Changing Our Mental Maps

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. In February 2024, 2 German tourists visited Australia. During one section of their trip in Queensland, they turned off the main road on the advice of Google Maps. They figured that the road up ahead was closed because of a rising river, and the detour would take them to their destination. As one of them put it later, They trusted the map. We decided, okay, let's follow Google Maps because Google Maps knows maybe more than we know. The tourists told an Australian TV station and other media that they took a dirt path known as the Langi Track. At first, things looked fine. Their off-road vehicle seemed up for the terrain. But about 40 miles in, the 4-wheel-drive Nissan Navara got bogged down. Its wheels sank into the mud. The Germans were stuck, and they found they couldn't reach anyone for help. Recognizing they were in serious trouble, they decided to abandon their vehicle and trek back in the direction they'd come.

I feel like in a movie, like in a bad movie.

We tried to build a shelter, but that didn't work really well. So we slept, like, under the sky. Rain poured down on them. They had to watch out for pigs and snakes and crocodiles. The 40-mile journey took several days. The tourists made it back safely. Rangers later helped them retrieve their vehicle. But they had learned an important lesson: a map that's wrong can sometimes be worse than no map at all. Today we explore the maps inside our own heads. What happens when these maps, which we have constructed ourselves, turn out to be inaccurate, and how we can rediscover the path forward. Misdirection, minds, and maps. This week on Hidden Brain. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Planet Visionaries. Professional climber and environmental advocate Alex Honnold hosts Planet Visionaries, a podcast spotlighting the people tackling climate challenges with real hopeful solutions. Throughout season 6, Alex brings together extraordinary changemakers for powerful conversations about grit, determination, and the power of hope to fuel our fight for a better future. In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, This is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Southern New Hampshire University. The brain isn't fixed. It's flexible. That means we're always capable of transformation. A master's degree from SNHU can help you build the skills to become whoever you want— a leader, career changer, dream chaser. With no set class times and low online tuition, SNHU makes grad school possible because it's never too late to learn something new. Get started at snhu.edu/brain. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive save hundreds because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on those iced lattes you love. Switch to Progressive and see if you could save. Get your quote today at progressive.com/hiddenbrain. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, affiliates, and other insurers. Not available in all states. It's human nature to make plans, to generate expectations, to imagine how things will go. But life often has other plans in store for us. What happens then? Norman Farb is a psychologist and neuroscientist at the University of Toronto. Over many years, he has studied how we plan for the future and what happens when our plans are derailed. Norman Farb, welcome to Hidden Brain.

Thanks so much, Shankar. It's really a pleasure to be here.

Norm, your maternal grandparents were born in Poland. They were Jewish, and they experienced the horrors of the Holocaust. After surviving the concentration camps, they moved to Canada to start a new life. They knew what they wanted for their daughter. This is your mother, Linda. Tell me about the world your grandparents constructed for her.

Yeah, so they wanted things to be very safe for their children, as you might imagine. There's literally no extended family. They're the sole survivors of both their family trees. For their daughter, they brought with them the somewhat antiquated view that her job was to be a really good girl growing up, be a help to her mother, and then find someone to marry and manage a household. And I think she really internalized that if she just was a good girl and married, you know, a nice man and had a good household, then life would turn out just great for her and she would be happy.

Linda's life But it didn't turn out the way her parents imagined. She and Norm's father fought.

I remember growing up in a period where there would be calm, but then also really stormy periods where my parents were fighting a lot. And ultimately, that led to their divorce right around the time I left for university. And by the time I was done my undergraduate days, my parents had completely split and my mother was living on her own. This was a catastrophic change in the narrative that she expected for herself.

Talk about that. I mean, she was raised with the notion that if she was a good daughter, a good wife, a good mother, that was the responsibility she had. And in turn, she would be looked after. She would have security. She would have stability. And in some ways, She had done her part, but life had not responded in the way that she thought it would.

Exactly. So for her, there was this massive disruption of the story she expected for herself and for the way her life unfolded. And she lapsed into a deep depression. So she would tell me in these phone calls that she felt like, you know, it was just unbelievable that her life had turned out this way. We would talk on average once a week and go into these really deep soul-searching conversations where she tried to explain to me why she didn't deserve this, that someone was supposed to take care of her and what was going to happen to her now. Often she'd be in tears, so really emotionally dysregulated and upset and sad. And with that sadness, was this urge to make sense of what had happened, that she had done her best, but it wasn't good enough, and it was unfair and just really unreasonable. It was just so almost incomprehensible that life had turned out this way, almost like an unwillingness to accept that she was now single and living on her own and isolated.

So by this point, you had started to study psychology. So you were learning about ideas about the mind and the brain. And I'm wondering, did you try and share with her the things that you were learning, the models you were learning about human behavior?

I've been studying a lot of things around existentialism and people negotiating their own meaning in life on the philosophy side. And I've been studying psychology and about how people make meanings for themselves and how much we construct our own our own narratives of our lives. So I would try to reason with her and say, okay, these things happened, but can we see from a practical point of view that the more time you spend rehearsing all of these hurts, these slings and arrows from the past, the more you end up suffering as though they are still happening?

Mm-hmm.

And this is where these conversations would take 30, 40, 50 minutes. And there were times I really felt like I At an intellectual level, she's following me. My mother's a bright woman as well and would be able to say, I see this, I see this. Maybe I should stop focusing so much on what your father did. And then there'd be a pause, and then, but you know what he did this other time? And so it was almost like it didn't really matter if there was some sort of intellectual understanding. This This rupture of her model of the world was so catastrophic that it had a gravity of itself that just demanded her attention. When she wasn't effortfully thinking about something, it would just suck her right back into this litany of slights and hurts and wrongs.

And I'm wondering from your part, it's difficult at any age to be handling a situation like this, but at 20, it must have been especially difficult. But did you feel, you know, I'm giving my mom good advice. She really should listen to me. It clearly does make sense to live in the present and not in the past. Were you frustrated in some ways that she was not learning from you or taking your advice?

Yeah, I think I moved from a position of benevolent intentions and a conviction that we're going to get through this together and we're going to figure out how to pick up the pieces to a sort of first frustration that the way out of this cell that you're in, like the door is open here. There's a Rumi quote, the door to your cell is open, why don't you go through? And I remember just getting so frustrated thinking like, we've been here before, we've gone through this reasoning, you've recognized that what you're doing is harmful to yourself and perpetuating your suffering, and you agree that it would be better to do something else, and then yet you persist. And got to this point where I really started to resent the interactions, and I just didn't want to have this role anymore of being her counselor. Like, I'd put in my time, and it just wasn't working despite trying to be inventive and approach it at different angles. And I remember if the phone would ring on the weekend at the time when she would normally call, starting to feel like this real negative feeling in my body, like an aversion or repulsion almost. And at the same time being like, oh, what's happening now? I feel like my relationship with my mother, my own mental health is being compromised by being drawn into this rumination pattern over and over again.

Well, it seems to me at this point that both of you in some ways had come up with maps. She had a map for how her life was going to turn out and was really upset that the map did not seem to conform with the reality of her life. And you had a map of how you could help her and how psychology could help her. And when she did not follow that map, you were getting frustrated. In some ways, both of you had these maps and were upset that real life was not conforming to them.

I think so. At the time, I would've said it was all about her map being, her holding onto her map. But I did have this insight at one point that also I was starting to fall into my own sort of script, right? And that I had a map of Being the smart, helpful son who was going to help pull her out of her depression, and that I was going to fix her in some way. And so there was, just as you said, actually 2 violations. There's the violation of her narrative of being cared for for the rest of her life and her marriage continuing on happily ever after, as idealistic as that was. And then there was also this violation of my efficacy as a good son who's going to help her and pull her out of things through my sheer ingenuity. And And I realized that I too was running along a script. And the result of me running through the script of trying to play psychoanalyst, of pushing her to change, of pushing her to accept certain facts, was actually causing me to suffer and probably also causing her to suffer. Because then every— imagine every time you talk to someone, you have to grapple with the hardest parts of your life and you're being asked to confront it and change, and then you can't do it. So both of us are actually suffering more not just as a product of her own expectations or model of the world being violated, but of me stubbornly clinging to my model of being able to come in and fix things. And realizing that I had a part to play in what felt like the degradation of our relationship was a really important insight for me at the time, because I was becoming convinced that the way I was going about things was doing more harm than good. And at that point, I think it really became an opportunity to think about practicing what I'd been preaching. So if my mother's not able to let go of her expectations and update her model of the world to accept the reality of the situation, maybe I could work on myself and accept the reality of the situation. It wasn't my job or my ability to fix her or save her. And what would it be like to have a phone conversation with her and just stop the whole process, like break the script of trying to fix her?

