That’s the headline. I taught in an all-female gym, so I was curious and read on.

The numbers for enrolment, retention, and participation by women in fitness facilities in the average space are down in general, and there are periods where it really drops off. The previous explanation was “motivation” which is why gyms run campaigns, discounts, upgrades, and bonuses.

A white paper published this past spring by Total Fitness showed some new research about gym engagement, particularly women. The data from over 5,000 adults in the UK surveyed, 150+ women interviewed, and behavioural data from women-only facilities showed that the mainstream gym environment, membership structures, and equipment are designed in a way that excludes a large part of the female market, unintentionally.

Interesting.

But do the women want to be there?

A third said no – no interest in joining, ever. The rest said they are open to it or have a membership (actual participation varies greatly).

The barriers, from the women’s perspectives, were cost, comfort, and self-image. 76% cited comfort as a primary reason for joining a particular facility. Staff presence for safety and cleanliness mattered more than having staff present for fitness advice. 17% said they would need to get past an injury or illness first. 12% they would need to “feel better about themselves” before joining a gym. 9% said they would need an environment containing people similar to themselves.

From the gyms’ perspectives, a more attractive membership should have solved that. Some offer women-only hours, smoothie and breakfast stands, on-site child care, but not all can afford to offer these amenities, if that’s what we’re calling them.

Another finding from the studies was that 81% of women gym members take breaks from their gym memberships. The white paper did not report the equivalent figure for men, but it did report that 41% of female non-members had multiple breaks over 10 years, compared to 34% for men.

So this discontinuity problem is present in both, and just more for women. This makes sense. For women, breaks can be due to illness, injury, home responsibilities, pregnancy, menopause, and others. They do not necessarily mean someone is off the wagon. But it does mean re-entering a space often years later can be much more difficult, psychologically and physically.

Enter self-consciousness and those old demons. Some facilities offer built-in pauses, partially for these reasons.

So for the people who want to be there, they want conditions that provide a safe space for physical (and emotional) growth through discomfort. Sound familiar?

What it takes to build strength

Getting stronger often means being visibly bad at something first. Doing this in front of other people can speed up the strength-building, if it’s safe to do so. Any room that makes this more expensive will have the opposite effect.

Being watched while doing something you cannot yet do well is one of the most reliable stressors in experimental psychology. It is standard laboratory protocol for producing a cortisol response. An audience evaluates, you perform an unfamiliar task, there is no control or escape. Back to the busy weights floor and a machine you have not used in a while...

Watching yourself costs you too. Monitoring your own body as an outside observer would consumes attention and can degrade performance at first. Mirrors are also essential for evaluating your own form, especially as you build foundational strength or work on progressive overload.

Watching and evaluating yourself runs on some of the same circuits you use to learn new stuff. This is probably why women who are not regular exercisers reported feeling worse training in front of mirrors than in identical mirror-free conditions in these studies.

The mirror is often incompatible for a newbie or beginner or someone lacking confidence. I’ve seen enough women (and men) avoid it when it’s a tool that is really needed.

So is it really a design problem?

It could be. Redesigned women-only environments improved attendance and participation pretty significantly. These were relatively small changes, like wall colours, mirror-free areas, subtle privacy, membership caps, a more welcoming entrance, and staff available from a distance rather than walking up and down the floor. There weren’t major construction projects involved. Just simple tweaks that had great results.

The behavioural data from these particular facilities showed that nearly half of its new members had no active membership immediately before joining, and of those who had belonged to a gym previously, 31% had been out of the gym circuit for more than 5 years.

Before joining, 22% had done no physical activity at all in the previous month; after joining, this reduced to 1%. Training frequency of 9 or more times per month went from 14% to 48%.

That’s some movement, huh?

There were minor changes to the physical space. Massive changes to perceptions.

Cognitive drain was reduced.

People started to want to be there. And for many of the women surveyed, that was enough to reduce those self-inflicted barriers enough to stop waiting and walk in.

Your room

Okay, so we’re not really talking about the gym anymore.

If being visibly “wrong” is expensive to the people in your organisation, they will stop trying things they cannot already do and stop learning. The confident person will thrive and everyone else will be told they need more motivation. They don’t.

A room for error is cheap to build. Priceless when maintained.

Who is your room designed for, and what does it cost everyone else to be in it?

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Written by Drs Sara Farwell and Maciej Zatonski. Solutions Makers provide private advisory for decision-making, health, and longevity. Learn more and explore your future with us here.

References

Total Fitness, Women and the Gym: Unmet Needs and the Role of Women-Only Spaces (2026). Coverage in WellNation, Health Club Management issue 3, 2026, and Athletech News.

Fredrickson, B.L. and Roberts, T.-A. (1997), OBJECTIFICATION THEORY. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 21: 173-206. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1471-6402.1997.tb00108.x

Martin Ginis, K. A., Jung, M. E., & Gauvin, L. (2003). To see or not to see: Effects of exercising in mirrored environments on sedentary women’s feeling states and self-efficacy. Health Psychology, 22(4), 354–361. https://doi.org/10.1037/0278-6133.22.4.354

She was about to give a presentation to a group of people I’ve never met - supposedly some “important ones” from the company’s headquarters. I am not sure what made them seem important, apart from higher salaries. They were clueless about what the UK business realities were like.

“I’m fine,” she said. She was not: her jaw was moving as if she was endlessly chewing on my grandma’s well-done steak. Her hands were nervously clicking the loudest pen I’ve ever heard.

I had known Emma for about 2 months. I had seen her fire her friend just a few days earlier. She seemed calm when she was firing her.

So I did what any supportive new hire would do: I made it worse.

“You’ll do just fine!”

She stopped for about a second, and I felt like a good human being. Then she said: “You don’t know that.”

I didn’t. I just told her something we both knew was unverifiable. Worse, I had announced that I found her state somewhat inappropriate and wanted it to go away.

Reassurance feels generous. But here is what it does:

In clinical work, reassurance is well-documented as a maintaining factor. Repeatedly telling an anxious person that things “are fine” tends to feed the anxiety loop, not close it (Parrish & Radomsky, 2010).

People come back to the therapists’ offices for more, because the relief feels good in the moment, but it disappears almost immediately the moment they leave the room. Great for business! Not so great for you, if you care about making an actual progress.

The evidence, however, tells a different story: You said it will be fine, but her body and brain did not agree (as there is no verifiable evidence for your ability to reliably predict the future).

Now she has two problems: 1) the upcoming presentation, and 2) the fact that her state appears not to be “appropriate” for the upcoming meeting.

Reassurance sucks in most cases (apart from putting money into therapist pockets). “It’ll be fine” is a very poor attempt at clairvoyance, designed to make the speaker of those words feel better about themselves.

The noisy clicking started again...

“No need to worry, the numbers look great!”

Despite knowing exactly what to do, somehow I decided to do something I knew is ineffective… but feels logical:

“There is nothing to worry about. Focus on the numbers. Slide four, slide nine, the forecast chart. That’s all they care about.”

I don’t know why this feels like the right thing to do, despite centuries of evidence saying it does not work. The final nail to the coffin of this approach came in 1987 when D. Wegner asked people to talk freely for five minutes and not think about a white bear.

They were supposed to ring a bell each time the bear turned up in their thoughts. It turned up constantly. When the “ban” was removed, they thought about the bear more than people who had never been told to avoid it (Wegner et al., 1987).

Suppression does not work.

It gets even worse on the physiological side. Gross and Levenson (1997) had 180 women watch sad or funny films. Half were told to hide any visible emotion. This group showed increased cardiovascular symptoms, and the physical impact of the emotions was sustained and enhanced, not reduced.

Telling someone to stop worrying is a request to suppress. My personal favourite version of this ridiculous tactic is telling my wife to “calm down”. Results are equally impressive…

Brooks (2014) ran studies on karaoke, public speaking and maths performed under pressure. People who were told to calm themselves performed worse than people told to say “I am excited” or “I am scared”.

Most participants, however, believed that calming down was the right strategy. For some reason, there are entire industries (including the corporate wellness industry) supposedly helping stressed employees to be calmer. There is even an app for that. And there is plethora of evidence that neither the interventions, nor the apps work (in fact, they were shown to make things worse).

Bad for everyone, great for the business - companies make money, compliance boxes are ticked, and the humans are worse off.

Emma looked at me just as my wife does when I tell her to calm down.

Distraction!

Now, as she is visibly more distressed, I also start to feel uneasy. After all, my next year’s budget, headcount and future prospects depend on her successful delivery. Somehow, despite all my knowledge, I react to my feeling (yes, a poor decision) and decide to distract her a bit:

“Did you see the thing about the tube strikes? Many people barely made it to work on time today. And there were no Ubers available!”

But the consequences of distractions are devastating.

Kircanski, Lieberman and Craske (2012) put spider-phobic people (no, I was not participating in the study) 50cm (arms-length) away from a live f*cking tarantula.

One group talked about something unrelated (like things in their homes). Another group was forced to say out loud everything they feel in the moment, no matter how embarrassing it is (we call this practice “labelling”).

A week later, facing a different spider in a different room, the labelling group showed lower skin conductance than the distraction group, and they also could get closer to the beasts. Talking about the contents of your kitchen had ZERO positive effect.

There is a cruelty in distraction, and we don’t like to admit. And yes, there is also an entire industry build around distracting us. Can you think of such an industry? For how much are you giving away your most valuable resource?

But let’s get back on track and focus: Can we the make the situation even worse for Emma?

Yes, we can!

Well, at least I did…

“Let’s just rehearse the few opening slides!”

She started. “Thanks for making the time. As you know, we…” Her voice broke on “know”. She stopped. “Fuck. OK. Again.” Started. Stopped on the same word. And then started to edit the presenter’s notes.

Probably not the best time to do it…

Rehearsal is necessary and critical to your success in everything you do: it builds fluency, capacity, confidence, ability, reveals weak spots and makes you and your actions better.

But rehearsal is not designed (or helpful) when you try to lower your levels of distress.

Nothing in the rehearsal labels what is happening to you in the moment.

“OK Stop. What are you physically experiencing right now?”

She stopped, closed the laptop and looked at me. The clicking stopped.

“Ashamed,” she said. “If this goes wrong, I was already told two more of my team need to go out. And I told them we’d be fine.”

“Answer my question: how does it physically feel?”

Then her shoulders dropped, she exhaled, and took her coat off.

That is the whole trick.

She put the state into words, even though she didn’t speak them out loud. Precise words. And because you read our substack, you already know how much precision matters.

Why and how does labelling work?

In 2007, Lieberman’s group at UCLA shoved people in an fMRI scanner and showed them emotional faces. In one condition, they picked a word for the emotion, like “angry” or “scared”. In others, they matched faces, or picked a name like “Harry”.

Choosing the emotion word reduced activity in the amygdala and other limbic regions - any attempt our thinking brain makes to accurately describe objective reality allows to rapidly recover control of the more primitive (emotional) parts of the brain (you have learned to do it here).

The later studies confirmed the initial findings. The spider study used people’s own fear (Kircanski et al., 2012). Niles, Craske, Lieberman and Hur (2015) took people with public speaking anxiety and added affect labelling to exposure practice. The labelling group showed greater reduction in physiological arousal.

The more precise labels they used, the bigger the drop.

In both the spider and the speaking studies, the effect showed up in the body, not in what people said they felt. Self-reported fear did not differ between groups (Kircanski et al., 2012; Niles et al., 2015).

Emma would probably still have told you she felt awful (judgment, not a label). Naming (labelling) the actual physical sensations is even more effective than naming the emotion itself, as we can’t really distinguish accurately between certain states (for example, anxiety and excitement are virtually physically the same).

Torre and Lieberman (2018) reviewed the whole line of work and called it implicit emotion regulation - the cornerstone of what emotional intelligence truly is.

It works without feeling like it works. In fact, people predict it will make them feel worse.

They are wrong, and they stay wrong even after trying it. Which is why nobody does it. It sounds like wallowing. It is the opposite.

Yes, emotions are very poor advisors…

Naming isn’t venting

This is many of us get it wrong in the other direction. Venting is a narrative.

“And then he said, and then she said, and then I said, can you believe…” It is an emotionally replayed story about the situation without actual labelling.

You can do it for hours, and stay exactly where you started - because you keep reliving the emotions (this is what most therapists do - they make you replay your past, to keep you there. It is good for business!).

Labelling is different. One precise word, maybe two, aimed at the emotional (or, better, physical) state itself.

So the question is not “tell me everything”.

It is “what is this feeling called?”

The call

She opened with “Thanks for making the time” and did not stall on “know”. She did very well on the day. She didn’t save the budgets or the team. The decision was made by the “important people” long before they even planned their travel to the UK office.

Try it today

Next time you, or someone near you, is visibly agitated, don’t promise, don’t command, don’t distract, don’t change the subject. Ask one question: “What are you physically experiencing right now?” and then shut TF up.

Tell us how it went

If you want the next one of these in your inbox, subscribe below. Our post dismantle what people do on their gut feelings, checks it against the evidence, and offer solutions that work in real life. Sometimes the feelings are correct. Usually they are not.

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Solutions Makers provide private advisory for decision-making, mental and physical resilience. Learn more and explore your future with us here.

References

Brooks, A. W. (2014). Get excited: Reappraising pre-performance anxiety as excitement. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(3), 1144–1158.

Gross, J. J., & Levenson, R. W. (1997). Hiding feelings: The acute effects of inhibiting negative and positive emotion. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 106(1), 95–103.

Kircanski, K., Lieberman, M. D., & Craske, M. G. (2012). Feelings into words: Contributions of language to exposure therapy. Psychological Science, 23(10), 1086–1091.

Lieberman, M. D., Eisenberger, N. I., Crockett, M. J., Tom, S. M., Pfeifer, J. H., & Way, B. M. (2007). Putting feelings into words: Affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli. Psychological Science, 18(5), 421–428.

Niles, A. N., Craske, M. G., Lieberman, M. D., & Hur, C. (2015). Affect labeling enhances exposure effectiveness for public speaking anxiety. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 68, 27–36.

Parrish, C. L., & Radomsky, A. S. (2010). Why do people seek reassurance and check repeatedly? An investigation of factors involved in compulsive behavior in OCD and depression. Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 24(2), 211–222.

Torre, J. B., & Lieberman, M. D. (2018). Putting feelings into words: Affect labeling as implicit emotion regulation. Emotion Review, 10(2), 116–124.

Wegner, D. M., Schneider, D. J., Carter, S. R., & White, T. L. (1987). Paradoxical effects of

When we have a lot on our plates, the instinct is usually to add more input: more information, more advice, better diet, more time in the gym, another meeting, more vacation, more time with friends...

This episode makes the opposite case. We explore what we call “indexing” - deliberately creating periods of low input so the brain can process experience, reduce mental clutter and turn emotion into practical data, rather than reactive behaviour and distress.

We discuss how to easily and rapidly improve mental strength, emotional regulation and spiritual capacity, and how all of those can improve tolerance of uncertainty, criticism, frustration and status threats.

We discuss why non-reactivity is a prerequisite for good judgement and how time without input can rapidly improve your attention, memory, self-awareness and decision-making.

Once put into practice, it will change your life. It’s as simple as that.

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Nothing has happened. Nobody you care about died. Your salary did not change. Your children are still asleep. Your kitchen is dry. Your coffee machine works. Your bills are paid. Your car is in the driveway. There is food in your fridge. There are people you care about in your life.

And yet, by 06:28 you feel like you lost in life. Why? Because your brain runs an ancient piece of software that you don’t know about, but the media companies know and tap into since it was first described by the ancient Romans.

Social Hierarchy Software

Your brain and body run thousands of automated processes beyond your awareness: when to release chemicals, how much and for how long to increase the heart rate, how much pressure to apply when you pick up a glass from a table, what to eat, how fast to retract your arm when you touch a hot surface, when to empty your bladder, and many more.

All serve one purpose - maximise the chances of keeping you alive and protect you from real or imagined harm, while minimising your energy expenditure.

We run those automatic behaviours since birth. Most of us are not even aware of them. Hardly anyone learns how to overwrite them, unless their job required a specific type of mental training.

One of those ”programmes” does nothing but compare you against others on imaginary hierarchies. It ranks you against the people in the room, and against people who show up on your phone screen, and even against people who do not exist.

We call is ”the comparison script”, and we were all born with it.

Why your brain insists on doing this

Start with the oldest empirical finding in the field. Festinger (1954) showed that humans have a drive to ”evaluate themselves”. When an objective reference point exists, we will use it. When it does not, we use other people as reference.

That is the whole trick: Money has numbers. Steps have numbers. But nothing that matters can be easily counted. There is no unit for competence, inner peace, happiness, kindness, success, fulfilment, purpose, love or meaning. None for being a good partner or a decent father. None for being interesting at a dinner party.

So the brain does the only thing available: it compares you to other humans.

Why? Because 40,000 years ago knowing where you are in your tribe’s hierarchy determined if you lived or died.

Contradict someone above you on the social hierarchy, and you will be kicked out of the village - and for 99% of human history that typically meant death.

Today, this obsolete mechanism is useless and largely unhelpful. But states, corporations, and media cleverly continue to train you to strengthen this automatism.

Schools teach you to compete and compare yourself to a other students, workplaces have “employees of the month”, national curriculum sets grading standards that decide who gets to stay longer in the education system, and media companies use it to make you feel inadequate so you are more likely to purchase things you don’t need, or drink your feeling of inadequacy away with similarly miserable "friends”.

It is real and measurable

Zink and colleagues (2008) scanned people playing a game with an artificial hierarchy. Viewing a higher-ranked player reliably engaged attention and salience circuits, including the ventral striatum.

This is important because it shows that our brain treats relative social status as a rewarding signal, processed through the same reward machinery as money or food.

Now pay attention: the effect appeared even when the ranking was irrelevant to the reward. The brain still tracked your imaginary ranking when there was nothing at all to win or gain.

