Mental Strength Hacks for Everyone – Amy Morin #579

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You're listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. Today's guest is a psychology professor from Northeastern University who did a amazing TEDx talk called the Secret of Becoming Mentally Strong that is one of the most popular talks of all time with 9 million views to date. And her name is Amy Morin. In addition to being a psych professor, she's a licensed clinical social worker, a psychotherapist, and has written three best selling books translated into 33 languages. That's like at least 10 more languages than all the bulletproof stuff has been translated into. So she's a very successful author and her books are all called 13 things mentally strong People Don't Do. And she's joining the show today to talk about, well, 13 things you don't want to do. Because if you listen to Bulletproof Radio, you care about being mentally strong, among other things. Amy, welcome to the show.

Thanks so much for having me.

How did it feel when the Guardian called you the self help guru of the moment?

This is really surreal time, I think, to look and think, wow, here's this newspaper on the other side of the pond over there talking about me, number one. And number two, to call me the self help guru of the moment. It was really interesting.

It's pretty odd. Last month Men's Health ran a major piece on me where I had the, well, I guess it wasn't embarrassing, but it felt embarrassing at the time moment of taking my shirt off from Men's Health magazine as a former 300 pound guy. And they called me, I think they called the article the Guru's Dilemma. So, like, being labeled a guru is kind of like, ew.

Right, right.

But on the other hand, like, if you're sharing good advice, you're at least a source of knowledge, but who needs guruship.

Right? That was my response too, I think was, ooh, guru. I didn't really want to be called a guru of anything, but to be called this self help guru, maybe that's not the worst thing in the world.

Yeah, no, it's, it's odd. And I guess there's people who really like, oh, I wanted to be a guru, but like, I just wanted to help. It's a different animal. All right, before we get into the, the way you got into this, you know, 13 things that mentally strong people don't do list, I want to know, why are you a psychology professor? Because most psychologists I know and I have many who are dear friends, most of them kind of had crap childhoods. Or they have some reason they wanted to study psychology. Like they were called to it for a reason. Are you one of those?

No. So I was a pre med major and thought, oh, I'm going to help people talk about their bodies and fix problems. And it was actually my first day of college. We were dissecting cats, and everybody else in the room was super excited, and I wasn't. And it dawned on me. I don't actually want to be a doctor. I just wanted. I like the idea of being a doctor. So I called my sister and said, okay, quick, I need a new major. I don't want to do this tomorrow. What do you think? And she was a psychology major. And she said. I was like, I think I'll just do psychology as well, and I'll change it later on. And she said, why don't you. Why don't you go with social work at least? Because then you'll. You can have a social work license when you're done. And I thought, all right, that sounds good. So I switched it, fully intending that down the road I would switch to something else. But then I sort of fell in love with it.

And if you heard some cool sounds in the background there. Amy actually lives on a boat, which is a lot of people's. Well, it's one of the 13 things mentally strong people do do, apparently. But anyway, you may hear the cool boat sounds in the background. This will be the second podcast I've ever recorded on a boat. So there you go. Cool. So you decided you didn't want to be a doctor. Well, the good news is that maybe you dodged a bullet. My wife is a doctor, and having dissected her share of cats and human cadavers, she developed a sensitivity to formaldehyd, which is what they used to pickle them all. And it's something that even to this day, she notices formaldehyde areas, like, oh, headache. So maybe you avoided that.

Yeah, I think it was probably good. I figured out early on that was not the career for me.

All right, following your path, that's one of the rules and game changers. Doing what you're here to do, not what you're supposed to do, is something that's powerful. All right, so you got there because it wasn't med. All right, I get you. Now, a lot of people don't frame what they do in terms of here's what not to do. And I'm really attracted to your work because the number one thing in how to become bulletproof is stop doing the things that make you Weak because it's really easy to go lift more stuff, but maybe lifting more stuff isn't the highest return on investment. How did you frame your work and just your learnings in this weird negative way, as in what not to do well?

