podcast

Hi everybody. Welcome back to the podcast today. We've talked from the beginning of this podcast about the research that teaches us about how emotions are generated, how your anxiety is generated, how to change it when it's not helpful, and we've talked about how it really comes down to that our emotions, including our anxiety are organized by our stories that our brain tells about the different situations that we're in. And specifically when we're [00:01:00] talking about anxiety, the stories that our brain tells have to do with the relationship between the demands and our situation and our resources. So just to sum up really briefly, one of the most important concepts that we've talked about so far, when you are in anxiety, it's because your brain is telling a story about your current situation, where it is seeing the demands in the situation as too much for your resources. If you wanna have a different relationship with stress, where you don't have this threat response, this anxiety response, then that will happen if you can change your brain's story about your demands and resources. If instead of seeing the resources as not enough for the demands, if instead you can see your resources as sufficient for the demands in the situation, then you can switch out of anxiety. But unfortunately, just because we know that doesn't mean that we can wake up in the morning and say, [00:02:00] hey, from now on, I'm gonna have a new perspective. I'm going to see my demands as manageable. I'm going to see my resources as robust. I'm gonna see that I can handle everything that I'm up against. It's not that easy. And why is it not that easy? Well, you can compare it to an iceberg. Our emotion generation process is like the little part of the iceberg that sticks up above the water. It's just this little sliver and then underneath the water is this huge mass of an iceberg, which you could compare to the unconscious parts of our emotion generation and our anxiety generation. So there's only a little tiny bit of it that's conscious and that is directly controllable by our conscious brain, and then there's this huge mass of it under the water that's unconscious and super automatic. It's as automatic as when you walk outside on a bright, sunny day and your pupils constrict. Or when you go into a dark room and your [00:03:00] pupils dilate. You don't think about it. You don't decide, oh, I want my pupils to adjust to this light. It just happens. And that's how your appraisals or the stories that your brain tells about the situation that you're in, that's how automatic they happen a lot of the time. So quickly, you know, milliseconds. We don't even know that we have generated a story, and yet we have. And they have to be that quick because we don't have time to sit there and think about how we're gonna assess every situation. It has to be automatic. So we have this huge, unconscious, automatic portion of our emotion generation process that isn't directly obedient to our conscious brain. I like to compare it sometimes to having a pet dog. That pet dog, you don't directly control him 100%. You can't directly control all of his behaviors and actions. But what you can do is you can [00:04:00] learn about how he functions, learn about how he operates, learn about how to influence that dog, and then you can have control and influence over that dog. It's not direct, but it's indirect. By understanding how he operates. The same kind of thing can happen in our brains. We want to get to the point where we can change the default stories that our brains produce. If you're a person that tends to live in anxiety more of the time than you'd like to, that means that more of the time than you wish, your brain is generating stories where it's seeing your resources as not enough for the demands that you face. So if you want to rewire these default stories and teach, train your brain like you would train a dog to see things a different way, then you need to use different strategies and tactics that work on this unconscious brain. You have to understand how your [00:05:00] unconscious brain functions and operates and understand how to influence it, because it's not always as simple as simply deciding, I just wanna see things differently now. Right?
So first of all, in the beginning of this podcast, we talked a lot about the latest research in Emotion science, and how it teaches us about how this unconscious part of our brain works, how our emotions are generated, how we go about changing them if we want to change our emotions. And then after those first episodes, we started delving into different strategies that actually work to influence your unconscious brain's appraisals, the stories and the perspectives that your unconscious brain generates. This is what we've been discussing so far, and so I've always tried to bring not only strategies that have worked for me personally, but strategies that have been shown in research to work for people across the board that they work generally. These are types of things that tend to really train [00:06:00] and influence your subconscious appraisals. So I'm gonna bring a strategy today for us to look at that is one that you probably have not ever thought of, and it may sound totally random and like it wouldn't really work, but I'm bringing it today because it is backed up by research.
So the strategy that I'm gonna talk about today is knowing stories about your grandparents, great-grandparents, great-great-grandparents, knowing your family, intergenerational stories. This probably sounds pretty weird to you. Why would this help? Well, we're gonna talk about it, but first I just want to bring out that that studies have shown over and over that, especially teenagers who know more family stories and are able to tell more details in those stories, more elaborate stories, more coherent family stories that they have that they have a lot of positive emotional effects from knowing these stories, including [00:07:00] that they tend to have higher self-esteem, lower depression, and lower anxiety. And this also seems to help adults as well, studies have shown .Now, why in the world would knowing family stories have an influence on your anxiety?
So going back to what we talked about just a second ago, your anxiety really comes from the stories that your brain tells about your demands and your resources. Why would knowing family stories change the way your brain tends to view your own resources and the demands that you face?