Hmm.

And it was a more radical way of being with her in the moment, which is like, you could be anyone today and I'm going to let you be anyone today. And that means you might be fine today. So just call it and just really just listen, like, how is she doing? And not reward the rumination or buy into the blame story, but at the same time, not engage in this kind of therapeutic delving and And more try to model what a healthy interaction might be like, which is just telling her I love her, I care for her, telling her a bit about my day, directing attention back just to our ongoing experience. Because what I realized is my model was also one that began from a place where there was something horribly wrong. And so we're both starting with this assumption where things are wrong. So what would a model look like where I let go of that? And what if there was nothing wrong in the moment with the fact that she was alone and depressed and having these ruminations and I was feeling resentment? And what if all that was going on and then we're still just going to have a nice conversation? And over time, what I noticed was, I wouldn't say they were the funnest conversations I ever had, but they became much less aversive. We would just kind of have small talk and chat and communicate that we still felt connected and loved each other. And something totally unexpected happened, which was the conversations became shorter. And I felt like I could initiate contact with her more often. So as opposed to the whole narrative being like, if I can fix her, I won't have to have these painful conversations all the time. I would say, it's like Thursday, but why don't I just call and check in with her? Because I knew it would only be like 5 or 10 minutes now. And we ended up starting to talk more days than not. But in a much sort of lighter, definitely less expectancy-laden way. And in some ways, that really shifted the trajectory of our relationship, which until that point had been heading downhill.

Norm's mother was still upset with how her life had turned out. She was still stuck on the past. Norm was upset his mother wasn't following his psychology advice, which could make things better for her in the future. But when their conversations focused on daily events, it automatically downplayed both the past and the future and focused them on the here and now. Their conversations started to have more variability. Some days they talked about sad things, other days about happy things or funny things.

Because she was so isolated, like, our social interactions really were contributing a huge amount of the interpersonal quality to her day. So if those interactions were stressful, her day was going to be stressful. And so eventually you'd just be like, how's your day? And it'd be like, it was fine. We weren't rewarding attention into the story about the past, but we weren't trying to prevent it. And so we just started to get on with our lives together. Yeah, to the point now where she'll have good days and bad days, but we still talk quite frequently and it just feels like normal, which is something I was desperately trying to achieve and sort of ironically failing to do when I was trying to play therapist.

The maps we use to navigate through life are enormously useful. Sometimes, however, they can lead us astray. When we come back, the curious brain science of how our minds come up with maps and what happens when reality tells us that those maps are wrong. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive save hundreds. Because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on those iced lattes you love. Switch to Progressive and see if you could save. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, affiliates, and other insurers. Not available in all states. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Quince. We all have those pieces in our closet that we can count on— the versatile jacket, the perfect t-shirt. These are the pieces that make getting dressed easy, and that's what Quince does best. Quince makes elevated everyday essentials using premium materials in designs that are timeless, thoughtfully crafted, and made to be worn again and again. And when the temperatures start to drop, Quince makes it easy to build on these everyday staples with versatile layers designed to keep you warm and comfortable all season long. Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers, or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Hidden Brain. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. As we move through the world, it's easy to imagine we are processing everything that happens around us and then deciding how to respond. But it turns out this would be incredibly complex and time-consuming to do. Our brains are designed to save energy, not waste it. At the University of Toronto, psychologist and neuroscientist Norman Farb studies how our brains efficiently navigate the world by coming up with maps. So Norm, let's say I'm commuting to work every day. I drive or I take public transport. The first day I do this, it's novel. The third day, it becomes familiar. By the tenth day, At a conceptual level, can you talk about what happens in my mind as my commute goes from being new and strange to familiar and commonplace?

Sure. One of the main things that our brains have evolved to do, which is to take any sort of pattern in our reality and automate that process. So yeah, that first time you're driving, the problem you're trying to deal with is, okay, I'm going somewhere new. Where do I have to turn? What's traffic like? But once the route becomes familiar, And you're like, oh yeah, when I see the green bush over there, it's getting time to slow down and turn right. Before you know it, you're doing it without even thinking.

And of course, this is all not limited just to physical navigation. Your first day at work is nothing like your 264th day at work. So our maps are not just about physical terrain, they're about what we do.

Yeah. The idea that the brain is trying to set up a model of the world that lets it predict what's going to happen next applies to all facets of life, from figuring out how to speak to someone who's a bit prickly at work to the most abstract things even of what should we think about, what should we care about, what is worth devoting our emotional energy and attention. All of these decisions become automated over time so that any leftover resources can be used to deal with the unexpected.

Norm and other researchers have identified a network in the brain that is involved in this process. It's called the default mode network. At the risk of oversimplifying things, the default mode network is the brain asking itself, can I take what just happened and fit it into a pattern, a model of the world?

Yeah.

So the default mode network is a constellation of brain regions that seem to be most active when we're not up to anything in particular, when we're given instructions to rest and just do whatever comes natural for us. So this is part of the term default. It's what happens to us by default. So we have this sense that the default mode network is instantiating a habit and in our brain so that as things become familiar and our predictions can mostly just cover what we need to do next and we don't have to do a lot of conscious processing, this is the brain network that becomes most active to deal with the expected input/output from the world.

So one way that the default mode network can get us in trouble is when we start to feel like our map of the world actually is the world. Can you talk about that for a moment, that in some ways we're doing things, we're doing things repetitively. After some time, in some ways, we build a model of what this thing is because we don't have to do it effortfully each time. But after some time, the model comes to substitute for the world itself, for the thing that we are doing itself. Can you talk about how that process happens, which is in some ways you're training the autopilot function on the plane, so to say, but after some time, the autopilot just simply starts flying the plane, and we forget that actually there is a pilot available to fly the plane as well? Yeah.

I mean, I think we have moments of this. to sort of walk into a room and start doing something and then realize it's not what we intended to do. So we have glimpses that sometimes the autopilot takes over at a behavioral level. But I think what we don't often realize is that our habits are not just habits of behavior, they're also habits of perception. So where should I look when I walk into a room? Who should I pay attention to? What sorts of things should I think about? What sorts of plans should I consider? And By extension, we're also filtering out many, many other possibilities. So the default mode network is not just looking at habits in terms of, do I exercise or not? Or how often do I bathe? But also really fundamental habits for what parts of our reality we interact with. And these are the things that we have most deeply modeled. We practice doing it over and over again. We don't consider turning left on our way to work if we always turn right. We don't wonder what is Going on to the left of us because it's irrelevant. We've learned that it's irrelevant. And at a social level, we've learned that some topics are irrelevant, they're not that important to us. Some people are irrelevant or not that important to us. And even when we're talking to someone we know and have some affiliation with, there are certain things we're used to discussing with them and other things that they're just not the kind of person I would share that with, or I wouldn't make the conversation go in that way. And that all comes from just how we perceive the world around us and filter what matters and what doesn't matter in that context. And the default mode network is doing that too. So in a way, this greatly simplifies the problem of like, what am I doing in every given moment? But it also— the way it simplifies things is by creating massive blind spots as to what are all the other things that are possible in this moment, which has big implications for our ability to change.

I'm thinking about the story you told me about your mom. You know, she recognizes from time to time, you know, it might be better for me, you know, not to dwell on the past and not to, you know, have so much animosity towards my ex-husband. I should move forward with my life. You sort of know these things at one level in your mind, but at some level, Your default is to spring back into this model that says, here's the world that I was promised and the world didn't turn out that way. And my mind keeps returning to that groove of feeling betrayed and let down.

