Emotional First Aid with Guy Winch - Genius Network Episode #46

Welcome to the Genius Network show. In this episode, we'll examine emotional first aid, how to deal with rejection, loneliness, guilt, failure, and psychological injuries, the truth about trauma, emotional hygiene, and more with Dr. Guy Winch. Guy Winch is a licensed psychologist, author, and popular TED presenter. Dr. Winch received his doctorate in clinical psychology from New York University and opened a postdoctoral fellowship at NYU Medical Center. His books have been translated into 21 languages and his TED videos have been streamed millions of times. If you'd like access to the full feature presentation, the show notes, and the special resources for this episode, please visit geniusnetwork.com 46 that's geniusnetwork.com 46 hello, this.

Is Joe Polish and today I've got a speaker that I saw at the most recent TED conference in Vancouver that I honestly had my mind blown because he gave just an incredible talk about heartbreak. And so I ended up meeting him there and I went and watched some of his other TED talks. He has great books that he's done and I'm just going to give a short introduction and then we'll get into some conversation. His name is Guy Winch, spelled W I N C H. He is a PhD, a licensed psychologist, author, and keynote speaker. His books have been translated into 21 languages. His most recent book is Emotional First Aid, Healing, Rejection, Guilt, Failure, and other Everyday Hurts and also the Squeaky Complaining the right way to get results, Improve your relationships and enhance self esteem, which was published in January 2011. His TED talk, why we all need to practice Emotional First Aid, has been viewed over 4 million times and is rated among the top 5 most inspiring talks on TED.com. Dr. Winch also writes the popular Squeaky Wheel blog on PsychologyToday.com Dr. Winch received his doctorate in clinical psychology from New York University and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at NYU Medical Center. He's been working with individuals, couples and families in his private practice in Manhattan for over 20 years and he's also a member of the American Psychological Association. So Guy, super happy to have you as a guest today. And what did I not say about you that people should know?

I think you covered it and it's my pleasure to be with you.

Yeah, thank you so much. And so I'll just get right into it. When I saw you at TED this year, you know, really resonated with me. The talk that I know is going to be a subject of an upcoming book on heartbreak. It really allowed me to see that you have a perspective on, you know, people's emotional states and withdrawal symptoms and all the Stuff that I'm doing with addiction recovery. How much of, you know, the emotional state has to do with people's coping mechanisms and how they, you know, get through life in positive and negative ways. And I'd like to talk about all of that. So the first thing I'll ask you is for people who may not be familiar with you, how do you describe yourself and what you actually do?

So I'm a psychologist. That's the common thread that runs between the things that I do. I have a private practice that I maintain in Manhattan, where I live. I really feel that's important for me. It keeps me grounded, it keeps me very much in touch with regular people and problems of the day to day. And it also allows me to bring in research that I read about in journals and try and translate it into kinds of techniques or tools or things that I can actually help my patients with and that they can use in terms of practical applications. So that's one aspect of what I do. I also write books. I think you mentioned the two and the one that's coming up. And I do lots of speaking and some consulting with companies around the topic of emotional health.

Yeah. And what was your motivation to become a psychologist? I'm always curious as to why people go into that field.

Well, look, I mean, I think one can say generally that probably most people who want to be a psychologist from a young age, like I did, are interested in some kind of self exploration and understanding themselves and their situation. I mean, I really think that it stems from that probably, but then it probably morphs into some kind of general interest and fascination for me. At least it did with the. With the human mind and with, you know, how we respond to certain things, how we manage certain things, the dynamics of relationships. I think psychology touches every aspect of life, and all the time it's one of those things that operates behind the scenes and sometimes in front of the scenes all the time. And so to me, it's just a wonderful window onto life and a deeper understanding of what goes on around me.

Yeah, I mean, do you think most people are driven to seek you out out of just absolute chaos? And I mean, I shouldn't even just say you. I just mean psychologists in general. It's not something that someone usually is like motivated, saying, hey, let's use it as a preventive thing. It's usually total chaos. But like, what are the. How would you describe the type of individual that seeks you out? Is there a commonality between most of them?

Well, in terms of my practice, half my practice is individuals. Half of it is couples. People seek me out because they have me, because of word of mouth, and so they hear about me that way. Couples who are running into trouble will hear about me and want to come to try and save their relationship. And individuals that are feeling stuck or defeated or, you know, something that's going on with them that they feel they need help with will usually also hear about me from word of mouth, sometimes from articles I've written or from my TED talks or any of those things. Companies hear about me because they are interested in the emotional health of their employees or at least attempting to be. And so they also hear about me from those venues. But my practice is pretty much just regular people with problems. I don't have any hard specialties in terms of, you know, specific issues. You know, I have. I'm a generalist, one would say. And so I have. And I'm in New York City, so it's a huge range of race, ethnicity, ages, life, circumstance. It's wonderful for me in that way because it's very, very varied. And so it's always interesting and new.

Yeah, great. And by the way, I'm going to mention this from the very beginning, I would highly recommend, after you listen to us have our conversation, that you go and watch the TED talks that guy has given online. Just type in his name into Google. You'll find lots of good stuff and then even come back and listen to this again. I think it'll make a lot more sense. And so I want to ask you about something you talk about in your first TED Talk, which is emotional hygiene. I love the concept, I love the way you describe it. And I want you to define for the listeners, what is emotional hygiene and how can someone listening to this practice it?

