Episode 23: Psychography

In this shorter yet jam-packed episode, Mordecai and JD speculate on the mind and the body and how that contributes with letting go.

Books/Writers Referenced:
Bill Bryson - The Body: A Guide for Occupants

Michael A. Singer - The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself

David R. Hawkins - Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender (Not sure if this is the correct book)

Barry Magid - Ordinary Mind: Exploring the Common Ground of Zen and Psychotherapy (Not sure if this is the correct book)

Podcast:

The Tim Ferriss Show #485: Jerry Seinfeld — A Comedy Legend’s Systems, Routines, and Methods for Success

Resources:

Misophonia Institute: https://misophoniainstitute.org/

Yeiush as mentioned by JD Stettin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yeiush

Timestamps:
0:01 - 4:40  Misophonia and Physical Response

4:41 - 8:00   When Physical Response Becomes Emotional

8:01 - 12:37 Where's the Line?

12:38 - 16:04 Learning Responses and Letting Go

16:05 - 18:26 Coaching or Psychotherapy?

18:27 - 22:56 Playing Whack-A-Mole

22:57 - 26:51 Embracing Yeiush

Transcript

Mordecai Rosenberg: 0:00

All right, JD we continue on the path, another step. Hopefully a step forward, you know, a couple steps to the side. But it's all good. It's a delight to be here with you again.

JD Stettin: 0:14

Thanks. Likewise, definitely one of the high points of the week.

Mordecai Rosenberg: 0:17

Awesome. So I'm gonna go a little bit off script. I want to share something that I learned just yesterday, which is kind of off script of the book. I wanted to get your thoughts on it and see if there might be application. I have something called misophonia. So are you familiar with what misophonia is?

JD Stettin: 0:41

I am actually. One of my good friends just discovered this about herself over the last year or so.

Mordecai Rosenberg: 0:49

So misophonia, for anyone who doesn't know, is this thing where it's an ultra sensitivity to certain sounds. A lot of times for some reason eating sounds are a big trigger for people. For some people, it could be sounds like breathing or sniffling. A lot of people get annoyed by certain sounds, but here the emotion that's triggered is actually rage or anger, like extreme anger and fight or flight. It starts for a lot of people when they're young. For me, I think it was probably around nine or 10 years old. You can imagine it makes you a really fun companion around the family dinner, when you're shooting dirty looks at everyone who chews. So it's tough. I think mine has reduced over the course of 30 plus years, but it's an annoyance for people around the person who has it. It's also something is a huge burden for the person who has it. You just feel like an asshole because you can't be sitting at a meal. It also happens to be the people that you're closest with, the people who you spend the most time with, are the people who you're sensitive to. So a total stranger might not trigger it, but your child, or your parent, or your spouse will more likely. We found this guy who has something called the Misophonia Institute. He has a very high success rate of significantly reducing the misophonia, if not eliminating it. I had a session with him yesterday. He said it's very interesting that what happens in your brain is you start with the triggering thing, let's say it's crunching. You think that alone leads to the emotional reaction, that leads to the anger. Really, there's a physical reflex first. He did an exercise where he was playing different eating sounds over Zoom and he said "Alright, where do you where do you feel that in your body?" And for me, it was in my jaw. I could feel it tighten. So he said, "Perfect. That's great!" What your body does is basically looks to your physical reflex to determine the appropriate emotional response. So your brain says "I heard this crunching noise. Let me see what happens. Oh, he's tightening his jaw. Alright, that means get angry." His contention is that if you just focus on reducing the physical reflex, then your brain will unlearn that emotional response. The jaw happens to be one muscle that you can control. If your back gets tight, it's a little harder to loosen. But your jaw you can loosen. He said you start with some background noise to reduce the intensity of the experience. Then when you hear that crunching, just loosen your jaw. He expects for me that within one to four weeks it would be completely eliminated. Which is shocking.

JD Stettin: 4:39

Wow. I mean, you've had that since you were a kid, right?

Mordecai Rosenberg: 4:42

Yeah, since probably eight, nine ten, something like that.

JD Stettin: 4:44

Wow.

