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Debugging Your Brain

Casey Watts • February 02, 2021 • online • Talk

In the video titled "Debugging Your Brain," speaker Casey Watts discusses how to identify and address the mental distortions and frustrations that affect our thinking and emotional states. Drawing from his book and his diverse background in tech and neurobiology, Watts explores various psychological frameworks and hands-on techniques designed to help individuals better understand and manage their mental processes. The video outlines the following key points:

  • Introduction to the Concept: The human brain can produce cognitive distortions leading to anxiety and frustration, which can spiral negatively. By practicing different techniques, individuals can 'debug' their thoughts and reactions.

  • Key Techniques and Models:

    • Introspection: Recognizing automatic thoughts and emotional responses as the first step towards understanding one's mental state.
    • Identifying Inputs: Analyzing the inputs affecting emotional responses, including automatic thoughts, feelings, external stimuli, and bodily states.
    • Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT): Explaining how CBT can help treat various mental illnesses by changing thought patterns and behaviors.
    • Processing Techniques: Six methods were introduced, including expanding emotional vocabulary, talking to a friend, journaling, reading fiction, and practicing mindfulness meditation to process experiences effectively.
    • Validation: The importance of recognizing and validating others’ feelings to reinforce understanding and connection.
    • Cognitive Restructuring: Correcting cognitive distortions by replacing negative thoughts with more constructive ones, illustrating the process using personal anecdotes.

  • Illustrative Examples: Watts shares relatable experiences such as feeling overwhelmed before a presentation, arguments at work, or parenting struggles, and demonstrates how these moments can lead to downward spirals of thought and emotion, which can be redirected using the techniques discussed.

  • Conclusion and Takeaways: The primary message emphasizes the accessibility and importance of these mental frameworks for everyone. By utilizing these techniques, individuals can improve their emotional literacy and resilience, thereby enhancing their overall mental health. Watts encourages viewers to explore the offered resources, including his book and various apps for further assistance in their mental health journeys.

Debugging Your Brain
Casey Watts • February 02, 2021 • online • Talk

Video synopsis:
The human brain is buggy. Sometimes your mind distorts reality, gets frustrated with shortcomings, and spirals out of control. With practice, you can debug your brain. Catch those distortions of reality, transform those frustrations into insight, and short-circuit those downward spirals.

In this workshop you will get a chance to practice each core idea from Casey’s book [Debugging Your Brain](https://www.debuggingyourbrain.com): Modeling The Brain, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Introspection, Identifying Inputs, Experience Processing, Experience Validation, and Cognitive Restructuring.

Debugging Your Brain is a clear applied psychology book and a concise self-help book, available in all three formats: printed book, eBook and audiobook: [debuggingyourbrain.com](https://www.debuggingyourbrain.com)

Ruby Galaxy v0.1

00:00:03.520 hi i'm casey welcome to my talk debugging your brain
00:00:10.639 uh before we jump into the topic i want to introduce myself i live in dc this is dupont circle where
00:00:18.080 i sometimes host bubble parties when we're not in a pandemic i miss it i can play an instrument in
00:00:25.039 every color at least i can play bad romance by lady gaga that's my benchmark for myself i can see me
00:00:32.399 dancing there at the bottom i dressed up as a pirate playing bass drum this is very me
00:00:39.680 i love to teach there's me at the top teaching intro to programming at yale university from
00:00:45.120 a long time ago now and on the bottom you see me at a meet up in dc teaching electron
00:00:52.719 i may assign homework during this as my teacherisms might show
00:00:58.800 i've worked in tech for 10 years including recently at uscis working on immigration and at heroku
00:01:08.720 i've been a product manager an engineering manager an engineer i've worked in a whole bunch of sectors
00:01:13.760 too i studied neurobiology at yale
00:01:20.479 university and i'm co-author in a few papers they're not related to today's talk in
00:01:25.680 particular but i thought you might be interested in a little taste of the science language you have to use in this
00:01:31.600 field i wrote a book about this talk actually
00:01:38.320 i've been giving this talk for five years different forms of it always getting better and then i finally sat down and
00:01:43.600 turned it into a book so that i could reach more people with the content the techniques that i want to share
00:01:50.960 lately i'm working on turning that book into a board game because it's very practical and hands-on all the
00:01:56.560 techniques so i'm working on a mental framework of how to process your experiences
00:02:01.840 with cards and tokens
00:02:06.960 all right we'll do a quick little intro section before i give you the road map of the talk anxiety versus excitement if you've ever
