If you’re like a lot of men, you’ve probably set some big goals for yourself this year. Lose twenty pounds. Start a side hustle. Finally read Aristotle.

When you set those goals for yourself, you likely felt good. Really good. Setting goals feels awesome. You imagine yourself looking lean in the mirror, seeing that first deposit hit your bank account, or riffing to your friends about Aristotle’s idea of phronesis. You’re riding a high of pure, unadulterated positive vibes.

But then, a week later, you’ve missed a week of workouts, haven’t even bought the URL for your side hustle website, and a brand new, uncracked copy of Nicomachean Ethics sits on your nightstand.

What happened?

Well, you were probably too stinking positive.

According to Dr. Gabriele Oettingen, a professor of psychology at NYU, pure positive visualization can actually backfire on you. When you fantasize about achieving a goal, your brain starts to think you’ve already accomplished it. Your raring-to-go drive dampens, and when obstacles on your path towards achieving the goal come your way, you wilt. You eat the QT taquito instead of sticking to your macros. You scroll YouTube Shorts instead of working on your business. You read The Daily Mail instead of Aristotle.

If you want to actually accomplish your goals this year, you need a dose of realism. You need to marry a portion of positive thinking with a dose of negative thinking.

A framework that Dr. Oettingen developed can help you do that.

It’s called WOOP.

The Power of Mental Contrasting

If you want to move the needle on your goals, you have to stop indulging in what Oettingen calls “free fantasies.” This is when you only think about positive outcomes and the good feelings you’ll experience when you accomplish your goal. As I mentioned above, her research has found that when we only think about the positive, our brains get tricked into thinking we’ve already arrived, and we lose our drive to actually do the brass tacks work to reach the goal.

To fix this, Oettingen pioneered a process called mental contrasting.

The idea is simple. You don’t just visualize yourself on the mountaintop with your fists up in the air, celebrating your success. You also need to visualize the jagged rocks and the steep cliffs you’ll have to climb to get there. You pepper your positive thinking with a vision of the obstacles that could potentially get in the way of achieving your aim.

This creates what psychologists call “mental tension.” By contrasting the future you want with a realistic picture of the landscape you’ll have to traverse to get there, your brain recognizes a gap that needs to be closed. It suddenly realizes, “Oh, I’m not there yet. I better do things to relieve this tension.” The tension is the fuel that mobilizes your energy and prepares you to act and get stuff done.

But identifying the obstacles on the path to your goal is only half the battle. You also need a plan on how you’re going to overcome those hurdles and barriers so you can keep plodding towards your desired outcome. To do that, Oettingen recommends creating an implementation intention. We’ve written about these “automated” actions before. An implementation intention is an “if-then” plan that links a specific situational cue to a predetermined goal-directed response.

Let’s say you decide one of the obstacles you’ll encounter in your goal to lose twenty pounds is “I’ll be tempted to snack on the donuts left every day in the office breakroom.” An implementation intention to overcome this obstacle would look something like: “If I see the donuts in the breakroom, I will immediately return to my desk and start working.”

By doing this, you’ve essentially automated your response to temptation. Instead of standing in front of the box of donuts, dithering about whether you’re going to eat them or not, and telling yourself you’ll “just have half,” you’ve outsourced the decision to a pre-programmed script.

WOOP There It Is: A 4-Step Framework for Achieving Your Goals

To help people put these two concepts — mental contrasting and implementation intentions — into practice, Oettingen developed a simple, four-step framework. It’s called WOOP, and it stands for Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan.

Let’s walk through it:

1. Wish

A “Wish” is something you want to accomplish that is challenging but actually feasible. It’s a goal. It could be something you want to do today, this month, or this year.

Let’s say your wish is to lose twenty pounds by June.

Write that down.

2. Outcome

Now, visualize the best possible result of fulfilling that wish. If you lose those twenty pounds, how will you feel being able to play with your kids without getting winded? Or how would you feel knowing that your glucose and cholesterol levels are in check? Or how would you feel being able to show up to a pool party with a bit more muscle definition? Let yourself feel those positive emotions for a moment.

3. Obstacle

Here is where we pivot from the typical self-help manifesting fluff and start getting real. Ask yourself: What are the things that would hold you back from accomplishing the goal? Is it your tendency to stock your pantry with lots of Chewy Chips Ahoy? Or your tendency to eat a high-calorie meal at lunch sourced entirely from the QT Kitchen? Or maybe you feel like you don’t have enough time to work out?

Identify the biggest potential obstacles. Write those down.

4. Plan

Once you’ve identified the obstacles, it’s time to create an if-then plan for them. In other words, an implementation intention.

The formula is simple: “If [obstacle] occurs, then I will [action to overcome obstacle].”

Let’s use the obstacle of not having enough time for a full workout. Here’s what an implementation intention to overcome that obstacle could look like:

Obstacle: Sometimes I don’t have time for a full workout.

Plan: If I don’t have time for a full workout, then I’ll take a brisk 15-minute ruck around the neighborhood before 8 PM. (Check out our article on other ideas for quick workouts when you’re crunched for time.)

How about your tendency to default to eating QT taquitos and a Big Q soda for lunch?

Obstacle: When pressed for time, I eat lunch at QuikTrip.

Plan: When I go to QT for lunch, I’ll get the cobb salad and a Diet Coke. 

Harness the Power of Negative Thinking

This year, start visualizing negative outcomes with your goals. But then make a plan for how you’re going to prevent those negative outcomes from happening. The WOOP model reminds me a lot of the conversation I had with Kyle Austin Young about probability hacking. The key to reaching your goals, Kyle explained, lies in figuring out the things that will lower your odds of success and then plotting out ways to reduce the impact of those factors to tilt the odds in your favor.

Pick one goal you’ve been struggling with. Spend five minutes working it through the WOOP framework. Identify the snag that always trips you up, and write down your “if-then” script.

And then follow through on it!

Listen to our podcast on probability hacking for even more: 

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

When I played football in high school, our head coach had one refrain that he’d hammer into us over and over again: act with class.

It meant no trash talk. No showboating. Help the other guy up, even if he just tried to take your head off. Don’t scream at refs. Don’t throw your helmet. When you win, act like you’ve been there before; when you lose, don’t sulk and pout.

I’ve tried to carry that refrain with me even after taking off my football pads for the last time. For me, acting with class is a way of moving through your social world with dignity, respect, and a little heartening warmth and charm.

For most of Western history, class was about economics and where you sat in the social hierarchy. Centuries ago, your class was determined by what family you were born into, how much land you owned, or how much armor you could afford for battle.

But beginning in the late 1800s, the word “class” started being used in another way — as a signifier of bearing rather than birth. It was used to describe comportment, especially for athletes and entertainers who carried themselves with skill, decency, and poise. To perform well under pressure, to exude grace, made you a “class act.”

Today, “classy” can describe anyone who evinces magnanimity and self-possession. Someone who’s generous, but not a show-off — decorous but not stilted. A class act is governed by standards rather than moods or incentives; even when circumstances would excuse poor behavior, or a boorish move might gain them advantage, they still do the right and fair thing. Wherever they go, they elevate life a bit. They leave situations better than they found them.  

We like classy people because their steadiness and consistent good graces can be relied upon. They inspire you to live a little better without preaching. Classy fellas make the world a bit more pleasant with their everyday civilities.

Below are 25 of those small courtesies that you can practice to be known as a classy SOB.

1. Say hello first

A classy fella doesn’t wait to be acknowledged. He initiates eye contact. He gives a warm “hello” to the neighbor, the cashier, or the guy at the gym he sees every morning. It’s a small thing that can brighten people’s day.

2. Use people’s names — and remember them

As ol’ Uncle Carnegie said, “a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.” So regularly use people’s names. Be natural about it. You don’t have to say it after every sentence. That just comes off as forced.

When you meet someone new, make a point of remembering their name. When you see the person again, use it (“Hey, Chip! Great to see you!”), and you’ll leave them thinking, “Man, what a classy guy!”

3. Hold the door open for the person behind you

Holding the door open used to be a chivalrous gesture reserved for men to offer women. Now it’s a way for one human to acknowledge the presence and reality of another. It’s a way of saying, “I see you, fellow person; we share in the collective struggle of existence; and I’m going to make life a tiny bit easier for you.”

4. Let people merge in traffic

A classy SOB doesn’t treat driving like a zero-sum moral contest. He waves people into a busy traffic line. He understands that getting home 12 seconds earlier is not a victory worth defending.

5. Write handwritten thank-you notes

We’re big proponents of the handwritten thank-you note here at AoM, and in this day and age, when most communication is conducted digitally, a handwritten thank-you note really sets you apart as a class act. Whether someone gives you a gift or you just appreciate some small gesture, let them know with paper and pen.

You don’t need to be verbose with your thank-you notes. Two or three sincere sentences will do the job.

6. Don’t bad-mouth people behind their backs

Trashing people when they’re not around is easy, and it might get you some kudos from your peers; who doesn’t like to hear salacious rumors about others? But it’s also how you earn a reputation as someone who can’t be trusted. Everyone knows that if you bad-mouth some other person, you’ll probably do the same to them when they’re not around.

If you wouldn’t say it to someone’s face, don’t say it when they’re not there.

7. Compliment people behind their backs

This is the inverse of the above rule and an underratedly classy move.

When you say something kind about someone who isn’t there — and especially when there’s no strategic reason to do so — it enhances that compliment. It creates goodwill that often travels back amplified to the person you praised. And to the people who heard that third-party compliment, you seem like the kind of guy who sees and dwells on the good in others and not some two-faced, backbiting grumbletonian. Class act!

8. Pick up trash that isn’t yours

A classy gent leaves whatever environment he finds himself in better than he found it. One way to do that is by picking up trash. If you see it at the park, in your neighborhood, or in the breakroom, throw it away — even if it isn’t yours.

9. Dress appropriately

You don’t have to dress like Fred Astaire 24/7 to be a classy gent. In fact, there are plenty of stylish fops who are completely classless boobs.

But a classy guy dresses appropriately for the situation he’s in. A funeral isn’t the place for a t-shirt. A wedding isn’t the time to test the level of casualness you can get away with. Showing up appropriately dressed is a way of saying, “I recognize the significance of this occasion, and I want to add to it.”

10. Be on time

Tardiness is a form of thievery, as it steals other people’s time. Being on time communicates that you value other people’s schedules as much as your own.

There is an exception to this rule; when it comes to a dinner party, arriving early is the unclassy thing to do and being a few minutes late the classy — it gives the host a little buffer in finishing their preparations.

11. Be a generous conversationalist 

A classy SOB doesn’t treat every exchange like an opportunity to bask in the spotlight. He isn’t always looking for a way to turn the conversation back to him. Instead, he asks questions, listens intently, and adds commentary judiciously. He gives other people the chance to open up and shine. 

12. Return things in better condition than you received them

If you borrow some tools from a friend, bring them back cleaned and sharpened. If you borrowed a truck to move something for your mom, return it with a full tank of gas. If something breaks, even if it was an accident, pay for or procure a replacement.

13. Say “excuse me” and “sorry” without qualifiers

If you bump into someone, say, “excuse me.” If you mess up, say “sorry” with no “buts.”

14. Tip generously (within reason)

There’s a lot of unnecessary solicitation of tips these days, but when a service calls for it, and someone does a genuinely good job, harness your inner Frank Sinatra and duke ‘em. 

You don’t have to be reckless, but err on the side of generosity when you can. It’s one of the simplest ways to practice everyday magnanimity.

15. Put your phone away during conversations

Nothing says “you’re not worth my attention” like glancing at a screen while interacting with another human being. A classy SOB keeps his phone in his pocket when he’s with someone in the flesh. He understands that undivided attention is a form of respect — and true caring.

16. Keep your word — even on small things

If you say you’ll call, call. If you say you’ll show up, show up. If you say you’ll handle it, handle it.

17. Don’t overshare

Class includes a sense of discretion.

Not every thought needs to be aired. Not every personal struggle needs to be psychoanalyzed publicly. Don’t make others cringe because you feel the need for catharsis or are hunting for social media likes.

18. Give credit freely

If someone helped, say so. If an idea wasn’t yours, acknowledge it.

Classy people aren’t afraid of diminishing their own glow by letting others shine. In fact, giving people the credit they deserve lends you a greater luster.

19. Act with dignity when things don’t go your way

Anyone can be gracious when life is going their way. The classy SOB keeps his composure when it isn’t.

No sulking. No public tantrums.

You gotta learn how to lose and “never breathe a word about your loss.”

20. Give people an out

A classy person doesn’t corner others socially. If someone’s late, flustered, or clearly wants to leave a conversation or decline an invitation, he offers them a graceful exit rather than putting them on the spot. He lets people save face. Mercy is a form of manners.

21. Acknowledge service workers as people, not automatons

A lot of service workers spend their workdays being instrumentalized — ignored or treated like machines. The classy SOB doesn’t do that. He goes out of his way to acknowledge the humanity of the people who make everyday life function — cashiers, customer service reps, janitors, bus drivers, delivery people, waiters, garbage men, etc.

Don’t fiddle with your phone while you interact with them. Don’t berate them.

Make eye contact. Give them a warm “How’s it going?” Say “thank you.” Easy stuff.

22. Keep your complaints private and proportionate

If someone does something that upsets a class act, he takes care of it privately and keeps his complaint proportionate.

A classy man doesn’t gripe loudly in public or turn every minor inconvenience into a moral crusade. He handles issues calmly, directly, and without an audience.

Kid not getting playing time on the basketball team? Have a private conversation with the coach instead of airing your grievance in the parent group chat.

Your boss snub you? Set up a meeting with him. Don’t blast him on a Slack channel.

23. Don’t correct people unnecessarily

If someone gets a minor fact wrong, mispronounces a word, or tells a story imperfectly — and the mistake doesn’t matter — a classy guy lets it go. He understands that being right is often less important than keeping the interaction humane and preserving the person’s confidence and dignity.

Correction is sometimes necessary. But most of the time, when we have the urge to do it, it’s just ego and the desire to get one-up on another.

24. Don’t brag

A class act is secure in his own worth and doesn’t feel the need to boast — either overtly, or more subtly in the form of namedropping and humble bragging. He knows it’s off-putting, and he doesn’t wish to induce the noxious feeling of envy in others.

25. Act like a “host” wherever you go

For a classy gent, being a host isn’t limited to those times you initiate and invite others to a social event; it’s a mindset you bring to every place and interaction.

In thinking of yourself in the role of perennial host, your focus is always on making other people feel welcome and “at home” (even when you’re out and about). Your disposition and behavior says, “put up your feet and relax”; you seek to immediately make those you meet feel taken care of and at ease.

As a host, you take the lead in initiating conversation, and picking it up when it lags. You introduce people and help them find their footing. You ensure that others are having a good time and seek to make them comfortable — whether that’s getting them a drink or choosing a conversational topic that makes them feel good to talk about.

A class act becomes people’s atmospheric getaway and carries hospitality with him wherever he goes.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

It’s a new year, which means people everywhere are making resolutions about what they’re going to add to their lives. More exercise. New routines. A fresh system that will finally get everything they’ve got going on dialed in.

