Hidden Brain's Shankar Vedantam on how to rewrite the story of your life | North Words

Well, I think many of us think about our lives the same way that, you know, you sit down at a theater and watch a play. You know, you think of yourself as being an audience member to your life. Things happen to you. You observe them. You experience them. But they are happening to you. You're just the observer.

From NCPR, welcome to Northwards: people, ideas, and conversations from and about northern New York, Vermont, and beyond. I'm Mitch Teich.

Support for the Northwards podcast comes from Joe Steiniger and Mary McDonald. In support of the Adirondack Foundation, building stronger Adirondack communities.

I remember when we first started seeing commercials for drugs, pharmaceutical drugs, prescription drugs on television, products with unlikely names, but even more so products to treat conditions that I didn't know existed. The one that jumped out at me way back when was something called generalized anxiety disorder. And I remember thinking back then, like, Who is anxious all the time? Funny, I don't ask that question anymore. In fact, I kind of wonder who isn't anxious all the time. It seems like the last few years have been a roller coaster that's taken us from the heights of anxiety and plunged us into the valleys of fear and grief and left us hoping to reach that— I don't know— that flat stretch of ennui. In some ways, it's maybe a little comforting to know that many of us are dealing with struggles and anxieties, whether they've emerged since the early days of the pandemic or they're longstanding traumas that plague our ability to cope in the world. But as useful as it is to know that we're not alone, what comes next? The NPR podcast and weekly show called The Hidden Brain is devoting the entire month of November to a series it calls Healing 2.0. Shankar Vedantam is the host, and he joins us now. Welcome.

Thank you so much for having me on.

So I perceive this, but is there evidence out there, like actual evidence that we can put our finger on that says that this really is a more difficult, more anxious time than other times in the recent past?

You know, it's a great question, Mitch. I'm not sure there is a way to really test the question of whether this time that we're going through right now is worse than other times. say anecdotally, it feels that way. It feels like when I read the news or I listen to the news every day, my heart feels heavy at the end of it. It feels like there's a lot of hurt and horror in the world right now. And I think it is true that the season, the time of year that we're in, it's also a time of celebration and gathering, no doubt. But I think it's also a reminder to people about years gone by and about maybe friends and family that are no longer at the dinner table with them. And so it's a bittersweet moment for many people. And so our team at Hidden Brain said the combination of those 2 things prompted us to say, let's pull together all the interesting research on healing and trauma and put it together in one package that we're calling Healing 2.0.

Well, and I know one of the subjects you're tackling, I think the one you're starting with, actually, is how we tell the story of ourself to ourself. What are you getting at with that question?

Well, I think many of us think about our lives the same way that you sit down at a theater and watch a play. You think of yourself being an audience member to your life. Things happen to you, you observe them, you experience them, but they are happening to you. You're just the observer. It is the case that we are, of course, the, you know, if you will, the audience to our own lives. But in important ways, we're also the author of our own lives. And we can play an authorial role, especially in the way we tell the stories of our life. So if you imagine your life as a novel or as a book, That life can be broken up into multiple chapters. And one of the important insights that we explore in this first episode, which we're calling Change Your Story, Change Your Life, is that where you put the chapter breaks in your life seems to play a profound role in your mental health and wellbeing. So if your chapters generally begin on a positive note and end on a negative note, so maybe you start the chapter, I fell in love, I was so happy, things were great, we got married, and you end the chapter with, then things really didn't go well. we broke up or we got divorced or, you know, I lost my partner. That kind of story, which starts positive and ends negative, is what psychologists call a contamination sequence, where something started out wonderful but got contaminated. Instead of that, if we break the chapters so that we're starting with the negatives, we're starting with the things that didn't go well, and we end the chapters on ways in which we found the positive or things that new opportunities opened up to us in some ways. Psychologists call this a redemption sequence. And because all our lives have ups and downs, it's up to us to decide where we're drawing the chapter breaks, where we're putting the chapter breaks in our book. And the advice here is that the more redemption sequences you have and the fewer contamination sequences you have, as you look back and review the story of your own life, as you tell your story to yourself, to other people, the more redemption sequences you have, the higher your well-being and mental health.

It's really interesting. Thinking back to what we were saying just a moment ago about this kind of anxiety zeitgeist that we're in today, it almost feels like we've all written ourselves cliffhanger endings to every one of our chapters.

Yeah, that's right. I mean, but I would actually go further to that and say that I think in general, the way we often process our lives and the way the news media presents the world to us is often a story of contamination. It's a story of like, you know, everything was hunky-dory in this place, and then suddenly something bad happened. And look what's happened to the place now. And yes, there's an element of surprise or suspense in that we don't know what's going to happen tomorrow. But often the story that we hear in the news is a story of something that has gone wrong and something that has emerged that has become bad. And, you know, I don't fault journalists for doing this. The role of journalists is to alert us when, when something is going on in the world that we need to hear about. But unintentionally, I think this has the psychological effect of telling us that we're living in a world where constantly things are breaking or going bad or in a terrible place and heading to a worse place. I don't think that's very good for our mental health. And ironically, even though I think we often tell those stories as journalists in order to, you know, to engage people in the news and get them more involved, it almost has a paradoxically, you know, counterintuitive effect of actually turning people off and making people apathetic or saying, throwing up their hands and saying, what can I do about this? And I think what's true about the news is also true about our own lives. When we tell stories about our own lives that are constantly Harping on how something that was wonderful turned bad, I think we are doing ourselves and our psychological makeup a disservice.

