ASM224 You're a Miracle (and a Pain in the Ass) Part 2

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[Music] welcome to part two of hillary mcbride's interview of science mike about his new book you were a miracle and a pain in the ass you know this the the conversation we're having about feelings and being faithful to our feelings makes me think a little bit about one of the things that seems to be running through this book a theme right i've mentioned a few ideas that i have about themes already and and how that wakes something us and up in us but for me a theme that really stuck out in the book was to put it maybe so concisely or long-windedly hear all the things that are going on inside of you because of evolution and your historical life experiences that make you you but most of it you have no clue about but there's this like almost like you're peeling back the curtain for us on what it means to be human and what's going on on the inside and and usually when i intersect with that conversation with people it's because they come into therapy and they're asking the question that you you pose in the book several times why did i do that as if we're aware that something is happening through us and to us but we seem in some ways unwilling to admit that our experiences maybe the ones we had growing up or relationships with caregivers or emotions play as big of a role in our life as they actually do so what i'm curious about is why it's so hard for us to admit or accept that what we've been through and how we've evolved plays such a significant role in who we are now in this moment why is it hard for us to say wow my childhood really did affect me or to say wow yeah i'm i'm a lot more like this branch of the animal kingdom that i wish that i was what's going on there when it's hard for us to name that or admit that you know i came up with a metaphor after the book was done at my one regret as i wish i could have put this sentence in the book well now's your chance let it shine baby everything western people identify themselves as could fit in a shot glass like all the parts of our brain and our bodies that are involved in our cognitive experience and our moment-to-moment consciousness and language and philosophy would fit in a shot glass it is a tiny fraction of your overall brain body system tiny it's a tiny fraction of the brain much less the body i mean my goodness and the way i look at it and this is a little heady but we had a movement called the enlightenment and some things that led to the enlightenment and then after the alignment the enlightenment was an inflection point at which point a hired hand meaning our conscious minds led some kind of a revolt and took over bodies all over the world and they have been orchestrating this system ever since where we have privileged a certain way of thinking and knowing which has been around for like eight seconds in evolutionary history as being the best way right and there's some cool things about it um absolutely we have a prefrontal cortex for a reason we have an orbito frontal cortex for a reason we have a neocortex for a reason they do interesting things to help us survive we have an incredible capacity to think about the future we have an incredible ability to build detailed images of the past although there that recollection will be whatever suits us best in the moment um but ultimately the way we've been trained to live in that tiny part of our bodies in western society is also the seat of this dilemma of why our thoughts and feelings and actions so seem to surprise us because we've been trained to take to its most ridiculous extreme a natural system it is by design we're aware of very little because our bodies didn't need a neocortex to walk we could walk long before we had brains this size our bodies doesn't need a neocortex to breathe or to digest food or to eat food for that matter or make most of our life doesn't need the big fancy brains we have so our bodies very cleverly architected themselves in a way that let our thinking brain kind of sit and daydream and plan while the body took care of everything else uh and then the enlightenment comes along and we go oh the dangering part of the brain that's the whole person the rest of it is a machine that carries the person and uh and that's why we're a huge reason of why we're so unhappy because then we get confused when the ancient wisdom of our bodies uh wants to eat for comfort because our thinking brain is ignoring our stress or when our thinking brains design an industrial food system that creates super normal stimulus that absolutely overrides our survival mechanisms and leads us into compulsion and addiction and then we're confused why the animal part of our body wants to eat the food our science created to be irresistible we when we start to unlearn this radical association of our cognitive and conscious experience with our entire experience we begin to suffer less under the effects of that dissociation that's um i write about emotional awareness and embodiment which by the way my embodiment journey is much less far along than my emotional awareness journey but starting to lean into those things is starting to help me escape some of those cycles i love to start with food because it's my number one compulsive comforting mechanism but here in a pandemic i have found i have a tremendous desire for cookies and i will go to the kitchen and i will have a very reasonable amount of cookies i will have two cookies and then i will go sit back at my desk and i will work some more and then i will start to feel bored or anxious and my wonderful body will go you know what made you happy a few minutes ago a couple of cookies and then i get up and i go eat two more cookies which is a reasonable amount of cookies and i come sit back down and somewhere 12 or 14 cookies two at a time i realize wow i mean a lot of cookies