00:02:14.319 given a presentation like this in public you probably feel one of the other uh
00:02:22.319 they're physiologically similar you could be anxious or excited and have the same set of physiological experiences
00:02:31.200 physiological arousal is a term for a bunch of the overlap including increased heart rate which i
00:02:36.720 probably have now whether i'm anxious or excited dilated pupils talking fast which takes a lot of
00:02:43.280 practice not to do when giving presentations like this i'm definitely inclined to talk fast and i'm
00:02:48.319 trying not to whether it's excitement or anxiety is
00:02:55.200 depends a lot on which outcome is expected if you expect a bad outcome you'll
00:03:01.519 probably feel anxious but if you expect a good outcome you might feel excited
00:03:08.400 often we don't know whether the outcome is going to be good or bad there's a big uncertain trunk in the middle and by default
00:03:14.239 humans tend to be anxious if you're uncertain about the outcome we tend to focus on what could go wrong
00:03:20.640 and usually most possible outcomes uh we don't know if we're uncertain how it's going to turn out we just
00:03:26.159 don't know unless we've done the same thing over and over so most people presenting feel much more
00:03:31.760 anxious than excited at least the first times but with this trick reframing
00:03:39.680 you could be more excited so instead of focusing on what could go wrong like i could say something
00:03:46.319 wrong i could stumble over my speech and waste seconds of my presentation time
00:03:51.519 i could focus instead about what could go right like if i have an impact on someone listening to this talk and they learn
00:03:56.799 something valuable and i think you'll learn a lot of valuable things i think a lot of audience members will when i start focusing on what positive
00:04:03.360 impact i'm having i get much more excited and less anxious
00:04:09.920 so my uncertainty in the middle i'm focusing on all those positives and it gets so much brighter when i do that reframing trick i'm
00:04:16.639 excited to be talking to you all here thanks for coming
00:04:25.840 all right in this talk uh half the talk is going to be framing
00:04:32.000 like grounding topics and then the other half will be concrete techniques you can use
00:04:40.160 we'll start with some example challenging experiences you can use to go through to use these techniques on
00:04:47.759 then we'll talk about the inner versus outer brain which is a useful dichotomy when processing experiences
00:04:54.479 we'll have you model the brain like a system in the kind of way programmers tend to do
00:05:00.880 and then i'll explain the big ideas of cognitive behavioral therapy which the techniques are
00:05:06.639 largely based on so starting with the challenging experiences
00:05:14.479 so challenging experience um by that i mean one where you might experience a downward spiral
00:05:21.039 of negative thoughts leading to negative feelings leading to more negative thoughts and just feel worse and worse and worse
00:05:29.039 by the way i made that in blender last month i'm very proud
00:05:34.720 another term is rumination and the definition for this was really interesting when i looked it up finally
00:05:41.759 rumination is focusing on the causes and consequences of a bad situation it's like the negative stuff in the past and
00:05:47.360 the negative stuff in the future instead of uh the solutions the positive
00:05:53.280 future that you might be able to get uh ruminating is often counterproductive because you're just downward spiraling
00:06:00.080 often and the way out of rumination is what we'll cover this whole talk
00:06:07.360 all right let's have some examples of challenging experiences for one having an argument at work
00:06:16.560 if you have an idea how to solve a problem but your co-worker has a different idea you might get heated you might really uh
00:06:24.240 butt heads on it and that could be very stressful and then you could potentially think negative thoughts and feel negative
00:06:29.280 feelings and feel worse about it and say i should have said that if only they weren't so something or other anyway
00:06:34.960 that's an example hopefully it's relatable to a bunch of you second example if you're a parent you
00:06:40.479 might accidentally snap at your kids sometime when they frustrate you and then you might potentially downward spiral
00:06:46.560 thinking i'm such a bad parent why would i say that i wish i hadn't like it could make you feel worse and
00:06:52.880 worse for a third example this one i'll dig
00:06:58.080 into a later in this talk i was going to a meet-up and i was hangry hungry and angry both i was wet because
00:07:05.039 it was raining and i was running late and i thought all sorts of negative thoughts
00:07:12.319 i have a couple of activities i'm going to cut most of them out for this format but this one i do want us to do in the chat
00:07:18.479 sidebar please come up with five challenging experiences of your own from the past month when you had or almost had a downward
00:07:24.880 spiral i have some ideas here for like topic areas if you'd like if you are comfortable sharing please do
00:07:31.680 if not you can write them down on your own i'll set a timer for three minutes and
00:07:37.599 this will be what you'll think about as we go through the rest of the
00:07:42.840 presentation three minutes start
