How to Stop Caring What Others Think

We love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinion than our own true, isn't it? Your opinion is based on expertise, but there's something about the opinion of other people, especially when it comes to you, that you give disproportionate weight to, and that's really the thing that you're regretting. Why exactly do you care about other people thinking of you? The answer is because you want to avoid a very, very strong and negative emotion called shame. In the doubted chain, Lao Tzu, he wrote this. Care about people's approval, and you will be their prisoner. Here's my complementary verse. Disregard what others think, and the prison door will swing open. Judge not. Hey friends, welcome to Office Hours. I'm Arthur Brooks. This is a show, as you know, about how to lift people up and bring them together in bonds of happiness and love using science and ideas. This is not just a self-improvement show. 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Have it fed to them and they can use it and have it improve their lives as well. Today's subject is about a complaint that I hear from people all the time. And that's this. You know, I wish I didn't care what other people think of me. I hear this constantly. My students say this a lot. As a matter of fact, I've asked my students to vote. I say to my Harvard Business School students who are on average 28 years old, how many of you wish that you literally didn't care what other people think of you and the big majority put their hand up? Now, I want to talk about that today. Why is it that we're so uncomfortable with ourselves because we care so much about how other people think of us and and furthermore, why do we care so much? Why do we care? And then most importantly, I want to get to the end. I want to talk about how you can care less. Now, I'm not going to make the argument that you shouldn't care at all. Because if you literally didn't care at all, what other people think of you, really bad things will happen to you. And I'm going to talk about exactly how that works. But I will help you to care less in the way that you care yourself, the way that you consume media, the way that you pay attention to other people, and the decisions that you make about what you're going to do and how you're going to act on this very day. And if you're successful in this, I promise you. I've seen the data. I've done the experiments. I've experienced it in my own life. If you can learn how to care less about how other people think of you, you're going to be happier. You're also going to be more productive and you're going to bring more happiness to other people. So let's get started on that. Now, it's weird, isn't it? That, I mean, of course, you care what your mother thinks of you and you care what your spouse thinks of you. But we even care what idiots think of us on social media. It's the funniest thing that people get really wrapped around the axle when they get criticism from morons on X or Facebook or whatever. You know, random people. And if you've been watching this show or following my work for any period of time, you know perfectly that on social media, you have a disproportionate number of dark triads. People who are above average in narcissism, mucky of alienism, and traits of psychopathy. I mean, these are psychopaths in a lot of cases and they love trolling you and they love bothering you. And for some reason, you know this, but you care what they think, too. It's the weirdest thing. You need to develop a very, very thick skin. And that could be sort of the end of the show. Okay, develop a thick skin. That's great. Folks, see you next week. But, you know, it's kind of not good enough. We need to know why we do care if we're going to learn how to not care. So that's what we're really all about. Now, this is not a new problem. This is not the advent of social media in the country. If you read the meditations of Marcus Aurelius, the stoic classic written by the emperor of Rome, Marcus Aurelius, he wrote a journal for himself, a diary for himself that was later discovered after his death and it was a stoic classic. It was just little nostrams to himself about how to live, according to the stoic philosophy, called the meditations. Go get it. The meditations of Marcus Aurelius is going to go into the show notes. Here's what he said. We love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinion than our own. True, isn't it? Your opinion is based on expertise, but there's something about the opinion of other people, especially when it comes to you that you give disproportionate weight to. That's really the thing that you're regretting. You don't care about what other people think about you. You care about other people's negative opinions of you that are conflicting with your own. That gives you a sense of insecurity about yourself, fear about whether or not your own impression of yourself is it might be incorrect. That's really what we need to dig into. More importantly than that, you're afraid of these negative opinions and these negative emotions that proceed from it. That's pretty complicated, isn't it? Well, we're going to start that out right now. Let's begin with this question. Why exactly do you care what other people think of you? Think of you about what? They think about how you look. They think about how you present yourself. They're opinion about what you just said, whatever it is to