Growth from Adversity: Hacking Resilience with Dr. George Bonanno

Welcome to Flow Radio. I'm Dr. Tory Higgins, head coach here at the Flow Research Collective. Today, our executive director and bestselling author Stephen Kotler and I are honored to welcome Dr. George Bonanno, a luminary in psychology at Columbia University. Dr. Bonanno's work has shifted our understanding of how people overcome loss and adversity, explaining the human capacity to withstand life's most devastating moments. His influential work ranks him in the top 1% of psychologists cited globally, with contributions to leading journals such as Nature, JAMA, and American Psychologist. Dr. Bonanno's dedication has earned him lifetime achievement awards from the Association for Psychological Science and the International Positive Psychology Association. In his acclaimed books, The End of Trauma and The Other Side of Sadness, you'll discover science-rich yet accessible roadmaps on how to become more resilient in your own life. In today's conversation, we're going to be shining a light on the reality of resilience with Dr. Bonanno. His pioneering findings challenge a misconception that resilience is a trait people have or don't have. Instead, we'll learn it's a psychological skill we can all develop. Thanks so much for joining us, Dr. Bonanno.

My pleasure. It's very nice to be here with you.

We're stoked. SK, I'm going to go ahead and pass the mic to you to kick off some questions.

Thank you, Tori. So I want to start with just a thank you, first of all, for popping the cult of trauma balloon. Which has bothered me for a very, very, very long time. I've noticed also in a lot of your talks, you have valiantly avoided naming names and pointing direct fingers at people. But, and we can continue with that if you want. But what I really want to start with is the reason the cult of trauma has bothered me so much is from a peak performance standpoint, once you adopt a victim mindset, once you give up your locus of control, there's very little we can do for you in terms of get it. And by the way, when we say peak performance, we're talking about nothing more or less than just getting our biology to work for us rather than against us. That's how we define peak performance here. So nothing fancy. But once you sort of have a victim mindset, have an external locus of control, you can't really get into flow. It can almost permanently block the state. State. And it really, it hurts with almost every other aspect of peak performance. So, it's a terrible, terrible sort of the cult of trauma from a peak performance standpoint. How did we get in this mess? Where did it, like, where did it start? I want to talk in a second about your 9/11 research, but I want to back up before that. And how did we get in this mess where trauma went from, from, from what it was 100 years ago to where we are now?

Oh, that's a great question. I think there's a confluence of factors. I think it goes back to around 1980 when it began, when PTSD became an officially recognized diagnostic category. And that was very much needed. You know, some people are seriously traumatized. There's no mistake about that. Some people really suffer for a long time and they cannot get over traumatic events. So the diagnostic category was needed to provide treatment for, for those people. But then over time, it began to expand. That's one thing that happened. It became more subjective. People thought, well, we're kind of missing some people. So let's make it a little more fluid. And then the Pandora was kind of out of the box at that point, can't put it back in. That's one thing that happened. Another thing that happened is people began to study trauma, PTSD, and write books and, and get those books out there in the general public. But all of that was focused on the worst case scenario. Right. And so the books began to circulate about how bad trauma can be, how much pain is involved. And there were beginnings of attempts at treatments. But, you know, it just put up— it added to the list of things that can harm you in life. Right? So that happened. But, you know, we're as human beings, we're wired, if I can use that phrase, it's not really accurate, but we're sort of primed to perceive threat. That's what our brains do. It's an animal response. So we're looking for danger. And then when experts come out and say, here's a new one right here, that can harm you psychologically, even if you're not physically harmed, you can be psychologically harmed. That's pretty scary. But then it wasn't long before that, that the internet became a thing, right? And the internet began to dominate the world. And the internet originally started out as a great idea, but it evolved into, and as we all know, a market economy. So clicks, and you know, how if you go to the end of articles on a newspaper, that counts. If you click on something, that counts. How long you look at something, that counts. So all that turned into information to propel advertising. And before we knew it, the basically ghastly, horrific, traumatized, harmful things have become— they make money, right? There's even a thing on TikTok called trauma dumping. I don't know if you've ever heard about trauma dumping. It's where people collect all the horrible stories and they put them in one place and they They make a lot of money doing that because everybody looks—

Always a crash reel in skiing.

It's something like that. So all of those things have been sort of conspiring at once to just make us constantly aware of how lousy life can be at times. And if we see it all day long, because we're online all day long, you know, we're constantly reminded. And I think then, if I can take this even a little bit further, then people began to speculate. And I think some ideas that we thought— I thought many people, research-minded people like me, thought were dead— had come back in the idea of hidden traumas, that you have these hidden traumas stored in your body, that you're carrying them around with you. And, you know, we've all been through difficult events. The epidemiological research makes this really clear. Almost everybody has something really horrible happen to them. Them in their life. And but we— the research shows we move on from those things. But if we don't think of it that way—

George, let me ask you, because the follow-up, the thing that I like, what blew my mind, and look, and I've got no problem naming names, in that like when I saw— this was in Vander Kolk's book, The Body Keeps the Score, and where he was trying— 5 to 90% of exposed traumatic stress develop PTSD. 5 to 90. Did nobody take a statistics course? Like I said, I like, I literally have like, what happened? How did you get your degree without taking statistics? And how could, so yeah, A, see if you can answer that question. And B, I'm using it as a way to set up how you really pop punctured this balloon, which is your fabulous work on 9/11.

So if you could, yeah, the 5 to 5 to 90%, then that was That was in the literature.

What the hell is that, right?

Well, that was in the psychological literature when I began my career. And exactly as you said, if you know anything about data, you'll say, well, that's not possible. So basically, 5 to 90% means that there's some— there's a couple of things. There's some really bad research out there. Or people are, you know, if you get the word, if you get— if you aim your research at the most harmed people, you're going to get a lot of PTSD. So for example, in— I'm at Columbia University— in the hallways, you might see a sign that says, we're looking for subjects for a study of trauma and PTSD, right? And if you put that poster up, you're going to get people with PTSD into the research. And then you're going to conclude that everybody has PTSD.

So it's a sampling bias.

Sampling bias. And you would think that researchers who say they have 90% PTSD would realize that that's a sampling bias, but that wasn't the case. I think now it is. Now people realize that. Yeah. But it's, you know, the damage has been done in a sense.

