never learns what to do with that emotion the next time it happens. We asked families to talk about challenging experiences many of them talked about an illness or death death of a grandparent or a beloved family pet and the families that were more collaborative who really shared the emotional experience you know I know that you were really sad about that I was sad too. I remember you know that you you were crying when Susie came over to hug you and that kind of shared emotional resonance really helps us deal with grief and mourning and difficult experiences. There's also a second style of storytelling that you studied Robyn and you call this a repetitive style of storytelling what is this style what does it look like? So rather than being asking open-ended questions you ask close-ended questions did you have fun rather than how did you feel and that there's no opportunity for the child to do more than say yes or no or even saying something like you remember your grandmother's cookies don't you? You know maybe that's not always important to the child maybe she wants to talk about the ornaments that were on the Christmas tree so it's not really giving the child an opportunity to recall their perspective on the event or what they remember and when the child doesn't remember the parent will simply repeat the question you know who who drove down to Florida with us who was in the front seat don't you remember who was in the front seat with us and the child just doesn't remember right so it's almost as if the collaborative collaborative style is their their goals are different their goals are to create a shared story in the moment that creates a resonance and a shared history and helps us to bond and understand each other the more non-aliberative or repetitive parents it's about getting the facts right I remember this is a mother with her four-year-old son who was a dinosaur fanatic and they were talking about going to a natural history museum and she was asking about seeing the T-rex and he was like no there was no T-rex and she was like yes there was there was a T-rex there don't you remember and she goes on and says you know and and then we saw you know the exhibit on this dinosaur and that dinosaur and he's like yeah there was a Brontosaurus and the da da da and he lists them he says but there was no T-rex and she's saying I I know there was a T-rex and then he says no and he names another museum and she says oh that's right but it was almost as if there was a T-rex there so she you know it's not a collaboration of kind of oh maybe there wasn't you know maybe my memory could not be accurate or maybe the way you're remembering it is different or yeah you know there's kind of an assumption that I remember it correctly and you don't and it's my job to make sure you remember it correctly I asked Robin why she thought families with collaborative styles of storytelling function better than families that told stories in order to get the facts right or families that didn't tell stories at all we create our sense of self through our sense of our experiences I am the person I am because I've had these experiences this has made me the person I am today this has set up my beliefs my goals my values particularly in adolescence and young adulthood when we really all of us go through a period of identity questioning right as children we don't question our families values their their religious values their community values their moral values but then we get to an age where we have more resources we're moving out into the world we have a greater set of friends and contacts we can think about things more abstractly we start to go through what Eric Erickson called the identity crisis who am I who do I want to be you know just because my parents go to church do I want to go to church just because my parents vote for this political party is that my political party many many adolescents and young adults end up in the same place as their parents but we all go through that process of exploration and questioning and that's when we really start to put together what's called a life story or a life narrative how did I become the person I am and who do I want to be in doing that we need material we certainly have our own experiences but what we've discovered is that adolescents and young adults really draw from their parents stories the stories their parents tell them about their childhoods and their family history to figure out what their own personal experiences mean and how to make sense of it it's how they draw their life lessons and moral stances an interesting finding from your research Robin is that knowing family stories appears to help people be more resilient in the face of adversity and you see this might be because hearing other people's struggles provides us with something that you call vicarious memory what is vicarious memory about carious memory is a memory that you have of something that happened to somebody else so I can tell you for example I can tell you a story that happened to my husband when he was a child I wasn't there I didn't know him when he was a child but he's told me that story I know that story and so I have a vicarious memory of it that's what these intergenerational narratives are most of our knowledge of the world is vicarious and these vicarious memories essentially provide models or views of how the world works so when we have these stories of our parents and our family they become ways of understanding both how the world works and how we fit into that world one of your studies looked at how children coped following the 9-11 attacks with specific attention to the role of the family stories being told tell me about that study and what you found what we discovered is that the families who had been able to talk more openly and in more collaborative ways about difficult and challenging experiences pre-9-11 at kids post-9-11 who were showing better aspects of well-being they were showing fewer behavior problems fewer indexes of depression less anxiety fewer symptoms like anger problems substance abuse so there was something about being in a collaborative storytelling family that buffered them against some of the anxiety that we all experienced after 9-11 there was another study conducted by the psychologist Adam Brown of the new school that looked at how familiarity with family stories affects military veterans what what did he find Robin so as you might imagine military veterans who have seen combat come home and it's very very difficult for them to talk about their experiences for multiple reasons one they themselves are traumatized they don't want to traumatize their listeners and frankly their listeners don't always encourage wanting to hear about the awful things that had to happen we saw this with World War 2 vets Holocaust survivors it's a general pattern of people who have experienced trauma we see it with refugee families but the veterans who came home having experienced traumatic combat in the rock in Afghanistan the ones who knew more of their family history showed higher levels of adjustment and well-being than those who did not and again it's some suggestion that having that as a buffer is helpful and I think it's because