00:09:25.519 all right for time i want to cut it a little shorter than i said 30 more seconds feel free to share what
00:09:32.000 you have as you go if you'd like
00:09:54.640 all right and time thanks for sharing some challenging experiences in the side
00:10:00.720 if you didn't get a chance yet go ahead and read through to see what other people are thinking
00:10:17.040 all right so those challenging experiences are what you'll use these techniques on
00:10:23.760 next i'm going to go through two different mental models you can use universe out of brain and system
00:10:29.200 modeling of the brain our outer brain this gif demonstrates
00:10:35.200 pretty well this cat turns around sees a potential threat
00:10:40.480 and jumps away from it and then i like to imagine a moment later the cat investigated and discovered that it's
00:10:46.160 just a cucumber so there are two levels of reaction here
00:10:53.600 the fast one the jump out of the way and the slower investigation
00:10:59.680 that fast part happens inside the inner brain emotions tend to happen there and the path as you can see drawn on the
00:11:05.600 brain is much shorter the thought path has to go a lot farther
00:11:11.279 i took the scale of milliseconds on the left and the scale of seconds on the right it's like a huge difference
00:11:18.160 specifically the inner brain is often called the limbic system it's the older part of the brain more animals have it
00:11:23.760 fewer animals have the cortex the outer brain
00:11:31.519 roughly speaking feelings happen in that inner brain and they're faster than thoughts which happen in the outer brain
00:11:36.720 that are much slower that's probably intuitive but there are some interesting takeaways
00:11:42.000 like when you have a feeling and a thought which one came first often the feeling came first
00:11:48.240 even if you uh maybe think the other way around
00:11:54.639 all right we're skipping that one so that's the interverse outer brain fast and slow thoughts and feelings
00:12:00.800 next up is system modeling the brain software developers you probably think
00:12:07.120 about functions a lot these have an input they do something and they have an output they return a value
00:12:13.200 this is the simplest model of a system is something that has an input a process and an output it's called the input process output
00:12:20.079 model the ipo model sometimes you also incorporate a feedback loop from the output to the input
00:12:29.600 applied to psychology a simple one is characterized by pavlov's experiment
00:12:36.079 where he rang a bell when feeding a dog and the dog learned the bell meant food was coming
00:12:42.399 and then he noticed when he rang the bell the dog salivated in anticipation of food even if there was no food
00:12:48.560 present so that was an uh association a model in a very simple way there's an input the bell and the
00:12:54.399 output which is the salivation and he even measured how many milliliters of saliva the dog produced
00:12:59.600 to see how strong the correlation was like this is empirical
00:13:05.200 we like to think in general that humans we aren't just input output machines we actually think and the thinking
00:13:12.160 changes the output the things that we do to the world and that happens in this middle part of the
00:13:17.519 api model the process but of course we humans aren't always so
00:13:22.800 thoughtful sometimes we are just input output machines like that animal model we just described and
00:13:28.959 often animals probably do think we don't we can't ask them they can't tell us but if they have the
00:13:34.560 cerebral cortex it's very possible anyway often humans are on autopilot and
00:13:40.320 habits run things it's not really in your control but we can flip to a mindful state
00:13:48.079 and then we're in more manual control of how we respond to those inputs
00:13:55.440 so in summary autopilot is when our habits are in control and then we're just simple input output
00:14:00.800 there's not much control in the middle and when we're mindful that's what this is what the word means to me is it's when we can influence
00:14:07.360 things in the middle there we can respond to our inputs according to how we think we should instead of just doing it
00:14:16.560 all right so that's my systems model of the brain input output model and defining the word mindful
00:14:22.639 next i'll explain cognitive behavioral therapy cpt is the nickname for that cbt treats
00:14:29.920 many mental illnesses so many in fact that it's maybe more interesting to list ones it doesn't treat
00:14:35.600 in undergrad psychology it was the most common answer on every test if i wasn't sure i could just say cbt and i often
00:14:40.880 got a lot of points for that cpt is just uh very powerful
00:14:45.920 it's not necessarily the best or most effective therapy for everything but it is helpful for so many mental
00:14:52.959 illnesses for one example for treating depression
00:14:58.000 some studies show that cpt is just as effective as antidepressant drugs
00:15:03.120 the combination might be even more powerful so i'm not saying this is i'm not suggesting anything you do or
00:15:08.160 don't do but it's very powerful talk therapy alone is can be as powerful as anti-depressant
00:15:14.399 drugs and the talk therapy skills you get kind of stay with you forever a lot of ways that's more powerful