Mordecai Rosenberg: 4:45

Yeah. So it made me think about this idea that there's actually a physical response first. There's a physical reflex, and then that leads to the emotional response. I thought that was very interesting and maybe more broadly applicable. I remember hearing Jerry Seinfeld interviewed on a Tim Ferriss podcast. He said the mind is of infinite wisdom and capability. Right? But the brain is a dumb monkey. And you can train the brain, you can trick it. I've had experiences where I feel stressed and my shoulders and back get tight. Then you'll get a massage and your back is loose, and all of a sudden you feel better. You realize, oh, actually, I wasn't stressed. It's just that my back was tight so my brain thought that I must be stressed. I'm wondering if with this letting go method, you should pay attention to the physical response first and catch that. It's almost instantaneous. It's like 200 milliseconds or something. It looks instantaneous, in terms of the response. But notice that response. I wonder if you can just focus on where are you feeling that right away. Not five minutes later, but right at that moment of the trigger, right? Is there a physical reflex, and if there is, you can focus on just that. It's really what he talks about in Untethered Soul. He says when you feel that you should loosen your heart and breathe into it. But I never thought about that as specific. I took that as general advice, like just try to loosen around and you don't know where. Like where? In my chest? Or my what? What am I loosening? But if you can identify an actual physical reflex, maybe there's something there. There's a gateway, that you can kind of short circuit to lessen, at the very least, maybe less than the intensity of the emotional response. So that's a long winded explanation. But what are your thoughts about that?

JD Stettin: 7:18

I think it's really interesting. And I think that the distinction that we often make or have inherited in my mind between, you know, mind and body. I mean, we can't really think about these things independently. I know you're reading the Bill Bryson book about the human body. Even the way that so often our senses, or our sense organs, kind of project information as much as they take it in. So what we see is as much what our minds think we're supposed to see as it is what's actually out there.

Mordecai Rosenberg: 8:00

Right.

JD Stettin: 8:01

And so too, in terms of this input and what it means with mind body emotion, we talk about these sometimes as if they're three different things. But really where do you draw the line between front and back, like on a coin? Okay, front is front, back is back. But then what's the side of the coin? Where is the line between front and back? It's very hard to distinguish. And, to your point, this idea of breathing and taking a breath. I feel like for so long in my life people kind of gave folk advice of "Oh, if you're upset, just take some breaths". It's like, what, why, what is that? I'm always breathing anyway. What does it matter? And you realize to your point, or to this Misophonia Institute guys point, there really is this interplay between what our bodies do, how they respond, what sensory organs are working, what information they're putting in and taking out. By doing something as simple as maybe breathing into a certain spot in our bodies, we really are letting go. In some ways, and certainly in Untethered Soul, I think his version of the of the letting go process really is breathing in to whatever the difficult feeling or experience is.

Mordecai Rosenberg: 9:33

Yeah. Right. I think you're right. It's hard to know where the line is between one and the other. But maybe as an exercise like you could see there are certain things that are going to trigger it. Maybe you can become a little more keen to the subtle ones. Maybe it's watching a TV show and you see something that triggers. So that's not going to be like to be a very strong emotional response. But there'll be some emotional response. Where do you feel that in your body? Is there something right then where you know you are triggered. You can also probably trigger it yourself if there are experiences that you've had. Let's say, I don't know, like, we both come from divorced families, You can read a story about like a divorced family or like what a kid went through and trigger some amount of recreations. Where did you feel that right right away? Maybe you feel yourself clench your fists, you notice your arms get tight, or maybe it's your feet. You just clench your feet, or they get tight. But if you could add that in, I feel like it would actually totally open up access to this letting go and this Michael Singer method because now you actually have something specific. If I know that, oh, I'm hearing this, let me watch my jaw. Let me just watch it and then do it. And I can do it for for a few minutes and then stop. I can play some background noise to help myself. People have told me before to have a mantra, like "I am okay" or "this noise is not a threat" or whatever. Okay, I'm doing that, but I still feel pissed off about hearing it, you know. So, it might be just interesting to experiment with and see. I also I didn't realize it was my jaw. When he was doing it I thought it was gonna be like my back and shoulders. Then I thought maybe was my lips, like I push my lips together. But he figured out no, it's actually the jaw and your lips are out. Once you're clenching your jaw, your lips will move together. But there could be some very micro reflexes that are happening without your awareness, and you can just you can really just head it off at the pass by by focusing on those.