I, you know, I, I came from the other side of the coin and we had been specifically at the Flow Research Collective and most of my career I've been interested in like all the north of happy experiences. I sort of figured the psychology is a whole field that deals with getting people from broken back to normal. I want to work on normal up to, up to superhuman, um, in, in a sense. And so when I, you know, as I started doing this work more and more, people started, you know, obviously people, everybody, everybody doesn't start at normal. They start where they are. And so I suddenly had to, you know, deal with, with trauma and I had to learn stuff about it in the literature. And as soon as I started opening the literature, I was just baffled. I was used to like precision and accuracy in real science and this just looked like fairy tales to me. So talk to me about your phenomenal 9/11 study.

Well, it goes back a little bit before that, Stephen, if I may, so that I first began to study grief and I had somewhat the reaction you described. I was offered a position when I first got my PhD running a large-scale bereavement study in San Francisco. I had just gotten married. San Francisco is a lovely place. I'll go there. And, and but I wasn't interested in grief at all. Bereavement. I didn't know much about it. And, you know, I was young. I wasn't thinking about it. And I looked at the literature and I really did think, my God, this is like still 19th century literature. And I was, I was just surprised and kind of, you know, really that really piqued my curiosity. How could this thing that everybody goes through have not caught up with the rest of what we know in psychology. So I began— I took on this project thinking I would only do it for a short while. And we pretty much could do anything we wanted. We had so many— all the methodology that hadn't been used. And right away, we began to see that most people who are experiencing loss are resilient. Most people do not suffer prolonged harm. They suffer. Everybody suffers when there's a loss. There's some pain. But most people continue on with their lives and functioning well, and they move forward. So we found that, we found it repeatedly. Then I moved to New York. I was still doing that work. We began to get into some traumatic stuff like sexual assault and things like that. And then 9/11 happened. So we quickly, you know, like everybody else, we initially, we wanted to help the city as best we could, help the survivors. But once it became clear that there was there was a lot going on and a lot of people helping. We quickly— I thought, well, what we do is we do research. So let's get some money quickly and let's do studies. And then we began to see that same kind of resilience among people who would— people had been in the World Trade Center and got out, you know, people who watched bodies. I don't mean to get so graphic, but we saw a lot of dead bodies, people jumping from the buildings, people in the building and thought they were going to die. Had ran for their lives, et cetera. So we saw a lot of resilience among those people.

Yeah. And I'll, look, I'll fully admit I was on the other side where, you know, earlier in my career I was working predominantly with wounded combat veterans. And so reading your book, I was actually blown away by, you know, the reality that resilience is actually the default response. It's a much more common response to trauma. So can you pull in a little bit of your work with the military as well here? Because the findings are similar across the board, right?

Yeah, sure. And the default is the right word. And it doesn't mean that there's something wrong with people if they're not resilient. But what it means is it's a shift in paradigm to where we say, okay, the default is resilience. So then what goes wrong? And how can we help people that are unable to be resilient? So the research with the military and veterans is something I continue to do to this day. And it really happened with— there was a big project called the Millennium Cohort Study that I'd heard about. And this was a study to recruit, I think, a couple hundred thousand recruits. This is right after 9/11 when there was a lot of— there were a lot of new soldiers.

That was the Army study, right?

It was all branches of the military, actually.

Okay.

And it was the The idea was to get soldiers in before they're deployed. And it was the first study in the military to guarantee confidentiality, because in the military, everybody knows. And it was a hard sell for people in the military. They all know if somebody says, I have, you know, I'm having some nightmares, everybody's going to know about it. Your commanders are going to know about it. Somebody told me once even that they went to their They went to the counseling center to ask about their nephew who had ADHD. And the next day their commander said, tell me about your ADHD, you know. So there really isn't much confidentiality. This study guaranteed confidentiality, recruited a huge bunch of soldiers and followed them to their deployment and afterwards and multiple points afterwards. I heard about the study. I contacted these investigators right away. Incredibly nice bunch of people. And we— I had been developing some computational tools to map different trajectories, different patterns of outcome. And so we worked with this incredible dataset. And we found right away, we found that there was a trajectory of chronic, chronically elevated symptom, PTSD symptoms that was around 7%. That's much lower than what was typically assumed to be the norm. And we found that the resilience, which is the basis, stable trajectory of health, that was 83% in deployed US soldiers. We looked at whether the degree of combat exposure made a difference, and it did, but it was a small effect relative to the findings. So even when we controlled for the worst combat experiences, most sold— over 80% of the soldiers still showed this trajectory of stable mental health. After they left the military. And that's really, I think, the norm. That is what— the soldiers are incredibly resilient because they're trained. They're trained for what they're going into. Yeah, you know, and they're not trained to be resilient. They're trained just to do what they do. So they have more control. It's less frightening. It's less unknown to them, you know.

And where do you got with your results?

Yeah, even though we had incredible— that was probably one of the nicest studies I've ever been involved in methodologically. So, you know, it's been replicated now many times that that is kind of what you see in the military.

I mean, I think it makes sense that there were some disbelievers because we've just been saturated, I think, in the media that trauma is this much more common response. And your, your findings just consistently have flown in the face of that, which this is great news, right? That resilience is far more common than developing PTSD. And I know, you know, Stephen, I can see you jumping in. Go, go for it. Go. Oh no.

What I was going to say is it's right off your question. I've, this is what I thought. This is what I've thought for a while, which is, has nobody read Elizabeth Lofton's work on implanted memories? That's what I keep, every time I see this cult of trauma, I'm like, this looks to me exactly like the conditions that create implanted memories and all the work she did in courtrooms. With eyewitness testimony not being valid, etc., etc. That's what I kept— that's what I— that's what comes to mind when I think of trauma. Am I thinking wrong about this?

Oh, you know, well, to some extent. I mean, you can— I don't think people are— I don't think implanted memory is such an issue here. But what we've learned since then, and because of Loftus's— Elizabeth Loftus's work was just absolutely seminal, really brilliant research. And she has suffered for that, like a lot of people, you know, she's been She's been accused of various things, you know, like siding with the enemy and things, you know, if she points out how memory works. But we've since come to realize that memory is, is a very much an organic thing. You know, I think initially we, and we tend to think of memory as, as almost like wires, you know, you have a memory in your head, it's a thing, it's in your memory. But as soon as you remember something, it's memory is really a matter of a network of neurons, right? So if you, when you remember something, you're reactivating activating most or all, usually most of that network, whatever we recall. And it's an organic thing. You're now, those same neurons are active when you're remembering it, but now you can change it because you're doing, you're somewhat in a different context. You can think about it differently. And then when you sort of re-remember it, we could call that reconsolidation. It's already a slightly different memory. It can be a different memory and you can literally change memory into something very different through that process.