be. Once again, even strangers, why do you actually care? Now, there's two big reasons why you care what other people think of you. Either people you should care or people you shouldn't care. Number one is that you trust the data you get from other people about you, because that's actually how your opinions are formed. Your opinions are formed largely as an amalgam of the opinions that you hear from other people. We're empirical creatures. We're collecting data all around us all the time, data here, data there. And we're triangulating across different data sources to form our own impression about the outside world. So somebody thinks that something is happening, for example, and you get a couple of different opinions. Do you think this is actually happening in politics, for example? And this is dependent weighted for how much you trust other people. This is how you form your own opinions. This is very normal because we live in society. This idea is based on the work of Richard Foley, who wrote a very nice book called Intellectual Trust in One Self and Others. It's written in 2002, kind of an old one. But basically what it comes down to is this. I mean, if you're at work and now everybody around you is saying, did you see, you watch that series Squid Game, right? And you didn't. And then you hear it through your four more times. And people say, you should really watch that series Squid Game. You're starting to form your opinion, even before you've seen the series, about the quality of the series. And that's because you're, it's a mosaic of the opinions of other people that winds up being your opinion. That's true about yourself as well. So you're trying to figure out what you think about yourself. And you're doing that by collecting data from the opinions of other people about you. You're not an autonomous individual. You have a sense that maybe your own self-interest might be getting in the way of things. And so you want some disinterested observer, perhaps from the outside. And that's what you're getting. And sometimes you're getting it even when you don't solicit that. And you use that unconsciously. So you're forming this puzzle together with the puzzle pieces of everybody else's opinions. And that's why you pay attention. That's why you actually care. That's reason number one. Reason number two is just, you know, I was going to say it. If you watch my show, evolution is the evolutionary psychology and the evolutionary biology of Homo sapiens. We want approval of other people. We're built to want approval of other people. Now, going back to the beginning, at least the beginning of the place to see, probably 250,000 years ago, probably much earlier. Homo sapiens were evolved to live in bands. That's what anthropologists call groups of early humans of 30 to 50 individuals. Now, 30 to 50 individuals that are related to each other by kin, usually by blood, except in so far as you take a mate, usually from another band. These are people who are all about each other and taking care of each other. And you have a very, very strong evolutionary interest for your survival and not being separated from your band. This is the basis of a little part of the limbic system in your brain called the dorsal anterior singulate cortex, DACC, which makes you not want to be socially rejected. I mean, we're so averse to social rejection because it gives us a sense of sadness. And that sadness implicates different parts of the brain, but most notably, this thing called the dorsal anterior singulate cortex, a bunch of interesting papers talk about social rejection. And they look at the brain under FMRI scans when people are doing various activities. There's one pretty famous paper in which people are in the FMRI machine playing a ball-tossing game back and forth. And at one point, they start to be excluded from the game. And that social exclusion stimulates that part of the brain that is implicated in pain. Social rejection leads to a sense of sadness and pain in the human brain. What I'm talking about is mental pain, not physical pain, of course, although that actually can manifest in physical pain as well. That's how much we want to prove. Why did we evolve that sense of pain from social rejection? Because once again, if a couple hundred thousand years ago, you had social rejection, you'd walk the frozen tundra and die alone, or the savanna or something. You'd be a cheetah's dinner in a couple of minutes if you didn't have people around you. And so you have to have an incentive not to feel social rejection. And you neurologically literally do have that pretty good incentive. That's why we're wired to want the approval of people around us. Now, who's around you? Your kids are around you. Your parents are around you depending on where you are. Your friends are around you. If you're in college and so you want that approval from ancient times, but in modern life, that circle of approval has greatly expanded. Why? Because the village is now not 30 to 50 individuals. It's now 30 to 50 million people. Or more, that's the number of people to whom you have personal access, at least potentially, in the world of social media. And the result of that is that social approval has expanded. It has hyper accelerated sort of into this weird ether, into the stratosphere of the internet. And that's made it such that we even want approval way, way, way outside the bounds of anything. It could be considered normal or healthy. Welcome