Fliessbach and colleagues (2007) went further. They paid people while scanning them. Reward-related activity tracked what the other participant earned, not what the subject earned...

Why? Because in a tribal village you do not need to get more to climb ”higher”. It is sometimes enough to make some fall below you, as this will increase your relative status.

Swencionis and Fiske (2014) reviewed this literature and found a consistent pattern: upward comparison recruits pain-related responses, and downward comparison recruits pleasure-related ones.

Even if the hierarchy is non existent or fake.

Your brain does not care what you gain. It cares what you get relative to others.

Memorise this - as this is our default setting at birth.

Same pattern across all living things

Those hierarchies are ancient, and most animals have them. Serotonin is responsible for ranking, that’s why perceived low rank sits at the centre of shame, anxiety and depression (Gilbert, 2000).

Your great-grandmother compared herself to perhaps a hundred people in her life. She saw most of them rarely. She got updates about them few times a year. She saw them likely as they were in the moment: wet, tired, drunk, bereaved, injured, sick, unwell, hungry, tired or happy.

Today, you compare yourself to a global, mass-scale, curated and edited highlight reels, often created by professionals with top-grade equipment, filtered by algorithms, and delivered to you every single minute of your life.

Even worse, you compare yourself to imaginary composites. Nobody has his money and her marriage and their peace.

Nobody has success in business because they spend a lot of time with their family.

You see the cars, homes and holidays others brag about, but you don’t notice the mortgages and debts behind them.

Verduyn and colleagues (2015) tested the mechanism and showed that even short-term passive use of social media immediately lowered everybody’s affective wellbeing.

Yes, there is an entire multibillion industry behind how you feel right now. And they are about to sell you another pill for your symptoms…

Time to Stop

Here is the part that should freak you out. Gilbert (2000) showed that when a person accepts a low internal rank (even if it is imaginary) they lose self-agency, avoid challenge, withdraw, and close up. Later the resulting behaviour confirms the assumed “rank”.

In other words, if you see yourself at a lower place compared to someone else, you will behave in a way that validates that prediction.

One morning you find you have stopped applying for jobs, and you call it “being rational” or conclude that “the job market is bad”.

You stop exercising, because someone has posted bigger muscles online.

You distance yourself from your partner, because you believe there are thousand of “better” ones out there - after all you constantly see, hear and think about all those people who have all the things you don’t…

Get it?

So, what can I do?

Simply assume that you no longer need to do this. If you find this hard, try the below first:

Compete in only one hierarchy: comfort.

People compete on height, looks, money, status, jobs, houses, education, work hierarchy, partner’s attractiveness, places visited, disposable time, clothes, cars, jewellery, penis sizes, who they know, and many more imagined hierarchies.

Our suggestion: learn to be (and compete on, if you have to) the only hierarchy that truly matters: Can you be more comfortable than any other person?

Comfort is a state you can actually control. Height is not. Someone’s inheritance, luck, genetics, dad’s friends - are also not. You are moving the contest onto ground you own.

Fix the ratio between self-control and influence.

The principle is that you need roughly three times more mastery over yourself than you want over others. Applied here, it means one thing. Stop analysing someone’s life until you have finished mastering your own.

Name the automatic behaviour in the second person.

Kross and colleagues (2014) found that non-first-person self-talk improves emotion regulation under stress. So do not think “I am behind”. When you notice that, say out loud: “your brain is running the comparison automation”.

It sounds stupid, but it is very effective.

Swap self-esteem for self-compassion.

Self-esteem is nothing but a set of comparative assumptions about your position across all the hierarchies that you are tracking yourself on. It requires someone to be below you.

Neff (2003) proposed self-compassion as a non-comparative alternative - it works because it does not need a loser.

Immediately stop passive consumption of media.

Not just social media. All media.

There is really nothing of real value there. And if there is anything important going on in the world that impacts you, you will hear about it from someone before it affects you or your business.

The sense or feeling of urgency is fake. Be curious and test it out: simply cut all media consumption for 21 days, and see how your life changes.

I don’t know a single person who went back to consuming media after they completed this experiment.

I don’t know how to call this final section

You can’t “delete” the ancient built-in automation. It is older than trees and it originates in your brainstem (you have no control over it, in the same way as you can’t control your knee-jerk reflex).

That is fine! Your goal is not to try to erase it, but to agree to amend what it tracks. We suggest comfort, or your own life priorities (where the things you track is progress against them).

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References

Festinger, L. (1954). A theory of social comparison processes. Human Relations, 7(2), 117–140.

Fliessbach, K., Weber, B., Trautner, P., Dohmen, T., Sunde, U., Elger, C. E., & Falk, A. (2007). Social comparison affects reward-related brain activity in the human ventral striatum. Science, 318(5854), 1305–1308.

Gilbert, P. (2000). The relationship of shame, social anxiety and depression: The role of the evaluation of social rank. Clinical Psychology & Psychotherapy, 7(3), 174–189.

Henrich, J., & Gil-White, F. J. (2001). The evolution of prestige: Freely conferred deference as a mechanism for enhancing the benefits of cultural transmission. Evolution and Human Behavior, 22(3), 165–196.

Hughes, C. (2025a). Interview by S. Bartlett [Audio podcast transcript]. The Diary of a CEO.

Hughes, C. (2025b). Reading and understanding behavior with Chase Hughes [Audio podcast transcript]. Easy Prey Podcast.

Kross, E., Bruehlman-Senecal, E., Park, J., Burson, A., Dougherty, A., Shablack, H., Bremner, R., Moser, J., & Ayduk, O. (2014). Self-talk as a regulatory mechanism: How you do it matters. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 106(2), 304–324.

Marmot, M. (2006). Status syndrome: A challenge to medicine. JAMA, 295(11), 1304–1307.

Neff, K. D. (2003). Self-compassion: An alternative conceptualization of a healthy attitude toward oneself. Self and Identity, 2(2), 85–101.

Peterson, J. B. (2018). 12 rules for life: An antidote to chaos. Random House Canada.

Ranehill, E., Dreber, A., Johannesson, M., Leiberg, S., Sul, S., & Weber, R. A. (2015). Assessing the robustness of power posing: No effect on hormones and risk tolerance in a large sample of men and women. Psychological Science, 26(5), 653–656.

Sapolsky, R. M. (2005). The influence of social hierarchy on primate health. Science, 308(5722), 648–652.

Swencionis, J. K., & Fiske, S. T. (2014). How social neuroscience can inform theories of social comparison. Neuropsychologia, 56, 140–146.

Verduyn, P., Lee, D. S., Park, J., Shablack, H., Orvell, A., Bayer, J., Ybarra, O., Jonides, J., & Kross, E. (2015). Passive Facebook usage undermines affective well-being: Experimental and longitudinal evidence. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 144(2), 480–488.

Zink, C. F., Tong, Y., Chen, Q., Bassett, D. S., Stein, J. L., & Meyer-Lindenberg, A. (2008). Know your place: Neural processing of social hierarchy in humans. Neuron, 58(2), 273–283.

In the 1960s, a study was run with dogs that became famous and foundational in every introductory psychology textbook.

Dogs were put into a room with a floor that could deliver safe electric shocks. There were three groups: one could switch the shocks off by pressing a panel, a second received the same shocks but there was nothing they could do to prevent them, and the third group received none. Later, all three were put in a box divided by a low barrier, where stepping over it lead them to a floor without shocks. The dogs who had control with the panel before stepped over. Most of the dogs who had experienced the uncontrollable shocks just laid down and took it. Even when the experimenters physically moved them across the barrier to show them, it took way more repetitions than expected before they would do it themselves.

The conclusion at the time was that the first group had learned to be helpless and give up, and that carried over into a new situation, even when escape was objectively and obviously available1. This was replicated in rats, mice, fish, and cockroaches.

What about humans?

Shocking undergraduates is apparently frowned upon, so researcher Donald Hiroto used noise.

In 1974, 96 students were put into the same three-group structure as the dogs, with a loud aversive tone instead of a shock. One group could turn it off with a button, one could not, and one heard nothing. Then they were given a hand shuttlebox, where sliding your hand from one side to the other stopped the tone. The group that had been unable to stop it sat there and let it play.

There was another level to this study. Researchers also manipulated what people were told. Some were told the task was a test of skill, others that the outcome was down to chance. The chance group became more helpless, regardless of what was actually happening. So a belief about controllability produced the effect without the contingency having to be real.

The equivalents of shocks and noise in real life for humans are rarely as dramatic in the moment, but can have dramatic consequences. No one is being harmed, nothing identifiable has gone wrong. It is not despair. Learned helplessness in humans can look like:

• decisions that were once made confidently get deferred upwards or sideways into another round of consultation

• loss of ownership or interest in putting in the effort to maintain autonomy

• failure is predicted before any attempts, and then the attempt is not made so the prediction is never tested

• decreased initiative and action-taking

• decreased desire for exploration, brainstorming, creativity, or seeking / putting additional effort into stretch assignments

The original experiment in humans also measured something in advance. Using Rotter’s scale, participants were sorted by locus of control, whether they generally saw outcomes as flowing from their own actions or from luck and fate. The externals became significantly more helpless than the internals.

From the very first human experiment then, the procedure did not do the same thing to everyone. Which brings us to the next question.

Is it really learned or is it inherited?

The original experiments in animals had an important detail that we need to uncover. Expose a group of naïve rats to inescapable shock, and only one in five will fail to escape. The majority are fine. Something about the other “helpless” 20% was different before the experiment.

Henn and Vollmayr chased this difference. They wondered whether it was something genetic. They took the animals that became helpless and the animals that did not, bred each group with its own kind, and repeated the procedure. Within five generations, the vulnerable line was scoring as helpless over 90% of the time. After more than 50 generations, the line showed the phenotype without any exposure to uncontrollable stress at all, and it also lost its responsiveness to antidepressants.

So there is a real, breedable, inherited component to how easily a rat collapses under uncontrollability.

It’s a bit muddy for humans. There is no heritability estimate for learned helplessness itself, and no genome-wide study of it. The closest work was done by Schulman, Keith and Seligman in which they gave 115 identical twin pairs and 27 non-identical pairs the Attributional Style Questionnaire and found a correlation of 0.48 among the identical twins and zero among the others.

Since identical twins share all their genes, and non-identical twins share about half, a large similarity in the identical pairs implies genetic influence. Doubling the gap between the two correlations gives a rough heritability estimate, which is where the figure of about 50% came from for learned helplessness. The small sample size makes this more of a beach read than anything. Other studies with larger sample sizes have shown optimism and pessimism heritability is between 25 and 36%. That’s about a quarter to a third of the differences between people.

A word about the words

The rat line was called congenitally learned helpless. Congenital means present from birth. Learned means acquired through experience. A bit oxymoronic, right? The field’s own name for its most selectively bred animal model was inbred to acquire helplessness, which is contradictory.

The same problem shows up in humans as trait learned helplessness. The phrase “learned helplessness” has stuck since these 60-year old studies. It has been applied to depression, poverty, abusive relationships, chronic illness, toxic workplaces, dysfunctional organisations, and increasingly, to senior professionals who describe themselves as capable but no longer taking the initiative they once did.

If it is a trait, it was not technically learned. If it was learned, it is not a trait in the sense psychologists usually mean.

The way we untangle this now helps us change what you (and your practitioner) think can be done about it.

State: This is what the dogs and students showed in the lab. This is a temporary condition induced by a specific experience of uncontrollability, which fades.

Disposition: How readily any individual enters that state. This is the part with a heritable component. It is not helpless. It is susceptibility to helplessness, which is a different thing, in the same way that susceptibility to sunburn is not sunburn.

Personal interpretation: How a person routinely explains bad events to themselves. That is learned, moderately stable, and the piece you can get at.

The disposition varies continuously across people, like most traits, rather than dividing between who have it or not. The variable expression of trait learned helplessness in different people shows up under different conditions, both internal and external, and are tied to real and perceived control, not pain.

This matters because we want to help people, not hinder them. The label often determines the intervention.

There are now validated questionnaires used when studying learned helplessness behaviour, but there is no genetic test for trait learned helplessness. The candidate gene era promised specific answers but did not deliver. The most famous claim for the genetics of psychological traits was that a particular serotonin transporter variant determines who breaks under distress, and this has been squashed.

Whatever the genetics turn out to be, they are spread across many variants of tiny individual effect.

Heritability is not destiny. It describes how much of the variation across a population is attributable to genetic variation, in a particular environment, at a particular time. It says nothing about how fixed any individual is. Height is far more heritable than explanatory style, and populations have still gained several inches in a century on better nutrition. Those rats were bred under laboratory conditions for fifty generations specifically for this trait. I assume your family doesn’t share the same passion for inbreeding.

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A little neuroscience

The researchers of the original study, Martin Seligman and Steven Maier, published a paper 50 years later in Psychological Review making a few corrections. Fifty years of neuroscience showed that the original interpretation was not quite as simple as learning to be helpless and surrendering for life.

Passivity is a default. Prolonged, uncontrollable, aversive experience produces intense activation of serotonergic neurons in the dorsal raphe nucleus. That activation generates the behavioural signature of reduced initiation, poor escape learning, and heightened anxiety. This response is unlearned. It does not require an animal to work out everything about contingency before deciding whether to jump over the barrier. It is what the mammalian brain does when adversity persists and nothing appears to change it.

What is learned, or rather, adaptable, is control.

A circuit in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex detects that behaviour is changing outcomes. When it detects that contingency, it inhibits the dorsal raphe response. The prefrontal cortex is the part that has to learn something, and what it learns is that taking action works. Once learned, the detection also carries forward. Prior experience of control protects against later uncontrollable stress, an effect the original literature called “immunisation”.

The state is the raw response of the brain. The disposition is how “twitchy” your particular response is and how efficiently your particular brain functions and detects which varies between people. The personal interpretation is the running summary your brain has built from a lifetime of evidence about whether your actions have mattered, and it is the layer that determines whether one bad experience gets filed as an exception or as confirmation.

Both original answers were half right. Nothing was learned about helplessness. Something was learned about control. And we now know much more about mechanisms of control and prediction in the brain.

Not all giving up is giving up

So if it’s more about control, where did that come from? In 1982, Rothbaum, Weisz and Snyder argued that the field had been interpreting withdrawal and passive behaviour incompletely.

Abandoning the attempt to change your circumstances is not the same as abandoning control.

Often it is a switch to a second route. They called the first primary control, changing the world to fit yourself, and the secondary control, changing yourself to fit the world. Both are attempts to preserve some relationship between you and what happens to you.

There are subdomains of secondary control. Lowering your expectations so that outcomes stop blindsiding you. Aligning yourself with someone or something more powerful. Attributing outcomes to chance and then positioning yourself favourably within it. And finding a meaning in the situation that makes it liveable.

This matters practically, because it means a person who has stopped pushing is not automatically a person in trouble. Someone who accepts a restructure they cannot influence and reorients around what it leaves them is doing something adaptive, not something necessarily broken. Interpreting automatically as helpless and prescribing more effort is a great way to make it worse.

Secondary control is healthy when primary control has genuinely been tested and is unavailable. It is damaging when it replaces primary control that did not need to be touched. It is not whether you have accepted something. It is whether you checked first, recently, and with real attempts rather than predictions about how those attempts would go. In other words, was predicted failure actually tested?

This is mechanistically different, and it changes what someone can do next.

What works and what doesn’t

Reassurance does nothing. Telling someone a situation is survivable, that they are competent, or that things will improve does not engage the neural pathway involved in deciding whether and how to avoid a truly aversive situation. If you get some nice words from your friend while you’re “dealing with something”, it doesn’t change what you immediately do. This is also why encouragement from your well-meaning colleague might slide off you or even feel a little insulting in the moment. You might have emotions later which may or may not influence your eventual decision, but this is a separate circuit and a separate challenge. Reassurance in the moment of facing something aversive does nothing.

The contingency must be real. The students in the chance-set group showed that belief alone can produce helpless behaviour, and the same lever works in reverse for a while. But the brain ultimate measures whether your action changed the outcome, not whether someone told you it did. A leader handed a token decision, in a context where the decision has already been made, gets no lasting benefit and often gets worse when they notice.

Latency matters. A behaviour whose outcome arrives in eighteen months provides weak evidence of control. Strategy, culture, succession, and market position are all long-latency, all noisy, all confounded by other people. A person can work at full intensity for two years in a role of genuine authority and receive no real evidence their actions produce outcomes.

Generalisation runs both ways. The original finding was that helplessness transfers across contexts. So does control. Establishing a domain of reliable, short-latency, verifiable control has effects outside that domain.

Unless in objective captivity or objective removal of all available mechanisms of control, someone experiencing helplessness will not say “Good morning, my level of subjective helplessness is especially high today. I have not yet transitioned into secondary control.”

They’ll say something like, “I’m tired.”

Prescribing rest but changing nothing will not help cycles of helplessness or feeling out of control. It can have the opposite effect. Rest removes the aversive input but does not supply the missing one.

A week off produces almost no evidence about someone’s ability to evaluate contingency. People come back rested and unchanged, and reasonably conclude that something else might be more seriously wrong. Sometimes there is. Often they treat the evidence problem as a recovery problem, but these need opposite interventions. Recovery asks you to stop. Evidence requires you to act and watch what happens.

Your real life

And so since your brain runs on evidence, how can we give that brain evidence to manage the challenges that make us feel helpless or out of control?

There are four things to keep in mind first:

1. The result needs to be as immediate as possible.

2. It has to be attributable to you directly, not a committee, a market, or someone else’s mood.

3. It has to be repeated often enough to be a pattern rather than an anecdote. Doing something once and feeling good about it doesn’t mean it will stick.

4. And it needs to be recorded, because you will need to literally show your brain the updated written word.

This is why moving through your workplace or climbing corporate ladders can eventually get us into an uncomfortable spot since the “evidence” of our success and output is either manufactured, artificial, or not really ours. But that’s for a rainier day.