that tells you we're a family that perseveres we've been through hard times we've gotten through them we stay together we get through it in one of the stories that you elicited from one of your research participants a 14-year-old named Mary she told you about a story involving her grandfather and her father tell me that story Robin this was an African-American family and it shows how family stories can situate us not only in a family history but in world history so this is a story about the civil rights movement and about this family's role in the civil rights movement so Mary told us this story that her father when he was in a stroller was taken to a civil rights rally where MLK spoke in Atlanta by his I think it was by his grandparents and he still remembers it even though he was so young he was an astruller and according to the story it really changed his perception of the world he felt validated and it was the awakening of his political consciousness now is that possible probably not if he was an astruller but it's still a great story and Mary herself used that story to talk about her own interest and work in political activism so when Mary tells that story of her father and astruller listening to the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. what she's saying is that is my story as well that is my story not just of me and my family but of my people you found that when young people tell family stories from the perspective of a parent or an ancestor this can have very powerful effects you once heard a story from a 14 year old named Dave who told you a story about his mother when she was in high school what was the story Dave was he was 14 and he talked about this story where his mother was also in junior high or middle school and she was at the school bus stop and she overheard one kid bullying this other a little boy and she went up to him and this is the story that Dave tells she went up to him and she said stop bullying that kid even though she was really scared herself and was afraid of what the bully would do to her and the bully said what's it to you and she said it's not right and so the bully hold off and hit her and then he comes back he said but my mother you know she didn't even realize her nose was broken but she went to the hospital and indeed her nose got broken and that was just such a courageous thing for my mom to do to stand up to a bully like that and the code of the story and this is really critical too is and it really taught me how important it is to stand up to bullies so Dave is putting himself in his mother shoes in her head what is she thinking what is she saying how is she feeling and that even though she was scared she did it anyway so it really is this lovely model of what it means to be morally courageous that he's internalizing I mean he's essentially saying my mother could be courageous when she was 14 I can too the developmental age matching I think is important because every child at age thinks their parent doesn't understand them and never went through anything like this but this is she's like me and of course parents are identity figures I'm like her stories are not just stories they are sophisticated tools that humans use to pass on values norms and the complex contours of relationships in family settings stories can be engines of meaning identity and purpose when we come back how we can start to tell better stories you're listening to Hidden Brain I'm Shankar Vedanta this is Hidden Brain I'm Shankar Vedanta Robin Faiwush is a psychologist at Emory University who studies family stories she's found that intergenerational storytelling has a wide range of psychological benefits that range from increased resilience to higher self-esteem Robin you and your colleague Marshall Duke have theorized that there are three types of family stories and that one of these three is the most predictive of positive outcomes what are these three types of stories Robin ascending descending and oscillating these are not about particular stories it's about the shape of the whole family saga so to speak so this is really the family history so ascending in some sense it's the American dream you know we came with nothing we worked hard and we succeeded ta-da descending is things are bad they only got worse things are never going to get better and oscillating is life happens there's good in life there's bad in life we will talk about the bad things that happened but we'll also put them in the context of all of the good things that happened so for example we came we worked hard unfortunately we didn't have as much success as we might have liked there were some back steps that we had to take but we overcame and now we are here and we're still together that's a characterization because all family saggers are a little bit of all of those but the problem within ascending everything's great all the time is it's not and life happens and if that's all that's your model when something bad happens you have no resources you have no well I know grandpa Joe went through sometime like this and was okay you have nothing to rely on so you just have no coping skills descending of course is this kind of spiraling down into rumination so the oscillating story is one where you have a sense of life has its ups and downs but we are a strong persevering family we will overcome we will get through this you say that it's really valuable for parents to share stories of their own transgressions with their children what are these transgression stories and why are the important to share transgression stories are stories that really challenge our sense of who we are we did something that we're ashamed of now proud of we feel guilty about we hurt somebody or did something wrong and we all do it I mean hopefully in our lives small transgressions we lie we cheat maybe we do a little bit of stealing or we betray a trust we break a promise so for example we're working with had a lesson so the stories that the parents tell the transgressions are minor they cheated on an exam I'm relatively minor a lot of them are about lying to their parent or sneaking out I think sometimes adolescents and young adults think that their parents don't understand what it is to go through teenage angst don't understand what it is to be angry or dark or moody but in fact we all have those memories and it's one thing to say oh yes I felt like that too and then time is your age I think it's another thing when you tell a story like this it gives it a texture or reality it's like you really were a brat wow you do get it you get who I am you get what I'm feeling you you also say that collecting and saving physical objects can also keep family stories alive Robin you treasure an object that connects you to a woman whom you've never met named Annie Lester what is this object and who was Annie Lester the object is a diamond engagement ring so when I married my husband unfortunately both of his parents died relatively young and he neither was alive when I met him so I never had the opportunity to meet either one of them but when we got married he was able to give me his mother's ring his mother's name was Annie Lester and he has a fairly large and very good storytelling