to modern life. This has led to a whole lot of neuroticism, a whole lot of sadness and anxiety, probably biologically, because our dorsal anterior-singular cortex is working over time when we feel social rejection from a moron on Twitter. It's crazy as it sounds, blame mother nature, because we're still cave men and women in the place to see basically. It's pretty interesting how this works, but once again, as I'm going to explain to you a little bit later, knowledge is power. The more that you understand, the biology of your psychology, the better off you're going to be, which is why I talk about these things on this show. This has helped me and off a lot, and it can help you and off a lot as well. Number one is you're collecting data. That's why you care way a little people think. Number two is your evolution. You want the approval of others, because you don't want to be cast out of the tribe. These days, it's sort of the virtual tribe. Now, this can be normal, but it can also be a problem as I'm indicating. It's a problem because of the modern technological way that we're comporting ourselves and the community that we're trying to fit into. But it also just under any circumstances, even if you remember them before, times like I do. I mean, I grew up as a kid way before the internet. And still, there was a lot of problems with social rejection, and then some people suffered a lot more than others. As a matter of fact, there is a malady, a debilitating theorist, psychological condition, known as elidoxophobia. It's an actual phobia of social rejection. This is this exaggerated fear, a debilitating fear that develops in certain people all of the world. Not everybody, obviously, it's a minority of people that actually have this, but they become so attuned to what other people are thinking, and so fearful about what other people are thinking, that it actually makes it hard for them to function normally. And maybe that's you. Maybe that you find that you just feel like you're unhappy, sad, anxious, maybe even lonely a lot of the time, because you think so much about what other people think of you. Now, that's a self-diagnosed deal, and I'm not here to judge you and say, ah, you don't have this thing. This thing is a continuum. This is not a, you have it, you don't. The truth is, if you're unhappier than you should be, because you're thinking too much about whether people think of you, well, then that is something that we need to deal with. And that's what we're trying to cope with right now. Now, let's talk a tiny bit about how your brain actually makes you debilitated with respect to the opinions of other people. So, somebody thinks it has a bad opinion of you, and it makes it harder for you to function in your ordinary activities. Or maybe, you know, you're speaking in front of class, ordinarily, if you're in college, and somebody laughs at you, and that makes it harder after that for you to speak in class. Maybe you post basic opinions and jokes on the internet, and somebody makes fun of you, or tells you you're an idiot, and then you don't want to anymore. Your life is interfered with by the negative opinions of other people. Okay? What's going on? What's going on in your brain that actually makes you inhibited by the behavior of other people? The answer is that the pre-foto cortex of your brain, the executive centers of your brain, that console tissue right behind your forehead, it has two sort of two systems that are going encounter to each other all the time. They're called the BIS and BAS system. It sounds like twins, or a doctor's suicide book, or something like that. BIS is, they're just acronyms. BIS and BAS. BIS is the behavioral inhibition system, and BAS is the behavioral activation system. Most of the time, your pre-foto cortex is dedicated to inhibiting things, it's telling you to not do things. If you're a normal person, you're having all of these intrusive thoughts all day long. Like, what if I went up and just slapped that guy? And you think yourself, what's wrong with me? It's like, what am I some sort of psych out? No, you're normal human being, but your BIS, your behavioral inhibition system, may do not do it. That's great. Congratulations. Your pre-foto cortex has just saved you from being charged with assault, or fired from your job, and it's going on all day long. And this is how you, by the way, this is how you stay married. Last week, from when I'm taping this episode, it was my 34th wedding anniversary. And I've got a very happy marriage. I'm completely in love with my wife. But I guarantee you that she has plenty of intrusive thoughts about me. I'm not that easy to live with. I guarantee you she's like, I don't like that punch that guy in the face, but she doesn't do it because she has a very strong behavioral inhibition system, which is great. You need that. That's like the almost the number one function of your pre-foto cortex is BIS. But you've got to have BAS as well. So what you do is you're collecting data on things all the time. And BIS isn't charged while you're collecting the data until you get to a particular threshold where you say, OK, I'm going to go do that thing. Why? Because I've inhabited it long enough to know that the caution is unwarranted and I can go forward. So BIS starts and then BAS happens. And that's when you go do a thing. Let me give you an example. You're about to pull out in traffic every day example, right? And you're at the