Ryan Bush l Master Your Mind: The Algorithms Behind Anxiety, Identity, and Becoming Who You Are

Studying and mastering this thing we call anxiety, I decided to make that the first sort of deep dive that I did into how psychotexture is applied to a specific psychological challenge. And so I really immersed myself in the research. I read many dozens of books on anxiety to try to build a really comprehensive understanding of it. And it wasn't long before it had sort of illuminated this model of exactly what causes anxiety and what can sort of cure it, what can eliminate anxiety.

What if your thoughts aren't just reactions, but code you can actually rewrite? Today I sit down with Ryan A. Bush, creator of Psychitecture, to explore how our beliefs, emotions, and habits function like mental algorithms and how we can redesign them to build a more resilient, aligned, and fulfilling life. We dive into anxiety, identity, and what it really means to become who you are.

Very happy to be here today with Ryan Bush. Welcome, Ryan.

Thank you, Fleet. I'm happy to be here.

Well, we're really happy to have you. I, I read your book over a year ago and I found it absolutely fascinating. And so I've been looking forward to this interview. So I'm gonna share your bio first and then we'll jump right into the conversation. Sound good?

Sounds great.

Okay. So Ryan A. Bush is a thinker, designer, and founder of Designing the Mind, focused on building better systems, better people, and a better future. His work integrates wisdom from ancient and modern thinkers such as Lao Tzu, Buddha, Marcus Aurelius, and Nietzsche to create a new vision for psychological growth and self-mastery. As a designer, Ryan works with tech startups and organizations to create award-winning products and experiences, bringing patented physical products from concept to market and building digital platforms and apps. He's also the co-founder and chief design officer at Nomad, where he continues to innovate and rethink complex systems. His ideas have been featured on platforms like Psyche, Lifehack, Modern Wisdom, and The Art of Manliness. Ryan is the author of Designing the Mind: The Principles of Psychitecture and offers transformative programs like the Anxiety Algorithm, providing practical frameworks for expanding human potential. And as we were chatting before the interview, you have a newer book out. What's the name of your most recent full-length book? "Become Who You Are." "Become Who You Are," great. All right, so let's start off with this idea of psychitecture and how you developed that. So you introduced this concept to describe the process of designing and changing one's own mind. I wonder if you could share how this concept emerged in your life and how you understand how our understanding of what happiness is and how we develop more happiness and joy in our life kind of fits into this overall framework of psychitecture.

Yeah, well, it's a long time in the making. I think the first traces emerged when I was a teenager still, and I was just starting to become really fascinated with the inner workings of my own mind and other people's minds. Particularly, I was always excited if I could change an emotional response in some way. So if I would face some setback that would normally upset people, normally upset me, I was sort of discovering new ways just through my own inner experimentation to try to rewire those emotions, right? Work them around so that I could feel a positive emotion or neutral even after something seemingly negative happened. And, you know, it was really a building fascination from there. I didn't know that, you know, the Stoics and the Buddhists had beat me to a lot of these ideas by a couple millennia at the time. I was just kind of experimenting with myself and figuring it out. And it wasn't too long before I started studying these other sources. I got really into Stoicism. I got really into Eastern philosophies. Other philosophies like Nietzsche have been really inspiring. And then I, you know, even later than that, really started getting into the psychology and the psychotherapy behind it. So I really took a quick liking to CBT when I discovered it. Cognitive behavioral therapy really inspired a lot of this, and learning that that had its roots in Stoicism also really, really started getting me excited about the connections between all these things around that same time when I was in college, I first went into computer science and, and started learning about, you know, software and algorithms. And then I ended up switching over to product design and getting my degree in that. And so that led to a lot of the creative problem solving, design thinking sort of elements to all this and the systems thinking behind it. And so ultimately I ended up sort of weaving it all together. You know, I was working a job as a product designer at the time and And I just started finding that my notes I was taking were like crashing my notes app. There were so many of them on all these interrelated topics. And I, I kind of felt like, you know, I was waiting for someone else to write this book that, that essentially takes our psychological states and puts them into this software metaphor that we can use to sort of reprogram them. And no one, no one did. So I figured I had to write it. So I sort of went part-time and then eventually quit my job there and— And then, yeah, ever since I've been kind of exploring this concept of psychitecture and sharing different ways to rewire and reprogram your psychological algorithms, essentially.

Yeah, fascinating. I love that term psychitecture. We often talk about in our Rewiring Your Brain and Rewiring Summit series, we talk about rewiring the brain. We also talk about reshaping the neural architecture. So kind of the architecture of the psyche, if you will, and the mind and so forth. So I think it's a great term. And so in your own experience, you've also been somewhat transparent about your own struggles with depression. And I'm curious as to how that also led to the development of some of these interests and theories and so forth.

Yeah, this sort of picks up the story where we left off. So it was kind of during the period when I was part-time at that job and I was working on writing this first book, but it was, you know, my progress wasn't coming along fast enough. I was really struggling creatively with the process of putting all these pieces together. But more importantly, I was just, I was feeling more and more like I wasn't doing well at my job. I wasn't really, you know, I had coworkers who'd sort of taken like a— or one, one in particular who sort of took an instant dislike to me. And so I was, I was sort of battling with that. And then of course there was a global pandemic during that time, which doesn't tend to help make things better. And so I was finding that I was getting cut off from a lot of the domains that my self-esteem had normally come from. I, I was disconnected from a lot of my friend groups during this lockdown period. I was, you know, working this, this job where I was becoming increasingly alienated. I was, I was increasingly doing work that I really wasn't good at as the product cycle matured. I wasn't doing the creative design work anymore, and I was, I was really doing kind of tedious engineering drawings that I was, I was just not good at. And so all this led, I think, to a place where I couldn't really see what I was good at. I didn't really have evidence of my own personal strengths, and I had never really experienced that. I'd always kind of had pretty high, healthy, high self-esteem my whole life. But during this year, I kind of got to experience what it was like to not feel good about myself and to— , you know, gradually sort of sunk into a, what I would describe as a mild to moderate sort of depression. And luckily it was pretty short-lived. It was really just for that one year. Um, I, you know, after that I got out of that job and into a place that was much, uh, sort of harnessing my strengths much better. I, you know, wrapped up the book and published it and, and was able to start, you know, interacting with readers who were saying that this book was changing their lives and, and And all of this served to sort of bring me back at least to the same, you know, to my normal point that I was at before, probably beyond it essentially. But it did teach me a lot about depression and the nature of wellbeing and self-esteem. And so that essentially inspired the theory that went into my second book, "Become Who You Are," which is called Virtue Self-Signaling Theory. And so it really just explores the actual levers of our wellbeing, the core components that bring us up toward what the ancient Greeks called eudaimonia and down toward what we now call clinical depression.