Instead, let’s use physical exercise as an example of how we might generate evidence for our brains and bodies to combat that “helplessness” feeling.

Progressive overload happens to satisfy all four of those conditions. Effort goes in, a measurable outcome comes out, the lag is days to weeks, and nobody else can take credit for the exercise that you do. And, if you track your movement with a wearable or if your PT keeps good documentation, then that satisfies the fourth criterion.

For a lot of people, the exercise routine is the only place where the relationship between what they actually did and what happened is completely clear.

Now, I’m not telling you to start lifting. There are plenty of other things you can apply this to in your personal or professional lives. Maybe you have a high-pressure technical project you need to finish yourself, learning an instrument with a public recital, learning a language with a formal weekly test, one recurring meeting you redesign end to end and then watch, growing your garden, cooking a difficult recipe a few times.

The most important non-negotiable for never feeling helpless again is that you can observe the outcome without asking anyone’s opinion of it.

Two things before you start experimenting with giving your brain evidence.

• If your actions genuinely do not change outcomes in a role, a market or a relationship, no amount of evidence-gathering will help, and spending the effort to manufacture a sense of control is worse. Change the situation, the idea, the actions, if you can.

• If you cannot, this is where secondary control belongs, and it is a good strategy that aligns with your brain.

Distinguish predicted failure from tested failure. Most people who tell me “nothing I do makes a difference” have either not tried or not tried recently. They have run the simulation which returns whatever their current interpretation feeds it.

Then take it slow. Smaller decisions, made by you, with outcomes you can see, on a short enough cycle to notice a pattern, written down.

Remember – the dogs who were shown the way out still had to be hauled over the barrier more than once before it registered. Evidence works, just maybe not the very first time.

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Disclaimer: The behavioural profiles described here overlap substantially with clinical depression, hypothyroidism, sleep apnoea, anaemia, and other clinical conditions that may need evaluation by a physician. If you have noticed changes in yourself or someone you care about over months, consider a medical assessment.

Written by Dr Sara Farwell. Solutions Makers provide private advisory for decision-making, health, and longevity. Learn more and explore your future with us here.

References

Maier SF, Seligman ME. Learned helplessness at fifty: Insights from neuroscience. Psychol Rev. 2016 Jul;123(4):349-67. doi: 10.1037/rev0000033. PMID: 27337390; PMCID: PMC4920136.

Rothbaum, F., Weisz, J. R., & Snyder, S. S. (1982). Changing the world and changing the self: A two-process model of perceived control. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 42(1), 5–37. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.42.1.5

Henn, F. A., & Vollmayr, B. (2005). Stress models of depression: Forming genetically vulnerable strains. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 29(4-5), 799–804. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2005.03.019

Schulman, P., Keith, D., & Seligman, M. E. (1993). Is optimisn heritable? A study of twins. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 31(6), 569–574. https://doi.org/10.1016/0005-7967(93)90108-7

Hiroto, D. S. (1974). Locus of control and learned helplessness. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 102(2), 187–193. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0035910

Abramson, L. Y., Seligman, M. E., & Teasdale, J. D. (1978). Learned helplessness in humans: Critique and reformulation. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 87(1), 49–74. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-843X.87.1.49

Seligman, M. E., & Maier, S. F. (1967). Failure to escape traumatic shock. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 74(1), 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0024514

The tall, skinny woman looked at me from behind the mask, but complied without making a fuss. She wanted to be in the room, as you rarely get to see a rare infiltration of the major blood vessels by a tumour during a neck dissection.

There was nothing emotional in my ask. There was nothing emotional in her compliance. Her calm response to my calm request told me that she will get far…

An uninformed life is led by emotions, and many of us believe that what we feel is real. We chase feelings: we want to feel safe, understood, connected, powerful, appreciated or happy.

Yet, even if we believe that emotions are real and helpful, we intuitively know this is not true. It becomes obvious when we raise the stakes.

How many of you, when you end up in a hospital with an emergency, would ask for the most enthusiastic surgeon? Would you request the happiest and most creative accountant for your business? Do you want to be defended by the most courageous and empathetic lawyer, or would you rather meet a competent one?

A good surgeon does not open you up with enthusiasm, but with a plan: the knife enters at a named place, and stops at a named depth. There is a focused, shadow-eliminating light above surgeon’s head, and everything apart from the operated site is covered up and deliberately removed from the field of view. The beeping sounds of the monitors provide information, not background noise.

And when a trainee is breathing too loudly, you can ask the staff to escort her out of the room. No hard feelings. Those who get it get further faster. And she did. Twenty years later she heads a major head and neck oncology unit in a university hospital, while many of her classmates still get upset when they hear words they don’t like.

That focus is the real skill, not the cutting.

Now look at how you run your own life.

The dirt under your rug

You have felt off since roughly March. You could not name what is off even if someone offered you £1,000. So you scroll. You vacuum. Re-organise the desk. You start another course. You go out and drink with people you don’t even like when you are sober. Get into rollercoaster relationships. Change jobs. Overeat. And each of those “decisions” repeatedly tries to teach you something you refuse to name and see.

The feeling never leaves. And with each failed lesson it gets harder to name.

Peterson (2018) illustrates this with a children’s book by Jack Kent. A boy finds a dragon on his bed, about the size of a house cat. His mother tells him there is no such thing as a dragon. So it grows. It fills the house, and eventually it picks the house up and wanders off down the street. The boy finally says “There is a dragon!”, and it shrinks back to cat size. His mother asked why it had to get so big. The boy responded that it only wanted to be noticed.

That is a childhood fable that many adults don’t know or forget. What follows is data.

“Do your best” is a con

Locke and Latham (2002) spent thirty-five years testing people’s goals. Their findings are fantastic, life-changing, useful, and also blunt and rude.

Specific, difficult goals beat “do your best” every single time. Effect sizes in their meta-analyses ran from .42 to .80 (Locke & Latham, 2002).

When you ask people to simply do their best, they don’t. When there is no target, there is no failure. No failure means you can feel good about yourself. But what follows is no correction, no growth, no improvement. So you become stuck in a pile of your own shit while still feeling good about yourself. And the more times you repeat it, the safer and more familiar it feels.

Disappointed? You can now choose not to chase that feeling…

Now add the second layer. Gollwitzer and Sheeran (2006) reviewed 94 independent tests of if-then planning. The format is stupidly simple: If X happens, then I will do Y. Across those 94 tests, that little sentence worked. The effect on goal attainment was medium to large, d = .65 (Gollwitzer & Sheeran, 2006).

Read that again. A change in one sentence that added more precision to your thoughts. Not a change in willpower, motivation, morning routine or supplement stack.

No need for a motivational coach, speaker, or a new drug… Just a bit more precise thinking generated willpower, motivation, discipline, and produced life-changing outcomes. Quite a powerful domino effect: one tiny change, multiple positive outcomes. But it felt hard, harsh, and unpleasant in the moment.

Your choice.

Naming the dragons shrinks them, literally

Lieberman and colleagues (2007) put people in an MRI scanner and showed them angry and frightened faces. Your animal parts of the brain light up - getting your body ready to respond to anger or fear before you realise it or become aware of it. Then participants picked a word for the emotion they saw. The moment they labelled it amygdala activity dropped to zero within seconds. Activity rose in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex - the part of brain in charge of thinking (Lieberman et al., 2007). But you already know that from our posts on fear management.

Yes. Emotions are tamed with logical thinking.

Engaging prefrontal cortex can be as simple as naming it. Putting a feeling into words changes what the brain does with it. There is a dose effect too. Kashdan, Barrett and McKnight (2015) reviewed work on emotional granularity.

People who split “bad” (judgment) into disappointment, shame, guilt, resentment and boredom coped significantly better. They were less likely to reach for alcohol or drugs, resort to aggression, self-depreciation, promiscuity, or self-injury when distressed (Kashdan et al., 2015).

The more vague and imprecise your thoughts and words are, the worse you feel. Yet most of us try to avoid or distract themselves from the feelings (symptoms) rather than address the cause (imprecision).

What the best athletes do with their… eyes?

Here is where sport earns its place in this argument. Vickers (1996) tracked the gaze of basketball players taking free throws. The highest performers share an odd things in common… They fixed their eyes on one specific location on the field and held it. They held it longer than novices did, and held it right up to the moment of release.

She called it the quiet eye (at Solutions Makers we call it periods of extended visual attention). It has since been measured in golf, darts, shooting, football and ice hockey. Lebeau and colleagues (2016) pulled the literature across 27 studies, and the gap between experts and novices in quiet-eye duration was large…

Within individuals, successful attempts showed longer quiet-eye periods than failures, d = 0.58 (Lebeau et al., 2016). Then the interesting bit. Nine intervention studies trained the quiet eye deliberately.

Those trainings changed the gaze dramatically, d = 1.53. They also changed actual performance, d = 0.84 (Lebeau et al., 2016).

Vickers showed that lack of focus is not a personality trait or a disease. It is a trainable skill with a dose-response curve.

Ducrocq and colleagues (2016) examined it further. They trained inhibitory control (inhibition of emotion) and focus with a boring computer search task. The benefit transferred to the performance during tennis tournaments. And it held up when the researchers ramped up the pressure (Ducrocq et al., 2016).

Some researchers argue the quiet eye is a by-product of expertise rather than a cause of it, but regardless of the position one thing is true: the better your ability to focus with precision the better your real life outcomes are.

Macnamara, Hambrick and Oswald (2014) found deliberate practice explained about 18% of performance variance in sport. In an environment where 1% improvement can mean a difference between winning the gold or not even qualifying, 18% advantage is massive.

Practice matters. Focus matters more. And anyone selling you “ten thousand hours” is doing just that. Selling.

Nobody teaches this, and the incentives explain why

Now the uncomfortable bits.

Gloria Mark’s group out of UC Irvine tracked how long people hold attention. In 2004 the average person was able to hold focused attention for around two and a half minutes. By 2012 it was about 75 seconds. In 2023… 47 seconds (Mark, 2023).

300% decline in the ability to hold attention across entire populations in less than 2 decades… And you already know how your ability to focus shapes your life’s outcomes.

Ophir, Nass and Wagner (2009) found heavy media multitaskers were worse at filtering distraction. Uncapher and Wagner (2018) reviewed a decade of follow-ups: multitaskers and social media users tend to perform worse across all cognitive domains.

The more short format videos you consume the more miserable your life becomes. Vosoughi, Roy and Aral (2018) analysed roughly 126,000 stories on Twitter over eleven years. False stories spread further, faster, deeper and more broadly than true ones. The effect was strongest for political news (Vosoughi et al., 2018).

Schools, governments and media do not need to plot against your attention. They simply monetise it. Schools optimise for compliance, media for retention, socials for engagement, politicians for crowd control…

Your attention is being taken away and the amount of noise increases. This deprives you of the two most powerful instruments to navigate the objective reality: focus and quality of information.

The argument that eats every argument

Watch what vagueness does to a relationships: Schrodt, Witt and Shimkowski (2014) meta-analysed 74 studies (total sample: 14,255 people). The link between emotional roller-coasting (push / withdraw) with poor relational, individual and professional outcomes was clear.

You cannot discuss “everything.” So when person tries to discuss everything without narrow specificity, the other will predictably withdraw. Peterson (2018) described the antidote: specify what is the exact thing that is making you unhappy, and the one very specific thing that you want instead.

Precision of thoughts is a scalpel. “You never listen to me” is a hammer.

Think about the consequences next time you allow yourself to think “I feel bad”…

And notice how different it is to saying “I feel resentful when I am under-slept and have to stay focused in the late afternoon Tuesday meeting after I skipped my lunch.”

Granularity is trainable and essential (Kashdan et al., 2015).

And attention responds to training way better than it does to drugs. Mrazek and colleagues (2013) ran a randomised trial of a two-week course: working memory improved, mind-wandering dropped, reading comprehension scores on the GRE went up (Mrazek et al., 2013).

Two f*cking weeks was all it took. Not two years. Not two months. No drugs. No products. No supplements. No AuDHD coaches. No diets. Nothing to sell. No bullshit.

Back to the theatre

What made a good surgeon was not her hands. It was her mind.

You have the same choice every single day. Are you choosing precision or feelings?

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References

Ducrocq, E., Wilson, M., Vine, S., & Derakshan, N. (2016). Training attentional control improves cognitive and motor task performance. Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 38(5), 521–533.

Gollwitzer, P. M., & Sheeran, P. (2006). Implementation intentions and goal achievement: A meta-analysis of effects and processes. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 69–119.

Kashdan, T. B., Barrett, L. F., & McKnight, P. E. (2015). Unpacking emotion differentiation: Transforming unpleasant experience by perceiving distinctions in negativity. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 24(1), 10–16.

Lebeau, J.-C., Liu, S., Sáenz-Moncaleano, C., Sanduvete-Chaves, S., Chacón-Moscoso, S., Becker, B. J., & Tenenbaum, G. (2016). Quiet eye and performance in sport: A meta-analysis. Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 38(5), 441–457.

Lieberman, M. D., Eisenberger, N. I., Crockett, M. J., Tom, S. M., Pfeifer, J. H., & Way, B. M. (2007). Putting feelings into words: Affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli. Psychological Science, 18(5), 421–428.

Locke, E. A., & Latham, G. P. (2002). Building a practically useful theory of goal setting and task motivation: A 35-year odyssey. American Psychologist, 57(9), 705–717.

Macnamara, B. N., Hambrick, D. Z., & Oswald, F. L. (2014). Deliberate practice and performance in music, games, sports, education, and professions: A meta-analysis. Psychological Science, 25(8), 1608–1618.

Mark, G. (2023). Attention span: A groundbreaking way to restore balance, happiness and productivity. Hanover Square Press.

Mrazek, M. D., Franklin, M. S., Phillips, D. T., Baird, B., & Schooler, J. W. (2013). Mindfulness training improves working memory capacity and GRE performance while reducing mind wandering. Psychological Science, 24(5), 776–781.

Ophir, E., Nass, C., & Wagner, A. D. (2009). Cognitive control in media multitaskers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106(37), 15583–15587.

Peterson, J. B. (2018). 12 rules for life: An antidote to chaos. Random House Canada.

Schrodt, P., Witt, P. L., & Shimkowski, J. R. (2014). A meta-analytical review of the demand/withdraw pattern of interaction and its associations with individual, relational, and communicative outcomes. Communication Monographs, 81(1), 28–58.

Uncapher, M. R., & Wagner, A. D. (2018). Minds and brains of media multitaskers: Current findings and future directions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(40), 9889–9896.

Vickers, J. N. (1996). Control of visual attention during the basketball free throw. American Journal of Sports Medicine, 24(6, Suppl.), S93–S97.

Vosoughi, S., Roy, D., & Aral, S. (2018). The spread of true and false news online. Science, 359(6380), 1146–1151.

Wiradhany, W., & Nieuwenstein, M. R. (2017). Cognitive control in media multitaskers: Two replication studies and a meta-analysis. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 79(8), 2620–2641.

I still remember the scan. A lesion on the screen, and a patient across the desk who wanted it gone. He had already decided. Cut it out, today, if possible.

I told him we would wait and watch it instead.

He looked at me as though I had refused to treat him. In a sense, he was right. I refused to operate, and that’s not the same thing.

We booked scans and bloods. I booked him back in a couple weeks later. He went home furious. Most of us rarely remember that emotions are very poor advisors when it comes to decisions that can permanently change our lives.

That was the day I understood something that took decades to say out loud. Waiting is one of the hardest skills in medicine. It is also one of the hardest skills in a life.

Especially in the world that monetises impulsivity and instant gratification.

Two: the scam of self-help

We have built an entire culture around impulses. Ship it. Hustle. Fail fast. Buy today. Fuck now. Click here. Scroll down.

Yes, agency matters, nothing improves for those who wait for things to happen for them or to them. But somewhere along the way we made a swap. We started treating impulsivity as proof of agency. They are not the same thing.

A hamster on a wheel runs fast, works hard, and is very very busy. But gets nowhere.

Agency means you choose the action and the response. Sometimes the chosen response is to do. Sometimes it is to wait.

Someone who quits their job in anger is acting impulsively. The person who stays another eleven weeks, collects data, times things well, protects the next move, and then leaves is also taking action. Only one of them is exercising agency.

I have sat with founders who could not stop reacting. It never, ever, worked for them. It got them nowhere. But they felt good about themselves. Some got lucky once or twice, which made things even worse in the long run, because they felt as they had “evidence” why their impulsivity worked. Luck is also not agency.

Three: procrastination seems similar

Deliberate waiting and procrastination can look identical from the outside. Both involve a person not doing shit.

The difference is on the inside. It is entirely a matter of what the waiting is for.

Procrastination is nothing more than avoidance of discomfort. You are not waiting for information. You are waiting for the feeling to go away.

Deliberate waiting has three things procrastination does not:

• It has a true reason. A purpose.

• It has a deadline.

• It has more discomfort built into it.

Miss any one of those and you are not waiting. You are hiding, delaying, failing or choosing momentary comfort. Be honest with yourself about which one you are doing.

Four: medicine

In medicine we call it active surveillance, or watchful waiting. Consider localised prostate cancer. For years the protocol was simple: Found something? Remove it.

The ProtecT trial in the UK randomised 1,643 men to monitoring, surgery, or radiotherapy. After a median of 15 years, 45 patients had died of prostate cancer: 17 in the active-monitoring group, 12 after prostatectomy, and 16 after radiotherapy. There was no significant difference in prostate cancer mortality between the groups.

Read that again, slowly.

Men on monitoring were more likely to see the cancer progress or spread. It did not reduce their likelihood of survival.

I am not telling you that waiting is always right, in medicine or anywhere else. The trial authors were careful, and so am I. Their conclusion was that the choice involves weighing trade-offs between benefits and harms. Some still need the urgent operation.