00:15:21.920 all right you might be wondering why are you talking about therapy i am not someone who needs therapy there's a stigma around therapy still
00:15:28.079 for sure but the the skills from cpt apply to really everyone
00:15:33.120 i would reframe cbt to be targeted behavioral training and if that helps make it more palatable
00:15:39.040 to you that's great these skills should be learned by everyone
00:15:45.839 all right so what are the techniques a lot of these are from cbt a couple of them are my own anyway some
00:15:51.120 are from dbt dialectical behavioral therapy this is my synthesis of the biggest ideas the core ideas that
00:15:57.600 i want you to take away from these we'll go through these in order uh
00:16:03.759 introspection is kind of like hitting your debugger break point so you can see what's going on in the first place identifying inputs
00:16:11.120 is kind of like becoming aware of what the inputs to your function are what any local variables are that you have to work with
00:16:20.639 verbalizing experiences so in the mind if you can describe it
00:16:26.800 it's much easier to manipulate and work with and understand
00:16:32.800 and then validation it's kind of what it sounds like in programming too like make sure the thing is right and often this is
00:16:38.560 done with someone else if someone else tells you that makes sense you can have much higher confidence than if you're trying to convince yourself that you do make sense
00:16:47.199 and then lastly there are some thought patterns that get in the way that aren't helpful cognitive distortions we call them but
00:16:53.920 you can counter those with cognitive restructuring all right we'll go through each of these in depth starting with introspection
00:17:04.319 i'll tell you a story about a time when it helped my mom to introspect
00:17:10.000 so she had a problem my little brother had left the door open again and she was very frustrated about it and
00:17:15.760 yelled but then she felt bad and wanted us to catch catch this kind of thing next time
00:17:20.959 so it happened again maybe a week later she got very frustrated about it and then we all went whoop
00:17:27.760 we yelled woof at her and that helped her realize she didn't want to have this kind of stressed lash out response she wanted to take a
00:17:34.559 moment think about it so she entered the whoop state she became mindful
00:17:40.559 she decided to take a moment figure out what her inputs were to process them and all that and this is huge this is amazing like if
00:17:47.200 you could take a moment in the middle of a frustrating situation to step back if you can get good at that you can
00:17:52.480 really change the course of a lot of events in your life a lot of situations
00:18:00.080 doing the whoop you're basically switching modes from the habit autopilot mode down into the mindful manual mode
00:18:07.039 switching gears once you're there you might or may not know what to do but i want you to
00:18:12.799 celebrate any time you notice you should or would like to get into this group state to become mindful
00:18:19.360 if you just notice that it's an opportunity to do it and you go whoop that's a moment for celebration
00:18:27.200 all right skipping that technique all right identifying inputs is next so
00:18:32.320 when you enter the loop it helps to take stock of what you've got to work with here
00:18:38.720 there are four inputs we'll go through and two non-inputs two things that you do have control over
00:18:45.760 two of the inputs are your automatic thoughts and automatic feelings to illustrate this imagine you just
00:18:51.840 stubbed your toe and you thought crap ow that hurt the automatic thought might have been all those curse words you
00:18:57.840 thought in your head the automatic feeling might be frustration maybe anger a whole bunch of feeling words there and
00:19:03.520 you didn't decide to think those thoughts or to feel those feelings they just happen to you your conscious mind gets that as an
00:19:09.760 input to work with your conscious mind can choose what thoughts to respond with though
00:19:16.400 i'd call those deliberate thoughts ones that you chose to think you can say i should move that piece of furniture
00:19:23.520 or something like that maybe you think that deliberately and if you think deliberate thoughts
00:19:29.440 that change the way you feel you could say that those are influenced feelings so that's within your control some amount too
00:19:37.120 all right what are the other two inputs thoughts and feelings is everything right kind of another category is external
00:19:44.799 stimuli so like the fact that the furniture was there for your foot to stub on
00:19:50.400 or at the disagreement at work or stuff happening in the news all these external stimuli their real
00:19:55.840 inputs and to treat them as such is helpful
00:20:02.240 the fourth category is bodily state so this is kind of none of the other three my favorite word to explain bodily state
00:20:08.799 is hangry this is a portmanteau a combination of two words that makes a new word
00:20:15.120 uh hunger and anger put them together it's angry i wish we had more words like that i
00:20:21.120 think this is super useful i'm thrilled that people have vocabulary to describe how your bodily state affects
00:20:28.480 your emotional state so once i get into a whoop state when
00:20:35.360 i'm in this mindful uh position i like to take stock of all of these types of inputs
