The Difference Between Shame & Guilt, Creating Whitespace & Avoiding Insomnia Forever | Flow Research Collective Radio

Your body knows how to sleep. It's like breathing. Like, your body knows how to do it. And even in severe insomnia, there's nothing wrong with your body. Like, there's nothing broken in you that leads to difficulty sleeping. What happens in insomnia is unintentionally we get in our own way, and this leads to interference and eventually sort of frustration, anxiety, all of which just really hampers and interferes with your body's natural ability to sleep. So in some ways it's a strange approach because it's all about getting out of your own way and letting your body do what it's perfectly capable of doing already.

Hey there. If you are a leader, a knowledge worker, or an entrepreneur, and you want to take your professional success to the next level while reclaiming time, space, and freedom within your personal life, then Zero to Dangerous may be a fit for you. Zero to Dangerous is our flagship peak performance training. You'll work one-on-one with our coaches. You'll go through our whole curriculum. You'll join a community of peak performers from all over the world.

This was like a really weird thing that happened is my workday started ending at 2. So then somewhere in Zero to Dangerous, there was this idea that I needed now an entirely new category of things to do just because I enjoy them, which is an entrepreneur for 23 years. It never occurred to me to make a list of things to do for the sheer pleasure of doing them because I had gotten all my work done. Like, it never occurred to me to do that.

It was really, really weird.

I enforced the deadline. Like, it had to be real. I had to create the output to really have the experience be valid. And I was watching my productivity go up and up and up, and I was like, what do I do now?

It's 2 o'clock. And it was just so weird.

Like, when you have, you know, 20 or 30 people who have weird experiences like that and can put them in a way that somebody can kind of scan through those. It allows somebody to self-identify and be like, oh God, that's really meaningful to me. Because some person's going to be like a 40-year-old dad who's going to go through Zero to Dangerous and make enough time to go see his kids play baseball or whatever. That's going to be somebody.

Go to getmoreflow.com, getmoreflow.com. Pop an application through, takes 30 seconds. We will be excited to speak with you to see whether it's a good fit. So that's getmoreflow.com. What does it take to do the impossible? What does it take to level up your game like never before? What does it take for individuals, organizations, for even institutions to achieve paradigm shifting. Nothing is ever the same again.

Breakthroughs.

Our mission is to decode the neurobiology of flow and cognitive peak performance. Access the minds of maverick scientists, groundbreaking innovators, and world-leading experts to understand what it takes to achieve ultimate human performance so you can feel your best, perform your best, and accomplish your boldest goals. I'm your host, Ryan Dorris, and together with bestselling author Steven Kotler, I Present to you Flow Research Collective Radio. Hey there, Rhian Dorriss here with the Flow Research Collective, and welcome to today's episode with Dr. Nick Wignall. So Nick is a clinical psychologist. He's a writer, teacher, and podcaster, and he's got a really well-known blog on Medium, Nick Wignall medium.com that has a cult following. And Stephen actually started following Nick's blog, really enjoyed his writing, reached out to him. And since then, both myself and Stephen have developed a relationship with Nick and become friends. And Nick has just an incredibly practical, application-oriented approach to psychology. Specifically, he breaks down key concepts with this beautiful simplicity that you're going to notice immediately and really enjoy. And in today, we talked about cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia and how to ensure that you never develop insomnia. We talked about the fact that white space is a critical element for peak performance, and Nick described what that was. We talked about fake guilt and the difference between guilt and shame and how they relate to peak performance and lots of other really fun practical stuff. You're going to love this episode. I'm excited for you to listen to it and would love your feedback on it afterwards. So for now, Let's kick off and enjoy. Nick, welcome to Flow Research Collective Radio. It's great to finally have you here.

So glad to be here. Thanks for having me on.

Yeah, I've been excited to jam. Stephen actually, about 2 years ago, showed me your blog. He binge-read, I think, almost every article that you had up at the time and really enjoyed them all. And to kick us off, I actually wanted to ask you a question about something that you gave an incredible explanation of when we last spoke, which is cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia. One of the things you said that was really intriguing to me that I think a lot of people don't know about is that CBT-I is one of the most effective interventions in all of psychology, and insomnia with CBT-I is actually quite curable. So I would love for you to give a breakdown of how this protocol works and why you think it's been so effective.

Yeah, it's really wild. To this day, it's so useful and helpful. And still very few people know about it. It's like tucked away like in a corner of the sort of mental health world, which is wild 'cause it's not only is it helpful for like full-blown cases of clinical insomnia, but the principles are just super helpful for getting better, getting and keeping better sleep generally. So I like, I jump at the chance to talk about it anytime I can. And yeah, in mental health, I mean, there's so many things that are really tough problems where the best you can hope for is kind of modest improvement. But with insomnia, I've worked with people who have had pretty severe insomnia for like decades, and in the course of a few months, completely ironed it out. And then most importantly, I check in with them months, if not years later, and they're still doing really well. So it's just a really robust approach to working through kind of insomnia-related sleep issues.

So yeah, and the thing I just want to mention on it, for anyone who's listening who does not have any problem sleeping, the reason I think this is so useful for I want everyone to know is, number one, as you said, a lot of these principles are transferable just for general sleep optimization and improvement. But the second thing that I found to be huge from learning about this is actually a sense of comfort in knowing that if you do get insomnia or if you get a bout of insomnia at some point, you can solve it relatively easily and consistently. And honestly, I take quite a lot of comfort in that. I've had friends who've had crippling insomnia that's ruined their lives. And I've had periods where I haven't slept well and it's been like really anxiety invoking to wonder, is this going to be a long-term bout of insomnia? So it's nice from that perspective as well.