Yeah, the idea of a groove or a channel that it's just easier for our thoughts to flow that way, I think, is a really good metaphor. We know that we have certain mental habits that we would like to change. So, At the times that we're effortfully concentrating, we're using our attention to choose differently, we have this sense of agency, but our attention is a very fragile thing. And as soon as we're no longer paying attention, we become distracted, or especially if we're stressed and fixated on something else, then what's filling in all the background of what to do, what to think about, what to recall is the default mode network. So I know I shouldn't think about this negative event because I'll become upset. And just the momentary instruction of like, well, this actually isn't skillful right now, has very little power compared to all of this machinery saying you should think about it more, it's about you. And we know from other research that thinking about the self gets the highest priority over any kind of other thinking because those are the types of thoughts that are by definition relevant for our survival.

I mean, I'm imagining that if you're driving on a street, for example, and now we see a red light, most of us are not going through the effortful process of saying, all right, that's a traffic signal in front of me. The light has turned red. Red is supposed to mean that I'm supposed to slow down and stop. So I should come to a stop because it's a red light. All of that is happening automatically. And really what you're saying is that the same thing happens at the level of interpersonal relationships, for example. We have these defaults where we see people, we've had certain patterns of conversations them, and the default mode network in some ways is putting us into the same mode that we are in when we see a red light and we automatically come to a stop.

Right. And it's not that there's zero awareness on a red light. It's more like, let's shortcut through all the reasoning and just give you sort of a basic feeling of like, you need to do this now, and it might be dangerous or unpleasant not to. And this is the default mode network trying to simplify things for us that comes with with trade-offs because this network is almost like a feeling of certainty in our minds, but the world itself is an unstable and changing place. So it can make it very difficult for us to change if that learning is now being overgeneralized, or even if it's like the same person, but let's say that person has changed or the situation has changed, it's going to be hard for us to change that programming.

I mean, as you pointed out when you were talking to your mom, it was easier in some ways to start with the default of saying, she is She is depressed. I need to help her. She's in need of therapy, as opposed to say, let's see where she is today. Let's pay attention to what's actually going on today. That's a much more effortful process of actually reading where things are rather than assuming you know where they are.

Yeah. So it's much more effortful to go in assuming you know nothing about a person and be open to this flood of information and not knowing what to pay attention to and not knowing who this person is and starting from beginning each day. each time is a hugely effortful and also kind of scary process, right? Like, there's a safety in knowing who people are and what they're up to and what they might say or do to you. And to entertain the possibility that anything could happen kind of makes you vulnerable, right? And what if that means you had to respond in different ways, right? There might almost be a fearfulness in letting someone just show up totally differently because You know, we want to assume that we're going to be the same person tomorrow and that other people are going to be consistent. What if they're not?

So you've conducted a number of neuroimaging studies of people who have experienced or are currently experiencing depression. You put them in the fMRI scanner in your lab so you can see what's going on in their brains. In one study, you put people in this brain scanner and you asked them to watch very sad film clips. What were these clips and what did you find, Norm?

Yeah, so in order to be a good prediction machine, the name of the game for the brain is to associate whatever's happening in your momentary experience with other past events so that you can contextualize and interpret those events. And this is why we think we see the default mode network activating, lighting up in the scanner when people are exposed to sadness, is they see something happening. We show themes of loss. We show clips from Terms of Endearment, the mother saying goodbye to her kids because she has terminal cancer, for instance. And the brain is sort of saying, oh, okay, I'm getting this interpersonal interaction happening. What's happening here? Oh, a mother is sick and she's having to say goodbye to her kids. And we immediately relate that our own experiences of loss, of having to say goodbye to loved ones, of the fragility of life, our own severed relationships. And this helps us go from just seeing pixels moving around on a screen to really feeling immersed in a story. This is why we enjoy stories so much because they aren't just about the protagonist in the story, they're about us. And that's the default mode. Now we're kind of filling in like, wow, look at how richly this particular stimulus, this particular event or experience is actually a candidate for many other experiences or a prototype of many other experiences that have happened in our own lives. It's a ubiquitous kind of response to try to think about how can I make sense of this experience in terms of what I already know about myself and the world.

Now, you did find a difference between people who were prone to depression and people who were not showing signs of depression, but it wasn't in the default mode network, but in another What did you find, Norm?

Yeah, so this really surprised us that the default mode network wasn't driving our prediction of who is depressed and who wasn't. We thought, of course, people who are depressed are so sucked into their negative life stories that this is causing depression, and it just wasn't. I had to sort of open up my own set of expectations, my map for what was going to happen, and say, okay, well, If I'm going to make something out of this study that tells us something about depression, maybe I should look for what else is happening in the brain. And when I started now looking at what parts of the brain were deactivating, where we actually saw less activity during sad films compared to neutral films, we saw that it was the parts of our brain that represent what's happening in our bodies that tend to be turning off. So there's parts of the brain that we know across almost every person represents what's happening on the surface of your body. And we know that there's parts of the brain that represent the internal feeling state of the body. And it was these regions that were deactivating in response to the sad film clips. And what really convinced me that there was a story here, because this is not how I think even the general scientific community would think of depression vulnerability, it's still thought of as being the triggering of threat signals that then trigger you into your defensive habits. So What really convinced me that this was important was when we looked at what parts of the brain had activity that correlated with or helped us predict whether someone was depressed or not, it was this pattern of deactivation in body representation regions that was significantly associated with whether people were depressed or not. And it did not seem diagnostic to look at differences in how much people were activating the default mode network.

Hmm.

It just seemed that what might be pathological or harmful is doing this to the exclusion of continuing to process and update yourself with information about how your body is feeling.

And when you say how the body is feeling, you mean everything from, are my eyes seeing color? Are my ears hearing sound? What is the feeling of the carpet on my feet or the desk under my arm? It's all of the feelings and sensations that are flooding into the brain. You're saying that in people who had a propensity for depression, these areas were suppressed. These signals were being suppressed.

Right. The most pronounced places that were associated with depression were specifically the regions for what am I feeling in my body right now? So as you know, how do I feel lying here in the scanner? Am I hot or cold right now? Do I feel sensations like in my gut? Does my heart ache? And if we think about our strong emotional responses, you feel it a lot of times in your chest and in your gut. And if this signal is being suppressed while you're thinking about your sadness, it's that kind of perfect storm that's actually associated with depression, which poses its own sort of conceptual mysteries for us to understand, because it's not at all what we expect.

It's almost at that point like you have a brain without a body. Your brain is full of its own thoughts, its own activity, its own self-perception, but it's not paying attention to signals coming in from the body.

That's right. In the case of depression vulnerability, what's happening is people are saying, well, I want to protect myself From these negative feelings. They feel bad or threatening or just icky. And so I'm going to just, for now, I'm going to pause taking in new information just while my brain thinks about this model of me being sad. And meanwhile, the default mode network is saying, I'm just going to keep thinking about all the reasons I should feel sad right now and I've felt sad in the past and link all this information together until I get interrupted by new information. So you have this kind of recipe for turning on the sadness machine and then locking all the doors for other visitors that might interrupt sadness. So there's this ironic perpetuation of our sadness by conceptualizing it and cutting out the sensory aspects of it. The default mode network is not in the business of changing unless it has to integrate new information, and now we're not letting it integrate new information.

To put this another way, the brain is doing 2 things. It's taking in information and then using that information to improve its internal maps of the world. People with a propensity for depression seem to stop taking in information, leaving the brain with only its own internal maps. If those maps are filled with ruminations about an unfair, unkind, unhappy world, that becomes the only world we can see. Even if good things happen to us, even when we catch a break, our internal map continues to paint a picture of gloom. When we come back, how to update our internal maps. You're listening to Hidden For Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Instagram. Instagram teen accounts' automatic protections limit who can contact teens, the content they can and the time they spend on the app. Teens are automatically placed into Teen Accounts. Teens under 16 will need a parent's permission to change any of those settings to be less strict. Learn more about Teen Accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/teenaccounts. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Air France. Air France Business Cabin offers comfort throughout the journey with priority check-in, boarding, and lounge access. Onboard, enjoy menus from renowned French chefs, wines and champagne selected by a sommelier, and free high-speed Wi-Fi. When it's time to rest, settle into a fully adjustable lie-flat bed with added mattress comfort. The art of travel, elevated, because Air France Business Cabin goes further in every detail to make your journey exceptional. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Norman Farb is a psychologist and neuroscientist at the University of Toronto. With Zindel Segal, he's the author of Better in Every Sense: How the New Science of Sensation Can Help You Reclaim Your Life. Pop psychology talks a lot about the differences between the left brain and the right brain. But Norm says the more important distinction might be between the front of the brain and the back of the brain. The front of the brain is where a lot of our mapmaking happens. The back of the brain is mostly where the brain picks up information from our senses.