That's what I mean is like during the reconsolidation process, I feel like people had traumatic stuff that happened in their past, bad stuff that happened in their past, the call to trauma happened, they're reimagining the memory through and, and they're reconfiguring it according to modern definitions of the trauma you suffered rather than the original experience.

Yeah, that's what I Yeah, and you know, here, this is the crucial part is that I mentioned this earlier, just fleetingly, that epidemiological research, you know, these large-scale studies have shown that most people will experience an event that would qualify by the DSM, by the, you know, the official diagnostic criterion that would qualify as a trauma. And I think that's a misnomer. I use the phrase, I forced myself to use this phrase until it became natural. Potentially traumatic event. It's a potentially traumatic event, a PTE. All these bad things that happen to us are potentially traumatic events until we're— until we can't get over them, then they're traumas. So, so the fact is that most people have in their past an event that could qualify as, you know, a kind of a potentially traumatic event, a life-threatening event. If they think of those as traumas, which is what people do, most people do. Then somebody's, you know, you're struggling, you're not able to function very well. You don't know why. You can't seem to stay in a relationship. You just lost a job again, or you have a job that you should like, but you don't. And you're just not happy. Nothing makes you happy. What is it? Then you maybe talk to a therapist or you talk to friends and you think about it and you remember this thing happened to you. Aha. I was traumatized in the past. And if there's somebody, you just might happen to read a book that suggests that you now are carrying around a hidden trauma, or a well-meaning therapist, you know, but mistakenly tells you that you are carrying around this hidden trauma. Even the government is on board with some of this stuff a little bit. Some of the government funders endorse the idea of what's called trauma-informed care therapy. Trauma-informed therapy sounds like you're being nice to people, right? I'm trauma-informed. But what it actually— I think it's a very dangerous concept. Now, I know I'm going to upset somebody by saying this, but trauma-informed therapy has as its assumption that the person you're talking to may have a hidden trauma in the past. They may have a trauma that they're not aware of or they don't want to talk about it. So this interview, if we followed a trauma-informed approach, we wouldn't be talking about these things because we'd be stepping very gingerly in case that either one of you or one of your listeners has a hidden trauma. And that's a kind of a preposterous proposition.

You think?

You can't quite function in the world.

Oh my God. This is the conversation we're here for, right? Just because the beliefs around the implications of trauma are dangerous, right? It sets us up to have this mindset that, you know, where we don't have control at all, right? That this is inevitable.

Let me just bounce this to the, to the other side of the coin for a second so we can flesh out a little bit more of the discussion, which is one, I want to, I want to start with a question because your research has shown that like, what is it, 35 to 65% of people bounce back. That's the sort of standard resilience.

No, it's about two-thirds. It's about two-thirds. It's two-thirds on average, two-thirds.

On average. Here's my, here's a question, and this is, this is probably a post-traumatic growth question, and I know you differentiate that a little bit from resilience. What percentage of people bounce back better?

Bounce back?

Has that been looked at?

Oh, bounce back better than they were?

Better, better than they were.

I don't know.

And better, I'm, I don't even know how I'm defining better here, which would be the next question you should probably ask me, but I, and I don't have an answer there, but I'm just asking it in a general way.

Yeah, apart from the alliteration also there, bounce back better. I don't know the answer to that because I don't think we know. I think there's— I'm a little bit critical of the idea of post-traumatic growth. I don't doubt that post-traumatic growth happens. I don't doubt that people learn new things and sort of see their life in a better light and, you know, grow from traumatic experiences or potentially traumatic experiences. But I don't think we have any realistic sense of how often because it's measured. It's very popular. It's a very popular concept. It's measured largely by questionnaires. And it just can't be done that way. So people, you know, it— what you tend to see is that the more someone suffers, the more they endorse post-traumatic growth. And that's really—

can I ask, can I back you up for a second? Why do you think the surveys fail to capture post-traumatic growth? Like, I tend to agree with you, but I just wanted to stop on that point.

Surveys often capture people's beliefs about what they should be experiencing. And there's been some research that actually measured growth in about 1,000 people who had— where some of them had been exposed to potential trauma. And that study showed— I love this study because it showed that some people actually improved in some domains in their life after this potential trauma, but their answers on the questionnaire were unrelated to that. There's a questionnaire that's really about beliefs, like, I should have grown is what you're at. I should have I should have been better now because of all I've suffered. That's what those measures capture. Because we are, you know, we don't— we have a limited capacity to report on our internal experience. It's not so simple, right? So it's very important for any real concept to actually measure things objectively. And it just hasn't been done for this kind of thing. We know that it's possible for sure, because we know— I know people, you know people, we all know people that have And we ourselves may have grown, but the way to get at that and to answer your question about how common it is, I don't think we really know.

And so I thought your, I thought your 2007 paper about, you know, the differences between resilience and post-traumatic growth was really interesting because I think that in the media, right, we talk about, or you hear people talking about, they didn't just bounce back, they bounced back better. They grew from this trauma. And that seems to be kind of captured as a a superior response compared to resilience. Like, resilience is good, but post-traumatic growth is better. What's your, what's your take on that?

Growth is good, and growth is better than not growth, for sure, you know. But I think that you can also— you don't have to go through a potentially traumatic event to grow, you know. I think so. You might grow from, you know, just simply reading a book, or you might grow from sudden epiphany someday that has nothing to do with your life is fine, but then you're walking along the beach or something and you have this epiphany. So, you know, it may be that suffering leads to growth, but it may be that growth comes from other means as well. So, you know, I certainly don't think there would be any reason to cast a shadow on anybody's growth, you know, but I think linking it in a particular way that trauma, I think, is wishful thinking.

I think it's important. I think it's an important distinction. I'm also wondering, though, resilience seems to require a really high level oftentimes of kind of this adaptive flexibility, right? This ability to respond flexibly. And the way that I read into that, is that not a form of growth in and of itself, that you're developing kind of that adaptive flexibility muscle in some way?