Yeah, totally. The way I talk about sometimes is it's like thinking about sleep is a little bit like, you know, like if you've ever seen photos or actually been in the cockpit of an airplane, there's like knobs and dials and buttons like everywhere and it's kind of overwhelming. I think about CBT-I as like I'm going to teach you what all these things do so that you can, depending on your circumstances, whatever trouble you're having with sleep, you know, given something that's going wrong, what the right knobs and dials to adjust are and how to adjust them and see if it's helping. So it really is like an empowering sort of approach. But so where to start? I guess one of the key principles behind cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia is that your body knows how to sleep. It's like breathing. Like, your body knows how to do it. And even in severe insomnia, there's nothing wrong with your body. Like, there's nothing broken in you that leads to difficulty sleeping. What happens in insomnia is unintentionally we get in our own way, and this leads to interference and eventually sort of frustration, anxiety, all of which just really hampers and interferes with your body's natural ability to sleep. So in some ways, it's a strange approach because it's all about getting out of your own way and letting your body do what it's perfectly capable of doing already. So that's the first thing I like to kind of point out. I guess we can just sort of go through some kind of common, like, principles underlying CBT-I. A big one is that you can't try to sleep. It's an oxymoron. And the reason is any sort of striving activity, whether it's like laying in bed and you're trying to like problem solve, like, well, what was it today that I did that like led to me not being sleepy? And why can't I fall asleep? But was it that coffee I had at 1:00 PM, or was I happy? Or What's gonna happen tomorrow if I don't get enough sleep? If I only get 6 hours, I'm gonna be a disaster and this meeting's gonna go through. All these things that are a natural sort of your brain's like problem-solving faculties, even if well-intentioned, they all lead to arousal, right? So when your brain sees you start to problem solve, it goes, oh, I guess there's a problem out there. We better rev up into a higher state of arousal, right? Alertness. So any kind of problem solving, no matter how well-intentioned, is counterproductive when it comes to sleep. It's just going to wake you up more. You literally, you cannot try to fall asleep. Anything you do that's effortful is probably going to backfire and be counterproductive. This is why I think one of the things you'll hear most CBTI practitioners talk about is most sleep hygiene is really overrated. So there's all, there's these lists of, you know, dozens and dozens of things you should do from blackout shades to, you know, no caffeine afternoon to all this kind of stuff. None of these tips in themselves are necessarily wrong. The problem is they often, they encourage this what's called a striving attitude towards sleep. It's like sleep's this problem that if I try hard enough and think enough about, I'll fix it, and then I'll be able to sleep super well. No, because the harder you try to do anything, the more you're telling your body to wake up, which is the exact opposite of what you need to fall asleep, which is just to relax, right? And to let your own internal sleepiness take over and tell your body, okay, now it's time to kind of fall asleep. So it's a little philosophical, but it's actually really important, this idea that unlike so many things in life where effort leads to really good results, it's totally backwards in sleep. The metaphor I always use is the Chinese finger trap. Have you ever seen these little things where you stick your finger in, right? And the harder you try to pull your fingers out, the tighter it gets, right? This is like laying in bed trying to analyze why you're not sleepy or all the problems that are going to happen if you don't get enough sleep. It just makes it harder and harder to fall asleep. Ironically, you have to sort of release and relax into it, and that's what allows your body to do what it already knows how to do without your help, which is to fall asleep.

That's super helpful. Yeah, I think the simple sentence that I'm going to be repeating to myself at least is striving stops sleeping. And I love the Chinese finger trap example where you, you have to release rather than kind of, yeah, exert effort to get the results when it comes to sleep.

Yeah, exactly. So that's a really big one. Honestly, a lot of it depends on what the specific issue is with sleep. So for instance, a lot of people who have trouble waking up in the middle of the night and not being able to go back to sleep— really pretty common issue, even if you don't have full-blown insomnia, something that bothers people a lot— a common mistake people will make is They'll try to go to bed earlier, right? They'll think, oh, you know, I only got 6 hours of sleep last night. I better— I'll get into bed at 9 instead of 10:30 when I typically go to sleep. On a surface level, this makes sense, right? The longer you're in bed, the more opportunity you have to fall asleep and get more sleep, right? In reality, this tends to be counterproductive because if you get in bed when you're not actually sleepy, when your body's not ready to sleep, what are you going to do? Well, you're going to lie there and you start thinking, right? Pretty soon you start thinking about why you're not falling asleep, and you're probably— you're either going to get frustrated or anxious, both of which tend to rev up your level of arousal. So you create this self-fulfilling prophecy where you're not sleeping, right? So it's a classic mistake is to really— to get in bed anytime when you're not actually sleepy. So like, one super practical takeaway is do not get into bed unless you are actually sleepy. And a critical distinction here is that Sleepy is not tired. There are a million and one ways to end up feeling tired, right? The example I always give is if you ran a marathon, right, everyone who crosses the finish line of a marathon is pretty tired. I've never seen anyone fall asleep after crossing the finish line of a marathon, right? You don't get sleepy just because you exerted a lot of effort. Now, these two things sometimes go together, so we kind of conflate them, but it's a huge mistake to feel tired and then get into bed as a result because you think you're also sleepy. You could be exhausted, but your brain's not actually ready to go to sleep. And if you do, again, you're going to be in bed, you're probably going to start worrying and getting frustrated, which is going to make it less likely to fall asleep. But even more importantly, long term, what you're doing is you're training your brain to associate your bed with problem solving and worry and frustration, right? Which means not only is that going to be a problem that night, right? It's going to make it harder to fall asleep. The next night when you get into bed, if you do this often enough, your bed is going to become an unconscious cue for wakefulness, right? So this is a real— just like Pavlov's dog, right? You train to associate the sound of a bell with salivating, right? So with a lot of cases of insomnia, that's what's happened. People spend so much time in bed being awake, worrying, trying hard to fall asleep that the bed itself becomes a cue for the opposite thing it should be. It should be a cue for relaxation and sleep, but by trying too hard to sleep, you turn it into a cue for wakefulness and not sleeping. So don't get into bed unless you're actually sleepy. Hallmark signs of that, right, are— it's totally physiological— your eyelids are getting heavy, or you're doing like the head nod, you know, you're watching TV in your head, you can't stay awake. That's how you know you're actually sleepy. Your body needs sleep, not just tired. You'll often hear people say, well, you show it, you know, good sleepers always go to bed at the same time. Maybe, right? But correlation does not equal causation. People who happen to be good sleepers, they may tend to fall asleep at the same time. But if you're not sleeping well, that doesn't mean going to sleep, trying to go to sleep at the exact same time every night is going to be helpful. In fact, it can be unhelpful if you're not actually tired. So I actually recommend it. It's a principle of CBT-I is that you should listen to your body when you're thinking about getting in bed, right? Because you don't want to get into sleep if your body's not actually ready for sleep, even if it's later than you normally would go to bed to sleep.