So I was working as a psychotherapist. It's early on in my career and they really taught me build on people's strengths, find out what people are doing well and encourage them to keep doing that. And so I did at first. And at some point along the way though, I thought, you know, I'm doing people a disservice. If I wanted to become physically strong and I was going to see a trainer and they said, go lift weights, great, but if they didn't tell me to quit eating so many donuts, I wouldn't see the results that I wanted. I'd rather give up eating all those donuts than spend another hour on the treadmill. And it's sort of my personal journey led me in this interest in mental strength on a deeper level. Shortly after I became a therapist, my mom passed away suddenly. And I thought, okay, now it's not just about teaching other people how to be mentally strong. I really want to know for my, for my own purposes, how come some people go through tough times and they're sort of reduced by it, but other people go through hard times and they find strength in it and they come out on the other side stronger than ever. So I started studying the people in my therapy office with this new sense of passion and I started looking at them and I realized that people who were stronger than others, there were certain things that they just didn't do. So that no matter what they went through, no matter what sort of practices they were doing, as long as they didn't do certain things, they came out mentally stronger. And in my personal journey I went through all sorts of more stuff in the, in the coming years. My husband passed away when he and I were both 26. He passed away unexpectedly and through my grief, really wanted to know how do I not do these certain things that I've identified in my therapy office? How do I make sure I don't stay stuck? And took years to get better to start to feel like, okay, there's light on the other side. But after it was about four years later, I got remarried and life was starting to finally look good. And then my father in law was diagnosed with terminal cancer and I thought, oh, now I'm going to lose another loved one. I lost my mother, I lost my husband, now I'm Going to lose my father in law. And so I wrote myself this list of what not to do. When I was done, I happened to have a list of 13 things. I didn't mean to sit down and write the 13 things mentally strong people don't do. It's really just a letter to myself. And I would read over that letter as often as I needed to to stay strong. And then I thought, well, if this is helpful to me, maybe it would help somebody else. So I published it online, sort of on a whim, and that went viral. It got read by 50 million people and therefore changed the course of my career. But I thought it was just really important to talk to people about, hey, if you want to, if you want to get better, if you want to go through tough times, it's about working smarter and not just harder. Don't do these certain things, and then all of your good habits will be much more effective.

You've demonstrated an amazing amount of resilience because most people don't lose their parents, their spouse, and a bunch of other loved ones until they're late 40s, 50s. And the normal course of human progress is you spend your 20s and early 30s going to a wedding every weekend. And then after that it calms down. Then it's baby showers for the next 10, 15 years and school events and all that sort of stuff. And then there's a few divorce parties scattered around there. And then it's the 50, 55, 60 plus. You start realizing, oh, my God, I've lost my parents. I've lost potentially a loved one. But then it comes down to, okay, now I'm 70 and I've seen several funerals at this point. And you kind of get good at it. But you did all that before you were 30, so you basically did your older person stuff. And in my case, I had most of the diseases of aging before I was 30 that I had the pleasure of overcoming. But you learned so much wisdom there. But what you did that was different is you said, all right, here's these 13 things. And because you got to practice three times, got to not being a very positive way of putting it, but say that that was the position you were in. What are those 13 things? I mean, give me a couple of those things. I'm sure half the people listening saw the blog post when it first came out, but just kind of walk me through, what is it?

So number one on the list is that mentally strong people don't feel sorry for themselves. That's because that's where I was when I was writing this letter. I was in the midst of hosting a pity party. So that ended up as number one on the list. Don't feel sorry for your. Another one's. Don't give away your power. Which is really about when you say things like, you know, my boss makes me work late or my mother in law makes me feel bad about myself. Nobody makes you do those things. So taking back your power is about acknowledging that you're in control of your time. You're in control of how you think, how you feel, how you behave. Another one's about not resenting other people's success. In today's world, it's so easy to look around and think other people are doing better or that somehow other people are taking away things from you, whether it's money or that they have more fame, more fortune, more good luck, and that somehow they're. They're robbing you. So really the whole list is sort of these things that we all do sometimes. It's not a list of, yeah, I do that, or no, I don't. I guarantee we've all done these things at least a few times in our life. But it's also things that we can choose to give up and that if you, once you recognize them, you can't unsee them and you can start to recognize points in your life where you do them. And then you make a conscious decision of, how do I stop doing that?

Feelings are not generally subject to logic. We don't really, oh, I had a thought and then I had a feeling about it. Usually you have a feeling and then you make up the I'm feeling sorry for myself sort of thing. How would someone. I'm asking you, not just as the author of the 13 Things Mentally Strong XYZs Don't do, but just as a psychology professor, someone who's studied this a lot and someone who's lived through it. How do you do that little mental trick of saying, okay, I'm feeling sorrow, but now I'm not feeling sorry for myself? Because a lot of people get stuck there.