Among people with a propensity for depression, Norm says the mapmaking part of the brain is very active, while the part that processes sensory information The more stressed we become, the more we start seeing that the front of the brain becomes active and many parts of the back of our brain are becoming deactivated. So I think you can think of it as a tale of 2 partners that are trying to work together to help get you through life. And one of these partners is the default mode network. It really uses a lot of the mental machinery that, you know, makes us more kind of evolved. And its job is to make a really good model of the world and help us make decisions and make decisions use that model to efficiently get through life. But this other partner is the sensory parts of our brain that are still open to the fact that the world is changing. It's almost like this force of chaos, and we need to have chaos because the world is changing and our models are going invariably to be wrong if they do not adapt to change. And so, What seems to be happening when people become stressed or you feel like you're stuck in a rut or you wonder why you keep doing the same things or having the same interactions play out the same way, it seems to be the case that the part of our brain which we think is driven by default mode network activity has become too dominant. And it's happening at the expense of the sometimes scary process of letting the chaos of the world, and that could change our models of the world, which also means changing us.

At the same time, I think this might explain now why someone who has a certain map of the world sort of finds themselves not able to extricate themselves from it. Part of the problem might be that they simply have stopped taking in information that could tell them that their map is wrong.

Right. So if your response to a stressor is to think, okay, I don't have a lot of time to learn something new right now. I have to deal with this situation? What do I already have in my toolbox to deal with this sort of situation? Someone is being aggressive towards me, or I've just experienced a failure and I'm worried about what the future holds. We're driven to use what we already know. But if the problem is that what we already know is leading us to repeatedly get into conflict or to run into failure or to descend into the pits of despair, then we just keep reaching in to the toolbox that has the same tools that are causing the problem in the first place.

I'm also imagining, let's say you have a fight with someone who is close to you, and the fight is very painful, and you're flooded with all kinds of sensations. Your cortisol levels are elevated. So there's a lot of signals coming in from your body that, in fact, something very unpleasant has happened, and now your default mode network kicks in. You're telling yourself a story about how this fight came to be and what your relationship is like with this other person. You have now the elaboration of the map. You have a map of the fight. In addition to the fight. In addition to the fight. I think what you're saying is that 2 hours after the fight is over, the body has stopped sending you signals that a terrible fight has happened. The body has gone back to baseline, but the story of the fight, the map of the fight continues in our heads. For some people, that map becomes so powerful that the fight now persists, and now it has a life that basically is lasting a week, a year, a decade when the bodily sensations of that fight in fact have dissipated.

That's exactly right. And then the insidious thing is that because you're telling this story, even after the body's calmed down, your body doesn't know the difference between you telling the story about the fight or the fight. So it thinks the fight's happening again. So you do actually get more cortisol and more stress hormones released into the body as you hold onto this over and over again. And so, yeah, it's really just like this irony that It makes sense that we want to get away from feeling bad. We want to move things into a kind of conceptual realm where we can manipulate them and think about it in terms of a story, and it's less energy intensive and all these things. So it makes sense that we do this, but then before we know it, exactly as you said, now we have this model of the fight that we can carry with us wherever we go. And that's what happens in real life. Someone says something at work and then your body kind of calms down, but then driving home, you think about it again and the body reacts. And then you go home and you tell your your loved one about it. And so now it's happened again. And then you call, you know, your friend and you say, do you know what this person said to me? And it happens again and again and again. So we are like inflicting the fight over and over again, even though it was only like 2 or 3 minutes of our day.

You know, I'm thinking about this story that is ascribed to to Buddha and Buddhism, there's a story of something that's called the second arrow. The Buddha is supposed to have said, as we go through life, we're going to be struck with arrows. Unfortunate things are going to happen to us. Tragedies are going to strike us. But what we shouldn't do is we shouldn't take a second arrow and plunge it into the site of the first injury. Really, what you've just described, you have the fight at work, but then you're reliving that fight now 20 times. Each of those 20 times, You're plunging a new arrow into the site of the old wound.

I think there's a really nice parallel there. It's, it's these stories we tell ourselves about the negative events that are like the second arrows, potentially, if, if the stories we tell are negative or disempowering. And of course, we learn what stories to tell to interpret events very early on in life through the modeling of the people around us.

Norm says that being disconnected from our senses can keep us from feeling connected to other people. The more we live inside the world of our internal maps, and the less we pay attention to how our interactions with others make us feel, the less happy we are going to be.

And it's kind of catastrophic because we know that our reasoning is never able to take everything into account. And there's times we can have perfect reasons for our actions and be doing drastic harm to our sense of relatedness or connectedness. So we're not taught to balance this sort of reasoning with, well, what does it feel like while you're being right? What does it feel like while you're showing that your model is the correct model? And I guess there's a Chinese saying, the signal that things need to change is often a sensory signal. It's this feeling that There is something amazing and great about feeling connected to other people, for instance. And to feel that rupture and realize that something's wrong, no matter how right you are symbolically and logically, that's a really powerful motivator to put down your model for a little bit and think about, what am I assuming here?

Yeah.

And when you think about so many, both interpersonal disagreements as well as partisan disagreements that we have, so much of that is about my map versus your map, as opposed to asking, how does this affect the relationship between me and you?

Yeah, I really think, I mean, what many of us want, and I can say definitely what I want, is to feel connected and loved and accepted by other people. And that's a real feeling, right? In the times that I am most satisfied with my life. I feel like I have that connection and it's able to be there reliably. And the times that I've felt at my lowest is when I feel alone. Not to be too melodramatic, Shankar, we just met, but I can feel a connection right now as we speak, and that's motivating me to open up more and share more.

Hmm.

And it's meaningful. And I just feel like we don't even have a great vocabulary for that. We're not taught that to the same extent we're taught math or spelling. And we don't have a culture that checks in on that feeling of connection or disconnection as being as important as maybe some of our outward indicators of health and success. And I really think it's This felt sense of connection, both to ourselves in the world, but by extension to other people, to other living beings, that's often missing when people feel like life has gone awry somehow.

The solution, Norm says, is to deliberately and consistently reconnect with the world of the senses. To feel, to hear, to see. The more attentive we are of our bodies, the less likely we are to get trapped inside our internal outdated maps. Norm says he has embraced a tactile practice each morning to help him be present with his family instead of letting the models inside his head tell him how to behave.

You know, in the morning when I am tired and grumpy, I needed something that would just break right through and remind me that I had some intentions about how I wanted to be in the world. So what I learned to do Yeah. What I do is associate the feeling of cold tiles on my bathroom floor touching my feet with a reminder that I can be intentional about my relationships. And I've used that especially in times I felt really calcified in my relationships. If I'm stuck in a pattern where I'm getting into quarrels with my kids, for instance, then I would use Touching those tiles in the morning is a way to remember, like, today's a new day. It's a chance to look at things differently. Like, can you stay open right now?

I understand that there was a morning recently when you and your kids were running behind schedule and you felt yourself getting increasingly angry. This had happened before and your mental maps were saying, they never listen to me. We're always running late. Describe what was happening in your mind and what you did at that point in time.