I don't think so. I mean, part of what I've argued is that most people are resilient and they don't— they simply, they get over events and then they move on, right? They just keep that same level playing field in a sense. And most people— what this, I suppose, leads into all the work we're doing now is about flexibility, the capacity to adapt to challenges is flexibility. I mean, our research more recently has shown that most people actually are flexible. When we actually measure it. We have pretty good measures of this now because we measure it experimentally. We measure it with some questionnaires that don't have an obvious answer so people can't tell us what they think they are, right? They're kind of like, I hate to say this, but trick questionnaires. But that flexibility is inherent in the human brain. And but it doesn't mean that we're— I mean, you use the term like, I don't know, super people or, you know, I don't remember the term you use, Stephen, but Flexibility is a kind of a base level for humans unless something gets in the way. You know, and I like to tell people, you know, we have the longest developmental period in the animal kingdom. It takes 25 years for a cortex to be fully cooked. We have more cortical neurons than any other creature on Earth. We have— we're born absolutely helpless, which a number of creatures use this evolutionary strategy. But it means that we have a lot of capacity for development, and it takes us so long means we have a sort of a built-in plasticity. We have a very, very flexible brain. And as long as something doesn't get in the way, some untoward sort of circumstances developing, we have a kind of inherent flexibility. Where I think what I'm interested in now is the fact that we can make people more flexible by one, teaching these skills, and also by teaching people that they— most people don't know they're flexible. Most people don't know about these skills because they're kind of overlearned. We learn this as we grow, as we develop, as we become adults, we learn these skills. So I think becoming explicitly aware of how this works, how— what it is that we do to resilient, gives us more control over it. We can use it when we, when we need it. We can deliberately turn to it when we're struggling, and all of us struggle sometimes. We have like an explicit source to turn to, to get us back on track. So I think that's where how the flexibility works in terms of— and you could say that's growth, you know, becoming more clear about flexibility, learning and becoming more flexible. That certainly is growth.

Okay. All right. I'll take it. I'll take it. So I want to highlight that we've dropped the word control here a few different times already. And I know Stephen and I have a ton of interest in this factor. Right?

So George, I don't know. I think Ryan sent you our recent paper on the kind of the neurobiology of the first 2 seconds of flow as the brain goes into flow. And the question that actually, I don't know if you took a look at it. But the question that we started with that paper was a really simple question. We do a lot of work in and around the action sports community, and action sport athletes put themselves in situations all the time that for most people can produce, can potentially traumatic stress, right? And it doesn't happen in action sports. So, we were asking the question if you know, a motorcyclist is driving down the freeway, gets cut off. In one scenario, they swerve around that car and they drop into a flow state and drive away in total control, and it kicks them up a level. Totally different scenario, same swerve, and it produces traumatic stress that could potentially lead to PTSD. And the question we started with was, what the hell's the difference? Neurobiologically, what's going on? And one of the, you know, some of this was based on some work done by a colleague of ours, Dr. Andrew Huberman at Stanford, who found that the fight or flight response, the fight response is actually separate. Flight and freeze are in the amygdala, in the basolateral amygdala, like most people thought. And it turns out that the fight response is in the thalamus, the zyphoid nucleus of the thalamus control, and they're split responses. And that was the first clue that, hey, wait a minute, maybe something interesting is going on. The end result of all of this work was one of the defining characteristics that we seem that came out of this work that leads to, are you going to, could you end up in flow or could you end up with a traumatic experience, was how much control you felt you had over the situation. A sense of control is very critical for flow. It's one of the things that flow produces, right? When she said the high defined the state, one of his core definitions for the state is the sense of control. It's very prominent, and it seems to be very predictive of flow versus potential trauma outcomes. I know in all of your work, resilience isn't very, very predictable. There's a lot of sort of weakly correlated factors that have led you to abandon those factors and move towards flexibility. I want to talk more about that in half a second. But before we get there, What have you found about this sense of control versus trauma or not trauma? Has it showed up in your research in that way?

A couple of things. First, I don't know the paper. I missed— must have missed the email. I don't—

we can— we can— yeah, we can send it. Please send it. It was in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews like 6 months ago.

Okay. I want to say I miss a lot of email that I don't know how anybody keeps track of email anymore.

We all miss a lot of emails.

Yes. So I don't have a lot to say about control because with something we don't typically measure, it's hard to measure that in the moment. So we haven't really got into that. I think that when we are, if we're overwhelmed by a situation, we find it very difficult to think clearly, which means we don't tend to have control about what's happening. But the distinction between that and what's going into flow, or I really don't have much to say about that. I don't know that. I mean, I could speculate, but that would be just me speculating.

Well, I'm certainly interested in you speculating for sure. That's yes. But So feel free to speculate and then we can, then let's talk a little bit more about what you did, what led you to flexibility. Like there's a backstory. We started, we jumped right in and we're talking about adaptability and flexibility, but the backstory that led you to flexibility as kind of a key factor in resilience is so interesting and so counterintuitive, at least for me, when I, you know, when I was reading it, I was just, I was shocked by that.

It's like a lot of things that I've done in my career was there was a part of it that was an accident, you know, serendipitous. I had always been interested in emotion and emotional reactions. You know, one of the first things we did back way back when, when I first started studying bereavement was we looked at facial expressions of emotion. You get a lot of information and facial expressions are somewhat automated, not completely, but that, you know, they really are brainstem reactions. To events, and they— we make expressions without even fully being aware of what's happening to us. So all that was interesting to me. And at one point, I got interested in emotion regulation, like many people. And I was intrigued by the assumption that suppression, the suppression of emotion was maladaptive, particularly the suppression of the expression of emotion. And I thought, you know, there seemed to be lots of reasons to think that that was at least adaptive in some situations. So I designed a paradigm to test that. And that was back in like the early 2000s. And we actually did a 9/11 study where we asked people to deliberately show as much emotion as they could or deliberately conceal as much emotion as they could. When we were, you know, exposing them to disturbing things. And we found that the ability to do both of those things, to show emotion or conceal it, predicted who would be doing best 2 years after 9/11. And this is experimental. So, okay, great, cool, nice finding. We went on to do more things like that. And it took me about 10 years, and I'm almost embarrassed to tell you this, it took me about 10 years to really make the connection with the resilience work I was doing. It was like two streams I was doing. And at one point I realized, you know, I can't— we can't explain.

So in other words, you kept finding flexibility in the emotional responses. You weren't looking for it, but that's what kept showing up.