Mm-hmm. So, and I wanna talk about that virtual self-signaling theory in a moment, but to begin with, you're, one of your key frameworks in Designing the Mind is this, and you mentioned before recognizing these algorithms. So, and your work in studying computer programming. So in that book you talk about when we have habituated behaviors, various habits or so forth that aren't serving us. And in order to look at how to change those, all these habits can be looked at as a series of if-then statements. So there's some kind of stimulus or cue and then we generally have a habituated condition reaction. And that leads to a certain result. And there's just all these patterns of those. So one way to look at redesigning the mind and for one that really serves us and empowers us and leads to the kind of behaviors that create the results we're hoping to manifest in life, we can just look at these if-then statements and begin sort of rewriting them so that there's always gonna be these various stimuli and cues. So can we respond to them differently with a kind of different algorithmic a design and get a different result. So I wonder if you could talk more about how you kind of developed that and maybe talk about, you know, how that plays out beyond theory about really how you maybe took that approach to actually redesigning some of your own emotional patterning, thinking, beliefs, and habits and so forth.

Of course, yeah. So I think it's pretty clear to just about everyone that our mental phenomena are interconnected, our beliefs, our emotions, our habits and behaviors, that there's clear connection between a lot of these. And this is, you know, well established in a lot of different fields. You know, you can look at, you know, I was mentioning earlier cognitive therapy. This makes very clear that our thoughts are essentially the triggers for our emotions. It's not just a direct response to what happens to us. It's the way that we interpret it. So, so, what happens is first filtered through our beliefs and our thoughts, and that ends up triggering different types of emotions, right? We can look at behavior change where, you know, it's clear that, that the way that we set things up, the inputs in our environment and the consequences we structure for ourselves influence how motivated we are to take a certain behavior and, and to stick to a habit or to break a habit. And also if we just look at the pure belief space, the, the cognitive realm, we can see that cognitive biases have this same sort of a relationship. There, there's inputs coming in, there's some modification to it that results in the output of a belief or an emotion or behavior. And so what, what psychitecture sort of does is it puts all of these findings from various fields into a common framework that we can make sense of a lot of even ancient wisdom through.

Yeah.

If you look at a lot of the ideas of Ancient thinkers, you can see it as this kind of, uh, open source cognitive code that allows us to go and identify this algorithm, uh, in our minds that's causing whatever we want to eliminate that, that negative emotion, for example, and rewire it by, by altering that emotional trajectory. Uh, and so, yeah, I, I think one of the best examples of this is, is looking at cognitive therapy and, and seeing how. You know, you see, for example, a lot of extreme polarized thinking in people who are depressed. So you can identify, oh, people think that they are either a total success or a total failure. There's no in-between. And so they'll hold these beliefs of, oh, I missed an appointment, I must be a total failure, right? And a lot of what CBT does is it kind of teaches people, no, there's a whole space in between. You don't have to be one of those extremes. And so changing that thought of, oh, I'm a total failure 'cause I missed this appointment to sort of an alternative balanced belief of, oh, like I missed an appointment, that's unfortunate, but I make most of my appointments. I usually stick to a good schedule. So, you know, I'm not perfect, but I'm not a total failure for this reason. And so going in and kind of restructuring these on a case-by-case basis allows you to gradually build a better, more robust mind that's less vulnerable to, setbacks and, and things that would normally cause you to suffer. And, and it can become a, a sort of lifetime art, a lifetime discipline of gradually restructuring beliefs and emotions and behaviors to, to build a better and better mind.

Mm-hmm. Um, I'm, I'm curious about, um, you know, you mentioned CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy, and there's, uh, um, as you said, you've been influenced by the, the Buddhist teachings as well. And there's one of the things that's come into our modern secular mainstream world from Buddhism is mainstream mindfulness. And so you have mindfulness-based CBT, MBCT, mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, and developed by Siegel and others. And so within the cognitive behavioral work, it seemed to be kind of on a spectrum from some of your earlier cognitive therapies— Which kind of, I'm thinking of, oh, I won't be able to think of the author right now, but some of the early models were basically there's bad thoughts that lead to bad results. So take out the bad thought, replace it with a good thought, and you'll get a better result. To the other end of the spectrum, which are considered more kind of acceptance-based cognitive therapies where there's at least some context of learning to be with our experience with some level of acceptance, the willingness to kind of feel what we're feeling, and then from there beginning the process of kind of reprogramming, as opposed to doing it from a more kind of surgical, you know, good/bad approach. And I'm curious about what you've discovered along that spectrum and where your work fits kind of within that.