Well, the thing that struck me when I was preparing that talk and doing the thinking about this in general over the years is that it always struck me that we have so many. We have so many minutes a day in which we attend to our physical needs between, you know, taking care of our teeth and, you know, we check the weather so we can dress warmly, we'll put a band aid on a cut. We really know how to address common physical injuries when we have them. We have no such practice whatsoever when it comes to emotional or psychological injuries. And a, we should, because we sustain those pretty regularly. And I'm talking about injuries like failure, rejection, you know, loneliness, guilt, those kinds of things that really daily experiences for most people. And yet when that happens, we have no idea what to do to make the pain get better, to avoid, as it were, infections, to really make sure that we are treating it in such a way that we can heal quickly, that we're not left with scars, that we are moving forward in life and not actually withdrawing or retreating as a result of these injuries. And when that occurred to me, I thought, well, all right, but let's see what the science says. And when I went and I started reading all the research a number of years ago now, I was, you know, there was lots of it. There actually are all kinds of things we can do to prevent further inflammation, as it were, when we get rejected. There are things we need to understand about what happens in our mind when we experience failure. We need to be aware of the paradoxes of loneliness and the traps that it lays for us. And so unless we're aware of these things, we're just going to get deeper in and sustain more damage than we need. And so to me, the issue of emotional hygiene is developing a routine, a practice of maintaining our emotional health, of treating emotional and psychological wounds, and I mean really small ones, when we sustain them, not to run to the doctor, but to actually do it ourselves. Like, we have a medicine kit in our homes. We should have a psychological medicine kit. And we use that to really address these kinds of insults and injuries when we sustain them. And we would all be, I think, happier and have greater life satisfaction for that. Except it's completely not something we think about at all, we discuss at all. It doesn't occur to us that that's a need.

Yeah, totally. So when someone. You call it an injury, which is an interesting sort of description because I don't know if many people would think of rejection or loneliness or guilt or failure as an injury. So elaborate on that a little bit.

Well, actually, look, if I ask people to talk about times in their lives where their feelings were hurt, most people will kind of go back to middle school to those young ages, and there was some kind of issue that happened there. They were, you know, the rejection. They asked a girl out and she said no. Or they, you know, they failed at something that was really important to them and they felt terrible because of it. But so those are injuries. And I'll give you just a simple example from daily life. When. And this is something I hear in my practice all the time, and I'm sure people experience people in relationships will, you know, make a sexual advance toward their partner, and it gets rebuffed. So that can happen once in a while, but then it gets rebuffed again, and then it gets rebuffed again. And each time that happens, they feel their feelings get a little bit hurt. They get a little bit bothered and a little bit more bothered each time. And within a few times, it doesn't take that long, they're going to start feeling like, wow, they do not find me attractive anymore, or, wow, they are not interested in me sexually anymore. And then in their head, that scenario is going to expand and grow to this real feeling of feeling rejected and dismissed by their spouse. Now, it could be their spouse was actually having GI problems for a month and she didn't feel like it, but they're not going to mention it in that way. And then in your head, you start to concoct these responses to what happened in a way that starts to create a difficult dynamic between a couple that really shouldn't have it there because they didn't address what was going on with their spouse. Another example is you try something that's important to you and you fail at it. And I'll give a simple example would be like a diet or health regimen. And you keep feeling like you keep failing on these diets, that these diets don't work for you. But the common thread in the diet is you, and there's something that you're doing that is making you fail and allowing you to. And making you not recover from your failure sufficiently to figure out how to avoid it next time. So just this repetitive cycle until you kind of give up and feel defeated. And so these are injuries because they leave a mark, they leave a scar, they leave a wound there that can easily get reopened again when we experience a similar rejection or a similar failure again. And so the idea with injuries is, you know, you want to treat them. You don't want a deep wound to form. You want to be able to patch that wound up as quickly as you can. And with psychology, at least, you can actually develop emotional resilience and develop ways of thinking about these things that do actually make you stronger as a result. That's a benefit of psychology that doesn't exist in the physical world as much.

Right, right.

It's really important. Sorry.

No, no, no, go ahead. Yeah, so I'm just thinking about how many people are walking around the planet with all of these injuries that are not only being not treated, but if they're unhealed, all of the ramifications of that.

Right. Here's another example. So the issue of brooding and a rumination, which I talk about in my book as well. So to ruminate means to, like, chew over something that's distressing or upsetting. And it means to chew over in the sense that you don't problem solve it. You just keep thinking about how much it's bothering you, how much it's upsetting you, how much it's angering you. You might tell six, seven different friends about that thing that happened, the breakup conversation or the fight you had with a friend or with a spouse, and it just keeps chewing at, gnawing at you. Now the interesting thing about rumination is that that can become a habit, and it's a really damaging habit because it really is one of those things that paints your world extremely negatively. But one of the interesting things about it is that people who tend to ruminate by habit tend to be significantly more at risk for developing substance abuse disorders. Because when we have again, emotional injuries and things that distress us emotionally and psychologically, one of our go tos to deal with it is substances. We numb it because it doesn't occur to us that there's something else we can do about it. We just think that's how it is. That's just how I feel. There's nothing I can do about it. So we numb it. But no, there is something we can do about it. And much more efficient than alcohol or substances or food.