Well, we kept looking. No, we weren't looking for it. We were studying flexibility as a phenomenon in its own right. And at the same time, I was doing all this work tracking people who'd been exposed to potentially traumatic events. And we were at the point where I thought, okay, we're not able to predict who's going to be resilient, because all of these different factors have small effects. And I couldn't make sense of it. And then it kind of, kind of in a— sorry, that was my phone just doing something— kind of an epiphany one day, where I just thought, wait a minute, this flexibility is how we make sense of all this. Flexibility is how we decide what to do in a situation. Because the reason the effects are so small of all these different variables, the reason they only correlate a little bit with resilience is because they work sometimes, and they don't work at other times. Because every situation is so different. You know, we tend to think of trauma, even if we say potential trauma, as just one basket where all these events go into this basket, all these bad things that can happen to us. And I think this is a common perception in, in the world right now that, you know, any— you get one of these category events and you've been in a trauma. But in fact, if you look at all these different events, they're all radically different. What, what challenges you when you're in a natural disaster or hurricane is very different than what challenges you when someone threatens you physically, which is very different than what challenges you if you're in a disease pandemic or somebody you're close to has died or somebody has left you. Or, you know, any kind of thing you can imagine, combat deployment, they're all incredibly different in the challenges they present. They're not the same thing. And so what's going to get us through one of those events in that moment, and it really is in the moment, it kind of relates back to what you were saying about whether you go into flow or you have a different reaction. That's in the moment. And that's the challenge at hand. But even after those events happen, whatever we're struggling with, we only can cope with it in the moment we're in. And then that moment, often it requires a specific kind of response. So the flexibility idea is really about deciding what's going to get me through this moment right now. And if we do that moment by moment, that's how we get through, right? We— and so of course, being the scientists, we've broken it down into many different pieces. How people do it, we call the flexibility sequence. This is the sort of psychological stages people go through to work that out. But it's really just about— it's about taking this idea of flexibility and looking at it more closely. And it's what we've now— I've decided what our research is all about now is how people do that and how people use that to get through these really difficult events. That's what we come with.

Can I ask a weird question off of that? As you were talking, is there some number of challenges, right? You're facing a trauma and it requires you to solve 20 problems in a row and they're all different, right? Is there some number of problems that we get to that, oh, I've solved 6 in a row and I start to think of this trauma, oh, wait a minute, this is something I can manage. Does it start to, is there any, regular number we can put on how many things you have to adapt to flexibly before you start changing how you categorize the term, the stressful event?

Well, immediately, I saw a terribly asked question, but no, no, it's, it's, I got, I mean, immediately think of these shows on TV, which I've actually never seen. I've just seen seconds of them where people are, you know, have to jump over something and underneath something and then run on barrels and then fall into the water. And if they fail—

some Ninja Warrior.

Yeah, yeah, something like that. But, you know, I think it can happen with one. I think it's all depends on the person. It can happen with one event that I had an experience like this recently. In the last couple years, I have a— I had a very severe nerve problem in my face that was so severe at one point I couldn't talk or eat. And I remember when it got really bad, it was like electric shocks of pain. And ultimately, I've had surgery and it's been repaired. But at one point, I thought, all right, I can't do my job right now. Things are really bad. And using this same kind of set of mental operations, I thought, okay, what's the problem right now? And the problem is I can't eat. So then that problem becomes what I have to solve. Forget about the rest of it. Forget about my life is ruined. And And I often tell people, you know, if you're focusing on the problem in the moment, you solve that problem, you get the sense already of mastery where you think, okay, I can do this. I can solve these things one at a time and go on to the next thing and on to the next thing. And, you know, it may seem you can tell yourself, well, there's an endless array of problems. My life is ruined. Or you can say, I need to deal with this problem right now. And in my own life, I was able to find a way to eat. I discovered blenders. I had no idea what you can do with a blender. You can do all kinds of things. With a blender. I didn't know. And I could drink food. And, you know, my wife is also an incredible cook. And she made me— took her a while to accept this, but she made me mushy food, you know, for a while. And as soon as I could eat, then that solved that problem. So I said, what's the next problem? And the next problem, talking. What's the next problem? You know, I talked to, you know, the university was incredibly supportive. They said, we'll help someone read your lectures until you solve this And, you know, when you do those kind of things, you solve those problems. Even I think if it's a significant problem and you find a way to solve it, you already are moving towards a sense of I can do this, right? And that I think, and if you go take this all the way back to growth, I think that's where people also get the sense that I actually can master these things that happen to me. You know, I can maybe do this forever. Like I can master whatever comes my way. My way. And that's part of it too, the motivation to do that.

Yeah, I mean, so just hearing how critical flexibility is, right, to attending to the problem at hand and having this 'I can do this' response and solving for that problem, right, being flexible enough to adapt and kind of pull out the necessary tool. It strikes me though that kind of the precursor to that resilient response is that, that belief of 'I can do this.' Right.

There actually is. And I don't know if it's essential or not. I don't know if I would say that yet, but we've actually defined that in my recent work. We call it flexibility mindset. And it's basically the conviction that, you know, I'll get through this. I didn't want this to happen. It's not fun, but I'll get through this. And ultimately, at some point, life will continue. And, you know, I've seen this in so many instances. Is, and we've actually measured this empirically. For example, we work with spinal cord survivors of spinal cord injuries. And when you're around a bunch of survivors of spinal cord injuries, it's inspiring, because the majority— and we show this empirically— the majority are basically psychologically fine. You know, and if you go back, great example, if you go back to the '60s and you look up research on spinal cord injuries, the assumption there is Everybody's depressed. And I even found literature from the '60s that suggested if your patient is not depressed, you have to make them depressed so that they will, will work through all this stuff.

And except they're not— what, they're not being realistic?

They're not being realistic and they're not— they're in denial. Yeah. So, so spinal cord injury survivors, though, mean that even in the hospital, they're psychologically resilient. The majority And they endorsed all these things that when we talked to them, like fighting spirit, and I'll get through this, you know, and, and in fact, because they do say to themselves, okay, I'm alive, I could have been dead by what just happened, because spinal cord injuries are not caused by bumps on the head, right? They're caused by pretty serious injuries. And people that go through those injuries, they're not thrilled by any stretch to be paralyzed. But they realize, okay, I can get get through this. And, you know, I don't mean every single person, but the majority. And then they realize, okay, I can do this, and I can now solve this problem, and I can now solve this problem. And I'm on my way to— I'm still here. I'm still me. I think Christopher Reeves, the former Superman, he wrote a book, I think it was called Still Me, if I remember right. And that was essentially saying, well, I'm still here, you know, even though this is not what I wanted to happen, but I'm still here.

Sure. And I think, you know, I think that this, this need to be flexible as kind of the key factor that drives resilience makes a ton of sense in terms of why there have been a million factors researched in the literature that all have kind of weak correlations to resilience, but none of them really explain it. So, you know, things like, you know, meditation and social support, optimism. And it's really because none of those factors are always going to work all the time.