There’s nothing wrong with trying to add good things to your life. But there’s another, often more effective way to improve it: subtraction. Instead of asking, What should I start doing this year? ask, What should I stop doing?

Nassim Taleb calls this approach via negativa. It’s about improving your life by removing the things that diminish it. In many cases, giving something up delivers faster, more noticeable gains than adding something new ever could.

If you’re looking for some ideas of things to give up in the new year, we’ve got 27 suggestions below, along with plenty of resources to help you take those ideas and put them into action.

1. Keeping up with the news

Think about all the news stories you’ve kept up with in the last ten years — the wars, disasters, elections, and so on. How much did those events affect your life, and how much were you able to influence them by being informed? Chances are, the answer is close to zero on both counts. Staying a little abreast of news is important for being a sound citizen, but you can drop about 95% of its consumption without hurting yourself or society. Your life will in fact improve without this stress-inducing, time-sucking, almost entirely pointless distraction.  

2. Engaging in negative self-talk

You wouldn’t let a friend talk to you the way you sometimes talk to yourself. While it might feel like your inner critic is helping you improve, that negative inner monologue is making you more anxious, more depressed, and more likely to flub a performance. Drop the negative self-talk this year, and you’ll free up the energy needed to navigate life more resiliently and adeptly.

3. Looking at your phone right when you wake up

Rolling over and grabbing your phone first thing hands the steering wheel of your day to whoever emailed, posted, or tweeted overnight. You start the morning reactive, not proactive, and that sets the tone for the rest of the day. Use a real alarm clock to wake up and wait thirty minutes before you check your phone, allowing your brain to boot up on its own terms.

4. Consuming caloric drinks

What a colossal waste of calories caloric beverages are. They simply don’t taste that great (especially if we’re talking about soda), and have little to no nutritional value. If you want a treat, at least consume something you can chew! Switching to nothing but diet drinks and water is the very easiest way to lose weight; people can often drop significant poundage and improve their all-around health profile just by making this move.

5. Mindlessly scrolling your phone

We’ve all been there. You’re bored, so you pick up your phone and start scrolling through your various apps. “Just five minutes,” you tell yourself. But five minutes turns into thirty, and you don’t even remember the content that flicked across your screen during that time. And to make matters worse, instead of feeling refreshed and invigorated after that scrolling-filled brain break, you feel more stupefied. What a waste! Break your smartphone habit this year, and you’ll slowly start to feel your brain come back to life.

6. “Shoulding” on yourself

Constantly telling yourself what you should do is like living your life by someone else’s checklist — a way of avoiding real choices and accountability. When your goals are driven by what you think others expect from you rather than what you genuinely want, you give up a bit of your personal power and head down a path paved with resentment, guilt, and frustration. This year, stop shoulding all over yourself and start making decisions because you choose them, not because you feel obligated by some invisible script.

7. Saying you’re too busy to read books

You’ve got plenty of time to read books. Being “too busy to read” is usually just a failure of priorities. You’ve given up mindlessly scrolling. Use that time to read a book. You can even use the Kindle app on your phone to read books while you’re on the subway or waiting for a doctor’s appointment. You can get a lot of books read when you break it up into 5 to 15 minute chunks throughout the day.

8. Skipping cardio and mobility work

Strength training is awesome. But don’t neglect the other aspects of fitness. Cardio keeps your heart healthy; mobility keeps you moving like a human instead of a rusting Tin Man. It’s not hard to get this stuff in. Take a short walk every morning. Do a quick mobility routine when you get out of bed. Do longer Zone 2 cardio sessions two times a week. Life’s more fun when you feel vital and spry.

9. Letting minor annoyances ruin your mood

Slow drivers, long lines, glitchy Wi-Fi, inept customer service reps. These minor inconveniences and annoyances aren’t personal attacks. Sure, they’re annoying, but those annoyances probably won’t matter in ten minutes, so stop letting them ruin your mood for the rest of the day. No circumstances can make you feel a certain way; you’re in charge of that.

10. Avoiding difficult conversations

That talk you’re avoiding doesn’t get easier the longer you put it off; it just gets harder. Unsaid things have a way of leaking out sideways. Addressing issues directly is uncomfortable, but it usually brings relief. In fact, the awkwardness and discomfort you imagine will exist during that conversation usually don’t arise to the degree you think they will; the exchange typically goes much better than you imagined (here are some tips for upping the odds of that outcome). Rip off the band-aid!

11. Watching porn

We’ve written about the downsides of porn. Porn trains your attention and desire in ways that don’t translate well to real intimacy. Many men find that cutting it out improves their relationships, their mood, and simply how they generally feel about themselves. Why not give quitting porn a try and see if it makes a difference for you?

12. Complaining about things you can’t (or won’t) change

Complaining feels like action, but it’s usually just noise that allows you to slip responsibility for doing something about what’s bugging you. Stop your bellyaching: if you can’t change something, accept it; if you can change it, get to work.

13. Letting algorithms choose what you read and watch

Algorithms are everywhere, from your social media feeds to your streaming platforms, serving up things they think you’d like based on what you already like. But sometimes we don’t know what we like until we’ve tried it. Open your life to new flavors and delight-inducing serendipity. Browse bookstores. Wander record shops. Pick a movie at random. Choose articles and podcasts based on interest, not just recency or virality. Rediscover the joy of surprise.

14. Being cynical

Cynicism masquerades as manly intelligence, but it’s mostly just emotional armor. It keeps you from being disappointed by keeping you detached and aloof. The problem is that cynicism also keeps you from being moved and inspired — from the emotional investments that give life its richness and depth. This year, trade cynicism for love. You’ll notice that your life becomes bigger and more vibrant.

15. Thinking you’re too old to learn new skills

When you were a kid, you developed skills in academics, art, music, and sports, and likely even taught yourself things like how to do magic tricks and skateboard. Now that you’re an adult, can you think of the last new skill you learned? If it’s been a long time, consider ending that drought. That voice saying “it’s too late for me” is lying. It is harder for adults to learn new things, but it’s still very possible. So pick up that guitar or skateboard this year — just make sure to wear kneepads.

16. Drinking alcohol

Alcohol is essentially a poison, and in addition to making you feel like crap the next day and dinging your wallet, more and more research shows that even moderate drinking is bad news for your health. Make this the year you extend Dry January into the next eleven months.

17. Trying to win every argument

Winning arguments often means losing goodwill. Not every disagreement needs a verdict. Sometimes the better move is to try to understand the other person and agree to disagree.

18. Holding on to your anxiety habit

Anxiety ruins your well-being and ability to enjoy life to the hilt. You may think of it as a reaction, a feeling, or a disorder. But perhaps the best way to think about anxiety is as a habit. Like all habits, the anxiety habit can be broken. Here’s how to break yours.

19. Dressing like a boy instead of a man

For most of human history, dressing differently marked the passage into manhood; it helped men take themselves seriously and be taken seriously by others. Clothes don’t make the man, but they do shape how he shows up. Dressing more like a grown man and less like a boy will remind yourself (and the world) that you mean business.

20. Saying yes when you mean no

You’re probably a nice guy. You like to help people and you don’t like to disappoint them. But saying yes to things when you really want to say no is just setting you up for burnout and resentment. This year, learn to say no tactfully without over-explaining. It will free you up to say yes to meaningful, freely-chosen priorities.

21. Settling for a job you hate

You spend at least a third of your life at work. Why spend that time at a job you despise? Enduring a bad job drains more than your paycheck can replace. Even if you can’t leave tomorrow, you can start positioning yourself for something better.

22. Being a conversational narcissist

Conversational narcissists only like to talk about themselves; they don’t ask other people questions, and even when someone else has a chance to talk, they find ways to bring the discussion back to themselves. Conversations are meant to be games of tennis where you each take turns hitting the speaking ball over the net. When you listen as much as you talk, you’ll learn more, come off as more charming, and walk away with stronger connections.

23. Going through your week without a plan

Winging it sounds freeing until the week runs you over. A simple plan creates orientation and reduces decision fatigue. You don’t need a color-coded system; you just need a rough map. Check out our article on how to plan your week; it shares the system I’ve used for nearly twenty years to get stuff done.

24. Being too proud to say you’re sorry

Apologizing is hard; it’s never easy to admit you’re to blame. You feel like you lose status and face. But shirking responsibility costs you more in how people see you. You’d be surprised how much respect you can gain from others with a clean, unqualified “I messed up and I’m sorry.”

25. Not responding to emails and text messages

A hundred years ago, people set aside a dedicated hour or two each day to answer handwritten correspondence. Twenty years ago, people would spend hours each week writing each other long emails. Today, it feels too onerous to dash off a 30-second response to a text. Don’t let your attention span shrink so much that you don’t have time to reply to people who may need an answer to move forward on something, or just feel dejected over being ignored.

26. Blaming your parents for your current life

Your upbringing matters, but at a certain point, you’ve got to take responsibility for who you are now and who you’re becoming. You can’t change the past, but you’re in charge of the future.

27. Thinking good times are just around the corner

You’d like to get together with friends, you’d like to host a party, you’d like to take that trip you’ve been thinking about, but this month is just too busy. You’ll make those things happen a few months from now, when your calendar seems clearer. Of course, when that future time arrives, your schedule will feel just as busy as it currently does. The idea that good times are just around the corner is a mirage; life will always feel crowded. There’s no better or worse time to make fun happen, so why not pull the trigger right now?

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Note: This is a rebroadcast.

Happiness is the subject of thousands of articles, podcasts, and scientific studies. Yet all this focus on happiness doesn’t seem to be making people any happier. In fact, the more they try to be happy, especially by fighting to get rid of bad feelings and cling to good ones, the more unhappy people often become.

My guest would say that the first step in escaping this negative cycle is redefining what happiness even means — thinking of it not as a state of feeling good but of doing good.

His name is Russ Harris and he’s a therapist and the author of The Happiness Trap.

Today on the show, Russ explains how struggling against difficult feelings and thoughts just makes them stronger — amplifying instead of diminishing stress, anxiety, depression, and self-consciousness — and how simply obeying your emotions doesn’t work out any better. He then unpacks the alternative approach to happiness espoused by Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. With ACT, you allow both hard and pleasant feelings to coexist, and unhook from the latter so that they no longer jerk you around. This allows you to focus on taking action on your values to create a meaningful, flourishing life, or in other words, real happiness.

Resources Related to the Episode

• AoM Podcast #614: Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life With the Founder of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Steven Hayes
• AoM Article: From Overwhelmed to Empowered — How Labeling Your Emotions Can Help You Take Control

Connect With Russ Harris

• Russ’ Website

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Read the Transcript

Brett Mckay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness Podcast. Happiness is the subject of thousands of articles, podcasts and scientific studies, yet all this focus on happiness doesn’t seem to be making people any happier, in fact, the more they try to be happy, especially by fighting to get rid of bad feelings and cling to good ones, the more unhappy people often become. My guest would say that the first step in escaping this negative cycle is redefining what happiness even means, thinking of it not as a state of feeling good, but doing good. His name is Russ Harris and he’s a therapist and the author of the Happiness Trap.

Today on the show, Russ explains how struggling against difficult feelings and thoughts just makes them stronger, amplifying instead of diminishing stress, anxiety, depression and self-consciousness, and how simply obeying your emotions doesn’t work out any better. He then unpacks the alternative approach tp happiness espoused by Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, with ACT, you allow both pleasant and hard feelings to co-exist and unhooks from the latter as they no longer jerk you around. This allows you to focus on taking action on your values to create a meaningful, flourishing life, or in other words, real happiness. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/happinesstrap.

Alright, Russ Harris, welcome to the show.

Russ Harris: Thanks for having me.

Brett Mckay: So you have a background in medicine, but then you made a shift in your career, or became a therapist and you became a trainer in a form of talk therapy called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. So you do therapy, but you also do coaching, and you got a book called The Happiness Trap: How To Stop Struggling And Start Living, and you start the book off talking about how most human beings, they wanna be happy. So we have all these blog posts, books, apps, courses on how to be happier, but people aren’t happier, depression’s up, life satisfaction is down, so what’s going on there? We have all these resources, there are people researching scientifically how to be happier, yet we still find happiness hard to achieve, what’s going on?

Russ Harris: Well, there’s a number of different factors, but probably the biggest one is the way that we think about happiness itself. Most people think of happiness as a good feeling or feeling good or a state of pleasure or contentment, and if that’s your concept of happiness, then there’s no such thing as lasting happiness. How long can a state of pleasure or contentment possibly last for if you think of the happiest day of your life? How long were you feeling happy for before there was some frustration, disappointment, anxiety? In western cultures, we don’t really learn how to deal with those inevitable painful emotions, we see them as the opposite of happiness and we start trying to avoid or get rid of all of those unwanted thoughts, feelings, emotions, all the uncomfortable stuff, and we start desperately trying to create more of the good, pleasant feelings and clinging to those feelings, and the technical psycho-babble name for this is experiential avoidance. Experiential avoidance is the ongoing attempt to avoid or get rid of unwanted thoughts, feelings, emotions and memories, all of that uncomfortable stuff that shows up inside us that we don’t like.

And experiential avoidance is normal, we’re all… [chuckle] I don’t know anybody who just loves having painful thoughts and feelings, but what happens is, high levels of experiential avoidance, where people are really trying very, very hard to avoid and get rid of unwanted thoughts and feelings, while high levels of this actually directly correlate with your risk of depression, anxiety disorders, addiction and many other mental health issues. So if you’re trying very, very hard to control your emotions, to avoid or get rid of the unpleasant ones and create and cling to the pleasant ones, it’s gonna create a lot of problems for you.

In my book, The Happiness Trap, it’s called The Happiness Trap because popular notions of happiness create this trap that actually pull you into this vicious cycle of avoidance that makes life worse. There’s a very different way of looking at happiness which doesn’t come naturally to most people. The concept to happiness I’ve just been talking about is really only become popular in the last 100 years, this idea that it’s about feeling good, but if we go back over the centuries for most of recorded history, happiness has not been about feeling good, it’s been about doing good, it’s about living your values, behaving like the person you want to be, doing things that are meaningful and purposeful.

And when we create a meaningful life, living by our values, doing the stuff that’s fulfilling and meaningful and purposeful, well, as we do that, we’ll experience the full range of human emotions, both pleasant and painful, we’ll experience the enjoyable emotions, love and joy, and we’ll experience the painful ones, fear and sadness and anger and anxiety and guilt, these are all part of the rich tapestry of human life. So if we could re-conceptualize happiness as living a rich, full and meaningful life in which we feel the full range of human emotions, both pleasant and painful, we’d be a lot better off.

Brett Mckay: Yeah, and that second definition of happiness, that it’s a meaningful life where you can experience unpleasant emotions and feelings but still have a meaningful life, that’s like eudaimonia from the ancient Greeks, like it’s a flourishing life.

Russ Harris: Yeah, very much. That’s much more in line with the meaningful, fulfilling life that encouraging…

Brett Mckay: Yeah, so you talk about, when we define happiness as just feeling good, we engage in experiential avoidance, and you talk about there’s different ways we can do that, and you call it we struggle with an emotion or a feeling, and there’s different struggle strategies you describe in the book, what are some common ways we struggle with an unpleasant emotion so we can get rid of it, and the idea is that we’ll feel that happy feeling again, what are some typical struggle strategies?