Yeah, you're probably thinking of Aaron Beck and Albert Ellis, the sort of founders of— Absolutely. CBT. And, and yeah, so the third wave practices, I think, introduce a really important element that has been really a staple in all of my work. If, if you read one of my books, uh, or take one of my programs, before you even get into the psychitecture, like the actual changing stuff, uh, there's gonna be talk about metacognition and mindfulness and defusion. And this is a, a really important step that I think, yeah, it was neglected early on in CBT's history, which is that a lot of people aren't really aware of what's going on in their minds. And if they are aware of it, they're sort of fused with it. They're identified with it. They're not really able to step back and see a thought for a thought. It just looks like reality. Uh, and so what has been introduced in these later therapies, and of course is in Buddhism and, and a lot of other practices, is learning to step back and simply observe and accept what's going on. I don't really think that there's this conflict that has sort of been made out between accepting what's going on in your mind and changing what's going on in your mind. You know, you hear people arguing about this, but ultimately, well, of course you should accept what's going on in your mind right now. Of course you need to be aware of it in order to do anything else. But I, I don't necessarily agree with the mindset that we should accept and then do it some more. We should build awareness and then just keep maintaining that awareness. I think that in itself can solve some problems, but not all problems. And so I think that's step one. That's the prerequisite to psychitecture is that you practice some form of mindfulness. You develop a level of metacognitive awareness. So you are able to notice your thoughts and your emotions. And there are, there are several other practices for doing this. Mm-hmm. You know, Eugene Gendlin's focusing has been really powerful for me, actually noticing my emotions, being able to observe them and say, oh, look, that's, that's what's happening in there. And here's sort of what's causing it. But yeah, so that's sort of, that's in chapter 1 of Designing the Mind. And that's kind of, kind of the first step to a lot of this stuff is defusing from your thoughts and emotions, learning to see them as just that instead of simply as reality. But then you can really get into the fun stuff, at least the way I frame it, which is you can actually start modifying and altering these things.

Mm-hmm. And for our audience that's less familiar with the whole spectrum of cognitive behavioral therapies, some of the other third-wave therapies, dialectical behavioral therapy and acceptance commitment therapy, people may have heard of some of these. And so I agree with you that I think that's a false argument around the acceptance quality. I think what's sometimes pointed to an acceptance is just as we approach redesigning our mind, doing so from a perspective of kind of befriending ourselves and with some level of self-compassion rather than with some kind of, there's something wrong with me, or, you know, I've gotta somehow exercise this bad stuff outta me, that we can take a little gentler, more self-compassionate approach. But I think you're absolutely right. It does begin where mindfulness really begins is that defusing from our experience, getting that, that little bit of distance so that we can be aware of what's going on and the quality of metacognition you were pointing to. So let's talk about your virtual self-signaling theory and just tell us what all that's about and how it kind of integrates current neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and other disciplines.

Yes, I will try to summarize it in a fairly concise way. It does get into the weeds of evolutionary psychology and clinical psychology, But essentially, there are a number of realizations that became clear they were very much interconnected. And one of them I think has to do with just the deceptive nature of wellbeing, right? We can see that a lot of the things we would expect to make a person really happy or that we would expect to make them really unhappy actually don't have that kind of long-term effect. So winning the lottery, for example, it doesn't end up resulting in way higher happiness levels. In fact, you know, lottery winners and paraplegics a year after their incident supposedly have the same levels of happiness that they did before. And some people have sort of concluded that, oh, you just return to a set happiness level no matter what. And I think really, The correct takeaway here is that these superficial sort of life changes, these changes in circumstance aren't really pulling the levers of our happiness. But that doesn't mean that nothing is. It's become very clear to me that there, you know, my happiness has changed pretty dramatically over the course of my life, particularly during that one year that it was much lower than before. And what was notable about that is that I always had a very high view of myself. I had a very positive view and I had reason for that view. You know, there were definitely periods where that was disrupted. For example, you know, I noticed when I was in high school, when I would go into a summer break and be so excited that I didn't have to do school, I didn't have to do anything. I could just stay home and lay in bed and play video games. It wasn't ever long before I was kind of hating it. I was kind of miserable and wasn't sure why. You know, it seemed like the best thing in the world, but it wasn't. And, you know, you see this kind of thing in a lot of people who are depressed. You see that they are, you know, not very active. They often have very idle, sedentary lives. And you can see this as a symptom of depression as well. And you can see, you know, low self-esteem and negative self-critical monologues as a symptom. Uh, but I think there's actually more evidence for the alternative, which is that your beliefs are what result in, in your wellbeing level. And the actions that you take are essentially feeding into your beliefs. In other words, you are as happy as the actions you see yourself taking. When you see evidence of the kind of person you are and you approve of that person, uh, your happiness level increases your overall sort of deep wellbeing increases, when you bring out what I call your virtues, your greatest personal strengths, your brain is observing that and it's regulating your mood accordingly. And similarly, when it can't find any evidence of those virtues, or worse, when it sees evidence of, of vice, of things that you actively disapprove of, that you would disapprove seeing someone else do, that sort of lowers this dial in your brain. And I think there are evolutionary origins for why our brains would do this. It's sort of rooted in social status and mating, uh, that our brains are essentially designed to regulate our mood according to the virtues or the strengths that it perceives in our own behavior. Uh, but that's the idea. And it, and it really goes all the way down to, yes, clinical depression, uh, where you, you have to either intervene at a behavioral or a cognitive level in order to improve things. And also all the way at the peaks of happiness, when we study, you know, the happiest people, the people that Maslow was calling self-actualized individuals, the people who were studied in, in cognitive therapy and what again, the ancient Greeks called eudaimonia, which was this sort of deep wellbeing. It really is based on these, these core virtues that we pretty much admire universally, cross-culturally, we have these deeply ingrained into our minds. And so eudaimonia, this ultimate wellbeing, is the product of essentially aligning who you are with who you would most admire through a gradual action-oriented process.

Mm-hmm. That's really interesting. It seems like what you're referencing is a kind of evolutionary organic, like happiness, seeing happiness as an evolutionary organic behavior modification program that's in there to help us move in the direction of virtue, virtuous behavior.

Exactly.