The point is elsewhere.

Waiting was not the absence of a decision. it’s not a delayed discomfort. It’s not avoidance. Waiting was the decision.

Try applying that to your marriage. Or your business.

Five: attention is your most valuable currency

You cannot wait well if you cannot pay attention. To yourself. Your thoughts, emotions and sensations. To your goals, your purpose and to what matters to you most.

Not time. Everyone gets the same 24 hours every day. You get the same twenty-four hours as the person who annoys you on TikTok.

Attention is a key resource management tool. It turns your time into anything at all. This is why it matters a lot.

This is why the waiting most people do is so damaging. They are not really waiting. They are distracting themselves or avoiding something else.

Your phone is the perfect anti-waiting machine. It removes the discomfort of the gap without removing the gap.

So you arrive at the far end of three months having felt busy, having learned nothing, hoping that the distraction didn’t turn into the destruction of your self, your life, or your future.

Real waiting is uncomfortable by design. It lets you notice things you would otherwise have scrolled past.

Six: wait like a pro

Some of this I learned in hospitals. Other bits I learned the harder way - not realising the series of reactive actions before their consequences became irreversible.

• Be still in the body first. The mind always follows. Sit down. Slow down. Keep the body still. It’s hard!

• Name the sensation, then wait 30 seconds. Hope, fear, frustration, anger, overwhelm, longing, doubt. Call them out, wait a few seconds. This tip alone will reduce your anxiety in 30 seconds by more than 50%. No distractions, no avoidance, no unfocused thoughts. Label it, and pay attention.

You do not have to act on any of your feelings. Feeling frustrated is not evidence that reaction is required or that your feeling requires attention. Yours or anyone else’s.

• Uncertainty is not the same as danger. Your body cannot tell the difference. Your conscious judgement can. That distinction is what separates adults from children.

• Fill the wait with the right work. This is the difference between waiting and rotting.

While you wait for the market, you build the thing. While you wait for the scan, you fix the sleep, the smoking and the drinking. While you wait for the answer, you get stronger, so you can survive either answer. While you wait for their words, you observe their reactions. While you wait for your partner, you get better (so that they want to stay), you get ready for their arrival.

Waiting is an uncomfortable, focused, and active process. The opposite of being distracted.

• Set the trigger in advance. Decide now what will make you move. Write it down. Otherwise you will react on the day you feel worst, which is the worst possible day to act.

• Build a ritual. Waits without structure and meaning become torture. Waits with a discipline, ritual and purpose become training.

Seven: 7

The people I work with are rarely short of drive. They are people others rely on. Their instinct under pressure is to act, because acting has got them where they are in life.

Sometimes life happens: A family fracture. A diagnosis. A partnership going wrong.

When they intuitively apply more force, the situation gets worse. What they need is the capacity to hold a position, while they gather what they need to respond.

Patience is not a personality trait you were given at birth. It is a skill. It can be trained (badly or well). Ask anyone who has held still while their whole body screamed at them to run - maybe from the ants nest at their door mat, maybe from their own decisions, maybe from a stinging bee under the shower.

But the moment they forced the stillness they controlled the situation. They got braver. More capable. More resilient. More confident.

Here is what I would put on the wall, if I put things on walls: Act with everything you have. Then learn when the act is to hold.

Most of the ruinous decisions I have watched were not caused by laziness. They were caused by reactive distractions at the wrong moment, by good people who could not bear with an unconscious feeling.

Mastery of time is not speed. It is knowing how to use the minutes you have.

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Solutions Makers audits and redesigns how people function for longevity in life and career. Our programmes are bespoke, personal, and rooted in brain health, biology, and behaviour. To learn more and explore your future, get in touch with us.

But the dashboard looked green, and the management cashed in on bonuses in April. The hospital went into administration in October the very same year.

I was sitting at the back of a room, years ago, during one of my last months in clinical practice, before leaving to pursue a career in big pharma. The boss stood at the front, beaming at a slide about “Project Marker”. On track. On budget. Team morale: strong. Time spent by surgeons at the operating table: reduced by 30%. Bed utilisation above 93%. Reported complications: 0.1% - almost 20x less than the national average. All green. All great…

He had every reason to smile. Every report for the last six months had told him the same story. There was just one problem.

Down there, the doctors, nurses, trainees and other staff had a nickname for Project Marker. They called it “Project Wanker”. Nothing worked in the hospital since the new management took over. The project managers knew. The staff knew. The department heads knew. The cleaners knew.

The low reported rate of complications was exactly that: low reporting. The shorter time of surgeries was because nobody was treating complicated cases. Low re-admissions were due to the fact that patient sought help elsewhere…

The only person in the entire complex who did not know was the man presenting the slides. Each reporting layer distorted the reality. By the time the info travelled three floors up, the corpse looked on paper like an Olympic athlete.

That is when I realised that the most expensive person in the building was the least informed… That is dangerous when your decisions impact lives of other people.

Clever people (without spines) quickly learn how to act

Let’s stop pretending. A huge share of workplace communication is not designed to transmit truth, but create personal safety.

People don’t say the truth. They don’t say what they know they should. They say the thing least likely to get them noticed, blamed, or “invited to a quick chat”.

This is because your coworkers are mammals. And mammals don’t mess with the thing that controls their food supply or mortgage repayments.

DePaulo and colleagues (1996) had people log their daily lies in diaries. The average person told multiple lies per day, mostly small, social, and self-protective. Now put that same person in a hierarchy, and add a mortgage…

Why do people lie upward?

In short, because they are rational.

1. Messengers get shot

Psychologists call it the MUM effect, or “Minimising Unpleasant Messages”. Rosen and Tesser (1970) showed that people are reluctant to deliver bad news. Bad news makes the messenger look like s/he is responsible. Nobody want’s that.

2. Silence is a n effective strategy

Morrison and Milliken (2000) described organisational silence as a collective phenomenon. Whole companies learn that speaking up changes nothing and costs plenty.

In a follow-up study, Milliken, Morrison and Hewlin (2003) interviewed employees directly. 85% admitted ‘omitting’ a serious work concern on at least one occasion. Their top fears? Being labelled negative, hindering their next promotion, damaging relationships, impact on compensation, and retaliation.

Read those three fears again. None of them mentions being wrong.

3. The rules are invisible.

Detert and Edmondson (2011) found people carry “implicit voice theories”. Unwritten rules like: never embarrass the boss in public, never challenge without a solution, never skip a level, and similar type of corporate bullshit in under-performing companies. Nobody teaches these rules. Everyone obeys them. They operate even in companies with posters about “transparency and integrity” in the lift.

4. Fear rules the interactions.

Kish-Gephart and colleagues (2009) showed that fear-driven silence is fast, automatic, and unconscious. People don’t deliberate and then decide to shut up.

5. Ambition is real.

Read (1962) demonstrated this decades ago in classic research on industrial hierarchies. The more an employee wants promotion, the more they filter what they send upward. And there is at least 10 people waiting for the boss to slip, so his or her lucrative position becomes available for grabs.

Ambitious people don’t send data up the chain, they send self-promoting adverts.

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The story of Elena

I met her on one of my early consulting engagements. Elena was a finance director. I liked her, because she was allergic to bullshit. The kind of person you hire specifically because she checks everything twice. This kind of matters in finance.

Every business screams for a bold and creative and courageous marketeer. But I have never seen anyone asking for the most creative accountant or a courageous lawyer (or a surgeon).

Anyway, back to Elena. During a quarterly review, she said the sales forecast didn’t reconcile with the pipeline. She showed her work. She showed why. Everyone knew that the Head of Sales makes the numbers up to make herself look good before her next promotion. Elena refused to sign it off on bullshit.

She was right. Everyone in that room knew she was right. I watched them know it from the back of the table, observing the dynamics. That’s one of the perks of being an external consultant.

And here is the fascinating part. Nobody argued with what she said. Not one person challenged a single number. They went after “how she said it” instead.

We call it “argumentum ad personam” - if you can’t reason with the argument, attack the person instead. And it is written in Latin, because the tactic is as old as language.

Within a month, Elena had acquired a certain reputation. “Not a team player.” “Rubs people the wrong way.” “Great analyst, difficult personality.”

Notice the trick. Elena’s facts were never questioned. Only her delivery - whatever the fuck this means.

Remember the Milliken findings from earlier?

The top fear stopping people from speaking was being labelled as negative. Elena’s colleagues watched her get that label. For being correct. For being honest. For exposing self-promotion. For trying to provide accurate information upwards. For speaking up. For not signing off on bullshit. Lesson received, loud and clear, by every witness.

The part every leader should find terrifying

Elena adapted. In less than 6 weeks she stopped raising her hand. She signed what was put in front of her. She answered exactly what was asked and volunteered nothing.

Her boss told me later, that she had “really settled in”. He was delighted. He genuinely believed he had coached her. It’s like taking the battery out of the smoke alarm.

The sales forecast Elena refused to sign? It missed the made up target 5 fold (!) the following year. The managing director said that “nobody could have predicted it”. The Head of Sales who made the ridiculous forecast got promoted 3 months earlier, and moved abroad to a better paid position, and left the mess for her successor to clean up.

The company never lost a difficult employee. It lost the last person willing to tell it the truth. The general manager “chose” to resign a year later. He failed to deliver on the sales he was promised by his team. He was thinking that when he will “spice the numbers up, just a little bit” his boss will like the forecast event more.

The 180 employees of the UK affiliate who watched the whole spectacle? Learned what really pays off in this organisation: keep your head down, lie upwards.

Because that’s what gets rewarded.

So if you have ever been called difficult for saying what everyone else was thinking, reframe it. You were never the problem.

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Why the top gets fiction

Now stack these effects, layer by layer. The sales rep softens the truth by 15%, out of fear. His manager softens it another 15%, out of ambition. His director softens it again, out of loyalty and self-preservation. Only three layers. We barely reached the head office. The message is now roughly half true… Which means it’s false.

This is why executives are often blindsided. “Everyone knew” always means the same thing: everyone except the person with the power to act.

Edmondson (1999) gave us the antidote’s name: psychological safety. In her research on hospital teams, the teams that reported more errors were not worse teams. They were the teams safe enough to admit (and correct) errors.

In emotionally-led workplaces, psychological safety is completely twisted from its original concept: a place without consequences for speaking up.

Today, many poorly informed HR managers, who never reached for the original research, mistakenly believe that psychological safety means a place where people feel safe.

But there is a huge difference between feeling safe, and being safe…

Making people feel something is manipulation, because this makes their behaviour predictable.

Dictionary of corporate theatre

Since we are being honest, here is what the script actually means. Learn to translate in real time:

• “Let’s park that for now.” Translation: you are right, and it is awkward.

• “We value your passion.” Translation: lower your voice and your accuracy.

• “There are some optics to consider.” Translation: the truth would embarrass someone important.

• “We’re on a journey with this.” Translation: it does not work.

• “Great question. Let’s discuss separately.” Translation: never mention this in front of witnesses again.

• “We need alignment first.” Translation: I am a coward and I refuse to be accountable for the decision.

Funny? Only until you remember that careers, pensions, and entire companies run on this dialect.

For leaders: you are the problem and the solution.

If you run anything, accept this: your seniority is an information filter. People edit reality for you, daily, out of self-preservation.

Project Wanker Marker died four months later, expensively, and with lawyers. The CEO called my colleague afterwards, genuinely puzzled “why did nobody tell me?”

He never got the answer. So look around your own workplace this week. Count the green dashboards. Count the smooth meetings. Count the people who never bring you problems.

Then find your Elena. Every company has one. Ask her what she stopped telling you, and when. Then ask yourself the only question that matters: Are things really that good?

Or are you just comfy in the box seats?

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Solutions Makers audits and redesigns how people function for longevity in life and career. Our programmes are bespoke, personal, and rooted in brain health, biology, and behaviour. To learn more and explore your future, get in touch with us.

References

DePaulo, B. M., Kashy, D. A., Kirkendol, S. E., Wyer, M. M., & Epstein, J. A. (1996). Lying in everyday life. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70(5), 979–995.

Detert, J. R., & Edmondson, A. C. (2011). Implicit voice theories: Taken-for-granted rules of self-censorship at work. Academy of Management Journal, 54(3), 461–488.

Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383.

Kish-Gephart, J. J., Detert, J. R., Treviño, L. K., & Edmondson, A. C. (2009). Silenced by fear: The nature, sources, and consequences of fear at work. Research in Organizational Behavior, 29, 163–193.

Milliken, F. J., Morrison, E. W., & Hewlin, P. F. (2003). An exploratory study of employee silence: Issues that employees don’t communicate upward and why. Journal of Management Studies, 40(6), 1453–1476.

Morrison, E. W., & Milliken, F. J. (2000). Organizational silence: A barrier to change and development in a pluralistic world. Academy of Management Review, 25(4), 706–725.

Read, W. H. (1962). Upward communication in industrial hierarchies. Human Relations, 15(1), 3–15.

Rosen, S., & Tesser, A. (1970). On reluctance to communicate undesirable information: The MUM effect. Sociometry, 33(3), 253–263.

In part 1, we bring you a helpful mantra, a few rules, and some tips for when we think and feel our way in (or out) of making decisions.

Join our twice monthly free decision-making Zoom room, The Deciding Factor. Message us here or to matt@solutionsmakers.com for the link.

Read On:

Verdict Before the Trial

A Surgeon’s Guide to Overthinking

Quick Tips on Avoidance

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It was a Tuesday. She wanted another blue squishy toy. The ones with the soft memory foam insides and cute big eyes. I didn’t like them. They only collect dust. She doesn’t play with them. She already had 28 similar ones. And they cost f*cking £40!

For something that will end up on a landfill after a decade of collecting dust mites that give my dog and my wife sinusitis. So I did the ”responsible” thing…

I gathered evidence: “You already have tons of them,” I said. “You never play with them anyway. You can have a similar one for a fraction of the price. They will end up in a landfill, and they are terrible for the environment.” (Well, the last sentence isn’t even mine, it’s what my wife keeps saying to our daughter).

Every word, however, was true. Yet every word was also a lie… Because I had already decided. I decided the second I saw the price tag. Everything after that was me building a case.

She looked up at me and said ”Daddy, you’re not thinking. You’re arguing.”

So I bought another useless plushie.

Brain Trap

Here is the uncomfortable shit: What I did that Tuesday is our brains’s default setting.

We like to think decisions work like this: You gather facts, you weigh them, and then you choose. It feels clever. Rational even.

But it is bullshit.

Most of the time it runs backwards: You “choose” first. Then you go looking for facts that agree with you. This is called confirmation bias, and it happens all the time. You do not analyse; you rationalise.

And the two feel identical to your brain.

That is the trap. Real analysis (using analytical tools, such as KAC, QIC, ACH, etc.) and fake analysis (what we do by default) are deceptively similar. Both involve reasons. Both sound clever. Both make you feel like a thinker. But only one of them is real.

Your brain on a decision it has already made

Hard to believe it? We can watch this process happening live inside a living brain.

In 2004, a team led by psychologist Drew Westen sat committed political partisans inside a fMRI brain scanner. He showed them embarrassing, contradictory statements from their own favourite candidate. Then from the rival (Westen et al., 2006).

Cold logic would light up the reasoning parts of the brain. That is not what happened. They wrote that: “Motivated reasoning is a form of implicit emotion regulation in which the brain converges on judgments that minimize negative and maximize positive affect states.”

In plain English: their brains did not do any reasoning. They soothed feelings. The researchers found that the brain areas responsible for reasoning DID NOT show increased activity as participants drew their conclusions.

Read that again. When people defended their guy, the reasoning switched off. The emotional machinery lighted up. Then, once they reached the emotionally comfortable conclusion, the reward circuits gave them a little hit of chemical pleasure.

Your brain (by default) rewards you for lying to yourself.

That was me and the plushies. That is you and your car purchase. The emotional decision came first. The reasons justified it later, pretending to be logic, making you feel good, but making your decision wrong.

Here is how this messes up your life

This default behaviour that we are not even aware of leaks into everything we do every day.

It happens at work: You have already decided to hire her. You liked her in the room. So when the reference check coughs up a red flag (after the 5 you ignored in the interview) you explain it anyway. “Every workplace has politics.” “Her last boss sounds difficult.” You are not evaluating the evidence. You are defending the automated decision.

It happens at home. You have already decided to buy the thing. The car. The kitchen. The holiday. So you stop counting the real cost, and start making up reasons. “We deserve it.” “It’ll last for years.”

It happens in relationships. You have decided to trust him, and ignored the signals, the red flags, the story that did not add up. “I’m probably overthinking.” No. You are not reading the person in front of you. You are protecting the decision behind you. Because you want to feel something. And this is not a smart thing to do.

In each case the same shit has happened. Rational analysis has been replaced by emotional reasoning impersonator. And the impersonator is very, very good at its job.

Kill your assumptions

Good intelligence analysts are trained to do something that feels deeply unnatural. Before they argue for a conclusion, they try to kill it first.

They ask a brutal question. “What would need to be true for me to be wrong?” Then they go looking for exactly that. Not to feel clever, but to avoid being fatally stupid.

The core of that method is simple. The goal is the truth, not the win. Those are different targets. Most of us aim at the second but pretend it’s the first.

Winning feels like being right. It is not the same thing. Before you defend any decision, try to kill it. Say the strongest case against it out loud. Ask yourself the six-year-old’s question. Am I thinking? Or am I arguing?

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A plot twist

Every good substack post needs a plot twist, or at least that’s what I have been told. You might now be thinking the answer is simple. Strip out the emotion. Become a machine. Pure cold logic!

But that does not work either. And the proof is one of the saddest stories in neuroscience.

Antonio Damasio had a patient named Elliott. A tumour damaged a specific patch of Elliott’s frontal lobe. His IQ stayed sky high. His memory, his language, his logic, all intact (Damasio, 1994). One thing changed: he stopped feeling.