The principle that I've heard there within CBT-I is to minimize the number of minutes you spend in bed not asleep, basically, you know, to get in when you're about to fall asleep. Then you can talk more about how the actual intervention works, but there's the whole piece about waking up actually earlier and getting less sleep, but to increase the percentage of time in bed asleep, even if the total amount of hours of sleep goes down, and then you gradually kind of expand it out.

Exactly.

As well.

Yes. The underlying principle here is that something that actually everybody kind of understands intuitively, which is that in general, quality matters much more than quantity for sleep. So if I just asked you, you know, would you rather have 8 hours of sort of mediocre, restless, fitful sleep, or 6 hours of super deep, consistent sleep, which would you take?

Yeah, the 6.

So the 6, right? I mean, A, you're gonna, you're gonna feel better on 6 hours of good sleep. You're gonna perform better on 6 hours of good sleep. Like, everything is better with high-quality sleep. So you have 8 hours, but if it's kind of junk sleep where you're sort of going in and out and you're like restless and you're worrying, like It's going to be worse, right? So the idea is you can, if you're not sleeping well, you can temporarily restrict the amount of time in bed so that your quality of sleep is up. And so sometimes people call this sleep restriction, which is actually a misnomer. You're not actually restricting the amount of time you're sleeping. You're restricting the amount of time you're in bed so that the ratio of sleep to not sleep is higher. right? Because that's— you want that, you want dense sleep. You don't want fragmented sleep, you want dense sleep. So if you're not sleeping well, waking up in the middle of the night, for instance, is a common example of this. If you say, okay, I'm actually— I'm only going to be in bed for 6 hours, even if ideally, you know, 7.5 is your ideal amount of sleep each night, if you're really struggling with sleep, temporarily restricting yourself to 6 hours in bed means you might only sleep for 5.5, 6 hours a night, which again is not optimal, but it's fine. Like, you'll be okay on 6 hours. The body can do perfectly well on, you know, on 6 hours. It'll be okay. Most importantly though, what you're doing is you're training your brain to get what's called efficient sleep, right? So you get in bed and you are really sleepy the minute you lay down into bed, so you're more likely to fall asleep quickly. You're also— if you do wake up in the middle of the night, your sleepiness is going to be higher, so you're more likely to fall asleep quickly instead of being awake, laying there worrying about not falling asleep, etc. Then once you've sort of trained yourself to get good quality sleep in those 6 hours or whatever it is, then you sort of gradually add time back on until you get to your optimal point, whatever it is— 7, 8, somewhere in between.

Yeah, one of the other really interesting things that I think is very counterintuitive is that I know at least some CBTI practitioners actually recommend leveraging caffeine to ensure that there is full wakefulness between the sleep blocks that you are trying to maximize rather than having this, again, as you're describing, that kind of like all day long in and out napping, half asleep in different places state. So the idea is sort of build up the sleepiness so that once you put your head on the pillow, bang, you fall asleep. And then as soon as you come out of it, get out of bed, as fast as possible.

Exactly.

And, you know, start, start doing other things so that the bed is a cue and a trigger for sleep and nothing else.