Yeah. And so I think it's super important to recognize, all right, feeling bad can be healing. If you're grieving, you're going through tough times and you feel sad, absolutely healthy. But it crosses over that line when you start to think, my life is worse than everybody else's, nobody understands my problems. When you start to fall into the category of hopeless and helpless, and for every solution that you try to elicit from other people, then you find 101 problems, 101 reasons why it won't work. That's when you get stuck in that trap of thinking nothing's going to help. There's nothing I can do about this. And sometimes it becomes an excuse. I'm going to sit around this weekend and not go anywhere. I'm not going to do anything. I'm just going to sit here and sort of wallow in my misery. That's when it becomes a problem.

Okay, that, that makes sense. And it's, it's a lifelong skill. And when you just, you practice early, do you find that the best way to know when you're having a pity party? Because you probably don't know it. At least when you start it, like it feels real. Is it friends, is it family? Is it a therapist? Like what's the early warning system for the fact that you've fallen into self pity and you didn't notice?

I think when you start to recognize, okay, there's absolutely nothing I can do to make myself feel better. There's nothing I can do to make my situation better. There's nothing I can do to contribute to the world, to make the world better. Because some problems can't be solved. If you have a loved one with a terminal illness, you can't fix it. But you can say, well, what are my options? Do I, what could I do to make myself feel better? How could I take care of myself? How can I help my loved ones during this time? But when you're hosting a pity party is when you think, oh, there's nothing I can do. This is terrible, horrible and awful and my life is ruined. So. And sometimes your friends and family are the ones who can point it out. Maybe they're trying to offer you solutions. Maybe they're trying to say what if you tried this? And for every time they offer that, you come up with a reason why it won't work. You start thinking nobody understands, nobody cares. Think a lot of that terminal thinking. When you start thinking things are always horrible, things are never going to get better, always and never are. Some pretty good clues. Or when you're thinking nobody understands or nobody else has ever experienced this, those are all red flags that you're sort of exaggerating how bad your misfortune is.

Byron Katie's book the Work and she was on the show recently, she has a practice of asking herself, is this true? Yeah, like okay, a lot of your self pity probably isn't true. Any of those things you just said, all of those just a simple fact based thing, they're not true. But man, they sure feel true. Which is the challenge of just overcoming. How do we solve that? You also talk about how people who are mentally strong, they don't fear taking calculated risks. So how do you know that you calculated your risk right? I say this as someone who just did the world's first six hands total body stem cell makeover with four hours of, you know, having needles put everywhere, et cetera, et cetera. I don't know, I thought I calculated that risk pretty well, it seems like it turned out, but I don't know if I did it right. So how do, how do mentally strong people know they did it right?

So, you know, I think part of it is just being more aware. We take risks every day and we don't even think about it. And when we look at how we handle risk, it's kind of crazy. So if we take the same risk every day, after a while it doesn't seem risky. Take driving a car, for example. Most of us get behind the wheel or drive a car. You probably even speed sometimes and don't really think about it. And yet the things that scare us are bizarre. So it's scary to maybe take the stage in front of a group of people, or some people are terrified of flying. So a lot of our risks aren't based on any type of logic. It's just based on how we feel. So just recognizing how do your emotions affect your decisions? Well, when you're really excited about something, you'll overlook the risks. You'll underestimate how rough things could be. So if you're super excited about it, opportunity to make a lot of money, you might think, well, nothing bad will happen, and you jump in and just take it. And you become on the impulsive end of the spectrum. That's why some people fall for get rich quick schemes because they're so excited about the possibility of, of getting all this money. But on the other end, sometimes when we're, when we're already anxious about something else, maybe you're nervous about something that happened at home and you go to work and you have an opportunity to take a risk, your anxiety will spill over from home into work, and you'll think, no, I can't possibly take this risk at work, whether it's applying for a promotion or volunteering to be on a committee. So part of it's just becoming more aware of your emotions, recognizing how do my emotions affect this? And then to say, well, what's the logic of this risk? And did you really look at the potential benefits? The pros, the Cons. And did you evaluate it or did you just sort of go with your, your gut and think, I'll just do this without really putting any thought into it?

Oh, all right, that's. That's strong advice. I like that you went on from talking about what middle is strong people don't do. And you got into parenting. Do you have kids?

So I was a foster parent for most of my adult life. Right. It was one of the. From the time I was like a little kid, I was like, ah, someday I'm going to be a foster parent. And so as soon as I was in graduate school, my first husband and I became foster parents. And I had kids between the ages of 4, all the way up until 17. And after I was widowed, I decided, I'll do this as a single woman. And then when I got remarried, my second husband was on board. So for most of my life, I had therapeutic foster kids. I like the ones who were sort of been kicked out of every place they'd ever been. The ones that were considered somewhat unadoptable. My goal was to say, how do I make it so that these kids can, can be adopted before they turn 18. It's something I'm super passionate about. I've taken a break now that I live on a boat and I'm not home very often. But yeah. So to answer your question, I don't have biological kids, but for most of my adult life I've had foster kids.