JD Stettin: 12:38

Well, that's kind of an interesting segue into where we talked about starting today, which is the end of chapter 16, from last week about the psychotherapy versus the letting go method. Hawkins has some very particular ideas about that. But why I thought to bring us into there now is because so much of the therapy practice I've been engaged in the last two and a half years is about kind of locating these sensations in your body. And I remember the first many months when my therapist would ask or would notice that I was in some way reacting to and was triggered by something. She'd be like, let's take a pause. Where do you feel that, what do you feel? And at first, it was really hard. I was sort of like, I don't know, I mean, I know I'm feeling something. But where is it? And with practice and mindfulness over the last two and a half years, I've gotten better . To your point, I wouldn't think or know it was my jaw, or notice for me there's certain emotions that feel like the lower part of my abdomen rolled in on itself. And then I noticed that my forearms and hands start to have extra energy, like they want to like squeeze or move or do something. And it's really interesting. Because once you locate that, I think part of how it works or what happens is when we can notice that and pay attention to the physical body, it's a way of getting out of this, to paraphrase the Seinfeld quote, it's a way of getting out of the monkey brain or mind or whatever part of us that is, and focusing in on kind of the corporeal reality. It's like, oh, okay, body, blood, breath. And in a way, it's maybe getting in touch or in tune with the parts of us that are just as much if not more, quote, unquote, us that when we're so lost in our chattering minds, we forget about. Because, you know, we're not busy pumping blood through our body, we're not checking in on our nervous system, we in terms of the conscious mind, we don't even know how that stuff works, let alone are we controlling it. But by paying attention to it, it's also a way of just reconnecting with kind of our own reality and presence. There are probably many reasons or explanations for how and why it's so powerful, or it works. But there's something really neat about just kind of tuning back into reality, because most of the times whatever the mind is doing, or saying, and, you know, in your misophonia example, whatever thoughts your mind is coming up with for how like annoying or horrific or offensive these sounds are, all these people in your life, your loved ones who are doing these terrible sounds to bother you. Like, that's a story. And when you check in on the reality, it's like, okay, my jaw is tight. And as you breathe, you're just we're just getting in touch with reality, in a way.

Mordecai Rosenberg: 16:07

Yeah, I think that's right. So I have a question. So that kind of therapy you're describing, where you're becoming aware of where you're experiencing something in your body. Would you consider that psychotherapy, or would you consider that more like, coaching almost?

JD Stettin: 16:25

Yeah, it's a good question. My therapist does a lot of different things and has training, I guess, in a bunch of modalities. I think it sounded like, from rereading this chapter, Hawkins is talking about maybe a very particular kind of like classical Western psychotherapy. And I don't know enough about it because I don't remember. I listened to it again last night, but I don't remember him labeling a particular sub-genre of it or something. But it was an interesting chapter to revisit, especially in light of us both reading or having read the Barry Magid book. He's a Zen priest of some kind as well as a classical like, Freudian psychoanalyst. I don't know if psychoanalysis is the kind of therapy that Hawkins is referring to or not. But hearing Magid talk about it, to him psychoanalysis and Zen are in a lot of ways similar and doing the same kind of work. So, you know, I don't know exactly who Hawkins is pointing the finger at and I also don't know exactly what you would necessarily call the kind of therapy I do. But for what its worth, my therapist is a licensed therapist, even if she also does kind of coaching things. I think for her this kind of somatic experience is one of the names for what we do. That is a type of therapy that is gaining in, I think, momentum and popularity, certainly among my friends circle and people reading. Maybe it's in the Austin podcast or biohacker scene seen for sure. But it's having its moment, it would seem, these days.

Mordecai Rosenberg: 18:27

I've done a lot of, in my past, a bunch of years of talk therapy, probably more typical therapy. And it was probably helpful for a period of time. But one of the things that I didn't like was that you felt like you were always trying to find the next thing that's wrong with you. I remember I would kind of deal with an issue and feel like, alright, I think now we're done. And the therapist would say, alright, well, what about this? I think once we hit this issue, then you'll be done, you'll have made it. But it's never just that. Then there's another issue, and it's very much looking at your past trying to like, it's judging your past. It's judging others and showing how you were wronged or where trauma came from. Hawkins says really that therapy and letting go is two different paradigms, that the object objective of psychotherapy is to replace unsatisfactory mental programs with more satisfactory ones. In contrast, the objective of letting go is the elimination of limiting mental and emotional programs. It's not just about, oh let me see how I can reframe what happened to me in the past so I can hit that Whack-a-Mole. Right? But it's how do I just eliminate that emotional trigger? You don't even have to go deep into the cause of it, you're just you're actually rewiring. If somebody's like, thats what we started with was that term of eliminating the emotional response. I think that's what you're after. That's kind of like that freedom to just be able to experience whatever you experienced without it really pulling you pulling you down.