and what leads us to frustration is to say god damn it why am i eating so many cookies you stupid stupid stupid self and what i've learned to do is go oh my gosh body thank you for trying to help me happy when i'm anxious i understand that you are sending me to get cookies because i'm unhappy and you want us to be happy and good for you now i am uh in a different position than you body i have a little more access to the neocortex and i know what this is going to do to my heart health if i ate 24 cookies a day every day so i'm going to now take a moment to reflect on why i want the cookies at all and at first that's not obvious to me so i'll get up from my desk and i'll go sit in my office chair and i'll say body what are we feeling and body will go i don't know i think some cookies would be nice and i go okay what else are we feeling let's look let's look around and sure enough i will find that i typically feel anxious or worried and then those don't really tell me anything other than i'm uncertain about the future um and so then i say okay what do i feel past that and i start to scan my body and then i will find almost inevitably that i'm either sad and i will cry or i am afraid and i found some in a strange way sadness needs to like express itself but for me if i say gosh i'm afraid that usually dispels a lot of it or i'm angry and sometimes i have to sit and be angry and name the things i'm angry about and the injustices i see that frustrate me and just and then say you know what i should be angry about people dying unnecessarily and i'm proud of myself for being angry about that and now how can i chill that anger into meaningful action and then sometimes i'll realize i'm actually lonely and then i will get up and instead of going to the kitchen i will go to the living room and i will go up to my wife and i will say i feel lonely and i have a hug and that encapsulates the entire process of what i'm talking about here when we live in the shot glass so to speak we're unaware of all the things our body is trying to do not to hurt us but to help us but our poor body is from a different time our poor body doesn't understand ip addresses or 4k screens or or kcals our bodies only understand the world is difficult and i know how to seek shelter and comfort and food and physical contact with others and when we let our body have its wisdom and then work with it and guide it we don't feel so trapped in this pattern of why did i do that instead we learn that our body was trying to tell us something the whole time and if we listen we are less prone to those medicated behaviors and by the way don't hear me wrong i still ate cake last night and i just knew i was eating cake because i was sitting with my family and it was easter and we wanted to celebrate with some cake and that was okay and when i have 24 cookies in a day that's okay the trick is that there is no trick and simply fostering an awareness over time and trying to accept ourselves as we gently try to guide ourselves into patterns that better support our goals around health and relationships in that answer you somehow managed to cover intuitive eating emotion regulation theory um the evolution of our psychobiology as a human species i think you just about covered it all and somehow slipped in there the key phrase that you wish was in the book [Laughter] i'm i'm uh speechless i this is the time for the standing ovation that i'd like to give you while i'm sitting in my office mike that was exquisite wow i like to talk [Laughter] oh i so love talking oh my gosh well then let's give you something else to talk about here i came ready with all sorts of things i wanted to know and this is your time to shine and you are doing it brilliantly okay here's another question i have uh a quote from the book in the chapter where you're talking about emotions you say well i'll back up you're referencing a moment we had together at this one of these men's retreats where i'm talking about emotion and defenses against emotion and how that actually just keeps us away from ourselves right it keeps us yeah kind of temporarily away from the pain that we've been through but more more long-term keeps us away from knowing ourselves and being present so you say so i made a joke i said intellectualization and humor are my entire public platform and everyone in the room laughed and i felt a lot better end quote so you're talking about your relationship with intellectualization as a strategy to get away from feeling and you and i both know and love learning right as a strategy but also is something we're passionate about we find interesting we love information we love to share information we regularly do that with a public audience and with each other for fun so information and learning and intellectuality are important for both of us and in fact i could say that this whole book is about communicating information you might even call the book the writing of it and the reading of it an intellectual pursuit so with with a human heart-centered healing kind of end game can you talk about a relationship to information culturally and how relating to information loving learning loving information can both be educative and defensive as a strategy and maybe how we know when education is something that is taking us closer to ourselves and other people or is like this beautiful expression of who we naturally are or is something that gets in the way of being with ourselves what a fantastic question i think that might be the best question anyone has ever asked me oh ever oh my gosh well i'm over here blushing that's great i noticed something i went back and listened uh because someone sent it to me um oh yeah i was recently i went back on pete holmes you made it weird and when i first went on pete's show in 2014 or whatever it was i didn't even have any podcasts i was not a podcaster back then and i listened to myself