Well, I'm gonna give you a couple of examples to illustrate how it is that family stories can change the way your brain sees your own challenges. So first of all, I'm gonna tell you a story about my great-grandfather, James Rue Tyler. I actually knew him. He died when I was a teenager. But my story about him begins in the 1920s. He [00:08:00] was working in Los Angeles as an oil tool machinist. He was working for an oil company, taking care of their machines. And one day, the rag that he was using to clean one of these machines that had a lathe, the rag was sucked into the lathe, sucked his hand into the lathe, and his right hand was severely mutilated. Two of the fingers, the two middle fingers on his hand were mutilated so badly that they had to cut them off at that first knuckle. So I remember meeting him as a little child and he had a pinky finger and a pointer finger and a thumb. But these two middle fingers, they were cut off at the first knuckle. And he loved to joke around. And he would, he would stick those two short fingers on his nostrils and he would play with me and he would say, I bet you can't stick your fingers up your nose this far. He was a real jokester. But anyway, after he had this accident and he had his fingers cut off, he couldn't work at that job anymore, [00:09:00] and the unemployment compensation that he was getting wasn't enough to support his family, and so he had to make a career change at that point. Well, he had a crazy idea. He told my great-grandmother that he was going to start a banjo band. She had never heard of a banjo band. He had never heard of a banjo band. He had actually never really had any serious musical training. He was pretty much self-taught on the banjo. He'd had a couple of basic rudimentary lessons on the guitar and banjo, so, so that he kind of knew how to read notes. But other than that, he had basically taught himself how to play the banjo, but he decided he was going to start giving banjo lessons and create a children's banjo band. And he did. He put up signs in music stores, ads in the newspaper. He started giving out scholarships in different newspaper contests. For example, there'd be a baby contest in the newspaper, and he'd give a banjo scholarship as a prize, [00:10:00] and he started to mount a group of students and put together a band of little banjo players, and they would go around the area and play in churches, and they would play in movie theaters between the movies, they would appear as the special act between the, the different movies that were being shown at the theaters. And the banjo band started to grow and grow and grow. Soon. It had 50 children in it, then it had a hundred children in it, and I think it even got up to about 150 children at one point. They even played in the 1932 Los Angeles Olympic Games. They played as one of the variety shows in that game, in those games. And they even got to the point where they appeared in some Hollywood movies. And the most, maybe one of the most remarkable things about this feat that he accomplished of starting this new business was that he started it in 1929, which was the year of the stock market crash, in [00:11:00] the beginning of the Great Depression. So you would think that that would be a terrible time to start a new business that involved music lessons. He used to charge the family $6 a a month for four half hour lessons, and the families also had to buy a banjo and a music book. But he was able, with his charisma and his advertising, to put together a large banjo band, and the people loved having their children appear and perform in this band.
Well, how is it that this story makes a difference in my life? Well, I at age 48, last year, decided that I wanted to start an anxiety management podcast. I'm a musician. I haven't ever done podcasting before. How can I possibly start a new business? I didn't, I'm not that great of a public speaker. I don't know, I didn't know anything about recording, about editing, about sound engineering, about marketing, about making a website, [00:12:00] all of these different things. I had no idea how to do them. But I have this framed copy of an ad that my great-grandfather had put in the newspaper in California, that, where he was advertising his banjo lessons and his banjo band. And it said, the richest child is poor without musical education. Your child can join Rue Tyler's Rhythm Kids. Rhythm Kids is what he called his band. And this framed newspaper ad inspired me and it made me feel like my great-grandpa started a brand new business, made a career change after being forced to leave his old career, started something that nobody had ever heard of at a time when it really shouldn't have worked. But he made it work and he inspired me. He made me feel like I could do this. Knowing about his story, boosted my sense of what Albert Bandura calls self-efficacy or a belief that I could do [00:13:00] something. It's a belief that my resources can be up to a brand new set of demands that I don't even know really what they are. So that's one example of how knowing the story of my great-grandfather helped me to generate a challenge response in the face of something brand new and unknown that normally would've been anxiety producing for me. But because I had his example, I was inspired to think that maybe I could do it too.
Now. In addition, I learned about stories about his mother that also helped me through a really difficult period in my life. I've talked many times about how I got really sick with long covid, and I was sick for years, three years. And I have to admit, there were a lot of days where I just didn't feel like I could keep going. And it's really easy when you're sick for this long to, to start to give up hope that you can ever get better. You feel like maybe you should stop trying to find a solution 'cause maybe there isn't one. And you, it's [00:14:00] really difficult to not just give way to despair. But I learned a story about my great grandpa's mother, so she'd be my great, great grandmother. Her name was Charlotte. And she, I've mentioned her once on the podcast before, but she married a man who had four kids and then she had nine more kids of her own, so she had a huge family. And when her youngest, her youngest kids were twins, and when they were just babies, she got really serious mercury poisoning somehow. She doesn't really go into a lot of detail about how it happened, but she got bad mercury poisoning. And she was hospitalized for quite a while, and then she was able to come home, but she was basically bedridden for several years. And her older children had to help her out a lot because she had all of these little kids and the the youngest were twins and they were babies, and so she was sick, bedridden for several years, but then she [00:15:00] did finally get better. She finally totally recovered and was able to have quite a good chunk of lifetime after that and have a lot of rich experiences that she talks about in her own life history. And her story really made me feel like, you know, my great great grandma went through years of illness and so I can do it too, right? It knowing these family stories, it can give us a perspective on things like that, that this has happened before. Somebody's done this before, so it doesn't feel quite as alarming anymore because it's been done already. And in a, in some ways her situation was a lot harder than mine because she had all these, this huge family of kids to take care of. And, and some of them were tiny. And so, and I didn't, you know, when I was sick, my kids were already big enough that they were taking care of me. And so I, I really thought [00:16:00] of her while I was sick and I had a picture of her. She even, obviously I didn't meet her 'cause she's my great, great grandmother, but she looks a lot like her granddaughter, who is my grandmother. So she looks familiar to me, so I feel like I kind of know her, and just knowing the story about how she made it through this illness inspired me and helped me to keep hope and not give up and keep looking for a solution and endure when it was really hard.