JD Stettin: 20:38

Yeah. In going over this chapter, the way he talks about the kind of blaming, pointing finger, problem solving, it reminded me actually of why I think I was so hesitant to do therapy for so many years, because that was my impression.

Mordecai Rosenberg: 20:58

Yeah.

JD Stettin: 21:01

Of what of what it was all about. And that just felt like, I don't know, just that much less interesting to me. I just didn't understand. It felt like it was this kind of just this loop, that, okay, so you solve one problem and then the Whack-a-Mole another one pops up. You figure out where this trauma comes from and you unlock another. It's this idea of just kind of getting better at, and I forget exactly how he phrases it, but it's almost like just getting a little better at being in the ego in the world, rather than kind of chipping away at the notions of maybe the ego itself, or why we want any of the things. It kind of reminds me a little bit of some of my feelings towards some of the, you know, personal development self help stuff over the last six, seven years, where it's like, you're just replacing one set of problems for for another. You know, so you get a little better at work, so you're making more money, but what is not solved. Or you have a slightly better relationship, it just kind of catapults you into a different realm. Whereas, the letting go method certainly makes pretty bold claims about being able to undo the notions of problems or the ability to even have them in some in some kind of big, big way. It feels like a very different take. Although just thinking about the letting go method, this anecdote he tells in the next chapter talks about some guy at a company who was causing all this commotion and hubbub and trouble. He was driving to work and anticipating that this guy was going to make a big scene at the board meeting and really getting worked up about it. Then he just at some point in his car ride decides he's just going to let it go. He thinks about this person as a human, and he's scared, and he has all these fears. So he kind of lets go of his need for this guy to be anything other than what he is, which is a troublemaker at work. And sure enough, he gets to the office and the Secretary tells him that the troublemaker came in and said he was actually totally fine with everything and wasn't going to disrupt the board meeting, and this interesting way in which when he let go of his need to solve the problem, it solved itself. And I was just thinking, as I was listening to it, of all these like neat and tidy story examples. Then it occurred to me I was like, oh my god, I just had one of that in my life last night, which got even better this morning. So one of my closest friends, and absolutely absolutely brilliant guy, totally unconventional. He's a math PhD. But he's had like jobs in anything from home health care to making pizza to cryptocurrency consulting. He's out there. He's amazing. His crypto startup, like so many others in the last few months, hit rock bottom. Investors pulled out so he lost his job in the first week of July. At first it was a little bit, I mean, he knew the end was near a lot of people in crypto saw this coming or felt at least over May and June. And he was sort of like, okay, I knew this would happen. I thought I had a couple of more months but it's fine and maybe I will just lease out my apartment and go live with family or travel or just kind of bum around. He really completely gave up. The term that comes to mind from our upbringing is definitely like Yeiush, which is a legalistic term in Talmud. I guess for me it is for letting go, relinquishing, like completely giving up your claim to an item, an event, an outcome. And, like the last few weeks, he's been just totally yeah. And sure enough, out of nowhere, he did nothing proactive. I can assure you, he did nothing. And he just got two teaching jobs at UT, and Texas University, Texas State in San Marcus. He's going to be working like 50% fewer hours and making 90-95% as much as he was at this consulting thing. And it literally fell into his lap. We knew about the UT gig, and then the San Marcus thing just came up. Then just this morning, he texted me that there was some salary cap they originally had but then they offered him two more classes and now it's triple what he thought he was going to make. like, what a what a wild... Anyway, as I was kind of

Mordecai Rosenberg: 26:15

Wow! grumbling to myself about these examples that Hawkins gives us like, well, that's a pretty nice one. Yeah, that's a great one. Yeah, just for that letting go of expectations. So alright. JD in our experiments with shortening our episodes, why don't we call it at this and then we can, we can pick it up for another one.

JD Stettin: 26:46

That sounds good. Stay perplexed people. We will be back