Wow. Well, thank you for that. You're changing some lives in a really profound way just on an individual basis with doing something that requires that level of energy and care. And that probably would be the best possible background to write a book on what, 13 mentally strong parents. Wait, what was it? 13 things mentally strong parents don't do. Because you actually had a sample size of kids saying, okay, what happened here? What didn't happen? Abandonment, all that stuff. Dug in on that. And your list is really strong there. As a parent of two kids who has never been a foster parent, I gotta say this is a fantastic list. And I wanted to call out a couple things from things mentally strong parents don't do. One of them is you talk about making their children the center of the universe. Why did that make the list?

So it's one that I've seen, you know, a lot in my therapy office, but I hear a lot about too. And people will say, you know, your kids should be your everything, your kids should, your entire world should revolve around your kids. But we're seeing the consequences of that kids who think, kids who grow up with their parents entire universe is revolving around them grow up to think the entire world revolves around them. And that doesn't mean that your kids shouldn't be a top priority in your life, but it means that. That you can set limits. You can say, no, you don't have to do the things your kids want to do. I would see it in my therapy office all the time. Parents would come in and they have this kid, and the child just has never really dealt with a lot of things in life because the parents were willing to do whatever the child wanted to do 24 7. Whether they were traveling the country to go to sporting events just for their child, or they were spoiling them with everything they could afford. And they had the best of intentions, but at the same time, they were raising this child who just wasn't going to have the skills that they needed to deal with the fact that their future boss, their future mate, their future friends that they were going to have just weren't going to be able to meet these kind of demands.

I had one employee the first time, first time having a job out of school, and this person said, I'm going to show up to this thing. And it was a thing that had been planned for a long time. It was an important attendee. And then the evening before, it's like, oh, I'm not going to show up. Like, okay, that's out of integrity. You know, it's one of those things where at this company we do what we say we're going to do, and it's not okay to flake unless we're talking about a family emergency and all the emergency was a hot date, as far as I can tell. And I said, when I said it's out of integrity, they looked at me and said, it's out of integrity for you, but it's not out of integrity for me.

Interesting.

What do you do with that? I don't even know. But I was asking myself, all right, is this that being the center of the universe? Because integrity isn't about you or me. It's about, do people do what they say they're going to do? And that's what actually made that rule pop out or that whatever piece of advice pop out. What are some other things that you're seeing parents do today that maybe they didn't do 25 years ago?

Yeah, so certainly that's one of them. 25 years ago. Nobody was making their kid the center of the universe or very few parents, but another one is really Parents are taking responsibility for the way that their kids feel. When kids are bored, we cheer them up. When they're, we entertain them. When they're bored or when they're sad, we cheer them up. When they, you know, get overstimulated, we calm them down. When they're upset, we. We do whatever we can to. To make things right. And I think for a lot of parents, they have guilt about being working parents, or they have guilt, or they worry that if their child isn't happy all the time, that somehow they're doing something wrong and we're not giving kids the skills that they need. And as a college professor, I see this firsthand, but there's studies that when they surveyed college students and said, were you ready for college? Most of them said, academically, I was 100% ready for life after high school. But then when they say, well, what about emotionally? Almost all of them say, no, I don't have the skills to be lonely, to be sad, to be upset. I don't know how to deal with those things on my own. In fact, that was the one skill that college students say that they wish that their parents and teachers had spent more time working on with them was.

Actually being alone and, well, just being.

Having emotional skills so that you could handle being alone. And so I think it's super important that as parents, we give kids the coping skills that they need. And I think part of it's electronics, too. When I was a kid, if I was in the backseat of the car and it was boring, I just had to look out the window. Well, now you see kids and they've got these handheld devices and they don't know what it's like to be bored or when they're kind of lonely, they just turn on their smartphones and they're chatting with people. And so it really takes away a lot of opportunities to deal with real life emotions when they're constantly on their digital devices.

So they just need to feel their emotions. It's funny, I sat down with my daughter once. She was probably four or something. It was a while back, and she's like, I don't know what's going on. Finally we talked about it. It's like, oh, you're feeling an emotion. She's like, really? Yeah. And it was angst or I don't remember exactly what it was, but finally she just started wailing and it was like, oh, I feel much better. I said, oh, can you draw a picture of it? And she draws this red ball or something, like, great. And then she Went off and played. And it was so weird because I wasn't necessarily raised that way. But he was puzzled by this weird thing that was happening to her, because whatever that was, she'd never felt it or never noticed it before. But it would have been pretty easy to like, hey, let's have some ice cream, and grateful I didn't do that. Okay. If your parents didn't let you feel your emotions, let's say, okay, so now you're an adult, or, you know, young adult, or even an old adult, you're like, oh, there's emotions in there. Is there any remedial action that you should do to be more functional that way? I mean, is that going back to the 13 things mentally resilient people do?

