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Okay, welcome back. Another episode of calm your caveman. Thanks for joining me again. We talked last time about the importance of finding your why, finding your purpose, your overarching life aim, life goal. And how that really helps to change on a general scale your brain's perception of your own resources in relation to the demands that you will meet in your life. How it really helps shift your brain toward feeling like you've got this. You've got what it takes. You can meet this stressor, whatever it is. And it does that, remember we talked about because it shifts your mindset from feeling like someone who is hunted by life, to feeling like you are the hunter. You are the agent. You're not the victim. You have choice. It increases your sense of autonomy. And the way that it does this is by shifting your brain's attention. Our brains only have so much attention. What we choose to focus on is what our brains are going to be filled with. That's the information that our brains are going to base their appraisals on. So if we're focusing on what I want to create, on the aspects of my life and my situation that I do have choice and power over, this purpose, this value, this meaning that I want to create in my life, then this helps shift your focus away from fixating on those things that you can't control, on those things that seem to be controlling you. Instead, you're focused on ways that you have autonomy. Ways that you can create, ways that you do have power in your life. And research has shown, we talked about how it actually changes your brain's perception of the demands by making them seem less scary, less terrible. We talked about how that study about how it actually made people perceive the steepness of a hill that they had to climb, it made them perceive that in a different way. People that had a sense of purpose perceived the hill as less steep. People that did not have a sense of purpose, a reason to climb that hill, felt like the hill was a lot more steep. So it changes that perception of the demands that you're up against and it makes them seem more approachable, more actionable. And research has also shown that it fosters a perception that there are multiple ways to deal with whatever problem you're up against. So it helps you to be creative in your solution finding, it helps you to recognize that there's more than one way to solve a problem. This is a very interesting effect of having a life purpose. It's not something that you would predict is an effect, but this is a consequence. And it also increases what researchers call the grit factor. It increases our grit. It makes us able to maintain focus on our goals, despite changing conditions, despite additional challenges that might come up. It helps us to grit and stick with it. And just reminding you again about that memorable quote from Nietzsche that "he, who has a why to live for can bear almost any how." So that sense of purpose and meaning gives us the capacity to deal with whatever comes up. So these are the things that we went over last time.

And we talked about also several different questions and exercises from various psychologists that they have suggested to help you to identify and develop your own sense of purpose your own life goal. Because it can be difficult to just pull it out of your hat and say what is I want, what is it that I want to create with my life, if you just ask yourself that question. But there are various exercises and ways of looking at it that different psychologists have offered that can help you to really explore this. And so again, I invite you to listen to that part of the podcast again, or look at the PDF in the show notes that lists these different questions in these exercises. And remember, you don't need to do all of them. You just look through them and find which ones call out the most to you, which ones feel like they really have something in them that you would like to explore. And then you pick these one or handful of questions and exercises. And I really want to encourage you to actually write about it, actually write in your journal, in a notebook about it. Why is it important to write? Why can't, Why can't you just mull it over in your head and think about it. Well, because one of the big challenges that we have when we're talking about learning to become experts emotion regulation, is learning to become more conscious of the unconscious processes involved We talked before about how most of what goes on in emotion regulation is automatic and unconscious in our brains. And we talked briefly about how that's important for our bodies and brains to automate and make subconscious a lot of different processes that are necessary and that are always going on. For example, our heartbeat, our breathing, various other autonomic processes. And also these appraisals that happen in our brains are often automatic and unconscious. Because if we had to be aware, always, of everything that our brains are keeping track of, our awareness would be so full of all of these internal details that we wouldn't be able to do anything else with our lives. We wouldn't be able to have goals and act in the outside world, because all of our processing power would already be gummed up and used up with all of these unconscious processes. So it's important that our brain is able to do many things without our conscious awareness. But when we're talking about emotion regulation, if you want to become someone who has more influence over your own emotion processes, you need to become more conscious of what they are. More conscious of this big iceberg of unconscious processes that's under the surface, that we're not aware of when we experience emotions. And, what does this have to do with values and finding your sense of purpose? Well, Your brain already has a lot of things that it values, and you're not always aware of what they are. It's using those values to evaluate all of your circumstances, and to decide how good is or bad is this for my wellbeing. And so writing about it can help you to become more aware of what it is deep down that is most important to you. You can be assured that you have many things that are very important to you, both in the short term and in the longterm, that your brain uses to make these appraisals, but we're not always aware of them. And so when we use these questions and these exercises, and we actually write about them, it's kind of a process of becoming aware of what our brains already value. And it helps us to start to recognize what is most important to us when we're talking about the longest term goals, the longest term values, the most enduring concerns. So, this is a quote from Deb Dana who's a therapist and she says that "with awareness comes understanding, and with understanding comes choice." And that's exactly what we want. We want to be able to become more aware of our internal values of what is most important to us in the longterm, so that we can understand it, and so that we can choose in relation to it. And as you become more aware of your internal processes, You will understand them better and you will have more autonomy, more choice over what goes on unconsciously and automatically in your brain. So that's why I would really encourage you to actually sit down and get out a notebook or a journal and answer these questions for yourself, and explore it and try and figure out what is it that I really want to create long-term, what long-term, what is most important to me, when we're talking about looking back on my life when I'm old, what will have been of most value to me.
All right. So now we're going to continue talking about another set of reasons why finding your why is so crucial as a foundational strategy for anxiety mastery. Okay. Finding your why. This may seem a little obvious but it helps you to locate, to identify what your desired outcome is in a situation. And knowing your desired outcome, then you can know what type of strategies you need to use to get there. So remember we have these four families of strategies. Four different points in the emotion generation process where we can interfere. We can work on situation, we can work on attention, we can work on appraisal, we can work on emotional response. Any one of these four different families that we have. Which family are we going to choose for the specific situation? Well, that depends on where you want to go. We're talking about a map. We need to know where we are. That's becoming more aware of the unconscious. But we also need to become aware of where we want to go. So when you can identify your most enduring concerns, your longest term values, what's most important to you overall in your life, then you can understand where it is that you want to point your efforts and your energies. And you can understand what you want your desired outcome to be.