You would think that makes him a decision-making god. Emotions out, pure reason in. But that did not happen: “Elliott emerged as a man with a normal intellect who was unable to decide properly (…) Making an appointment took 30 minutes, choosing where to eat lunch took all afternoon, even deciding which colour pen to use became an impossible struggle”.

Damasio watched him weigh a simple decision: “what will you have for lunch?” Elliot listed every factor, for and against, for two and half hours, and still could not choose.

“Without emotion to guide him, he was paralysed by choice in a world with too many variables for pure reason to process.”

That is decision paralysis - too much unfiltered information preventing you from taking the next step.

The recipe for a good decision

Let’s put the two side by side: Let the emotions in, and you get me with the plushies: the decision first, the facts bent to fit. We call it emotional reasoning - and our brain rewards us for it.

Zero emotions and you get Elliott. Endless analysis, zero decisions. A genius starving in grocery store.

Emotion is not the enemy of good thinking. Without it you cannot even start. But if you let the emotions drive the decision, you end up making mostly wrong calls while feeling great.

The key is recognising when your gut gets involved and using structured tools and processes to not let it take over.

Your gut is needed to make the call, but it is a terrible guide. It is almost always wrong, while always making you feel good and rewarding you with dopamine. A good decision maker is someone who is able to rapidly cross-examine their feelings before you let them pass the verdict.

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What I do now

Here is a simple rule I follow: 3 simple questions.

• Have I already decided?

• What would prove me wrong?

• What specifically is my gut feeling protecting or hiding?

Three questions. It takes less than 5 seconds. Memorise them now. They have saved me from bad hires, buying shit I never needed, or doing business with people I felt good about, but knew deep down knew I shouldn’t.

Who was right?

The dog ripped the memory foam from the plushie the next Saturday. My daughter changed her favourite colour to green two weeks later. The toy went to trash, exactly as I predicted.

I was “right”. Yet it does not matter.

Why? Because I was right by accident, for the wrong reasons, having done no thinking at all. You can get your outcomes from bad decisions, just as much as you can get into trouble from good calls.

My “correctness” was a coincidence, and coincidence is not a strategy. It will make you lose in the long run. Which kind of matters in a world where outcomes of our decisions compound as we go through life.

The plushies were never the point. The point was a 6 year-old catching her father not arguing, but deceiving him self that he was reasoning.

Sometimes you need another person’s input to examine your own shortcomings. And that’s why we are starting something new…

Join us for The Deciding Factor, a live decision-making session twice a month on our private Zoom. Bring a decision you’re grappling with at work or in life, and we’ll teach you decision-making tools for your real life.

The first session is Thursday, August 6th. We open the room at 12 pm BST / 7 am EST. Bring your lunch or breakfast and drop in!

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_{*Damasio is one of the world’s most distinguished pioneers in emotions and cognition; start here}

References

1. Bechara, A., Damasio, H., Tranel, D., & Damasio, A. R. (1997). Deciding advantageously before knowing the advantageous strategy. Science, 275(5304), 1293–1295.

2. Damasio, A. R. (1994). Descartes’ error: Emotion, reason, and the human brain. G. P. Putnam’s Sons.

3. Dunn, B. D., Dalgleish, T., & Lawrence, A. D. (2006). The somatic marker hypothesis: A critical evaluation. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 30(2), 239–271.

4. Heuer, R. J., Jr. (1999). Psychology of intelligence analysis. Center for the Study of Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency.

5. Iyengar, S. S., & Lepper, M. R. (2000). When choice is demotivating: Can one desire too much of a good thing? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79(6), 995–1006.

6. Kunda, Z. (1990). The case for motivated reasoning. Psychological Bulletin, 108(3), 480–498.

7. Lerner, J. S., Li, Y., Valdesolo, P., & Kassam, K. S. (2015). Emotion and decision making. Annual Review of Psychology, 66, 799–823.

8. Lord, C. G., Ross, L., & Lepper, M. R. (1979). Biased assimilation and attitude polarization: The effects of prior theories on subsequently considered evidence. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37(11), 2098–2109.

9. Nickerson, R. S. (1998). Confirmation bias: A ubiquitous phenomenon in many guises. Review of General Psychology, 2(2), 175–220.

10. Nisbett, R. E., & Wilson, T. D. (1977). Telling more than we can know: Verbal reports on mental processes. Psychological Review, 84(3), 231–259.

11. Scheibehenne, B., Greifeneder, R., & Todd, P. M. (2010). Can there ever be too many options? A meta-analytic review of choice overload. Journal of Consumer Research, 37(3), 409–425.

12. Westen, D., Blagov, P. S., Harenski, K., Kilts, C., & Hamann, S. (2006). Neural bases of motivated reasoning: An fMRI study of emotional constraints on partisan political judgment in the 2004 U.S. presidential election. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 18(11), 1947–1958.

She had been having chest pain since lunchtime. Fourteen hours. Do you know what she did during those fourteen hours?

She ironed the bedsheets. She wrote instructions for the neighbour about the dogs. She cleaned the bathroom, because “you can’t have paramedics seeing the house like that”. Washed the dishes and vacuumed, too.

Then, and only then, she called an ambulance. Apologising for the inconvenience. Maria died 9 hours later from a massive heart attack that was entirely preventable.

The trait everyone admired her for, her whole life, was the exact trait that killed her.

Sit with that for a second. Because this article is about you, not Maria.

The lie we tell ourselves

We like to sort human qualities into two neat boxes.

Good box: disciplined, kind, brave, honest, loyal, optimistic, empathetic, persistent.

Bad box: stubborn, cold, reckless, blunt, pushy, obsessive, narcissistic, greedy, selfish.

Here is the uncomfortable bit. Both boxes contain exactly the same items. The only difference is what we choose to focus on.

• Persistent is what we call ourselves. Stubborn is what we call the other guy.

• I am spontaneous. You are impulsive.

• I have high standards. You are a perfectionist, and she is a control freak.

• I have AuDHD and need drugs and adjustments. She is distracted and needs more time off-line.

The trait does not change. The label does. And the label depends entirely on who is doing the talking.

There are no good or bad traits. There are only traits (reality) and contexts (stories in your head).

Hard to believe? It is one of the better replicated findings in social sciences. Let me show you.

Every virtue has a dose

Aristotle figured it out about 2,300 years ago. He called it the golden mean. We call it composure. Courage sits between cowardice and recklessness. Generosity sits between stinginess and waste.

Modern psychology finally got around to testing him. The ancient bastard was right.

1. Too much of a good thing.

Grant and Schwartz (2011) reviewed the evidence and found the same shape everywhere: an inverted U. Nearly every desirable quality helps up to a point, then starts to hurt us.

Pierce and Aguinis (2013) found the same pattern across management research. They named it the “too much of a good thing” effect. Experience, assertiveness, conscientiousness, empowerment. All beneficial. And all “toxic”.

2. Conscientiousness, the poster child.

Conscientiousness is psychology’s golden retriever. It predicts health, income, longevity, marriage stability. Employers salivate over it. Carter and colleagues (2016) studied 912 people and found the catch. At extreme levels, conscientiousness bends into obsessive-compulsive territory. Well-being drops. Life satisfaction drops. Distress goes through the roof.

Maria was not weak. Maria was too strong on one dial. Dutiful, orderly, considerate, right up to the cardiac arrest.

3. Grit, the overrated darling.

We worship discipline. Never give up. Push through. Rise and grind, and other slogans printed on gym walls and repeated between TikTok influencers.

Lucas and colleagues (2015) ran a lovely experiment. Participants solved anagrams for money. Some anagrams were unsolvable. Grittier people kept grinding on the impossible ones. They lost money doing it.

Grit predicts workplace success. Grit also predicts staying too long in dead careers, dead projects, and dead marriages, and dead investments. With equal strength.

The trait cannot tell the difference. Only you can. And most people never check.

4. Optimism, the pleasant delusion.

Optimists live longer and enjoy it more. They also systematically underestimate their own risks. Weinstein (1980) showed this decades ago. People rate themselves as less likely than others to face illness, divorce, or disaster. That cheerful bias is precisely why people skip screenings (and die), skip savings (and end up poor), and skip seatbelts (and end up disabled).

5. Empathy, the one nobody dares criticise.

Feeling others’ pain sounds saintly. But living in the world of feelings is a disaster. Klimecki and colleagues (2014) showed that empathy training increases negative emotion and activates pain-related brain networks. Nurses, doctors and carers drown on the first one. That has a name: empathic distress. And it is something to be avoided.

Yet in the modern world, even suggesting this will bring a flood of criticism on every person saying that emotions-led life is a recipe for failure and constant unhappiness.

6. The full catalogue.

Freidlin, Littman-Ovadia and Niemiec (2017) tested character strengths directly. Both overuse and underuse of strengths predicted depression and social anxiety. Optimal use, the middle dose, predicted flourishing.

Kindness is the other side of intrusiveness. Humility equals invisibility. Curiosity is nosiness. Every strength has a corresponding weakness.

7. Evolution never picked a winner.

Here is the elegant final proof. If any trait were purely good, evolution would have maximised it in all of us. It didn’t. Nettle (2006) argues that personality traits persist as trade-offs. Extraversion brings mates and status, just as much as it brings accidents, unhappiness, and infidelity. Neuroticism brings misery, but also vigilance and cautiousness. Every setting on every dial carries a cost. That is why variation survives.

Nature refuses to call any trait “good” or “bad”. We should probably take the hint.

So why do we keep sorting traits into boxes?

Because the boxes were never about the truth. They were about marketing. Specifically, marketing ourselves.

Your brain runs a small, dishonest PR department. Its job is to make you look good, mostly to yourself. The more you compare yourself to others, the more dishonest is your internal PR.

Mezulis and colleagues (2004) meta-analysed 266 studies. The self-serving bias is one of the most robust effects we have. We credit our successes to character and blame our failures on circumstance. For other people, we reverse the formula.

Thorndike (1920) described the halo effect a century ago. Decide someone is “good”, and you will rate everything about them as good. Decide they are “bad”, and their persistence magically becomes unbearable. Identify as a leftist, and everyone who has a different opinion becomes a fascist (the one that you secretly are).

And it gets worse. Merritt, Effron and Monin (2010) documented moral self-licensing. Doing something “good” gives people psychological permission to behave worse afterwards. Buy the organic vegetables, then feel entitled to be a prick in traffic.

Calling your traits “virtues” is not self-knowledge. It is a press release: fake, curated narrative that makes you feel good about yourself, while being a dick to others.

We do not describe ourselves. We defend ourselves. And the stronger we compare ourselves to others, and the more we protect our fragile egos, the stronger the defensives gets. The good and bad labels are projections of how we want to be seen - a mask over what we are trying to hide from the world, because we haven’t fully accepted ourselves.

What this means for you

Right. Enough theory. Here is what to actually do with this.

1. Audit your favourite trait first.

Pen and paper please.

Take the quality you are proudest of. The one in your CV, your dating profile, your eulogy draft.

Now ask: where is this same trait costing me? Not “could it, theoretically”. Where is it costing me, this month, in money, career, health or relationships?

The loyal one is still in the wrong job. The high-standards one has an exhausted family. The strong one hasn’t asked for help since 1998. The kind one cannot say no, but secretly hates everyone for it.

Your biggest liability is always also your biggest strength.

2. Ask “in what context”, not “is this good”.

Decisiveness saves lives in an operating theatre. The same decisiveness can prevent your partner from eating food s/he likes. Traits are tools. A knife in theatre is surgery. A knife on the night bus is assault. Same blade.

3. Translate the labels, in both directions.

When you call someone stubborn, pause: persistent, pointed somewhere I dislike, knows what he wants, able to hold her direction in life.

When you call yourself honest, stop: blunt, direct, inconsiderate.

This single habit will improve your marriage, your management, and your opinion of strangers. Results may vary on the in-laws.

4. Stop trying to delete “bad” traits.

You cannot amputate a trait. You can only learn how and when to use it.

Your anxiety is also your risk detection tool. Your laziness is also your efficiency. Your arrogance is also the confidence that got you in the room.

5. Don’t believe everything you feel.

Whenever you feel morally certain about a judgment you passed on someone, or yourself, assume you got it wrong. Every judgment has another side to it. Every trait has one, too.

Back to Maria

I asked her why she had waited for hours. She straightened the blanket, looked at me, and said: “I didn’t want to be dramatic.”

Fifty years of being praised for it. Composed. Selfless. Never a bother. An entire identity built on one side of one coin. The coin has two sides. It always did. She just never wanted to flip it, until the life flipped it for her.

You have a coin like that in your pocket right now. Everyone does.

Flip it before life flips it for you.

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Solutions Makers audits and redesigns how people function for longevity in life and career. Our programmes are bespoke, personal, and rooted in brain health, biology, and behaviour. To learn more and explore your future, get in touch with us at solutionsmakers.com.

References

Carter, N. T., Guan, L., Maples, J. L., Williamson, R. L., & Miller, J. D. (2016). The downsides of extreme conscientiousness for psychological well-being: The role of obsessive compulsive tendencies. Journal of Personality, 84(4), 510–522. https://doi.org/10.1111/jopy.12177

Freidlin, P., Littman-Ovadia, H., & Niemiec, R. M. (2017). Positive psychopathology: Social anxiety via character strengths underuse and overuse. Personality and Individual Differences, 108, 50–54. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2016.12.003

Grant, A. M., & Schwartz, B. (2011). Too much of a good thing: The challenge and opportunity of the inverted U. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6(1), 61–76. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691610393523

Klimecki, O. M., Leiberg, S., Ricard, M., & Singer, T. (2014). Differential pattern of functional brain plasticity after compassion and empathy training. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 9(6), 873–879. https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nst060

Lucas, G. M., Gratch, J., Cheng, L., & Marsella, S. (2015). When the going gets tough: Grit predicts costly perseverance. Journal of Research in Personality, 59, 15–22. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2015.08.004

Merritt, A. C., Effron, D. A., & Monin, B. (2010). Moral self-licensing: When being good frees us to be bad. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 4(5), 344–357. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2010.00263.x

Mezulis, A. H., Abramson, L. Y., Hyde, J. S., & Hankin, B. L. (2004). Is there a universal positivity bias in attributions? A meta-analytic review of individual, developmental, and cultural differences in the self-serving attributional bias. Psychological Bulletin, 130(5), 711–747. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.130.5.711

Nettle, D. (2006). The evolution of personality variation in humans and other animals. American Psychologist, 61(6), 622–631. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.61.6.622

Pierce, J. R., & Aguinis, H. (2013). The too-much-of-a-good-thing effect in management. Journal of Management, 39(2), 313–338. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206311410060

Thorndike, E. L. (1920). A constant error in psychological ratings. Journal of Applied Psychology, 4(1), 25–29. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0071663

Weinstein, N. D. (1980). Unrealistic optimism about future life events. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 39(5), 806–820. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.39.5.806

Mitch is on the phone. Every 20 minutes or so, he writes down the next song and album and passes it to me. I go find it, look at the back of the tape, rewind it to that song using a machine, and then hand it over to Mitch who puts it in the cassette slot and presses play. And that’s how someone could request special songs on the WLGC local radio station.

Maybe they liked the music, or they were on a date, or wanted to surprise someone. We were (half) joking that we were helping horny people get laid. At least, I don’t think people were celebrating their Dad’s birthday with radio-ordered love ballads at 2 am.

We were on an important mission to help our fellow men (and the occasional lady) of the night.

The reason I took this job was because it started between 8 and 10 pm, so I could still socialise and do activities after school. It paid twice as much money as what my friends made working at Wendy’s, plus it was the night shift, plus the work was super easy. It was 30 seconds of focused work every 20 minutes or so. And it was less and less work later in the night it got.

So after school, I’d go and spend 6 hours locked in that room. I would leave at 4 am so that Mitch could pass off the morning shift to the “real” radio people. I’d get a few hours of sleep and get back to school in the morning.

Besides the money and the unique experience, it was also a perfect job for me because at the age of 16, I was obsessed about sleep. I mainly believed sleep is a waste of time. And life.

Why would I sleep when I could be reading, learning, or experiencing other things? I started researching and playing with sleep schedules to know how to function with as little sleep as possible.

And I stayed obsessed with this for a while. I remember planning a trip to Iceland for a summer because there would be virtually 24 hours of sunlight, and I wanted to see as much as I could while sleeping as little as possible.

This attitude carried over through school, university, and was reinforced by the environment when I went into ENT / surgical training.

The doctors who slept were considered weak or lazy or unimportant. Not sleeping was normalised, it was a sort of a badge of honour.

Even if people knew that rest is needed, because it is safer for you and your patients, they still didn’t do it. Sleeplessness was just part of the job. I tried to maintain this image, this toughness, my sharpness. I never told the people I worked with I would sleep in between shifts in the car of the back of a cinema. They thought I was running errands or “being productive” in that time.

Another irony is that I operated on patients with sleep apnea, seeing how their lack of sleep makes them accident prone, hearts weaker, decisions poorer…

But for some reason I didn’t believe then that voluntarily cutting down on sleep could (did) have the same impact on me.

I fell asleep behind the wheel at a red light once. My ability to provide excellent care was compromised. I snapped at my kids and colleagues for trivial reasons.

I was lucky nothing serious happened. I just didn’t want to connect the dots.

At that time, I didn’t know how my health, judgments, or decisions were impaired. And trust me, I made plenty of stupid decisions when I was younger. But those tiny, accumulated judgments (or lack of) over time add up.

It took me 20 years to fully understand that cutting sleep cut REM, the important restorative part.

I did know, but I chose to ignore it until the price became my health, my relationships, and my patients’ safety. I could see it in others, but chose not to see it in myself.

