PNTV: Positive Psychology and the Body by Kate Hefferon (#413)

You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in less time. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today we've got another great book. In fact, we have a great textbook, Positive Psychology and the Body by Kate Hefferon. Subtitle Somato Psychic the Somato Psychic side to flourishing Want to live with Eudaimonia? Well, we need to engage in a study of not just the mind but also the body if we want to fully express our soul. I found this book. Kate Hefferon had a quote, a testimonial in another one of the positive psychology books I was reading will feature soon on character strengths. I kind of went on a stoic science, stoic science, stoic science binge not too long ago and absolutely love this book. So Kate is a professor in England and she says that if you looked on Amazon.uk when she published this book in 2013, you'd find something crazy like 7626 books come up under the subject are keywords of positive psychology and exactly. She said zero of them were focused on the body other than her own textbook of a different title and kind of context. Now she says she's a huge fan of positive psychology. We're going to define it, but that would be one area if we were going to criticize the positive psychology movement, still a nascent movement, changing the world literally. But if we were going to offer a little critical analysis, which she does, she'd say, guys, we need to shine a brighter light on the effects of physical movement, positive nutrition, she calls it, positive neuroscience, positive sexuality, other expressions of our body and see the integration between our mind, our bodies and our soul. Psychology literally means the study of the soul, but it can also mean the study of the mind. And positive psychologists tend to focus more on the mind. And now we're starting to see a need to see more emphasis on the body. And again, the number one virtue that positive psychologists say is most highly correlated to our flourishing is zest. It's our life force, our energy. So that's why I love this book so much. We've got five big ideas, but let's start with an overview of the definition. We'll start with the definition of positive psychology. Kate tells us positive psychology is defined as the scientific study of virtue, meaning resilience and well being as well as evidence based applications to improve the life of individuals and society in the totality of life. Now in the beginning of the book she gives us a little overview of psychology in general and then the evolution of positive psychology. Of course, you can't talk about the evolution of positive psychology and not talk about Martin Seligman in his ideas as he kicked off the positive psychology movement in the year 2000 with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and a number of other colleagues around the world. But Seligman started with a book called he had Learned Optimism and all that stuff. Then he had authentic happiness. Then his most recent book is called Flourish, where he moves beyond what he calls happiness theory to, well, being theory. Flourish, of course, is the English word we use to translate what Aristotle says was the summum bonum eudaimonia, a good soul, flourishing, expressing the best version of ourselves. Which is why in our very first session for our mastery series for our optimized coaches, I playfully invite Aristotle and Seligman into the room and say, hey, guys, what's the ultimate purpose of life? The summum bonum. And I playfully say, they give us the same answer. In one word. Aristotle says, eudaimonia. Seligman translates that into Flourish, which again is the name of his most recent book. Then we say, okay, guys, that's cool. We want to flourish. We want to express the best version of ourselves. Have a good soul how? And again, they give us the same answer. Aristotle says arete. One word, arete, which we translate as virtue or excellence, but again means something closer to closing that gap between who you're capable of being and who you're actually being. Because when you do, there's no room for regret, anxiety, disillusionment, et cetera. Arete is the way we achieve eudaimonia. And we go for that, we go for excellence. And then the byproduct is happiness flourishing. Seligman says virtue. And one of the differences between authentic happiness theory and well being theory is that virtue is the underpinning. They have six of their core virtues extrapolated into 24. It's the underpinning, the foundation for these five aspects of well being theory. P, E, R, M, A perma. Right. He says that a flourishing life has five things that are optimized. You have positive emotions. It's not about not having positive emotions. But that's not the only thing we're going after. We also want to have engagement in life. P, positive emotions, E, engagement, which means you can get into flow. You're engaged with life, you have the ability to focus on what's important right now. And of course you have relationships. We know that that is scientifically, if it isn't the most important thing right up there, tied for the first slot, right? Then we have meaning, we have a sense of purpose, both beyond ourselves and in what we do, making that connection. And then we have what he calls accomplishment, which is interesting because Aristotle talks about the same thing, his eu daimon, which is the archetype of his ideal person, the eudaimon. Right? And again we talk about optimize equals optimus, which is Latin optimizes for from the Latin optimus, which means the best. Optimize equals optimus equals best equals eudaimon. When you are the best version of yourself to go to Maslow, you are actualizing your