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Steven C Hayes on Wisdom, Love, and Acceptance (Episode 88)
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Want to become more Stoic? Join us and other Stoics this October: Stoicism Applied by Caleb Ontiveros and Michael
Caleb Ontiveros speaks with Dr. Steven C. Hayes, the originator of acceptance commitment therapy.
Acceptance commitment therapy deeply influenced our programs at Stoa, so this discussion was an honor.
In this wide ranging conversation, we cover how Steven thinks about “negative emotions” and cultivating wisdom in our technological age.
(00:58) Introduction
(04:51) What's Bad About Bad Emotions?
(16:31) Ancient Wisdom Traditions
(25:39) Anxiety & Meaning
(32:13) Living With Emotions
(34:50) Death & Love
(39:38) Getting Better With Technology
(45:55) Wisdom
(50:29) The Dangers of Choosing Virtue For Others
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Transcript
Introduction to Love and Loss
00:00:00
Speaker
Love and loss is one thing, not two. And when you go through a loss and the sadness and the pain of a loss, you have a chance to do so. Attend to these moments. Be present. Remember what you're up to and give it voice because this too shall pass.
Introduction of Dr. Stephen C. Hayes
00:00:24
Speaker
another wisdom tradition. Welcome to Stoa Conversations. My name is Caleb Contaveros, and today I have the honor of speaking with Dr. Stephen C. Hayes, an American clinical psychologist, originator of acceptance commitment therapy, and professor and author of numerous books, including the personally influential Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life, and more recently, A Liberated Mind.
Dr. Hayes' Personal Journey
00:00:52
Speaker
Thanks so much for joining.
00:00:55
Speaker
Glad to be here with you, Caleb. Looking forward to it. Well, let's start with a broad question. What's your story? Well, I'm an old man now by the arc of my professional story and maybe personal story. I think a lot of psychologists, I'm trying to understand, you know, why the humans around me, especially my mom and dad or
00:01:18
Speaker
having such a hard time being human and being able to be whole and free, happy. They were loving people, but they got in their own ways and they were fighting constantly. My dad was an alcoholic and mom. Very severe kind of obsessive worries that I found out him was only recently related back to some of her childhood in an interesting way. And what you'd probably call depression.
00:01:46
Speaker
And so pretty early on, I'm trying to figure out what the heck is going on here. And I got interested as a teenager and what produces peak experiences. I was interested in people like Maslow and so forth where basically what is a good life. And then college then through graduate school turned to trying to figure out what are the smallest set of processes that do the most good in the most areas.
00:02:15
Speaker
And I was on that journey when I developed a panic disorder and did a little three-year spin and then to that particular, hellacious, bottomless pit. There's a TEDx talk people can see where I kind of hit bottom and think I'm having a heart attack and I realized it's another deliciously awful form of a panic attack. And somehow or another turned in a different direction. Instead of trying to get out, I tried to get in.
Understanding Emotions
00:02:43
Speaker
Instead of running away, I
00:02:46
Speaker
said, okay, you got me. You know, the metaphor I use is a childhood dream of running from dinosaurs. And most of us have running or flying dreams, but I had that one of running away from the monster to dinosaur movies, I suppose. And then realizing in a kind of an awake dream.
00:03:04
Speaker
that I could turn and jump in the mouth of the dinosaur and then I'd wake up. And so I did that with some regularity and then the dinosaurs didn't come to me in my dreams. They didn't like this game. Well, at the bottom of my own struggle with anxiety, you might say, but really just on being able to be myself, I turned and jumped in the mouth of the dinosaur and kind of woke up.
00:03:27
Speaker
And then I've been on a 40-year journey to understand what that is, try to put it in people's lives, so to hack the human mind with a basic science effort called Relational Frame Theory. There's hundreds of studies on how the mind works basically, and now several thousand studies on how to bring that into processes that people can use that will lift up and empower their lives.
00:03:51
Speaker
But I'm not really interested in the grabby. I don't even said the name yet, acceptance and commitment therapy. I'm not really interested in labels and all of that. I'm more interested in empowering human journeys and whatever you call it.
Modern Behavioral Science
00:04:03
Speaker
You know, we were several thousand years of philosophy work and science work. I'm trying to figure that out. And the only thing I bring to the table that's a little different is
00:04:14
Speaker
modern behavioral science, trying to get it down to the smallest set of processes, things you can do in a sequence, a procession of parade processes that do the most good in the most areas. And I think we've done a pretty good job of that.
00:04:31
Speaker
I think arguably what's inside the work I've been doing and with hundreds, even thousands of colleagues is that smallest set. For what we know now, nothing lasts forever, but for what we know now, you can kind of say, yeah, that accounts for most of what we know about how change happens.
Evolution of the Human Mind
00:04:51
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. So maybe one question that I think is basic but sometimes seems ignored is fundamentally, you know, what is bad about so-called bad emotions?
00:05:05
Speaker
Well, the human mind, which is a pretty recent adaptation, there's all kinds of parts of you that are a thousand times older than the particular channel you and I are using right now of symbolic language, you know, speaking with meaning, listening with understanding.