Which is.

Well, it depends on the injury, but that's my whole point. In other words, there are treatments for all these injuries. You know, when it comes to failure, when it comes to rejection, when it comes to guilt, when it comes to all these things, there are actual steps we can take that will mitigate the pain, that will make us feel better, that will make it less likely to bother us when it happens again in failure, for example, that will make us less likely to make those same mistakes again. Except that when we fail, we don't tend to think it's our mistakes. We tend to think that just we're incapable as opposed to there's something we need to tweak there. But knowing those things is super important because otherwise you just feel helpless. And then you do go to the alcohol or the substances or the food or whatever it is that you try and numb the emotional pain with.

I want to talk for a little bit and get your perspective on how I'm thinking about this. Because I'm always trying to, for one, validate if I'm on the right track. And secondly, get a deeper understanding of how I think about, say, addiction. Because one of my biggest struggles in my life was I became an addict when I was 18 years old. At my worst state. I weighed 105 pounds from freebase and cocaine. And then later in life, it became work, it became sex, it became exercise. I mean, these behavioral and chemical. And I've done so much work on myself, spent an enormous amount of money on treatment, over half a million doll. I've sat through numerous 12 step meetings over the last couple of decades. I've met some of the greatest psychiatrists and psychologists and therapists in the world and just so many just addicts that have gone through their own struggles. And part of, you know, one of my missions is to change the global conversation about how people view addicts with compassion instead of judgment and finding the best forms of treatment that have efficacy. And so, you know, one of my friends is Gabor Mate, who, you know, I'll be interviewing later at my conference this year. And he's written numerous books. And one of his things is the question is not why the addiction, but why the pain? And I tend to believe what Gabor does is that addiction is a response to trauma. And the more I've thought about this, and I'd love to get your take on this, I actually am viewing addiction as a solution. It's not a very good solution if people can survive, helps them get through, but. But it doesn't really help them because the solution has consequences. So the way that I would define addiction is doing something that you don't want to do or that you do want to do, that you can't stop, and it has negative consequences attached to it. But if someone's in pain or angst or loneliness or failure or you name it, and you want that to go away, there's nothing wrong with wanting that to go away. It's just the method you use to scratch the itch. And so I've thought a lot about trauma and how you treat it. And when you say rumination, I mean most of the consumption of my time in addictive thinking and addictive behavior wasn't the actual act. It wasn't the drinking. It wasn't the sex. It wasn't the escapism. It was the preoccupation. We're just constantly thinking about it. And part of it stemmed from I was molested as a kid when I was between the ages of 8 to 10 years old. And it only happened a few times that I can remember. It might have happened more, but the times that I can remember, in the scheme of things, it was maybe a few hours of my life, but in terms of my rumination, thinking about was thousands of hours of my life. And I've Thought about that. When I heard you talk, I was like going, God, I mean, it's just so fascinating how you talk about how you chew over it, how much time has been spent, and that's what I see so many addicts doing. So my, my question to you is, for one, do you agree with that, that addiction is a solution or that it's a response to trauma? And then how would you even describe trauma? Because I'm curious to, you know, what's the difference between like, a psychological injury versus a trauma? Or are they the same thing? So, just wanted to see some of your thoughts on that.

So, first of all, yes, I agree that. I mean, I'm not going to just say that for all people, addiction is a response to trauma, but for many, it's a response to trauma. And for who are traumatized, that's a risk factor and something that actually does happen. So I fundamentally agree with the premise there. Yes, I do. And when you said, you know, it was only a few hours of my life, really, it only takes a few seconds to have trauma, you know, it's not a quantitative thing. It's a qualitative thing. And the measure of the injury is qualitative rather than quantitative. Certainly, yes. I mean, if trauma occurs and then reoccurs and reoccurs, some people are molested for years, you know, then it's an accumulation of such. But the single, you know, a single incident can be traumatic. And how I would define trauma, you know, I think a regular injury is specific. It is something that happened that in a moment at least, it's a specific thing. Trauma. This is not necessarily the general definition in the field, but it's my definition. This is how I think of it. Trauma is something that shocks the system. It's something that's impactful enough that it causes you to reassess and rethink your general views on yourself, on life, on people around you. It causes a fundamental shift, a seismic shift in your psychological system. Now, the thing about trauma is that the one thing, an event that can traumatize and do that for one person will not do that for another person because they have lesser vulnerability in that area, the circumstances of their life, whatever it is. So it's not about the objective event. It's about the subjective experience of that event. And if the subjective experience of the event is one that causes this seismic shift, this reorganization of how you think of life or how you, you know, when a child is molested at the age of eight, even if it's just once there's a seismic shift in their perception of safety and their perception of adults in the world or older children, whoever that was, who did that. There's a seismic shift in their whole understanding of what life is about and what can and cannot happen to you. So it's traumatic in the ripple effects, in the implications of how that resonates cognitively and psychologically and emotionally, certainly within a child of eight years old, when you were eight years old, how that resonated. And so that's what defines it as trauma.