So here's an example. Let's imagine somebody who has a stifling miserable job that they absolutely hate. Okay. So the problem is that they feel stifled. They feel miserable. There's different ways that they could approach this emotion. They could reappraise their relationship with that, with that job. They could change the way that their brain relates to that job. They could change the story that their brain tells about the job so that they feel better about it. So they feel more peaceful about it. So it doesn't bother them so much or so, or maybe so that they even can find aspects of it that they enjoy. So they stay in the job. But they feel good about it. That's one direction they could go. Another direction they could go is they could change the situation itself. They could use their feelings of dissatisfaction and discontent in their current job to motivate them to do all of the work to find another job, and put themselves out there and network until they actually get another job, which offers them more opportunities for fulfillment and for growth. So these are the two directions, two of the possible directions that you could go in this situation. You could work on modifying the situation itself, finding a new job, or you could work on modifying the story that your brain tells about your current situation. You could work on reappraisal. So situation modifying or reappraisal techniques. These are two directions we could go. Which way are you going to choose? Well, it depends on your desired outcome, and that you have to answer partly by trying to find what is most important to you in your life. Imagining yourself a couple of decades from now, looking back on this situation, what will you want yourself to have done? What will be most important to you? The way, Depending on the way that you answer that question will tell you which one of these two directions you want to go, whether you want to stay in your job and develop a new relationship with it, or whether you want to actually get a new job. Whether you want to change your situation or change your appraisal. So which strategy is best, will depend on your goals, your long-term goals in this situation. Another example might be somebody with social anxiety. This person with social anxiety, imagine they have a lot of trouble whenever they have to be in social groups. So there are a couple of different ways that they can deal with this emotion. Again, They could change the situation, like the person with the job, change the situation. So they could basically try and avoid social situations or keep to the periphery so they don't have to talk to people. So they're basically choosing situations where they're not going to have to face certain um, triggers. So they can modify the situation. Or they can work on reappraising social situations so that they become gradually more used to them, more familiar with them, more accustomed to them, and able to shift the way their brain sees them so that their brain starts to feel that these social situations are not quite so threatening. So again, they can either work on modifying the situation, or they can work on reappraising the situations, to have a different relationship with the situations. The direction that the person goes regulating this emotion will depend on their desired outcome. What is most important to them in the long run? What are their life goals in relation to this situation? Looking back on it 20 years from now what am I going to wish that I had done? What am I going to prefer? What's going to feel of most value or meaning to me in this situation? So that's how finding a sense of purpose initially can really help you to make that initial strategy selection, help you to know which direction to go to regulate your emotion.