and um i could hear some differences wow um i was emotional but often in a way i would recognize now as performatively so and i was uh boy i just drowned people in information and the tone of my voice was somehow different than it is now and i went and listened to another couple of things and somewhere in the process of um after that men's retreat where you identified um humor and intellectualization the way i communicate with friends and the public shifted like the literal tone of my voice huh and i've noticed here recently um and i felt embarrassed by this at first was that a lot of people around the same time on social media started calling me uh pandemic mr rogers or today mr rogers but mr rogers kept coming up over and over and i felt so mixed about that because i think mr rogers is one of the the greatest media figures we have ever had because he did so much to educate people about feelings and emotionality and from everything we can tell did it because he genuinely lived it which i particularly admire and uh and i i i'm too gen x don't want to be anybody's copy yet but what uh what brings me to mr rogers in the context of that question is i think learning an intellect without trying to get away from ourselves someone like mr rogers did really well he shared information a lot with children but the goal of him sharing information was neither to make him look or feel smart or superior to others nor to help himself nor the children watching escape from their feelings and so often in my life when i've had an orientation towards information acquisition or sharing it has been to allow myself an audience or both to escape a feeling so at the very beginning of my public work is i would discuss the brain's relationship to theology the reason i would do that would be to allow someone moving through a faith transition to for a moment assume a more front of the brain posture towards that information and for a moment to suffer less because what in moving neuromechanically towards the front of the brain they're experiencing less affect their experience less feeling which in the moment is a relief right and there's nothing wrong with that but when it becomes a pattern when we constantly seek to to acquire and share information to escape our feelings we move into a pattern that can ultimately lead us to being less well i see that right now with people absorbing and digesting information about covid19 uh the information we get day by day is typically not going to be illuminating to someone who's not a virologist or an epidemiologist but that's pursuit of knowing the latest study in the latest death toll becomes simply a way in which we are mindlessly managing our feelings instead of actually feeling them and what i have found more recently more often and not always is that when i share information it is actually to lead myself an audience or both into a place of more affect and more intuitive awareness and not less and i think our wonderful intellects for which i am so grateful and think are just a tremendous part of our species i mean what would we do without poetry i still think that these things are more valuable when we when we use them to connect more deeply with ourselves instead of escape from ourselves um we have been trained and conditioned to be so terrified of certain feelings uh either societally or personally you know i i'm a person who at my intersection identity anger is encouraged i'm a white man and i'm a person who personally has been terrified of the violent anger of men in my life and so in that experience like i kind of uh uniquely moved to a posture of extreme fear of anger in myself and in other people because i hadn't seen anger done well and so i had learned whenever i felt angry to understand what was happening in my body and my brain and think about that and then just suddenly not feel angry which works great for a moment and there's nothing wrong with these kinds of defensive strategies that they get us through a moment but that pattern over time created that that emotional deficit spending i referenced earlier to the point that i had tremendous reservoirs of repressed anger and repressed resentment from that and that got associated with traumatic events in my past and all that latent energy was sitting on there and because i had to keep that buried i had all kinds of other things i had to bury too it meant that i could cry at a film but not at a funeral it meant that i would go through periods of reduced or no libido i would even go through uh periods of limited impotence uh and that none of these were physiologically in basis this was the pattern of escaping my anger through intellectualization has other costs for the ways that was related to my body and brain system because all of these things happen in very similar areas of our bodies and our brains and if we if we cauterize one eventually we cauterize them all um and so what i've been on this this this pursuit of is um approaching information without detaching from the body to gosh i love learning i just love learning i love sharing information anyone who knows me knows i love that but i'm learning to be aware that if as i read or as i share i go to a certain posture of kind of a hyper verbal focus a hypercognitive focus that maybe it's time to check in and ask my body what my body thinks about this paper and to slow down and that maybe life is not a race to learn and memorize as many things as i possibly can and that maybe there's value and not just learning but also reflecting and sometimes if i learn and reflect before i share instead of simply learn what i share then in some way is of deeper value yes that's all i can say is just yes i i mean two a few things stuck out to me about what you said first is i saw this comparison between the story you just told about the cake and how we were talking about learning the cake isn't bad right but if