intersection. And you look around, there's some cars going past. That's BIS saying don't just zoom into traffic. BIS. Good. Good. And then you see an opening and then BIS eases up and then BAS takes over and you pull out into traffic. It's going on all day long. OK. Now back to the subject at hand, which is people caring what you think or you caring what other people think about you. And there's a pretty interesting body of data that the opinion of other people, especially when you're highly sensitized to the opinion of other people, keeps BIS active too long. In other words, BIS stays on when you're thinking about the opinions of other people. And especially if you have some non-trivial amount of aloevoxophobia that BIS is going to be like stuck on all the time. And you won't do stuff. That's what it comes down to. Really interesting papers about that. There's one from 2013. I'll put in the show notes in the American Psychological Association review. It's the, I love these papers that actually the whole paper is the title, practically, meaning making following activation of the behavioral inhibition system, how caring less about what others think may help us to make sense of what is going on. That kind of sums it up, doesn't it? Anyway, read the paper if you want. I mean, I read them so you don't have to, but pretty much everybody watching this show is interested in behavioral science and probably neuroscience. So go watch it. You'll like it. You don't do new stuff. And so if you find that you've gotten to a place in your life where you're kind of stuck, you're not doing a lot of things. You're not experimenting. You're not experiencing life. One reason actually might be because you're really worried about other people think and it's got the switch on your bis on. And you need to figure out a way to get the switch unstuck so that bass can turn on and the way to do it is going to be to modulate, moderate, lower the opinion or the, how much you care about the opinions of other people, which is what we're going to be talking about right now. Okay, so once again, your psychology has really strong biological implications and there's a reason for all these things. There's nothing weird about you. There's nothing wrong with you. But there are ways where you actually can change your life by understanding this biology and understanding the interventions that I'll be talking about right now. Now, this is all related, by the way. You know, when we're talking about you caring about the opinions of other people, I mean, why do you care about the opinions of other people? The answer is because you want to avoid a very, very strong and negative emotion called shame. Shame is something that we're, and you know, this idea that we don't want to be cast out of our tribe and all that. That's one thing to be isolated. It's something else to just feel shame when you're cast out of the tribe, even if you're not harmed. Shame is something that just has a tremendous amount of power over people. Now, let me define shame. Shame is the feeling of being deemed worthless and competent, dishonorable or immoral. There's a big range of stuff out there. So, worthless means that, you know, you suck. You know, you bat at your job. You're good for nothing. You're a dishonorable or immoral person. That's a different category of shame that people have. But it's really the same emotion that's being processed in the limbic system of the brain. It's actually a complex emotion, it's a mix of a bunch of different emotions. It's super powerful. People do all kinds of stuff to avoid shame. And some of the things that they do are really dumb. Like, you know, virtual, virtue signaling on social media. Where, and this is, a lot of this is, you know, when you've got kind of a gang up effect, a mobbing effect on social media, where you have to show that you, you stand for some crazy, bad or moral panic on the internet. And so, you have to put up something on your internet profile that shows that you stand for something you don't actually care about. Or you have to condemn somebody or insult somebody publicly that you don't really want to. The reason you're doing it is because you don't want to be associated with that person you're trying to avoid shame. When you're saying something that is your opinion, even though it's not your opinion, it's almost always because you're trying to avoid shame. So that's, it's so aversive that it'll lead you to do things that later you're like, man, I don't, that's proud of that. It's a dumb thing for sure. Now, there are some effects of trying to avoid shame that are really good, however, for example, when you are charitable to a stranger because you don't want to look like you're a jerk, that's good. I mean, that's like, and there are all kinds of times when people, you know, quite frankly, should feel a shame. They do something that really is immoral, is dishonorable, is harmful to other people. And the shame that they feel is their teacher. Remember, there's no bad emotions. There's negative emotions because these are things to show you that there's a threat on the horizon and you need to avoid it. Negative emotions are supposed to be uncomfortable so you don't do something. You don't go someplace. You don't put yourself at some risk. All of these things have a big beneficial effect and have been evolved for a reason. Shame among them because it's important that you not be cast out of your tribe, but