00:20:41.360 and just treat them as data try not to judge them try not to be upset at myself for automatically thinking them or
00:20:46.480 automatically feeling them because i didn't choose to do that they happened to me
00:20:53.600 i would do an activity here i just want to say to do this later
00:20:59.360 for one of your situations try to go through and find something in each of those four categories and the categories aren't strict i don't
00:21:05.520 you don't need to decide each word or statement you write down which one it is this just helps you brainstorm and make sure you get the full breadth
00:21:11.440 of things like for my mom the fact that she was hangry was a big factor in why she was frustrated with my brother
00:21:17.760 and if she had missed that she may have focused some thoughts and feelings instead she'd be missing out on a big chunk of it
00:21:26.480 all right that was identifying next up verbalizing experiences or
00:21:32.720 processing yeah verbalizing is a great way to process them i'm going to go through six techniques
00:21:39.039 with you by the way i drew these and i'm proud even if they are not beautiful
00:21:44.159 because uh they're not licensed i can use them for however i want
00:21:50.000 uh one technique technique one is to expand your emotional vocabulary uh so when you're writing out your
00:21:56.720 thoughts or trying to think about how to describe it it helps to have nuanced emotional vocabulary words to do
00:22:02.320 so there's a bunch of references that i have here i'll show you some examples this is just a chart giving like
00:22:10.240 synonyms that are more nuanced for each of the main feelings here a bunch of those words are in a
00:22:16.480 visual seeing how they relate to each other on a couple of axes there
00:22:22.240 my favorite is actually this table from the wikipedia article on emotion classification
00:22:28.000 uh let's drill into one of these so let's say i'm feeling angry and i can go through this and say am i
00:22:33.120 feeling rage no not rage disgust nope irritable yeah that's close
00:22:38.720 okay sure then i can drill into irritable and discover i'm feeling grumpy i like this tree a lot
00:22:44.400 for finding new emotional vocabulary words cross patch i've never used i think that might be british
00:22:50.240 i'm curious all right so uh that was emotional vocabulary expanding that
00:22:56.799 having more nuanced speech can help you understand yourself technique two is to talk to a friend
00:23:03.039 this is my favorite technique i love doing this when you talk to a friend you have to put your experience into words
00:23:09.360 so that it can convey to the other person in the first place they also help you realize if you're
00:23:15.120 speaking clearly if you're enunciating and articulating your experience in a way someone else can
00:23:20.320 understand that's helpful and sometimes they even can tell you ways they are interpreting what you're saying so
00:23:26.720 you can refine how you're describing it and how you understand it it's huge they can also validate you and
00:23:32.799 say your experience makes sense to me but we'll come back to that at the validation section
00:23:39.919 if you don't have a friend handy you might want to talk to a duck
00:23:45.279 a rubber duck this is a common programming trick so let's say you're working on a hard work
00:23:50.640 problem and you might want to talk to a co-worker but you're not sure if anyone's available
00:23:55.760 you could try to explain the situation to a duck and give them all the contacts they need to catch up to where you're at
00:24:01.840 to troubleshoot it with you and by the time you enunciate the whole problem you might discover you don't need to talk to the co-worker at all
00:24:08.559 because by articulating it you've come to your own answer i end up doing this a lot in the form of
00:24:14.240 i'm slack messaging a co-worker and then i delete it completely so if you ever see me casey is typing then i
00:24:19.520 stop maybe i solve my own problem i didn't have to message you
00:24:25.679 it applies to experience processing too you can talk to a plant or a pet like a cat or a dog and talk to
00:24:31.919 them even if they can't respond to you just by articulating it out loud and hearing your own voice in the air you
00:24:37.600 might get deeper
00:24:43.200 alright next technique is writing journaling and i don't necessarily mean a journal by your bedside table i mean
00:24:48.720 writing your thoughts and feelings somewhere i often open a gmail draft just because that's the quickest opening
00:24:54.799 text editor i have word and google docs are so much slower when you journal not only do you have to
00:25:01.200 put your thoughts and feelings into words you also have the chance to reread them and edit them if you want to be more
00:25:07.760 accurate or explain it more clearly journaling's super powerful
00:25:14.799 all right next one reading fiction is really helpful to get
00:25:20.320 you better at the general skill of it because when an author wants to convey a character's thoughts and feelings to you
00:25:27.679 they have to put it into words and hopefully they use accurate understandable words that convey exactly how the character is
00:25:33.919 thinking and feeling so you get a lot of good examples of that one of the words in psychology of
00:25:41.440 research around reading fiction is emotional transportation where if you identify with the character