Well, you know, I think a lot of us weren't right in my. In my house. We didn't really sit around and talk about our feelings or emotion words or anything like that. And I think it's something we're becoming more aware of. But a lot of people just never dealt with that. So I think when you become an adult, a lot of those people end up in my therapy office just because now they're like, what do I do with this? But it's never too late. Part of it, I think the very first thing is just label it. And when I talk to adults, I'll say, name as many emotions as you can. They usually come up with about four. Right? We have happy, sad, mad, angry, maybe. And after that, you think, gosh, we talk so much about emotional intelligence. Yet I've got a vocabulary of about four feeling words. And so I think sometimes just Google a list of emotions and maybe you hang it up on your wall and just look at it and sometimes say, gosh, how am I feeling today? And put a name to it. And that takes a lot of the sting out of it, but helps you become better at understanding. How do I feel today? And how might my emotions be clouding my judgment or affecting my decisions or fueling my behavior? And it just really helps you to become more aware. So that's just one super easy thing you can do to just start becoming more aware of how you feel.

That is actually really good advice. I work with a list of emotions at 40 years of Zen, the neuroscience thing that I do for personal development. But I've never thought of printing that list out and putting it on the walls. So I'll do a blog post for people with a list of emotions. It's actually a really cool idea. I'm going to do it with My kids. Which one of those do you have? What a cool idea. Thank you for that.

Sure.

Let's talk about women. One of my favorite topics. Just kidding. Your latest book was 13 Things Mentally Strong Women Don't Do. What made you decide to write a book targeted specifically for women versus a book about people?

Well, you know, my books have really been. Out of the first book. I got so many questions from parents about how do I raise mendeleye strong kids? That the parenting book was born. And when the parenting book came out, had a lot of questions from moms in particular, saying, okay, but how do I raise a strong daughter? Or how do I as a working mom, how do I go ahead and be. What's it look like to be strong? And I thought, you know, we have so many examples of strength and mentally strong people out there, but a lot of them tend to be men. We look at Navy seals, we look at a lot of male elite athletes. I thought, you know, we need examples of what does it look like to be a mentally strong woman, and does it look different than men? And how. How might we have those role models for girls who are growing up to say, okay, this is what it looks like. This is how it feels to be a mentally strong woman. This is what you can do. So I just really wanted to. And I think in looking back, probably a lot of the examples in my people book are men. And it was something. When I wrote the book, I probably, you know, I know there are plenty of women in there, but I suspect I've never haven't done the math on how many men compared to women. But I thought, you know, I just think there probably aren't nearly as many examples that we're talking about. They're out there, but a lot of the men get the limelight because when we think about strength, we talk so much about physical strength and these physical challenges and men who can submit themselves to all the rigors of, say, becoming a Navy seal, that we talk about that rather than what does it look like to be a woman who's mentally strong?

All I know is if you want to see how mentally strong women are, just look at the amount of sleep deprivation that happens after you have a baby.

Exactly.

If you can wake up in the morning after that, that's mentally strong.

Right.

And even today, women still do somewhere around 70% of the housework, which is lower than it was historically, but it's still not anywhere close to parity. So also, we have more women working than ever before. So let's see. More work And a greater share of what goes on operating a household, that takes mental strength. That's not even counting if you have kids. Yeah, just the idea of not having mental strength there just doesn't. It flies in the face of the facts. But we don't oftentimes recognize that. So I buy your perspective there. Question about Your list of 13 things for women specifically, is this based on gender based social constructs or is this more around research and science say this is what women do. Is this built in or is this what we learned?

I think a lot of it has to do with what we have learned as women. But I think a lot of the things are just so. Just become so common in society that we don't even necessarily recognize them. The more that I was researching, the more I was thinking about it, the more I would find, you know, just from the way that we start raising girls a little bit differently when they're born from how teachers treat girls in the classroom as compared to boys. And a lot of it's just become so ingrained that I think we've sort of accepted it and we don't necessarily even notice it. But I wanted to bring those things to light and talk about as women, how do you, how does that affect you? How do you get caught up in these bad habits and then how do you give them up?