00:05:22
Speaker
is a pretty recent thing. It might be 300,000 years old, could be 3 million years old, but it's in that range. And our brains are many, many, many, many times older than that. I mean, just being able to learn by experiences half a billion years old, being able to do something and then something happens and because of that, you learn something, whether you call it
00:05:45
Speaker
classical conditioning, opera conditioning, all these words. It's a half a billion years old. And how do you know that? Every creature since the Cambrian, which is 545 million years ago, do that, whether you're a spider, a snake, or a wolf. But what
Embracing Emotions
00:06:04
Speaker
we're doing is really recent.
00:06:07
Speaker
And this little tool of ours is claiming parts of our brain even that filter out our sensory motor information. We don't even literally don't know the world we live in because of the stories we tell about who we are and what we're up to and what we'll work in life. And one of the stories we tell very easily because this tool has been massively useful for problem solving is that what we really need to do in life is figure out
00:06:36
Speaker
how to solve the problem of feeling good all the time. Well, why? Because people prefer feeling good to feeling bad. They prefer it in a very superficial way, mind you. You know, if your mother died tomorrow, you'd probably have the wisdom to know that you need to slow down and walk inside the pain of the loss that you feel, which is a direct reflection of the love that you feel towards your mom. But this organ between our ears will pretty quickly tell you that
00:07:06
Speaker
This has gone on too long. It's time to eat tranquilizers. I mean, it will give you ridiculous solutions that aren't solutions, that are really harmful.
00:07:20
Speaker
good, bad emotion. Boy, if, if you have a group of six year olds in front of you and say, you can only say good or you're making me say bad, I'm going to say a word and you can only say good or bad and this go through the emotions. They'll sort of, anxiety is bad. Sadness is bad. Happy is good. Joy is good. And they'll mobilize even at that age. Well, what if we're talking about
00:07:45
Speaker
knowing what's happening in the climate. What if you just saw what happened to Syrian refugees? What if you witnessed the kind of economic disparities or cruelty that we visit in each other? You're supposed to actually try to mount a thing where feeling bad is the thing to do.
00:08:09
Speaker
How are you going to be able to feel it all if you do that? And how do you know whether or not you care about something when something is unjust or when something has happened that signals something important inside an emotion that your mind calls bad?
00:08:26
Speaker
Just think of all the positive enough. Think of all the important, like that slip. Think of all the important events that have happened in your life. If you just go through them, I bet you a third or more you'd label as bad and way, way, way important. The time you were cheated on, the time you were betrayed, the time you were lied to, the time you failed, the time you had an injury, the time there was a loss. I mean,
Misconceptions about Stoicism
00:08:54
Speaker
look around you.
00:08:57
Speaker
just look in your own life. So we got an organ between our ears that's constantly saying, you come this way.
00:09:06
Speaker
Or your experience tells you that's not wise. Yeah, but we often do it and then we're not, they're a little surprised at the result, but we shouldn't be happy. Happy joy joy is not a joyful path. That's not a meaningful path. It's not a human path. It's understandable. I don't want to, you know, sneer at or criticize how we end up there. It's human and
00:09:34
Speaker
It's time to grow up as a human species and do a better job of learning how to be whole and free. And that means all these emotions have a place. The question is, what are you going to do with them?
00:09:54
Speaker
I think one common misconception about stoicism is that it's ultimately about reducing negative feelings, that it's about becoming tranquil, maybe not happy, happy, joy, joy.
00:10:12
Speaker
at least free of many negative feelings. And I think this is probably similar for other philosophies and religions, but ultimately the focus is on something that the Stoics would call virtue or other Greeks would call eudaimonia.
00:10:28
Speaker
which I think would map on closer to a vision of, you know, what does it look like to live a good life? And what that looks like can't help avoid negative feelings,
Challenges in the Digital Age
00:10:40
Speaker
I think. I want to be hard pressed to come up with any accounts of the good life that was free from such things.
00:10:50
Speaker
Yeah, it's kind of, I mean, the dictionary will use words like repression and link it to stoicism. So it's pretty unkind, but it's kind of, and people who are, you know, actually delving into what's left of it. I mean, there are obviously some of the earlier phases are only referred to, we really don't have the original writings, but
00:11:13
Speaker
you know, people who study, it's just horrifically offended by how ridiculous the modern culture treats that ancient tradition. But it's a reflection of everything I'm talking about, you know, that in order to understand what's being said there, you have to tell all these people are just going to
00:11:35
Speaker
you know, repressed so that they don't care about, so that they don't have, you know, like being numb, you know, so they do, I don't care. And that's some sort of vision of...
00:11:47
Speaker
a positive life, it's ridiculous. You know, I think if you are in touch with a values-based journey, a journey in which meaning and purpose is central and it's intrinsic to your behavior, to what you do, I don't mean overt behavior, I mean all the things you do, and that your guide is
00:12:11
Speaker
trying to put chosen purposes into your life's moments, which is part of the work that I do. If you're on a journey like that, you better figure out a way to be more open to the range of emotions you're going to experience because
00:12:33
Speaker
we hurt where we care. And so, yeah, some degree of tolerance of distress, sometimes people say I don't really like that term either, but it's the attempt of the kind of modern Western mind even grasp what's being taught. I would prefer to say a significant degree of openness without avoidance or attachment to the ebbs and flows of
00:13:02
Speaker
evaluated sensations, emotions, and thoughts in the service of a step-by-step journey that has a direction to it towards a life that's meaningful by choice.