you're noticing and you're connecting to why you're eating cake you might find out some different information like oh this is about me trying to manage my anxiety or this is a way to connect with my family to take me into this experience that's shared and cultural and uh helps us mark some sort of specialness in this situation so like cake is not bad information learning is not bad but we can get curious and move into what what's going on here without judgment just to know ourselves better and then maybe to give us some options about what we do but another piece that stuck out to me about what you said was the way that you learned that your emotions were were dangerous because of seeing how other people mismanaged theirs and that i think that there is this um this fear that i hear from people sometimes which is like i the only reason that i don't want to go to my emotions is because they're uncomfortable for me without us realizing that sometimes they're uncomfortable for us because other people have hurt us by how they have felt or not felt certain things and it really tears apart this idea that who we are as individuals is really individual we're seeing the in what you're saying the connection between all of us that what happens in our body is shaped and known to us based on the bodies and the stories and our cultural context that are all around us all the time and that to me really feeds back into this principle that you started with that shaped the entire way that you write this book which is if i love myself then then they can love themselves too i know that i'm using different language but to me i think what what i'm hearing you say is we're all connected and when we are more connected to ourselves we can be better connected to other people and that it can undo this aloneness we carry in our life and it can undo the isolation and maybe even begin to to heal the interpersonal and societal fractures that have kept the us and them divides so rigid that's the good stuff that is the good stuff this that's um that's what i learned so quickly knowing you because i just watched you live that i noticed that um i noticed that whenever i talked about justice i had a rescuing fixing orientation and i noticed that you had this different ability to be present and connected during a justice conversation um but to also know your lane in a way that i didn't for a long time and i noticed that [Music] that you have the actual qualifications to advise people well on emotional experiences and yet what i mostly saw you do when people shared their feelings was being present with them and offering a statement of appreciation and safety and that as you did this i saw people i knew in my life begin to change and i thought wow how is hillary changing everyone and then as i kept watching i was like gosh hillary doesn't change anybody hillary is just hillary and then other people go wow that seems nice maybe i'll try it and it was the most wonderful trick except it's not a trick um just seeing that pattern of like hillary's just hillary that's all hillary ever does and in the process of her being her it invites people to be them and it invites people to to notice different things something i've noticed when i have conversations with people or when i'm in a group of people is i watch the cues their bodies send each other and i can watch fears or hurts or anxieties be exchanged or cravings for acceptance or affirmation that i was never aware of before and the reason i'm aware of it is because i'm aware of it in myself now right that i'm aware when someone says something and before i would have gone ah that's no big deal i'm aware actually no my feelings are hurt and um that really i just really believe that that leads to better community and that better community leads to better society um one of my dearest friends i mean one of my absolute closest friends is a man named andre henry and often when andre and i are together andre names the ways in which whiteness and white supremacy are hurting him and hurting his life and sometimes as that happens i'll have a moment where i experience such deep gratitude for the journey that i have been on in trauma therapy that allows me to sit with andre in those moments and really listen and not have to defend the part of my identity that is associated with whiteness and i'm only able to do that because i'm aware of my feelings and i'm aware of andre's feelings and and i've learned to accept myself you know when i read austin channing's i'm still here black dignity in a world made for whiteness part of what i read in that book is the impacts of very large numbers of people being unable to listen to and be aware of their feelings and by and to be clear i'm talking of white people right right as i scanned that sentence on to make sure i was clear about that um that the way in which europeans have been trained to be cognitively oriented ultimately becomes a tool and continue a system because we don't know how to cope with the sense of shame that comes up when someone critiques whiteness which means what we have to talk about and manage our feelings and we need someone else to manage our feelings because god knows i don't know how to manage these feelings of shame and in fact i feel upset with you marginalized person for making me feel this shame because i felt fine four minutes ago so i think what i'm going to do is scold you and then go eat a pie and none of that does anything to make the world a better place when you talk about all of this and when i read your book i see so clearly the relationship between good mental health interventions and racial justice activism and and that there is no such thing as one-way liberation or me without you and how when we are able to be with ourselves we can begin doing the hard work of of repairing the damage that has been done and so i think of your book as as a as a mental