Gotcha. Yeah. And it definitely was a seismic shift. I mean, it was huge. I know that I defined so much of my self worth in that moment. And there were other things that led up to it. And again, it's funny because Gabor always gives me a hard time about not minimizing what happens to you because I'll say, well, other people had it a lot worse. I mean, I don't live in a third world country. Some people are beaten repeatedly. And I would find myself using these rationalizations or comparisons to say, well, it's not so bad. And there's a part of me that's like, yeah, I mean, you can blow something out of proportion or make it miserable, but then there's the other part of, you know, having a perspective is one thing, but being able to really own it and say, how did this really affect me? And what is, you know, what is an intelligent, resourceful, responsive way to go about healing this? And the, you know, the thing was, I wouldn't be talking to you today had that episode not happened. But I also, you know, I know that that led to many ways that I tried to numb this pain that I had psychologically that I had no idea how to cope with. And the methods that I used to numb it just made it worse. It exasperated it. And my life up until most recent years was more reactive than it was responsive. I mean, I find myself thinking a lot now about responding to life versus reacting to it. And so, I mean, how. How does one. What have you found to be the best ways to treat trauma?

So that's a very individualized thing, I find. In other words, there are people, for example, have certain proclivities in terms of how they want to deal with certain things. Some people want to really excavate and go back and dig and really excavate, as you would an ancient monument down to the foundation. So every piece of stone is unearthed and every artifact and relic is clear and shaped. And some people do not want to do that. Some people want to do Broad strokes and get understandings and then, you know, kind of move on without excavating too deeply. And there's no right or wrong. In fact, the research shows I talk in my book, for example, about 9 11. I was a psychologist during 9 11, and obviously I worked with people who were highly impacted by it. I had one of my patients was in one of the planes, in fact. So it was something that you could see that there were two people who were impacted severely and impacted. I mean, were. There were injured and hospitalized with injuries from debris from the buildings. And one of them, just in this example that I. An example I use in the book, one of them just came in and said, I do not want to talk about it. They just announced it. I mean, they were obviously injured. And I knew what had happened because we communicated while they were in the hospital, but I do not want to talk about it. And the other one came in and wanted to talk about nothing else for a long time now, the one who didn't want to talk about it was actually able to get on with life. And if your want is to not talk about it, not because you think that there's no one around you who wants to hear, not because there's no one who's going to actually listen well, but because you really don't want to. You want to actually get on with things, then those are the people who want to do the broad strokes in terms of trauma because they just want to move on. And if they can move on, that's actually okay. They do not have to do the excavation. And there are some people who want to excavate and those who excavate and then start, you know, putting the pieces together, rebuilding, focusing on the moving on, focus on the recovery. That's great. The people who get lost in excavation, it's already the building's excavated, you know, the past is excavated. You've exposed it all now, so there's nothing more to expose it. Just going back to it over and over and over again is not healing. It can absolutely, you know, re traumatize you each time. So you have to know the proclivities, the coping mechanisms, the emotional resiliences and strengths of the person that you're dealing with. To know what system of trauma, what system of trauma recovery is best for them. And that's a very individualized thing. And so when I read that the general approach to trauma should be this or that, it's really difficult for me, at least, to endorse that. The general approach should be one thing for all because people have very different ways of coping with trauma. And some of those coping mechanisms are successful and some are not. And it depends on the person in terms of shoring up what the coping mechanisms are that they need. Ultimately, people need to get to the place that you got to and you didn't put it in these words, but I'm sure you have in the past. So I'm just going to say it, that you have to be able to have some kind of understanding it in a way that gives it meaning. It has to. In the narrative of your life and the story that you tell of your life, that has to be a plot point that led to something of significance to. And as you said, I wouldn't be talking with you if that didn't happen. You wouldn't be talking with me. You wouldn't be doing a lot of the work you're doing that's benefiting other people. So you've reached a point where you've been able to acquire a certain amount of meaning and satisfaction and you know, a way of understanding what happened to you in a way that's actually beneficial and is positive because the outcome ended up being positive. And that's the place people have to get to. They have to be able to forge some kind of meaning from the trauma and have an application of that in their life that gives them a sense of purpose. It doesn't have to be the all consuming purpose, but an aspect of it. And therefore it plays a role that's positive rather than one that's solely destructive.

No. Very, very well said, yes. And I agree with that wholeheartedly. And that's what I do my best to transform what was perceived or real suffering into something useful. And that is one of the reasons why I am doing what it is I'm doing. Because I've. The people that I know that I've seen really transform their lives from suffering to happiness and levels of bliss and productivity and you name it, view a lot of the worst things that have ever happened to them as gifts. And I can't say I could speak those words, but internally do I think like, oh, these were great gifts. I'm not there yet. Although I do pursue that because I do believe the ability to transform suffering into something more useful and transcendent is one of the greatest things you can do in life. And the people that I admire the most seem to have had an enormous amount of adversity that they've been able to turn shit into something very useful and very productive for themselves. And, and so that's sort of my pursuit is to look at all of these things that happen and say, okay, even if it's a trick that I planned myself, the whole these didn't happen to me, they happened for me. And assigning a meaning to it, because we are meaning makers. And you can make something mean, whatever you can make it mean, but it does, I believe, develop some skills. I do believe you're as sick as your secrets. That's one of the, the sayings that I've always liked. And so part of it is, you know, when, when I get into discussions with people about, say, 12 step groups, because I talk to a lot of people that they don't like 12 steps. They, you know, there's many things they can, they can talk about. And one of the things I always try to remind people is that, well, for one, hope heals. And wherever a person can go to an environment and find hope, be it in a meeting, be it somewhere that's useful. And so I don't know very many addicts that recover in isolation. Frankly, I don't know any that have recovered in isolation. They're doing it in some sort of community or with some sort of other individuals. And then there's, you know, there's many other aspects to it. So what I would like to ask you is when it comes to renumeration, as an example, when someone is triggering you or you're around constant triggers, how do you break, you know, how do you break, how do you break those triggers? How do you get. If you have a family member, as an example that I have a massage therapist that I was had watch your TED Talk. And one of the things that she said to me is, you know, what if I'm with a family member all the time? Like, her sister drives her crazy and she's gone to therapy with her, she's done a lot of stuff, but it just, for some reason, this person really gets under her skin. And she believes that her sister's incredibly manipulative and not honest and she has to be in this person's presence frequently. And so what does one do when you're working on triggers, when you're working on things, but you're constantly, they're being introduced to you in a way, and it's challenging you all the time. I mean, any thoughts or suggestions?