00:13:20
Speaker
I think that's pretty close to a Stoic
Wisdom in Modern Culture
00:13:23
Speaker
vision as I understand it. I haven't really done the kind of reading that would allow me to even delve into that in a sophisticated way. But I do think that in the modern world where you're constantly exposed to pain,
00:13:26
Speaker
And
00:13:43
Speaker
comparisons towards others and judgment, which is kind of the toxic triad in terms of what knocks people off balance. A lot of evidence, those three are pretty powerful set of how you get knocked off balance where the camera, the computer in your pocket, you call your phone, the screens that we're looking at give us constant exposure to those three things.
00:14:13
Speaker
pain judgment in comparison. So we should be surprised that our young people are stumbling, that our suicide rates are rising. It isn't just that they're saying that they're unhappy, they're actually killing themselves. So you can't just say, oh, we've learned, we're a nation of wimps, we just learned to complain.
00:14:31
Speaker
It's not that. Young people aren't being given good guidance in the spiritual and religious traditions and philosophic traditions that used to serve them. A lot of those have been hollowed out and were left with commercial culture that is only too happy to use your reaction to pain, judgment, and comparison to buy a product. Or it is, you know, pick where you put your eyeballs in front of screens because they'll make money off that.
00:15:02
Speaker
Meanwhile, it's harder to be human and it's harder to come together in cooperation and build a world that's going to be there to support your children's children's children in a way that would be sane and healthy. So something needs to happen. And I put my bet on humanity. I think we're in the process right now of pushing the reset.
00:15:30
Speaker
And trying to find another way, if it's not going to be done through our spiritual or religious traditions, well, it's better be done some other way where we learn how to have some of these skills that the ancient philosophers were talking about.
00:15:44
Speaker
And they said, there's nothing new under the sun and ended level of philosophy. That's probably pretty much true. And at the level of tools and behavioral science support and physical science support is definitely not true. We have polls that in both directions from artificial intelligence or, you know, communication technology or medical technology. And I think now our psychological technology.
00:16:12
Speaker
So I would like to see that reset button pushed. I have some ideas about where it needs to go. I think I have some ideas, the colleagues I work with, about how we got into this mess. And some of the ancient wisdom traditions have a lot to say about how we got
00:16:31
Speaker
What comes to mind initially when you think about ancient wisdom traditions applying today? There's always that divorce between the world in which those traditions developed in our technological reality. What sorts of ideas or practices are most promising initially, or do you want to mention here?
00:16:57
Speaker
Well, let's start with that word wisdom. It's kind of startling how infrequently you're going to run into it just in the modern world and how central a topic it was in the ancient world.
00:17:12
Speaker
You know, the superficial things that we chase, like power or money or fame or being seen to be attractive, et cetera, just in commercial culture and in kind of the modern culture.
00:17:29
Speaker
The word wisdom is nowhere to be found.
Philosophy as a Pathway
00:17:34
Speaker
And, you know, I have kids that range from 53 to 18. And the four adults that I've raised, including the one who still lives in my house, you know.
00:17:46
Speaker
all that would go through periods in their childhood where they would point to things that really looked cool to them. And sometimes what really looked cool would go like, oh my God, Stevie, my youngest, was really impressed that YouTubers could in three months go from obscurity to making millions of dollars and everybody's following every word they say.
00:18:10
Speaker
Wisdom's probably not in there. They're pretty remarkable if it was. I'm not meaning to be critical. Of course, those things are cool and they afford opportunities that are wonderful actually because the slog on through a hierarchy, you know, you only get to be a blacksmith after you have four years as an apprentice, you know, all of that has fallen away and how we got a generation really expect to be famous tomorrow or at least promoted
00:18:40
Speaker
So I think you take a concept like eudaimonia, that happiness is not just a smiley face button, but it's a really sense of connection, a deep sense of connection to your inner chosen purpose. The capacity for choice, recognizing that the purpose isn't just a list. Of course, we had scriptural traditions that would
00:19:07
Speaker
give you a list, but also in those scriptural traditions, every single one, you had to then choose that or not. There's hardly anywhere it was visited upon you. We did have wars around the infidels or whatever, but
00:19:26
Speaker
And I picked one infidel so it probably gets you thinking about the Islamic word, but you read the Holy Quran, and boy, is it a gentle version of the Abrahamic religions. In most of its pages, it really doesn't have God coming in and saying, who told you you're naked? Have you read it from the truth? It says, ah, dang, I'm going to have to send you back to shoot. You need more development. These ancient spiritual religious traditions and philosophical traditions
00:19:55
Speaker
focused on wisdom and how to acquire it. And you see very, very little support for what the modern world is actively supporting. That appearance, or money, or fame, is a route to happiness, or even an honorable, worthy life. I mean, happiness alone already starts sounding a little bit too smiley.
00:20:27
Speaker
So I would like outside, we can't do it now inside religion only.