Yeah, so I pride myself on being an engaged parent, and I want my kids to learn about punctuality, and I have a model that I should be able to get them to school on time. And I would find that the harder I pushed them to get ready, the more they would kind of flop around and be playful and bicker with each other, and I would just be losing my mind. I would feel this rage building up, this frustration of like, why won't you do this basic basic thing for me. Like, don't you even care about me? And at the same time, I have like a meta rage about like, but I'm studying mindfulness and I'm supposed to be open to these things and just like let the feeling go. And so I noticed like, okay, I'm just going to notice my rage. And then like 3 seconds later, it'd be like, get your like freaking shoes on, right? Like, so just like attending to the rage and being open to the feeling of anger actually wasn't just going to take care of this problem. What I needed to do was actually be more exploratory. And I remember looking at my kids and being like, they don't care about getting to school on time. They just want to play. And I was like, well, what's it like to feel like you want to play? And feeling this kind of warmth and this sparkle again of instead of rejection of them, sort of othering them as people who are thwarting my plans, feeling like, well, I want to be connected to them. I want to play too, but we also have to get to school. And then realizing, well, then really what I just need to do is get them out the door. with this kind of feeling of connection and playfulness. Like, how could I do that? Well, I bet you if like a big scary monster showed up and was threatening to tickle them, they would be really motivated to get out the door, but it wouldn't be like angry dad time. So I felt the anger, but I also felt this like connection to my kids. And I learned to become this kind of tickle monster when they were kind of messing around getting out the door. And eventually they started to be like, oh, he's turning into the tickle monster. Get your shoes on really quick because you're going to get tickled. And it was like a totally different way around the problem that wasn't about being stricter or having more consequences or lecturing them about responsibility or other things that little kids just don't care about and are actually connection disrupting. So yeah, foraging isn't as simple as just like, if you get into sensation, all your problems are solved. It's the beginning of starting to explore, right? And then remembering like, what are you actually exploring for here? Like, are you willing to be You might be surprised that the way to get this kind of connection, the way to have this feeling of positivity, it's not the way you expected it to look, but it's probably available if you're willing to let go of what you know and try other things.

There's another way of describing describing what Norm was doing at that moment. He was practicing radical acceptance. He realized that he wasn't getting anywhere by lecturing his kids or getting angry with them. And this acceptance gave him the space to try something new. Recently, we heard from a listener named Meg who shared her own story of radical acceptance. A few years ago, Meg was struggling to maintain the life she'd built I wasn't just stuck.

I felt like I was melting. On the surface, my life looked good. I was a successful lawyer with my own firm. I had 2 beautiful kids, a husband, and a menagerie of pets. But underneath, the pressure was too much. My 9-year-old daughter had been diagnosed with autism and ADHD, among other diagnoses, and she was in crisis. Later, my son would receive the same diagnosis. I was in a state of crisis. What's more, I, like so many other moms in their 30s and 40s, was diagnosed with autism and ADHD myself following my daughter's diagnosis. Despite making small changes in my life, I was still pushing myself to levels of professional and personal performance that was breaking me.

Meg didn't know how much longer she could cope with the pressure she was under, and she didn't know how to make things better. Eventually, though, she accepted that something had to give.

I realized that my family's brains really are fundamentally different and that we cannot function in the way that society may expect. Once I accepted that my life was not going to be the way that I planned, everything changed for the better. My children and I are now all thriving. They are in a specialized school for twice exceptional learners. My husband and I shifted our parenting when we realized that having extraordinary children require strategies that are extraordinary. I closed my law firm and joined another amazing firm that accepts me for who I am and where I can focus on the work I love. It has even led me to what I believe is my purpose in life, using my communication skills to help others better understand and support neurodivergent families in the legal system. Without the radical acceptance that my family and I are fundamentally We would still be in crisis, and we would not have found our way to live deeply meaningful and fulfilling lives.

When we experience a series of crises, we long for greener grass, for less work or more work, for a different relationship, for a bigger this or a stronger that. But often accepting where we are is the first step in getting where we want to go. When we come back, listener questions and stories about struggle and acceptance. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Instagram. Instagram Teen Accounts' automatic protections limit who can contact teens, the content they can see, and the time they spend on the app. Teens are automatically placed into Teen Accounts. Teens under 16 will need a parent's permission to change any of those settings to be less strict. Learn more about Teen Accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/hiddenbrain. Thanks for listening.

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This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. When we imagine our future lives, we typically ask ourselves, where do I want to go? Often that dream of the future involves frustration with the present. We feel we're not where we deserve to be in our career or our relationship. We feel wronged. At Stanford University, Dave Evans says that these feelings of anger or unfairness can block us from seeing reality clearly. With Bill Burnett, Dave is the author of How to Live a Meaningful Life: Using Design Thinking to Unlock Purpose, Joy, and Flow Every Day. Hi, I'm Bill Evans. Dave recently joined us for 2 Hidden Brain episodes called Designing a Life That Matters and Radical Acceptance. Last week, we heard part 1 of our listener-focused segment with Dave about getting unstuck. This week, he returns to answer listener questions about the idea of radical acceptance. Dave Evans, welcome back to Hidden Brain.

Thank you, Shankar. Glad to be here.

Dave, you spent time as a technologist before you became a design thinker at Stanford University. And both in the world of technology, as well as in the world of helping people design their lives, you say that we need to deeply understand what's going on around us before we can change anything. But in order to deeply understand what's happening, step 0 is accepting reality for what it is. Unpack this idea for me.

Well, we've been teaching design thinking at Stanford since 1963. That's where it actually originally Called human-centered design, HCD, was in fact begun. It's been around a long time, and the steps are empathy— deeply understand what you're looking at and what you're in the midst of— then define what problem you're going to actually solve because you understand the situation well enough to pick a good problem, then have ideas, then prototype those ideas, then finally test your result before you let it out into the world, and off you go. So those are the steps. And we noticed that empathy, deeply understand the situation first and foremost, is great, but you have to enter that process willingly. So step 0 is accepting that reality is in fact the way it currently is. I have to have that acceptance in hand so that when I'm looking at my reality, trying to understand what's going on in my family or what's going on in this company, or, you know, My soon-to-be daughter-in-law was in a company that had a 40% layoff a couple of weeks ago because of AI. Like, okay, do I accept those realities? Am I willing to see things as they are? That enables me to actually be more objective, see more deeply into the situation, and that seeing deeply into the situation is what's going to free me to empower me to design the best possible thing. Acceptance precedes everything.

Talk about why this radical acceptance is so difficult to achieve. What are the internal processes, the thoughts, the emotions that get in the way of us being able to accept where we actually are?

That's a big and complex question. And let me oversimplify it. It's really all about being too goal-oriented. We long for a certain outcome. We have a goal. We have something in mind. And we're trying to pursue it. And we have a plan for how we're going to accomplish pursuing that goal. And in order for that plan to work, Reality is supposed to comply, and then reality goes off script and we have to change. And maybe we even have to change what our objective is going to be because that's not going to work out as originally intended. And we feel like it's so disappointing. We may even feel that it's immoral to let go of our goal or to see things a different way. Like, I'm committed. I promised myself I was going to do this. I'm not going to give up. And so somehow we get so stuck On the version of reality that was required for us to get where we're trying to go, that we feel we have been wronged. In your introduction, you said people feel wronged. So acceptance can be hard because we feel like we're giving up, maybe even immorally giving up, and we're not. We're just adapting.

Hmm. We heard from several listeners who struggle to embrace the reality of their own lives. Listener Fernanda Fernanda is from Brazil, and she works as a filmmaker and an actress. And her dream was to win an Academy Award. She put everything into achieving that dream.

I put everything aside— my family. Like, my grandfather died, and I couldn't come to the funeral. Like, my nephew grew up and is now 20 years old, and he barely knows me. And so I put put aside my life for this one goal of winning this Oscar, right? One day. And, and that was the meaning of my life, right? And so when it all crumbled because my health gave out and I got into a deep depression and the industry is crumbling, and so there's no work, nobody can do anything. I'm not the only one crumbling, but I feel like my fall was higher because I am 44 now and I have no family, no kids. Kids, no, nothing to show for really, like financially. And I come back to my hometown in Brazil with my tail between my legs and I'm like, what the fuck was all of that for? And this is very much in line with this, what this author was saying. And I loved the podcast and I want to live a radical acceptance life with this idea of designing a new life now where I'm in a different city, in a different country, different culture, and having to relearn how to live, really.

I really feel for Fernanda, Dave. What do you hear in her story, and do you have any advice for her?

