Speaker 1: Good morning, Dr. Peterson. You speak a lot about negative emotion. As someone who's very prone to negative emotion and borderline neurotic, I have fairly severe anxiety problems that are being controlled with SSRIs currently. Anyway, my question is, is there a way to change your temperament if you're prone to negative emotion? Is there a way to fix that permanently? Well, there are ways of modifying it. I spoke a little earlier today about the self-authoring programs. I would say you could try those. That'll help the evidence that writing about your past, unresolved issues in your past, let's say remaining mysteries, reduces the overall level of stress that you carry with you because your body computes your average level of stress by calculating something like the proportion of things you don't understand that have happened to you to the proportion of things that you do understand. And you want that ratio to be low. You want to have understood virtually everything that happened to you so that if the same situation, same potentially problematic situation that did you in in the past arises in the future, you know how to deal with that. So getting your story straight in relationship to your past is important. Doing the same in relationship to your future is crucial because that reduces another level of uncertainty, like another domain of uncertainty. If you're uncertain about where you're going or why, that makes you chronically stressed. Okay, so that can help. If you do those things, you straighten out your story about who you are and where you're going, that will lower your baseline levels of neuroticism. Now, conscientious conduct also decreases neuroticism. There's a negative correlation between conscientiousness and neuroticism, and it looks causal in that more orderly and industrious people suffer less from negative emotion. Okay, and that's probably because they put their environments in order, right? They actually keep order in their immediate environment, so things are neat and orderly around them, but they also work hard so that the future is more stable. Okay, so then what else? There's an emergent literature showing that excess concern about the narrow self is associated with self-conscious suffering. So for example, you can discriminate between people who are depressed and or psychotic and those who are not with about 75% accuracy by calculating the relative number of self-referential pronouns that are used in speech or writing, speech or writing of the people involved. And the more people concentrate on themselves, their narrow selves, the more miserable they are. And that's buttressed by finding, showing that in the scales that measure trait neuroticism or negative emotionality, self-consciousness is actually a facet of the scale itself, which means that acute self-consciousness is so tightly associated with misery that they may be essentially the same thing. So now you can't really escape from that trap by consciously trying to think less about yourself, because if you start thinking less about thinking about yourself, you just end up thinking more about yourself. That's not helpful, but what you can do, this is extremely useful, is you can start thinking about how to put other people at ease and what you can do for other people, like how you can be of service. And paradoxically, because that takes the self-conscious stress off you, then your negative emotion levels will fall. So if you find yourself ruminating about yourself and your concerns, you can actually learn how to switch your thinking to what you might do to make the lives of the people around you better. And that could be your immediate partner, for example, or your immediate family members, or your friends, or your business partners, or people in the broader community. Service to others is one of the ways out of negative self-focused emotion. We have this strange idea in our culture that the more we encourage young people to be concerned about their mental state, let's say, the more value we're attributing to them, and the more good we're going to do them on the mental health side. And that couldn't be less true. It's actually an anti-truth. To over-protect people and to have them focus on their own concerns is definitely a pathway to misery. Now, the other thing I would say, this is useful too, you know, something you could try to do is, imagine I asked you to say, why don't you just sit down one day for an hour, or maybe across a couple of days, and write down all the things that you're afraid of and avoiding that are necessary for you to do to move forward, right? So these would be things that you're not doing that you know you need to do in order for you to move to where you want to move. And so, you need to make a pretty exhaustive list of those. Then you need to break each of those down. You need a strategy, and a written strategy would be very helpful. You need a strategy of exposure. You know, I mean, like maybe you're behind on your tax documents, let's say, you know, or there's some other stack of paperwork sitting on your desk that you're not attending to because you're afraid. And there may be lots of things in your life that you're not attending to because you're afraid. And so, first of all, you want to admit to what those things are, and you can ask yourself that. Then you want to write them down. Then you want to come up with a strategy for starting to deal with them. Like if it's a stack of unpaid bills that you're terrified of, and that you've been avoiding for a few months, or even worse, you're gonna be pretty damn afraid to even take a look at the problem. But it'll almost inevitably be the case that if you take a look at the problem, a detailed look, the reality will be less terrifying than the specter that your imagination has conjured forth. And maybe the first thing, the thing you can do for the first day when you decide to actually turn around and face the dragon, let's say, is all you'll do is open the file folder with all the documentation of what you're avoiding in it, and just glance through it, like for five minutes, just to break that paralysis. You know, or maybe you have to spend 15 minutes gathering the dispersed documents that are in whatever the hell passes for your filing system together so they're all in one place. Some move forward. And so what you want to do is you want to think about what it is that's producing negative emotion in you, your doubts and your concerns. And then you want to develop a strategy of incremental approach. And that will also fortify you, partly because you reduce the number of things that you're afraid of by actually dealing with those things so they go away, you actually solve the problems. But also, you train yourself to see that you're the sort of person that doesn't have to run from their problems no matter what they are. And that deep learning that you are that sort of person is in fact the solution to the problem that you're describing with regards to severe anxiety. Now, the other thing I would say too, and I don't know anything about you, obviously, is you think that your anxiety and perhaps associated depression is psychological, right? And you think that the reason the SSRIs are dealing with it is because they're having a psychological effect. But there are a lot of reasons to be anxious. So for example, there is good evidence that depression, in many cases, and associated anxiety, let's say, can be a consequence of inflammatory autoimmune problems. Lots, and you can look that up for yourself, the relationship between depression and immune dysfunction, especially inflammation. And you know, you gotta ask yourself, is there something wrong with you that's making you anxious? You may be physically ill in some complex way. My daughter and members of my family have had a lot of good fortune treating high levels of negative emotion with dietary alteration. It, as you may know, because it's somewhat well-known, we only eat meat. And there's a huge literature emerging on the utility of ketogenic and carnivorous diets to redress serious physical and psychological disorders. So my daughter has done a podcast with a psychiatrist at Harvard, for example, at McLean Hospital, who's been investigating this quite deeply with regard to schizoaffective disorder, which is a very serious, near psychotic disorder, a very deep problem that looks like it's physically rather than psychologically grounded. And the data on the carnivore diet in relationship to disease control is extremely positive. Now, there's not a lot of data yet. The studies are hard to do. But don't be so sure that the reason that you're miserable is because there's something wrong with you psychologically. It could easily be that it's the secondary consequence of some physiological illness that's going to be somewhat difficult to specify, right? Because autoimmune problems, the sort of autoimmune problems that cause inflammation are difficult to specify. So you might wanna figure out, like, do you have allergies? Do you have psoriasis? Do you have any other signs of autoimmune trouble? That's one way of starting. And any other physical illness-like symptoms, because that can help you triangulate on what might be driving your anxiety. But don't assume that it's all psychological, because it could well not be. You know, when I do my, well, I don't practice clinically now, but when I did differential diagnosis to begin with, trying to figure out what was wrong with my clients, I always started with the assumption that if they were seriously afflicted on the psychological side, that they may have been ill in some manner that hadn't been diagnosed properly. And that's very much worth considering. So, anyways, that's not bad. ♪♪