potential. You're a eudaimon. But that's not enough. You need to be a hero, we say a protector, having strength for two. But the eudaimon in Aristotle's philosophy was a successful human being. It's not like they studied philosophy and did all these things and then checked out from the world. They were engaged in the world, but their primary initiative was virtue. That was their summum bonum. Everything else was a byproduct of wisdom, self mastery, courage, love, hope, gratitude, curiosity, zest, etc. So, perma, this is what Seligman tells us these days constitutes a life in which we are flourishing. Positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning and accomplishment. It's a long first big idea, wasn't it? I love positive psychology and connecting the ancient wisdom, the modern science, practical tools. Boom. Second idea again. This is positive psychology in the body. So let's bring that wisdom into our bodies. She tells us the first thing we need to understand is our nervous system, specifically your autonomic nervous system, which has two parts. And again she walks us through, textbook style, the different aspects of our nervous system, automatic nervous system. We have, as you may know, a sympathetic aspect of the nervous system, autonomic nervous system and a parasympathetic. Your sympathetic is essentially your on mechanism, right? So to very oversimplify it, if we've got these waves we talk about all the time, sympathetic is on, parasympathetic is off. Now, sympathetic is also associated with a fight or flight response. Doesn't need to be, but at its heightened level is a fight or flight response. Boom. You're in your sympathetic energy. Now I'm in my sympathetic right now. I'm teaching and I'm doing so with a level of vigor, right? So I'm on right now. Now it's very important that I also know how to flip the switch and go off. So I discipline myself to create the energy such that I can be on and then I oscillate and turn the switch off. Now, the balance between our on and off sympathetic parasympathetic is our hrv. Our heart rate variability measures your well being, essentially, and how well you're integrating and balancing dynamically the sympathetic and parasympathetic. So my number one metric, as I study my data via my aura score in our number ones, those daily videos I'm doing these days, looking at what I learned day in and day out, how I'm going to get a little bit more optimized, et cetera, my number one metric is my hrv. I want to be balanced. I want to find my edge of giving everything I got and recovering as deeply as I can, training my recovery. Resting heart rate would be the other thing. And that's super fun for me to play with and to look at that data and measure it and improve it. Now, the problem is most people, as we've said a number of times, are never fully, totally on. They're always a little distracted. They got their smartphones out and they're jumping from thing to thing to thing to thing, and they're never fully off either. That leads to burnout. In our work with the optimized coach program, we call it enervated anxiety versus energized tranquility. When I can flip the switch and be on and then be off, super relaxed, meditating as hard and deeply as I'm showing up in my work and my craft, then I can have a sense of energized tranquility vis a vis the enervated anxiety. We got to understand our nervous system and optimize it. Which leads us to the third idea, longevity. She talks about positive emotions as it relates to longevity, and she shares some fascinating research on nuns. Now, nuns are a very good group to study because they have a very controlled lifestyle. They can only do certain things, and they have very like ritualistic behaviors and kind of guardrails on certain behaviors. So it's a very clean, if you will, group to study, right? Pure sample. Obviously, it's a cohort that's very different than most, but within it, there's a lot of homogeneity, which is good for a study, right? So they're alike in many ways. But they took a look retrospectively at the intake statements these nuns made when they were 22 years old. Tons of nuns, right? 22 years old. They came in and they wrote a statement about why they were starting their ministry as a nun, et cetera, and they analyzed those statements for positive and negative Affect, Right. You can look at different words and say, well, this person used a lot more positive words than this person. We can kind of impute they're a little happier and than these people. Right then they wanted to see, well what happened because this was a longitudinal study and they had the data, they had the statements and then they could look at them and see who is still alive at 85 years old. At 85 years old, what percentage of the quote happy people, positive emotion nones do you think were alive vis a vis the unhappy via those statements? Nones. The numbers are crazy. So at 85 years old, 97%. Almost impossible to believe. 85, 97% of the happy nuns were still alive, whereas only 52% still a decent number. Only 52% of the unhappy nuns were still alive. 