Exactly.

Right.

Exactly. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

George, would you talk a little bit about mindfulness? Because it's— I just— and your work on mindfulness and how it— where it can fail with trauma?

Well, mindfulness is a tool. And, you know, I mean, there's mindfulness and then there's mindfulness. You know, I mean, there are exceptions I once had the luxury of being on a panel with Matthieu Ricard, who is a lifelong meditation pro. We were actually waiting to participate on a panel for the World Science Festival. And it was an auditorium and a few of us were on stage with a TV host who was going to interview us. And while we were waiting, I don't remember how this happened, but somebody in the green room had said something about being in solitary confinement. And he said, oh, I would love that because then I could meditate all day long. And I thought to myself, okay, I'm not likely to get there. You know, like that's a pretty extreme state. It was, you know, I didn't quite know what to make of it, but he's an unusual person. But mindfulness, you know, for most people. It's a tool. And you can embrace Buddhist philosophy, which is actually quite wonderful. And it can change a little bit how you— it can change how you see life. But it's not going to solve every problem you have. And I think that's the key. And the literature doesn't show a link between mindfulness and this resilient pattern that we see. And I think mindfulness helps people. I I think it promotes health. I think it's good stuff, but it's not a panacea. And nothing is, nothing is. Because there's some situations when you just, you need to do something else.

I was wondering when I was reading that stuff, has anybody bothered to look at questions of resilience in people who have had 10,000 hours of meditation and really enough meditation to produce what Richie Davidson discovered, right?

Yeah.

Capable of sustaining the gamma rhythm. I want to know what happens if you're capable of sustaining gamma and you're exposed to trauma, what the resilience data looks like. I'm guessing that hasn't been done, but I thought I'd ask.

It hasn't been done, but I mean, just about everything else has with those particular groups of people. I think, I would guess that they would be, they'd be, they'd come out You know, sterling. They'd come out shining, you know, um, because that's just— they're pretty, um, I think they have, they have really good balance in life. But those are very rare people.

What—

why do you think they'd come out sterling? Like, what would be the mechanisms driving that?

I think because they've taken— you know, that is a good question. I think that they've, they've spent so much time, um, controlling their mental state, evaluating their mental state, reflecting on what life is and what the absence of life is. You know, the little I've dabbled in meditation, you can sense the wisdom in Buddhist philosophy and meditation, but it's very hard to maintain it for for an average person, you know, that state of, you know, I mean, so yeah, that's, that's, I think they're, they're exceptional in that kind of mental control and that perspective. It's a, you know, kind of a remarkable perspective, you know, and there are other people like that accidentally, you know, there was a film, I'm not going to remember the man's name, the guy who climbed the film was called Free Solo?

Alex Honnold.

Yeah, right. And so they— he was in the scanner and they were showing him disturbing things and trying to tweak him. And he had very little amygdala reactivity. He wasn't reacting with threat. We once had some special forces that were hanging around the hallways at Columbia. And we said, hey, could you guys come in here for a minute? We put them in front of the computer, we showed them really disturbing photos and filmed it. Which is what we typically do. And they just stared at the screen like, this is all you got, is kind of what, you know, because they're used to dealing with all kinds of things and they have a very different perspective on life. But I think for other people, for us mere mortals, you know, I mean, I meditated for a number of years, but I still found sometimes I just wanted to get a beer and popcorn and watch Godzilla, you know, or something like that, you know, and just completely tune out the world and just forget about it, not think about it, because it was what I needed. I have a concept which is the antithesis of mindfulness in a way called coping ugly. And it's the idea that we just do whatever we need to do in a particular moment to get us through, even if it's something that seems unhealthy. We just need to get to the end of this moment and, you know, out to the next day and then we can take it from there.

So it, it strikes me though that all of these people, and even in the, you know, when you're talking about coping ugly, like step one, and this is, you know, part of your flexibility sequence, which we should probably cover in a second for everyone. But the first step is right, the context sensitivity. So the ability to be present and concentrate on the demands that are in front of you in that moment. That you're going to have to adapt and respond to, right? So it seems like people who are great at meditating, who folks who in the special forces community who are frequently in environments with high levels of threat, but they still have to be completely focused on the moment at hand. Alex Honnold, same deal, right? Really, really good at attending to the current context that they're in, not thinking about what could happen in the future, what's happening, what could, you know, what's happened in the past, just totally present, right?

Yeah, I think so. But I hasten to add, though, you don't have to have enormous skill to be context sensitive, because it's not, you know, at the same moment, you can also need to distract yourself and get something completely off your mind. The context sensitivity is a very brief period where you need to be able to focus on the event, on the painful thing that's happening long enough to assess why, what's causing it, what's happening, what I need, what do I need to do? And as long as once we have that information, then we might decide, okay, what I need to do is stop thinking about all of this right now, you know, so it's a brief period of, of attention that we do need. And that's where the motivation comes in. So, but then, you know, so you don't need to be an absolute wizard at attentional focus. And most people actually have the ability to do the context-sensitive part.

Would you mind kind of giving an overview of the flexibility sequence?