So I guess I could sum that up as we're not sure, but a lot of it is learned openly.

I think so. I think so.

Okay, what's your favorite One of the 13 things that you wrote for women?

That mentally strong women don't downplay their success? Because I find that not to say that men are right and women are wrong, but we know when it comes to say, talking about our skills about, or achievement, men tend to go to one end of the spectrum. They're much more boisterous. They talk about all their skills. Even when they have the same amount of experience as women do, men tend to say brag a lot more. Women on the other hand, downplay it.

I'm feeling stereotyped right now.

So there's a study on LinkedIn where they looked at men versus women and ones who had the exact number of years of experience and they'd ask them about their skills. And the list for men was so much longer than the list that women would have. And, and I think, you know, as women, we don't want to sound arrogant, we don't want to be impolite, we don't want to look narcissistic. And so but it's to our own detriment sometimes that we will minimize our success because we don't want anybody else to feel bad. And one of the ways that, you know, just a simple way to look at it is how do women respond to compliments? I know a lot of men do this too, but women in particular, when they're complimented, they often will minimize it and say, well, oh, it's no big deal. Or we give a compliment back and say, no, you're amazing. Or we tend to sort of shrug it off. We think, you know, like, oh, this old shirt, I bought it for $10 or something like that.

Do you mean like being a guru and.

Right, right.

Caught you.

Rather than, well, you know, in this, how we say my lists, I come by them all honestly, including this one. But to just say thank you when somebody compliments me is uncomfortable. But I've practiced it and after a while I get more used to it. But just in looking at how women tend to respond to compliments, it's the statistics are something like, especially when women are complimented by other women, 80% of the time, they'll deflect it, they'll minimize it, they'll do something because it's just so uncomfortable. But it's okay to acknowledge your success. It doesn't mean that you're bragging if you just simply say thank you and somebody else acknowledges you and it's okay to talk about your achievement and it's okay to say, gosh, I'm proud that I put in a lot of hard work and here's what came of it.

It's funny that saying thank you thing didn't come naturally to me either. And I work with a variety of advisors, mentors, people way older than me who therefore have more arrows in their backs than I do, and energy workers and anyone else I find who has unusual skills that they'd like to share with me. And one of them was like, Dave, when people compliment you or say thanks or whatever, you got to say thanks. I'm like, okay, I can do that. But you're not saying it right. What do you mean? There's something that you're supposed to do when you say thank you for a compliment. You have to actually energetically receive the compliment. So it's one thing to kind of have a fake smile and go thank you. Can we go next? Another thing going thank you and actually feeling the things. And I've never talked about this on the air, but I actually went through probably a six month practice of reminding myself every time people say thanks to like, oh, thank you. To actually hear it and then feel the sensation of thanks, if there's even a word for that. And it was great advice, but it doesn't really make a lot of rational sense. But when people tell you thanks or they compliment you and you do that, they can feel that their compliment had an impact, and then they feel better about it.

Yes.

And you probably get this all the time. You walk somewhere, people recognize you, like, oh, thank you for your book. It changed my life. And then you go, oh, thanks. And you have to receive that. And I have similar experiences quite a lot, which I'm really grateful for. But it was actually work to learn how to do that. Right. So I love that you put this in your book, because receiving a compliment, there's a skill to that. And your parents don't teach you that. No one teaches you that.

Right, Right. And I think there's so much focus on humility. And so I love that you said that about receiving it. And to help yourself, try to at least feel it on the inside, too, because there is a big difference in just saying thanks and you keep walking versus, hey, thank you for acknowledging that. And then to take a moment and really feel it and think, okay, and it's uncomfortable. It's so bizarre. It is the words that are supposed to make you feel good feel so cringeworthy sometimes. But, you know, I think after a while, you get more used to it and it becomes more comfortable just being able to say thank you.

Yeah. You're making me question or ask myself, how can I teach my kids that skill? That's a tough one. You have any ideas?

Yeah. So you know that line between, you want to raise humble kids, but on the other hand, you want them to be polite and to receive a compliment. And so I think just practicing receiving it when they get a gift. If you write a thank you note not just to go through the motions of thanks for that gift, but to really say, you know, how do you. That person took time, they were shopping for you, what do you want to say? Or when somebody compliments them on how they played in the game or how they scored on a test or for being a nice kid, how do you just take a moment, say, you know, thank you for saying that to me, and then I think you can have a conversation with them afterward. How'd you feel when that person said that? And how'd you really feel? Because kids might say, good. Well, did you really feel good? Does it ever make you uncomfortable? So I think just about starting those conversations and noticing how they respond to compliments. And then for you to be a good role model and say, this is how I'm going to respond when people say nice things to me, too.