The series is titled Healing 2.0. Do you look at— is resilience a subset of healing in your mind?

It is a subset of healing in our mind. We certainly talk about resilience. There is an episode in the package that talks about the likelihood of resilience. And sort of in some ways, when you think about the long history of human beings, I don't mean over the last 10, 20, 30, or even 100 years. But if you look at over the many thousands of years that we have been on the planet, you know, our story as a species is a story of resilience. We have overcome tremendous hardships, tremendous obstacles. It's been an uphill climb, you know, for much of that way. And yet we are the, you know, we are here and we are the descendants of people who have survived. Our ancestors were survivors, which is why you and I are on the planet today. And so resilience is a very important part of the story. And in some ways, I think it's an under counted part of the story in that I think many of us sort of imagine that we are— we have more fragility than actually might be the case.

There is quite a lot of talk, obviously, about mental health care access everywhere, but especially in rural places like the one from which I'm talking with you. Is there something to the idea of this series as giving people a place from which to start?

I think that's right. I think that is our aspiration. Our goal is to try and present ideas that would be useful. I don't want to suggest any way, shape, or form that what we're offering is a substitute for somebody who's a trained therapist. If people have serious concerns about their lives, if they're having— feeling like they're emotionally disturbed, you know, you're not going to be able to solve those problems by listening to a podcast or a radio show. So I want to be humble in terms of what it is that we can offer. I do think that the messages and ideas that we are offering here can in fact be very valuable to people and valuable to people across a large spectrum from people who have daily annoyances and frustrations to people who have more serious problems. But I don't want to suggest that in some ways that we're a replacement for a professional or a professional who's actually helping you with a problem.

Of course not. Yeah. Do you think— is it fair to think of this series in terms of self-discovery though, or introspection?

Yeah, I think probably more by way of introspection than self-discovery. One of the ideas that we want to explore in— that we explore in the series is, follows the work of an Australian psychologist whose name is Lucy Hone. And Lucy suffered a terrible tragedy in her life. She lost her own daughter in a car crash. But she's also a psychologist and a researcher and spent a lot of time sort of thinking about the research into grief and introspecting about her own experience with grief after this terrible tragedy befell her. And one of her insights, and I think this is an insight that does come from introspection, and it precedes Lucy Hone and modern psychology. In fact, it's an insight that you see in many spiritual traditions dating back hundreds or even thousands of years. And that idea is that the thoughts that we have, how we respond to the things that happen to us, matter enormously. You know, we can't always control the things that happen to us, but we do in fact have significant control over how we think about what's happened to us. I was reading a book the other day that talked about an idea from Buddhist philosophy, and it was called The Story of the Two Arrows. And the idea of the two arrows is that apparently the Buddha said that, you know, through— as you go through life, You're often going to be struck by arrows. Things are going to happen to you. Negative things are going to happen to you. But when you're struck by an arrow, the last thing you want is to compound the injury by plunging a second arrow into the site of the first injury. And yet that is exactly what many of us do when we are struck by misfortune or by difficult things happening to us. We compound that injury through our thoughts, the way we think about this, through our regret and recrimination, our lack of self-compassion. And in some ways, the second arrow is not just, you know, unnecessary. It's also in some ways especially painful because it's an arrow that's of our own doing. It's— we have caused that arrow to happen. So I do think that in some ways, when we introspect, I think when we think about even the events that happened to each of us over the last day or two, any of us can think of moments when we had setbacks. Perhaps they were minor setbacks, but we can very quickly see how many of us reach for that second arrow. And then plunge the second arrow into exactly the same spot as the first arrow, compounding our own suffering. So I think that's an idea that has sort of universal resonance, and it's a theme that I think occurs through many episodes of this series.

Well, Shankar Vedantam, first of all, I wish you a holiday season as free from anxiety as possible, and I'm really looking forward to hearing this. Thank you so much.

Thank you so much, Mish. Really happy to be on.

Shankar Vedantam is the host of the Hidden Brain podcast and radio show, which airs on NCPR Sunday afternoons at 3:00. The show's Healing 2.0 series runs throughout the month of November. That is all for this edition of Northwards. Before we go, just a reminder, you can always go through our back catalog of interviews by visiting the Northwards website at ncpr.org/northwards. And please recommend this podcast to a friend. Tell 'em they can subscribe on Apple, Google, Amazon, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you— er, they get their podcasts. Thanks for listening.

North Words is an NCPR podcast production. The show is written, edited, and produced by Mitch Teich, with digital production supervision by me, Ethan Shanti. Caitlin Kelly handles our social media, Bill Hanell is our digital director, and Doyle Dean is our production manager. Music is by the Wickmore Jazz Trio of Plattsburgh. To support this show and find more podcasts, visit ncpr.org. This is NCPR, North Country Public Radio.