Yeah, I mean, look, first of all, I mean, I have to say family is tough in that way, because really, I mean, other than family, if it was just a friend, I'd say, I do not know why you have to be around that person so much. And even when it comes to family, I would say to someone like that I'm kind of just taking your word for it that the sister is indeed very, very difficult and manipulative and is not workable in that sense, then I would say to her then you need to absolutely minimize the amount of time you're around her. And if that means, oh gosh, then I don't get to be around my parents as much or I don't get to see my other siblings as much. A, that's unfortunate and B, then organize other ways in which you do get to see them. That's without your sister. But there's a checks and balances there, there's a pros and cons in terms. You have to weigh the damage and the benefit. And to me, people who are damaged by being around other people, then they really have to weigh whether that's worth their while and whatever the cost of minimizing those encounters, you know, the wrath of the family, the disappointment, what have you, you know, then you have to weigh and see, are those costs, are they more consequential than the damage that I'm sustaining by being around that? And where I hear this most, I mean, family is an example, but the other one is the. I talk to so many people who have workplace scenarios. Bosses say colleagues sometimes, but bosses mostly who are absolutely abusive and sometimes in very demonstrable ways, sometimes in less HR proof kind of ways, but are nonetheless doing exceeding damage to them, like wrecking their self esteem fundamentally and their spending, you know, eight, ten hours a day with this abusive relationship, more than they're spending with a spouse in terms of waking hours. And when I say, well, you absolutely must change your job, then, you know, I mean, either you, sometimes you can actually appeal to hr, but let's say in the cases that you cannot, then you have to take a different job. Yeah, but I'll take a pay cut. And I'm like, yeah, but you'll be alive longer to enjoy it. Is my point. Like what is the point of this misery? This is your quality of life. You've been absolutely miserable. And people stay in these situations for so long because they're math in terms of my quality of life versus my financial. You said remuneration, but my quality of life versus my bank account, my retirement planning. So don't retire at 65, retire at 67, but be happier when you get there. To me, that math, it's off because one of the. In the same way, when my lament about Emotional hygiene is that people even know the term because, you know, it doesn't occur to them that there's something that one needs to do in terms of maintaining emotional health. My lament is the same about life satisfaction in our math, about where we want to work and where we want to spend our careers and what we want to spend our careers doing. The life satisfaction is often a way too small a variable in that equation, if it's in there at all. And it absolutely should be in there because otherwise what's the point of it all?

No, you're right. You're absolutely right. So I mean, since with you've done so much writing, thinking, probably therapy with people related to emotional hygiene, what are maybe three best daily habits that you'd recommend people practice for Good, strong emotional hygiene? Just like you make the analogy of brushing your teeth in the morning. I mean, do you have some recommendations?