Challenges in Modern Education
00:20:34
Speaker
It's fine if somebody's doing it there and I want to support those institutions to the degree to which they're doing positive things for the world. But if you just look at where the developing world is going,
00:20:48
Speaker
there's no indications of a developed world basically stopping and going to church and so forth where it's come back. It doesn't come back, goes away and stays away so far as we know. And so if you just look at what is the fastest religious group in the US of A, it's none of the above.
00:21:10
Speaker
Many of those are atheists, but many are not. Many, many, many are not. But their sense of religion is connected more to their personal sense of spirituality. Sometimes I'm guided by philosophy. And I do think we need to examine our assumptions. I think what philosophy allows you to do is examine your assumptions and to make them more coherent and to take responsibility for them and to own them.
00:21:39
Speaker
And that is an adult thing to do, a wise thing to do. If you want to live a life that's coherent, it makes sense to look at, where do I stand? What do I assume? What am I up to? Where am I headed? And take responsibility for that. And if you're not going to do it in the pews of a church role, then time's up. Do it another way. And I think the world has to support that. That has to.
00:22:08
Speaker
We will pay the cost if we don't. Yeah, I think so. You go to the colleges and they get squeezed by the modern idea, especially in the US of A, where 15% of the budget is paid for by the taxpayers and the rest are up to the professors to somehow grab a grants or business or something, this crazy thing where we no longer even want to pay to educate our children.
00:22:32
Speaker
And when they get in real trouble, I came from the West Virginia University. I got my PhD there. I didn't grow up there, grew up in Southern California, but the president there got, I'm Dr. G, G-E-E, just got some national publicity. He had been president, left, came back later because he's slashing and cutting and because why? Because the state won't pay for it. And what's being caught? Well, some things like foreign languages and stuff like that.
00:23:02
Speaker
Maybe we don't need the Department of Philosophy. Hey, dude, it's called a PhD for a reason.
Anxiety and Meaning in Life
00:23:10
Speaker
What is that pH about? You think it's about artificial intelligence? No. So it is kind of shocking, I think, isn't it?
00:23:27
Speaker
Then in the modern world, I just went through it in 2008 and my own university. I've just retired from a university in Nevada, Reno, which is a 150 year old institution with a land grant institution, punch PhD programs. And I've worked really hard to help build them. It's a really bad downturn. And what comes on the chopping block? Department of philosophy. Oh my God, really?
00:23:55
Speaker
Thankfully, that didn't happen. It did take a hit. But I'm just saying, we better do something that we better be wiser about how we
00:24:05
Speaker
Create a wise culture and that would be great if that's more central to our cultural conversation. Practice Stoicism with Stoa. Stoa combines the ancient philosophy of Stoicism with meditation in a practical meditation app. It includes hundreds of hours of exercises, lessons, and conversations to help you live a happier life. Find it available for a free download in the Play Store and App Store.
00:24:31
Speaker
Right, right, yeah. It does seem like philosophy, humanities broadly are one of the first to go on these chopping blocks. And that among people like the people looking at your podcast or the people reading, I see a worldwide yearning for people finding in their own path
00:24:55
Speaker
meaning and purpose and answering these really basic questions like, what do I do with my emotions and thoughts? Given that I'm carrying all kinds of ones that are difficult or that are not admirable. I mean, you got prejudice thoughts in your head. You got racist jokes in your head. Come on. And that there's no delete button in the nervous system. They don't leave. Once they go in, they just hang out there for the rest of your life. They show up in your dreams and they move things around. You can be quiet about them. That doesn't mean you've done anything.
00:25:25
Speaker
admiral with him. So we'd better figure out how to deal with our own histories, emotions, thoughts, in a way that empowers a journey that's worthy of a human life.
Emotions as Guides
00:25:40
Speaker
When we've surveyed listeners or people who use stoa, what problem they're currently working through. The top rated one is nearly always anxiety. But the second top rated one close behind is a lack of meaning or a sense that.
00:26:00
Speaker
one doesn't have a clear narrative for one's life, which I think philosophies like Stoicism provide in the past, religions provided a clear sense of order and purpose, ones that allowed for choice, of course. But today it does seem like we live in a much more free-floating world behind that.
00:26:28
Speaker
And if you take, let's take anxiety as a panic disorder person in recovery, I can easily go there. And a lot of the work done, I mean, the work I've done that goes everywhere, but I know anxiety is an important place that's gone.
00:26:46
Speaker
I don't know anybody who's anxious about anything where inside what you're anxious about is something that you care about. I totally can't think of any exceptions. And so in an important sense, anxiety is a little indication that something's at stake.
00:27:11
Speaker
And sometimes it's an indication that you have some more work to do about how to get with that. Sometimes it's just an indication that you're headed even in the right direction. I mean, if you had an opportunity, just suddenly you're going to go on Oprah. I guess Oprah's no longer. But, you know, Oprah reached out and said, Caleb, I really want you to talk about the stoop podcast you're doing.
00:27:36
Speaker
You know, maybe you're somebody who doesn't react at all, but my guess is you're probably feeling a little anxious about that. I would get nervous. Yeah, I get nervous walking on the stage, I think. Yeah. And why wouldn't you? Of course you would. That's part of that journey. This is something of importance.