family so I have been emeshed in stories about Paul his father and Annie Lester's mother and everybody has his fabulous stories but I never got a chance to meet them but through this ring I feel connected to his mother and his mother was she was a whisper of a woman who was a force of nature she also was very wild in her teenage years um settled down and was just fiercely loyal to her family and anybody who did any kind of threatened harm to her family got a lesson from Annie Lester she had a sharp tongue and wasn't afraid to use it she was stubborn but unbelievably loving and I just love those characteristics so I feel connected to her even though I've never met her stories carry a connection even when that person is no longer there and that connection for me with Annie Lester is a connection of love and compassion so that I can still feel that love and compassion even when the person is no longer there Robin 5-Osh is a psychologist at Emory University Robin thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain thank you I've really enjoyed it when we come back your questions answered we'll dive into listener stories and questions about stoicism with philosopher Massimo Pilucci you're listening to Hidden Brain I'm Shankar Vedanta this is Hidden Brain I'm Shankar Vedanta when you hear someone described as stoic what pops up in your mind do you think of this person as being emotionless would you describe them as having a stiff upper lip are they repressing their feelings our modern understanding of the word stoic has strayed from the meaning embraced by stoic philosophers in the ancient world today it's often used to imply that someone is emotionally stunted or joyless yet philosopher Massimo Pilucci says that stoicism as understood by thinkers such as epictetus and Marcus Aurelius can offer us a path to greater well-being and satisfaction we talked with Massimo in a recent episode of Hidden Brain called you to point out the wisdom of stoicism he joins us again today for an installment of your questions answered Massimo Pilucci welcome back to Hidden Brain it's a pleasure to be here thanks for having me back Massimo you talked in our first discussion about how you used to assume that stoicism meant like being Mr. Spock from Star Trek do you hear that a lot when you talk to people about stoicism and where do you think that impression of stoicism comes from yes I do hear that a lot which is kind of ironic because Mr. Spock is actually one of my favorite fictional characters but on the other hand I wouldn't suggest any actual human being to try to live as as Spock does so it's it puts me in an odd position of having to defend both Spock and stoicism which you know requires some mental gymnastics I think what it comes from is over time over centuries the words that identify several of the major Greco-Roman philosophies not just stoicism but also epicurianism skepticism and cynicism they kind of degenerate it in in normal parlance in common parlance to mean something that is rooted decently in the original but it's actually quite distorted for instance think about epicurianism right if today I say oh I'm I'm an epicurian people in the media start thinking about sex drugs and rock and roll but that was definitely not the way epicurists thought we will live our life we should live our life we thought that the most important thing was stay away from pain physical and mental if possible and then to pursue very mild pleasures you know friendship a simple meal that sort of stuff same thing with stoicism today it often means a stiff upper lip attitude associated usually with a stereotype of you know British man and things like that suppression of emotion hints the Spock idea now those are connected vaguely to something real about stoicism stoicism is in fact about endurance in part that that's where you get the stiff upper lip although they're not the same thing and stoicism is about being conscious of your emotions and trying to regulate them in a way that is actually good for you and you can see how you can go from there to the simplistic version of oh that means I just need to suppress my emotions. So in our earlier conversation you talked about an idea from Marcus Orrelias that is if the cucumber is bitter don't eat it so you can't make the cucumber unbitter so rather than focus on something you cannot control focus on the things you can control I'd like to share a listener's story that I think is a good encapsulation of the idea that we should avoid eating bitter cucumbers this comes from listener Adam. So I was in electrical engineering student at the University of Michigan and as you can imagine this meant lots of stressful problem sets and lots of stressful exams but funny enough teeth exams wasn't actually the part I dreaded the real horror always came after the exam was finished when everyone poured out in the hallway outside the lecture hall that's when the post mortem would begin hey man what do you get for question two I do the seven equivalent for question four what did you do see I'm a terrible test taker so these conversations are absolutely torture to me when the minutes I discover all the ways my answers are different from my friends and I'd be convinced of my failure as an engineer. Now one day after particularly brutal electromagnetics final I walked out feeling devastated and certain I bombed it sure enough my friends were also worried wave me over to go over answers with them but as I was walking over there it suddenly hit me the ink was dry the grades were now in the hands of the professor I'm completely out of my control why put myself through the stress of confirming whether I'd messed up when there's nothing I could do about it what do you think Massimo was Adam correctly channeling his inner markets or relics or perfectly I think markets would have been very very happy about him very proud yeah that's exactly right I mean the reasoning there is exactly correct right once the test is done it's over there's nothing you can do to change it the only thing you can do is to learn from your mistakes eventually if you actually did make mistakes and then get ready for the next test right so to subject yourself to this after the fact you know post modern analysis where you're gonna have all sorts of doubts which may not be justified yes your your answers may be different from those of your friends but that doesn't mean you got the wrong answers they they may be the ones that were wrong right there is no way to know until you get the results of the test so my advice would be to do exactly that after the test say guys I'm I need a break I'm walking back to my room I'm reading a book I'm listening to music whatever it is that relaxes you and makes you feel better and then wait for the test and see what what actually happened so I want to play you the rest of what Adam told us he doesn't check his answers with his friends he says the test is done the post-modern is pointless a few days later the test came back graded now when the graded exams came back a week later something surprising and kind of funny happened I'd got a 94 out of 100 oh one of the top grades in the class I know but here's the kicker out of the five questions I'd