00:25:46.960 a lot on a deep level then you like learn things about other people you get maybe better at empathy it
00:25:52.240 correlates with a bunch of things anyway fiction is useful if you've written it off as a not useful
00:25:57.520 uh way to spend your time consider it again maybe even the top 20 books of last year
00:26:03.760 would be a good place to start because i imagine if they're popular they probably have some emotional
00:26:08.840 transportation all right last technique here is
00:26:14.720 meditation specifically mindfulness meditation and this is particularly good at getting
00:26:20.400 you comfortable viewing your emotions as data so your automatic thoughts and your
00:26:25.760 automatic feelings to not judge them and just get comfortable with those as inputs that's one of the focuses of mindfulness here
00:26:37.919 all right those are the six processing techniques to help you work through your problems
00:26:46.400 i i find it difficult to think of them when i need them sometimes and so i find a reference like this
00:26:52.000 really helpful i wrote out a bunch of the ideas on this google doc which you can download make a copy of
00:26:58.720 including those six techniques we just talked about
00:27:06.720 next section is about validation
00:27:15.520 right validation is the recognition and acceptance of another person's experience as
00:27:20.640 understandable the key word there is understandable to say that it makes sense and you can do this whether or not you
00:27:27.200 agree with what their conclusion is if you can just say if i believed x
00:27:33.039 then y would make sense to me that's validating or that you're like with them through that thought process
00:27:42.799 my favorite way to think about validating a friend who wants support is through the six levels of validation
00:27:48.559 i have the six named down on the right and then i kind of group them on the left here we'll go through these um one is about
00:27:55.840 being available two or about verbalizing like we did before a little bit and three are about making sense telling
00:28:02.080 them that they make sense all right the first one being present so
00:28:07.440 you can make someone feel validated by just being with them if you just sit with them while they're sad or upset or
00:28:13.440 frustrated not you don't have to say anything even just your presence is helpful uh in the this
00:28:20.960 time period we're in uh phone calls video calls or even texting can also be a form of presence that makes someone
00:28:26.720 feel comforted uh oh by the way the validation levels
00:28:33.840 here go from be present is the lowest one and radical genuineness is the highest one
00:28:39.679 in terms of its potential impact but you can't always do the highest one sometimes being present is all you can do and
00:28:46.000 that's okay so this is a range this is a tool belt you can use these in different situations it's good to have all six
00:28:51.919 available all right so number two sometimes you can do better than just sitting with
00:28:58.080 them if they're telling you how they are thinking and feeling their experience you can reflect back to them sounds like
00:29:04.960 you're feeling this and you're thinking that at the extreme i think of a caricature of a therapist
00:29:11.120 that just echoes back everything you say just parroting and that's not super helpful it's something it's it's good but
00:29:17.360 you can do better and that's what the other levels are going to be for all right so just saying it back to them
00:29:24.000 is helpful and better than just sitting with them the third level here is to carefully
00:29:31.279 guess that they're unstated feelings this is like exploring how to explain it with them
00:29:38.240 it can be really validating to guess correctly but you could also guess incorrectly and invalidate them which is
00:29:43.840 dangerous it's hard to do this very effectively and you can't do this with everybody you
00:29:49.760 can't necessarily get this comfortable with someone but hopefully you can with your closer friends i i believe if you work on it
00:29:56.480 with them and if they're open to it you probably can develop it but it's hard
00:30:02.240 the key here is to leave plenty of room for correction so that they feel like they can correct
00:30:08.159 any guesses that you make that aren't quite right and again like you might not be able to do this with everyone so caveats are
00:30:15.039 plenty i have two different tools you can use to make space for correction to make
00:30:20.960 space for them to feel comfortable correcting you the first one is the open closed spectrum so an open-ended
00:30:27.600 question is one where it's open for any answer the person wants to give
00:30:32.960 and at the farther end the closed at the bottom is not even a question it's just a statement so for them to correct that the last one
00:30:40.320 that is so unfair for them to correct that they would have to say no and like completely stop the statement that you
00:30:45.840 had in the air and like shift gears it's so much easier for them to correct you for the open one what did that feel like they just share what they felt like
00:30:53.679 i often reach for ones in the middle though so they say if i have an idea that it might have been unfair did that feel unfair and they