Yeah. So one of the things I'm actually really for, it's not my invention in any way, but it's one of the things I just practiced and I really believe in his gratitude exercises. And I don't mean the. When I say this to people, like they say, oh, you know, I got up in the morning and I say, you know, I'm thankful for the sun. And I'm like, yeah, no, that's not a gratitude exercise. That's an observation of nature perhaps. I'm not sure what that is. But that's not a gratitude exercise. A gratitude exercise is getting up in the morning and saying to yourself, you know what? The people I really care about right now are healthy. My parents are getting older, but they're in good health. I'm really grateful for that because there's going to be a time in the near future where that might not be the case. And so I'm glad I don't, you know, I can enjoy the fact that people around me are in good health, just as an example. That's a gratitude exercise for me. I work out, you know, all my life and for me it's the injury free period where I can actually do what I want to do physically. I'm always grateful for that, that I can work out today. And this thing isn't injured, or that thing isn't injured, or that one's not sprained or what have you. So they're the small little ways in which we can find the things we're actually really grateful for. When I'm in touch with a friend and they really do something, they express something that's really touching and meaningful. I'm always. I note it in my head. I'm grateful for having really good friends that truly do care about me, for example. So gratitude is one thing, I think that's very important. The other, I think is the idea of. And this comes to again, treating emotional wounds. To me, the two most common ones we have are failure and rejection. And failure just happens to us. And I'll give you the stupidest example I can think of is I see people on the subway playing, let's say, Candy Crush, whatever it is, right? You should see their face when they are about to succeed in the level. And then they don't. It really irritates them. You can just see that they're like white knuckling the phone and they're getting really pissed off at Candy Crush or whatever it is. And there's an interesting thing there because that little mini failure is actually a microcosm of how they're responding to failure in general. They're getting overly frustrated. They are feeling defeated. I'll see them like put down the phone and just kind of glare into the. And the ways we respond to failure are typical. We tend to respond the same ways to all kinds of failures. So you can see it in how somebody responds to a video game. You can see it in how they respond to a test. If they're at the university or they're trying to get a license of sorts. You can see it how they respond when they don't get the promotion or when their presentation doesn't go well at work. And so to me, one of the emotional hygiene things that people have to do or should do is really look at blind spots when it comes to failure. And I'll just give this quick example of it because it's a very common one. Time management. How is it that people who have time management issues still have time management issues? In other words, that didn't go well. Why didn't you fix it yet? And it's 20 years or 30 years of it. What is preventing them from fixing a time management issue? You know, the people who are always late or the people who, you know, at work never get their stuff done on time. It's one of those things, you know, they keep failing at it. How come they're not able to fix it? Right? I mean, does that puzzle occurred to you that it's. Why isn't that fixable for most people? And it isn't because of blind spots? When we have failures, there are certain things we just don't see. We think we have it covered, but we don't. When it comes to being late, for example, people, one of the common blind spot is people don't count the small stuff. I have patients who are late all the time. By the second or third time say, what's going on? You're ten minutes late continually. No, I left on time. And I'm like, ah, but no you didn't. Because by definition, three times you're late. You didn't leave on time. No, but I did if the trains were running. Right. But what they don't count is it takes them three minutes to get from their desk to downstairs to the subway. It gets them three minutes to get from the subway to my office. It takes two minutes to get upstairs in the elevator in my office. I'm the 22nd floor. So all those add up. And people with lateness don't look at the small stuff, they only look at the general. How long should it take? Or a woman will say, I'm ready to leave the house. But no, you're not. Because your keys are in the kitchen, your bag is in the living room and your coat's upstairs. You're not ready to leave the house. But she feels she is. So you know, when we fail to figure out what our blind spots are is a crucial exercise. Because when you fix one blind spot, you fix a ton of things. So that's another one. And the third one is very generic. But I'm going to say it very emphatically. Our self critical internal voice. Like when we get rejected and we go into that, I'm such a loser, I'm not tall enough, I'm not smart enough, I'm not blonde enough, whatever it is, that self critical voice that so many of us have in so many frustrating moments is absolutely useless. It's purely damaging. There is no utility to it. Whenever I ask people who tell me, well, I just got really hard on myself and I'm like, hard on yourself, like a coach, yeah, you can do it. Work harder is fine. Harden yourself. Like I'm an idiot is not fine. What do you get out of that? How does it help you? Well, and people have a really hard time articulating why it helps. And if they do, I can knock down the argument very, very quickly. It's a habit. We have that self criticism thing that is completely, completely damaging. It has no utility. It sets us back tremendously and most of us indulge in it some to a lot of the time. So that's one I would absolutely eliminate. Eradicate is the self critical voice. You know, I would be honest about what I did wrong. But that doesn't have to come with, you know, like calling myself names and putting myself down and beating myself up.

Well, first off, those, all three of those were great. And I love what you said about when you fix a time block as an example or anything you fixed, you know, hundreds of things. Because I always think about what's the one thing that needs to be solved? That, that if you solve this one thing, it solves 100 other problems. And then when it comes to negative self talk or the self critical thing, I've always wondered when people say, you know what, you wouldn't have this in your life if you didn't want it. You obviously want it to be there or you wouldn't be doing this. There's a reward that you get for it. And I don't know if that's true because I've seen a lot of my own negative behaviors. You know, especially when you're actively in addiction. You're, you know, addicts lie, they cheat, they steal, they do destructive stuff. They, you know, it's. There's this Guns N Roses album for the rock band Guns N Roses from years ago. Their first very popular album was called Appetite for Destruction. And I've thought about those three words and about how well that describes like the behavior of an addict. It's like this appetite to just self destruct. And so my question to you is what, what is it about these negative things? These call them bad habits, call them traits, that, I mean, what is going on in the brain that causes someone to knowingly or unknowingly do stuff that is continuously damaging to them?