gotten every single one wrong everyone the teaching assistant and his notes explain they're all arithmetic errors little multiplication slip ups so he just took off one or two points on each question and at the top of the exam I kind of even remember him writing he said you clearly know electromagnetic so you just need to work on your multiplication now had I done the holy review with my friends after the test the week before I would have spent the whole week convinced I failed them managing my future career ruined and it would have all been for nothing so Massimo this reminds me of that saying I read somewhere I'm an old man and I've had many worries most of which never happened exactly and Santa come back one of the one of the stoics the engine stoics makes that point repeatedly in his letters to his friend Lucille's he says you know a lot of the times we worry about things that are actually not going to happen and and if that's the case then why worry in the first place you're creating a problem that may not exist now I'm happy that that you know that was the conclusion for for the listener however I could of course have gone the other way around and that would have certainly not changed the basic point I mean even if he had in fact failed the test and done horribly and in turns out he's a horrible engineer and maybe you should switch to I don't know music as a major it the same principles applies the thing was over no sensing warning about it until you are back in a position to do something about it it is really about agency right so it's not a question of not caring right oh I'm not worried as in I'm not care of course you care you do want to do well in your in your tests right but caring is means doing your best to actually do well on the test and then move on and learn once the time comes learn from the mistakes if you actually made any any if it turns out that the mistakes were in fact dramatic so much so that you actually have to rethink you know the rest of your life okay well that's also under your control you can do that it may be painful it may be not what you expected but it's still the same principle still holds what are some of the other central principles of stoicism maxima well one of the fundamental principles is that the our goal in life should be to live rationally and pro socially which the stoics are put in in in this way they said we should live according to nature meaning according to human nature they their analysis of human nature is that we are essentially animals so we need the same things that a lot of other animals need right shelter food water that sort of stuff but we are specifically animals that are highly social and capable at least of reason we're not always reasonable but we are in fact even often arguably but we're certainly capable of it reason is the way is the best way that we have to actually solve our problems so according to the stoics therefore if that's human nature then a good human life means to try to do your best to live pro socially to cooperate with other people and to try to solve your problems rationally and I think that's excellent advice across the board another one of the fundamental stoic concepts is cosmopolitanism the notion is that we should do our best to think of everyone else on the planet regardless of where they live and whether we know them personally or not as our brothers and sisters or our relatives friends and stuff like that why well because we're all russia animals we all share this this basic human ability to and propensity to live socially and and to use reason to solve problems therefore there is no reason in fact reason itself tells you that that it's nonsense to just treat other people differently they're just like you and it's only an accident of personal history whether you know them or not you met them or not so cosmopolitanism is another one of those fundamental stoic concepts so when we look across cultures and religious traditions we can often see core themes that come up again and again in different practices and beliefs we got an email from listener Amy who writes stoicism is Taoism Taoism is to seek balance to find the harmonious flow to achieve but not strive to be centered in the present stoicism took the allegory of Taoism and made it specific practical for the west what's your take on Amy's note massama well again there are some similarities for sure there are some passages in Marcus areas that I could point point out and they do really sound Taoists for instance one of my favorite is when Marcus tells himself that you know if there is an obstacle and your first instinct is to just go straight at the obstacle your bump your head against against the wall that might not be the best way to do it if you stop and reflect about things there may be a way around it or above it or under it and he says I'm paraphrasing here but it says that essentially the obstacle can become the way the way forward in other words the obstacle itself might suggest to you another way of doing things that uses the obstacle in your favor instead of against you now that really is straightforward Taoism this is going with the flow however that's only one component of both Taoism and and stoicism they differ in a number of other other respects and also we have no reason to think that one directly influenced the other Taoism took shape a little earlier than stoicism about a century or so or there about earlier but we have no reason to believe that there has been any contact between the two cultures in that sense in sort of cross philosophical exchange so to speak also there are a number of other things in stoicism that don't find any as far as I know I'm not an expert on Taoism but as far as I know they don't find a correspondence in Taoism of 40 instance the notion of cardinal virtues the notion that we should live according to nature in the specific sense that I was saying earlier but certainly there are similarities and not just with Taoism Buddhism is perhaps even more obvious example of a similarity between the two philosophies on the Eastern and Western tradition in terms of their ethics they're often our major differences in terms of metaphysics the way in which let's say Buddhist or Taoists think about the universe and how it works is very different from the way the stoics do some of our listeners have noticed a discrepancy between those who talk about stoicism and those who practice it a listener named Gigi said she has been romantically involved with men who say they are stoics but also prone to volatile temper tantrums there was one who had sent me something from meditations every single day and though they proclaim to follow Marcus Aurelius and epic Titus and all of these great philosophers with these great ideas it seemed like the more they got into stoicism the less centered they were the less calm they were the less stoic they were anyway love your show thanks for everything you do so messimal it has to be tempting to carry around a copy of meditations to talk the Marcus Aurelius talk but not walk the Marcus Aurelius walk yes and unfortunately the listener is pointing to a whole subcategory subclass so to speak of aspiring stoics who is really making a fundamental