Okay. Now here's another reason why finding your sense of purpose is essential for anxiety regulation. And it is because um, emotion researchers teach us that emotional events are often very complex. And we all know this. They describe that there is not just one appraisal that goes on. We had this rather cute and simple model, the process model, that simplified things down to just a single appraisal. We had an event, a single event, and it was filtered through our attention, and we had a single appraisal up there at the top, which created a single emotional response, which then circled around again. But that's simplified. That's not actually the way that it often is. Often we have multiple appraisals going on simultaneously up at the top of that model. Because this is what some researchers call, we have multiple partially independent subsystems in our brains. Or they've also been called different valuation systems that can be active at the same time. Different values, different priorities, different things that are important that are all being evaluated at the same time in our brains. Sometimes these multiple valuation systems can create appraisals and emotional responses that are mutually supportive. So, um, let's say that I am invited out to lunch with someone. And my brain appraises, part of my brain appraises oh, this is good because I'm hungry and I'm going to be able to eat. So that value of being able to feed my body, it's congruent with that value. And another part of your brain thinks, oh, well this is good because I have been a little lonely and I need to get out and be social. And this will be a chance for me to talk with people. And so it's good for me for that reason. So that's a different value that your brain was attuned into that the need for social interaction. And those two valuations were mutually supportive. They both decided that this was good for you. And so you end up having a sort of a more cohesive, single emotion of feeling that this is good. However, sometimes the different valuation systems in your brain can be in competition or in conflict in the way that they interact. So you can end up both wanting something and not wanting it at the very same time. These different valuation systems can pull in different directions. Which creates this feeling, this sense of inner chaos, right? Because you've got these conflicting emotions going on at the same time. Here's an example. A performing musician. They're about to go out on stage. Part of them feels really motivated and excited to be able to share this beautiful thing that they have worked on for so long, with people, and be able to share and connect with people in that way. And another part of them feels like absolutely running away and hiding. It feels like the very last thing that they want to do at that moment is go out on stage in front of people. That feels terrifying. So part of them is tuned into the value of sharing beauty with others. And part of them is tuned into the value of self preservation and self protection, protecting myself from an embarrassment in front of my social group. So these are two values that are both important to different parts of us, different parts of our brains. And the person can end up feeling conflicted. I want to go out there and I don't want to go out there. So how do our brains resolve this inner conflict?

Well, A really great way to turn that conflict and inner chaos into order is to identify your sense of purpose. Identify your longest term values. If you can figure out what is most important to you in this situation, then you will know which direction to go, even though you have these conflicting subsystems that can be champions of different conflicting concerns., you can already begin to put your priorities in a hierarchy. And you can identify what is the very most important to me, longest term, most enduring value. And these other things that are important to me, yes, they are important to me, but they're not as important as this longest term purpose and value. And then you can order all of these things in a hierarchy and understand what is most important to you. And this can help create what Russell, Dr. Russell Harris, who's an Australian psychologist, he calls a willingness to feel anxiety. In the case of the, of the performing musician, who's having anxiety about going out on stage, it can create a willingness, to feel that uncomfortable emotion, to allow it to be there in order to do something that you value. So you've prioritized. You have identified what is most important to you. And you're willing to do it, even though it feels uncomfortable. It increases your ability to feel uncomfortable emotions without fear of that discomfort. And that's important because fear of discomfort is a way of layering emotions and intensifying emotions, making the negativity, the unpleasant emotions magnified. And what happens when you are willing to experience anxiety or other uncomfortable emotions in the service of something that you value is, something that doesn't seem like it would happen. It's a paradox. When you're not trying to keep your anxiety down, but instead you're accepting it and you're willing to feel it because you're going to do something that you value, that ends up reducing your anxiety. Because paradoxically, this is a quote from Blackledge and Hayes from an article that they published in the journal of clinical psychology, " as willingness to experience anxiety increases, anxiety goes down. Because paradoxically, what has kept anxiety high is the attempt to keep it low." So there, we have this issue of resistance to the negative emotion when we are afraid of it, when we are resisting it, when we feel like we want it to go away and we don't like it. That tends to keep it high. When we accept it, when we no longer are trying to resist it and push it down, it actually reduces. Because what makes it stay high is the attempt to keep it low. Very interesting. Isn't it?

Researchers have identified in the area of music performance, for example, that when performers have performance goals, specific objectives for their performance, that tends to take their focus away from the audience as a threatening entity. So this is an illustration of how purpose- oriented goals can help us to allocate our resources more efficiently and shift our attention to what is most critical in the situation. We talked a minute ago about how our brains have limited attention. We have limited processing power. And so what we choose to focus on is going to fill up our awareness. When we are filling up our awareness with what we want to create, with our goals, with our longest term priorities, then our brains don't fixate so much on those lower priorities. They don't occupy as much of our attention. And they create less conflict. So it helps us to shift our resources toward the greatest need and minimize wasted energy because we know what we want. We know what we're going for and we're going to shift our attention and our energy toward doing that. So we're going to go out there on stage, even though we feel performance anxiety, and we're not going to waste attention and energy on imagining running away. We're just going to accept that we feel anxiety. We're gonna accept that uncomfortable feeling and proceed. So having a sense of purpose, finding a sense of purpose is powerful because it helps us to identify that desired outcome that we have. And knowing where we want to go, helps us to know what strategies we want to select, helps us to know which family of strategies is best going to serve us in this situation. It helps us to create inner order out of that chaos. . Those of us who have issues with uh, travel anxiety. This is something that I have dealt with a lot. I end up having a lot of conflicting feelings in myself, because part of me wants to share experiences and new new experiences and new places with my family and friends, and to learn new things and be exposed to new ideas and new cultures. And another part of me feels absolutely terrified by all of the unknowns in this situation and all of the new things and all of the possible dangers that I simply don't know if I have the resources to meet. And so I both want to go on the trip and I don't want to go on the trip at the same time. But if I can identify long-term, in 30 years, what will I wish that I had done? Then that can help me to understand which direction I should go. Should I work on reappraising my relationship with traveling so that it feels less threatening or should I avoid this trip altogether? And that the answer to those questions comes when we understand what our longest term values are, what our purpose is, if this choice is consistent with our overall purpose in life.