Yep, absolutely. The principle there is that sleep is always a function of basically two variables. Your, what's called sleep drive, which is just your body's internal need for sleep, right? And that the longer you're awake, the higher that is basically. Other things affect it, like exercise, intense mental activity tends to lead to stronger sleep drive. And so it's pretty normal after you've been awake for, I don't know, 12, 13, 14 hours, 16 hours, like that sleep drive starts to get higher and higher and higher, right? At a certain point, it crosses that threshold and you start to feel sleepy. That means you're ready to fall asleep. But the other factor is what's called arousal, right? And so the trick is arousal can always interfere with sleep drive for really good, like sort of evolutionary reasons. You know, no matter how sleepy you are, if you hear a saber-toothed tiger crawling into your cave, like, you want to be able to suppress your sleep drive and get the hell out of there and survive, right? Even if you don't feel great the next day, like, that's much more important. So what's really important is CBT-I is all about how do I make sure my sleep drive stays high, and then how do I prevent arousal from interfering with it, right? So keeping your sleep drive high, that might be things like Yeah, you using caffeine strategically or not napping during the day, right? Because that's going to make— ensure— or exercising more, getting more physical activity, exercise, stuff like that. That's going to ensure that when your bedtime comes around, your sleep drive is nice and high, right? And at the same time, avoiding things that interfere with sleep drive, that make you more aroused. So like worry, for instance, frustration. I think about it as you want a really good sleep runway leading up to bedtime. Right? So if you want to go to sleep around 10 PM, right, you really want to make sure that from 8 or 9 until 10, you don't have any what I think of as striving activities, problem solving, really like effortful stuff where you're trying to figure things out and make things happen. Because your, your mind is— I think about it like your mind's like a jumbo jet, right? This is really impressive, like powerful piece of machinery that's capable of doing incredible things, and you are doing super impressive things all day long. But if you think about it, how does a jumbo jet get people to their gate? It doesn't just fly right over the airport and then dive bomb straight to the gate. That would end terribly for everyone. So you can't just be go, go, go, go, go, and then all of a sudden, oh, it's 10:00 PM, like, okay, brain, shut off. That's not how it works. You need a slow, gradual descent. And then even once you hit the runway, you sort of brake and slowly taxi to your gate. That's the optimal way to fall asleep. You can't force yourself to sleep. Again, that tends to backfire. So giving yourself that nice long is important, having enough time is important, but more importantly, during that time you're avoiding activity that is arousing, that's going to interfere with that sleep drive, right? So that's like another really key sort of practical approach that a lot of CBTI kind of protocols and approaches make sure to kind of tap into.

Hey there, just gonna interrupt. If you are a leader, a knowledge worker, or an entrepreneur and you want to take your professional success to the next level while reclaiming time, space, and freedom within your personal life, then Zero to Dangerous may be a fit for you. Zero to Dangerous is our flagship peak performance training. Work one-on-one with our coaches. You'll go through our whole curriculum. You'll join a community of peak performers from all over the world.

This was like a really weird thing that happened is my workday started ending at 2. So then somewhere in Zero to Dangerous, there was this idea that I needed now an entirely new category of things to do just because I enjoy them, which is an entrepreneur for 23 years. It never occurred to me to make a list of things to do for the sheer pleasure of doing them because I had gotten all my work done. Like, it never occurred to me to do that.

It was really, really weird.

I enforced the deadline. Like, it had to be real. I had to create the output to really have the experience be valid. And I was watching my productivity go up and up and up, and I was like, what do I do now?

It's 2 o'clock. And it was just so weird.

Like, when you have, you know, 20 or 30 people who have weird experiences like that, and you can put them in a way that somebody can kind of scan through those, it allows somebody to self-identify and be like, oh God, that's really meaningful to me. Because some person's going to be like a 40-year-old dad who's going to go through Zero to Dangerous and make enough time to go see his kids play baseball or whatever. That's going to be somebody.

Go to getmoreflow.com, getmoreflow.com, pop an application through, takes 30 seconds. We will be excited to speak with you to see whether it's a good fit. So that's getmoreflow.com. I'm going to shift gears slightly here, Nick. You wrote an article called How to Manage Other People's Bad Moods Like a Pro. Which is a great title, by the way. It really struck me. It stood out when I read it. I'm curious how good the traction was on Google with that title. One of the quotes though from that article was, "When you shift from problem thinking to puzzle thinking, your mindset becomes driven by curiosity rather than morality, which is far more helpful in an emotionally intense situation, both for you and the person across from you." I think that quote and the title of the article is very relevant to leaders, and anyone who's dealing with other people consistently. So I'm curious if you can give a breakdown of, you know, how to shift from problem thinking to puzzle thinking and how to leverage curiosity rather than morality so that you can be more receptive and better at communication.