So, it’s 4 am. I close the door to the radio room. The On Air light is on again. Mitch stays, and I somehow get myself back to get a few hours of sleep before I do the whole thing over again…

The first time I flew business class was when I was a month into a new role with a small pharmaceutical company I was recruited into I was being sent to Germany on a very comfortable Lufthansa flight and it was spectacular. I got lucky with the stranger next to me, Wolff, who was traveling from NYC to visit his mother for her 99^th birthday.

We just clicked. We chatted and enjoyed the flight. We talked about the history of the Lufthansa airline, how he and his wife always visit MoMA on New Year’s Day, the time his corgi got sprayed by a skunk and rolled around their bedroom carpet. And since he was German, he could ask the stewardesses for a bit more cheese and port wine to accompany our conversation. We did not take the hint after they dimmed the lights and kept chatting until we finally both agreed it was maybe a good idea to get some sleep. Wolff took half an Ambien, and I finished my n^th glass, and then we both had a hell of a time running through the Frankfurt airport to find our connecting gates the next morning on a few hours of sleep.

I showed up to the site the following day, professional and functional as always, but there was this dim little light bulb flickering in the back of my mind, like, I could tell some of my judgments were not quite up to par with the interrupted sleep. I was in a new country, I needed to drive (in Germany!), move an important project along with a new team, secure my own professional future. You know, all those tiny little things that really benefit from “a good night’s sleep”.

Since then, almost a decade ago now, I have become very aware of how substances and sleeping pills actually effect major decisions, health, relationships, and all those other daily choices in between. Not just for myself, but for many others too.

Putting people in an MRI scanner now has shown me how those judgments work at a level we’re often unaware of, and how much of an impact non-physiological sleep has on how we think and regulate our emotions and make decisions. How we move, how we exercise, how we eat, what we eat, how we think about ourselves, how we take care of others, how we work, how we play.

Maciej knew all about the consequences of sleep impairment in the patients he was treating. But completely unable to see the consequences of that with what he was doing voluntarily for himself. It’s part of being human. Your brain will not help you see those things in yourself the same way. It often takes someone else for that to become clear.

Now, I don’t know about Wolff, but I knew that if I want to get anywhere even close to 99, it wouldn’t happen with alcohol. It took me a long time to understand that falling asleep faster after a pill or glass of wine seemed like sleep was okay, but it was also robbing me of the physiological (natural) sleep and restorative REM. Duration is just one aspect of sleep; it needs the correct architecture too.

And for me that’s when that flickering light bulb in the back of my mind finally switched On Air.

Read On:

Master Your Slumber - The Complete Book

Life in the 1980s looked different than it does today. It wasn’t unusual for my parents to put their 8-year-old (me) into a taxi. On one of those trips, the car in front braked hard. The taxi driver hit the horn. Then he wound down the window (partially) and started yelling. Actual screaming. And then he spit on the glass. It was quite scary.

Over what? A three-second delay at a light? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. I was eight and I remember thinking this cannot be about the traffic…

Forty years later, I finally understand what it was about. It was about control. It is always about control.

The animal in the driver’s seat

Your brain is not built for truth. It is built for prediction. It makes multiple predictions about the future and then desperately tries to create the predicted reality for you. This is what people often get in life what they think a lot about. This is why we tend to see what be believe. This is why we ignore opportunities in front of us when we tell ourselves a story about how unlucky we are.

Your brain really wants to know what happens next. When it cannot, it feels unsafe. This normal feeling is often medicalised and treated with potent psychoactive drugs. The precise brain circuitry is still debated. But the behavioural evidence is clear.

One clever study strapped volunteers into a game. They turned over rocks. Sometimes a snake bit them with a small electric shock. The most stressed people were not the ones certain of pain…

They were the ones who did not know. A 50% chance hurt more than a guaranteed shock (de Berker et al., 2016).

Read that again. Not knowing felt worse than being hurt.

Your body would rather take the punch it sees coming. Uncertainty feels the real enemy. Yet the whole concept of certainty and control is largely an illusion.

Why losing control makes people mad

There is a part of us that needs to feel in charge, as it allows us to perceive ourselves as being able to influence external events and outcomes. This part is our ego. The ego wants to predict. It wants to avoid feeling helpless, exposed, or bossed about.

Take that feeling away, even for one second, and the animal brain lights up. It tells you “I am not in charge and I cannot cope with this situation”.

And here is the cruel bit. The bigger the ego, the more control it craves. Because to the ego, control is not a preference… It is about the ego’s survival.

If you feel a strong reaction to the words above, you’re like to be that person. Psychologists have a name for this rebellion. They call it reactance.

When you feel your freedom being restricted, you get a strong need to fight back (Brehm, 1966). The target of your anger will be whoever exposed you.

What people are actually protecting

Once you see it, you cannot unsee it. Most arguments are not about the topic. They are about who is in charge. Here are the five real reasons:

Loss of perceived autonomy (“Don’t tell me what to do.”)

Some people hear any instruction as a power grab. Even a polite one. The trick is about their perceived control. Perceived. Remember that. We will learn how to use it later.

Frame hijacking (“Don’t tell me what just happened.”)

Challenge someone’s version of their personal reality and they will resist like a cornered cat.

Public power disruption (“You made me look like I’m not in charge in front of others.”)

An audience raises the stakes.

Control deficit carryover (“I have no real power in my life, so I’ll grab some here and how.”)

This is the road rage. The entitled shopper. The class bully. The “Karen” videos you have all watched. These are not powerful people… They feel powerless everywhere else, in their entire lives: maybe the kids didn’t turn out as they wanted others to see them. Maybe their career is not what they hoped for. Maybe they feel entitled to their bosses position, but are nowhere near competent to get it. So they overcorrect in the one place they might win: in the queue, in the car park, at the customer service desk, and other places where the perceived rules give them the feeling that they can maybe be in charge for once.

The taxi driver, screaming at a stranger’s car, was not powerful. He was powerless and small.

Uncertainty collapse (“If I can’t predict what’s next, I feel unsafe.”)

Remember the snakes? Brains hate unpredictability. You will hear: “You’re not listening.” “You’re twisting my words.” “I don’t have to take this shit.”

And it escalates fast. What is counter-intuitive is that the perceived ego threat has to go up before it can come down. A person must feel back in control before they can relax.

The move that ends it

So how do you handle a person like this? Since you read our content you already know a lot about how to control yourself. Here is how you give the perception of control and power to others, while remaining in charge all the time.

Remember: people living in their personal realities see the world thought the lens of their feelings, which makes their behaviours entirely predictable.

Do not try to win the argument. If you try to win, you lose the person. Every time.

Instead, you give them the back the illusion of control their ego is craving. Not real control. Just the feeling of it. The illusion of dominance is usually enough.

While they squeeze the steering wheel, you are steering their emotional state. That is what real control actually is. You let others feel in charge. Meanwhile you manage how the whole thing unfolds.

There is a neat piece of science underneath this. When people lose control, they start seeing patterns that are not there. Faces in noise. Conspiracies. Superstitions. Racism. Oppression. Victimisation. Self-pity. Whitson and Galinsky (2008) showed it across six experiments. Learn to recognise them early, as they reveal people with little agency and with external locus of control.

But the same study found the antidote. When people affirmed themselves, the illusion goes away (Whitson & Galinsky, 2008). Restore someone’s sense of self and the threat dissolves. You do not have to agree with them.

Lessons from an old taxi ride

I didn’t know how to handle an angry taxi driver when I barely started primary education. I learned how to do this when handling aggressive, drunk or drugged patients in the emergency department.

And I have used this on hundreds of people since. Patients terrified of a diagnosis. Executives losing face in a meeting room. Bosses when I needed a quick promotion or pay rise.

The words don’t matter. What matters is that they feel the wheel back in their hands. The person shouting at you is not your enemy. They are just someone who feels small. Give them illusion of size and importance, and you immediately turn them into your allies.

The fight was never really with you.

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References

Brehm, J. W. (1966). A theory of psychological reactance. Academic Press.

de Berker, A. O., Rutledge, R. B., Mathys, C., Marshall, L., Cross, G. F., Dolan, R. J., & Bestmann, S. (2016). Computations of uncertainty mediate acute stress responses in humans. Nature Communications, 7, 10996. https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms10996

Whitson, J. A., & Galinsky, A. D. (2008). Lacking control increases illusory pattern perception. Science, 322(5898), 115–117. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1159845

Trip planning is the strategy of considering which factors can contribute to potentially challenging scenarios and which factors may increase the likelihood of an ideal psychedelic experience.

Please note: check the legal status of psychedelics in your country or region, as many backward societies still class those life-changing substances as Class A drugs, and their possession and use is illegal.

Planning Overview and Personal Traits

Imagine you’re preparing for an adventure.

Before setting off on the journey, you prepare for your trip: planning your route, packing your gear, buying the necessary supplies, and checking the weather.

If you’re going with friends, you make sure they’re prepared too. You do all this because you want to maximize the potential benefits, and minimize the potential risks.

The same goes for planning a psychedelic journey. “Trip planning” is a strategy of considering which factors can contribute to potentially challenging scenarios and which factors may increase the likelihood of an ideal psychedelic experience.

Any psychedelic journey is influenced by many variables.

Careful and thoughtful planning is the way to nudge the variables we can control in directions that are more likely to lead to the desired effects and outcomes.

In this article, we’ll be giving you a general sense of which elements should be factored into trip planning. We’ll also provide an introduction to key concepts behind Psychedelic Peer Support & Harm Reduction.

It’s important to note, however, that this post only covers the very basic concepts about preparation for a psychedelic experience and provides a general overview of the practical aspects of Psychedelic Peer Support & Harm Reduction. The good news is, we have extensive experience focused on these topic.

For now, let’s run through the main situational factors that can affect your trip, and consider them on this sliding scale from ideal to problematic.

Trip Planning: Personal Traits

Personal traits stem from your innate personality and life history.

Some questions you may ask yourself to determine your own readiness for a psychedelic journey:

• Are you feeling emotionally stable?

• Do you have well-developed mental tools and capacity for navigating challenging situations?

• Are you open minded?

• Do you have positive self-esteem?

• Are you self-aware?

• Flexible?

• Trusting?

Humility, courage, adaptability, and patience are a few positive, foundational personality traits that can support a positive psychedelic journey.

Being arrogant, deceptive, disruptive, reckless, and argumentative are often incompatible with the psychedelic headspace.

Psychedelic use can bring a great risk for people with certain conditions or traits, especially outside a clinical setting. Neuroticism seems to be a trait that correlates with more difficult psychedelic experiences.

People with underlying mental illness, especially those with a family history of bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, may unintentionally trigger these latent traits.

Individuals with a traumatic past are more likely to have a difficult time, and should be supported by professionals with specific training.

It may be important to address potentially incompatible aspects of self before embarking on any kind of psychedelic experience.

Intentions

Another important factor in trip planning is setting a clear intention.

An intention acts as a purpose for the journey, or a focus point while planning, navigating, and integrating a journey.

Without intention, a psychedelic experience may simply be a wild ride — or at least, a confusing one — that comes and goes with no lasting benefits. Setting intention increases the likelihood of gaining and retaining value from the experience.

Intentions can be simple:

• They can be questions,

• requests,

• invitations,

• or desires.

Research has shown that intentions related to connecting with nature, spirituality, creativity, or play are often beneficial.

In contrast, intentions to escape from or control difficult emotions, or to heal or cure a condition— may actually be associated with more challenging experiences, as can too many expectations.

Best practice is to set a broad intention, which will help you to be open and flexible with your expectations. Rather than trying to force the experience you hoped for, be willing to go where the trip takes you.

Adapting your plan and intention as the journey unfolds is still better than going in completely unprepared.

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Set and Setting

Mindset (the first half of the “set and setting” phrase that is often referenced in the psychedelic journey) is a combination of your personality, intentions, attitude, expectations, and overall physical and mental well-being.

Ideal mindsets for a journey are open, curious, intentional, and accepting whatever may arise. Being clear-minded, humble, relaxed, content, and having a sense of humour about yourself and the world around you can be very beneficial. It’s also ideal to be rested and physically healthy.

Mindsets that may result in a challenging psychedelic journey tend to be rigid, narrow, rebellious, apprehensive, distressed, hurt, preoccupied, or controlling. Also, being physically ill or sleep-deprived are two conditions to avoid. Recent crisis, big life changes and experiencing physical injury or mental imbalance are potential red flags for a psychedelic journey that are recommended to be integrated and revisited from a more stable perspective.

Trip Planning: Setting

Setting refers to the physical environment where the journey will take place.

This includes location, as well as the atmosphere and aesthetics of the space, ambient sounds, music, lighting, smells, creature comforts, safety, and overall “vibe.”

Your personal mindset can determine which aspects of setting feels compatible, and which may feel uncomfortable or challenging.

As you reflect on the specific intentions for this particular journey, some basic considerations for your environment may be: indoors vs. outdoors, relaxing vs. stimulating, ceremonial vs. recreational and an inner journey versus a socially interactive one.

A quiet, relaxed, and comfortable environment with trusted support and few distractions is ideal for inner journeys and therapeutic work.

An outdoor environment with more people can be socially connecting, transformational and beneficial, but presents more risks and uncontrollable variables.

None of these aspects of setting are inherently good or bad. Depending on the voyager’s intention and level of experience each variable can either be supportive or a hindrance to the psychedelic journey..

In all cases, safety is critical. This includes both the reality of safety, but also the perception of safety. Your individual sense of what is safe and unsafe can become amplified during a psychedelic journey.

Supplies, Substances and Dosing

Much like preparing for a wilderness adventure, supplies refer to the gear – the materials and equipment – that support and enhance a psychedelic experience and the intentions within the voyage.

Supplies are there for safety, comfort, mood-setting, creativity, fun and emotional care. Ideally, the presence of these supplies will enhance your experience and support your intention.

Plan to have everything you may need on hand; ensure items like clothing, blankets and pillows are readily accessible because body temperature can fluctuate and physical comfort can allow for a deeper surrender to the psychedelic process.

Trip Planning: Substance & Dose

Choosing the right “vehicle” – or substance – for a psychedelic trip requires careful research and planning, and should be informed by the individual’s intentions and goals for the journey. Substance, dose, and route of administration must all be considered because each affects the duration, timing, effects, and intensity of the trip.

The ideal scenario is a tested, verified compound, taken orally to reduce the speed of onset.

The ideal dose depends heavily on the substance, and also the intention. Best practice with substances like psilocybin and ketamine are to “start low… and go slow.”

On the other hand, MDMA at a low dose can cause anxiety without the euphoria of a typical experience.

A potentially challenging, or possibly lethal, situation could result from taking new, unknown, or unintended substances, taking too large a dose, or getting an unusually potent batch.

Educate yourself on dangerous reactions resulting from combining other drugs such as alcohol, cannabis, SSRIs and benzodiazepines.

Support and Harm Reduction

Like any journey, the people you are with on a psychedelic trip have the potential to enhance the experience, or disrupt it.

In an ideal scenario, your relationship with fellow travelers would be one of compatibility and trust. Clear intentions and expectations set before the trip are essential to align outcomes and avoid misunderstandings.

Roles, responsibilities, and agreements on the things like intimacy, confidentiality, and disclosure should all be determined in advance. Emotions are amplified during and after a trip, so ideal trip mates are those you feel comfortable being vulnerable around.

More information on boundaries and consent can be found in the resources section.

Trip Planning: Support

For larger doses or specific therapeutic intents, working with a trained, trusted guide or mentor (ideally - avoid psychotherapists), sitter, or guide, can make a profound difference in supporting a sense of safety and allowing for a deeper and more meaningful psychedelic experience.

Sitters serve in a stewardship role by accompanying the voyager during and after a session, providing support when challenging experiences arise and creating space for access your inner “healer”.

Guides work in a more directive role to help the voyager explore particular psychedelic states.

Because of the inner focus of these journeys, a person is more vulnerable to outside influences. Having an experienced intermediary can allow for a deeper, safer experience.

Harm reduction offers a set of practical strategies and ideas aimed at reducing negative consequences associated with drug use.

Harm reduction programs feature quiet care spaces, compassionate, trained staff to look after people in need, cooperation with medical and other services, and a dedication to help people in distress get the greatest benefit from their experience, no matter how challenging.

Integration

Integration is the process of digesting and processing the experiences that arose during a journey, making sense of them, and determining their meaning for an individual.

Integration can include pulling together the narrative of your experience, distilling key insights, and developing ways to support a behaviour change. Some common practices that support integration are journaling, indexing (DMN activation), and cognitive mentoring.

it’s important to allow sufficient time and space for recovery and integration in order to get the most benefit out of the experience.

After returning from a psychedelic journey, it’s highly recommended to delay any major life decisions – such as changing jobs, relationships, or living situations.

Limiting extraneous outside stimulation and having the support of a guide or a brain expert during this process can be very beneficial.

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Further Resources

• The Fireside Project – Psychedelic Peer Support HotLine

• The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide by James Fadiman

• How to Plan Your Psychedelic Journey – Lucid News

• How to Prepare for Your First Psychedelic Trip in 5 Easy Steps

• 20 Safety Tips for Those Participating in Ceremonies That Use Psychoactive Substances

• If You’re Going to Solo Trip On Psychedelics, Bear This in Mind – Vice

• The Ultimate Guide to Integrating Psychedelic Experiences

• Chacruna Sexual Awareness Guidelines

• Voices of Esalen (Podcast) – Sara Gael on Psychedelic Harm Reduction and the Zendo Project

• Community Care: The Zendo Project for Psychedelic Harm Reduction (video)

• Horizons 2019: Ismail Ali, J.D. – “The Challenges and Opportunities of Decriminalizing Psychedelics” (video)

Dr. Song was raised in Beijing in a 17-generation medical family and trained in Pathology at Brown University. She has run a holistic clinic" in Boston since 2004 and founded the Zenerchi Retreat in Colombia in 2018 where she trials not yet approved therapies. Integrating stem cells, Traditional Chinese Medicine, and anti-aging treatments, Dr. Song aims to help people live longer, healthier lives.