So yeah, that's quite an interesting perspective. Another one of the third wave cognitive therapies, Acceptance Commitment Therapy, One of the hallmarks of what's seen as evolutionary progress there is called psychological flexibility. And I wonder if that's a term that resonates with you within both your practice and your theorization around this, of how a quality like psychological flexibility relates with eudaimic wellbeing. Yeah.

Yeah, I think it definitely aligns just being able to adapt your beliefs, your views of yourself, your behaviors, not being too rigid and all that. That's, I think, an important part of actually changing those underlying beliefs and behaviors. And in general, yeah, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy has been one of the many influences behind that. You know, it really emphasizes values in a way that. I don't think CBT normally does. So it, it, it talks about value-aligned action, essentially. That's the next step. And I, I think there's, you know, a really elegant integration in, in all this because, you know, if you look at CBT and you look at, you know, if you read a book by one of these thinkers, you find that, that people who are depressed, they have these thoughts that are very much centered around their own virtues, their own alignment with their own values. You know, it's, it's, it's not often pointed out, but it's very self-oriented, these thoughts, and they're very much about how well I am aligning with the things I most value. And so it makes sense that actually setting a patient up for, for behavior that aligns with their values through things like behavioral activation would be a really important part of this process. And so I think that's one of the benefits of these later waves is it's not so focused around just altering beliefs. There's a great Goethe quote that basically says, if you wanna find out who you are, it's never by thinking, but always by doing. Do your duty and you'll know at, you know, you'll know who you are essentially. And so what these practices like behavioral activation do is they have you actually take action that you admire, that bring more pleasure and mastery and ultimately that relate to your values so that you are giving yourself that evidence. You don't need to necessarily play mind tricks with yourself, you can't even deny it 'cause you're seeing your own actions and you're drawing conclusions from it.

So contrasting eudaimonic wellbeing with hedonic wellbeing, which is basically we're happy 'cause things are going our way, we're experiencing more pleasure than pain and things like that. You've developed a model of, you talk about navigating life in 3 dimensions. That leads to this quality of eudaimic wellbeing, sometimes also called psychological wellbeing, which often includes a sense of basic competency, value alignment that you've been describing, ability to kind of handle our lives. And it could even be a level of self-regulation, self-leadership, self-mastery. These kind of things lead to this psychological eudaimic wellbeing. So talk about these three dimensions and how that— Yeah. Plays into that.

Yeah. So this is sort of a visual model for the virtue self-signaling theory that I think is pretty practical, something that people can use to sort of plot their direction in their lives. Essentially, I lay it out. You can imagine a chessboard sitting in front of you. If you think about the x-axis, the left and right on the chessboard, this is essentially pain and pleasure. And so further to the right is more pleasure, more to the left is more pain. And then you've got the y-axis, which is loss and gain. And so you move further away from you on the chessboard or closer to you, that represents, you know, you've experienced some positive circumstance in your life. Maybe you got a promotion, you know, or loss, which is maybe you lost your job. Right. And so what I argue is that naturally we're sort of wired to navigate our lives on this two-dimensional chessboard, right? So we're trying to maximize pleasure, we're trying to maximize gain and minimize loss and, and pain. And the problem with this is that people who navigate their lives on this often find, well, this doesn't really add up. I, I've achieved the things that I'm supposed to. I've got hedonic pleasure in my life. I've got, I'm not fulfilled. I'm not happy. And, and you've got the opposite. You got people who don't have these things and yet they seem really deeply satisfied. And so what I do is, is I essentially extrude a, a third, third dimension out of this chessboard. So if you imagine sort of a topographical chessboard with mountains and valleys in it now, I, I argue that this is what's really pulling the strings of your happiness is this third dimension. And, and if you, if you look at it that way, Really, if you think that you are happy because you got that promotion or something, you, you're really being sort of deceived by what this third dimension is doing. That's really the reason you're more fulfilled. And this third dimension is essentially virtue. I've mentioned it a couple times. I know it's kind of this outdated, stuffy, preachy-sounding word, but I really don't use it in that way. It's the way the ancient Greeks used it. That's, that's a truly sort of beautiful, colorful view of ethics, which is essentially, it's your greatest strengths. It's, yeah, it's, it's not necessarily just moral, right? Compassion and creativity and charisma. These are all virtues. So are courage and, you know, a lot of these others. But you can, you can think about Martin Seligman's 24 sort of virtues that he's studied in different cultures, right? There are a lot of these things like honesty that we value, but also things like humor. And, and so, uh, these traits and, and the degree that you are exercising them and seeing evidence of them in your own life, this is what's really determining how satisfied in your life you are. And so you can have the extreme pleasure and, uh, gain in your life. You can have a cushy job that doesn't require you to do anything that, that's paying you a lot of money. You can go and spend that money on all kinds of momentary pleasures. You're not going to feel deeply satisfied if you're not bringing out your greatest strengths and you're not seeing those strengths in your own actions on a regular basis. And similarly, you can experience loss. You can experience pain and go through uncomfortable periods, and they can be deeply rewarding. You can look back on them as great periods of your life because even though you were low on the X and Y axes, you were high on the Z axis. You were high in virtue at that period of your life. And you have, you have reason to admire yourself during that period. And so this is essentially just illustrating in 3 dimensions, uh, the implications of this theory. But if, if you go very high on this terrain, you know, that's gonna be the most fulfilling period. And if you go really low on it, like I went through during that period where I didn't really have a whole lot of evidence of the things I was best at, you're gonna be at risk for depression. And, uh, and yeah, so this is, uh, this is the framework that I sort of center the book around.