I might have some suggestions. Advice, I'm very loath to give advice, but here are some thoughts. She knows Which choice she made. She made a radical choice. She made an incredibly sacrificial commitment. So she knowingly took a massive risk. And then when it didn't work out, what was hard to assess is, boy, now looking back on the price I paid, I willingly paid, looks awfully tall. So she would feel better about that price if in fact she had an Academy Award sitting on her shelf. And so if I were talking with her, kind of say, it's time to think about your story. Life is indeed a story we tell ourselves. Pick your story carefully, including it might be time to edit that story. So her story was, my life is worthwhile as soon as I get that award, because that award will validate that I've become a terrific actress. Well, is that— that's a great validation form, but is it the exclusive definition of good acting?

No. Hmm.

So it might be time to rewrite the question. Okay, it worked. I stayed in the business as long as I could. I got as good as I possibly could. I didn't fail trying my hardest. It didn't generate that award, but I became the actress I could be. And now I get to decide— life has invited me to go do something else, and now it's time to say, okay, It's not picking up the pieces of my life. It's just accepting the facts of my life. What relationship with my nephew could I start now? What other things could I do if I don't have the intimacy of a family? What are other forms of intimacy that I can start designing now? Chosen families, by the way, often become more intimate than given families. I've got both chosen and given family, and I have more refrigerator art on my refrigerator from my 2 chosen granddaughters than my 9 other real grandkids combined. So she's got some choices in front of her, and acceptance is where it starts.

Hmm. Here's another story from a listener who's having trouble with acceptance. Nat is a trans man in his mid-40s and has had a good life for the most part. In a note, Nat says, I own my home, have a job I love. I have great friends and family and full acceptance from everyone in my life, an amazing dog. I'm currently single, but I've had loving relationships, and I'm currently working to improve my health and feel better than I have in a long time. Yet I still have a hard time accepting the fact that I was not born male and that I'll always be kind of a man. I mourn not being able to experience life as a male in my youth. And even though I know I have a good life, I feel stuck accepting it and therefore can't fully enjoy life and feel truly happy. So Dave, I can feel Nat's pain. Without taking anything away from Nat's story and feelings of loss, Can you talk about how feelings of regret and rumination can get in the way of accepting where we are?

Well, I really appreciate Nat's situation. This is where the distinction between acceptance and endorsement is crucial. We're not saying that it was a good thing that you weren't born who you really are. We're saying it's true. And if I fully and radically accept it, because it's completely out of my control, Then making the best not of a bad situation, making the best of the situation is all that is available. So here's almost an interesting existential question. Nat, do you really want to decide that in order for you to be happy, to be fully happy, reality has to be false? That in fact You were wrong from the start, and the universe decided from the get-go that you can't be fully yourself. That's an important decision to make. So if I accept I was born one way and my identity was other, and now my task is to bring those 2 as close to each other as I possibly can—

He's doing a terrific job of being the gnat One listener told us a story about a time when he confronted something of a meta-challenge. He was feeling badly about where his life was at, and to make matters worse, he was feeling badly about feeling badly. Here is listener Jocko.

I was really stuck and spinning my wheels in the summer of 1978 after my spouse Yes. Left me for someone else, and I found myself driving across country to visit a friend. Long story short, I drove through the night one time, and as the sun was rising in eastern Colorado and I was looking out over the fields, It was a beautiful setting. I was open and opened to an insight about struggle in general and how one need not fight the struggle. The struggle is enough without having to fight the struggle itself. A bit abstract perhaps, but it has helped me when I felt stuck to realize, okay, let's just be with the struggle and let the struggle exist. And in reality, that's what it is. It's the struggle. But I needn't fight the fact that it's a struggle.

So Dave, I have to say, I'm in love with the phrase, the struggle is enough without having to fight the struggle. What do you think of Jocko's insight?

Well, he's exactly right. And, and that lesson, slightly different phrase— differently phrased in my own experience, was probably the single biggest lesson coming out of my processing the grief of losing my wife. Um, so I think Jocko has learned a profoundly important lesson. And what he noticed was, oh, she left me. And then there's, oh no, she left me. The struggle is enough. The primary pain is enough. The reaction against having the pain is elective. So our strong recommendation, this goes back to acceptance, is, look, just let the pain be the pain and then work that through. My own experience of that, by the way, is there's a very important line that occurred to us when my wife was going through cancer. She went in for a procedure, they're going to do this, you know, radio-opaque imaging thing, And the nurse says, oh, and you might feel a little warmth when we inject the dye. And Claudia was very tired of what she called medical euphemism at that point. She goes, oh, a little warmth like where you take a can of kerosene, pour it down my throat, and light it on fire? Is that what you mean? And the nurse goes, oh, you've had the procedure before? She goes, yes, I have. And I'm, I'm tired of these euphemisms. Um, so the nurse goes all hard-ass on her, and she goes, oh, Okay, so you get it. Here's the deal. It's just pain, okay? Let it rinse through you and it's over. Or you can resist it and it hurts worse and it lasts longer. It's up to you. I get paid the same either way. Whoa, talk about harsh! Turns out it was one of the most life-giving things we ever heard. So that line, it's just pain, let it rinse through you, became a mantra in my life. That's exactly what Jocko was saying. Oh, it's really painful to be left by somebody you're in love with. Let it rinse through you. That you that the sunrise reminded you is not gone is still here. And after that pain rinses through you, you're still here. And now let's go on with life. So I found when I just let the pain be the pain and I didn't get into reacting against it, I received it, it would go through me quicker, it would leave me cleaner, and on the rare occasion there was a lesson, I could actually learn it rather than be upset. So Jocko is doing a great job of a hard thing.

When we come back, should you accept being single when you badly want to be in a relationship? You're listening to Hidden Brain I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Stripe. Stripe is built for whatever comes next, because scaling your business model isn't a set-it-and-forget-it thing. You want to test, iterate, and launch new pricing plans constantly. With Stripe Billing, you can easily experiment with new subscriptions and launch new usage-based and hybrid pricing models so your revenue model can change as fast as your product and market fit evolve. Reach new customers, expand globally, and keep revenue operations ready for whatever comes next. Stripe Billing powers any business. It's built to support you no matter how much you scale, with a network powering more than 1.6% of global GDP and the partner of choice for 86% of Forbes AI50 companies that have monetized to date. Learn how you can power any business model at stripe.com/billing. Support for Hidden Brain comes from US Bank. With a US Bank Smartly Visa Signature Card, With the Smartly Card, you earn an unlimited 2% cash back on every purchase. No quarterly activations, no categories to track, just unlimited 2% cash back on every purchase. Visit usbank.com/smartlycard to learn more. The creditor and issuer of this card is U.S. Bank National Association, pursuant to a license from Visa USA, Inc. Some restrictions may apply. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Hoping to make a big life change? First ask yourself, have I fully accepted where I am right now? At Stanford University, Dave Evans argues that seeing reality clearly is a crucial first step to making change. But seeing reality for what it is— radical acceptance is very difficult. Dave, it's one thing to say that we want to plan a better life for ourselves, but we're engaging every day with the world around us, and we have relationships with other people to consider. Listener Katie shared a comment that gets at this reality. She enjoys a successful career. She has 3 wonderful children, but something still feels like it's missing.

I have been divorced close to 10 years, and I did not I would still be single now, but I am, and it's really hard to accept that. And I think the word that you all didn't use but I'm going to try to use is embrace. And instead of being so negative and saying, I'll never find someone, I'll never meet someone, I will be single forever, With a negative tone, I need to embrace the reality and accept it that I'm single right now. I've had relationships, none of them were the right one, and, um, I just need to really work on radical acceptance of this part of my life. It may or may not change, I don't know, and I want to embrace it. better and keep living with my work as my mission and my family as my joy and my dog and my friends and all the things I have going on in my life.

So Dave, romantic relationships are one domain where it seems radical acceptance can be both very important and also very difficult. Our wants and preferences are not the only things that determine whether where in a relationship or how that relationship goes. What do you think of Katie's story?