00:27:56
Speaker
in all kinds of ways. And of course, the mind may try to turn it into an importance about how much applause do you get or how famous you are or whatever. But underneath that is something that you're here to do, something you care about. Anything where you really are deeply connected with that, turn it over on the other side. You'll find anxiety. You'll find sadness. You'll find
00:28:23
Speaker
Lots of emotions you'll label as bad. And the reverse is true. You know, I'm a person who really had a hard time with social things and giving talks and things like that. So, I mean, my first panic attack was in a department of psychology meeting where I tell the story, you know, I was watching full professors fight in a way that only wild animals and full professors are capable of. And I just wanted to tell them to stop.
00:28:50
Speaker
And by the time they turned to me, all I could do is open and close my mouth. That's all I could do. And I felt completely humiliated, you know. And I sort of slunk out of the room. They eventually just got tired and were watching my mouth open and close and went back to fighting. And I had a history, which I discovered later on, of the fighting that went on in my home and things like that. But it was a little arrow pointed at something.
00:29:21
Speaker
In my mind, it was humiliating and shameful. But actually, it was right inside something that was deeply important to me of how can we work together in ways and deal with conflict that isn't filled with anger and aggression and dangerous things.
00:29:49
Speaker
that was about creating supporting, loving, trusting relationships in which belonging and cooperation are central. Well, it shows up as anxiety. I mean, what does your mind tell you to do? My mind tells you to run and hide. So what do you then start doing? Well, let's see, maybe I'll skip some department meetings. I won't.
00:30:10
Speaker
even be in any kind of meetings. Maybe I won't give talks anymore. Maybe I'll just stay in my house. Maybe I won't travel. Maybe I won't do phone calls. And I did all those stupid things. So the exact thing that you want to do, which is to help participate and create loving, supportive, cooperative, meaningful groups, in my case.
00:30:35
Speaker
That would, for example, step up to the challenges of domestic violence in my case. Your mind ends up telling you the way you'll solve that pain is that you won't give yourself an opportunity to have purpose in the areas where you're feeling so-called negative emotions.
00:30:56
Speaker
It'd be like somebody yearning a really thirsty, you know, getting a glass of water and then dropping it and the solution was, well, you know, no more liquids for me. The mind is that stupid. They will say when you're betrayed, you can never have intimate, loving relationships.
Wisdom from Love and Loss
00:31:14
Speaker
It'll tell you when you fail, you can never try to succeed again.
00:31:20
Speaker
It'll tell you when something really horrific happens in life, it's time to leave the planet by your own hand. I mean, it'll go all the way up to that. Well, let's learn from that and now use our emotions in a different way. Open up to our emotions, not in the sense of wallowing, but in a sense of noticing, observing, describing, and then flipping it over and say, what does that say about
00:31:50
Speaker
the values-based patterns I want to put in my life. I'm focused there. That would be a pretty useful thing to do with difficult emotions. Turns out when you do that, it's not that they go away, but they then become part of a journey and they're less of a focus and they're less automatically pushing you around. Choice can happen.
00:32:14
Speaker
Right. I suppose that one way the Stoics talked about that would be interesting to get your response on is when it comes to
00:32:24
Speaker
feelings of anxiety, what we might call feelings of anxiety, those are turned into positive emotions that have to do with caution, prudence. If you want to have the, you know, if you wanted to completely remove those feelings, that would result in imprudent action, usually recklessness.
00:32:45
Speaker
As you say, these feelings are telling us something about our social world, about our health, about the decisions we're making and purely purging them. It's not, so you could say, the virtuous thing to do, but rather learning how to use these feelings, these impressions in a good way to make prudent decisions or whatever other path you're aiming to promote.
00:33:13
Speaker
Yeah, human emotion is kind of a rich soup. It's a complex thing. It includes social communication, social role. It includes your history. It includes intentionality and it includes cognition. It includes a valence that is based on who you take yourself to be, what kind of journey you're on. If you take anxiety, for example, and
00:33:41
Speaker
Inhale it, embrace it and turn it into a positive journey. It isn't so much that it becomes a positive emotion. Well, kind of. It almost changes what the emotion is because the emotion is no, I mean, you can go from anxiety to excitement really, really easily. Really easy. I mean, you know, it's like take the fear of a person who's lost.
00:34:07
Speaker
And I'll take the excitement of an adventurer who got lost on purpose. You know, it's a very subtle difference. And, you know, even physiologically.
00:34:19
Speaker
I mean, there's quarrels about this. And so people say, no, it was really a big five. And you can tell by the corrugator EMG, just like Darwin said. My reading of all that, having looked at it and dived into it, no, I don't think that's true. I don't think there are hard categories of emotion. And human emotion includes these things so much. Purpose, sense of self, evaluation, and how you use it.
00:34:50
Speaker
So there's kind of a transformational event when you take what has been stopping you emotionally, and you take it on board and turn it in the direction of what moves you towards what you yearn for. It becomes something that functions positively. That doesn't mean that you like it necessarily, or there's a big smile there.
00:35:19
Speaker
I'll give you an example. I'm looking at the clock where I can see the dates just to see if I can remember exactly. I think it was nine months ago that I got a call. My brother had gone into the hospital with a tummy ache and had taken a turn. I was coming back from the eastern part of the United States. My wife and I, when we landed, I blasted down there just in time to see him wheeled out of an operator.