Russ Harris: Well, by far, the most common that we all do is distraction, it’s so easy for us in our modern world with our phones always at our fingertips that we can just distract ourselves with. Got some unpleasant thoughts and feelings going up, we start scrolling through social media or watching some YouTube videos or whatever it is that we like to do on our phones and our devices, and it gives us a bit of short-term relief from whatever unpleasant feelings are showing up, and a little bit of distraction’s not a problem at all, but we all know what happens when we do excessive distraction and I’m sure… I know I have, and I’m sure all your listeners have experienced that sense of wasted time where you’ve just been… Whether it’s skipping through programs on television just trying to distract yourself from how you’re feeling, and it’s not really very satisfying or fulfilling, and of course, it’s only a temporary relief.

Opting out is another very common strategy, we opt out of the difficult people, places, situations or activities that bring up difficult thoughts and feelings for us, we procrastinate on things, we avoid difficult conversations, we stay away from perhaps social situations that we think are gonna be challenging. And again, this opting out, procrastination, putting things off, gives us a bit of short-term relief, but of course in the long term, if we do too much of this, our life gets very small. If we do too much procrastination, that leads to many other problems because we’re not really addressing the important things we need to do in life. And so, all of these struggles strategies, they have this short-term relief, but in the long-term, they tend to make by for worse if you do too much of them.

Another common one is just substances, all of us just to some extent, put substances into our body to feel better, whether that’s just a aspirin or whether that’s a glass of wine, or whether that’s some chocolate cookies or chips, or in the more extreme cases, hard drugs. And again, very often when we do this, these substances give us some short-term relief from pain, but in the long term, if we overuse these substances, that we use them too much, too excessively, then we get all sorts of health problems, however that’s from overeating but overdrinking or addiction.

Brett Mckay: Well, you also talk about many traditional therapy modalities, they inadvertently maybe lead people to engage in struggle strategies, what are some examples of that?

Russ Harris: Well, I would say probably again, the two most common would be distraction techniques, these are so popular. Some unpleasant thoughts and feelings show up, and so you go to your happy place or you think of something positive or you snap an elastic band around your wrist and tell those thoughts and feelings to go away. And one of the big problems with distraction strategies is there’s a rebound effect, so they do work in the short-term, for example, snapping an elastic band and telling negative thoughts to go away, actually in the short term they do, but what the research shows very clearly is that in the long term, they rebound with greater and greater frequency and intensity.

It’s the same with squashing painful emotions down, suppressing our emotions, in the short term, we can actually do it, but again, in the long term, lots of research that show there’s a rebound effect where the emotions come back with greater frequency and intensity. Many, many pop psychology strategies rely very heavily on thinking techniques, it might challenge your negative thoughts or try to replace them with positive affirmations, and the thing with thinking techniques is they work quite well a lot of the time if your emotional pain is mild, if you’re just a little bit sad or a little bit angry or a little bit anxious or little bit guilty. You can usually think your way out of it quite effectively with these pop psychology strategies, but the more intense your emotional pain and the greater the difficulty you’re facing in your life, the less effective those techniques become.

Take the example of someone you love is dying or has just died, there’s no positive thinking strategy that’s gonna enable you to think away your painful feelings, you’re gonna have intense feelings of sadness or anger and maybe anxiety, it depends on what your relationship was like with this person and what’s led up to their death and so forth, but one thing’s sure, there’s gonna be lots of painful emotions. And you can’t just think that away, you can’t expect to feel happy and think positively in the face of a great loss, same with other very, really challenging situations in life. So, people often get a bit frustrated, they’re trying to use these positive thinking techniques and finding they’re not working, and then it’s what’s wrong with me and it’s just setting people up for failure. So they work okay with mild emotional distress but not with really big stuff.

Brett Mckay: Now, I’ve experienced that, ’cause I’ve read books about Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, one of the premises of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is that if you have this self-defeating thought, you’re supposed to challenge it. Alright, let’s think rationally and logically about this. But I found sometimes when I do that, I can come up with all sorts of reasons. Like if I’m like, “Well, I’m an idiot.” And then you’re like, “Well, am I really an idiot?” And I’ll be like, “Well yeah, here’s all the reasons why I’m an… ” I can come with up… [laughter] And it just makes it worse. And I’m feeling… And then like you said, you’re like you feel dumb, you’re just like, “Why isn’t this working? Why can’t I get this thing, this Cognitive Behavioral Therapy thing to work for me?” And then it just go down, it just continues down the vicious cycle.

Russ Harris: I can relate to that very strongly, yeah. And then of course that just gives you mind even more ammunition. “Yeah, see what loser I am, I can’t even do this Cognitive Therapy stuff.”

Brett Mckay: Okay, so those are some struggle strategy, so distraction, fighting with it, trying to [0:12:24.1] ____ rein your way out of it, you’re not saying that the Cognitive Behavioral Therapy stuff isn’t useful, it’s useful in some situations, but not all the time. Another thing that we often do when we experience a negative emotion or feeling or thought, besides struggling with it, is obeying it. What do you mean by that?

Russ Harris: Well, a lot of the time, our thoughts show up and we’re not even aware that we’re thinking, our mind says, “Do this, do that, do the other,” and we just go along with it. Our mind makes a judgment or an appraisal of a situation, “That person’s bad. This situation’s too hard, I can’t deal with it. I have to do this. I must do that. I shouldn’t do the other. I can’t do X until Y,” and we just go along with that stuff, our mind lays down these judgments and these rules, and we just follow along blindly. And the problem is that can keep us caught in a rut just doing the same old thing. I mean a good example of this is perfectionism for example. Our mind lays down all these rules, “I have to do it perfectly, I mustn’t let anyone down, I have to stick at this and make sure everything’s spot on, and there’s no point doing it unless I can do it perfectly.” And what happens is, if anyone’s experience this, and I know I certainly have in my life, it puts just massive pressure on you, it doesn’t even occur to you that these arbitrary rules your mind just come up with, that you’ve got a choice about whether you follow them or whether you bend them or whether you break them. We just go onto automatic pilot and do what our mind tells us to do. Another common example is people-pleasing rules.

These play a big role in many people who suffer from depression, it’s like I have to please others, I have to put their needs first, my needs don’t count, what they want is more important than I want, and if you get caught up in the people-pleasing routine, life gets pretty miserable, it’s all about sacrificing yourself to please others. So we can identify our mind’s rules by words like should, have to, must, ought, can’t unless, won’t, until, don’t, because. And we wanna have a look, if I keep following these rules, is it actually giving me the life that I want, is it giving me the relationships I want? One of the problems with obeying these rules is they very often create tension and conflict in relationships, particularly when we start imposing those rules on the other person, “You should do this and you shouldn’t do that,” and none of us likes being told what we should or shouldn’t do, right?

Brett Mckay: No, no. Okay, so we can either struggle with these negative thoughts, emotions, feelings, and that can lead to a happiness trap because they usually just backfire, just makes the problem worse, or there’s a rebound effect, or we can obey it and just follow along with it, and that continues to just making us feel miserable, doesn’t change anything.

Russ Harris: Yeah, well, just expanding the concept of obey, it’s not just about obeying what our mind says, it’s also obeying our emotions. Anger shows up and there’s an urge to shout or yell or fight, fear shows up and there’s an urge to hide away, escape, avoid, and so again, we often obey our emotions, just let them jerk us around like a puppet on a string, pull us into patterns of behaviors, just completely driven by the emotion itself.

Brett Mckay: And so we connect ourselves with your emotions, like too… We’re fused too much with our emotions when we obey.

Russ Harris: Yeah, fused is the technical term. Basically, the emotion dominates us and it just jerks us around and pushes us around. In everyday language, we say I was in the grip of anger for example, but what that basically means is you’re just allowing your emotions to rule you and dictate what you do, so this applies to thoughts as well as feelings.

Brett Mckay: So let’s dig into how Acceptance and Commitment Therapy approaches difficult thoughts and emotions, and you talk about the first step of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy is this idea of unhooking yourself from the difficult thought or emotion, what do you mean by that?

Russ Harris: Can I, just before I answer the question, explain the name Acceptance and Commitment Therapy?

Brett Mckay: Yeah.

Russ Harris: It was created by Steven Hayes, a Professor of Psychology at the University of Reno, Nevada. And ACT is the shortened term for it and it gets its name because of one of the key messages, “Accept what’s out of your personal control and commit to action that improves your life.” So there’s basically three strands to the therapy itself, one strand is this idea of taking action, committed action to do the things in life that are important and meaningful and fulfilling, so you get in touch with your values, your heart’s deepest desires for how you want to behave, how you want to treat yourself and others, and you use those values as a compass to guide your actions and motivate you to do the things that matter.

The second stream of the approach is learning these unhooking skills, how to un-hook from difficult thoughts, feelings, emotions and memories so that they can’t jerk you around and pull you all over the place, learning how to basically take the power and impact out of difficult or unwanted thoughts and feelings. And then the third stream of therapy is really focusing your attention, learning how to focus your attention on what’s important right here, right now and to engage in what you’re doing so you get the most out of it.

So unhooking skills are one of those three streams, and it’s basically a set of skills that really teach you how to respond to even the most difficult painful emotions, thoughts, feelings and memories in a new way, in a way that basically drains them of their power, they’re still there, it’s not a way to get rid of these thoughts and feelings, but it’s a way to take the impact out of them, you learn how to let them flow through you, let them come and stay and go in their own good time without sweeping you away, without crushing you and without you fighting with them or trying to escape from them.

Brett Mckay: Okay, so the idea is you’re not… Instead of… I’m trying to get an example, in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, if you had a negative emotion or thought, the typical response would be like, “Well, let’s look at this, let’s challenge it, do you have any real reason to feel like this?” And you go through this self dialogue. In Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, when you have that negative thought and emotion, that doesn’t happen, you’re not trying to get rid of the negative thought or emotion.

Russ Harris: No, that’s right. Yeah, so it’s basically… Your first step in ACT would be just to acknowledge, “Oh, okay, here it is, here’s this difficult thought,” or, “Here’s this difficult feeling showing up.” “Yes, I know this one.” And then rather than… Well, let’s talk about thoughts and feelings a bit separately, that kind of overlap…

Brett Mckay: Sure.

Russ Harris: That’d be useful. If you’ve got a thought like, “I’m not good enough,” for example, the chances are that thought has showed up hundreds of thousands, if not millions of times by the time you get to therapy or read a self-help book, or go and see your coach or something. So theres no delete button in the brain, there’s no way you’re gonna delete the, “I’m not good enough,” story so that it never shows up, it’s deeply entrenched in your neuronal pathway. And so it’s a bit pointless going in and trying to fight it and challenge it and dispute it every time it shows up. What we wanna do is basically lay down a new neuronal pathway in the brain so that when, “I am not good enough,” pops up, we can go, “Oh, there’s the not good enough story,” or, “Oh, there’s the inner critic,” or “Oh, there’s my mind giving me a hard time.” “Oh, I know this one, I’ve heard this before,” but instantly takes a lot of the impact out of it, just recognizing it, acknowledging it and choosing not to fight, it doesn’t mean that we agree with it and believe it and buy into it, but we start to see this is a thought, these are words or sometimes words and pictures that are popping up in my head right now.

Brett Mckay: So that’s thoughts, you could do the same thing with feelings as well, correct?

Russ Harris: Yeah, so a painful feeling shows up, anger or sadness, and again, the first step is just to acknowledge, Oh okay, here’s sadness or here’s anger. I’m noticing here’s tightness in my chest, here’s knots in my stomach, here’s some teariness in my eyes and just recognizing this is a normal human emotion, this is an emotion that we expect to feel when life is tough, when things are challenging, it’s absolutely a normal part of being human to have painful emotions, it’s a normal part of being human to have negative thoughts. And it’s useful to recognize if we come back to thoughts, our mind generates these negative thoughts for a purpose, it’s not deliberately trying to beat us up and give us a hard time, it’s always there’s an underlying purpose, our mind is always trying to help us avoid things that we don’t want or get things that we do want. The problem is, it very often goes about doing that in a way that is ultimately unhelpful. I often compare your mind to an overly helpful friend, one of those friends who’s trying so hard to help [chuckle] that they end up getting in the way and making things worse, if you ever had a friend like that, Brett. [chuckle]

Brett Mckay: Yeah.

Russ Harris: And so if you come back to the idea of your mind beating you up, criticizing you, telling you the not good enough story, usually your mind’s trying to help you change your behavior, it’s telling you to shape up or it’s warning you about what might happen if you keep on doing these things, how you might get into trouble, maybe it’s trying to save you from failure or save you from rejection, but mostly it’s trying to just help you shape up and do things better when it starts beating you up. If we take other common patterns of negative thinking like worrying, and predicting the worst, and catastrophizing, again, this is your mind warning you of potential dangers, potential threats, it’s trying to help prepare you for the worst, make sure that you’re as well prepared as you can be, it’s trying to keep you safe and avoid you getting hurt. So if we look at pretty much any negative cognitive process, we’re gonna see that there’s always an underlying purpose, it’s always your mind trying to help you avoid something you don’t want or get something that you do want or both.

But it’s just going about it in a very clumsy way, and so we’ll be, “Ah, here’s my mind again, oh, here’s the not good enough story, I know this one. Oh okay, thanks mind. I know you’re trying to help and it’s okay, I’ve got this handled.” So now we’re not fighting with it, we’re not arguing with it, but nor are we buying into it, nor are we letting that thought dominate us and push us around.

Brett Mckay: We’re gonna take quick break for a word from our sponsors.

And now back to the show. And what’s weird about… This is really counter-intuitive, by simply just accepting the negative thought or emotions like, “Oh yeah, there’s that thought,” it diffuses things. What’s going on there? Has there been research done? Why just noticing it and accepting it just takes the heat off of things?

Russ Harris: Yeah, well look, it’s interesting because coming back to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and ACT are fellow travelers, and they actually do have a lot in common. And Steve Hayes, the guy who created ACT, was intrigued by the finding in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy that improvement happened way before you got to the point where you start disputing or challenging negative thoughts. We noticed that at the first stage in CBT is that you just acknowledge the thoughts that are showing up and you non-judgmentally label them, say, “Ah, okay, there’s black and white thinking,” or, “There’s catastrophizing.” And clinical improvement started at that point, just the noticing and non-judgmental naming of cognition which in CBT is called cognitive distancing. And so Steve Hayes thought, “Well, what if instead of going on to challenge and dispute those thoughts, what if we went in distancing further, really helping people to step back and see their thoughts as nothing more or less than words or pictures?”

And when we can step back from our thoughts, then we’ve got a lot more choice about what we do with them. I often use the analogy that your mind is a lot like radio doom and gloom, it naturally broadcasts a lot of painful stuff from the past, a lot of fearful stuff about the future, and a lot of difficult stuff that’s going on in the present, that’s a normal human mind, and have you ever had the experience there was a radio playing on in the background and you were so absorbed in what you’re doing that you hardly even knew the radio was there?

Brett Mckay: Right, yeah.