Yeah, for sure. I mean, in some ways it kind of starts with language. Like, even the, the title of that post is a little bit deceptive because it uses the terms we all use, like a bad mood, right? But bad is a, that's a tricky word, right? It's pretty loaded. Like sometimes we mean bad in terms of just, it's just unhelpful, right? But it kind of has these very strong, like moralistic connotations. Like someone's a bad person if they're feeling too X, you know, anxious, sad, like whatever it is. So part of it just starts with being careful about what we mean. Like, is this, when we say something is a problem, right? What are we talking about exactly? And so what I like to think about is, again, this is kind of go back to what we were talking about with sleep. And your mind being like this impressive sort of problem-solving machine. We spend all day identifying problems and then working through them, fixing them, right? Stuff's wrong or it needs to be better, and we use our pretty impressive kind of mental faculties to analyze those problems and then generate solutions, right? Now, the problem is when you get to something like what we call a bad mood, we have to be really careful because Someone feeling really, let's say your spouse is just really anxious, right? And it's kind of starting to stress you out, right? It's very easy to think of that as bad. It's bad that they're so anxious, right? It's bad for them, it's bad for me, it's bad for everybody, right? The issue there is that any kind of emotion, anxiety, anger, sadness, guilt, whatever you wanna call it, emotions aren't good or bad, right? They're not moral because they're not things we have direct control over. No one decides to be anxious, right? No one decides to get really angry. You might do things that then put you in a situation that makes it more likely that you end up feeling some emotion, right? But emotions themselves are not moral phenomena. How I think about it, they're mechanical in nature, right? And so dealing well with these difficult emotions, like say anger or anxiety or whatever it is, including other people's, you have to sort of— you got to take off the kind of moralistic good, bad, and instead think of it mechanically. Like, okay, something's like— just like, okay, like there's some smoke coming out of the engine in my car. Like, something's off. Your car's not bad, right? Your car's not trying to be bad. It's just something's a little bit misaligned or something. So you got to go in there and see what's going on. So it's the same with other people. When you take a moral stance, when you, when you treat their difficult emotions as bad, 'Oh, you got to stop being so anxious,' or 'Just get over it,' or whatever it is— what you're doing is you're implying that they're bad for feeling bad, which only makes them feel worse and makes the problem bigger. It compounds the emotion, right? So I would say feeling bad is hard enough without feeling bad about feeling bad, right? It's just like feeling bad squared, right? So when you're dealing with someone else's difficult emotions, the most important principle is you want to try to minimize anything that would make them feel bad about feeling bad, right? So if they're anxious, you don't want them to feel guilty about feeling anxious. That's just going to explode their overall level of emotionality, right? So instead of thinking about this as, okay, this is a problem we got to fix and deal with, right? This is where you want to think of it as a puzzle, not a problem. Like, oh, this is interesting. It's a little scary, right? Or it's a little uncomfortable. But like, so when you dump out a puzzle and there's 1,000 pieces scattered across the table, like, it's a little intimidating, right? But it's, uh, fundamentally you're thinking that as this thing that it's not good or bad, right? Even if it's uncomfortable, it's like a challenge, it's like a game, right? And we're going to kind of mess around and see if we can figure out things. So that's where curiosity really helps. So if you're— if you got, again, a spouse, a co-worker, someone who's struggling with some kind of big, intense, difficult emotion, the first kind of mindset shift that's often helpful is to think through not why is this happening, why is this good or bad, but like what could have happened that would have led up to this, right? So what's going on in a very mechanical way, like how could situations have led to this happening, right? Have I ever been— there's another point I bring up in this article is this idea of what I call reverse empathy. Thinking through sort of like, have I ever been in a situation where I've felt that way? And what this does is it really takes the, the sort of the judgment off of how you're going to approach this issue, right? And it's going to make you much more kind of validating and empathetic when it comes to helping this other person who's, who's struggling. So trying to get curious, not judgmental, about what's going on rather than already deciding, okay, this is a bad thing that needs to be like fixed, trying to understand it. So you might ask, even if someone's really revved up and anxious, your instinct is going to be to like, okay, we just got to like stop talking about this because the more you talk about, the more anxious you're gonna get, or whatever, right? But you could actually lean into it and you could say, wow, yeah, it seems like you're really afraid. Like, when did you start feeling this way? Now the point here is not to like crack the code or like solve the case or anything, right? What you're doing is you're validating their experience. You're saying, oh wow, yeah, like that's hard. Like implicitly what you're saying is neither of us like the fact that you're feeling anxious or angry or whatever it is, but it's okay. It's not wrong that you're feeling bad, right? You're not a bad person for feeling bad. It's a difficult challenge and we want to try and get through it, but like we're okay. Like we're all okay here. This is a challenge. But we're going to figure it out. That's what you signal when you approach difficult emotions with curiosity, right? Mechanically, not morally. And it's so much easier to deal with difficult emotions when you're just— it's so much easier to deal with feeling bad as opposed to trying to not feel bad when you're feeling bad about feeling bad, especially when you're feeling bad because someone else is kind of encouraging you to feel bad about feeling bad. It's just so much harder. So you'll find both of yourself and with other people, it's amazing how well you can work through difficult feelings when all you're dealing with is that one feeling instead of the second layer of, I feel bad about feeling bad. I'm anxious about the fact that I'm anxious and other people know I'm anxious, or I feel angry and I know I shouldn't feel angry because it's bad to feel angry. Now I feel guilty about feeling angry, right? Right. So much harder and more complex. So Anything you can do to keep it at one layer of emotion, that's by far the most helpful thing you're going to be able to do in a situation like this.

Yeah. Tal Ben-Shahar, who's a Harvard positive psychologist who was actually on Flow Research Collective Radio a while ago as well, has a lecture from, I believe, 2013. And I can't remember if he cites research or if he just argues that what you're referring to, these sort of secondary or satellite emotions, the badness that comes with feeling bad or the guilt that comes with feeling anxious or whatever make up the majority of people's negative emotions. So to your point, if you can just strip off the second layer and just sit with the first layer of guilt or badness or whatever it is, the picture gets a lot easier. Also, I love what you said as well about the fact that emotions aren't choices. We view, I think oftentimes, emotions as choices, but that point that For something to be moralized, there needs to be agency behind it. And if that's not the case necessarily with an emotion, it doesn't make sense to moralize other people's emotion either.