health intervention but but as you're talking i also hear it now too as an intervention against all of the forms of inequity that we continue to prop up because it's uncomfortable in us to look at them and our role in them and so for that i am so thankful for this book and for you and the work that you've done thank you thank you hillary mike as we get to the end of our time in this conversation i want to ask you a question that maybe feels similar to where we started but i'm wondering what it's like to to talk about the book what it's like to talk about your book how how this conversation was for you i'm so excited um do you know how sometimes you have an idea for a christmas gift for someone in may yep and you go and you get the gift in june and then you wrap it in july and then there's just this weight there's just this weight you just have to sit with this box and i'll just go ahead and tell you i'm the kind of person who on december the 22nd goes here's the gift just open it if you want and the person goes i want to open it on christmas and i go how could you be so cruel i want to see you open this gift and i really mean it i i wrote this book for people to hear and to read and to experience um and i wrote it with a full heart and a love and an affection for them and for a desire um this sounds so strange but one of the things i often wish for people i know and that i don't is that they could think as highly of themselves as i think of them and that's that's that's that's this book's whole job is just so that you my friends and my podcast listeners that you could start to think as highly of yourself as i think of you a collective thank you for helping us see ourselves that way do you want to tell us anything else about book tour online stuff anything you would probably say anyway but i get to to ask you about because i'm technically hosting what a great idea i forgot all about it i got so present i think for a significant time i forgot this was a podcast [Laughter] uh yeah i had a we're all stuck at home and i thought we're stuck at home but we can still be together we had a great idea as a civilization we went ahead and built the internet ahead of time and so i've worked with my publisher and my events team and some really amazing independent bookstores and we tried to think about everything that happens at an in-person event of mine and that is that we talk to each other face-to-face that i don't monologue that we talk together that you get something personal from me that i sign to remember our time together and you connect with people in your local community and so we just built a way to do all those things uh so we are i'm doing a city by city tour on the internet and what that means is i'll do an online event that will be two-way so your camera can come on and you can talk to me and we can talk together just like we would in person uh you will get either a signed book plate or postcard from me in the mail that i will hand write and send to you and and you'll be included in a facebook group that lets you connect and socialize with people in your local community so this is an online hyperlocal event it's the you're a miracle in home tour and uh you can find a link to that as well as all about this new book of mine at mikemcarg.com new book and just in case you can't spell my name don't worry you can also visit ask sciencemike.com new book for all the details i don't know if you would say this mike on your own behalf but one of the things that i've known that you do so well for other people is whenever somebody has a book come out that you that you know that you want to support you buy the book online and then you write a review on amazon or wherever you can find the space and so what i want to ask this community to ask science my community the people who know and love mike mccarg get your books get lots of them send them to people you love we've got lots of time to be reading right now and when you have a chance please go online and review it so that more people can find it and can know know about some of the stuff that that mike shared that really changed his life that can change our lives too that's another way that you can help get the get the message of the book out i wanted to end mike by saying well is there anything else you wanted to say about that before oh just it's fitting i opened with tears and ending with tears well then let me say this mike i am in awe of you this book what you have made is a masterpiece and i believe that it's because it's you this book came from you you're learning your heart your ability to synthesize information your incredible intellect your growth your healing and your pain all of that is what we get on these pages thank you for all the hard work you did to write this yes the writing but also the work on yourself and it's with such deep sincerity and affection mike that i say i'm so grateful to be your friend and i can't imagine the day when i ever stop learning from you because you mike mccark i could not resist you are a miracle and a pain in the ass the life of this book is just beginning right all of the work that you put into it in some ways it stops here to some degree but the life of it is is just starting but for all the work you've done up until this point well done mike i love you i'm proud of you well done i love you too hillary thank you for being my friend i'm so grateful it's such a gift to me it still feels like a feeling i don't quite have a name for yet that so much of our friendship is written into these pages and yet i know it is delight and affection and awe and a little bit of kind of this adventurous risk piece of being seen and some of these moments that we've had between us being seen and shared with other people it's it's so fun to interview you for this in the most meta loop in the history [Laughter] i delighted that well played sir thank you hillary