00:31:00.559 could very easily correct that if it wasn't quite right but i'm still like giving them something i'm thinking about it with them i'm
00:31:05.760 guessing with them how it might have felt i use the full range but often something in the middle is pretty
00:31:12.320 powerful my second tool here is the confidence level spectrum so if i have high
00:31:19.360 confidence i can say something like must have and if i don't know maybe i don't even
00:31:24.559 say at all it's a very open-ended question kind of thing how do you feel i can't imagine that i have such low
00:31:30.159 confidence that i'm not even going to suggest something in the middle sometimes i say like i
00:31:35.200 imagine or i guess that might have felt a certain way so that's the way to do it without questions necessarily but there's still
00:31:41.360 room for correction it can be helpful if you i mean you
00:31:46.720 might think okay so if i want to be very correctable i should always just ask open-ended questions
00:31:51.840 but it can be really validating for someone to guess correctly so like if you can safely do that and
00:31:57.679 they can safely correct you it's helpful to be able to say sometimes that's unfair
00:32:02.880 i'm sure you can imagine a time of friends agreed with you strongly like that and it was right and it felt pretty good so this whole
00:32:09.760 range is there for you to use
00:32:16.080 that was guessing uh guessing unstated feelings next up
00:32:22.399 because of the three four five and six are the three that are about saying that makes sense so four here validating
00:32:29.039 based on their past the example i like to use is i had a friend growing up who was afraid of my
00:32:35.279 pet dogs i had two sweet dogs that just loved to be pet all the time they liked cuddles and affection
00:32:41.279 but he was afraid of them and i eventually figured out he was
00:32:46.640 attacked by a dog as a kid when he was even younger it's of course he would be afraid of dogs even if he doesn't want to be even
00:32:52.799 if he believes my dogs are safe and cuddly he still might not want to that makes sense ah do
00:32:59.200 you see that it makes sense that he would feel that way based on his past
00:33:05.519 but if we're walking past a dog on the street that's snarling trying to defend someone's front yard i
00:33:12.720 could do even better than just saying it makes sense you're afraid of that snarling dog based on your past i could say anyone
00:33:19.039 would be afraid of that dog it looks like it's trying to protect its area it doesn't it doesn't want us here
00:33:24.640 anyone would be afraid of the snarling dog so you can do a little bit better than just based on your past this surprised me
00:33:31.600 because i thought the more personal answer is generally better it's like pointing out that i know his history with dogs might be supportive
00:33:38.159 but this when i've tried it actually did make people feel even better than
00:33:44.240 the personal one anyway these are all tools in your tool belt you can apply them as makes it
00:33:52.399 that seems like a lot that's almost everything right what could six possibly be
00:33:57.760 radical genuineness is the term for this one this is like if you have
00:34:02.799 the same experience or similar very similar experience to one that someone else is going through and you can relate to it very deeply
00:34:10.320 so with the dog example i guess if i had been attacked by a dog as a kid maybe i would feel the same and i could relate to that a lot
00:34:17.200 for a more extreme example if you had a parent pass away and someone else had a child pass away
00:34:22.720 uh i mean you could relate to family death some amount but the tricky part with this is the
00:34:29.679 other person has to believe your experience is very related or it doesn't quite work it could invalidate them say
00:34:34.800 oh i know exactly how you feel if they don't believe it that could be counterproductive
00:34:41.919 so the key for this to share your experiences that relate to theirs is to make sure they think it agrees and it relates
00:34:49.760 and that they are open to hearing it and often you need to go through the other levels first to get on the same page for this to be helpful
00:34:56.320 but if you can this can be the most powerful of all
00:35:01.680 it's a lot about validation this is another thing that i don't expect you to memorize based on what i just said
00:35:07.280 so you might want the reference for these just list the six out
00:35:16.160 i love talking about validation but anyway switching gears next up is cognitive restructuring
00:35:23.040 that's the process of correcting cognitive distortions
00:35:29.119 there are some thought patterns that are just counterproductive they get in the way
00:35:34.320 this graphic has 10 of the most common ones we'll go through some examples to look at these so for the scenario i
00:35:41.440 shared earlier i was going to meet up i was hangry and wet and late and i stepped on a pothole and i thought lots of bad things to myself lots of
00:35:48.560 negative thoughts here's one of them wet shoes are the worst i heard myself snarl to myself
00:35:55.680 and then i went whoop and i thought about it i said all right that statement doesn't seem quite right
00:36:00.960 it's not quite true and identified that it was uh magnification that i was doing here
00:36:08.079 magnification i was blowing it out of proportion not only is it uncomfortable and i'm not in a good happy state right