I like that. And this V-axis really is pointing to the deeper dimension of life. And you kind of referenced this from the classic Greek-Roman traditions and the Stoics, as well as in the Buddhist tradition, there's this admonition and recommendation, if you will, to not ground our life, to not ground our happiness or our wellbeing in things like loss and gain, pleasure and pain, the, I think called the 8 worldly beliefs and so forth, because these things are transitory and don't lead to lasting happiness. And another aspect of that, which kind of ties into the Stoic view, is when we have our happiness, our sense of well-being and happiness reside in circumstances, whether they're internal circumstances within ourselves or external circumstances, we really are giving our power away because we really can't control any of that. Sometimes we can influence things a little, but ultimately the only thing we really have any control over is our own mindset really, and what we're doing with our own mind, right? And so when we base our happiness and wellbeing on external circumstances, we're essentially giving our power away. We're putting the world in charge of our internal state. And so it makes complete sense to take this deeper view of what are the real causes of genuine happiness and well-being in an elastic sense.

Yeah.

And I think also the Buddhist view would very much focus on the idea of virtue. And not simply in the most simplistic sense of good and bad and morality, there's nothing wrong with that, but in a deeper view of virtue. Absolutely what you're talking about.

I think so. The Noble Eightfold Path is in many ways best practices for a virtuous life. So I think it is you know, subtly centered around that as well.

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So let's talk about anxiety for a moment, 'cause I know you've spoken about anxiety. And of course in our society, we both try to self-medicate anxiety and we also clinically medicate anxiety and we try to suppress anxiety and it's very uncomfortable. So it's understandable that we do that. And we develop a lot of coping mechanisms to deal with anxiety that are actually in the end not so helpful or have all kinds of collateral negativities. So you've talked about an algorithm looking at, again, like this from an algorithmic perspective, that rather than coping with anxiety or suppressing it, we could learn to master anxiety. So I think that's really fascinating. Could you talk about that? Yeah.

Absolutely. So, so yeah, after I sort of came through that period and I published the first book, which was sort of this high-level overview of psychitecture, I sort of, you know, I, I was gradually growing this audience. I said, I'm, I'm not wasting time. I'm gonna start building things. So I, I built this community called Mindform that, that has, uh, turned into this really beautiful community. But I also dedicated that year that the first book came out to essentially studying and mastering this thing we call anxiety. I decided to make that the first sort of deep dive that I did into how psychotexture is applied to a specific psychological challenge. And so I really immersed myself in the research. I read many dozens of books on anxiety to try to build a really comprehensive understanding of it. And it wasn't long before it had sort of illuminated this model of exactly what causes anxiety and what can sort of cure it, what can eliminate anxiety. And so the anxiety algorithm centers around 4 sort of nodes. And of course, this is visualized like all my stuff, but you've got the antecedent, which is the real-life trigger or the situation. You've got the arousal, which is your emotional response, your physiological response. Mm-hmm. You've got the appraisal, which is your mental interpretation, and then you've got the action. So 4 A's, that's the action you take in response to your anxiety. And these are essentially what is either, you know, increasing or decreasing anxiety. So for example, if you come across something that makes you nervous, that's an antecedent, right? Then it triggers this physiological arousal, your heart rate increases, right? You maybe start sweating. Right? This is all kind of unavoidable for the most part, but then you get into where you have an option. So one approach is you can interpret not only that thing that you're facing, but also these feelings that you're having as a danger. So you can say, oh no, no, I'm getting anxious. I might have an anxiety attack. This is not good. Uh, if you interpret that as a danger, it's going to feed back into the arousal. So you're going to get even more anxious because you've now interpreted that there's danger, right? And then that's going to feed back into the appraisal and so on. So it's going to become this vicious cycle where your thoughts and emotions feed off of each other to make you more and more anxious until potentially it does result in a panic attack. And then eventually when you do take an action, if you escape from the thing that incited all this, if you take some kind of behavior that removes you from the situation. That is additionally going to teach your brain, okay, this is really dangerous. This is— we're right to be anxious when I come across this. So let's keep that response or even increase that anxiety response. Now, the other options that you have are when you feel that first wave of anxiety, you can interpret it as nothing more than meaningless anxious arousal. You can interpret it purely as physiological noise that, you know, doesn't really warrant a whole lot of attention, right? You can notice it, you can acknowledge it, but you can say, okay, that's not really a problem for me. And even if it escalates, even if you feel your heartbeat increasing, right? If you don't resist it in any way and you actually lean into it, you'll find that you don't ever have a panic attack, right? Panic attacks are always caused by this mental resistance to the feelings. If you lean in and you say, that's fine, my heartbeat can, get as fast as it wants. It's not gonna give me a heart attack. That's not how anxiety works. That's okay. Just, just let it run its course. You won't have a panic attack, right? Because it, it's, it's essentially that thought process that creates panic attacks. Similarly, if you take actions in response to anxiety that your brain does not interpret as escape, if you, uh, just sit there and allow the anxiety for a moment, uh, allow the wave to come and then to subside, you'll find that that decreases your future anxiety response. If you, you know, th— this is pretty clear when it comes to something like exposure therapy. If you're scared of spiders and you see one and you don't run away from it, and maybe you even get a little closer to it, uh, that's essentially going to lower your anxiety response. It's gonna tell your brain, okay, maybe I really shouldn't be afraid of this thing. And I've done a lot of experimentation with this. I've, proven it really true with my own fear of heights. And I've applied it in many other ways, even when I didn't know I was applying it. My social anxiety when I was in 7th grade, I essentially, without knowing it, took on a multi-year-long exposure practice to eliminate that and, and have, have come quite a long way since then. So I've seen this demonstrated in many ways, but it applies to everything from tangible fears and phobias to panic attacks, to worries, right? It all essentially falls under the same anxiety algorithm. And there are clear leverage points for actually eliminating that anxiety from your life.