also that you learn to behave in a different way. The problem, of course, is when it's maladapted or it's just, it's in response to something you shouldn't be ashamed of, and in which case, it'll actually be obstructive for your mental health and your well-being. Okay. Now, it's also, by the way, normal people are ashamed, right? They feel shame regularly. Some of the most dangerous people in our society who have what's called APD, which stands for anti-social personality disorder, one of the characteristics is no shame. I mean, utterly shameless. They'll just lie, get caught, and say, nah, yeah, no. You know, there's a lot of personalities and just our internet life and our modern politics, where we see this all the time. And if you're wondering, you know, people in public life that do this, that seem like they're utterly shameless, the reason is because they have anti-social personality disorder. And that's the disorder. You don't want that. So when you say, man, I wish nobody, I wish I didn't care what anybody thought of me. That's not what you want. You don't want that. And I could go into a whole show that all the bad things that'll happen to you if you have anti-social personality disorder. Who knows? Maybe you'll get elected president in the United States or to the Senate or something. I'm kidding. Okay. So you get the idea of what I'm talking about here that a little of this stuff is good, and there's a reason that we have these things, but you don't want them to be exaggerated. And you don't want to care what other people think of you for stupid reasons. This is all a question of equilibrium. This is all a question of the person that we want to be in the golden meme, which is not nothing, but not too much. Again, let's go back to it. Slightly backwards for a second. If you're uncomfortable, because you feel that you're being inhibited in your health and happiness, your ability to live your life by caring too much about what other people think, that's what we're talking about here. Okay. All right. Now, how do you get to that golden meme? What can you actually do to lower the amplitude of your caring about what other people think? There are three big methods for doing so. Try it in true following the research. I'll give you the research, but it's going to kind of make sense, but you got to do the work. Like everything else, you need to do three things. For you to care less what other people think, then let them into your head. You need to number one, well, you need to number one, understand the science that I'm talking to you about. Number two, you need to change some habits that I'm going to give you. And number three, once again, as always, you're going to need to share these ideas with other people. So if you need to take notes and actually give a version of this podcast, okay? Give a short version, because, you know, I'm like, blah, blah, blah, blah, you don't have to be. All right. Number one, remind yourself of a very important fact. I'm going to clue in on a fact. It kind of new, but you probably forgot. No one actually cares. They don't care. It's like, oh, yeah. I'm so bummed out of them with what they think about me. They don't care. They actually probably don't care at all. Why? Because all they care about is what other people think of them. That's what everybody's thinking of all day long. Me, me, me, me, me. That's called the psychodrama. The psychodrama is that terrible, quotidian obsession that I have that's me on the star of everything. It's just so horrible. It's like, you know, my breakfast and, you know, my exercise and, you know, my commute, my work, and my money, and my family, and my television shows. You know how bad it is? I had a bunch of dreams last night. I was the star in all of them. It was so terrible. Right. It's like, give me a break, man. Give me a break from me. That's why so often in this show, I talk about the boards of transcendence of getting little, the eye self, where I'm looking outward as was the me self that I'm so stuck in where I'm looking inward. And I always say me, I mean, all of us folks. That's what I'm really talking about. And that's why I talk about transcending by serving other people and having a relationship with the divine. Those are the two ways to transcend yourself, whether through traditional religion and spirituality or not, you need to stand it off. Something is not you to unfocus on yourself. But I got news for you. It's hard to do it, and people aren't doing it for the most part. When you think somebody is actually paying attention to you, when you're craving their positive approvation, and when you're feeling afraid or depressed about the fact that people don't have a high opinion of you, I got news for you. They don't really have much of opinion of you at all. I got the data, but you don't really need me to look at it. Interesting paper, by the way, for 2001. Do others judge us as harshly as we think? Overestimating the impact of our failure shortcomings and mishaps, that doesn't mean that your shortcomings are really shortcomings. It means that they are, but people just really care at all. You can safely assume that everyone around you is actually thinking about themselves, and they punctuate the equilibrium of their psychodromal by just giving you a zinger, no one cares. Remember that. As a matter of fact, right here on this post it, put it on your mirror, and look at it every day and say it to yourself for 