Well, I hear it often, and I'm kind of living close into it because, uh, truth be told, as we are recording this, I am 9 weeks from getting married for the 3rd time. And the person I'm about to marry, by the way, um, hasn't been married in over 30 years, um, hasn't been in a relationship in over 20. So she and many women and many men I know have gone through what Katie's going through. So what do I think about Katie's situation? I think it's extremely difficult. It's incredibly painful, and a lot of people are there. And what do I think about how she's doing it? I think she's doing it brilliantly. As you just listen to her on the verge of tears because she really longs to be with somebody, and I get that. When I was going through being widowed, you know, the term widower didn't make any sense to me. That's not who I am. Who am I? Oh, I'm an amputated husband. I've been a we all my life. So my identity is entirely rooted in a relationship. And so I'm just a broken half of a pair. I don't even feel like an individual person. I just feel like a broken half of a pair. You're like one bicycle wheel. So I get what she's talking about. Now, in terms of what she's doing, embrace reality is a lovely idea. At least allow reality. When I go from acceptance, it's not just, okay. The reason we talk about radical acceptance is like fully lean into, okay, not merely accepting it, but being available. So acceptance plus availability is, and what does reality have for me here if I lean forward? Looking at what is true, what is available, what is possible, and ask what might be life-giving in that which is there is an entirely different experience than leaning into that which is missing. She's spending all her energy looking at the empty chair of the partner who's not here is entirely different than looking at the people that she's with.

So we discussed this when we had our initial conversations, Dave, but there is a potentially thin line between radical acceptance and being passive. So let's say you feel like something's wrong with your life, or let's say you think something's wrong with the world. What's the difference between radical acceptance and just simply saying, okay, it's the way it is, nothing can be done, I don't have to do anything? What's the difference between radical acceptance and being passive? And how can we tell the difference and act on the difference so that we retain our sense of agency?

Ah, okay. So that last, That's the way things are. There's nothing to be done. I don't need to do anything. Those are 3 very different sentences, and they don't go together. That's the way things are. Okay, now that that's the way things are, what can be done? Going from that's the way things are to nothing can be done is a huge decision, and I think a mistake. The mistake is we go from that's the way things are to nothing can be done because we haven't changed our mind about what we want. If nothing can be done to force somebody to show up in Katie's life and become her partner, then nothing can be done about my relational longing. So it doesn't look like long-term relationships are happening anytime soon here. That's what's true. Oh, now what can be done? How can I live more fully into my platonic friendships? Do I want to be a casual dater? Is that worth my time or not? It invites me through acceptance to not become passive. Passivity as the outcome of acceptance means you've not changed your mind about anything. What acceptance is supposed to do is to free you to change your mind about what can be, not get stuck on what can't be, and then move into that. The reason acceptance helps is you're no longer wasting your time on something that needn't require your attention, so you can do that which deserves your attention.

So some listeners pointed out, Dave, that our friends and family can help us to accept where we're at, In fact, listener Elise had a story to share on that front.

I was an entrepreneur building a company and became a workaholic. And it took an intervention with 2 of my top people at my firm, along with my husband, to get me to change. And it was a rather poignant moment when my husband sat me down at the kitchen table one evening and said, we don't know who you are anymore. But something's got to change. And I remember looking at him and saying, well, I know I need to change, but I don't know how. And that began a journey, literally. I learned to ride a motorcycle. And I tell everybody that learning to ride a motorcycle helped me rediscover the joy in the journey of life. And only after I became a whole person again, By no longer living just for work, but learning to enjoy the ride, everything seemed to change for the better— my marriage, my family, my home life, my friends, and my work. Which surprisingly, the firm after that grew and grew to an exponential level, and I ended up selling the company to an international holding company. So it all turned out really well, but I don't think it ever would have changed if I had never gotten unstuck by those who really, really loved me.

What do you think, Dave? Can the people who are closest to us help us accept reality and help us change?

Oh, yes. And it happens all the time. And Elise is blessed to have a family and even colleagues, it sounds like, who are willing to tell her the hard truth in a loving way. I have been involved in both receiving And executing interventions of this nature. I've had them done to me and I've done them to others. And anytime you go through that, by the way, those giving the intervention, in this case her husband and her colleagues, you never know what you're going to get. There's no guarantee that the intervention will, quote, work, meaning you, you're going to get their attention strongly enough to cause a change to occur. In Elise's case, fortunately, she was wise enough to actually hear the message and do something. She admitted, I have no idea how to fix this. Because of course, the reason you become a workaholic is you're doing one thing all the time and it completely occupies all your attention. So you don't have another idea. Can loved ones be the author of critically valuable inflection points? Absolutely. Happens all the time. So if you love somebody who needs an inflection point, you might want to think about having the courage to do it. Doing it well matters, by the way. It's really easy to blow one of these. But done well, they can be life-giving. No guarantee, but it's worth it.

So there's a subtext to this conversation that I want to flag, which is being able to take a pause and figure out where you're headed in life is an opportunity, but it's also an opportunity that not everyone can afford to take. Is designing your life or thinking about design thinking when it comes to your life, is that a privilege that is reserved for the well-off and the wealthy, Dave?

Well, no and yes. Let me be honest. First of all, look, the well-resourced person who's healthy, who has good housing, who has a decent job, who has a couple of ego-contributing successes under their belt, who has some healthy relationships and enough money in the bank to buy them a little time to think about something— that person is more easily situated to apply these tools than somebody who is working 4 jobs, is a single mom, you know, whose landlord is a monster, you know, and has a restraining order against a violent ex-husband. Those people are not in the same situation. But it's not that design thinking is only for the well-resourced. So the more constrained you are, the more important it is to have some powerfully creative tools to start making things be a little bit different. So, an example. I was befriending one of the workers in the food service at Stanford. There's a woman who worked in the food court, you know, who I got to know, you know, and she's a woman of color and she's a single mom and she's a laborer. And of course, in order to own a home, she bought a house 2.5 hours' drive away from Stanford. And her nearly 80-year-old mother would stay home and, you know, receive the high school kids back from, you know, and it was a really tough life. I said, well, what are you going to do about that? She said, well, next year my youngest is going to be in high school. And at high school, I think the kids can take care of themselves. And I really want to spend time with my mom. So what I did was, I got my mom a job at Stanford, a really crummy job, a very clerical job. But now she rides with me from home in Merced all the way to Palo Alto in California. And so I get to spend 4 hours a day with my mother in these latter years of her life, telling stories and being in love with her. And that's really working for me. So here was this incredibly constrained life. And she said, what can I do within this thing? And she found a life-giving thing to do.

As part of daily life, Dave, many of us have to interact with large institutions, whether that's a government bureaucracy or a religious group or a company. And navigating these can be frustrating because they can make us feel really powerless. Listener Emily called in with a story about how she worked at several tech companies and she hoped to change them for the better, but she found she never could.

And so for 13 years, I Goldilocks'd my way through publicly traded companies and startups, slaloming through confusion and toxicity, and eventually trying to leapfrog to yet another gig. Until the day I realized that I was stuck. I was stuck in a loop that would never yield a different outcome because it would never produce a different story. The companies that I looked to for truth and fulfillment, they weren't going to change. They were all consistent. They weren't the problem. My belief in them was. The problem wasn't something that I was finding. It was something that I was creating by believing that things were different than they were. I finally recognized that in order to get unstuck, I had to accept things outside of my control as they are. I wasn't going to change the culture of the tech industry. or even the culture of a single company. But what I could change was how I lived by my own values. And so I did. I started my own company, and the responsibility that I have to how I serve my clients is my own.

So Dave, I'm amazed at Emily's story. She realized she couldn't change the people around her or the big institutions that she was part of.

So for her, getting unstuck meant creating her own company where she could create the reality What Emily figured out was that she wanted to make the kind of impact in her workplace that required her to have a level of authority where she could direct the culture. And the way she accomplished that was by being the founder, being the person in charge, having the most authority in the room. Now, she was willing to take on the ton of work that involves, the huge risk of failure, Asking, you know, it's called, you know, OPM, other people's money. You get investors to come in and now they want something from you. I mean, so she is willing to pay a very high price for something that she valued, which is, I want to author through authority, the culture of the workplace to create the kind of thing that matters to me. So what you got to do is get honest about what do I want and how much power and authority would it take for me to accomplish that?