Yeah, right. I mean, if only they were— if only we set a little dial where we just crank up the happiness or crank down the anxiety, right? But obviously it's not to say that things we do don't affect how we feel in the long run, but it's not this direct A causes B thing. It's always more complicated than it seems. One thing just to point out that A really practical thing I think that you can do to get better at not only, I mean, dealing with your own emotions and other people's is be really careful actually about the language you use when you talk about emotions. I, I'm not perfect at this, but I try really hard not to talk about positive versus negative emotions or good or bad emotions because they have so much moralistic baggage. It's like there's this idea that, well, it's not okay for me to feel anxious or afraid or or sad or whatever it is. So instead, I like to talk about it in terms of difficult emotions, right? Or pleasurable and painful emotions, right? Feeling sad is uncomfortable, painful even, right? It's not bad. It's not even negative, really. It's uncomfortable, right? And so something as simple as that is like something that you can do to get into this more kind of curiosity-oriented mindset rather than a moralistic kind of judgmental mindset. So just being really careful about the language you use, it seems a little like trivial, but I've seen such outsized effects from just small tweaks to the way we talk about our emotions in terms of staying on, like you were talking about, that first layer of emotion and not adding all this secondary baggage. And in the long run, this is— it's really confidence boosting when it comes to dealing with difficult emotions because when you stop having to struggle through that exponentially bigger amount of difficult emotion that comes from that second layer, you realize like, hey, you know, like this, like feeling bad stuff, like it's hard, but I can do it. I can get through it when it's just that first layer. But people get— they feel kind of hopeless when all of their experiences dealing with difficult emotions are— it's like a double whammy, right? You're, you're dealing with feeling bad and to some degree feeling bad about feeling bad. And it's, it's so much easier actually if you can keep it on that first level. So I think that's huge, and it comes all the way down to little things like how we talk about our own emotions and other people's emotions and trying to be as sort of neutral as possible.

Yeah, reminds me a little bit of Lisa Feldman Barrett's theory of socially constructed emotion and her point that these are just sensations, and a lot of our perception of whether the sensation is even pleasurable or not, or good or bad, is based on how we've been taught to relate to the emotion. And when you think about a feeling like sadness, who's to say that the feeling of sadness isn't a pleasurable cleansing nice feeling? It's just that there's a lot of inbuilt reactivity and presumption in relation to that sensation that often causes it to feel unpleasant. But when you drop to the core base sensation, bad emotions feel good and sometimes vice versa as well, which is interesting. Nick, you've got a concept, you've written about a concept at least called fake guilt. One of the things that you've said is be vigilant for fake guilt. So I'm curious what fake guilt is.

Yeah. Fake guilt, or sometimes I call it pseudo guilt, but it starts with this idea that Guilt, I think of guilt as actually a very narrow emotion. And what I mean by that is if you define guilt, which I think most people generally do, as it's the emotion you feel when you knowingly do something wrong, right? So you're like, you're a little kid and mom just said, I just baked these cookies, they're not for you, don't eat any of these, I'm going to the other room for a minute. And you, mom leaves and you're like, I know I'm not supposed to, but those smell really good. And you know I shouldn't do this, but you eat the cookie anyway. And mom comes back and said, did you eat the cookie? Like, yeah, I know. 'Oh, I shouldn't have done that. I did the wrong thing.' That's guilt. I actually think that that is not a super common experience for a lot of us. Most of them— I don't think there's that many times. I mean, certainly sometimes, but it's not that common that we knowingly do the wrong thing on purpose. I think much more commonly what happens is something bad happens, we feel responsible, and we label it guilt. Like, I feel, oh, I feel so guilty. I was just talking to somebody who is super overwhelmed and burnt out. They're doing a bunch of stuff. They got their own like side projects. They got this, a couple of different jobs freelancing and someone else suggested, well, like, dude, you seem like really burnt out and overwhelmed. Like, it seems like you just got to like drop one of these things. Why don't you say no to whatever X? And the immediate response was like, oh no, like I'd just be too, I'd feel too guilty. Like they rely on me so much. You know, I just couldn't, I just couldn't say no. Now, if you break this down, this is actually interesting what's going on emotionally here. He was saying he felt guilty. Now, first of all, I would say you haven't done anything yet, so you're not feeling guilty. What you're feeling is you're feeling anxious about potentially feeling guilty in the future. So there's a prime example of fake guilt. You're not— you're definitely not feeling guilty. You're worried and anxious about feeling guilty in the future, right? That's different. The other thing is, if he was to say no to this job that he's doing that's kind of leading to overwhelm and burnout, what I asked him was, is that wrong? Is that morally wrong for you to say no to this job? And he sort of said, well, no, right? Okay, so if you're not doing something morally wrong, you might feel something It's not guilt though. It's not the emotion that comes from you knowingly doing something wrong. In reality, what it would probably be something like, if I said no, I'm imagining them being really disappointed. Right? So again, it's probably some form of fear. You're feeling fear about someone else's difficult emotion, potentially about you. Right? So maybe they just be disappointed. Maybe they get really angry. Right, and say something nasty to you, whatever. All that— but all that stuff, none of that is a reason for guilt, right? So I think it's really important to— to— now, this isn't just academic. I think this actually matters, this distinction of fake guilt, because I think a lot of people end up using guilt. It's not intentional, it's unconscious that they want to classify things as guilt when it's not. And the reason is guilt as an emotion is generally something you can, you can do something about. You can apologize, you can rectify a situation when you've done something wrong, you can, you can help fix it, or you can try and make up for it somehow. So there's usually something you can do about feeling guilty, right? On the other, other emotions though, there's often less you can do about it. So take sadness for instance, or some version of sadness like disappointment, like somebody else feeling sad. If someone's disappointed in you, you have no control over that. You can't do anything about that. So along with sadness, there's almost always helplessness. As difficult as emotions like guilt or sadness or anxiety or anger or all these other kind of classic emotions are, I really think the emotion most of us hate the most, like the one we will do anything to avoid, is helplessness. People really don't like feeling helpless, right? Including like if someone's, you know, sad that you moved on and decided to leave a job, right? It just is. It's not good or bad. Like, they're just sad. And there's— if you do that, there's nothing you can do that's going to make them less sad. That just has to run its course. So one of my kind of theories is we use fake guilt because it temporarily makes us feel a little less helpless. We feel guilty, but at least we don't feel helpless, right? Whereas if you were to really acknowledge, okay, what's actually going on in here is I'm feeling anxious about them potentially feeling disappointed, right? And that really scares me because it makes me feel like I'm going to be really helpless. Like, that's just going to be an icky situation. I'm not going to do anything about it. So we do these like unconscious psychological maneuverings in order to resist that kind of helplessness. So that's probably a much longer answer than you wanted, but I see this everywhere. So whenever you— it's a really good practice to kind of do a gut check on yourself when you're either with other people, like if you hear someone else talking about feeling guilty, or with yourself. If you're like, oh no, I'd feel too guilty about that, or I just feel so guilty, I would really encourage you to ask yourself Am I really feeling guilty now, right? Or is it some other emotion? And really trying to explore with more granularity, like, what's actually going on on this emotional level? Because there's a good chance it's not actually guilt.