00:35:49
Speaker
out of or even built into an operation to remove a blockage in his colon. And by the end of that night, he was gone. You know, so my bro who, you know, ran a half marathon when he was 75. I mean, the guy died at 77. He's a monster, you know, just in persistence and his willful ability to
00:36:19
Speaker
Keep moving. I think three months before he died, turned out he had a massively metastasized cancer in his colon. He brought a 250 mile back ride through Italy, you know, just any, the cancer was already there. And he was huffing and puffing a little bit and saying, I feel a little weak. You know, a couple of months away from being dead, dude. And probably even if he was aware of it, he wouldn't survive. But here's the point of that story.
00:36:50
Speaker
I find myself over and over again over the last several months now telling people that I've worked with for years and years before I hang up or before those Zoom call ends that I love them.
00:37:08
Speaker
That's not new, but it's new out of my mouth. It's not like I'm stingy about it, but you know, you don't normally say to your colleagues, love you, dude. Really? Oh, that's awesome. Love you. No, you don't, but you do love. Just think about how many loving relationships are in your life with people who are not necessarily your spouse or your children or things like that. You're not necessarily talking to your family. Oh, love and loss is one thing, not two.
00:37:38
Speaker
And when you go through a loss and the sadness and the pain of a loss, you have a chance to do so. And I'm sorry if it's a self-focused example or a prideful example. I'm suspicious of some stories serving that function. But I can feel in these Zoom conversations about business matters and articles we're writing, the impermanence of life,
00:38:05
Speaker
and the importance of these people to my life journey. And I want to give voice to that. So would that mean that the pain and sadness of seeing my brother die unexpectedly, of having to disappear in less than a 24-hour period from my life?
00:38:26
Speaker
that I resolve this sadness, or that, I don't know, it's still sad, I still cry, I still bring tears to my eyes, but it has a different, it has a deeper meaning that means something like, attend to these moments, be present, remember what you're up to, and give it voice, because this too shall pass.
00:38:57
Speaker
another wisdom tradition. So I think that's everywhere. And I can't think of a negative emotion and a real human situation where such a thing has occurred. I literally can't think of where if you flip it over, you don't find.
Behavioral Science and Wisdom
00:39:14
Speaker
positive, potentially positive messages and values in the lives of those who are experiencing it. So tricky, because the mind doesn't want to go there. It doesn't easily fit the categories. But I think our wisdom traditions, if it was selfless traditions, can really help us go there. And from what I know of stoicism, I think it's on that journey.
00:39:38
Speaker
I think that's right. One of my favorite lines from Marcus Aurelius is that the universe is transformation, life is opinion, and that I think captures that sense of impermanence
00:39:55
Speaker
change while focusing on what the Stoics would call judgment, making good decisions with whatever circumstances, whatever questions life presents you with, and not thinking of life so much as a problem to be solved or
00:40:16
Speaker
something where we're trying to maximize how good it feels, but as something that is dealt with in terms of questions about who do you want to be and those questions have some amount of urgency to them, I suppose, given our temporal nature.
00:40:41
Speaker
Yeah, I resonate to that. And, you know, how do we put these things into our lives and the lives of others? Well, if you want to put them lives of others, start with yourself. That's probably a good idea. But also, I think we can... So speaking now with my science hat on.
00:41:00
Speaker
I think there is a role for behavioral science that really takes this seriously and that looks at these individual life trajectories in a way that allows us to illuminate what moves people forward and brings people down.
00:41:14
Speaker
we can do something a lot wiser than just shoving people in normative categories and saying, you have this disorder, you have that, or you're the smart one, you're the dumb one, now please. Most of that's based on statistical models and tools that really do not tell you what a life trajectory will be.
00:41:35
Speaker
So in the modern world, we can actually do that. I mean, we can, I got my little Apple watch and my iPhone and it'll tell me how many steps I took today. And it'll tell me, you know, what my heart rate was. And, you know, why couldn't we have our little wisdom monitor? I mean, seriously, maybe I'm a little bit cartoonish to say that, but I think you could, if you were just, were willing to look at
00:42:04
Speaker
you know, whether or not you're moving towards or away from the things that you most deeply value.
00:42:09
Speaker
and find ways to sort of channel some of the things that are there in your emotional and cognitive life, the memories you have, the sensations, your experience that would foster making wise choices. And we make wise, you know, this, I just saw a study that people actually do make wiser health choices when they're wearing their little watch, you know, health related watches, whether it's Apple watch or something else. And they look at the,
00:42:36
Speaker
I don't know. I think we may be able to figure out, and I've been working on this myself, probably one reason I'm mentioning it. We released an app that I worked on for three years here about two months ago, and then an app that I've been working on for about two years that will be part of it. I hope we throw this with by Friday. And so I'm on a journey of trying to figure out a way to give people tools that
00:43:03
Speaker
Maybe we'll support wiser journeys according to their own choices as to what's wise.
Scientists in Moral Discussions
00:43:13
Speaker
I don't want behavioral science telling people one thing I worry about with the interest in virtues and positive psychology. I don't want to see the list of virtues being coming out of scientist's mouth. Nobody nominated us to be some great, wise leader.