This episode is a blend of science, traditional approaches to medicine, and the basics of human health and happiness that have been known for centuries.

Join us for this conversation on:

· The clinical use and the limitations of stem-cell therapies

· Early prevention versus symptom-focused healthcare

· The role of inflammation in ageing and tissue repair

· Why there is no single “magic bullet” for health and longevity

· Self-awareness, personal strengths, and understanding your own biology

· And More!

Gifts & Connect with Dr Song

Free Gift from dr Song for your listeners

The Regeneration Effect Book - direct link

Dr Yi on Instagram

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Twelve floors up, glass walls, a “launch readiness review” for a new drug. I was the medical lead. My job was simple. Approve the claims the sales people wanted to say about the product, or block them. All of them either made no sense, were not true, or stretched what I would consider to be ethical to say about a new drug with limited population scale safety data.

Nine out of ten claims overstated the survival data (efficacy). The remaining one had no safety grounds. I blocked it all.

The commercial executive leaned across the table. He smiled the way sales people smile before they feel they can bite: “I see you’re comfortable delaying access to latest drugs for dying patients…”.

Well, I am very comfortable delaying sales people in trying to convince doctors about something that is not true (or not yet proven).

Twenty years earlier, as a junior surgical trainee, I would have taken the bait. I would have defended my character, my motives, my entire f*cking career. But that was a long time ago…

Years in emergency rooms and at operating tables taught me how to recognise things fast. When I pay attention, I am very good at noticing what is going on with my body and by brain. My heart rate. My hands. The speed of my own thoughts. My breath rate.

And I understood, properly, what is going on in that room long before anyone else did, including the manipulative commercial executive.

We were not having a discussion. He was trying to force an argument. Those are different animals entirely. Why force it? Because once you can make someone react emotionally, you can predict and control their behaviour.

Those tactics may work on a junior marketeer, but had zero impact on someone used to making life or death decisions for a living. Multiple times. Each day. For decades.

Arguments are not about facts

A discussion is an exchange of information. An argument is an exchange of emotions, disguised as exchange of information.

People reacting emotionally are entirely predictable. And therefore can be easily influenced (or manipulated). Acute stress floods the brain with noradrenaline and dopamine. This impairs the prefrontal cortex, the region you need for reasoning and self-control (Arnsten, 2009). John Gottman’s laboratory studies of couples found the same thing. Once heart rates climb during conflict, productive conversation collapses. He called it flooding (Gottman & Levenson, 2000).

A chemically flooded brain cannot be reasoned with. Yours included.

So you cannot win an argument with logic. There is no logic in the room to appeal to. What you can do is refuse to play. Here are ten ways to do exactly that.

The ten rules

1. Never argue the point first.
Whoever defines the fight controls the fight. If you skip this step, you inherit their narrative. Don’t. You will spend an hour defending a position you never actually held.

2. Do not speed up when the pressure mounts.
Speed hands control to whoever applies the pressure. The person who controls the timing controls the outcomes. Research on negotiation backs this. Pauses of just three seconds shifted people into a more deliberative mindset and produced better outcomes (Curhan et al., 2022). Slow is good - even in your girlfriend disagrees.

3. Stop explaining.
Defensiveness put you on trial. Trials like that rarely end in your favour. You are a witness volunteering for cross-examination. Sit down. Relax. Stop talking. You owe nobody any explanation.

4. Never answer emotional questions.
“Why do you always do this?” “Do you even care about anyone but yourself?” “What is wrong with you?” These questions are not looking for truth. They exist to hand the leverage to the person asking them. Any answer confirms the premise. Decline the premise instead. Stay composed and confident - both are trainable skills.

5. Make the other side define their claim.
Most attacks collapse when you force specificity. This one has strong experimental support. People hold confident, extreme opinions right up until someone asks them to explain the mechanism. Then both their confidence and their extremity drop (Fernbach et al., 2013). Psychologists call the underlying bias the illusion of explanatory depth (Rozenblit & Keil, 2002). Vagueness is where bullshit lives. Never let anyone stay vague.

6. Never defend your character.
The moment you show your character needs defending, you allow the other side to judge you. Gottman’s data is brutal on this point. Defensiveness is one of four behaviours that predicted divorce with roughly 90% accuracy (Gottman & Levenson, 2000). The same pattern poisons boardrooms and family dinners alike.

7. Say less than expected.
People reveal their strategy when you refuse to fill the gaps. Silence is not absence. Silence is bait.

8. Change perspective.
Attacked on details? Zoom out. Attacked with grand statements? Force specifics. The whiplash breaks their control. Zooming out also calms you. Viewing a conflict from a distance, like a fly on the wall, reduces emotional and physiological reactivity (Ayduk & Kross, 2010).

9. Be willing to let the moment be awkward.
Most people cannot tolerate discomfort for even five seconds. Learn to. It is a superpower that costs nothing.

10. End the interaction the moment it becomes a power test.
Arguments do not end when someone wins. They end when someone leaves.

Here is what you actually need to control: Who decides, what really matters, what counts, what happens next. Control those four, and you do not need better words. Once you see this, most arguments stop feeling worth having at all.

The Six Sentences Sequence - SSS

Sometimes the argument is not only heated. Sometimes it is engineered. While most people argue because they fail to spot emotional reactions in themselves, many executives will force it intentionally. Learn to spot when someone is steering you, and doing it deliberately.

For those moments, here are six sentences. They expose manipulation by naming it.

1. Alignment check: “It seems like you’re wanting me to feel XYZ right now. Was that your intent?” If the intent was clean, they will correct you. If it was not, the pause will tell you everything you need to know.

2. Forced outcomes: “Help me understand what reaction you’re hoping to get from me here?” This kicks the conversation from words exchange into more objective space.

3. Forced request: “Before I respond, what are you actually wanting from me right now?” Either the ask is revealed, or the pressure collapses.

4. Frame control: “Here’s where I might have gotten off track. I thought we were talking about X, but it feels like we might be on Y now.” This redirects back to structure without blaming.

5. Control labelling: “That commitment felt like it might be designed to shift control of this conversation.” Once control is named, it loses its power. It can’t hide anymore.

6. The ending: “That’s a clever reframe. It puts you in the reasonable seat, and make me seem like the irrational one. I wish we could keep this honest.”

Why does naming and exposing things work? Because the brain treats labelling as regulation. Automatic behaviours (scripts) lose their power once they are called out.

In fMRI studies, simply putting feelings into words dampened amygdala activity, the brain’s alarm system (Lieberman et al., 2007). Naming (labelling) someone else’s tactic likely works on both brains at once. It cools yours and exposes theirs.

Here is how you make the SSS framework work

1. Memorise all six sentences. By heart. Exactly as written.

2. Say sentence from number one, then stop talking. Let the silence do the exposing for you. An honest person will say, “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that.” A manipulator will explain, backtrack, or switch tactics. Either way, you have your answer.

Manipulation only works while the intent stays invisible. Bring it into the light, and the game is over.

Back to the twelfth floor

So what happened with the commercial executive?

Nothing went as he predicted it would: I did not defend myself. I did not explain. I stay relaxed, composed and calm. I let the silence sit until it became uncomfortable, then slightly obscene.

Then I said, “Help me understand what reaction you’re hoping to get from me here?”

He blinked three or four times. He laughed, badly. At this point I knew who controls the room, long before he realised. Then he said the quiet part out loud. The claims were needed for the team to hit the (falling) quarterly sales targets… Nothing to do with the patients.

That is the whole point. It is to simply expose what is not being said out loud. It makes dishonest people uncomfortable, and honest people collaborative.

The real win is not proving anything. But it is never allowing anyone to corner you in the first place.

If this saved you one pointless fight, imagine what a year of these will do. Subscribe or share and get the next one before your next argument finds you.

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References

Arnsten, A. F. T. (2009). Stress signalling pathways that impair prefrontal cortex structure and function. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10(6), 410–422.

Ayduk, Ö., & Kross, E. (2010). From a distance: Implications of spontaneous self-distancing for adaptive self-reflection. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 98(5), 809–829.

Curhan, J. R., Overbeck, J. R., Cho, Y., Zhang, T., & Yang, Y. (2022). Silence is golden: Extended silence, deliberative mindset, and value creation in negotiation. Journal of Applied Psychology, 107(1), 78–94.

Fernbach, P. M., Rogers, T., Fox, C. R., & Sloman, S. A. (2013). Political extremism is supported by an illusion of understanding. Psychological Science, 24(6), 939–946.

Gottman, J. M., & Levenson, R. W. (2000). The timing of divorce: Predicting when a couple will divorce over a 14-year period. Journal of Marriage and Family, 62(3), 737–745.

Lieberman, M. D., Eisenberger, N. I., Crockett, M. J., Tom, S. M., Pfeifer, J. H., & Way, B. M. (2007). Putting feelings into words: Affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli. Psychological Science, 18(5), 421–428.

Rozenblit, L., & Keil, F. (2002). The misunderstood limits of folk science: An illusion of explanatory depth. Cognitive Science, 26(5), 521–562.

But how often do we actually step out of that comfort zone?

We teach and watch our kids and animals fall, learn, and get back up again. Occasionally we might have coaches who might get an extra rep or journal entry out of us.

But what happened to those everyday moments of struggle that teach us the lessons we really need?

In this episode, we speak about:

· What training dogs teaches us about our own comfort zones

· The world mental health crisis and leadership

· The relationship between fear, growth and learning

· The hallmarks of what a safe space really is

· The true cost of avoiding discomfort

· Small steps

· & more

Subscribe and share this episode with someone you care about

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Life doesn’t come with a solutions manual – so we made one! The Solutions Manual Podcast is where Drs Sara Farwell and Maciej Zatonski talk about the challenges and solutions to a healthy mind, body, relationships, and career. Featuring super guests with personal stories, the science behind human behaviour change and transformation, and everyday tips for living fully.

Have you ever been told to “think positive!”? Look on the bright side? Good vibes, man. Reframe the negative. Just flip it. Smile with your toothbrush in the mirror. Manifest. Practice gratitude.

Struggling? Be positive. Find the silver lining.

Why is it so difficult then? If you’re not positive or optimistic, does it mean your mental health is poor? Or, the opposite – if you’re a positive person* does it mean your mental health is A-OK?

What is mental health?

Mental health is not an emotion.

It’s also not optimism or positivity.

According to the World Health Organization, mental health is “a state of mental well-being that enables people to cope with the stresses of life, demonstrate their competence and productivity, exercise their cognitive and emotional capabilities, contribute to their community, and realize their own potential.”

Okay, now read that again, and notice the images that appear in your mind. (Remember, the human brain doesn’t really speak in words.)

If you look up mental health on any search engine or even LinkedIn these days, or if you peek up from your phone for a moment to notice a billboard on the train or the highway, you might see representations of mental health that is the super fit executive-types that appear calm and worry-free in a moment of relaxation (or intoxication) and seem to have all their shit figured out. Or, you’ll see therapists or things on addiction. Or, you’ll see a neurodivergent teenager lost in the screen under the sheets.

Now back to your brain.

What does well-being even mean?

What did you see? Do these everyday images of peak or poor “mental health” show you what your brain needs to see to be able to choose a different story?

What does “coping with the stresses of life” look like for you? Maybe you imagine a superhero in a cape or a grandparent or someone lifting something heavy.

How about “competence and productivity”? My sister has always been a fantastic sketch artist. She would draw dozens of characters a week and colour them and give them names and all sorts of back stories. She has a learning disability and was on the educational tracks that today’s autistic and neurodivergent kids would be lucky to be on. But she’s one of the (few) people who pumps out quality work when she’s fully focused on her strengths and her purpose.

“Cognitive and emotional capabilities.” Let’s forget about the “skills” we need for our jobs. What about thinking through everyday problems? Cutting coupons for weekly grocery, alternate routes for traffic jams, coordinating a busy household for kids’ activities. Recognising when you feel frustrated or anxious or ecstatic about something and not having those emotions interfere with getting something done or making a healthy decision or having a much-needed conversation with a partner.

“Contribute to the community.” Ooh, good one. I’m sure you can think of many activities that you or your family have been involved in to help your community. It could be through your work, paying it forward, helping a neighbour, volunteering.

What images do you see?

And finally, “realizing their own potential”. What images do you see? How about purpose or passion?

None of these are about feelings. And none of these are about pushing feelings away or avoiding them or numbing them or reducing them. It’s about being as human as possible and using our brain for all the cool, creative things we are capable of doing.

And yet... Are we doing it? Why are we choosing other stories?

It could be that we just don’t have the cognitive reserve leftover. It takes energy to change those stories, whether they are “positive” or “negative” or “pessimistic” or “optimistic”. They still take energy.

Or, it could be our natural tendency to stay in the familiar and the comfortable.

What is the cost?

Research on emotional suppression consistently shows that the physiological arousal tied to a negative emotion continues, and in some cases amplifies, when its cognitive expression is blocked (Gross & Levenson, 1997). You push the experience toward a positive interpretation rather than process it directly. If suppression is chosen, the story changes about what you are telling yourself about the experience, but it does not change what the experience is doing to the body.

Neuroimaging research is consistent on this point: adaptive responding to negative emotional events is a key ingredient of wellbeing. Not the suppression of them. Not their replacement with positive content. Responding to them directly, through the prefrontal-amygdala regulatory circuit that is only trained when it is actually engaged (Lee et al., 2012).

So where did we get the idea that the opposite of this was the answer?

Positive psychology

It can be desirable to take an optimist view. To focus on the “good”. To identify as a resilient person, that you can handle the hard things, water off a duck’s back. But if it prevents you from objectively facing and accepting difficulties or stressors that pile up, that is the flag here. Conflation of positivity with a feeling of happiness or mental health is a common and highly consequential misconception.

Positive psychology as a movement made a number of sweeping claims since the 1990s. The most widely cited was the Losada ratio, that 2.9 positive emotions to every 1 negative emotion was the mathematical threshold between flourishing and languishing. It was published in a leading journal, cited hundreds of times, and became the foundation for countless coaching frameworks and wellbeing programmes.

In 2013, the underlying mathematics were formally retracted (Brown, Sokal & Friedman, 2013; Fredrickson & Losada, 2013). The equations had been misapplied and bore no relationship to the data they were meant to describe. There is no such thing as “optimal” positivity ratio.

Memory of events that cause “negative” emotions versus positive is a very different cognitive distortion, rooted in science. This matters because this framework shaped how an entire generation of people were taught to think of their own mental health.

Optimism

Dispositional optimism is a genuine personality trait. It is the generalized expectancy that good outcomes will occur (Scheier & Carver, 1985). It is moderately heritable, relatively stable across the lifespan, and it does have real benefits. What you think, matters. Optimistic people tend to make different choices. They use more approach-oriented, forward-looking coping strategies, persevere longer in the face of setbacks, and are less prone to depressive symptoms under chronic distress (Nes & Segerstrom, 2006). Optimism can be great!

Resilience, on the other hand, is not a trait. It is a dynamic capacity, defined as the ability to adapt successfully in the face of adversity and return to your functional baseline. Research is consistent that this recovery is an active, biological process. It involves specific neural circuits, stress response systems, and regulatory mechanisms (Kuehn, Calvert & James, 2025).

This is interesting because a person can score high on dispositional optimism and have low actual resilience capacity (It can be trained!).

If the optimism is operating as a cognitive filter, shaping perception before honest evaluation occurs, it can reduce the very engagement with difficulty that building resilience depends on.

Recent research on this might interest you even more – optimism predicts better mental health outcomes when it influences how a person interprets challenges. For example, when setbacks are appraised as opportunities for growth rather than threats to identity. But when measured in the moment against actual daily stressors, dispositional optimism does not reliably predict the coping strategies people use (Hammond et al., 2025). The trait and the behaviour are loosely coupled than the self-help framing suggests.

Expecting good outcomes is not the same as being equipped to process “bad” ones.

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What’s going on up there?

Optimism bias, the tendency to underestimate the likelihood of negative events happening to you, is driven by the rostral anterior cingulate cortex and its interaction with the amygdala (Sharot, 2011). When imagining “positive” future events, these regions show strong connectivity. When imagining “negative” ones, the connectivity is restricted. The brain is structurally inclined to filter toward the positive.

Some degree of this is the default state of a healthy brain. But it becomes a problem when it operates as a substitute for accurate assessment. Unrealistic optimism specifically, the belief that negative events are more likely to happen to others than to you (Maksim et al., 2024), correlates with underuse of preventive healthcare, poorer financial planning, and a consistent tendency to delay addressing problems until they are significantly worse, like health …

Neuroimaging work on resilience tells a different story about what protection actually looks like in the brain. Resilient individuals show lower amygdala reactivity to negative stimuli and tighter functional coupling between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala. A 2025 meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies identified the anterior cingulate cortex and bilateral amygdalae as the structures most consistently conferring psychological resilience against psychopathology (Kuehn, Calvert & James, 2025). These are not the structures of positive thinking. They are the structures of attentional control and affective regulation under load (aka - core features of cognitive performance and cognitive mastery).

Recovery from adversity at the neural level is a function of how quickly and completely the brain returns to baseline following a stressor. That recovery is mechanistically defined by the prefrontal cortex’s capacity to exert inhibitory control over the amygdala. Individual differences in the strength and efficiency of this circuit determine individual differences in resilience (Lee et al., 2012). And that circuit is trained through direct engagement with difficult emotional material, not through filtering it out in advance.

Gather around, kids – it’s story time

Okay, one more thing about the neuroscience.

The brain does not passively experience your world. It runs predictive models, continuously updated from memory and experience (Menon, 2023). It filters what we perceive and focus on and how we interpret it. A habitual stance of positivity, developed over years, becomes one of these automatic models. It feels like identity. It can also become the frame through which new information is processed. This is how learned patterns operate. It’s how stories sink in. Which is great, unless you don’t know it’s a story.