So I got two follow-up questions there. First one is related to a quote that I've heard a number of times, which is that shame is feeling bad about who you are and guilt is feeling bad about what you've done. So I'm curious, first off, if you agree with that and if shame plays into fake guilt at all. And then I'll hold for the follow-up afterwards.

Yeah, sure. So this is one of those, like, people— like, psychologists go back and forth all the time about the shame-guilt distinction. Probably the two most common ones are that, like, shame is a more kind of personalized, kind of global assessment, whereas guilt is, like, specific to a particular action. The other one is that guilt is private and shame is public. They both come from doing something wrong, but you— some people would say you can't feel shame unless you're, unless you're feeling guilty and you're imagining someone else knowing that you're guilty. But that's, that's a distinct thing. Personally, I don't really care. I think what matters is that you're consistent, that you just sort of know, okay, this is shame for me, this is what I'm calling shame, and this is what I'm calling guilt. Because then at least you have kind of consistent things you can work with. But if you're constantly sort of switching the definition of like what that means, just like with guilt, things get really confusing and it's hard to make sense of things and then work through things productively if the definitions are changing all the time. So I think that's a perfectly fine definition of shame if you want to think about it. But what I would just say is the label ultimately isn't that important. What's important is What's your attribution when you do something wrong? Is it, oh, I did this wrong thing, like I'm a terrible person? Or is it like, no, you know what, that was a bad decision and I should not have done that, and I'm gonna try really hard not to do that thing anymore in the future, right? I would argue the second is a hell of a lot more, A, accurate, but B, helpful. And the first one is kind of— so whether you call the first one shame and the second one guilt, That's fine if you want to do that, but what's important is sort of the mechanics underneath it. Got it.

That makes total sense. Another thing I wanted to ask you about, Nick, you wrote another blog post titled 59 One Sentence Ideas for Better Mental Health, and one of them was you need more white space in your life. So I'm curious what white space is and how people can get more of it in their lives.

Yeah, totally. So this is a concept from, or at least I'm familiar with it in sort of the graphic design world. It's a classic way to tell kind of like a rookie or amateur designer from a pro designer is how they utilize white space or not, right? And so a rookie designer or someone who's just like designing their own, like say business card, right? They're just gonna like fill all the space up with like stuff, tons of information. They got multiple email addresses, tons of phone numbers, website, blog, Twitter, Facebook, you know, huge description of what they're doing. And the thing is just like a mess. It's like stressful to look at, much less try to like decipher and figure out what you need. Right. Pro graphic designers know a company like Apple or like Nike, like these guys are like prime examples of this. All of their design has plenty of white space, right? It's got breathing room. For one thing, it's calming. And that calming effect, I think what it does is it allows whatever the message that is there to really have impact, right? Like, you know, there's one thing, right? And you, you know what it is. There aren't 14 pieces of, like, extraneous information that are competing with your attention for what's the most important thing to know or what's the most important thing to take action on, right? So similarly, I think you can make an analogy with our own lives. I think a lot of people, and myself included, sometimes we just fill our lives with stuff. Like, we're constantly doing stuff. We're just always have like some problem to solve or some activity or some engagement to do or some meeting or— and our— I mean, just look at your schedule and there's— there is literally no white space, right? It's just event, task, meeting, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot. Even our free time is full of like professionalized hobbies and like side projects and like— and there's nothing necessarily wrong with that, but if you struggle with chronic stress, overwhelm, burnout. That is a prime culprit. If you're constantly busy and overwhelmed, like you have stuff filling your day all the time, you are gonna feel stressed out. Just like if you look at a really crappy design that's like overloaded with information and stuff and junk, it's just stressful to look at. Well, it's the same with our life. And so I think a really good principle we can borrow from graphic design is allow for white space in your life. Right? Like have chunks of time that deliberately don't have like some kind of goal or objective or activity where you just have time to breathe. And so, yeah, I don't know if there's— I think there's a lot of ways you could take that and it depends a ton on your situation and whatever. But the principle, even if it's just literally like one block of 30 minutes in the middle of the day, I'm putting it on my calendar, but it's white space. There's literally nothing in it. I'm going to leave it. If I want to go for a walk, I'm going to go for a walk. If I want to sit and meditate, I'll sit and meditate. Maybe I'll decide to do more work, like, that's fine. But there's something really profoundly calming, I think, when your external world has white space and when you take it as a just a good principle of mental health and sort of self-care to protect your white space, right? Your white space is like It's like your buffer from stress. Think about a castle, right? The way castles are built. There's the castle, the like walls, but then there's also the moat, right? The moat is like a buffer. It makes it really hard for someone even to get to the walls and the gate, right? That's kind of like white space. If you have white space, you have a buffer. Big stressors can come into your life and you can sort of absorb them better. But if you have no margin, if you have no white space, You might get lucky here and there, but eventually it's going to be too much and you're going to get stressed out and stuff's going to start breaking and it's just going to— you're going to be kind of frazzled. So it's the hardest thing in the world. I mean, creating white space is hard. Maintaining it, like protecting it, is really hard because we've all— I mean, a lot of us anyway, we've constantly got new exciting opportunities to like to do and like new things to do. Yeah, I don't know. We just always have new fun, interesting, or— and sometimes like fires we have to put put out. But I think it's a, just a really important principle is trying to create and protect white space in your life.