00:43:32
Speaker
As I've known a lot of these folks, I don't view them as particularly wise. I mean, I won't name names, but I can stand in front of a mirror and name a name.
00:43:43
Speaker
look at my own self and say, you know, I mean, the rates of divorce are higher among psychologists and psychiatrists than almost any professional group. You just go down the list, suicide, et cetera, you just go down the list. So who are we? Yeah, but who are we to bring science-based tools into people's lives? And that is the we. Yeah, we should be doing that. And so I kind of have the hope
00:44:11
Speaker
that we can square the circle and bring some of our deeper philosophical traditions into the modern world in a way that's different. And we've been doing wild-ass things like applying artificial intelligence to your life's moments. If you just are willing to say two or three times a day what's going on, a month later we can model it and say, just you, this is what lifted you up, this is what pushed you down.
00:44:38
Speaker
not comparing to somebody else, not saying, you know, you're the 99th percentile or your second percentile. Not that that nonsense doesn't tell you what to do. What lifts you up and takes, closes you down, does. And ironically, everybody knows that because you've lived it, but the organ between your ears doesn't. So it's constantly taking your actual experience and saying, well, really, you need to do this. And it's not what you've been doing that lifted you up.
00:45:08
Speaker
It's not what you've been doing. That's pushing you down. So you can't just trust, you know, automatic problem solving mode of mind to tell you what to do. I think you really have to look deeper. What are your life's moments over time tell you? And there, maybe technology could actually help. Maybe we could do a better job.
00:45:33
Speaker
not by all going back to church or all reading maybe even ancient philosophers, but really looking as they did in the details of your life as it's lived and taking responsibility for what
00:45:51
Speaker
life choices you're making in the context of knowing what. How do you think about the word wisdom and defining it or picking out what's most important to accounting for why someone is or is not wise?
Nature of Values and Responsibility
00:46:06
Speaker
Well, what I just said actually would be a pretty good kind of operational definition of regularly choosing in the steps you take
00:46:16
Speaker
over the next several moments of now, or the extended now that you're living in, however long that episode is. You know, sometimes you're making choices that have many months of an extension, and of course, in a life trajectory, many years.
00:46:33
Speaker
sometimes really just in a matter of minutes, you know, whether or not you do those dishes or call that friend or clean up that mess that you created by your emotional outburst or whatever it is. I think regularly choosing to engage in sequences of behavior in the now that you live in that lift
00:47:03
Speaker
up your life so that values-based habits become more central to your life's moments and choices based on temporary thoughts, feelings, memories, bodily sensations that are not
00:47:20
Speaker
handled with regard to the values that you want to reflect and stand and pursue in your life. It's a pretty good definition of wisdom. I mean, it's a regular pattern of making the choices that move you towards a values-based life as the definition of what lifts you out. I mean, people are really living a values-based life where the values are owned
00:47:45
Speaker
you know, they're embraced from the inside out. I'm not talking about the wagging finger of your mama telling you have to be like this or that. You know, it's fine that values are social, it's fine, but you have to take responsibility. This is what I'm up to. These are the qualities of being and doing that I want to put in my life.
00:48:06
Speaker
Building habits around it by the choices that you make puts you on a wise journey. And that includes the others around you. We're the social primates. It isn't just you in isolation. It's you in context of your community, your family, your neighborhood, your nation, the world. This way of thinking doesn't stay small. It goes big quickly.
00:48:33
Speaker
in the sense of a whole world ethic. If anyone is suffering anywhere, we're all diminished. That kind of part of it is easily part of this more transformational, expansive kind of view of your capacity to live a life that's whole, free and purposeful.
00:48:54
Speaker
by the choices that you make. How does that land with you? Does that sound like what you would mean by wisdom? That seems pretty close. I suppose I think of broadly knowing what is good and being able to apply that knowledge. I think that
00:49:16
Speaker
there may be some differences, as we mentioned very briefly early on before we started recording around our pictures of whether values are chosen or discovered. There might be some differences there, I'm not sure. But I think that otherwise I think we're in broad agreement.
00:49:38
Speaker
Yeah, I think there may not be a distinction there. It's kind of hard to know. Chosen sort of sounds whimsical, you know, like it's just up to me. Well, I mean, I can read a book that tells me there's less solid matter in that wall than there is space and choose to run through it. And my bloody nose will politely inform me that that was not my choice to make.
00:50:04
Speaker
The world is such that, I mean, the suchness of the world without turning into a big mechanistic model. Yeah, there may be more empty space there, but that wall is a solid wall. In the same way, I could choose that value is making a lot of money. Well, hey, that's not a value. That's just a goal. I mean, you got to define terms a little bit. And by value, you know, I mean the intrinsic qualities of being and doing.
00:50:33
Speaker
They're intrinsic, so they're not an outcome of behavior as much as they are the qualities of behavior. They're like adverbs or adjectives, lovingly, genuinely, authentically, or honestly. They often have a Lee on them. Or if they don't have a Lee, then at least they're clearly an adjective. And the suchness of the world, I think, is we can rely on. If you said, I just want to
00:51:02
Speaker
Never be bothered by people and be a hermit and to hell with everybody else. Okay, Mr. Social Primate, who dumped endorphins when your mama looked at your eyes when you were 24 hours old. Exactly how's that going to work for you in terms of the kind of creature that you are? What's going to happen when you peek outside your cave and you see people are starving?