Awareness is the mechanism that changes this. When an automatic narrative is surfaced and examined deliberately, it moves from fast subcortical processing into slower prefrontal processing, where it can be evaluated against current evidence rather than past conditioning. That is basic cognitive processing. Not therapy. It’s the first step toward updating a model that may no longer be accurate.

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So should I be more pessimistic?

No, just be accurate.

Looking at a situation clearly, without the pressure to spin it positive or catastrophise it negative, is less cognitively expensive than either extreme. It also produces better information. You see what is actually happening. You can assess what requires a response and what does not. Your threat detection system is calibrated rather than suppressed.

This is what mental strength looks like from a neuroscience perspective: not the absence of negative emotion, but the capacity to encounter difficult information, process it accurately through prefrontal engagement, and respond without being destabilised. The prefrontal-amygdala circuit strengthens with use. Accuracy, practised consistently, builds the cognitive reserve that an automatic positivity default can not.

You can be a natural optimist and have poor mental health. You can be genuinely positive and be running a significant deficit in how you are actually functioning. The WHO’s current definition of mental health is functional: the capacity to cope with the stresses of life, exercise cognitive and emotional capabilities, and realise potential. It says nothing about how you feel. It describes what you can do.

Ask not: “am I positive enough”?

Ask: “Is my current read of this situation accurate? Is this sense of being fine the result of clear assessment, or a reflex I have not examined?”

Those are not pessimistic questions. They are the questions a well-regulated human brain asks. The habit of asking them, regularly and honestly, is closer to genuine mental health than any ratio of positive to negative emotions ever could be.

Positivity, when it is real, is an outcome of that process. Not the evidence of it.

And remember, the most useful thing you can do with a story is know that you are telling one.

When you’re ready to face your fears, send us a message here.

*Read more on identity

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About the authors:

Sara L. Farwell, PhD, is a cognitive neuroscientist, certified nutrition coach and physical fitness instructor, and mentor to professionals and students. She studies and writes about physiology, energy, recovery, and the mind-body axis for sustainable performance and change.

Maciej D. Zatonski, MD, PhD is a double board-certified physician, author, husband, and parent. He is an executive leadership coach specialising in cognitive performance, decision-making, and resilience under pressure in complex, demanding environments.

References:

1. Brown, N. J. L., Sokal, A. D., & Friedman, H. L. (2013). The complex dynamics of wishful thinking: The critical positivity ratio. American Psychologist, 68(9), 801–813. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0032850

2. Fredrickson, B. L., & Losada, M. F. (2013). “Positive affect and the complex dynamics of human flourishing”: Correction to Fredrickson and Losada (2005). American Psychologist, 68(9), 822. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0034435

3. Gross, J. J., & Levenson, R. W. (1997). Hiding feelings: The acute effects of inhibiting negative and positive emotion. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 106(1), 95–103. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-843X.106.1.95

4. Hammond, D., Ong, L. Q., Morstead, T., DeLongis, A., Sin, N. L., & Klaiber, P. (2025). Optimism and depressive symptoms in an adult lifespan sample: evaluating coping in daily life as a mechanism. Psychology & Health, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/08870446.2025.2505909

5. Kuehn A, Calvert ML and James GA (2025) Neuroimaging correlates of psychological resilience: an Open Science systematic review and meta-analysis. Front. Neuroimaging 4:1487888. doi: 10.3389/fnimg.2025.1487888

6. Lee, H., Heller, A. S., van Reekum, C. M., Nelson, B., & Davidson, R. J. (2012). Amygdala-prefrontal coupling underlies individual differences in emotion regulation. NeuroImage, 62(3), 1575–1581. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2012.05.044

7. Maksim, A., Śpiewak, S., Lipp, N., Dużmańska-Misiarczyk, N., Gustaw, G., Rębilas, K., & Strojny, P. (2024). Unrealistic optimism in the eye of the storm: positive bias towards the consequences of COVID-19 during the second and third waves of the pandemic. SAGE Open, 14(4). https://doi.org/10.1177/21582440241290926

8. Menon, V. (2023). 20 years of the default mode network: A review and synthesis. Neuron, 111(16), 2469–2487. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2023.04.023

9. Nes, L. S., & Segerstrom, S. C. (2006). Dispositional Optimism and Coping: A Meta-Analytic Review. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 10(3), 235–251. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327957pspr1003_3

10. Scheier, M. F., & Carver, C. S. (1985). Optimism, coping, and health: Assessment and implications of generalized outcome expectancies. Health Psychology, 4(3), 219–247. https://doi.org/10.1037/0278-6133.4.3.219

11. Sharot, T. (2011). The optimism bias. Current Biology, 21(23), R941–R945. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2011.10.030

12. World Health Organization. (2022). World mental health report: Transforming mental health for all. WHO Press.

Who will she meet?

The prevalence of psychopathy1 in the general adult population is estimated to be around 1.2% when using the Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R)2. However, other studies suggest that this figure could be as high as 4.5%3. Sociopathy, often considered synonymous with Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD), has a prevalence rate of approximately 3.7% in the general population.4 The prevalence of Narcissistic Personality Disorder is estimated to be about 6.2% in the general population.56

It is therefore safe to estimate that at least 1 in every 10 people my daughter will come across in her life can make her life miserable.

Exactly 91% of people who read one of my Substack posts return and read my new posts regularly. It means they must see something of value here. This article of my “Life, dissected” series is dedicated to my daughter, and to all women who are (or were) abused by their partners or spouses or boyfriends.

People typically ignore their suspicions towards a person they have just met for various reasons. Often, because they fill an emotional gap, or because they want to avoid embarrassment, making false accusations, or violating other societal norms.

This natural tendency to be perceived in a particular way by others, is also a window that manipulators use to take advantage of you.

The typical “wiring” of your brain

Many women admit to making “gut-based” decisions, even if they accurately notice (perceive) certain concerning behaviours or actions. Defaulting to emotional reasoning, rather than making fact-based assessments, is those who apply personal values in their decision-making process (often seeking harmony, taking into account “personal circumstances”, aiming to preserve relationships, etc).

In essence - in contrast to most men - women tend to see and hear factual behaviours but automatically revert to emotional decision-making when reacting (or responding) to observed reality. Meanwhile, an average male is the exact opposite: men typically make decisions based on the information they acquire, and what they think or predict might happen. Men are also typically less likely to conform to societal norms.

Who is an empath?

An empath is a person with the ability to sense and feel the emotions of others deeply, often experiencing these emotions as if they were their own. They often feel a strong desire to help and support others.7 Empaths are often sensitive to their surroundings, including the moods of people and the overall atmosphere of a place. Due to the constant influx of emotional stimuli, empaths may require regular solitude to recharge and regain emotional balance, often in nature. 8

Empaths can absorb the emotions of those around them, which can lead to emotional overload, and often have a tendency to feel overwhelmed in crowded or highly stimulating environments.9

Women tend to succumb to emotional reasoning (on average) more often than men, which makes them more vulnerable to abuse. Especially by people with narcissistic tendencies.

Narcissism

Humans “peak” in their narcissism between the ages of 25-35, and this is true for most of us. This is when most people try to be (or show to be) most successful or most competitive, etc. - which makes people lean into their narcissistic tendencies.

Now, on average men are more competitive and eager to portray success than women. When narcissistic tendencies land on an empath (someone who cares), they will essentially feed the narcissist with what they are looking for: attention, validation, perceived credibility… That’s what an empathic person tries to do naturally. A potentially caring and loving woman can easily start to feed and nurture her abuser.

Conmen and fraudsters work exactly like sales people

To close a deal, you have to make a lot of calls. You need to make a lot of pitches to find one buyer. You need to set up a shop in a place with high “traffic” to increase your chances of making a sale.

That is what people with malignant intentions do, too.

In order to con people, scammers need to constantly hunt for new leads. And the modern world, through the prevalent use of apps and social media, makes it easy for ill-motivated people to easily identify and find the most likely candidates for abuse.

Women tend to think all the time, often without realising they are thinking. Their brains rarely stop. They want to believe that people they meet are honest. They assume that when they put themselves out, share their vulnerabilities, and volunteer information about themselves, it will help them find the right partner. And they are right to do so - that’s how humans build relationships. But this is also what various freaks exploit.

In the meantime, while honest women are busy trying to build meaningful relationships, frauds and freaks are using this time to surround themselves with honest people, to get even more of an unfair advantage over their victims.

Before we go to the next part, here is a fun fact:

Both, men and women (in wealthy Western societies) enjoy watching crime TV shows. What is interesting, is that most men put themselves in the shoes of the detective solving the crime, while most females put themselves in the shoes of the victim10…

Pause and think about the implications of the sentence above…

What are the major signs that you might be manipulated?

Here are some strong warnings and red flags:

Someone starts to isolate you from your environment

If you spot someone who is trying to cut you off from your family, from your parents, siblings or even children, if somebody tries to prevent you from speaking to your work colleagues, etc. it is usually because they are trying to hide something that they are not worried about YOU discovering (as you were carefully targeted), but they worry about your mother or brother finding out the truth.

The reason is that if you were a “target”, the abuser will know they can control you, but they will be unable to control others.

There is a formula (process) used in sales to convert a potential client to a buyer11. This can be done do any person, as long as you understand the levers that make them work. Once of those processes is called KLT.

Read more

I should really get out of bed.

I should tell my partner about that.

I should really remember that.

I should never do that again.

I know I should exercise.

I know I should practice self-care.

I should get back to the gym.

I should read more.

I should talk less.

I should drink more water.

I should stop scrolling.

I should ask for a raise.

I should study.

I should get a new job.

I should really get off the couch.

I should stop drinking alcohol.

I should walk the dog.

I know I should call my mom.

I know I should schedule a doctor’s appointment.

I know I should …

And that’s just a few. From the week!

Do you ever have these thoughts?

Of course you do! And you already know they hold you back, physically, mentally, and emotionally.

We know what we should do. Or what we think we’re “supposed” to do. So why don’t we just do it?

The moment you think “I should”, you’ve already lost. “Should” does not signal a plan or a commitment or a negotiation or an intention.

You might feel enlightened or proud that you’ve recognized a flaw or something you want to improve. Or you might feel temporarily energetic and motivated – but then the action still doesn’t happen.

So what’s going on?

Words don’t matter

Understanding and producing spoken and written language is a fairly recently evolved cognitive process, and we have really only started to understand language processing on a neural level within the last 150 years. What is clear is that the brain does not understand words, at least not in the way we think. We take in “information” and the brain translates it into energy states, patterns of electrochemical activity, predictions, and felt bodily states. Those physical sensations are then re-interpreted as thoughts and emotions, and they largely dictate our decisions and behaviour (unless we train ourselves out of that). There’s a famous neuroscientist, Antonio Damasio, who is one of the first to show that cognition is inseparable from the body. Every mental event has a physical correlate. You can experience this if you simply imagine standing in line for your favourite ride at an amusement park – you might notice a change in your breathing, muscle tension, sensations in your fingers or toes, sweat response. There are also underlying changes in your autonomic tone and hormonal state with this simple imagination exercise or mental event. Damasio called these “somatic markers”, or those physical states that lead to emotions and guide our decision-making before our conscious reasoning even enters the picture.

So when you think you think the word “should”, your brain doesn’t process a linguistic input. It converts your physical experience – of fear, laziness, sleepiness, tiredness – into a word that will preserve the energy you think it will take to overcome. Because of this energy gap, cognitively speaking, “should” is a reaction to a low-grade threat.

Lisa Feldman Barrett’s theory of constructed emotion builds on this. Our brains are prediction machines, constantly running forward models of what the body is likely to need next. When you think “should”, it doesn’t file it under a future desirable action. It files it under an unresolved deficit and causes a stress response.

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Interesting – so I’m feeling something that isn’t real?

Yeah! Like most things.

The body responds to your perceived gap between what you are doing and what you “should” be doing the same way it will respond to a mild threat. The sympathetic nervous system is activated, there is a rise in cortisol, and attentional focus narrows. But you probably won’t notice most of this. Cognitively, you’ve associated a hypothetical task – the gym, the conversation, the study session – with a stress response. And your brain, whose primary driver is to protect you from threat, now has a very “good” (convenient) reason to avoid it.

This is a mechanism behind what researchers Fuschia Sirois and Timothy Pychyl describe for procrastination as an emotional regulation problem (and we agree). Delaying is the brain’s short-term strategy for escaping a negative affective state. The “should” itself is enough to create that state. Avoidance is a downstream consequence.

There’s a psychological theory coined by psychologist E Tory Higgins around this called the “self-discrepancy theory”, which is basically the gap between your actual self and who you believe you’re “supposed” to be. This consistently produces feelings of anxiousness and inhibition. Every “should” is a reminder and every reminder widens that gap. And that’s a trap!

The more you should, the worse you feel, the harder it becomes to act, and the more evidence your brain collects that you are someone who doesn’t follow through.

There is no such thing as “should”.

Should you get out of bed? Yes and hell no.

Should you go for a walk? Of course, and absolutely not.

There are only your priorities and what matters to you.

“Should” is like the energy loophole. It’s a clever way for your brain to convince you that the energy it will take to get up off the couch is too much or isn’t worth it. It creates the feeling of having engaged with the problem, without any of the cost of actually solving it. Psychologist Roy Baumeister’s research on self-regulation shows how the very act of this mental negotiation, “I should, but…” depletes the same cognitive resources you would need to actually act.

Bluma Zeigarnik’s classic finding adds another point to this. Incomplete tasks and unresolved intentions create persistent cognitive drain. Open loops continue drawing on your mental bandwidth until they are closed.

“Should” takes energy. A lot of it.

What do I do?

Perhaps replace the “s” word with the “f” word and do it anyway.

“I should go to the gym” becomes “I’m f**ing going to exercise.”

You already know what to do. The question is what prevents you from doing it.

Let’s help your brain out.

What do you see, not in words, when you hear or read “I should go to the gym”?

Do you imagine yourself laying in bed, or sitting on the couch, or scrolling?

Now – what do you see, in pictures, when you hear or read “I’m [bleeping] going to exercise.”

Do you imagine yourself getting up, moving faster, putting shoes on?

What does it feel like? Do you feel lighter? More “inspired” or “motivated”?

See how those physical sensations come into play?

This shift in language processing allows us to reorient ourselves and reclaim our agency. Research on implementation intentions consistently shows that specifying when, where, and how an action will happen (goals!) will increase follow-through at least 2-3x. You move into commitment and away from unhelpful loops.

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The best exercises to grow your glutes

Here’s another example.

Suppose you want to know what exercises you “should” be doing to achieve a particular physical look in your glutes. You start scrolling or asking questions in your AI of choice. An hour later, you’ve settled on an answer that feels good. But will you do it?

If you are asking that question, “what exercise should I do for _____?” chances are you likely already know the answer. Clever derivations are “what are the best exercises for [enter condition] or “best foods to eat for toned abs”.

First, moving your body is a good thing. Safely, appropriately, and with intention.

Next, break the goal up, and be realistic. If you want to “grow your glutes”, understand what your physical limitations and requirements will be to achieve that within a specific time frame. If you know exercises like squats and deadlifts and kickbacks and hip thrusts work the gluteus muscles, then what question are you really asking? What answer are you looking for? How much additional cognitive energy are you willing to spend on piecing together an answer for what you “should” do, instead of just doing something?

You have a choice

Go back to the energy drain that happens when things remain open. If you reframe “should” as that you’re going to do it now, or you are actually doing it now, that closes that loop and saves you (a ton of) energy. You can also choose not to do it, though. You can reframe to “I will not be doing this” or “I will not be doing this now / today” and that will close the loop as well. “Should” leaves it permanently open. The point is to decide, and not to decide based on your feelings alone. And if you’ve already made that decision, you’ll save yourself a lot of headache – literally.

“Should” is straddling identity. It’s straddling commitment. It’s signaling that there’s a decision to be made, and the sooner it’s made, the better. No one likes sitting in the waiting room longer than they have to, right?

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Mental strength takes practice

The next time you notice yourself thinking you “should” do something, thank your brain for flagging it, and decide to do it in the moment, or decide not to do it at all. Close the loop, and refocus on what you need to accomplish next.

Building mental strength means overcoming that kind of resistance. Do not let the weight of deferred “shoulds” drag you down.

Cut the S word and move forward.

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About the authors

Sara L. Farwell, PhD, is a cognitive scientist, certified nutrition coach and physical fitness instructor, and mentor to professions and students. She studies and writes about physiology, energy, recovery, and the mind–body axis for sustainable performance and change.

Maciej D. Zatonski, MD, PhD is a double board-certified physician, author, husband, and parent. He is an executive leadership coach specialising in cognitive performance, decision-making, and resilience under pressure and in complex, demanding environments.

References

Damasio, A. R. (1994). Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. Putnam.

Barrett, L. F. (2017). How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Kodden, B. (2020). The Art of Sustainable Performance: The Zeigarnik Effect. In: The Art of Sustainable Performance. SpringerBriefs in Business. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46463-9_10

Sirois, F. and Pychyl, T. (2013), Procrastination and the Priority of Short-Term Mood Regulation: Consequences for Future Self. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 7: 115-127. https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12011

Zeigarnik, B. (1927). Über das Behalten von erledigten und unerledigten Handlungen. Psychologische Forschung, 9, 1–85.

Gollwitzer, P. M. (1999). Implementation intentions: Strong effects of simple plans. American Psychologist, 54(7), 493–503.

Baumeister, R. F., Bratslavsky, E., Muraven, M., & Tice, D. M. (1998). Ego depletion: is the active self a limited resource?. Journal of personality and social psychology, 74(5), 1252–1265. https://doi.org/10.1037//0022-3514.74.5.1252

Bosse, T., Jonker, C. M., & Treur, J. (2008). Formalization of Damasio's theory of emotion, feeling and core consciousness. Consciousness and cognition, 17(1), 94–113. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2007.06.006