Joe Hudson: preference

Transcript context

…Oh, wow. I love this so much because there's so much that comes from this thing in your head just shooting you down or scaring you about stuff. It's so hard. I hear this, but it's so hard. Next time I'm, I don't know, giving a big presentation, I'm going to hear like, "Oh, something could go wrong. You could look really stupid or you could totally forget what you're saying." It's hard to really intellectualize, okay, I don't have to listen to this. Is there anything more there just how to turn that around and be like, just shut up? The shut up usually doesn't work. Experiment with all of it. To me, one of my favorite responses is, "Oh, I see that you're really scared. Don't worry. I'm right here with you. I got you." Because part of the deal is that the voice in the head has assumed the position that it's like the boss, but it's really a little kid having a temper tantrum. If you listen to it, if you just dictated everything it said, it sounds like usually like a five-year-old having a temper tantrum, or it sounds like the way your mom used to chastise you or the way your dad used to chastise you or whatever, a teacher. It isn't, it's not logical, it's not thoughtful, it's typically not thoughtful, it's usually abusive. It's a lot of fear. It's one of my favorites, one of my favorite ways to respond. I've tried, I mean, gosh, dozens of ways, and there's a lot of neat effective ways. I particularly think it's really good to set up a series of experiments rather than just take the one that I have because the experimental mindset means that you can never really fail. Typically, somebody, like worse with the voice in the head, they fail and they go, "Ah, fuck it." Because we have this part of our brain called the habenula, and the habenula basically is the part of our brain that is trying to teach us not to fail over and over again. It's the thing that when you go on a diet or you go to work out and then you don't do it one day and you say, "Ah, fuck it, I messed up," and then you don't try anymore or you don't try for a couple of weeks or whatever, that's basically what's happening in that part of the brain. If you do it as an experimental thing, then you can't lose, you're just learning about yourself. You're learning about the voice in your head. The way I like thinking about that is people are like, "I understand the problem, but I don't have a solution." I'm always like, "If you understood the problem, there would be no question about the solution." If you fully understand the problem, you know the solution. All you have to do is really fully understand the voice in your head through a series of experiments and the whole thing goes away. The advice here is next time you're hearing something in your head that you don't think is going to be helpful to you is try to respond to it in a different way from what you've been doing.…

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