So one of my favorite questions that we get from graduates of Zero to Dangerous, our training, because it's a sign that we've done a good job, is along the lines of, I've got all this free space and time in my life now, and I've never had it before, and it's completely disorienting. And they're referring to white space, and they don't know what to put in it. Or how to navigate it. So I'm curious if you've got advice for folks on what to do. Like we've had people, for example, saying they've taken up hobbies for the first time and things like that. So I'm curious, how do you navigate your white space? Because I'm assuming you want to leave it as white space and you don't want to necessarily schedule things in, but what do you do within it?

Yeah. So I think the first principle is like, it's a little like personal finance. Like if you're living paycheck to paycheck and you all of a sudden you bump your income by 10%, The first question should not be like, "Oh, good, more income. How do I spend this now?" You want to keep that buffer because life is unpredictable and chaotic, and you can't tell when your home's AC is going to go out or when you're going to need to get a new car or you're going to have some big medical bill. And so you want the buffer there precisely because it's not being used. So that's the first, I think, level of this is you want some amount of it, just because of unpredictability, randomness. You can't— you don't know when you're going to have some big stressor in your life, and that, that white space is really going to help you deal with it effectively. But then the second part of the answer, I think, is just that, frankly, I think you want to be— I don't know, there's probably a million good ways to answer this question. My, like, one of my, I would say, kind of an underappreciated answer to this is you want to be spontaneous with it. Leave it open again. Like if you— stupid example, but if you leave open, you know, from 11 to 11:30 every day, I just like, I really try and protect that. I don't schedule anything. I don't have any tasks. And some days, like maybe really feeling like picking up a book and like reading. Some days you want to like do a small workout or something. You part— so part of it is you need it because you ought to be listening to your body and your mind, which is going to need different things on different days. And so having whitespace is a way to flexibly address whatever it is you're sort of needing or whatever opportunity you see. So I, I would really resist the idea of giving whitespace a particular job. I think the whole point is it's like a safety in football, right? It can do multiple jobs. You sort of want— or like a sweeper in football or soccer, you know, you want— sometimes you want these these roles that are kind of flexible. And so I'm, I'm a pretty big proponent of if you're going to have white space, you should allow for flexibility and then spontaneity with it.

I love that answer. It's great. Final question, Nick, is the Research Genie question, which we ask everyone, and it's actually, it's a question about a question. So if you could click your fingers and you could instantly have all of the empirical research be done to answer any question, what would that question be?

Gosh, such a good question. And it's funny, there in our conversation, I forgot what it was. There was some topic I was like, I wish there was good research on this. Um, but yeah, I, I don't know. Like, I think, um, one— I— one of the biggest obstacles I see to people's both happiness and success or performance in life is— we were talking about judgment, right? Being judgmental of emotions. But self-judgment, like, so, like, being judgmental with yourself, kind of irrationally judgmental with yourself. What I found in my work with individuals is we have a lot of good strategies and tactics for dealing with self— someone who's really self-critical or self-judgmental, but it's very hard to figure out who's going to benefit most from which strategy. So I think it's about— I would love a bunch of research that tries to unpack in a really systematic way What leads people to have chronic kind of, um, self-judgment or self-critical attitude? And then how can we use that to tailor more effective strategies for, for dealing with that? Because it's one of the biggest problems across all sorts of domains in life is how just brutal people are with themselves. And when you can reduce that, it frees up so much energy to be put to more productive uses. So I think that would be I think society would just benefit so much from having a better understanding of how those dynamics work.

I love it. That's a great answer. And then the final, final question is just where can people learn more and how can they support all the work you're doing?

Yeah, so I have a website, nickwignall.com. I have a weekly newsletter that kind of rounds up all my, you know, I write an article or two per week and do podcasts and all sorts of stuff. It's a good place to go. Yeah, I would check that out. I run a course a few times a year called Mood Mastery, which is all about kind of creating stronger, healthier relationship with your own beliefs and moods and emotions, which I see as a pretty foundational skill for all sorts of things in life. So people can check that out as well. It's got its own website, moodmastery.com. Yeah, Kian, thank you so much for having me on. I really appreciate it.

Great. Thanks so much, Russ. All the best. If what you've heard on Flow Research Collective this radio has been helpful, please consider doing us a solid and leaving us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you are listening to this. Reviews help us connect to a wider audience so we can get these peak performance principles out to more people.