Oh, that's fascinating how our resistance to anxiety gets kind of then concretized and built into an algorithm that just takes us further and further into anxiety, even in the panic. And as I was listening to you, even before you mentioned it, I was thinking of things like exposure therapy and desensitization therapy and so forth. And so I've often worked with this, been teaching meditation for many decades and worked with a lot of students who are suffering from anxiety in one way or another. And anxiety can be very debilitating when it goes along that spectrum you were describing in a negative way. But I've often counseled them in the same way, just the willingness to be with it, to explore it, to give space to it, to be curious about it, right? And that in some ways anxiety, it depends on what you describe as anxiety. If it is the physiological arousal, then that may not necessarily be part of life. But what's stimulating that physiological arousal is part of life in that life is uncertain. Yeah. You know, when you start getting beyond the structures of our relative self, life is pretty groundless, pretty uncertain, impermanent. And the more sensitive to that we are, I think that produces anxiety. And I find some people struggling with anxiety are just kind of very open, sensitive people. They haven't dulled that down in a way some others of us have or compartmentalized it or, you know, in other words, shielded ourselves from it with distractedness and so forth. But they're experiencing that kind of groundlessness of life. So then there's the process of, okay, how do you make friends with that? And how do you learn to swim in those waters, right? You know, if somebody pushes you in a deep end of the pool, you don't know how to swim, you're gonna panic. But if you're a good swimmer, you might be irritated if they pushed you in with your clothes on, but sooner or later you'll start splashing around and probably start laughing because you're very comfortable in the water, right? Yeah. So it seems like it's a similar idea there of befriending and exploring and understanding what is anxiety, what are these cues, what's the ultimate source of it.

Yeah.

So, so that's the, that's kind of the worry component of this. So, so the Anxiety Algorithm program, it has 4 modules: fear, panic, worry, and then avoidance behaviors, uh, which is centered around procrastination and that kind of thing. Um, but the worry component, we really dig into, uh, these, these beliefs about how the world is or should be. And, and specifically, there's 5 distortions that we have to sort of overcome and expose ourselves to. And what you're getting at is, is Completely contained within that. So, so we've got first the utility distortion. A lot of people believe that they, uh, that their anxiety is serving them in some way, that worrying is a good thing, is a healthy thing, and that's gonna make it very hard for you to overcome it, right? You've got the security distortion, which is kind of what you're saying, the belief that we can attain a kind of safety or a permanence or a certainty in our lives when in fact none of that really exists. Everything is impermanent, everything is changing, everything is uncertain. That's simply And so the more thoroughly you can lean into that and embrace that, the less worried you'll be, right? You know, sovereignty is a big one. Thinking that you can control your life if you are just careful enough and you worry enough, you can control everything that happens to you, which of course is never going to be true. Adequacy, which is all about, you know, perfectionism, the belief that you can be perfect and live up to your full potential. And then catastrophe, which is kind of the idea that regardless of what happens, believing assuming that you won't recover or that you can't cope with it when in fact our minds are far more antifragile, far less vulnerable than we tend to give them credit for.

I wonder if those also play into, you know, in our search for happiness as human beings, we're often grabbing the wrong end of the stick. And, you know, there's that country western song, I think, you know, "Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places," right? And so I think you've talked about how, our intuitions about happiness and what will make us happy are often skewed. And I would assume they get skewed by some of those things you just mentioned. And I'm wondering how we can then kind of align our intuitions, or maybe you could describe what you mean by intuition for a moment. And then, but also, you know, this kind of internal framework that we kind of rely on to make choices and directions to go in, that we could better align that with the actual sources of happiness so that we make better decisions in the moment.

Yeah, so I think what you're getting at is kind of this idea that, you know, we can either go about our happiness through internal means or sort of external means. And this is a major message in my books. I kind of warn people early on, like, if you're here to, —rewire your mind so that you can just like get really fit or, you know, get, you know, get rich or whatever. Like, that's not really what it's for. And those things aren't really going to make you happy in and of themselves. And so it's really all about embracing the fact that most of the power to control our well-being is inside our own minds. And when we, when we try to achieve happiness through external means, we're most likely going to find that it doesn't really work. Even if we get what we want, which is not at all ever guaranteed, right? It's probably not gonna hit us the way we thought it would. And so you, we have an immense amount of power over our own wellbeing. We, we unfortunately can't change everything about society, right? There's a lot of things that could be a lot better, but we have a disproportionate amount of control over our own minds. And there have been ideas that, that are thousands of years old that are so neglected. They're not taught in schools, but essentially that they can dramatically change your wellbeing. They're more powerful than any technology, any medicine we've developed. I, I tend to call these psychotechnologies. But they're simple ideas that if you install them, install them into your psychological operating system, you can dramatically increase your overall wellbeing. And so I think these ideas, you know, maybe, maybe it's just because they're abstract. They don't have a physical form. They're not shiny things we can look at. But if we paid more attention to these and made them a bigger part of our sort of educational process, we could, we could increase our wellbeing and just the population's wellbeing dramatically. It's the most direct route to alleviating suffering. And cultivating fulfillment.

I'm curious what you think about, you know, before you were talking about there's this kind of evolutionary organic algorithm that motivates us towards virtuous, to virtues and value alignment because then we end up experiencing more eudaimonic wellbeing and that kind of lasting happiness. So, and even when in talking about rewiring our beliefs or rewiring the brain, there's all these kind of things we can do on one level of kind of relative reality that are gonna lead to greater wellbeing and happiness and so forth. And I know you've studied in the Buddhist traditions and in the Buddhist tradition there's something called Buddha nature or one of my teachers just called it unconditional basic goodness. And there's 3 basic views of human nature cross-culturally and historically. And that actually ends up being the dominant one if you study. But the other views are blank slate, that we're just a blank slate and whatever we're exposed to, we become. And then there's the idea of like the fallen nature of humanity, that we have some seed of evil in us or something. But I'm wondering about, you know, in my understanding of the contemplative traditions and in my own experience, through contemplative practices and introspection, metacognition, and some of the deep practices, we can drop into levels of our being beneath all the noise. Mm-hmm. Perhaps even beneath all the conditioning, where we experience this unconditional wholeness, this unconditional integrity, unconditional goodness that then becomes an ultimate source of wellbeing that maybe is even deeper and more lasting and less fragile to circumstances than a somewhat more constructed, albeit, you know, really wonderful source of wellbeing like you've been describing?