mistake is that they're so-called red pill mainly man kind of approach to stoicism I call it broisism as in broves and it's a it's a really a distortion of the original stoicism in the case of the broics in particular what they often point out is that the word virtue which of course plays a major role in stoic philosophy comes from the Latin Verdi I R which also means man and therefore they conclude that you know manly man well yeah but that's really a very partial view even a simple straightforward etymological ground if they hadn't taken an additional step they would have discovered that the word ver in Latin itself is actually a translation of the Greek Arete which means excellence means just to do the best you can and Arete is gender neutral so there is really no no particular reason to think that stoicism is a manly kind of thing when we come back stoicism emotions and relationships we look at how stoic ideas can help us navigate tricky interactions with family co-workers and friends you're listening to hidden brain I'm Shankar Vedanta this is hidden brain I'm Shankar Vedanta the Roman Emperor and stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius once wrote except the things to which fate binds you and love the people with whom fate brings you together but do so with all your heart but when the people we are bound to drive us crazy when they leave their dirty dishes in the sink or talk over us at an important work meeting or gossip about us with other friends loving them with all our heart can be difficult Massimo Pilucci is a philosopher at the city college of New York he's the author of How to Be a Stoic using ancient philosophy to live a modern life Massimo I want to talk about the role of stoicism in dealing with various emotions a listener named Jabari reached out to share a moment when he had to call on his stoic reserves during a moment of panic at Disney World he and his kids got into one of those pods you sit in for an adventure ride and the attendant locked the door and then I said wait I don't see how to get out of here I don't see any way out of this pod and I myself started to have my own internal panic attack and I started to internally break down and I looked to my right and I saw three of my kids they were just having the time of their life that sets myself if I melt down right now that's going to impact them so I had to tap into the different areas of stoicism and just really calm myself and endure the two or three minute experience that I was going through and when it ended I was okay so Massimo it's striking to me that Jabari tapped into his inner stoic because he wanted to do right by his kids I think many parents have experienced moments like this you want to freak out but if you freak out your kids are going to freak out so you keep yourself together is this something of a stoic hack yes it is and in fact congratulations to the listener for really having mastered that so so well and again this isn't about suppressing emotions right the listener himself said that he was feeling the panic right it just managed to to to handle it so that it wouldn't show up externally because that would make things worse and it would affect his children so that's an important thing to keep in mind the stoics are not people who don't feel or somehow manage to completely repress the emotions all of the ancient stoics are very clear about this a pitida says you know I don't to his students I don't want you to become unfeeling statues you know it's it's it's your human beings not pieces of marble and Seneca says even sage is even the ideal stoic of course has feelings because they're human but the important thing is that you have the presence of mind to know how to direct those feelings and how to handle those feelings depending on the situation right that may very well be a situation when you're on your own there's no problem if you go to the rebather and you start screaming that's fine it's not a historic and stoic if it makes you feel better go for it however if the screaming is in the middle of the situation that we just heard and your kids are going to freak out then that's not a good thing to do and good presence of mind good self-control in that sense again it's not a matter of repressing it's a matter of handling and modulating your emotions you know I remember I was on a flight many years ago when my daughter was maybe two or three years old and we were flying across the Atlantic and about halfway through the pilot comes on the on the intercom and he basically says you know we need to turn back because there's something wrong with the plane and we're over the Atlantic Ocean right now so obviously it's not a pleasant idea my daughter's sitting next to me she's fast asleep and I of course quite freaked out because you don't want to hear that your plane has a problem when you're over the Atlantic Ocean we turn back and as we come into land there are fire trucks that are racing along the side of the plane as the plane is coming in to land and so it's really terrifying and my daughter is awake at this point and I'm just smiling at my daughter and saying you know what are you playing with or what shall we draw on your book and in my heart of course my heart is like jumping out of my chest but this is along the lines about Jabari said but I think there's a larger lesson here a massimo which is that is it possible that one way in which we can learn to be better still eggs is actually to ask ourselves not how does this affect me but how does this affect the people around me so I think you're right that um asking ourselves how our behavior is affecting other people is not only helpful in a practical sense because you know if we're talking about your kids or your partner or your brother that's a significant incentive to get a hold of yourself and to manage things better than it would be if you were on your own but also it is very stoic because the whole point or a major point I should tell you stoicism is again the we are pro-social animals we should always think about how our actions affect other people. Epic theaters taught these students that there are three disciplines that they need to practice they're called the discipline of desire discipline of action and the discipline of a scent. Desire is about reminding yourself what's what's really good for you and what is not good for you regardless of what other people tell you so in other words it's about thinking figuring out exactly your values and your these values the kind of things that you think are important or not the second discipline the one of action is entirely devoted to how am I going to behave toward other people how am I going to put into practice my values and these values when it comes to other people because we're always with other people we're living society you know unless you're a Robin's or a crozer in on a deserted island you always live with other people you're always in tonight with other people so the discipline of action becomes fundamental to the way you live your life the third one by the way the discipline of a scent is about making the first two automatic it's about training yourself to always trying to make the right decision no matter the