Sure. So initially I didn't call it the flexibility sequence, and then eventually I realized, okay, that's, that's what it is. So the first part is we— when something happens to us where we generally— there's something upsetting, something's not right, something's not working, something we need to fix. Some painful thing is happening. We have to feel, we have to pay attention long enough. Okay, I need to get a grip on this. So what's happening? What do I need to do? These are questions we ask ourselves. And essentially, we then determine what we need to do and we set a goal. And that's, you know, the word setting a goal always struck me as a kind of a dry term for what humans actually do. But we decide I've got to do something. This is what I'm going to do. I'm going to stop. I'm having nightmares. I don't want to have these nightmares. I got to do something to stop having nightmares. Or I'm not sleeping well. I need to find a way to sleep better. Or I'm feeling anxious. So I need to find out, I need to figure out what's causing me to feel anxious and what I can do about it. Or, you know, I really made this big mistake. And now this is happening. I need to fix that. Whatever it might be, we have to kind of reflect enough. And I find actually self-talk really helps. We just literally say to ourselves, what's happening? What do I need to do? Right? We do that. We kind of get that information. And then we move to the next step of the sequence, which you call repertoire, where we now ask ourselves— we've asked ourselves, what do I need to do? Now, we ask ourselves, what am I able to do? And it's essentially what tools do we have? Toolbox. And it's a metaphor, but it's a good metaphor, actually. What am I— what are the things I know I can do, I've done before, and they're reasonably effective? And then we sort of take stock, you know, what would be the best of the things I have in my toolbox for this situation? And then we apply one of those things, we behave, essentially, we do something. And all of this happens at the periphery of awareness. I think for most people, we don't do this very consciously. Because it's highly overlearned, it's routinized. And but the key, a very key step is the third step, which we call feedback, where then people ask themselves, okay, I did something, is it working? And I think that's so important because it's completely overlooked. All the research on emotion regulation, all this other research always stops at selecting a strategy. But we humans, the healthiest people, cope by trial and error. Nobody knows how to do everything. Animals, in so much research, animals cope by trial and error. We figure out what's going to work in this situation because everything is different. So then we do something, we behave, we try a strategy, and then we say, is it working? And if it's working, great, it's working. I'll just keep doing it. If it's not working, or it's not working so great, maybe I'll adjust it a little bit, or maybe I need to do something else. And then we go back to the previous step and we think back into our toolbox. What else can I do? What else can I try? And I try something else. And then is that working? Maybe that's not working either. We might try a couple of things. So then we go back to the beginning and we think, okay, what's really the problem here? What is it that I need to do? What's really happening? And what is the goal here? And then we might try something else again. And we cycle through this you know, until we sort of get a grip on things. And often it will change, you know, the next day, even a couple hours later, sometimes the problem is now different. But that's what we do. Most people, as I said, are not aware of doing that, or they're vaguely aware of it. So this is why I'm getting into like the idea we can teach people this now and get it, make it more clear that this works.

I know we're slowly running out of time. I've 2 questions left. And Tori, I'm sure you have one. One, I want to roll back to something. When you started talking about the flexibility mindset, which I know you're looking at now, what always fascinated me about Carol Dweck's work was the neurobiology, right? We don't learn— the brain doesn't even let us learn from mistakes if we don't have a growth mindset. Is there— are there neuromarkers for a flexible mindset? Is there a penalty? Do you see similar things?

Have you—

has anybody looked? Um, it's my first question.

Then the answer is, is, um, I don't know. It's a big, gigantic I don't know, because this is a relatively new concept. In fact, I don't think anybody is doing research on it but me at this point. It's a pretty— there are people doing research on Carol Dweck's concept of growth mindset. There's wonderful research led by Alia Crum and others at Stanford who look at stress as adaptive mindsets, right? And there recently was a paper putting the two of those together. And I've looked at that work. I think that's great work. It's a little bit different than what I'm talking about. But we're, we're doing really the first stuff on it now. And it's, we're feeling our way. It's very much nascent. So we don't know yet a lot. We don't even know how essential it is.

Okay, here's a totally— this is another one of these weird questions that, that maybe there isn't an answer to. So one of the things that, uh, has come out of, uh, a lot of the flow research— this is predominantly, uh, our colleague Richard Husky's work at UC Davis, um, but we have found, uh, at the network level, when you're looking at flow in the brain, you see sort of dual activation of the cognitive control network, right, the sort of the executive function network in the prefrontal cortex and the goal-directed network. Other things that happen, but those two.

What was the second network?

The goal-directed network.

Okay.

Right. So you see both of those. And one of the reasons I bring this up is we, one of the things that we've seen, we've seen in PTSD is people with PTSD have difficulty with cognitive control. They have difficulty recruiting that area. And it's been shown that if you train up cognitive control in people with PTSD, it reduces their PTSD. My question is basically this similar protocol, but for resilience, for lesser traumas than PTSD. Has anybody looked at those questions? I said, this is probably one of these questions that's going to—

So I'm not sure I understand.

So is, do you mean, has anybody looked at Well, so one of the things that we, one of the things I'm wondering about is, can A, can training people in flow reduce PTSD? We've looked at this for a long time. Anecdotally, there's a tremendous amount of evidence that points to yes. And especially in, Tori and I both have backgrounds working with the spec ops community filled with people who self-medicate with action sports. For trauma. We see that, we see that a lot. And they're using action sports to generate flow as a way to self-medicate for trauma. We see that a lot in the, in the, in the special forces community. I was just, what I was wondering more specifically is the training seems to suggest that, um, and you were talking earlier about the, the goal-directed network being sort of active in, in, in, in the stuff people set goals. And that's what sort of brought this question up. And I've just been wondering are you— have you done anything with cognitive control and resilience, is, I guess, the question I'm trying to ask.

We're recently doing work on some cognitive things with flexibility, which is really the process that gets us to resilience. And we are finding that the more cognitive— what we're doing now is just giving people a lot of cognitive load, not cognitive control. Cognitive load gets in the way. It's just harder to harder to do it, right? So cognitive control, no, we haven't done anything like that.

Off the cognitive load question, this is another similar question. Have you found that people— and I guess measuring allostatic load at this point is such a new thing, but I've been wondering for a while, people with a higher level of allostatic load stress over time, are they more prone to trauma, right? Are they more likely to take a potentially traumatic event and actually turn it into traumatic?

I would say off the top of my head, I would say yes, simply because a longer period of, you say, high allostatic load, chronic stress, whatever we want to call it, is after about a month, we get pretty dysregulated, us humans, the systems, you know, we have, we're, we have a lot of very complicated systems that are in sync with each other, and they start to fall out of sync. The most notable is the HPA axis, the cortisol system, and the immune system. So that when, when we're under stress, the HPA axis kind of puts a damper on the immune system, because the immune system makes us, you know, the cytokines go to our brain and make us kind of sleepy, and they make us not want to engaged with socially, which is very adaptive when you're facing an infection or an injury, but it's not very adaptive when you're trying to survive, right? So the cortisol turns that off. But after about a month, that system stops reacting to cortisol. So now you've got an immune system out of control and HPA axis out of control. And after about a month, so I think at that point, people are quite vulnerable. So I would imagine yes. That they'd be much harder to fend off a psychological insult.