20 seconds. No one cares, no one cares. Right. Well, I'm like an existentialist today. All right. Number two, number two, technique number two, rebel against your shame. I've been a professor for a long time, and early on in my professional career, I took a job at the, in the fourth year of my academic career. I moved to Syracuse University, and I was teaching in the public administration department there, and that's the number one public administration department in the country. I mean, it's just super elite, and I was really honored to be there. I loved it, but I was so nervous. I was so nervous about the students. I was so nervous about my performance. I was really, really a little bit a little bit a little oxofobic maybe. I was just like caring what my colleagues thought of me, what my students thought of me, what the people were reading my papers thought of me. I was just like in this kind of, weird state of caring too much, what other people thought perhaps. And I remember I was kind of obsessing over the first day of the semester. I had this new class I was gonna teach. It was a three hour class. We used to have these three hour classes that met one day a week for these, for my master's students in public administration. They were so smart. I was thinking about the lecture I was gonna give, and thinking about, how was gonna do the exercises, and very, very nervous about the whole thing. And I got them for the class for the first day, and I started in. And I noticed that my students were like, really pleasant. They were kind of like laughing at my jokes a lot, and I'm thinking this is going great. And they looked just kind of abused the whole time, like amused. And I couldn't quite figure it out, but it was great. It was great. It was kind of the mood was light, and I thought I went really well, and afterward I'm thinking, that was a great first lecture. I mean, I'm in the groove, man. It's gonna be okay. I was walking down the hall, after my lecture, I was like maybe 20 yards outside of the classroom, and one of my colleagues, he looks at me, and he stopped and he says, Hey, your fly's open. I had done the whole three hour lecture. First one of the semester in this new job, with my fly open. Yeah, perfect, right? And that was bad, but it actually wasn't bad, because I was free after that. I had no choice, but to rebel against a substantial form of embarrassment. And I tell you it, it actually changed my teaching for the rest of the semester. Like, I mean, what else is gonna happen? Is it gonna be worse than that? The answer's no. And it was fine. And I got great teaching evaluations. I have to tell you. And so, and so I've been teaching with my fly down ever since. I'm kidding. I don't do that. Here's what I recommend in this lesson, rebel against your shame. There's something that you're embarrassed about. I mean, not shame. It's not like, yeah, at the time I robbed a bank when I was drunk. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about something that's just kind of embarrassing for you a flaw, right? That somebody would criticize you for on the internet. Some troll would criticize you for on the internet embrace it. Own it, right? Make a joke about it. Be completely open about it. Because once you own it, then you don't care what other people think. On the contrary, you've had utterly neutralized that. You've manually turned up your ability to fight Elidoxophobia by doing, trust me, this works. I mean, trust me, this really works. Number three, Matthew 7-1 in the Christian Bible. Judge not that ye be not judged. You want to stop caring about other people think, stop thinking critically so much about other people. You don't want other people to judge you, stop judging. Here's the deal. Once again, this is not a moral point that I'm making. And by the way, this is not a Christian point that I'm making per se. Whoever judges others digs a pit for themselves, said Lord Buddha. This is every major philosophy and religious tradition talks about this. And it's not just a moral point. On the contrary, if you judge other people, especially negatively, you're acknowledging a belief that people can, in fact, legitimately judge others. And you've just given people permission to judge you. You're cognitively, your brain is gonna tell you because you demand cognitive consistency. You will not sit in a state of incidents where other people can't judge you, but you can judge others. When you're judging other people, you're opening the door to their judgment of you. You just are. That's just the way your brain works. And so therefore, if you want the door to stay closed, you have to close it yourself with respect to your judgment of other people. Judge not. Now, that's super hard because you are cognitively developed to be judging people all day long. You know, it's like, Cali, what a terrible rainy day this is. It doesn't have to be that way in the contrary. You can go from rain is terrible to, it's raining. So the way to actually judge less is to make a conscious decision to go from judgment to observation. That's hard work. You're not gonna succeed entirely. But the whole point is that when you're giving in to judgment all day long, you're inviting the negative judgment of other people, which is the problem that we're talking about in the first place. When you're not giving into it, when you're saying, I will observe on this particular day, as opposed to judging, you will find