Yeah, so my worldview on this is that thanks to evolution, our psyche is sort of a mixed bag. It's not that we are under the core of it all where we're really truly good and pure or that we're deeply evil. It's that there is just a mix of tendencies and motives and desires built into us. Evolution really doesn't care.— the things that we consider ethical or not. It's all about what is adaptive and what serves our reproductive success. And so there is gonna be a mixed bag in there. But our values are, are a little bit different from our desires, right? I think there's a very meaningful distinction. Our, our values don't motivate us in the same powerful way. They're, they're very easy to ignore. But our values do seem to relate to these very good things. And I think that's by definition, right? If, if it weren't good, it wouldn't be one of our values. We, and you know, if we perceive it as good and we call it good, that's, that tells us that's what one of our values is. So I, I think it's inevitable that we're going to have to rewire certain tendencies and, and alter certain desires and behaviors in order to achieve that state that we actually highly approve of. Right. But, but there are these values that we see throughout cultures that we really do tend to admire in others. And I think going through and practicing psychitecture and re— rewiring the parts of us that we don't highly approve of, that we don't admire, is sort of the path to this. And so I, I think absolutely there are practices, uh, like this deep meditation that can bring us closer to that. Um, but I, I guess my worldview is not that that they're shedding outer layers and getting to the true, like, purely positive inner core of us. It's that they are rewiring us in strategic ways so that we can more closely align with our own values.

Mm-hmm. So yeah, it's fascinating to look at all these things through these different windows and, Anyway, we can deepen our understanding about what draws us in the direction of what we're calling well-being and lasting happiness. Seems to be an incredibly profitable way to focus our energy and attention. Let's talk about this idea of becoming who you are, this idea from Nietzsche, which I think you've done your latest book around. Could you talk about that for a bit?

Yeah, it very much relates to what we're talking about here. I mean, essentially, this is an idea that he proposed and kind of made a central part of his work, even though it's very cryptic. Not many people have ventured to interpret what Nietzsche meant when he said, "Become who you are," or "What does your conscience say? You shall become who you— that which you are." But I've sort of ventured to do that, and it very much lines up with what we're talking about here. It's the idea that you have— there's a sort of self, a template of your ideals that are sort of etched into your mind, right? It's in there. You can see when you approve of someone else's actions, right? If you look at— if you create a list, for example, of all the people you most admire, and then write out the, the specific traits that they demonstrate that you admire, you, you've sort of got a, a blueprint there for who your ideal self is. And chances are you're not that person. In fact, it's literally impossible to get all the way there. Uh, but that template is in many ways you, because it tells you it's a unique signature of your values that's only built into your brain. And so when we talk about becoming, We're talking about the you of your actual self, your actual behaviors on a regular basis, aligning more and more with that template of your ideals. And when you practice, you know, when you look at your life through this three-dimensional lens and through Virtue Self-Signaling Theory, you gain the ability to gradually become who you are, to become that template. And you organize your life around this process of, of self-becoming, right? This is really the most direct route to wellbeing. And I think even Nietzsche was, was aware of this. He, he criticized, you know, the ancient Greeks and the Stoics, but I think he had more in common with them than he realized. I mean, you can look at certain quotes where, where Nietzsche and Seneca, for example, essentially said the same thing using the same metaphors, right? The idea that You know, you can't— like the strongest trees are the ones that experience wind, right? If you protect a tree from the wind, it doesn't grow stronger. So this idea that you see in all these different cultures that it's not really about being comfortable, right? Our culture is sort of centered around achieving comfort, but ultimately character beats comfort and you could In many cases, you can choose the most uncomfortable route, and it'll be the more direct route to character and to virtue and to self-becoming that, that will determine your ultimate well-being. And so following that compass of your own admiration instead of the expedient or comfortable or seemingly successful route is much more reliable. And I think that's a major message of Nietzsche's work as well.

Yeah, absolutely. I've read countless accounts of some of the great yogis of the Eastern traditions and so forth who embraced discomfort at a level that most modern Westerners can hardly imagine. And yet it led to lives of complete freedom and joy and showed up as virtuous behaviors, incredibly altruistic motivated behavior and so forth. So, and it is amazing how in our Western culture, you know, I spoke before about that we keep grabbing the wrong end of the stick. And, you know, in some ways we are comfort-seeking animals. I mean, all animals seek to avoid discomfort and seek comfort. But as conscious beings, we can override that. But it's interesting that as a culture, we've become so comfort-seeking. And it's really to our own detriment. And it's not only, it's been physical comfort, but now we have kind of in this postmodernist era, there's a drive towards trying to create some levels of psychological comfort and emotional comfort and, you know, to create bubbles, imaginary bubbles of lack of challenge that we could live in and that somehow would be helpful to us.

Yeah.

Sure. Yeah. I, I think, you know, one thing is it is important that our discomfort be chosen as much as possible, right? If you look at people who, uh, go through something really difficult, who go through hardship and come out of it stronger, and you compare that to people who, you know, had something really awful happen to them, I think, um, you know, you got a much better shot at coming out of it actually better and more satisfied if you chose to take it on. As opposed to, you know, putting someone else in that position where they are forced to face a challenge, right? If you want to overcome your fear of swimming, right, you, you wanna jump in the water and force yourself to, but you don't wanna jump, you don't wanna push your kid into the water if they didn't choose to overcome their own fear of swimming. And I think that's a, a difficult challenge, but I, I empathize with those who are trying to decrease the amount that we challenge and offend other people because at the end of the day, you should be choosing to increase your own resilience and your own psychological robustness on your own and not having it forced upon you.

Yeah, absolutely. And we don't wanna in any way glorify poverty or any systemically caused injustices or discomforts. And at the same time, I'll just say we know from pretty extensive evidence and sociological anthropological research that often people who live in circumstances that modern Westerners would consider pretty uncomfortable are actually much happier on the whole than we are.