So it can create inner order out of that chaos of conflicting desires of competing concerns. And it can increase our ability to feel discomfort, to feel uncomfortable emotions without being afraid of them, so we won't magnify the negativity of negative emotions, because we're not resisting them or not afraid of them. We're just accepting them. This is just part of the package. That comes with me doing something that I value, something that is really important to me, something that I want to pursue as part of my overall life goals. And also, it increases the efficiency of our resource allocation, as I explained, because it helps us to shift our attention, and sustain our attention on the most important aspects, of the situation. The aspects of the situation that are most important for our enduring concerns. It helps us to shift those resources, our physical, our biochemical, our neural, our cognitive resources toward focusing on what we want most of all, out of all of these competing concerns, what is our biggest priority. And that's what we're going to invest in. And not these other concerns that are less important.

So, Finding your sense of purpose is a tool of extreme power when we're talking about anxiety mastery, because, just reviewing, it will give you a greater sense of autonomy in your life in general. You will be able to move from feeling like you are out of control, and you don't have power in your life over things that really matter, to feeling like you do indeed have power in your life, you do have choice. Because it focuses your brain on those areas in which you do have autonomy, in which you can create, in which you do have choice. In general, it it's tips the balance toward you being able to appraise stressors, your brain being able to evaluate stressors in your life as something that you can approach, you don't need to avoid, you can approach. And it does that because it actually kind of boosts your mental image of your power points in this video game of life, it makes you feel like you have more power points. Because it actually reduces the perception of the demands. The demands seem less demanding. You remember, we talked about how studies show that. And it makes your resources seem more ample, more varied, and more strong. It boosts your sense of inner order. So instead of feeling chaotic and out of control internally, you can feel orderly, and you can feel like you understand how to proceed and what to do next. Because it creates this hierarchy of goals for you personally so that you can understand what is most important to you. What is less important to you. And it can, because of that, it can increase your capacity, your willingness, your ability to be okay with feeling an uncomfortable or negative emotion in the service of something that is important to you. And that negative emotion, accepting and being okay with that negative emotion, will paradoxically diminish that emotion. It will, it will have less intensity, because when we're trying to keep anxiety down, that's what keeps it high. So when we no longer resist it, but we just accept it, that I'm going to feel some anxiety as I try and do this thing which is important to me, then it will not be quite as intense. It will be less, less intense and less powerful. It helps us to choose which family of strategies we need to use to regulate our emotions. Helps us know which direction we want to go because we have a compass. We understand where we're going and we understand what strategies we need to use to get there. So it is a fundamental, crucial, powerful and definitive tool, a tool that will definitively change your experience, your relationship with your life circumstances in a way that helps you to feel more powerful, feel more in control and less chaotic in your life. That will help you to feel that you have autonomy and choice, and help you to understand how to proceed when you have an emotion that's not serving you. Will help you to understand what the next step is in regulating that emotion. You'll know better how to get where you want to go, because you'll know where you want to go. If you don't know where you want to go then you can't figure out the strategies and the paths to get there. You'll just be wandering. So it's, it's absolutely crucial that you figure out for yourself, this is a very personal exercise, but figure out for yourself, what is it that I want my life to mean? And again, I would encourage you to physically write it. You can do it on your computer. You can write it down in a notebook, physically with a pen. I prefer that. I feel like that really engraves it into my consciousness and my senses in a way that writing on the computer can't, but everyone has their preferred way. But make it verbal. Making it verbal really has that power to shift things from the unconscious to the conscious, and helps you to really understand, helps you to become aware, of what you value, to understand what you value, and then be able to choose in relation to what you value.

Thanks for listening on this second installment of find your why. Next week we're going to talk about, know your context, the second foundational strategy that will affect everything that we do from here. So don't miss it. Thanks so much.
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