that you're inoculating yourself a very great deal to the opinions of other people. That guy, that guy who just cut me off in traffic, you used to say, what a jerk. And now you say, I suppose that guy's in a hurry. It's an observation. It's a logical inference on the basis of his behavior that doesn't contain a moral judgment. And deciding turning down the amplitude of judgment in your own life, turning up the amplitude of observation in your life is a game changer, my friends. When you're especially bummed out about whether people think of you, this is the number one way that you can actually just turn the handle on your emotions on that to spend the rest of the day in a posture of observation, as opposed to a posture of judgment. There's in the doubted Chang Lao Tsui about 500 BC, he wrote this, care about people's approval and you will be their prisoner. That's true, isn't it? That's the basis of this entire episode. So here's my complimentary verse. I got some nerve to try to complement the doubted Chang, but here we go. Disregard what others think and the prison door will swing open. Judge not. So my friends, let me sum up, if you care what other people think of you and you're tired of caring so much, you shouldn't want, your ambition should not be to care not at all. Number one is impossible. Number two, if you actually were able to do that, I'd be worried about you because we'd be talking to antisocial personality disorder. And number three, you'd be in danger, okay? Not at all. But if you want to turn it down because it's actually creating problems in your life and getting in the way of your happiness, the way to do that is threefold. Number one, right on the note to yourself that no one cares and repeated a hundred times. Number two, rebell against your shame by being open about the source of your embarrassment, thus neutralizing it. And number three, judge not. And you will not be judged. I hope that helps. It's helped me a lot. The science on your side, once again, if you want more details on this, do go to the show notes. The show notes are there for you so that you can dig in even deeper on that. And if you have any more questions, write them in. And some of you have written in, as always, we like to look at a few questions before we end our episode. Number one, this isn't anonymous email question. My brother's wife is very limbic and starts listening all the things that are wrong with him. I've been teaching him how to go back from his limbic system to the prefrontal cortex. We talked about that in the past episode on how to manage your emotions. Remember, the limbic system is a console that creates the emotional information that is then sent to your prefrontal cortex for a decision on how you're gonna use that information. The problem is that when you're highly limbic, your limbic system is managing you and you're not managing it. And so the key is, which anonymous here is referring to, is managing your emotions through a technique called Meda-Cognition. Where Meda-Cognition is putting space between your emotions and how you decide to act. Lots of techniques for doing that from journaling to prayer to meditation, et cetera. So this is his question. What can he do? What can his brother do? Where his wife kind of loses her cool and starts to berate him? What can he do to help her so that she doesn't do that? Okay? Now, here's my first question. Does she recognize that this is a problem? Because if she doesn't, sorry, there's not much you can do. If she, however, if she's constantly saying, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I lost my temper, I lost my temper, then you have an agolded opportunity. And this is basically advice for couples. If you're fighting too much in a way, that's actually deleterious to your relationship because you're saying things that you don't mean you're both reacting to each other, limbically, you have a reactive marriage. That's what reactive marriages have in common, that they're highly limbic in the way that the fighting works. Where you get mad and you say something you didn't mean, and then she says something in reaction that she doesn't mean that you go back and forth and back and forth, and then you both wind up apologizing. That is a golden opportunity for something that's more powerful than metacognition. Joint metacognition. Where you together are moving from a limbic state to one that uses the executive function with the person that you love the most, that joint metacognition is unbelievably powerful because you're deciding to do it together. This can be one of the most enriching things you can do in your marriage. So does your sister-in-law recognize his problem? Let's assume she does. If that's the case, then they get to work on this project together doing things like when they're really angry, they say, we gotta take a time out and go cool down and they go away for 10 minutes and then come back together again. Why? Because during those 10 minutes, they would have said a whole bunch of stuff that might take 48 hours to unwind. If they're not together and they do it consciously and on purpose, they don't say those things and they come back and they say, okay, part two, we have decided together to turn back the clock by about half an hour before we had that argument and then not have the argument. Can you do that? You actually can. You actually can because your big free, pretty frontal cortex allows you to do time