That makes sense. All right. I have to, I have to jump in because I have a question about the trainability of the flexibility sequence, because we've talked about, you know, resilience is the default response, which means most people are resilient, but not all. Right. And you were saying that the flexibility sequence oftentimes happens innately, like outside of our awareness or our peripheral awareness, but obviously not for everyone because some people aren't resilient. And it just strikes me that these pieces of the flexibility sequence are so similar in many ways to the skills that we teach people at FRC to deploy deliberately to engineer tasks for flow, right? So for example, context sensitivity requires you to be, you know, concentrated on the situation, maybe not for a Not a long time, but long enough to really understand the demands, right? So, there's some concentration requirements there, right? You know, what do we need to do? So, there's some clear goals, goal setting there, right? We also have to feel autonomy in our ability to assert some control in the situation, right? And then feedback monitoring, right? Collection of immediate feedback, and then maybe even leveraging creativity, pattern recognition to respond appropriately or recalibrate. Right? So I'm just wondering, like, do you think that this kind of metacognition and self-regulation that we teach for peak performance could actually help set the stage for resilience as well?

It sounds like it. It sounds like there's a lot of overlap. I think one of the reasons why I'm now, for the first time in my career, developing a training— I've never done anything like that. And I've been— I've asked people, I've been smart enough to ask for help because I don't know know how to do it so well. So we, we now, I think we're just beginning to roll out a training for flexibility. And I've thought a lot about, so why would we do that? Why would people want that if it's not innate, it's learned? I mean, I think we have the innate capacity, but it's learned. We're taught how to regulate ourselves. We're taught to pay attention to situations. We're taught to use different strategies. We're taught to, you know, to stop doing something if it's not working. And it becomes overlearned. But for most people, it's like, it's pretty good, right? And that's what our research actually shows. Most people have a moderate level of skill in all these things. But they don't have exceptional skill. They don't have a lot of skill they have, they have a reasonable amount. So one, people can enhance their skills. Two, I don't think a lot of people because it's people don't think about it. It's not a conscious process. Typically that people are not thinking of in terms of how these things are related over time, like how one thing leads to another, the sequence part. So that's another thing that people can learn. We've also found that there are a lot of people who have deficits in one of these, one or more of these things, right? So we can begin to identify what is a deficit for us particularly. And all of those things can be enhanced. By training, by work, you know, and the extent— one thing we saw what recently we did a review for Nature, and we, the journal Nature, and we, I did the research on this part, but we didn't include it for various reasons. But a lot of therapies touch on these ideas, psychotherapies and interventions, but they touch on it, but not fully, and they're not really integrated. So if you're the system that you're using and the teaching you're doing embraces these different components, then it would definitely be very useful. And it would most definitely probably enhance resilience. I would make that prediction, not knowing that specific.

She was listing the, I mean, depending on if you want to use Csikszentmihalyi's original language, he was calling them proximal conditions for flow. We talk I'll call them flow triggers over the past 10 years more than anything else. But she was listing essentially all flow triggers, right? This is if you want more flow in your life, that's part of your toolkit, which is interesting.

Can I tell you a little story about Csikszentmihalyi? When I first began my career, I interviewed for a job at University of Chicago where he was chair chair of the psychology department.

Oh, wow.

And he did not— they did not hire me, but he took me into— they didn't hire anybody. They were deciding, you know, they were trying to decide whether they would go into a clinical realm, and they decided not to. But he brought me in his office and he said, you know, I'll just tell you now, we're not going to hire you. And I said, well, why did you bring me here then? And he said, well, because you have ideas. And then he said, here's my advice to Don't try to get a job right away at a top-level school. Because you have ideas, go somewhere where they'll just leave you alone and develop those ideas. And I didn't intend to follow his advice. It was inadvertent that I followed his advice, but I've never forgot that advice, that it was just go somewhere where you can think and develop your ideas and do something novel. So that was a very nice, you know, little, uh, uh, that was a big, big moment in my career from a small little piece of advice.

He had that, uh, ability. I, I didn't know him super, super well, but we knew each other over the years and he would sort of drop in every like year and a half and he would talk for a half an hour. He'd say like 2 things that would stay with me for the next 25 years. You know what I mean? It totally shaped everything. And I don't even know if he remembered even like SAG have and stuff, but like periodically shaped years of my life, which is like random asides. Yeah.

That's nice.

There's a final question unless Tori has, I want to talk about, I just want to know what excites you in the future of resilience research in the field, which you have put on the map. What is really cool to you? What are your big unanswered questions that you think we're going to start to answer? Those kinds of things.

This is a real nerd answer I'm going to give you. What really excites me right now is that we're starting to do all of this in real time. You know, we've used questionnaires and we bring people in for experiments and you get a lot from that. You could control it, but it's in the long run, it's a little boring because you have You, it's you, you're taking people out of their lives. So we just recently did a study using what's called EMA, ecological momentary assessment, where people answer you, they get a text random times during the day, and they just tell you what experimental sampling method this is.

Yeah, just for the modern world, right?

Yeah, it's been used a lot over the years in psychology. And so we did a study like that, it worked really nicely. We're going to be pairing that with all this data you can get from smartwatches and things. And we, you know, so you can get people in real time and you can look at when they have stressful reactions. And we also recently developed some machine learning algorithms, one using language, the language that people use. And you can do that in real time. You can look at people's faces in real time. And basically, we want to try to figure out how people are using flexibility in the moment and how well they're using it, how it's affecting them, how well they're managing their life. And I'm hoping that that does a couple of things. One, I'm hoping that it really solidifies what we've learned, but I'm also hoping it breaks it open so we can see this in a much clearer light and perhaps more there than we even knew was happening. You know, really, I think that we're on the dawn of being able to do these things. And it's really exciting to me. You know, I now have these thoughts like I have to just keep running outside in the cold so I can live long enough to see this through, you know, because I think it's very exciting.

Somebody has been drinking the Wim Hof Kool-Aid.

Yeah. Well, Dr. Bonanno, I just want to say, I want to say thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your knowledge with our, with with our collective.

It's been really, really a pleasure talking with you.

Thank you so much. And you know, so many truly high-value, like high-value actionable insights. And I think importantly, hopefully shifting even more people's beliefs around, you know, potentially traumatic events and just the default reaction of resilience. I think that's incredibly important.

One would hope.

Echo what Tori said. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for your work. I think it's really, it's really great and it's really important. I have to say, you have more fun with statistics on stage than any human being I've ever seen. Like you, I, it is so entertaining watching you present statistics to the world. It's amazing.

I look at it.

I'm like, I want to be that funny when I'm talking about statistics.

That's interesting. Huh? Well, that's a nice, that's a nice compliment.

It's a unique skill set.

It's a great skill set.

To our listeners, I want to invite everyone to join us for the remaining episodes this month. We're going to be continuing to learn about resilience and flow so that we're all better equipped to tackle life's challenges and come out even stronger. See you then.