Russ Harris: And then… Yeah, yeah. And then suddenly the song changed, one of your favorite songs was there, and you were singing along and you were very aware of it, and then the song changed and the radio faded into the background again. And this is what we’re trying to help people do in ACT, it’s like focus on… Do the meaningful things, live your values, engage in what you’re doing, really focus on it, and let your mind just chatter away in the background, broadcasting all the stuff that it normally does. If you mind’s broadcasting something useful and helpful that helps you to live your life, then by all means tune in and make use of that. But a lot of the time, a lot of the stuff on that radio is gonna be fairly unhelpful. It’s like what happens if you start arguing with a radio? [chuckle] Its like, what happens if you start trying to ignore a radio? The more you try to ignore it, the more it bothers you, or a loud voice in a restaurant or a lawnmower outside, the more you try to ignore something, the more it bothers you. So just learning how to let it be there, let it play on and take anything that’s useful that gets broadcast along the way.

Brett Mckay: And in the book, you lay out some different strategies or techniques people can use to unhook, we mentioned… Which is notice a name, which is just like, “Well, there I am thinking that I’m an idiot,” that can work for a lot of people, but what are some other ones that you have found useful with the people you’ve worked with?

Russ Harris: Yeah, well, I’m wondering, could I take the listeners through a very quick exercise right now?

Brett Mckay: Yeah, it’d be great.

Russ Harris: Okay, so if you’re listening to this, I hope you’re listening to this, bring to mind a negative thought that tends to hook you, a thought that when it shows up, it tends to jerk you around, pull you out of your life, pull you back, pull you into a dark space. If you’re struggling to come up with ideas, then just pick some version of the I’m not good enough story, everyone’s got multiple versions of I’m not good enough, whatever, it’s I’m fat or I’m stupid or I’m too old, or I’m not enough of this, or I’m too much of that. So bring to mind a nasty, negative, self-judgment and what I’ll ask you to do is just for the next few seconds, I’m gonna get you to buy into that thought, believe it as much as you can, get all consumed by it, so please don’t challenge it or don’t dispute it, I want you to do the very opposite, let it hook you, let it pull you in, and obviously you’ll feel a bit uncomfortable when you do that, so I hope you’re willing to feel a little bit uncomfortable to learn a useful new skill.

So maybe if we just give people about five seconds of silence just to bring this thought to mind and buy into it. I’m stupid or I’m not smart enough or I’m fat or I’m unworthy, or any other thought that really tends to hook you, buy into it now, really let it grab you. Really let it pull you in. Now, silently replay that thought with these words in front, “I am having the thought that.” “I’m having the thought that I’m stupid.” Now, replay it one more time with a longer phrase, “I noticed I’m having the thought that.” “I notice I’m having the thought that I’m a lousy parent.” So I hope you viewers did that. Brett, did you have a go at it?

Brett Mckay: I did have a go at it, yes.

Russ Harris: And what happened for you?

Brett Mckay: Well, it just reduced the… There’s a distance put into it, the phrase is… I just noticed myself becoming more distant from that initial thought basically.

Russ Harris: Yeah. So yeah, that’s the common experience, if any viewer didn’t have that experience, I just encourage you to try it again, pick a different thought perhaps and try it again. But that’s a very simple… The technical name for what we’re doing there, I think you mentioned it earlier, is cognitive diffusion. So cognitive fusion means we get hooked by our thoughts, they dominate us, they have huge power over us, whereas cognitive defusion means we separate or distance from our thoughts and we can see their true nature, we can see that they’re words or pictures or combinations thereof, and when we can see that, then we’ve got a lot more choice about what we do when those thoughts are present. Now, I must say, I have occasionally had a client react when I introduce this exercise to them. I remember one guy, he was massively overweight, morbidly obese guy, and I took him through that exercise and he said, “But it’s true, I really am fat,” and he pulled up his shirt to show me. I was like, “Oh well, thank you for sharing.” And it’s one of the things in ACT is we never, ever get into debates about whether these thoughts are true or false.

So I said to this guy… He’d been referred to me because he was suffering from major depression, and so I said to him, “Look, I know you’ve seen other therapists before me and you’ve tried debating whether your thoughts were true or false, was that helpful for you?” And he’s like, “No, ’cause I am fat.” And he had a very harsh inner critic, “I’m a loser. I’m killing myself by eating all of this. I’m disgusting, look at all of this fat,” and so really, really harsh, lots of harsh self-judgment. And so I said, “Well look, your mind is actually a lot like my mind. We all have minds that are very quick to judge us and criticize us and label us and tell us what’s not good enough about ourselves, and this is basically a normal human mind, and I don’t know how to stop your mind from speaking to you that way. I do know that debating whether your thoughts are true or false is not likely to have any impact at all, right?” So he’s nodding his head yes. And so it’s like our aim here is to learn a different way of responding to those thoughts so that when they show up, you can take the power and impact out of them, so they don’t have to jerk you around, because I said, “What normally happens when all of these self-critical thoughts pop up, what normally happens when you get hooked by them?” “Well,” he said, “Well, I’ll get depressed, mate.”

“Okay. And so then when you get depressed, what do you do?” “Well, I eat a load of shit, mate.” “Okay, so getting hooked by these thoughts isn’t really helping you.” And then remember the other part of the model is about values, so I said, “Let’s just put this unhooking stuff to one side for a moment, now, let’s have a look at your values,” and one of my favorite ways of getting people in touch with their values is I ask this question, if I could wave a magic wand so all these thoughts and feelings that you’re struggling with are like water off a duck’s back, they flow over you without jerking you around, then what would you do differently? How would you treat your body? How would you treat your friends? How would you treat your family? How would you treat your life differently? What would you start doing more of? What would you start doing? What would you stop doing or do less of? And so I asked this guy the same question, I said, “Let’s just have a look at how you treat your body. If I wave this magic wand, all these depressing thoughts and feelings lose their power, how would you treat your body differently?” And he said, “Well, I wouldn’t sit around all day just watching the telly.”

“Yeah, okay, so what would you do differently?” “Well, I might get up and exercise.” “Okay, so you’d be exercising more, you’d be moving more. What else would be different?” “Well, I wouldn’t eat so much shitty food.” “Okay, so you might be eating more healthy food.” “Yeah, yeah.” “Okay, so I’m gonna say there’s a very important value here that’s getting lost, I’m gonna call it self-care, and if you were in touch with this value of self-care, you’d be making different choices, you’d be eating differently, you be moving more, exercising more.” “Yeah.” “Okay, so when your mind comes in and it starts beating you up and telling you the not good enough story and telling you about I’m fat, I’m a loser and so forth, if you get hooked by those thoughts, does it help you to live that value of self-care?” “Nah.” “Okay, so there’s no question here about whether they’re true or false, it’s just a pragmatic choice. Getting hooked by these thoughts isn’t helping you to live your values, do the stuff that’s important, so let’s learn some unhooking skills here, and let’s not waste time debating whether things are true or false.” So it’s a massive paradigm shift for people this approach, but a very liberating one.

Brett Mckay: And I imagine this takes practice to do, its not some one and done thing, ’cause you’re probably… I think most people are probably just ingrained like if you have a negative emotion, you gotta fight it, squash it down and distract yourself, it’s gonna… When you first try this stuff, you’re not gonna be very good at it, but the more you do it, the better you’re gonna get at it.

Russ Harris: Yeah, that’s a great summary, yeah. Basically, we’re talking about a whole new set of skills in this approach, and like any new skill, it requires practice. And as you said, these things are counter-intuitive, they go against the grain, they’re not our default. It’s so unusual for us to learn how to let these thoughts and feelings be there and just take the power out of them rather than fighting with them or running from them.

Brett Mckay: Related to this idea of unhooking ourselves from emotions, let’s say you’re experiencing a really strong emotion like I’m just… Just big, severe… Just anxiety or depression or just this rumination, you talk about you need to make room for that. Again, that’s counter-intuitive ’cause you think well, I’m feeling those things, I want those to go away, why would I make room for it? What do you mean by making room for difficult emotions?

Russ Harris: Well, I think I often talk about this idea, there’s like a struggle switch at the back of your mind, and as soon as a difficult emotion shows up, the struggle switch goes on and you start to struggle with it, so let’s suppose anxiety shows up, the struggle switch goes on. “Oh no, here’s anxiety, I don’t like anxiety. I wish this anxiety was gone.” Wow, now you’ve got anxiety about your anxiety, suddenly it’s getting bigger. “Oh, oh, now anxiety’s getting big, how do I get rid of that anxiety? This anxiety’s really terrible.” Now you’ve got another layer of anxiety, you’ve got anxiety about your anxiety about your anxiety. So the struggle switch amplifies your emotions, makes them bigger. You may then get angry about your anxiety. “Why does this keep happening to me?” Then you may start to feel guilty, “Oh, there’s starving kids in Africa, what have I got to complain about?” Now you’ve got guilt about your anger about your anxiety about your anxiety about your anxiety. So the struggle switch massively amplifies your emotions, makes them bigger, stronger, stickier, they hang around for a lot longer. So what we learn to do is how to switch off our struggle switch, so anxiety shows up and it’s not that I like it or want it or approve of it, it’s an unpleasant emotion, but I’m just not gonna struggle with it.

I’m just gonna let the anxiety be there, I’ll notice this tightness in my chest and knots in my stomach, and I’ll notice radio doom and gloom in my head is broadcasting a lot of scary stories, and I’ll just allow that anxiety to flow through me, I’ll just let it come and stay and go, not fighting it, not struggling with it, and what happens is I find that the anxiety is then free to move. It may get higher if it’s a very challenging situation, it may get lower, it may move on quickly, it may move on slowly, but the point is it’s free to move and it doesn’t get amplified and stuck as when the struggle switches on.

So there’s a number of different skills in the book that teach people how to switch off this struggle switch, and when you learn how to do that, how to just turn towards your emotions with openness and curiosity and notice what they’re like in your body and breathe into them and make room for them, it’s so much easier to have them. Without these skills, these emotions are always gonna seem awful and unbearable and your default is always gonna be to fall back into the struggle strategies.

So when I talk about opening up, that’s just a metaphorical way of speaking, really, people have to learn these skills that are all about tuning into their body with openness and curiosity and noticing the different layers of the emotion and learning how to let that struggle dissipate. And the research on this again is very powerful, there’s so many… I mean there’s over 3000 published studies on the ACT approach with over 1000 randomized control trials, which is the gold standard of research, and what we see is people with anxiety disorders, as they learn how to open up and drop the struggle with anxiety and let it flow through, and what we see is that their symptoms of go down and down and down and down and down. But not from doing the common sense things, not from trying to control the anxiety, not from trying to push it away, not from trying to challenge the anxious thoughts or squish the anxious feelings or replace them with relaxation feelings, it’s not from any of that, it’s from just learning this new way of opening up and letting it flow through you, so it is paradoxical stuff.

Brett Mckay: So yeah, if you’re angry, the thing would be like hey, just notice I am feeling angry, and then just letting it be angry and then just getting curious about your anger, thinking like, “Well, where am I feeling my anger? What urges do I have now that I’m angry?” You’re being curious about the emotion you’re having, and what this does counter-intuitively, it diffuses the emotion.

Russ Harris: Yeah, absolutely. And then again, looking at what angry thoughts is my mind generating and if I go along with those in obey mode, if I obey those angry thoughts, where’s that gonna take me? It’s not gonna take me towards the life that I want to live or away from the life that I want to build, so then bringing in your unhooking skills to unhook from the angry thoughts while at the same time, using your opening up skills to let the angry feelings be there in your body. And what happens as you do that, is you massively reduce the impact of those thoughts and feelings, which then gives you a lot more control over your physical actions, so this is the committed action part of the model. Instead of letting my anger control what I do, I come back to my values and I use those to guide my actions and do things that are meaningful, important or life enhancing. So once I’ve learned how to do this, I can feel angry but act calmly, I can say in a calm voice, “I’m feeling furious right now,” and that’s gonna have a very different effect than if I start shouting and yelling while doing all the typical things we do when anger is just jerking us around all over the place.

Brett Mckay: And again, this is a skill that takes practice, it’s not gonna be a week, it might take months, years to practice this thing.

Russ Harris: Oh, look, you can always get better at it, but there’s lots of good research showing that people can get benefits say even within 10 weeks of regular practice of this stuff, so it’s not a miracle cure or anything. As you keep saying, and I’m glad you do, it needs practice, practice, practice, but at the same time, if you do practise it and embrace it, you can get some pretty effective results in a short space of time.

Brett Mckay: So we’ve been talking a lot about unhooking ourselves from these negative emotions, but as you said, ACT isn’t just about that, isn’t just about stopping the struggle with anxiety or anger, whatever, it’s about committing yourself to living a meaningful life, doing proactive positive things so you can live the life you want, and that requires knowing what your values are, so you walk people through how to figure out what’s important to them, that’s an important part of ACT. Let’s say someone’s done that, they figure out, “Okay, I want to live a healthy life,” and they list out of tasks that they wanna do, those are intentions we have, we all have good intentions, sometimes stuff gets in the way of those intentions, how can ACT help us to live up to our values when things get hard?

Russ Harris: No matter how good you get at doing this stuff, there will be times where you just don’t live up to your values, where you do get hooked by your thoughts and feelings and pulled into self-defeating patterns of behavior, and when that happens, boy does it hurt, so we don’t wanna fall back into beating ourselves up, we wanna acknowledge it hurts and be there in a kind, caring way for ourself. However, we can get a lot better at living by our values, so there’s all sorts of little ways to bring them into your everyday life, you could start your day, each day by thinking of two or three values that you just wanna sprinkle into the day ahead, maybe loving and caring, playful, for example, and then you go through your day and look for little opportunities to be loving or caring or playful.

When we start translating our values into goals and action plans, it can be very useful to write those down, what are my goals, what are my actions, and to really tune into the values underlying them and to recognize that even if I don’t achieve this particular goal, there still 1000 other ways that I can live the value underneath it. If the value is being loving, there’s thousands of ways that I can translate that into different goals and actions. Life will often get in the way of one particular goal, but doesn’t mean we have to give up on the value of being loving or being kind or being playful or whatever value it is that we’re choosing to bring more into our life for that day.

And then another part of this is, is predicting how your mind and your body is gonna make this hard for you, what’s your mind likely to say to try and talk you out of this and what unhooking skill are you gonna use to take the power and impact out of that when your mind says it, and what uncomfortable feelings are likely to show up? When we really start living a values-based life, that means we face up to our challenges, we face up to our difficulties. It’s not a… Going back to the start of the interview, when we live a meaningful life, it’s not a life that’s just full of pleasant, enjoyable feelings, a meaningful life asks more of us, asks us to step up to our challenges and do the uncomfortable, difficult stuff. And so of course, difficult feelings and emotions are gonna arise, and that’s when we want to use our opening up skills to open up and let those feelings be there and let them flow through us.