97%. Then you fast forward to age 93. At 93 years old, you still had 52% of the happy nuns alive than 18% of the unhappy ones alive. Those are staggering statistics. Martin Seligman says something we talk about in the note, something similar where being in the top quartile of optimism, he says has the same health benefits as not smoking two packs a day. Little weird way to frame it, but if you're in the top quartile of optimism, it's as if you don't smoke two packs a day. That's crazy. Positive emotions matter for your longevity. But asterisks, very important asterisks. Let's put the asterisks right here. Asterisks on positivity. Kate does a great job of talking about the tyranny of positive thinking. The tyranny of positivity. Right. And we actually. One of my favorite teachers is Gabrielle Oettingen who is in our is a guest faculty, a luminary in our optimized Coach program. She wrote Rethinking Positive Thinking and she says the same thing. Look, too much of a good thing isn't a good thing. You need to ground your optimism in reality. Which is why she talks about her whoop process. Check out that PNTV and note and plus ones on whoop, etc. Wish outcome. What's your ideal? If you could wave a wand, what do you get? Wish, why is that awesome? And then rub it up against reality. What are the obstacles you're going to face with? What's your plan to meet those obstacles? We're not talking about fantasy land where you just imagine everything being awesome. Science says that doesn't work. You need to rub it up against reality. See what might Go wrong. And then you have a necessity to act and you go do what needs to get done. Barbara Fredrickson also talks about this. She wrote a book called Positivity. But she says unmitigated good isn't good. All great philosophers say this, right? There's an inverted U. So too little of something is not good, right? And too much of something isn't good. There's the virtuous mean. Boom. That's your optimal place. Happiness, or positivity rather falls into that. She says you want to ground it. You want to have levity and gravity. Then you have what she calls buoyancy. Levity, gravity, buoyancy. I say be inspired and be grounded in. And then boom, you have energized tranquility or calm confidence. That's the asterisk on longevity. Then we talk about sugar again in Healthy Deviant. Yesterday's we just talked about this. And then before that in Food Fix, we talked about sugar. Sugar is a toxin, positive nutrition. Kate goes off on it and she references the guys who wrote a great book called the Happiness Diet. Check that out, the note, the tv, et cetera. But I'm just going to share with you what she says. She says, and I'm just going to quote actually the paragraph because it's worth having her words here. She says sugar has been a component within Western diet since the 16th century, less than 500 years ago. Before that, you know how much sugar we ate? Bam. About that. That would be zero for those listening. Well, 500 years ago, the average human would be lucky to come across sugar. And it is estimated that today the average Westerner consumes 3 pounds of sugar a week. Do the math that. That's 150 pounds overall. She says our sugar consumption per year has risen from 5 pounds per person per year in 1700 to 152 pounds per person in 2000. Recent research has found evidence that sugar, while not only bad for our waistlines, which again is your number one predictor of morbidity, your waist to height circumference needs to be less than 0.5 if we want to optimize. And again, the way you optimize that is first and foremost, sugar. Ultra processed foods. Get your insulin right, your metabolism right, and boom, you can more easily reach your natural weight. While not only bad for our waistlines, can have deleterious effects on our brain, sugar has been found to shrink areas responsible for important functions such as memory and mood regulation. Wearing on the hippocampus. Then she goes and says some nascent Research shares that it's highly correlated with depression. Did you know that that sugar literally is directly connected to your mood regulation? Some intense stuff. We need to pay attention. The solution is simple. Don't drink your sugar. That's rule number one. Optimize food. Rule number one, don't drink your sugar. And fruit juices are not health foods. Get rid of the sodas, get rid of the fruit juices. You're a long way there. Then get rid of the ultra processed foods. If it's made in a factory, it's got added sugar. Check it out. Remember, your food label might be lying to you. That's Smucker's strawberry jam. Strawberry is the first ingredient. It's got to be good, right? No. The next three ingredients are different forms of sugar. Sugar comes in 60 different names. Why? Because the junk food industry wants to confuse us. Let's not be confused. Let's know that sugar leads to a sad face. If you or someone you love is suffering from depression or anxiety, et cetera. We need to bring some mindfulness. And this is an area again, where the mainstream positive psychology world doesn't quite get it yet. They haven't made the connection. One of my favorite scholars in the science of hope ended his own life. Yet his friend, who was a professor of clinical psychology, took him to the Dairy Queen for sugar laden ice cream. We are not making the connection the way we need to. And see that sugar is a toxin both for our waistlines and for our brain. If you or a loved one struggles with mood issues, pay attention. Physical activity is our fifth big idea. Positive psychology and the body in the upward spiral. We talked about reversing depression. The neuroscience of reversing depression. One little thing at a time. His number one of eight tips was exercise. And he jokingly said, I know you've heard it a million times, I'm going to tell you a million and one times. And then I said, I'll tell you a million and two times. Well, today it's a million and third, physical exercise does your brain good. Mind, body, soul. We need to move our bodies. As we talked about in the PNTV on the joy of movement recently, not only do we get a little bit of Ritalin, a little bit of Prozac focusing, boosting our mood, we, we get those hope molecules and not exercising is like taking a depressant. Exercise has been proven to be as effective as Zoloft in reducing depression. If you're not moving your