travel. It's amazing. And that's the whole thing. So at number one, you're getting hot under the collar, man. You're about to yell at each other and do something, say something stupid to each other and it's gonna be a couple of days and maybe not speaking and the kids are gonna be all uncomfortable. It's gonna be lousy. Uh-uh, you say we're at that moment. I think we should take 10. Maybe that's your safe word. I'm gonna take 10 and you take 10. And you come back together again and say, do we need to wind back the clock? And the answer is yes. You're gonna wind back the clock and you're gonna give each other a big kiss and say, you know how much I love you and I'm sure I'm so glad that we didn't have that argument and you mutually agree that you didn't have the argument that you just had. You know, like you can do it? Give it a try. Time travel is the way to solve a multitude of marriage problems. Paul Smith writes on email, can you tell me if you're six morning protocols, that's a show that we did that was very popular we had like a million and a half people watch that show? If it could be adapted for someone who doesn't wake as early in the morning as I do, I get up before 30. Yeah, yeah, super fun, right? But that morning protocol actually talked about the importance of getting up early and then proceeding even before the sun comes up of doing a bunch of stuff. Her question is can you adapt it for her son who has a job that has like, he has to work really late at night. And so getting up very early in the morning might mean he doesn't get any sleep. And the answer is of course, everything you never want to make the perfect the enemy of the good on any of the stuff that I talk about in this show. These are ideal scenarios. There's no dogma here. You need to adjust everything as needed. What you don't want to do is cutting corners for comfort, right? You want to cut corners because of necessity is the way that it works. And if you ever work scheduled, it makes it impossible for you to get it before nine o'clock in the morning because you're not getting home from until one or two in the morning. Yeah, completely. That's just the way that it works. It's just these are the ideal scenarios based on the data adapted such that they're as good as they can be for your particular situation. Last but not least, Christina Serigliano writes by email, do you know of any research regarding cold therapy and depression? You know, I've been thinking about this one. I really have been because heat therapy is exhaustively researched, heat therapy, sauna in particular, infrared in dry sauna. They have tons of great backing for all sorts of neurocognitive and mood benefits. Cold therapy is a much newer thing and I've always been very cautious about it. And frankly, the one of the reasons I'm so cautious about cold plunging in cryotherapies is because I'm reluctant to do something that I think actually might be spiking my HPA axis, you know, my adrenal system. I don't want a lot of circulating cortisol where I don't have it. And it's because I'm 61, you know, and in an chronically higher cortisol tends to be quite aging is the way that this works. And again, I'm not saying that. I'm just saying that it's that the data are very incomplete on this. So I've been very reluctant on that. That said, there is pretty good data now emerging that that that cold therapy has a great effect on depression. By which I mean, it lowers depression. It lowers depressive symptoms. There's a nice paper. We'll put it in the show notes from Frontiers in Psychiatry, which is an apex journal in mental health. From 2020 is pretty new. And once again, this is the title is actually the whole point of the paper, efficacy of whole body cryotherapy as add-on therapy to pharmacological treatment of depression, a randomized controlled trial. Right, there you go. But yeah, it works. So put it in that, you can actually look at it and it works really well. Well, that's the end of the episode. My friends, I hope you've enjoyed it and gotten a lot out of it. You know, you don't have to worry so much about other people think of you. Thank you, however, for the high regard that you have for the show assuming that you do. And even if you don't, leave me a comment. We always want to get better. If you think I made an error on something, let me know, because I want to know first, not last. Your thoughts at, you can email them to me at officehoursatarththorbrooks.com or leave a comment on any of the places where you're watching or listening to this show. We're looking at that, we're monitoring that all the time. Like and do subscribe. The YouTube channel is really increasing in subscribers all the time. Please subscribe on Spotify and YouTube so that the stuff is actually sent to you. And you don't have to look for it every single week. And liking it, once again, great for the algorithms, not just for my ego. Follow me on social media. There's all kinds of complimentary content, Instagram, LinkedIn, other platforms. My new book is Behind Me, The Happiness Files. I'll be talking about the new new book, which is actually going to be coming out in March of 2026. InduCourse. And I'm really looking forward to hearing from you. And most importantly, what I'm delighted about is if you find this useful spreading into other people because the world needs more love and happiness. And we got to be in this together to give the world what it needs. See you next week.