So actually I'm going to call them, I don't like traits because traits makes them sound like you can't change them. So habits I like because habits you can change. And it's actually more complex than habits, of course, but habits is a part of it. There are many things happening because there are many versions of this, of the self destructive or self critical. There are many versions of it and there are many contexts that impact it. And so there's not one thing necessarily that's going on in our brain, but one of the things that is going on in our brain is that it's related to your sense of your identity of who you are as a person. And when you do not have a strong enough sense of identity of the core aspect of being aware of and knowing who you are as a person, then it can get violated when it's not strong enough. And so addicts don't start by lying and stealing and scheming and manipulating. But they get there out of desperation. But there are speed bumps along the way that prevent some people from getting there. And those speed bumps are often that they have such a highly defined sense of who they are, that they have such clear parameters of this I would not do. And again, at a certain level of addiction, there are no parameters. Everyone will do anything. It's incremental. You don't usually. It doesn't happen all at once. But having a strong sense of self is actually really important. One of the things I find with addicts is that at a certain level of addiction, the addiction is so fundamentally prominent in their life. It is the organizing principle around which everything in their life, all their thoughts and all their energies are organized. It literally is this, this black hole of an event horizon that pulls everything toward it. And the tricky part is not sobriety, it's the maintenance of sobriety. And the tricky part about the maintenance, I mean, I'm sorry, sobriety is plenty tricky. But many people can become sober, get sober, go and do a detox for a month. Whatever it is, they can't maintain it. And the problem is that what the problem there is that the addiction has become so central in their lives. There is nothing else central enough to attract them into this other way of being. So there are voids because everything else was subsumed for the addiction. The friendships, the bridges they burned, the careers that never developed, the relationships that unrecoverable. There is not a new organizing principle of purpose, of motivation around which they can organize their lives. And a lot of programs are lacking in that because they'll go and they'll treat somebody for 30 days or 60 days and then they'll send them to some kind of intensive outpatient. But that's a three or four hour day thing. And other than that, that person comes back and there is nothing in their life that is making them feel that this is worth keeping or doing or that's what I want to do now. And unless you fill that void, unless you give them something new that can compete with the addiction for your purpose, for your attentions, for your emotional investment, People are just going to slip back into that thing, into that event horizon because you need to create a new thing and so re establishing new aspects of your life, new relationships, new aspirations, new. So for an addict in recovery, certainly there needs to be. It can't just be about not being an addict. That's a negative. What's the positive that it is about? And to me, that's missing in a lot of, not all, but in a lot of programs and a lot of recovery seminars and those kinds of things that putting that plus there and finding it was not necessarily an easy task, but that is a crucial component.

Well, I think you hit the nail on the head. I completely agree with you, what you said. Unless you can give them something new that competes with it. And it can't be just about not being an addict. I mean, that's one of the biggest challenges is people will go to very expensive rehab centers that have such a high relapse rate. It. I constantly live in this world, so I'm not going to go deeply into it on this conversation. You already know this. One of the things that I look at after having spent the last couple of years traveling around the country doing interviews with doctors and addicts and family members, ones that have lost loved ones, people that are in recovery, being my own human lab rat on all kinds of interesting things, brain scans, I mean, you name it. I have a buddy named Tommy Rosen who wrote a great book, recovery 2.0 and, and he's a dear friend and we did this great interview together. And one of the things that we look at is there's four different things that I've seen that seem to have the highest possibility of someone not only getting sober, but staying sober. And a lot of people would argue relapse is even part of recovery. But that being said, one is community, which I mentioned earlier. The second is it's biochemical, serotonin, dopamine, hormones. So that's addressed through nutrition, through supplementation, through the ability to sleep. The third is the issues are in the tissues. Somatic things, meditation, float pods, emdr, things that get you in a flow state. Could be surfing for some people, could be hiking, could be kundalini, yoga, and then breathing, the ability to even breathe. A lot of addicts, they don't breathe. That's why smokers, someone says don't smoke. For some smokers, the only meditative breathing they ever do is when they're smoking a cigarette or a joint. And then the fourth is the environment. If you're like you were talking about with work, if you're going to spend eight hours a day around an abusive, energy draining environment. So it's not just one thing. These are puzzle pieces. But at least that's my current thinking on it. And I say all of that knowing that, that I don't know anything relative to what's going to. I'll know ten years from now. So I'M going into this very complex sort of field and trying to introduce people to different thinkers. I mean, this is a perfect example of just having a conversation with you just to give people some insight and some awareness and things to look at. So what I wanted to ask you is what about biochemistry of the brain? Meaning how do we. How much of how people act and behave from your perspective is just simply serotonin and dopamine and happy chemicals? And I know that's not the best way to ask the question, but I wanted to ask you about what the heck is going on with this. The chemistry of the thinking apparatus that we walk around with.

In terms of addiction or in general? Both.

I mean, from depression, anxiety, addiction. Yeah, I mean, what are your thoughts on just simply brain chemistry? I mean, can, you know, it seems to me a lot of times people can only go so far with trying to think their way out of it. Like you mentioned earlier, if the gut is damaged and it's not producing enough serotonin, sitting in front of the best talk therapist on the planet, I don't know if that person's gonna feel any better. So I'm trying to learn as much as I can about that.