Hmm.

And am I willing to do what's necessary to get it? So you do what you can.

When we come back, more listener stories of radical acceptance. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from LinkedIn. Hiring for a small business is hard. LinkedIn Hiring Pro acts like a helpful hiring partner. Chat with it about what matters most, compare candidates side by side, and share feedback like, I want someone with more hands-on experience. Hiring Pro adjusts and surfaces candidates who fit your needs. I'm really excited to be here. Get started by posting your job for free at linkedin.com/hp. Terms and conditions apply.

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This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Dave Evans is a behavioral scientist at Stanford University. With Bill Burnett, he's the author of How to Live a Meaningful Life. Using design thinking to unlock purpose, joy, and flow every day. So Dave, before the break, we heard from listener Emily, who accepted she wasn't going to change the companies where she worked. Part of her skill was realizing what was within her control and what was outside of it. A listener named Morgan came to a similar realization. In 1990, Morgan was working for a startup and was putting in 100-hour work weeks. Yeah.

And we quickly realized we had to focus on things we could fix and things we could not.

And that was pointed out to us by the founder, Jim Flug, who said, the world is divided into 2 things: problems that you can solve and problems you cannot solve. Don't focus on the problems you can't solve because there's nothing you can do about it. Only focus on the problems that you can solve.

Once you achieve that understanding, life gets a lot simpler.

And it's ruled my life since then. So Dave, this motto strikes me as something that the ancient Stoic philosophers would approve of. To what extent does design thinking overlap with Stoic ideas, such as focusing on what you can control?

Oh, we're totally in agreement with them. There's a section in our first book that specifically talks about exactly what Morgan described. We call it gravity problems. When you've got a— you don't seem to understand, Dave, you know, I can't make any money as a poet. How do I solve that problem? You can't solve that problem. That's a market reality. 0.00001% of the professional poets in the world are making a living at it. There's nothing I can do about that. You can't suddenly make everybody in the world Value poetry in a way that they didn't before. So that is not a solvable problem. And the way we describe it is, as designers, we're all about doable actions. We want to give you tools to frame reality as generatively as possible and then live into it through incremental prototyping and experimentation to act doably and make forward progress, to design your way forward, to build your way forward. So when you run into something that you can't do anything about, we say that is not a problem. For us, a problem is an actionable thing. If it's not actionable, it's not a problem, it's a circumstance. And when I reframe that as a circumstance, like gravity— like gravity is not a problem, it's just real— then all I can do is accept it. And that acceptance now frees me to say, and what can I do on the other side of Hmm.

Listener Anna had an interesting story, Dave, that shows how the path to acceptance can sometimes be circuitous. When Anna was 28, she was working as a self-described ski bum. One day she walked into a gas station and she had an epiphany.

And I realized I could control my judgmental thoughts. Of other people, those quick snap judgments that are not necessarily unkind, but they're not really kind either. And I think that was a profound step in accepting myself for who I was, eventually. Now, a few years went by, and I used that as a regular practice. I would catch my thoughts and I would redirect them away from judgment or criticism. And I started to recognize when I was feeling more critical, there was something going on for me that I wasn't addressing. And about 3 years later, I finally accepted that I was gay and took small steps toward myself Secretly looking at dating profiles, glancing at people a little longer instead of shirking away. What I'd done was habitually deny my own reality, but by really witnessing my thoughts, I could no longer do that.

So Anna didn't intend to set out on a journey of radical acceptance, Dave, but acceptance seemed to find her after she spent more time observing What do you make of Anna's story?

Well, it's a lovely example of what is involved in becoming a person. We have known for a very, very long time, though culturally we haven't pivoted toward it yet, that you don't get a neocortex fully formed in the brain until 27 or 28, a little later in men. The neocortex part of your brain is the executive function and is actually the part of your brain that enables you to perform real empathy. And by empathy, I don't mean feeling deeply. I mean actually having sort of the technical objective capacity to look at something, attempting to see it through someone else's eyes. And so Anna's story of standing in the gas station and suddenly recognizing her own thoughts is exactly that mature adult capacity To see things from the point of view of what does it look like to them? And the first person she was empathetic to was Anna. Oh, I notice what Anna is actually doing is being judgmental. So I look at it from the observer's point of view. If I see the way the thing is actually going on in that context, then I have some freedom in it. So good job, Anna.

Hmm. We've talked on a number of Hidden Brain episodes about the stories we tell about our lives.

We received this message from a listener I'm 50 years old and I'm on what I would call career number 4, or maybe 5 depending on how you count. I've been a literary agent assistant, an executive assistant, an HR director, a nonprofit program manager, a garden teacher, and now I'm training to become an elementary school teacher. On paper, it looks like I couldn't stick with anything. That's the story my inner critic loves to tell, that I've wasted time, that if I had just picked up something earlier, I could be really good at it by now. But there's another truth running alongside that one. I've always worked. I supported myself from the time I was 18. Neither of my parents went to college. Every pivot I made, I made while figuring out how to stay afloat. And the common thread across all those jobs is that I was trying to be useful. to people, to communities, something bigger than myself. What's confusing is that from the outside, people see courage. They tell me that they admire my willingness to start over, to learn something new. But from the inside, it doesn't feel like courage. It feels like, why haven't I figured this out yet? And now I'm stepping into teaching, which feels right in a way I just can't fully explain. It feels creative, impactful, grounded in purpose. Maybe what I'm trying to learn is how to see my life not as a series of false starts, but as a collection of experiences that are actually building towards something. I'm not sure I'm there yet, but maybe I'm closer than I used to be.

So Annie is realizing that all these various paths are interconnected and they all lead to a life of service to others. And this relates to a principle that you've identified As key, Dave, coherence?

Absolutely. Bill and I describe coherency as when who I am, what I'm doing, and what I believe in are in alignment. And it turns out, if you wanna live the meaningful life, living coherently where those 3 things are in alignment, or to the degree they're at some struggle, it's a compromise that I've chosen and accept. And compromise is almost always required at some level. And if in fact I'm living not that way, and what I'm doing has nothing to do with who I am, and it certainly isn't what I believe in, then that incoherent life is almost impossible to bring about the experience of meaning-making.

Hmm.

So Annie's doing a really good job. And interestingly, she ends her story with, I'm not quite yet there, of explaining why this isn't a series of false starts But it really is building toward something, but I haven't figured out what it is I'm building toward.

Hmm.

Now, once again, what we have here is that there's an embedded rule in that little narrative, which is there's supposed to be one consistent narrative outcome that justifies the whole story. I think what she sounded like— if I could just say I'm building toward the big golden city on the hill where the green castle is, you know, That I knew what that endpoint was and that I can tell you why each one of the challenges along the way, called my 5 careers en route to finally getting to the castle, makes sense, they're a logical sequence, then I make sense. And so, what I would encourage Annie if we were having office hours is like, well, what if there is no castle on the hill? What if it actually isn't It's not that the elements all make sense because the last chapter of the book wraps it all up. But what it is, is this is simply the journey of becoming Annie. And oh, actually, Annie, what you are is you're a deeply creative person who's also a deeply flexible person and can adapt to delivering her usefulness in a variety of creative forms, in a variety of contexts. You know, from executive assistant to a schoolroom. And so what you really are is an incredibly adaptable person having a portfolio of expressions of what it looks like when Annie's being helpful to the world. It's not about just everything lands on the final square on the game board and makes sense. So let's stop thinking linearly and start thinking a little more organically. She's a garden. She's not just a result.

Dave Evans is a behavioral scientist at Stanford University. With Bill Burnett, he's the author of How to Live a Meaningful Life: Using Design Thinking to Unlock Purpose, Joy, and Flow Every Day. Dave, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

Shankar, thank you for having me, and thank you to all your listeners who wrote in and who recorded in those incredibly sincere and heartfelt stories. I'm very grateful to them, and my wish is for them and for everyone who's hearing this to simply become more alive.

Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Querelle, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. If you enjoy listening to Hidden Brain, you can now watch it as well. Check out our new YouTube channel. We're at youtube.com/@hiddenbrain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

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