00:36:13.760 now uh it's also the worst i feel like really blowing out a portion
00:36:21.440 all right second thought if i'm late i shouldn't even go i thought that i thought about not going so i was running late
00:36:28.079 and i noticed ah that seems like all or nothing thinking it's black and white thinking uh it's
00:36:33.680 like it's not acceptable to do the thing in the middle for some reason i thought about it people go late sometimes it's always fine i never even
00:36:40.320 really notice it's not like such a big faux pas i'm glad i caught that so i'd believe my
00:36:45.520 automatic thought i might not have gone i heard myself say this too today sucks
00:36:53.839 oh this is a doozy it's got a bunch for one it's over generalizing the whole day
00:37:00.720 it's also disqualifying all the positive things that happened to me earlier that day i had a great latte that morning i'm sure
00:37:06.880 so not the entire day sucked it's also jumping uh i guess fortune telling is
00:37:12.640 the subtype of this it was predicting the future the rest of the day wouldn't be good either which i didn't know what i did know is
00:37:19.359 that i was in a bad state right then being angry and wet and late
00:37:24.960 all right so to counter on the left those original thoughts that we just went through what shoes are the worst elena shouldn't go and today
00:37:31.119 sucks i can counter those kinds of thoughts that i noticed had cognitive distortions going on
00:37:36.960 with some more adaptive thoughts i have on the right i said i am feeling frustrated
00:37:42.320 that wasn't so cathartic to say to myself but it stopped me from downward spiraling
00:37:47.359 which was my goal here anyway i told myself it's okay to go late people do it all the time and today can get better
00:37:54.400 i wanted to say today will get better but i i did what i could i countered what i could
00:38:04.000 uh this list of 10 is super useful i suggest you print it there's a link to it from the notes too
00:38:10.800 i also listed my handout although i like their icons a lot
00:38:19.280 all right time for the summary you just whirlwinded through a ton of concepts let's review uh
00:38:26.480 oh yeah first of all the all the big concepts are in this handout if you'd like to get that
00:38:32.800 i'm just gonna um i'm also gonna read the techniques
00:38:37.839 yeah we'll just do that so the first technique you learned about going whoop
00:38:43.200 to switch gears into your mindful state you learned about a list of different
00:38:49.359 types of input that you can think through to take stock of what's going on once you're in that whoop state
00:38:56.640 we covered six processing techniques that you can pull out as needed
00:39:02.400 cover the six levels of validation which i imagine is new to a lot of people has
00:39:08.079 not discussed too much and i wish it was we also touched on some of the 10 most
00:39:14.560 common maladaptive thought patterns those cognitive distortions and how to counter them with other thoughts
00:39:22.000 i want to call out some other tools you can reach out for if you're interested uh first of all
00:39:27.680 a therapist it's like a brain trainer they can train you on all these ideas and more whether or not you have a mental illness
00:39:33.680 uh this is just their specialty i mean most people have an amount of anxiety whether it's clinical or not
00:39:40.560 uh anyway and therapists also do screenings if you just want to get screened to see if this
00:39:45.599 approach would be helpful any of these another tool is the cbt book the one
00:39:52.240 that popularized it is called feeling good by david burns that one has a ton of examples it goes
00:39:57.599 into the cognitive distortions in depth it's super thorough but it's it's a
00:40:02.960 little long and dense so that's one if you really want to dig into it the reason i wrote my book which is similar is because i wanted a
00:40:10.560 really short version that was concise to cover all the big ideas so plugged from my book mine is super short and digestible like that was my main goal
00:40:17.440 when writing it i think it's a good overview and then you can dig into other resources from there
00:40:23.520 there's also two apps or two types of apps i want to call out one is a meditation app headspace is a popular one com is
00:40:30.400 another one and they can take you through not judging your thoughts and just being sitting with your inputs and being aware
00:40:36.880 of them another app is if you have social anxiety or if that term
00:40:42.240 feels relatable whether or not you have it there's an app for that called enjoyable that i've had some friends use
00:40:47.839 that they had some success a lot of it is going through hard end of distortions and like it gives you some prompts to answer at
00:40:54.960 certain times i like that structure i wish there was something like that for general cbt and not just social anxiety but i haven't
00:41:00.640 found it yet if you find it let me know
00:41:06.160 oh yeah i have to plug my book i even made it an audiobook i'm very proud it was fun to narrate my own book
00:41:14.720 all right if there are questions in the sidebar since this is pre-recorded i can't answer them by voice but i'll be in the chat
00:41:21.760 let me know alright thank you all hope you learned a lot
Casey Watts
@caseywatts
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