Brett Mckay: That idea of when you set a goal and it doesn’t work out the way you’d hope, everyone experiences that, and I like the idea where ACT recognizes that just as your emotions aren’t in your complete control, you have to give up on that, just accept you’re gonna have these bad emotions, you also have to accept that outcomes that you have in life aren’t under your complete control, and the only control you have is just trying to live up to your values like you said. Even if you set a goal to, I don’t know, lose 20 pounds, maybe you don’t lose 20 pounds in the time you set, but you did in the process, every day try to live a healthy life in taking walks, watching what you eat and that’s a success.

Russ Harris: Yeah, absolutely. So let’s suppose the value is self-care, the goal is to lose a certain amount of weight, well, if you’re living the value of self-care through exercising and through eating well and so forth, even if you don’t achieve the particular weight loss you want, you’re improving your health and you’re improving your day-to-day quality of life through being self-caring. So yeah, we’ve all experienced that, that we don’t follow through on our goals, and we’ve all experienced how disappointing that can be, but that doesn’t mean we give up on our values.

And the goal-focused life is a life of misery, it’s always about achieving the goal, achieve, achieve, achieve and then if you do achieve the goal, a brief glimmer of some happy feelings, and then there’s the next goal and the next one. Whereas the values-focused life, we get to appreciate living our values from moment to moment, from day-to day. So we still set goals, they’re useful for motivation, but it’s about living those values, and if we embrace this concept, we can have instant success. If my aim is to live the value of being loving, I can do that right now and I don’t have to wait until the day I’ve achieved a particular goal. If I wanna live the value of being playful, I can do that right now, I don’t have to wait until the day that I achieve whatever goal it is I’ve set around being playful and so forth. So again, it’s very liberating, [chuckle] and then the goal-focused life can be very constraining.

Brett Mckay: Well, Russ, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Russ Harris: Well, so the Happiness Trap… And very importantly, that folks check that you’re getting the second edition, I rewrote it recently, this has got about 50% new material compared to the first edition, so just check. Second Edition is available in all good bookstores and even in some of the bad bookstores and my website, thehappinesstrap.com, there’s more information there.

Brett Mckay: Fantastic. Well, Russ Harris, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Russ Harris: Thank you so much, it was a pleasure for me too.

Brett Mckay: My guest today was Russ Harris, he’s the author of the book The Happiness Trap, it’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, thehappinesstrap.com, also check out our show notes at aom.is/happinesstrap, where you can find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast, make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com, where you can find our podcast archives as well as thousands of articles we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you can think of. And while you’re there, make sure you sign up for our newsletter, it’s free, there’s a daily or weekly option. And if you’d like to enjoy ad-free episodes of the AOM podcast, you can do so on Stitcher Premium. Head over to stitcherpremium.com, sign up, use code manliness at checkout for a free month trial. Once you’re signed up, download the Stitcher app on Android or iOS and you can start enjoying ad-free episodes of the AOM podcast. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate if you can take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify, it helps a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think would get something out of it.

As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the AOM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Does it feel like the world is out to get you?

Does it seem like everyone you know is an a-hole?

Does it feel like your life is going nowhere and that you’ll always be a loser?

If you answered “yes” to one or more of the above questions, then you might be a miserable SOB.

Don’t worry, though. You don’t have to be a miserable SOB for the rest of your life. You’re probably not really a miserable SOB, even. You’re probably a swell guy who’s just let some stinking thinking infect his mind.

At least that’s what psychologist David Burns postulates in his book — Feeling Good — which helped popularize cognitive behavioral therapy.

In the book, Burns highlights eleven common cognitive distortions people engage in that make them feel absolutely miserable. These cognitive distortions are erroneous thought patterns that give everything a jaundiced tint and sicken how you feel about yourself, other people, and the world around you. According to cognitive behavioral therapy, a big reason people feel miserable is that their thoughts are jacked up. Fix the erroneous mental models, and you fix the bad feelings.

Below we highlight the eleven cognitive distortions that people engage in on the regular, and which may be making you feel miserable. With each, we’ve included the definition Burns gives of the distortion in his newest book, Feeling Great, along with a thumbnail sketch of it that can help you recognize that distortion in your own life.

1. All or Nothing Thinking

“You look at things in absolute, black-or-white categories, as if shades of gray do not exist.”

“If I never write a bestselling book, I’m a failure.”

“Because I’ve discovered these flaws in my faith, the whole thing is a lie.”

“She forgot my birthday, so she’s not worth having a relationship with.”

Most things in life aren’t black and white. Overly dualistic thinking isn’t true to reality. Life is full of nuance. A goal can be worth pursuing even if it doesn’t garner the highest success; there are worthwhile things in both flawed people and flawed philosophies.

2. Overgeneralization

“You generalize from some specific flaw, failure, or mistake to your entire self. Or you may generalize the way you feel right now or some negative experience you’ve just had, to the future.”

Overgeneralization is all about lending a globalized import to a discrete mess-up. You make a mistake at work and decide you’re incompetent at your job. You lose your temper at your kids and decide you’re a bad dad.

Overgeneralization deals in “always” and “never”: You make a cutting comment to your girlfriend and think, “I always ruin my relationships.” You miss one workout and think, “I’ll never get in shape.”

You can also overgeneralize with other people by taking a specific flaw, and deciding it’s indicative of their entire character. For example, because your co-worker whistles annoyingly, you decide he’s entirely inconsiderate . . . ignoring the way he always brings donuts to meetings and helps you troubleshoot your software.

3. Mental Filtering

“You filter out or ignore the positives and focus entirely on the negatives.”

Your mind is like Velcro for the negative and Teflon for the positive; bad things persistently stick in your head, while good things slide off and into the realm of non-awareness.

4. Discounting the Positive

“You tell yourself that your positive qualities or successes don’t count.”

This is related to mental filtering. The difference is that you do recognize the positive qualities in yourself or in another person . . . but then you convince yourself that they don’t “count.”

“My last idea went over well, but it won’t get me any closer to getting the promotion.”

“Yeah, I did lose some weight this week, but it doesn’t matter because I still look like the Pillsbury Doughboy.”

“That woman may have said that I looked handsome, but she was just being nice.”

5. Mind Reading

“You jump to conclusions about how others are thinking and feeling without any clear evidence.”

Humans are terrible mind readers, but that doesn’t stop us from trying to be clairvoyant. And when we do read the minds of others, we typically assume — without evidence — that they’re thinking the worst about us.

“My boss didn’t say anything after my presentation because she thinks I did a bad job.”

“That woman smirked at me because I’m unattractive.”

“My friend hasn’t answered my text because I’m not important to him.”

6. Catastrophizing

“You make arbitrary and disturbing predictions about the future.”

Catastrophizing happens when you make seemingly logical jumps between a catalytic cause and a sequence of subsequent potential effects, creating a chain that ultimately leads to an illogical final conclusion. For example:

“I got a D in my accounting class. That means I won’t have a good GPA when I graduate. If I don’t have a good GPA, I’ll have a hard time finding a job. If I have a hard time finding a job, then I’ll be living at home with my parents for the rest of my life.”

Each little jump in such a line of thinking seems reasonable, but it’s pretty unreasonable to conclude that just because you get a D in a college class, you’ll die alone.

7. Magnification and Minimization

“You exaggerate the negativity in a situation and minimize the positives.”

Seeing the world through a lens that magnifies the negative and minimizes the positive — a lens of consistent pessimism — contributes to depression and just feeling unmotivated in general. If all you see are the downsides of your job (a cold boss), and you minimize its positives (enjoyable co-workers), it’s going to be hard to get out of bed each morning.

8. Emotional Reasoning

“This involves reasoning from how you feel: ‘I feel like an idiot, so I must be one’ or ‘I feel hopeless, so things are never going to get better.’”

After a terrible fight with your significant other, you think, “She is the worst person, and this relationship isn’t working.”

After a thoroughly romantic date with your significant other, you think, “She is the only one for me. I’ve never been happier.”

Which is the “truth” about your relationship?

Feelings fluctuate. And while emotions can be a source of reasoning, they need to be trained to align with your intellect. People who take part in maladaptive emotional reasoning completely substitute feeling for cognition. Whatever they feel and only what they feel is reality.

So if they feel bad, something must be wrong with them or the world around them.

But that might not be the case. Sometimes you feel crummy for no reason in particular. Sometimes you’re suffering from “emotional contamination,” and a bad day at work infects how you feel about your family. Sometimes a confluence of unfortunate circumstances come together to create a cluster of chaos, but these circumstances represent an aberration, rather than a norm from which to draw any kind of conclusions.

9. Should Statements

“You criticize yourself or other people with shoulds, shouldn’ts, musts, ought tos, and have tos.”

“Shoulds” are expectations and standards that may be arbitrary in nature. We can feel guilty when we don’t live up to what we think we’re supposed to do (even if we’re not obligated to do it), and angry and frustrated when people and the way the world works don’t meet our expectations (even if we’ve never communicated those expectations and/or they’re unfair and unreasonable ones to have).

10. Labeling

“Labeling is an extreme form of overgeneralization in which you try to capture the ‘essence’ of yourself or another person with a one-word label.”

If garden-variety overgeneralization takes place when we draw broad conclusions based on one specific belief/behavior, then labeling is where we wholly dismiss ourselves or others by collapsing complex humans into one-dimensional categories:

Because you broke your sobriety streak you’re a “loser.”

Because your brother hasn’t repaid your loan he’s a “cheat.”

Because someone belongs to X political party he’s a “moron.”

11. Personalization and Blame

“You blame yourself for something you weren’t entirely responsible for.”

“You blame others and overlook ways you might have contributed to the conflict.”

When mistakes and conflicts happen, the cause of it is often complex. Oftentimes you’re not the only one responsible for a problem, and neither is the other person.

Quit Being a Miserable SOB

So how do you get rid of these maladaptive mental scripts?

The first step is just recognizing them. As you talk to yourself and to others, be on the lookout for these cognitive distortions.

The second step is to challenge your negative thought patterns.

If you make a mistake at work, and catch yourself engaging in overgeneralization by deciding that the mistake means you’re a complete loser, ask yourself if that’s really true. Sure, you made an error on some report, but you’re doing pretty well in other areas of your life. Your family life is solid. You’re making progress on your fitness goals. And the majority of work days, you don’t make mistakes. So, no, you’re not a complete loser.

Do the same if you catch yourself engaging in cognitive distortions about other people. Yes, people can be annoying, and you may disagree with them, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re utterly irredeemable. Humans are multifaceted beings. They can’t be understood by focusing on a single trait, or described with a single word. A person can be annoying and conceited and giving and hardworking at the same time.

Look for the good in your life and in others; then, let it really marinate in your mind.

Challenging cognitive distortions is a skill that takes practice to develop. Don’t expect immediate results and prepare to have setbacks. But with time, you can rewrite the scripts that have made you feel like a miserable SOB, and begin to become a more positive, confident, son of a gun.

With our archives 4,000 articles deep, we’ve decided to republish a classic piece each Sunday to help our newer readers discover some of the best, evergreen gems from the past. This article was originally published in December 2021.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

One of the most neglected virtues of our daily existence is appreciation. —Dale Carnegie 

My career has mostly played out in roles that don’t involve directly managing other people. In late 2021, though, I spent a handful of months in a management role. That short amount of time totally changed my view of a manager’s job, as well as human nature and relationships in general. 

I expected the role to be more business-focused and even scientific in nature. Management content would have you believe that if you follow a certain set of predictable steps, measure the right “KPIs,” and give performance feedback based on a standardized rubric, you’ll be all set. 

The reality, as always, is a bit more nuanced. During my time managing a small team, it was far more about wrangling personalities and aligning expectations than anything else. Above all, though, I quickly realized that what folks mostly want and need is a cheerleader. They want someone to notice their effort and encourage them when the going gets tough. 

As William James once wrote, “The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.” 

It’s not to be managed to a set of desired ends, but appreciated. 

Dale Carnegie, perhaps the most influential self-improvement author of all-time, wholeheartedly agreed with James’ wisdom and made it one of the core principles in How to Win Friends and Influence People: 

Give honest and sincere appreciation. 

He knew that people primarily wanted to feel seen, valued, and respected — and that genuine appreciation is one of the fastest ways to build better relationships at work, at home, and everywhere in between.

The Nourishment of Sincere Appreciation

We nourish the bodies of our children and friends and employees, but how seldom do we nourish their self-esteem? We provide them with roast beef and potatoes to build energy, but we neglect to give them kind words of appreciation that would sing in their memories for years like the music of the morning stars. —Dale Carnegie 

The craving for appreciation is not merely about vanity. Human beings are wired for connection; we need it and thrive on it. In the same way our bodies need food and drink in order to function properly, our spirits need kinship. Giving appreciation is one of the most potent ways we can nourish the people around us. So when someone goes out of their way to tell you, “I noticed what you did, and it mattered,” it hits at the core of what makes us human and fills our emotional tank like nothing else. 

At work, appreciation boosts motivation more effectively than bonuses. In marriage, it fills the relationship bank account. For kids, it builds confidence faster than correction ever could.

Flattery vs. Appreciation

On the flip side of the appreciation coin, mere flattery feels disingenuous and gross. Carnegie drew a hard line between the two:

The difference between appreciation and flattery? That is simple. One is sincere and the other insincere. One comes from the heart out; the other from the teeth out. One is unselfish; the other selfish. One is universally admired; the other universally condemned.

Flattery is a manipulative type of praise that tries to get something in return. Appreciation, on the other hand, is grounded in sincerity. 

Fortunately, humans are generally pretty good at intrinsically noticing the difference between the two. We have a way of feeling it. It’s not easy to fake sincerity or earnestness, which is why certain people — or the certain things that some people say — just hit us as being off. 

True appreciation needs to come from a sincere and honest place or it simply won’t work.    

Making Appreciation a Daily Habit

Every morning, perhaps as part of your journaling or meditation routine, think about someone in your life that you can show your gratitude towards. Friends, coworkers, family members, even your rolodex of loose connections is fine. There isn’t anybody who would respond negatively to a bit of appreciation, even if it’s been a while.  

1. Make It Easy. No need to schedule phone calls or write handwritten letters (unless you want to); a quick email or text message is totally fine, as long as it’s sincere. 
2. Be specific. Generic compliments don’t land. Tell people exactly what you appreciated and why it mattered to you. 
3. Notice effort, not just results. In a society where ghosting of all kinds is commonplace, simply showing up and giving effort is commendable. The ol’ college try really does matter and deserves to be recognized. 
4. Don’t ignore what’s around you every day. Make a special effort to notice things around the house and express appreciation to your partner and kids. As Dale Carnegie said, “We often take our spouses so much for granted that we never let them know we appreciate them.” 

A Virtuous Cycle 

Giving honest and sincere appreciation doesn’t just strengthen relationships, it improves you too. When you make a habit of noticing what’s good in others, you start noticing more good in the wider world. You complain less. You lead better. 

Regularly offering sincere and honest appreciation takes but thirty seconds, costs nothing, and can make a world of difference. 

Be sure to listen to our podcast about Dale Carnegie’s insights for the modern world: 

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Most of us grow up thinking of anger as a problem. We’re told it’s childish, irrational, and something to repress or rise above. As journalist Sam Parker, author of Good Anger: How Rethinking Rage Can Change Our Lives, told me on the podcast, that assumption has left a lot of people more anxious and depressed than they need to be.