circumstances. Let's talk about the role of stoicism in dealing with grief here's a message we received from listener jules in 2024 my best friend of 46 years and died of ALS we spent much of the prior three years together realizing her bucket lists and during that time on a trip to Uruguay we listened to one of your episodes on stoicism and agreed that it was the closest description of the type of philosophy we had both tried to live and we're especially living during the time of her illness and decline it gave me great comfort I think it gave her a great comfort but after she died that perspective and ability to adhere to that philosophy completely went out of the window for me and it's been almost two years and I have recovered that perspective but I still look back on that time as a bit of a failure to myself and to Ian. First of all I think that the whole the fact that she spent time with her friends before she died and did the things that her friends wanted to do that's beautiful and that reminds me of one of my favorite passages in epictetus where he says that we should not pine after fix in winter and what he meant by that is like you know figs are available during the summer when they are available eat them enjoy them no no problem but when the winter comes accept the fact that there this is not the season for for fix don't don't say oh if only there were things in winter well there aren't that's just the way nature works and the idea is to apply that to our life and enjoy our friends our loved ones when they are around sometimes we have this this attitude of taking things and people for granted and then only realizing later on when they're gone that oh I should have spent more time I should have been doing this or that or the other so she did exactly the right thing she enjoyed the things as when they were doing summer time now of course then comes the regret the grief the part of the fixing winter stuff now there I would say one of the best things that I have read about grief from a stoic perspective is Seneca's letter to his friend Marsha Marsha had lost and the adult son I think he probably went off to war and you know that's a perilous thing to do so he didn't come back and she was in grief and the grief kept going on for you know a couple of years and so Seneca decides to write to her and he says look it's perfectly normal that you felt grief but now you are becoming identified with your grief you are beginning to neglect your other family your other children your husband your friends your social duties now it's time to intervene and I think he had a point so he's acknowledging he says in fact he actually says those people who tell you that you should not feel grief at all evidently they've never lost anybody so it's very reasonable it's very you remain from that perspective he says you know of course if you lose somebody you love you're gonna go through grief the question is however can you get out of it in a reasonable fashion and reasonable timing and get back to what what he saw as your duties as a human being to other people your friend was important but you know there are other people out there and they also need your help I'm wondering in some ways from Jules's question whether we should see stoicism as a process rather than a finished goal in other words should we have a growth mindset about stoicism and that we should see periodic breakdowns in our efforts to be stoic with a certain degree of you know stoicism that's right so the the stoic sage the ideal stoic is somebody who never goes through and gun any trouble of that sort right he or she always knows how to handle things but then Seneca himself says look sage is rare as the phoenix the mythological bird that rises from its ashes and according to Roman mythology there is one phoenix every 500 years so they're not that many right doesn't happen and so the idea is to try and make progress and of course you're gonna slip back but you know because you're human being you're gonna make mistakes it's okay the right thing to do with mistakes is not to beat yourself up for it because you made the mistake there is nothing you can do at this point the only thing you can do is to learn from it and then get back up and resume your path hmm let's talk a bit more about stoicism in the context of our relationships with other people uh Marcus Aurelius said it's valuable to highlight the virtues of the people around us he writes when you want to cheer yourself up think of the positive qualities of your friends and acquaintances the efficiency of one for instance the moral sensibility of another the generosity of a third and so on massive I'm wondering whether this is not merely a gratitude practice but a way of systematically turning our minds from the tendency to see the negative and to practice instead to see the positive yes with a major caveat however so we're not talking justice about straightforward optimism you know think positively kind of thing with you here are a lot these days well sometimes it's not rational to think positively you know there are certain things that are actual problems and some of these problems are in fact impossible to overcome or very very difficult to overcome in which case just to think positively about it ends up being a way long term to blame the victim because oh you didn't think positively enough and that's why that happened to you but what um Marcus is doing there is is at an intuitive level anticipating discoveries in 20th century and 21st century psychology it is true that access to gratitude are good for you that is they actually do something positive something something helpful to your own psyche and what they do is they remind you because it's too easy especially these days to open up your internet browser or your newspaper or listen to radio and be flooded with all sorts of negative really seriously bad stuff so it's easy to fall into despair you know the famous doom scrolling kind of attitude reminding yourself that there are actual people around you that you actually know person that are trying to do their best they are in fact they have characteristics you know character traits virtues as the story will call them that are positive and you can emulate you can you can set them in front of yourself as an example of how to live or live better i mean that is in fact a counter to all of these negative stuff that comes in it's not to to discount the negativity as I said there are real problems but real problems can be better handled if you actually have models of how to behave in a positive constructive fashion let's talk about stovicism in workplace relationships we received a message from a listener named john who shared a story about his workplace i had an experience in my career where a very aggressive business partner took steps that were going to be very damaging to a large group of people i worked with and most people reacted with anger but i for whatever reason reacted with sadness and even pretty much thought about him as a child somebody's baby even and a human being who for some reason had gone astray at any rate it made it a more humane situation one that i found more tolerable and actually probably helped me lead us to a