All right, I'll work on that with my kids. You have something else in here that stands out in your book for emotionally strong women, and you say they don't fear breaking the rules. Now, I've got a son and a daughter, and my son breaks rules, and I'm completely cool with that. My daughter does sometimes. But quite often the conversation comes like, well, that's not allowed at school. And we have this conversation. It's like, well, you know, there are lots of rules, more rules than you could ever really follow. And you got to decide, is it worth breaking that rule? Because there will be consequences if you get caught, but are the consequences worth it? And one example, their school, they have this ridiculous rule, you're not allowed to make snowballs. Come on, it barely ever snows. How could you not have snowballs at school? That's just sick and wrong. And if you're listening Waldorf school people, come on, lighten up. They should say, you're not allowed to put a rock bigger than so amount in the snowball and throw it at someone you don't like. That's at least where I grew up. But that idea of breaking it just seems like it's harder for her to break rules. And trust me, I'm the guy who's like, I'm going to live longer than I'm supposed to. I'll break a few rules. And like, I live that. I probably break more rules than I should. And at least I have historically, especially as a child. But I see the difference in my kids. And I got to wonder, is she getting it from her friends, she's not getting it at home? Or is this one of those gender things? Do you have any perspective on that? Like, how do women learn? Or how do we teach young women or children it's okay to break the rules?

So, you know, when they have done studies on this in schools, they found that American teachers are much more lenient when it comes to boys who break the rules because we have this sort of boys will be boys mentality. Other cultures that don't have that, boys and girls tend to act the same. The boys are better behaved, more in line with what we see from the girls. But it seems to be something I think a lot of kids pick up in school because teachers have that idea of boys are going to be more hyperactive, that they're going to Break more rules, they're going to be more impulsive, which isn't necessarily true. If we raise them the same, according to other cultures, kids will act the same. So I think that we're giving them just really subtle messages in society that girls need to be polite, you should be well behaved, you should be well mannered. We praise girls more for using their manners, that sort of a thing. And then look the other way when the boys are, you know, breaking their table manners, burping at the table or something, and we laugh at it, versus when little girls do that stuff, we tell them that's impolite. So, you know, I think even if they're not getting that message at home, I'm not surprised that there's other places that they probably aren't picking up on that.

So how do adult women who read your book become comfortable breaking rules?

So I think sort of like the question you said you ask your kids is recognizing, well, what rules are okay to break.

Like speeding, right?

Maybe you go five miles over the limit.

But not that I ever have, but I know some people do, of course.

But, you know, and when I was really looking at this too, I was thinking about women in history who've broken the rules and they sort of become trailblazers. At first we don't like them, but then after a while we think, oh, yeah. And one of my examples in this chapter was Catherine Switzer, who was the first woman to run it, run a marathon. And this was back in the late 60s. We thought women physically couldn't run a marathon. And so she just happened to sign up, she ran the marathon, and a lot of people weren't happy with her, but she didn't ask permission. She just went out and did it. And I think there's still things in our society that we think women can't do. And probably someday a woman will break the rule. And we think, oh, we could. And we just were tolerant of this for too long. So I think for women to just recognize, are there rules that I follow? Maybe it's an unofficial, unwritten rule. Sort of these societal things, these gender norms that we do, Could I do things differently? Why do I do this? Why do a lot of women, say, let their husbands drive the car? Why do the women do the dishes? Why do women, as you say, so many women, do the housework, that kind of stuff. And so I think it's just about recognizing what you do, why you do it, and think, is this a rule that's worth breaking? What are the consequences? And how might I Do things differently.

If you were to turn this around and write a book for men about things that were specific for men, I know you may be thinking about doing that. Are the rules that you would change of this list of 13?

Yeah. So some of the men that have read this book have said, gosh, this all applies to me, and I'm glad that men find value in it, too. But I tried to find things that specifically spoke about women about and that I could back up with research that affect women more. But when it comes to men, whenever I have this conversation, of course, the subject of toxic masculinity comes up where men feel like, you know, they can't talk to their friends about their emotions, that there's certain things that men have to do. So I think it would be a different list, but I think it would be similar in terms of, you know, vulnerability and emotions and the way that men think that they have to act in public in different gender norms that men deal with that women don't necessarily have to experience.