The reality of anger is more complicated. Anger is, in fact, a neutral emotion. Yes, it can make you snap at your kids or rage at a reckless driver. But it can also be a beneficial energy that helps you defend your boundaries, clarify your needs, and move forward on your goals.

The key is to learn how to work with anger, rather than against it — to make it your ally. The next time you feel your face get flushed and your pulse start to rise, here are four steps Parker suggested on the show to turn that heat into a positive force:

1. Name It

The first step is to simply recognize that you’re angry. For years, since Parker thought anger was a bad thing, he didn’t acknowledge that it was something that was present in his life. Then one day, while pounding a heavy bag:

I felt this strange surge of energy kind of coming up from somewhere lower down in my body, and I just started punching and swinging away with this kind of energy that I’d never had before, but also this feeling that I’d never had before in my body. And this went on for however long I managed to box for. And afterwards I was kind of sweating and bent over, exhausted. But I felt better than I had in months.

And I realized that the feeling that I tapped into was anger. I was absolutely furious.

And I was thinking about the things in my life that were going wrong and the conversations I needed to have to put them right. And everything was kind of unfurling beautifully in my thoughts. Everything was looking like targets rather than things to be afraid of.

Parker’s realization that he was deeply angry dramatically changed his life. By giving something he had been feeling all along a name, he was able to begin to get a handle on it.

We’ve talked before about the power of labeling emotions. Naming your emotions doesn’t make them disappear, but it does give you a better grip on them. There’s nothing quite so disempowering as knowing there’s an influence working on your thoughts and behaviors, but not being able to register and recognize what it is. Labeling your emotions allows you to evaluate them from an objective distance and gain greater control over what often feels like an uncontrollable force. Once you know, “I feel angry,” you can decide what to do about that.

2. Figure Out What the Anger Is Telling You

Anger is a signal. It imparts information. Psychologists say it usually points to:

• A boundary being crossed
• An unmet need making itself known
• An old wound being prodded

When anger shows up, ask: What does this say about the state of my life? What does this say about me? What does it say about my relationships?

Parker gave the example of feeling slighted at work. Maybe the jab was small, but your reaction feels out of proportion. Instead of brushing it off or blowing up, stop and ask: Why am I feeling so angry? Did that comment feel unfair? Am I feeling overlooked? Is this touching on some longstanding insecurity from my childhood? Once you figure out what anger is trying to tell you, you can figure out how to address its root cause.

3. Give Yourself 20 Minutes to Cool Off

When anger hits, your brain gets scrambled. Parker describes it like this:

You become momentarily disoriented. You can struggle to articulate yourself. You can struggle to understand your own thoughts . . . It’s a sort of mental scrambling.

You don’t want to react when your brain is addled by a surge of anger; you can end up saying or doing the wrong thing and hurting others or your reputation. It’s best to cool off a little before putting the energy of anger to use.

You may have heard that you should count to ten when you’re angry, but the research says it takes a lot longer for your system to reset — about 20 minutes. During that time, rehearsing arguments or plotting payback can just amplify your anger in an unhealthy way. Instead, use the break to distract yourself; Parker recommends listening to a podcast or reading a book. Taking a walk very often helps too — solvitur ambulando!

Parker says that while it is helpful to let your anger diminish a little before you react, you actually don’t want to let it cool down completely; as we’ll talk about next, anger can be a positive source of motivation, and you want to use it to take action while it’s still providing you a little heat.

4. Channel the Energy Into Something Useful

Parker calls anger the most energizing emotion. Once you’ve got it harnessed by labeling it, recognizing what it’s telling you, and letting its most volatile edge pass, you can channel anger’s energy into a productive force.

You might think that anger is like steam in a kettle that simply needs straightforward release. But punching or breaking things, yelling, or kicking over a wastebasket aren’t effective ways to deal with anger; venting without purpose usually just amplifies your rumination, which makes you more angry. Rather than releasing your anger in cathartic bursts, you want to direct it toward more sustained and constructive outlets.

If you’ve identified an interpersonal issue or boundary violation as the cause of your ire, use your anger to give you the boldness to have a difficult conversation with someone. While your anger can provide the push to initiate a forthright discussion, keep the dialogue itself calm and composed.

Even if an anger-causing issue isn’t within your power to resolve, you can still use your anger as a source of general energy; unleashing it during a workout can give you the drive to push yourself harder.

Parker notes that anger can also be used as a spur for tackling creative projects and reaching your goals. He calls it the “I’ll show you” energy. While seeking “revenge” for slights and offenses can sometimes be pursued in an unhealthy way, burning to prove the naysayers and critics wrong can be a very motivating and positive fuel for achievement.  

Anger isn’t a bad thing or a good thing; it’s a neutral emotion that can be used for positive or negative ends. Aristotle had it right: the goal in life isn’t to banish anger but to purposefully direct it — “to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right reason, and in the right way.”

Do that, and anger isn’t dangerous — it’s a force for courage, growth, and greatness.

For more insights on anger, listen to this AoM podcast episode with Sam Parker:

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Most people think of anger as a problem — something to avoid or repress. It’s irrational, immature, and best left behind.

But what if anger isn’t bad? What if it can actually be an incredibly positive, productive, energizing life force?

My guest argues we’ve misunderstood anger — and that doing so has made us more anxious, depressed, and stuck. His name is Sam Parker, and he’s a journalist and the author of Good Anger: How Rethinking Rage Can Change Our Lives. Today on the show, we explore the surprising psychology and philosophy of anger. Sam explains how anger should be understood as a neutral emotion that imparts valuable information. He shares why we confuse anger with aggression, how anger can point to unmet needs and violated boundaries, and why repressing it might be damaging our health. We also talk about anger’s role in work, creativity, and relationships, and how to channel anger to help us achieve more, maintain our self-respect, and live a more grounded life.

If you’ve ever thought anger was something to outgrow, this conversation may just change your mind.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Marcia Reynolds’ TEDx Talk: How to Use Anger as a Force for Good
• AoM Podcast #489: How to Get a Handle on Your Anger
• AoM Article: How Labeling Your Emotions Can Help You Take Control
• AoM Article: Should You Go to Bed Angry?
• AoM Article: How to Make Anger Your Ally

Connect With Sam Parker

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

The ancient art of rhetoric has shaped political policies, influenced social movements, structured legal arguments, and molded cultural narratives throughout history. It’s been used for three thousand years to persuade other people to change their lives.

But what if you could use it to persuade yourself?

My guest today says you can. Jay Heinrichs is the author of Aristotle’s Guide to Self-Persuasion, and he explains how the same rhetorical techniques that great leaders and orators have used for millennia can be turned inward to help you change your life. We discuss how to identify your “soul” as your internal audience, use the concept of kairos to turn chaos into opportunity, create hyperbolic moonshot goals that inspire action even if you fall short, and employ ethos, pathos, and logos to achieve the habits and goals you aspire to. Along the way, we talk about how Jay used these self-leadership tools to go from barely being able to walk to attempting an athletic feat physiologists told him was impossible.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Jay’s previous appearance on the AoM podcast: Episode #639 — Why You Should Learn the Lost Art of Rhetoric
• AoM series on Rhetoric 101

Connect With Jay Heinrichs

• Jay’s website
• ArgueLab

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness Podcast. The ancient art of rhetoric has shaped political policies, influenced social movements, structured legal arguments, and molded cultural narratives throughout history. It’s been used for 3,000 years to persuade other people to change their lives. What if you could use it to persuade yourself? My guest today says you can. Jay Heinrichs is the author of Aristotle’s Guide to Self-Persuasion, and he explains how the same rhetorical techniques that great leaders and orators have used for millennia can be turned inward to help you change your life. We discuss how to identify your soul as your internal audience, use the concept of kairos to turn chaos into opportunity, create hyperbolic moonshot goals that inspire action even if you fall short, and employ ethos, pathos, and logos to achieve the habits and goals you aspire to. Along the way, we talk about how Jay used these self-leadership tools to go from barely being able to walk to attempting an athletic feat physiologists told him was impossible. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/selfpersuasion. All right, Jay Heinrichs, welcome back to the show.

Jay Heinrichs: Well, thanks, Brett. It’s nice to be back.

Brett McKay: So we had you on the show way back in 2020 to talk about your book, Thank You for Arguing, which is all about reviving the lost art of classical rhetoric to persuade others. You got a new book out, but this time it’s about using Aristotelian rhetoric to persuade ourselves to be better people. And you talk about at the beginning of the book that it was sort of a midlife rut that kickstarted you exploring whether you could use classical rhetoric to improve your life and become a happier person. Tell us about what was going on there.

Jay Heinrichs: Back in my late 50s, I was suffering from this illness that should be familiar to a lot of men our age, middle age and older. I was depressed and I was feeling very sorry for myself in part because I had this physical problem. It’s called snapping hip syndrome. It’s disgusting. The iliotibial band, which is this tendon that stretches from the knee to the hip, was catching on my hip bone on both sides. And what happens when that happens is you fall down. You literally can’t move. And the reason for this tends to be when you get a really tight butt, like your gluteal muscles are contracted all the time and stress can cause that. Sitting down too much can cause it. All kinds of things can. But basically what was causing it was that I was just tight, like all wound up. And so doctors had, we’d talked about surgery and they said maybe I’d be able to walk again afterwards. So that was out. And I tried pills. I tried everything. Nothing was working until one day my doctor said she’d found somebody who would understand me because I didn’t want to just be able to walk normally again.

I was able to walk with a limp, but then my hips would catch and I’d fall down again and not be able to walk at all. This guy had a new procedure who might be able to fix me. But I thought that wasn’t enough because in order to do the incredibly painful physical therapy, I wanted to do something more than just being able to walk. And I had been a trail runner back through my 30s and 40s, not a great athlete, but an enthusiastic one. And so I thought, how can I possibly talk myself into doing all that it would take? And my wife came up with this idea, which was to persuade myself. She had mentioned the work I’d been doing with clients. I’d worked with NASA, with Harvard fundraisers. And she said, “Have you thought about persuading yourself for once?” I hadn’t, but my wife is really smart. I do everything she says. And so I gave it a shot. I made that attempt.

Brett McKay: Okay, so you’re gonna get a treatment for your snapping hip syndrome. And this treatment, it involves getting a lot of painful injections. It’s very unpleasant. And then you have to do some arduous physical therapy on top of that. And you decide, if I’m gonna be doing all that, I wanna push myself not only to walk again, but to run again. So you’ve got this big challenge ahead of you and to convince yourself to take it on and stick with it, you decide to persuade yourself to do it. And at the beginning of the book, you say this bold statement, that if you’re going to improve yourself, get a little bit better in your life, whether you want to accomplish some goal you have or overcome some obstacle, the master key is self-persuasion. Why do you think self-persuasion is the master key for us to make changes in our lives?

Jay Heinrichs: When you think about it, in order to make a change, you have to do something. And usually that means changing your habits, right? Getting rid of the bad ones and acquiring new ones. And Aristotle was the philosopher of habit. His books, almost all of them talk about habits and how to do that. Why? Because habits put you on autopilot. You don’t have to make choices whether or not to exercise if you simply do it every day. I mean, you think about it, if you floss every day, that’s a lot easier than deciding whether you want to floss in one particular day, which is, when you think about it, kind of disgusting, right? And tedious, going in between every two teeth. The same thing works with diet or exercise or practicing a new instrument or learning a new language. All these things that make a change in your life for the better require a lot of discipline, a lot of motivation. And where do you get the discipline and motivation unless you can talk yourself into doing it? And that’s where persuasion comes in. So the idea my wife had was, what if I could use those tools of persuasion on audiences in general or markets, all the work I’d been doing over the decades, and applying them toward myself to gain these habits that will allow me to make the change I wanted? That’s what this is all about.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I’ve noticed in my own life, any change I’ve made, it’s because I actually wanted it. Like I convinced myself this is what I need to do. And we can convince ourselves with the tools of rhetoric that people like Aristotle wrote about 2000 years ago. So let’s talk about some of this stuff. So typically when we think of rhetoric, it’s about persuading an audience. When we’re persuading ourselves, we’re the audience. But what exactly does that mean? Like what part of ourselves is doing the persuading? What part of ourselves is the audience?

Jay Heinrichs: Yeah, what is the audience when you’re the person doing the manipulation and at the same time the one being manipulated? So this was a big problem. I mean, when my wife said, “Why don’t you persuade yourself?” My first reaction was, well, how can I be the rhetorician and the audience at the same time? So I did a deep dive into Aristotle, reading books I really hadn’t gone into in the past. And I came across this really weird little book titled On the Soul. And so the way Aristotle describes it, your soul is this ideal version of yourself. It’s the person you wish you saw in the mirror. So you think of what’s an ideal Boy Scout, and I was a pretty unsuccessful Boy Scout myself, but I still remember what a Boy Scout is supposed to be. See if I can just from the top of my head.

Brett McKay: Yeah, it’s the Scout law, right?

Jay Heinrichs: Is that what it is? So a Boy Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent. That almost duplicates what Aristotle wrote about as the ideal soul. It’s like the ideal Boy Scout. It’s not who you are, but it’s the soul that represents your best self as opposed to your daily self that eats Dunkin’ Donuts or whatever. So the question is, how do you find that soul? You know, where is it? One philosopher claimed to locate the soul. He said it’s in your pituitary gland. But a better way to do it, a more useful way to find your own soul, is to separate your wants from your truest needs. Separate your wants from your needs. This is what Aristotle tells us to do. So our daily self wants things, but those things make us fatter or less healthy, or simply, you know, flatters our ego. We take a job because we think it’s prestigious, and even though we know it will make us miserable. Your soul is telling you, “No, don’t do that,” whereas your daily self is saying, “I’m going to take this because then people will respect me.

Your soul, because it can be such a nag if you really pay attention to it, thinking, what do I really need? What is it that’s important to me? That can be pretty annoying. I mean, when I was working on my own soul or discovering it, I kind of wished my soul would do something stupid and embarrass itself in front of strangers, you know, the way I do. But my soul is my audience, and my job is to convince myself that I’m worthy of that audience. Like, I’ll show it. I really can live up to it. And I found that to be a really powerful tool because it allowed me to use all the other tools of rhetoric, sort of thinking of my soul as an extension of me or maybe something that’s deeply internal to me, but something that’s a little different from my daily self. And that way, I had an audience I could persuade.

Brett McKay: Okay, so make sure I understand this. The daily self is the audience and your soul is the persuader, or is it the opposite?

Jay Heinrichs: It’s the opposite. So your daily self is the one every day that tries to prove you’re worthy of your soul. So, if you’re about to skip a workout, say, you say to yourself, “What’s my soul going to think?” Because I need to convince it that I have the kind of character that’s worthy of it. And at the same time, there are other things you can do to sort of manipulate the soul, and I’m hoping we can get into that. And those are the tools of ethos, pathos, and logos.

Brett McKay: I love that. So you’re looking for a way to help yourself admire yourself, in a way.

Jay Heinrichs: Exactly. And when you’re helping yourself admire yourself, that admiring self is your soul. It’s your better you. It’s like the really, the coolest, most awesome, impressive part of you that deep down is who you truly are.