Oh yeah.

Even though maybe they didn't particularly choose that. But there is something about our overweening attraction to comfort that I don't think is making us happy.

No, I totally agree.

So we're coming towards the end of our time, Ryan. I wonder if you can speak to what you think might be like maybe one of the beliefs or if you will algorithms that really stands out for you as, most getting in the way of people's ultimate happiness or ultimate wellbeing or eudaimic wellbeing?

I think one big thing is that despite the fact that discomfort can be, can ultimately lead to greater rewards, I think in some cases we justify suffering to an extent that we, we shouldn't, right? A lot of people are sort of under the impression that our emotions are all there for a reason and they're all, they all speak to us that we can learn from all of them and we shouldn't try to eliminate them. And I think one of the healthiest lenses we can take to this is an evolutionary lens where we can say, okay, why is this emotion here? What purpose does it serve? You know, there's a chance that, you know, maybe you're feeling depressed because yeah, your mind is trying to tell you in some ways you're not living up to your own ideals, right? But there are other times when you are getting angry because it's simply a primitive response to barriers. And, you know, the modern world has amplified them in a way where, you know, you're spending a lot of your time angry and you're sort of clinging to that anger in a way. And so I think people do, cling to and justify suffering in many cases. You can see this in people who believe that they have to choose between being happy and deceived about the world and unhappy and seeing the world clearly. You see people justify that all the time. You see people say, well, being unhappy, being angry, being anxious, it drives me to achieve what I do. And, and this is another fallacy, right? You can see there are plenty of people out there who are both happy and, and live in, in relative peace and stability who are also very effective and get things done. And so I think in general, justifying your suffering, right? Believing that it's somehow good or that it's inevitable or that it's deserved or something. I think that's one of the biggest problematic beliefs that I see. People just choosing to suffer or choosing to say, oh, well, you should be suffering, maybe in solidarity, or maybe because, because of society, whatever it is. I think we can all become more effective human beings. We can all become more productive. We can, we can develop more accurate beliefs if we choose not to inflict needless suffering on ourselves and not to cling to that suffering.

Yeah, absolutely. Knowing others. So I wonder, one last question might be, I think one of the— sometimes we get really identified with, and I don't even necessarily mean consciously, we can get consciously identified with our suffering or patterns of suffering. And I think that can become a barrier to change because if I wasn't that, who would I be? Right? And that can be kind of destabilizing because we all You know, we start off as these little beings with not much of a framework to navigate the world and we build a self-structure and we cling to that pretty tightly because we're not designed to deal with the groundlessness and impermanence of reality as it is at that age. And even as adults, it's a challenge, right? So that can happen. But then also there's trauma that happens in people's lives, childhood traumas, adult traumas, historical ancestral traumas that can tend to kind of almost build in some of these algorithms and get people, get us stuck, get our nervous systems, get our neurobiology stuck in some of these, what can be in some ways self-defeating algorithms. And I'm curious about your thoughts about that and then how one can develop both the perspective that you're talking a lot about, the metacognition, the perspective, the awareness, But then also the resilience to be able to change or allow those things to change.

Yeah, I think you're right. A lot of people do identify with those things and it's kind of, you know, there's two sides to it. On the one hand, like diagnosing yourself or getting a diagnosis for something you're struggling with, whether it's trauma or anxiety or depression, right? That can really help you get access to the tools that you need to overcome those things. On the other hand, it makes you start identifying that mental illness or struggle or whatever becomes a part of who you are. And that makes it a lot harder to get rid of. You, again, you start clinging to it and it becomes a part of you that you can't really get rid of. And so, yeah, when people go through my anxiety program, you know, I encourage them to, yeah, one, acknowledge that they are currently struggling with anxiety, that they're experiencing these emotions, to notice them., but to never identify as an anxious person or a worrier, right? I think that is a big part of it, changing your identity. You know, if you wanna change habits, right? This is a big part of, you know, James Clear's Atomic Habits. If you wanna change those behaviors, if you wanna say become a musician, right? You wanna not just say I'm practicing guitar, you wanna say I'm a musician. You wanna identify with that thing. But quite the opposite if you're trying to get rid of something. If you're trying to get rid of alcoholism, don't identify as an alcoholic. You can maybe say you're a former alcoholic or you're struggling with this. Um, but you, you want to be very strategic about your identity and, and sort of craft it along with, uh, what you're trying to change. This is a big part of Become Who You Are. It's the idea that depression is, uh, the product of identity failure. Mm-hmm. And in many cases, it's essentially letting us know that we have built an identity that isn't working in some way for us. Right. And we've reached a dead end for that identity. And so you do have to go in and design your identity. I talk about a virtue portfolio where you keep track of your greatest virtues and how, how much they're finding expression in your life, how effectively you're able to exercise them. Yeah. And essentially paying more attention to and designing your identity deliberately to serve your ideals instead of just allowing your identity to form on its own passively. So I think identity plays a huge role in both the lows and the highs of mental health.

I love that idea, designing your own identity. And I think that can give people tremendous hope, you know, to see, you're not just asking people to just completely give up any identity or the one identity that maybe is related to suffering, but at least it's an identity. You're actually giving them the tools to create something that's more empowering and more life-affirming and so forth. Yeah, I think that's a good place to bring our conversation to a close. Illuminating and fascinating and incredibly helpful. Thank you so much, Ryan. Thank you for this conversation and for the work that you do. Thank you.

Yeah, thanks so much for having me, Fleet. I really enjoyed it.

Thank you for joining me on the Radical Responsibility Podcast. Remember, real change happens when we commit to our growth, face our challenges with compassion, and stay open to transformation. If you found this episode helpful, I encourage you to subscribe and help us spread the message of healing and personal empowerment. Until next time, stay grounded, stay present, and stay true to yourself.

Take care. Hello.