body, get on it. If you don't know where to start, check out tiny habits, the PNTV on that book to create new habits, physical activity, nutrition, starting with getting rid of the sugar. Remember the positive emotions. Those nones see the world in a positive light. Cultivate your positive emotions. And know the fastest way to do that is to get your physiology right. Get your eating, you're moving, you're sleeping, you're breathing, you're focusing, right? You do that and then you tend to naturally have a positive orientation to the world. And of course you do all the other stuff, the gratitude, the hope, journaling, reflection exercises, et cetera. But remember that with the asterisks we're not talking about unmitigated, ungrounded manicy, positivity. We're talking about grounded, buoyant, calm confidence. Then remember your nervous system, autonomic, two parts, sympathetic, parasympathetic, Both awesome, but we need to balance them on, off, on, off, on, off. And one of the most important things that you can do that we didn't talk about today, but we did in why we sleep. Turn off the digital electronics. If you are constantly blowing yourself up and she Kate and we talk about it in the note. Cortisol and melatonin are like a seesaw, right? If your cortisol is high, your melatonin is low. If your melatonin is high, your cortisol is low. But your melatonin can't be high, which you need to sleep. Well, if your cortisol is high. Oh no. So when you're blowing yourself up with all the blue light, that's telling your mind which has evolved for millions of years, not being exposed to blue light other than the sun. If you're blowing yourself up with those inputs, blue light, electronic inputs, late at night, your mind is saying it's daytime, let's go. Cortisol is going to be produced, melatonin will not be, your sleep will suffer and you will not walk over the bridge from despair to hope. You'll actually go the other way from hope to despair. So again, the basic fundamentals and hacking our nervous system, flipping that switch is so important as we remember the essence of positive psychology. I'll read the definition again at the end, but according to Seligman, well being theory, positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning accomplishment, when today. And oh yeah, remember the underlying foundation of all of it is virtue. So the definition of positive psychology one more time for fun. The scientific study of virtue, meaning, resilience and well being as well as evidence based applications to improve the life of individuals and society and the totality of life and Then I also kept my own little sketches of the science that we've done with Sonia Lybomirsky and the top PhD student, one of the top PhD students from her lab. Looking at the efficacy of the optimized protocol, we wanted to know can we actually help people boost their confidence? Can we help them boost their energy levels, their sense of engagement at work, their fulfillment at home, Energy work and love wise. And as our researcher said, he was astonished. Day one, where were you? Day 300, where were you? And we measured dozens of different measures. We'll link to a video where we share. Science says that Optymyze protocol works. We're super humbled and inspired by this. Again, you can check out more at Optimize Me Coach. I actually wrote a letter articulating this. But the number one thing we want to help people do with this, all these videos I create and whether you join our community at Optimize in general Optimize Me or you go all the way into our coach program at Optimize Coach or you just hang out with me in this context, obviously I'm totally cool wherever we wind up playing together. But the number one thing we want to help you do is connect to the best version of yourself that daimon within that we want to high five, as we playfully say. So we asked our coaches, do you feel connected to the best version of yourself? Day one, 29% said yes. And again, half of the people going through our coach program want to be coaches. The other half just want to become just the best version of themselves. 29% said they felt connected to the best version of themselves. At the end, 300 days later, 93% said they felt connected to the best version of themselves. So I'm really excited to continue to lean into this is the nascent version, one of our research protocols, but really excited about that. Ancient wisdom, modern science, practical tools for the win. Hope you enjoyed. What'd you get out of today? What's one thing you can do to move from theory to practice to mastery? That's how we wrap up every one of these for a reason. That's how we get better. The theory is rudimentary practice. Michael Beckwith tells us the practice is the advanced stuff. Let's go practice today. See you tomorrow. We hope you enjoyed this episode of Optymyze with Brian Johnson. To find out more, go to Optimize Me. Hi, this is Brian with some super exciting news. Optymyze is now absolutely free. All 600 philosopher's notes, the 50101 masterclasses thousand optimized plus ones free. So what do you want to optimize today? Your productivity? Habits? Sleep? Mental toughness? We've got 33 categories here, each of which comes with its own Optimal Living 101 masterclass and a collection of philosopher's notes to help you go to your next level with More wisdom in Less Time We've had tens of thousands of people from nearly every country in the world sign up for our premium membership offering, which we have now made, did I mention absolutely free. Come join us. Optimize me More Wisdom in Less Time let's optimize every aspect of your life so we can go out and change the world 1% at a time together, starting with you and me today.