Brett McKay: Okay, so your soul is the best part of yourself. That’s your audience, and your day-to-day self is the persuader. And you want to use your day-to-day self to persuade your soul that you’re worthy of it. And one rhetorical tactic that’s inspired by the ancient Greeks that can help us persuade ourselves is this idea of kairos. It’s K-A-I-R-O-S. What’s kairos?

Jay Heinrichs: Kairos is so cool. And it’s funny that so few people study it. I kind of hope they’ll start. So kairos is what helps you determine what your goals are and what your big achievements are going to be. So kairos is the art of opportunity. And it’s a way of interpreting the most chaotic moments in their lives. Now, I think we’re going through, as the world and nation in particular, we’re going through a very chaotic time. We don’t know what’s going to happen. Things are very confusing. Pure chaos. Now, what’s interesting is the ancient Greeks and Romans actually saw chaos as an opening. So a kairotic moment is this time of crisis, this chaotic moment. Those who can keep their heads can push through this opening, this gap. And in fact, the original kaos in Greek, where we get chaos from, means gap. It doesn’t mean horror. It means something that just is something you need to go through. And if you look at great moments in history or great inventions in technology, they tend to happen at the most chaotic times. And in rhetoric, that’s called the kairotic times. It’s the best time to take action.

So now where Aristotle comes in on all this is in his theory of rhetoric. So one way to understand kairos is to think in terms of the tenses. So, and Aristotle described the rhetoric of each tense, past, present, and future. So the past tense, if you’re thinking about chaos and kairotic times, like the time we’re in right now, we tend to think about going back to the past and somehow restoring the better days. But the past tense also has to do with crime and punishment. Like who made this happen? And they should be punished. What went wrong? Who’s to blame? Now that can be useful. It’s not entirely something to ignore. But then also people use the present tense, which is all about values, what’s right and wrong, who’s good and who’s bad. So we tend to attack people who are the bad people who caused all the things, the bad things we think are happening today. And Aristotle actually said, “If you want to make a change in your own life, as well as in the world, you need to focus on the future.” And Aristotle called this kind of rhetoric that focuses on the future, deliberative rhetoric.

So you’ve got the past, the present, and the future. Which is going to actually fix things? That’s what you need to focus on. And so I tell a story in my previous book, Thank You for Arguing, about how my son George, when he was 15, used up all the toothpaste in the bathroom. And when I blamed him, he was making fun of me because he had heard me lecture about rhetoric at the dinner table for years. But he said, when I yelled at him saying, “Who used up all the toothpaste?” He said, “That’s not the point, is it, Dad? The point is, how are we going to keep this from happening again?” Now see what he was doing? He was switching the tense from the past tense, crime and punishment, to the future tense. How are we going to fix things? And by the way, if you’re ever in trouble for something, or someone blames you for something, or calls you a name or whatever, you can say, “Call me whatever you want, or I may or may not have screwed up, but how are we going to fix things?” That’s deliberative rhetoric. And in a time of chaos, these kairotic moments, when we have a tendency to panic, return to the old days, or get angry at people, deliberative rhetoric lets us say, “How are we going to fix things?

How can I use this time to make things better, or to get better myself?” And so back in my own kairotic moment, when I was having this late midlife crisis, my aging body, and this depression I was in, I found very confusing. This doesn’t seem to be me. Deliberative rhetoric and this idea of kairos made me reframe the situation. I thought, I’m not drowning in a whirlpool. Maybe I’m looking at a gap. And the question is, how do I get through to the other side of that gap?

Brett McKay: I love that. So yeah, instead of thinking about, “Oh, if I could only just go back to when I was 30 or 40, or what happened? What could I have done differently?” Using that past tense in this kairotic moment you had, you thought, you focused on the future. What can I do now? What can I do to make things better?

Jay Heinrichs: Exactly. And it’s a great way to understand what the situation really is without getting all panicky and negative about it. And yeah, if I wanted to go back and be a not-so-awesome 30-year-old, it’s, in a way, thinking about this kairotically in terms of navigating some gap. You know, the gap was between my youth and old age. And what gets me through that is being an awesome old guy.

Brett McKay: And so anyone can use this. So let’s say you’re a guy and you’re in a job that’s just making you miserable. You can see this instead of like, it’s just terrible. It’s like, this is a moment of kairos. This is an opportunity to exercise my ability to harness the future, like exercise my ability to improvise and take action.

Jay Heinrichs: Right. And one way to do that is if you’re thinking in terms of gaps, what exactly are the gaps? First of all, what’s making you most unhappy at work? Can you fix that while remaining in the same job? And if you can’t, what are the solutions? And the other thing is, what’s blocking you? What’s blocking you from getting another job? What’s blocking you from fixing the things that make you unhappy at work? So you think in terms of obstacles, the obstacles don’t necessarily prevent you because there’s always some space between them. That’s what chaos is all about. And kairos allows you not just to choose where the gaps are, but when’s the best time to act.

Brett McKay: So another rhetorical tool you talk about that we can use to persuade others, but we can maybe use to persuade ourselves, are tropes. I want to talk about a specific trope here in a bit, hyperbole, but just generally, what is a rhetorical trope?

Jay Heinrichs: A trope is anything that plays pretend. I mean, if you see it that way, it pretends something is not exactly what it is. So a metaphor is the most common trope. If I say, “The moon is a balloon,” you know the moon is not some inflatable bit of rubber, but it’s like one. And so if I say it is one, you start seeing the moon a little bit differently. You think about it floating. There’s a lot of unconscious brain work that goes on if somebody uses a metaphor. Then there’s other metaphors like irony, where you pretend to be serious when you’re saying something else. I mean, every teenager uses irony when somebody drops a tray in the cafeteria and they yell, “Nice,” as if they’re complimenting the person. I mean, the Southerners, especially Southern women, will say, “Bless her heart,” you know, not exactly praising. So those are what tropes do. They pretend one thing while actually meaning another, and they can actually change people’s whole views of reality.

Brett McKay: Okay. So one trope that you used is hyperbole. Before we talk about how you used it on yourself, hyperbole on yourself, what are some examples of great rhetoricians using hyperbole in their speeches?

Jay Heinrichs: Oh, my gosh. So hyperbole is the trope of exaggeration, where you say something is bigger or more important or tinier, for that matter, than what it really is in real life, and then pretend that that exaggeration is a true thing. So if you look at every great successful revolution of every kind, they start with a hyperbole. I mean, you think about, well, the American Revolution, this gaggle of British colonies, not all of whom got along all that well with each other, decided that they were going to push off the greatest military power in the world, the United Kingdom, and at the same time create a brand new political system that everybody around the world will someday imitate. That is totally hyperbolic. So when you think about it, all the great visionaries were hyperbolists. Think of Apple Computer. That arose out of this crazy hyperbole that people would have their own personal computers at a time when massive mainframes and terminals maybe in everybody’s home was the vision of the day. So, you think about that. If you ever want to do something amazingly great, first you have to sort of believe in the impossible, and that by definition is a hyperbole, if you can get people to believe it. That’s a trope.

Brett McKay: Another famous hyperbole, JFK’s moonshot speech, “We choose to go to the moon in this decade,” because we had just put someone into space, and the idea we’re going to get someone on the moon, that’s big. 

Jay Heinrichs: In a decade.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Jay Heinrichs: That is like, and we didn’t even have the technology to do that. Yeah, I mean, that’s brilliant. It’s a good, and you know, part of that speech that’s really interesting is he said, “We’re going to do this and do the other hard things,” he said. What’s really interesting about that is one way I started thinking about the hyperbole is if you have this grand moonshot goal, it actually helps you think about all the other hard things. It makes you believe you can do the other hard things as well, even if you’re failing at that one goal. I mean, imagine if we didn’t reach the moon in 1970, but it took a few years more. Even then, we would have been so far ahead in technology and beating the pants off the Soviet Union and all that good stuff that it would make us believe we could do other things. And the fact is we did achieve it, and it made us believe in all the other things as well, that we could do the hard things in general.

Brett McKay: So how did you use hyperbole in your quest to maybe overcome your snapping hip syndrome?

Jay Heinrichs: The etymology of hyperbole comes from two Greek words, hyper, which means above or beyond, and bállō, which means to throw. So bállō is actually where we get the English word ball. So hyperbole literally translated means to throw beyond. A hyperbole throws beyond actuality, which is kind of this amazing work in the imagination, but it’s more than that. And I thought personally, in my case, what if I created my own like capital H hyperbole? I would create an image of myself as this record-breaking athlete. Now, I never was a great athlete. I was an enthusiastic outdoorsman at best. But I would prove, you know, even though I couldn’t walk well and it looked like my condition may worsen to the point where I’d be in a wheelchair, I would prove my hyperbole by being the first person over 50 to run his age up this classic mountain here where I live in New Hampshire. Olympic skiers had been using it for years to test their fitness. Only a dozen people had ever run their age, which means reaching the top of this mountain in fewer minutes than their olden years. And I’d be the first old person to do it, the first over 50.

Never mind the fact that doctors had told me I’d never run again. And two physiologists told me that even if I were a good old athlete, they thought it was physically impossible to do because of the amount of oxygenation you need to have in order to run up this very steep, difficult mountain in fewer minutes than I was old in years. And that was to be my hyperbole. This was what was going to get me to do all the painful training over that time. But so just to make this clear, that was my hyperbole. But what I suggest to readers of the book is that this isn’t a fitness book. It’s about creating your own hyperbole, to create something exciting, some crazy big goal, with the idea that even if you fail to achieve it, you’re still way ahead. It’s this great motivational technique. So, imagine giving a speech in a foreign language. Instead of just learning the language, going someplace and delivering this scary talk, or learning to play the guitar and then busking performing on the streets of Manhattan, or learning to cook, and not just cooking a decent meal, but serving haute cuisine to a whole bunch of snobs to raise money for a good cause or something. Those are all hyperboles. And my book actually offers kind of a technique to come up with your own.

Brett McKay: I love that idea of creating a moonshot for yourself because it can be inspiring, and you might reach it. You reach it great, but I think the benefit is it’ll get you to do those things that are good for you. Along the way, you’ll be better for even just attempting that big moonshot hyperbole goal.

Jay Heinrichs: Exactly.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I think that’s a cool tactic. We’re going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. So let’s talk about another way you used Aristotle’s ideas of rhetoric on yourself. I think we talked about this last time in our last conversation about rhetoric. It’s the three means of persuasion. We got ethos, pathos, and logos. Let’s talk about ethos first, because Aristotle thought that was the most powerful, most important one. Recap, what is ethos? And then talk about how did you use that means of persuasion on yourself?

Jay Heinrichs: So Aristotle’s ethos is your projected character. It’s what people think of you, or it’s your brand. It’s whether your audience likes and trusts you. And this is why Aristotle thought it was most powerful, because if you like and totally trust somebody, you’re really likely to basically do what they say. That’s your leader. So now the ideal ethos, Aristotle says, three characteristics. And of course, he said them in Greek, but I translated them from the Greek and simplified them as what I call craft, caring, and cause. So first comes craft. You want your audience to think you know what you’re doing. You have the knowledge and the experience to solve whatever problem there is at hand. That’s craft. The caring part of it means your audience thinks you have only their best interest at heart. You’re selfless. You’re totally not selfish. It’s all about them. Then there’s cause, which has to do with values, with your audience believing you share those same values and that you live up to them. You’re a good person, right? You have a good soul. Now, when it comes to how I persuaded myself, that audience, as we talked about earlier, is my very own Aristotelian soul.

And my job was to convince that soul that I have an ethos that’s worthy of it, that I have the craft, that I knew how to get in shape and knew how to develop the habits, that I was selfless about it. This wasn’t about what I wanted from day to day. I wanted to read books with a cat in my lap. That’s what I really wanted. But my need was deeper. I wanted to be able to run my age. And then came the cause part, what I deeply valued. And that’s what connected me most closely with my soul. And that was the biggest secret of all, this idea that I was projecting a worthy ethos to my soul that allowed me not just to create these habits and believe in them that they could actually work, but to stick to them from day to day.

Brett McKay: Yeah. One of the tools you use to do that is decorum, correct?

Jay Heinrichs: Yeah. So decorum is how you make your audience think you’re one of them. And actually several days a week during the school year, I talk to high school and college classes and law school classes. And I talk to students whose classes have adopted my books. Now, the problem I have is that my children are older than these teachers now. And so how do I make people believe I’m one of them? And so there are certain techniques you can do. One is to understand their language, not necessarily use every word of it. But the most important thing I tell people is say before you talk to any kind of audience, “I’m going to love these people.” And projecting love, believe it or not, which honors your audience and makes you thrilled to be with them, makes you appear thrilled to be with them, actually works. So now how do you do that with your own soul? I decided that the most important thing was to try to love my soul as much as I could. And I know this is getting a little squirrely here, but really what it comes down to is another tool of rhetoric that Aristotle describes in many of his books, which is this idea of phylos.

And phylos is this idea of ultimate friendship, of being willing to do whatever it takes for the other person. And that’s partly what caring is, but it’s also about what decorum is. So decorum is this idea that you’re one of them, you’re very close to them, and you’ll do anything for them. So if you think of your soul as like your very best friend, and you’ll do anything for it, and you know at the same time your soul will back you up at any time and forgive you for these temporary lapses, which are inevitable, then that’s decorum. That’s acting as if you’re part of the tribe, with you and your soul the only members.

Brett McKay: And it sounds like one thing that you might need to do if your day-to-day self isn’t there to where your soul self is at yet, is fake it. Like if you want to be healthy, think of yourself as an athlete, but you’re not there right now. Just do athlete things. And then your soul will be like, “Oh, hey, this guy, this guy’s trying. Like he’s trying to be me here, and I’m gonna like this guy.”

Jay Heinrichs: Oh yeah. So weightlifters describe this phenomenon. It’s a joke, but they call it Invisible Lat Syndrome. So your back muscles from a whole lot of pull-ups get a little bit bigger. So you walk around as if they’re 10 times the size they are with your arms out as if you’re a well-armed policeman or something. So walking around like that actually can convince you. And one of the things that I found myself doing, this is faking until you make it, but it’s also a kind of decorous act. It’s pretending I’m so close to my soul, I’m already there. And that was, I would, when I still found it a little bit difficult walking after this procedure this doctor gave me, which was weeks long and involved a lot of very painful shots to flood the zone of my nervous system so that my gluteal muscles will stop contracting. I still was walking with kind of a limp. So I turned it into a sort of swagger. So I walked around as if I was like this really cool athlete instead of this old guy with a limp. And eventually as I overcame the limp itself, in the meantime, my brain had changed and I really kind of believed that I was capable of being more of an athlete than I was in reality. So that’s faking until you make it, but it’s also getting close to my soul, like what my soul really wanted to think of myself as.

Brett McKay: You know who I think did this? Ernest Hemingway. So I’m watching that Ken Burns documentary on Hemingway. And one thing I’m watching about right now is how Hemingway, there’s like this myth around Hemingway, but he created that myth. Like he had this idea of like ideal Hemingway. And then I think he tried to do the things that ideal Hemingway would do. And I think it got him into trouble, but I think that’s what he was doing. He had this ideal of himself, his best self, and then he tried to do those things, whether that was hunting in Africa, boxing, just doing all those manly Ernest Hemingway things.