better result would you consider john's response to be an example of stovicism massimo yes the stoics cultivate this attitude of being charitable to other people and toward themselves to be to be fair in fact they think that moral blame is not particularly useful when you say to somebody that somebody is bad or evil or something like that you just put a label on on a behavior but that label isn't particularly useful it only allows you to dismiss that person perhaps even to dehumanize them at some level well on the other hand what the listener did there is exactly the stoic thing to do that is here is somebody who is misguided epititus often uses words along the lines of misguided it's like this person has problems of his own who knows what they are than we may or may not be able to find out what those problems are but it does have a defective faculty of judgment and that's the way one should look at it there are reasons why that faculty judgment became defective either temporarily or permanently and now the question isn't you know to label the person one way or the other the question is what is it that i can do here and now to at least ameliorate the effects of the of the situation so you focus on your intentions to make things better and you act accordingly blaming it's not it's not particularly useful and so I think that's exactly the stoic activity when we come back stoicism in an age of volatility will your listeners thoughts and questions about how to apply stoicism to modern problems you're listening to hidden brain i'm shankar vedanta this is hidden brain i'm shankar vedanta focus on what you can control don't expect people to be something they're not avoid eating life's bitter cucumbers there are many aspects of life where the advice of the stoics feels eminently reasonable but then we get a breaking news alert on our phone or go on social media and we're deluged with the reminders of the disasters and conflicts all around us what can a philosophy design for an ancient world say to us who are living in a world that is moving so quickly and violently massimo piliochi is a philosopher at the city college of New York he's the author of how to be a stoic using ancient philosophy to live a modern life massimo i'd like to start with a message we received from a listener named Annie she was raised in california by british parents whom she describes as stoic and she came of age during a volatile time in the united states there were various issues happening in the late sixties through the seventies when i was a teenager that i very much felt should not be accepted and should be pushed against uh which i did a lot of much to my parents uh distress and likewise as a parent myself i raised my kids to question authority to question the world they're living in and don't accept everything as it is and i think that is very germane to what is happening now in this country so massimo when a parent discourages a child's activism is that really stoicism i think it's it's problematic i mean it's understandable from the point of view of the parent you one of the major most important things as a parent is to make sure your your kids are safe but you know life is what it is and it's important sometimes you cannot make everybody safe and also it's important to develop your kids from a moral perspective from a character perspective and activism being involved and you're being aware of what's happening in the world thinking critically uh questioning authority when it needs to be questioned i mean that that phrase is a little too easy these days or i don't like question authority well sometimes authority is correct you know when i go to my doctor most of the times i accept her authority because she's the doctor not not i right now uh so occasionally i question even her authority because they're well can you explain this more because it doesn't make a lot of sense to me but sometimes it's okay to to go with authority um but when i'm talking about especially political authority and you know the governments that go in directions that might not be good for society and of course you need to question them so i think that in a sense almost always we live in in times of turmoil yeah the six is in samadhi certainly i would argue that current times as we speak are times of turmoil in many places in the world including the united states now stoics would say that it is important to be socially and politically active why well that's because it's one of your duties as a member of the cosmopolies as a member of the broader family of humanity you don't live uh your life just on your own you you are a part of a society and you need to do your your your bet in order to make society better i listen a name jeff wrote into ask how we my channel stoicism when it comes to gigantic problems like global climate change i've been aware of stoic philosophy for years and by the time i retired i felt i'd mastered a hybrid zen stoic style of coping with life but the past ten years have removed the wool from my eyes life today as a human is not for the faint of heart the thought of my children barely surviving in a mad max world with billions of desperate young refugees sea level rise heat dome famine plague and war refugees roaming the world made my inner stoic curl up in the fetal position and cry but thanks to your july 21st podcast i was able to cross the line from being unable to muster my inner stoic to facing it directly towards the oncoming storm so masimo do you think stoicism can be useful when it comes to dealing with huge planetary problems like climate change so yes it can't be useful however again the fundamental principle here is regain your agency reclaim your agency and there is really not much i can do directly to affect things like climate change or international politics and so on to forth but that doesn't mean there are no nothing there's nothing i can do right there's a number of things that activists can and in fact do carry out that can make a difference so the enormity of the problem is never an excuse for not acting so there's always something you can do and the important thing is to do it of course with again the usual caveat you may or may not succeed but that's okay because there is no guarantee in life ever i mean no philosophy or no no attitude can give you a guarantee of succeeding that's it's not a it's not a thing the important part is to regain control of your agency so i would say for instance in the particular case of climate change and political turmoil it's good to be informed but it's not good to be obsessively following the news or doom scrolling and all that sort of stuff because that simply depresses you and it really doesn't doesn't do anything helpful so maintain a certain broad level of information you know be aware of what's going on but spend most of your time doing things that actually make a difference rather than reading every article that comes your way or or responding to every social media post of that that you happen to see the interesting thing of course is that i think when we are doom scrolling we almost have the illusion that we are doing something about it because it feels like we're getting upset we're getting outraged we and