So my general thought, I'll just, you know, certainly I'm not a psychiatrist, so that's not my expertise. But my general thought is this. Look, it's a two way street, except it's not exactly a two way street. By two way street, I mean that our brain chemistry, our wiring, you know, those kinds of things impact our behavior, our thoughts, our moods significantly. But there are things we can do. There are behaviors we can assume, there are thinking patterns we can assume, there are habits we can assume that will impact our brain chemistry. That's the two way street. Here's why it's not exactly a two way street. The impact of neurochemistry and our behavior of hormones on our behavior is like a six lane highway. And our ability to impact brain chemistry and hormones and those things by, you know, and I'm talking about, you know, not supplementation, but by thinking or by behavior is like a single lane country road. So we are more influenced than we can influence in terms of the quality of it, but we can have some influence. In other words, there are things we can do to increase serotonin, to increase dopamine. I'm actually one of the people who believe that if people are very depressed, then you should be on medication. Because the efforts that you will make to emerge from the depression to fix what you need to fix in your Life are going to be so laborious, given the depression. And the chemical nature of the depression is going to suck you back into depression so strongly that you need to be lifted out of it a little bit chemically so that your actions will have more impact and be more sustained. So in certain. So I'm not against medication or any of the supplementation. I'm not against any of it. I wish our science was more exact. I mean, if you think about it, our science is extraordinarily unprecise when it comes to psychiatric medications. I mean, there's a reason that, you know, you're taking something for your mood to get better, and suddenly you're having sexual side effects. Why? Because we're just throwing something generally, like this general throw something against the wall approach. And it'll hit some things which are good for mood, but it'll also hit some of the other things which are bad for our GI system or for our reproductive systems. And so I wish we were more precise. We could target things more precisely, and there'd be much less of these side effects and unwanted results. We also, we have tests now, genetic tests, to kind of see where we are more predisposed to metabolize certain medications, psychiatric medications, better than others. And we can tell somewhat with some of these tests, like what are the best bets in terms of medication. But, you know, Prozac came out, what, 25, 30 years ago. This is new stuff for us. We're still very much in the early stages of figuring out how to impact the brain with chemicals and substances. So I'm hoping we will get more precise. I'm hoping we will be able to figure out much, much more accurately what to do in these scenarios. But there are things that we can do in terms of behaviors, in terms of thinking, in terms of habits that will have an influence on our brain chemistry as well. And we would be wise to figure those things out as well and indulge in those as well, rather than just rely on medication. That's never quite enough. All the sciences that when you want to improve emotional health, it is a combination of medication and they will say therapy, but it doesn't have to be therapy, but medication and habit change, or medication and thinking change and behavioral change, whether by therapy or otherwise, that will have an impact.

Yeah, And I bring all that up simply because the things that have helped me the most is when I start looking at exercising on a regular basis, eating very clean foods, doing things that really get into the body. And I spent a lot of time distracting myself just by Trying to address things from an intellectual level. So I think there's. And you know this, of course, there's many aspects of this. Well, I want to be very cognizant of your time because I know you scheduled us to have this conversation in between appointments and stuff. So if you could give people listening to this some of the best advice for healing their relationships, creating an extraordinary life, any advice that you think would just be very useful and powerful, what would that be?

Well, two things. First of all, self awareness. So when things go wrong, if something goes wrong in terms of relationships, couples tend to have the same arguments over and over and over again. They don't have 30 arguments, they have three. But they repeat them in different contexts over and over and over again. I get bored when I see couples by the second session because they're having an argument. I can script out each person's next response after meeting them for two hours. And so couples know this. When you hear yourself in a couple, you know, in a relationship going through the same argument and saying the same things or having the same whiny voice or using the same kind of thinking, and it's not going to get anywhere, as you know, it's unproductive. Well, stop doing that. Change the script. And this is true in general. That's my advice, I guess, in general, when things aren't working for you, change the script. Do something different. Don't just squint and try harder. Do it differently. Not the same thing, but harder. But do it differently. You have to change the system. So. So take time to try and assess what's going wrong. Try and problem solve how you can approach the problem with a different perspective and do it differently, whether it's an individual one, whether it's a couplehood one. Become curious about the situation and why you feel stuck in it or why it's not working, and develop all kinds of ideas about, well, if I'm defining it as not working in this way, then how might I get around that problem? Solve it. Try different things. You don't have to try the right answer. You won't know it's the right answer as long as it's different than the wrong answer. You've been doing now for a while. That's good. Start there. And so that's my general advice. Don't follow the same scripts if they're not working. Change them in your individual life, in your relationships, in your internal thinking. Change the scripts when they're not working.

Great. That was awesome. So do you have time for one more question or do you have to run?

I kind of have to run, I'm afraid.

Well, then I'm going to recommend people just read your book the Squeaky Wheel because it has to do with completely.

Actually the emotional first aid is the one that most to do with the stuff we've been talking about and it also has a lot of relationship stuff in it. The Squeaky Wheel is a good guide for how to complain.

Yeah, yeah. Which I think is fascinating. So where can people go to learn more about your work and to just go deeper with what we've talked about today?

My website is guywinch.com, g Y-W-I-N c-h.com they can get links to most things there. My first TED talk is up. My second talk, the one that you saw that I did a month ago, has not yet been posted. It will be in the upcoming months. I do not know yet when it will be, but it will be on my website when it does. Post I have over 200 articles on psychologytoday.com you can get links from my website and from psychologytoday.com by putting in my name in the search engine there and it'll come up with all kinds of articles. But my website is probably the best place to start.

Great. And I will link on the show notes all of the links to your websites and your books. And Guy, I really appreciate you taking the time out to share some of your thoughts. This is going to be very helpful to thousands of people and I really appreciate it. So thank you and have a wonderful day. And to all of our listeners, there's probably someone in your life that you know that could greatly benefit from hearing this conversation and reading Guy's book. So Guy Winch is his name and please share this message. And thank you Guy. I appreciate it.

It's been my pleasure. Thank you so much.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Genius Network with Dr. Guy Winch. If you would like access to the full presentation, the special resources and show notes for this episode, please visit geniusnetwork.com that's geniusnetwork.com 46 if you'd like to learn more about the Genius Network Annual event, please visit geniusnetworkevents.com that's geniusnetworkevents dot com don't miss out on more insights, strategies and wisdom like this on geniusnetwork.com subscribe to Genius Network today by visiting geniusnetwork.com subscribe. That's geniusnetwork.com subscribe.