Jay Heinrichs: That is such a great example. And so in rhetoric, there’s this term called actio, which is Latin for acting. And it means acting in both senses of the word. It means playing pretend, like you’re acting a part, but also means action. So to project a certain character before you take an action allows yourself to sort of play a role that then you try to take on in real life. And Hemingway is a brilliant example of that.

Brett McKay: Okay, so we talked about ethos. Let’s talk about the next means of persuasion, which is pathos. What is pathos? And then how did you use it on yourself?

Jay Heinrichs: So pathos has to do with emotion. And in rhetoric, it has to do with your ability to change your audience’s mood. So there are lots of tools doing that. And one that worked really well for me. So by the way, to change my mood from depressed loser to like aspiring athlete and optimist. One of the things that I found that really worked was self-deprecating humor. And instead of telling myself what a loser I was every time I failed at something or made a mistake, I learned to laugh at those mistakes and sort of forced myself to do it until I did it naturally. And I actually, this is still working for me. The other day, I was asked to do a favor for a friend. I live on 150 acres and I cut a lot of my own firewood. So I’m pretty good with a chainsaw. And so this guy asked me if I would cut down a cherry tree at his condo development. So cherry trees are awful to cut down. They lean in all directions and you never know which way the damn thing’s gonna fall. And here it is, if this tree fell the wrong 

Way, it would crash through a stranger’s glass door on the ground floor. So, and of course I’m cutting this thing. I made a big mistake in the angle I was cutting and my chainsaw got stuck. And I’d forgotten to bring my ax and the other tools you need like wedges to get your chainsaw unstuck. Anyway, so the chainsaw was simply stuck. I live 40 minutes away. I didn’t have time to go back and get the other tools. So I drove home, leaving the chainsaw embarrassingly in the tree so that everybody in this condo development could see some idiot had left a chainsaw in a tree that was partly cut. That night it got windy and the tree fell, missing this glass door by like two inches. I mean, it was right there with a chainsaw still sticking out of it in the worst possible way so everybody could see it. I came back the next day with my ax and my wedges and got the chainsaw out and cut the tree up and everything was fine. Now, before I started practicing the rhetoric on myself, I would have said, “You can never face these people again.

Just leave the chainsaw there and buy a new one.” And instead I thought, this is just a sort of idiotic thing you do, Jay. And the great thing is you always fix it. So I laughed, I went back and fixed it and I kind of felt better for it. And nobody in the condo, they were very kind people. They watched me as I cut up the tree and nobody was laughing at me. God bless them all.

Brett McKay: Another example of a famous person who maybe they were using pathos on themselves and they just didn’t know it, FDR, Franklin Roosevelt. So we all know he had polio. He couldn’t walk, he was in a wheelchair. And I remember reading a biography about him. And when he was in his braces, he would often fall down, especially on like slick marble floor because the metal would just scrape and he would just fall down. And instead of engaging in self-pity and just like, “Oh, I’m such an idiot.” He just acted like it wasn’t a big deal. And he kind of kept that smile on his face and he’d say, “Hey, can someone help me up here?” Like people knew that he couldn’t walk, but he just had that big grin and just exuded levity and confidence.

Jay Heinrichs: Yeah. And so, you know, it’s interesting. You see the same thing in toddlers. Where, you know, a two-year-old falls down, which happens often, and scrapes their knee or whatever. And you always see this moment where the toddler looks around at the adults, especially the parent, and sees their reaction first. And if the parent looks horrified or rushes, “Oh my gosh, my baby is hurt,” the kid will cry. And when, I’m not sure this shows good parenting on my part, but when my two children were toddlers, when they fell down and there’d be that moment, a kind of kairotic moment when you think about it, like what’s the action to take here? I would quick look at the concrete or the floor or the ground, whatever, and I’d check and see if it was okay, which would make the kid angry more often than not, but much less rarely cry. Their mother would come rushing to them and they would always cry. And there’s something about doing that to yourself where are you going to be the one who sort of jokingly checks the floor or are you going to be the one who immediately thinks, this is awful?

And that’s a way to change your mood. Now, there’s another tool I have to talk about, which is actually more effective, which is repeating the same things over and over again, to have an expression when you’re in a bad mood that improves your mood. And this is where those cheesy affirmations, the stuff they used to sell, like eight track tapes for you to play in your car.

Brett McKay: Oh yeah, like Stuart Smalley, I’m good enough, I’m smart enough and gosh darn it, people like me. 

Jay Heinrichs: Yeah. And you know what? I mean, there are ways to do that. And I’m hoping we can talk about a way to use a particular rhythm to do that, which rhetoricians invented many, many years ago. But the big thing is repeating them. And there’s something that neurobiologists and neurologists have discovered, which is there’s a part of your brain, see if I can remember the term, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. That’s a part of your brain that actually controls our view of reality. And it also is very responsive to repetition. So if you repeat things often enough, or if you see things often enough on social media, even if they’re untrue, you start to believe them. It becomes your reality. And it’s that part of your brain, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, that actually starts changing the world for you. And actually repeating these stupid affirmations to yourself stops making them seem stupid if you repeat them often enough, and it becomes your idea of reality. And you can do it in very specific ways that actually change the way you see things happening around you and see the way you’re actually behaving. Now, so beyond that and what we call affirmations today, in the old days, they called charms, which were expressions that actually made magic happen.

And so to this day, you can find, people dig up all the time these leaden objects with expressions written on them that would cure people or curse people, whatever. These were charms, but they were really repeated things. You were supposed to say them over and over again, and it becomes your idea of reality. You could make magic happen. You repeated things often enough that would change reality. And rhetoric does the same thing by changing your brain. Now, there’s another factor here in terms of pathos, and that is you can actually make yourself into a kind of charm. And Aristotle wrote about this. The perfect ethos actually has a magical effect on an audience, which is charisma. And the word charisma comes from the Greek word for charm. So a charming person originally meant someone who had sort of a magical effect on people. And you see that with some Hollywood actors or when politicians like JFK or Martin Luther King, they were seen often enough in a perfect kind of character, at least according to their followers, enough that people changed the way they saw them and saw reality as a result. Those are the most powerful tools of pathos have to do with charms and repetition.

Brett McKay: So you mentioned there’s a specific way you can formulate those mantras or charms that make them more effective. What is that way?

Jay Heinrichs: Well, there’s something called the paen, P-A-E-N, which originally was a god that would protect soldiers from harm in ancient times. So when they would run in a battle, they would pray to the goddess paen. So they realized that if you do this with a certain rhythm, and actually, Marcus Tullius Cicero, this ancient orator and one of the great rhetoricians, wrote about this. If you repeat it with a series of short and long syllables, that becomes that much more effective. It’s more convincing. There’s something in the brain that’s not fully understood yet, I think someday it will be, that allows you to do this. So in Homer, he used paens a lot, like golden-haired far shooter, son of Zeus. And you repeat that often enough, and you really believe that this was a real character. Now, you can see that in basketball games in the Ivy League. People will be chanting, “Repel them, repel them, make them relinquish the ball,” which is silly. But on the other hand, it has this particular rhythm that actually works. So these charms that people dig up actually had these same rhythms on it, these paen rhythms.

So I use them myself, and I repeat them over and over again. And these rhythms become memorable. And so my own posture tends to be terrible. So I tell myself all the time, head on a swivel, not in my lap. That’s short and long rhythms with this kind of convincing way. When I was running up this mountain, this mountain Moosilauk in New Hampshire to try to run my age, in training for that, I repeat things to myself like, “My legs love rocks. I flow up rocks.” And stupid as that was, my brain changed to the point where my legs were loving rocks, which are the most horrible thing in the world. I mean, these were boulders I was running up. And I actually was convincing myself that I wasn’t kind of hopping in a weird, unrhythmic way. I was flowing up those rocks. That’s where the peon comes in.

Brett McKay: All right, so come up with your own charm by using a paen. So it starts with like a long sentence and a short sentence? Is that like the rhythm you want? 

Jay Heinrichs: A long And short phrase and syllables. It’s short syllables and long syllables. You don’t have to be too precise about it. But marketers have used this all the time. I mean, the New York Times came up with the first great paen logos. All the news that fit to print. That long and short syllables that convinced people that this was a newspaper of record. And Lay’s potato chips. Bet you can’t eat just one. The quicker picker upper for Bounty Towels. I could go on.

Brett McKay: No, okay. I love that.

Jay Heinrichs: But it convinced people. It made billions for marketers and companies.

Brett McKay: Yeah, so find one for yourself and repeat it to yourself, even though it might seem silly. It can work.

Jay Heinrichs: Yeah, and part of this is talking about mood. Do it ironically in the beginning. Like smile while you do it, because it’s going to be stupid. And then repeat it often enough that it’s not stupid. I mean, another thing about irony we’re talking about. Irony is another trope. Whenever I completed these horrible workouts I had to do, I was working out four to six hours a day in order to get myself into condition where I could run my age up this mountain. My wife, bless her, would always ask me how it went. And instead of saying, “It sucked, what do you think?” I would say, “Refreshing,” ironically. And, you know, after a while, I never truly believed my workouts, I still don’t, are refreshing. Part of me kind of thought they’re not so bad, they actually make me feel better in the long run.

Brett McKay: Okay, so we talked about pathos. Let’s talk about logos. That’s logic. So what is Aristotelian logos? Because it’s not how we think it is. I think typically we think of logos has got to be these iron clad arguments, no fallacies. Aristotle didn’t think that when it comes to logos.

Jay Heinrichs: No, not when it comes to rhetorical logos, which isn’t pure logic, in fact, it can be the opposite. You know, fallacies can actually convince people, but even as formal logic has confused people for centuries.

Brett McKay: Oh man, there’s a period I went through Aristotle’s like works Nicomachean Ethics is great, metaphysics, interesting, and then I get to his book about syllogisms. I’m like, oh, just started snoring. This was not fun.

Jay Heinrichs: Oh God, topics, even worse.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Jay Heinrichs: You know, even Sherlock Holmes gets it wrong, gets Aristotelian logic wrong. He talks all the time about using deduction to solve crimes when he’s actually using induction, which is a kind of logic that gathers facts and uses them to make a conclusion. And actually, I talk about formal logic that way because actually Aristotelian logic can let us deal with this firehose of information and fake news that comes to us through our devices. Aristotle taught us how to interpret facts and determine their value and reach conclusions without getting all emotional about it. And that can actually help in terms of improving your mood and not think that everything in the world is going entirely wrong. But using illogic to convince yourself to do the habits your soul tells you you need to do can work even better. So some fallacies I found work great on me. One of the best was the fallacy of antecedent, which has to do with, if something has always been done this way, it always will be. Or if something went well, it always will be. Or if something has always gone wrong, it always will.

So I happen to be an absolute master, and I don’t mean to brag, but nobody’s better, at least in my household of two people, at loading the dishwasher. I am brilliant at it. My wife is terrible. I swear she stands back and throws dishes into the thing. It’s hurt our marriage slightly, but now I’m the dishwasher loader and she’s allowed me to do it. But here’s the thing, this leads to a second fallacy, which is the false analogy. So I’m good at loading the dishwasher. Therefore, I’m brilliant at organization and problem solving. Because I can load the dishwasher, I could probably run a corporation, right? Same thing. So this is a fallacy. But that same kind of combination of things, I’m really good at this one thing. Now think of an analogy, however far away from that, that lets you overcome imposter syndrome or convince yourself you’re qualified to apply for a job that might otherwise seem above your station. So these fallacies can really work, again, if you repeat them often enough that you actually believe in them.

Brett McKay: Okay, so with logos, we’re gonna use logical fallacies for a positive end, convincing ourselves that we can do something, our moonshot goal that we have.

Jay Heinrichs: Exactly. And so that’s the thing, that moonshot goal, if you do it, if you set it up right, is impossible. So it’s fallacious logic or illogic that convinces you that you can even do it. Because if it is literally impossible, you won’t be able to do it. But to believe that it’s impossible and then to believe you can do it, that’s the greatest kind of fallacy.

Brett McKay: So we’ve talked about some of the rhetorical tools in your book, there’s a lot more. But I’m curious, how did your experiment go in using rhetoric and self-persuasion in overcoming this snapping hip syndrome you had?

Jay Heinrichs: Well, so I decided I would make the actual attempt on one day, my 58th birthday, August 27th.

Brett McKay: That’s Kairos.

Jay Heinrichs: That’s Kairos, very good. That was my one opportunity. I was gonna do it or I was gonna fail. And I deliberately, to test the tool, this whole experiment was to test the tools, to see if they would work, what would work, what didn’t. And I thought putting as much pressure on myself as possible would be one way to test the tools. And so one day, my birthday. Besides, when I turned 58, that gave me an additional minute to run my age, which meant running it in less than 58 minutes. So I’d have another minute. And for every minute less than 58 that it took me to make it to the summit, I would declare myself that much younger in years. So when you think about it, it makes as much sense as declaring your age in terms of number of years. So to prepare for that day, I had spent nine months in training, four to six hours a day, after this horrible procedure with this orthopedist who injected me with these hundreds of shots of dextrose, sugar water, to flood my nerves with pain. So I did everything I could with all these things of rhetoric.

And then on that one day, at 6 o’clock in the morning, I was at the trailhead of this mountain, 3.7 miles, 2,800 feet of elevation up these very slick rocks with a river running in waterfalls down beside it. Very difficult kind of run. And the conditions were bad. It was way too warm and humid. And the older you get, the harder it is for your body to deal with heat and to allow yourself to oxygenate. And the whole way up, I didn’t look at my watch the entire time. When I got to the summit and I hit the button on my watch, I didn’t even look then. I just realized it didn’t matter so much what my time was, whether I’d gotten younger by running my age or not. I discovered, and this is absolutely true. I know this sounds self-helpish, but it’s true. I was happier than I’d been in years. And that effect has lasted ever since. And this is years later. It’s taken me a long time to do the research to complete this book. But the rhetoric itself had worked. And when I looked at my watch, I then discovered, well, I won’t tell you. It’s going to be a mystery, you have to read the book.

Brett McKay: This is awesome. So it sounds like you can use Aristotle’s rhetoric to persuade yourself. So we encourage people to go check out your book. So where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Jay Heinrichs: Well, I have a Substack newsletter. If you look up my name, you’ll find it. It tells all about the tools of rhetoric and self-persuasion. But I also have a website called ArgueLab, all one word, arguelab.com. 

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Jay Heinrichs, thanks for the time. It’s been a pleasure. 

Jay Heinrichs: Brett, this is a real pleasure. Thank you.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Jay Heinrichs. He’s the author of the book Aristotle’s Guide to Self-Persuasion. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, jayheinrichs.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/self-persuasion, where you find links to resources we delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com, where you find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you take one minute to give us an email on podcast or Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member if you think we’re something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay. Remind you to listen to the AOM Podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

All the neurochemicals in the brain have to do with life in the present. Except for one: dopamine. Dopamine is the one neurochemical that looks to the future. It anticipates what may be to come and drives you towards it.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.