it feels like we're doing something even as we're just sitting in front of a screen and basically you know looking at the next screen and looking at the next screen marcus or alias had a strategy for dealing with some of our fears at times like this he counseled himself to adopt what is called the view from above what is this massimo and how did marcus practice this yeah the view from above is is a standard story technique which is actually also useful in kind of the behavioral therapy and there is pretty good modern evidence that it actually works you can do it in a number of ways but essentially is about training yourself to zoom out from the specific specifics of the moment one way to do it is as a visual exercise or you find a quiet moment in place in your house you close your eyes and then you imagine yourself zooming out from that scene looking at yourself from above and then looking at your house and then looking in your city and then going further and further out what is the point of these exercises it's to remind yourself that you're actually part of a much much broader campus that there are that there is a huge universe both in space and time and that therefore whatever things happen to bother you in the moment they're really tiny compared to the cosmic perspective now the mistake there is to then think oh so they're not important they are important to you at your scale the view from above is just a way to reminding you that your scale is not the only one and that there are other meaningful scales at which problems will look very differently so the idea is to relax about it and then zoom back in and see okay now what can I do about about whatever the problem was right agency is still important but it is good and as I said there is very good empirical evidence from modern research to from time to time sort of step back and give yourself the time to contemplate things from a broader point of view one way to do it by the way is to watch videos that are that helpful in this matter one of the my favorite is Carl Sagan's pale blue dot and if you check it out it's it's available on on YouTube that's one way to do the view from above the meditation from above I'd like to end with a message we received from listener Kerry when he was in his 20s Kerry says he was traveling in Thailand and one of his routines was to go swimming a mile or more out into deep waters one day a group of Thai fishermen maneuvered their boat near him and tried to get him to climb on board they kept saying a word that he didn't understand but he insisted that he didn't want a ride I let Kerry pick up the story from here and as I was making my way back towards the island of my own I realized what they were saying was shark and I never thought about sharks or not seriously but now my swim was turned on its head from a blissful meditative experience to a quite terrifying experience and I found this quite remarkable so I started practicing the only thing I knew how to do to keep my heart from pounding out of my chest I started to sing a song and it went something like this if I'm going to be shark me I'm going to be happy shark me yeah you heard me if I'm going to be shark me I'm going to be happy shark me and I continued chanting this until it became a song and pushing dark thoughts out of my mind with this trick of a song because I couldn't really control if I was going to be eaten by a shark or not and I was possibly shark meat whenever I went swimming so to this day whenever I get into the deep sea or any proverbial dark waters I sing that song of putting away those thoughts of things I can't control anyway and say if I'm going to be shark meat or car crash meat or any kind of meat am I as well be happy meat so that's my story so Massimo if you had to boil stoicism down to three words would happy shark meat fit that bill might that first of all that's a remarkable story when this is you know it's an incredible example of presence of mind and actually doing something useful in a situation that might very quickly become desperate so now the stoics very often had mantras like that that they repeated to themselves and you know we talked about a couple of them don't pine for things in winter if the cucumber is bitter don't eat it and so the obstacle becomes the white all of these things in fact they were very aware of this thing and if you did assess you should have a number of these phrases at hand for whenever the situation arises but the listener's story also reminded me of Senekas on anger in on anger Senekas writes about all the techniques that might get you out of an immediate situation of anger for instance you know go off for a walk or count until 20 or go to the bathroom you know just anything that will that will create a detachment and the sudden detachment from the situation so that you can deescalate basically and of course there is nothing in there entry stoic about any of those things specifically any of those specific suggestions what is stoic about is the notion that I want to keep my presence of mind here the best chance I have to do well in this situation is to act rationally and not to panic right panic has never helped anybody and it's a it's a great example of how you respond rationally and effectively to a situation that could very easily turn lethal Massimo Piliuci is a philosopher at the city college of New York he is the author of how to be a stoic using ancient philosophy to live a modern life he's also the co-author with Gregory Lopez and Meredith Alexander Coons of Beyond Stoicism a guide to the good life with stoics skeptics Epicureans and other ancient philosophers Massimo thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain it was a pleasure thanks for having again Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media our audio production team includes Annie Murphy Paul Kristen Wong Laura Quarelle Ryan Katz Autumn Barnes Andrew Chadwick and Nick Woodbury Tara Boyle is our executive producer I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor Thank you to loom by Atlassian for sponsoring the Hidden Brain 2025 perceptions tour while on tour we asked audience members to share the best piece of advice they've ever received here's one shared by a young attendee of our show in Boston Hi my name is Arya so my piece of advice is live in the moment because it doesn't last forever there's multiple times where this like came to me one time was outside a play date and my mom said it was almost time to go and I didn't want to leave because it was with my best friend but what I learned from that and my mom taught me this is that instead of crying over or whatever to take the the time that you have and really enjoy it and spend time with it so lovely thank you so much thank you thank you thank you thanks again to Arya for sharing that advice and thanks to loom for sponsoring the 2025 perceptions tour loom is AI-powered video communication that moves teams forward whether you're sharing feedback obtaining approvals or setting context it removes the friction by making it easy to share and collaborate on work without having to be in the same room or timezone try loom today at loom.com that's l-o-o-m.com I'm Shankar Vedantam see you soon