00:51:30
Speaker
what's going to happen. I'm not saying in an easy way, oh, that's stupid. No, I don't know. Who am I to say? But I would say, keep your eyes wide. In a tradition, you can arise that answers, you can make the list of virtues, for example.
00:51:52
Speaker
And that's fine. I understand why people go there. Certainly most religious traditions have gone there and most of our moral philosophies have gone there. But I'm a behavioral scientist and every time scientists have been the ones that make the list, creepy things happen. I mean, it ain't by accident that all of a sudden the virtues are the ones that your particular cultural and economic group and body, you know,
00:52:20
Speaker
I mean, Galton, who started all this stuff with the Belkers and where he fought, and his first big grandson of Erasmus Darwin, his first famous book was called A Reditary Genius, just happened to arrive at the answer that the geniuses were white UK people, upper class. Oh, how did that happen?
00:52:43
Speaker
And who were the ones to be, well, my goodness, black and brown people you treated as not humans at all, but Jews, wow, just hammered by him and by all the families that started the war.
00:52:58
Speaker
The field called eugenics and all these things that were living inside these bell curves and standard deviation. Oh, my son's ungifted and talented. Yeah, Galton's chuckling because you're just fulfilling his eugenic dreams. The IQ tests on which that was based, the achievement tests on which that was based, the statistics on which that was based was laid out 150 years ago by a racist, classist effort to sort people and those who had children and those who don't.
00:53:26
Speaker
I don't like it when behavioral scientists are given the role of coming up with the answer of what's virtue, because what they end up saying is, be like me. And sometimes I don't want to be like you, Galton.
Concluding Thoughts on ACT
00:53:39
Speaker
I'm not proud of the role that we've had in the Holocaust and the we here as psychology.
00:53:46
Speaker
Two-thirds of American presidents, the presidency of American psychological society from 1892 to 1947 were Genesis. Hardly anyone knows it. I'm not proud of that. I'm ashamed of it. And that our research allowed Virginia to write the laws that then Hitler just took and put into Germany as the legal justification. The US of A and its psychology tradition created the Holocaust. That's a little rant that I want to come back to this point.
00:54:16
Speaker
Philosophers, certainly people who are moral philosophers and religious people, can be given by the audiences who ascribe to them the right to say what the virtues are, and there is a suchness to the world, there is. But maybe not for everywhere, Mahananda, maybe not for everywhere, and I'd rather be humble and empower human choice that's informed
00:54:47
Speaker
by the full set of skills, I'll say the word skills, that we know you need in order to make moral choices. Like you do need some degree of knowing what to do with emotions, knowing what to do with history, knowing what to do with your body, knowing what to do with sensations, knowing what, you know, if you just put people in and say, hey, you know, pick what you're about, I mean, for goodness sakes, they'll say, you know, I'm about,
00:55:14
Speaker
you know, seeing how many people I can screw before I die. I mean, they'll say things that are incredibly stupid and try to live that life. So yeah, I don't know. We'd have to have a deeper conversation about that and how to guide without dictating, how to support without determining.
00:55:39
Speaker
especially the scientists, especially the ones who do have the privilege of place and role in society that could easily turn into another version of Galton's Be Like Me solution. Right. Yeah. It's a long conversation, but I think it's absolutely right that many
00:55:59
Speaker
in science are performing and have performed a role of moral entrepreneurship in a way that is often hidden given their professional mantle. And it's maybe even one you need to be more mindful of now given that other moral authorities have become less popular, like the religious authorities, of course.
00:56:23
Speaker
The cool thing about the modern world is that people can be exposed to things like your podcast, make some choices themselves, and they can try to apply these things to their own life in the way that allows them to be part of that conversation and make those choices. Even if you don't end up saying choice is the key, at least that part was your choice. You walked a journey that ended up in a different place. Okay, great. Take responsibility for that and keep your eyes wide.
00:56:52
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Well, I should ask, is there anything else you'd like to add or point to people to as a, as we wrap up? Well, if there's anything I've said that sounds interesting or reviews, you can, you can follow me. Let's go to the website that by my name, stevensiehays.com. But also if there's anything in here that you think is of interest, we haven't talked that much about it, but
00:57:17
Speaker
The ACK work is based on what's called psychological flexibility. You can easily Google it. You can find a lot of free resources and major, major kind of institutions for back to authority, but you know, the world health organizations of the world and so forth.
00:57:34
Speaker
My work is right now in Ukraine because WHO had several large randomized trials and showed that it was very helpful with victims of war with the self-submuse refugees in Uganda or the Syrian refugees in Turkey and so forth. So, and you can go to the WHO website and doing what matters in times of stress, the single most frequently downloaded book on all of the WHO website, it's an Excel help book.
00:58:00
Speaker
And with little cartoons there and so I'm just saying if anything I've said is of interest to you You can pursue this without any spending of money whatsoever other than you're gonna need a machine to search the internet and You can pursue it and see whether or not it fits with or empowers or uplifts or supports the particular journey that you're on Excellent. Well, thanks so much for coming on. It's it's been an honor
00:58:30
Speaker
Thank you for the opportunity.