The third rule in your book for women is they don't see vulnerability as a weakness. And, you know, Lewis Howes is a good friend who's written about the mask of masculinity. And about five days ago, I had Nick Foles, the Super Bowl MVP champion, on stage with me at a talk I was giving. And he was talking about what happens in the locker room. He's Super Bowl MVP and just a really great, humble human being. And he said, no one talks about this, but a lot of the guys before they go on the field, they're literally throwing up. They have panic attacks. They're so worried and so worked up. But of course, no one's ever going to talk about it. No one's ever going to show up saying, this is how I manage my stress. Because every time you go out there, you just don't know. And there's 100,000 people watching you and all this stuff. And so I was just kind of amazed to hear that, because you hear this maybe from SWAT team people, and I've had some people on who've talked about that, just the innate stress responses, but the fact that they don't talk about it. So I kind of feel like women are allowed in today's culture just to be more vulnerable than men. But you're saying even so, women don't see that vulnerability as a weakness. And it seems like that is an area where guys probably have more of an issue with that. It's certainly something that I worked through in my early 30s. Around just being comfortable being vulnerable. Because that was certainly not something that was ever acceptable where I went to school anyway, they'd beat you up if you were vulnerable.

Right? And I find for women, when I was really writing that chapter, a lot of it had to do with women work. You know, if women are emotional as a leader, then often they get to be called crazy. Whereas if a man expresses emotions, sometimes we'll think, wow, he's a really good leader or is passionate about this. And so I think for women there's a game face that they have to put on, but it's in a different way. Whereas women, you know, behind closed doors with their female friends, they can talk about, gosh, I'm really anxious, I'm nervous, I'm sad. And then men don't. A lot of men say, I don't have the opportunity. I don't have anybody in the world that I could really express my feelings to and feel like it's okay to do that.

So that's something that I think is shifting. And sometimes it's just having really healthy friendships is a really part of that. And there are a lot of guys going back to your book on kids where you have kids and you end up for only 18 years not really putting time into friendships because you're putting so much energy making your kids the center of the universe. And that happens for men and women. But at least the studies that I've seen, probably not nearly as many as you as a professor of psychology, but are that women tend to have better friendships during that time than guys do, because guys are quite often just really career focused. And women, especially when you have young kids, you tend to spend time with other people who have young kids, so you get some mommy social time, whereas guys oftentimes don't. So maybe that's one that would be in there. Well, I think that you've done a pretty profound job of breaking down this huge number of things into very digestible, digestible bites in all three of your books that really, that really stand out. And I gotta ask you now, if you had only one thing that would apply to all of those audiences, the single most important thing that mentally strong people don't do, what would it be?

I would say that mentally strong people don't expect immediate results. I think in today's world, you know, of instant gratification. We want things so fast, but yet change. If you're going to change yourself, you're going to change your life. It takes time. And to know that progress doesn't always come In a straight line. Sometimes things get a little worse before they tend to get better. But that doesn't mean you should quit. You don't give up. You just keep going and know that it's not going to happen overnight.

It comes down to patience and resilience and just continuing to push. Yes, as long as you're not following that one other rule you have, which is they don't keep doing the same thing over and over. That doesn't work.

Right. Exactly.

That's the problem with advice. It's always easy to generalize. Except it's not easy to generalize the way you have, where you've made some really clear rules with good stories. So I think you've done a fantastic job of summarizing learnings that life brought your way early on and that you've studied professionally and put it into something that's digestible and noteworthy and worth sharing. So thank you for writing those three books. I think they're just worth people's time.

Oh, thank you.

I've got one more question for you that has nothing to do with your work. Throughout the history of Bulletproof Radio, the first about 600 or so episodes, I asked people this question. Three pieces of advice for people who want to perform better at everything as human beings, which would include parenting and being a man or woman or anything else. But I publish Game Changers based on that work that just came out recently, same publisher as you. And now I'm working on my next book, which is an anti aging book. So for the last 20 years, I run an anti aging nonprofit research group. And I'm out there in terms of rules I want to break around aging. And I started to ask everyone who comes on the show this question. How long do you want to live?

I think so I'm going to be 40 this year. So if I could live to be 140, if I had 100 more good years left, I would be ecstatic.

All right. Look at you. I love that answer. Now, why do you think that might be possible?

My hope would be that between now. So if I'm going to be 40 and you know, and so I guess my average lifespan would be, what, early 80s, typically, if we looked at it, early to mid-80s.

Yeah.

So, you know, which would then say my life is half over. But if I were to think about the medical advances we've made in the first 40 years of my life, my hope would be that in the next 40 years we'll come up with some that will extend my life, things that will figure out how do you cure certain things, how do you prevent certain illnesses, how do you deal with.