So history, history can do this for us in general. History can give us this perspective that hard things have happened before. But somehow it's even more impactful when they are stories, not just about the world, but about our own family, about the people that gave us our DNA. People from our own, from our own family tree and their stories and the different things that they came up against and how they dealt with the different challenges that they had.
Research tells us that the people that fare the best as far as [00:17:00] being the most emotionally healthy and having the best wellbeing are the people who are able to adapt to challenges and, and be able to, to move from saying, you know, I didn't want this, why me? But towards saying, okay, how do I do this? What's the next step? And somehow knowing these stories about my ancestors helped me to do that in a couple of crucial moments.

Adriana: So how can you start collecting your own family stories? Well, obviously it's great to start talking to your family, start talking to people in your family and collecting these stories, but there are some online resources as well that can really help. There are different sites. One of them is, and I don't have affiliation with these sites, I'm just gonna tell you about them because they are resources that are out there. There's a site called Family Search, which is totally free and has a a way for you to be able to build your family tree. They have access to a lot of different historical records so that you can actually do research online to find [00:18:00] who's next in your family tree, through birth records, through death records, through marriage records that are uploaded a huge database of historical records on this site. And there's also, when you go on and you make your own account, there's also a tab where you can, when you're looking at a specific ancestor, there's a tab for memories and other diff distant cousins of yours, distant re relatives of your yours might have uploaded some family story or diary, or resource that they have in their possession . For example, maybe you have a, a great grandfather that had a diary. It ends up only going to one of the children who then passes it onto one of their children, and then the rest of the family doesn't really know about it, doesn't really have access to it. But a lot of these, um, resources have been already uploaded online by your extended family and you can end up finding out these different family stories through [00:19:00] clicking on this Memories tab. And by the way, I'll put links to all these resources in the show notes so you can find them. Another website that has a lot of resources to be able to find your family stories is ancestry.com. That one is paid. But they have also a huge database. And so these different sites can help you to begin to build your family tree even if you don't have diaries and other things that, that give more details about the stories of your family. Just knowing already the birth date and the death date and the places of these different events and the marriage place, and seeing how many children they had, this already starts to give you an idea, some aspects of their story. For example, somebody, somebody who was born in England but then died somewhere in America. And you see, that they had a first wife who died and then they married again, and then they had so many children and some of these children died in infancy and things like that. So you start [00:20:00] to be able to understand a little bit more about this person and about their story. So that's a, that's a place to start.
So I just wanted to tell you about this strategy. It's not something that most of us would think would really have any kind of influence on our anxiety, and when you say it, it doesn't seem like, you know, why would I engage in that? Why would that actually change the way that I feel in my day to day? But it goes back to this image of the iceberg and your unconscious emotion generation. And research shows that this helps, this helps people to have less anxiety. So just encourage you to start your family tree and start learning your family stories and see how that changes your image of yourself and the way that you can deal with life. So thanks for joining me today.
Now we will have our kindness narrative. So stay tuned and remember, if you haven't shared your kindness narrative yet, we'd really love it [00:21:00] if you would. It's such a kind gift for you to share it with all of us. You can share it in either audio or written form and send it to me by email or on Instagram, and the details will come on after this kindness narrative. Thanks again for listening.
Today I'm gonna share a story with you that's from my own life, a kindness narrative. In 1997, my husband and I had just had our first, our first son. And we decided to go on a crazy trip. We decided to go travel for a couple of months in Israel and Cyprus and Greece, and Turkey, and Russia. We spent the bulk of our time in Turkey. And what really surprised me about traveling in Turkey, you know, we were clearly foreigners, we didn't dress like the people there, especially [00:22:00] me. As a woman, I didn't have the headscarf. I wore shorts. I clearly looked like someone who didn't have the same values. I clearly didn't have the same religion or the same background. We didn't speak the same language. We had to communicate with people using a dictionary. But people were so kind and so hospitable to us, even though we were so different than them. In the Muslim religion, one of the key pillars of the religion is hospitality. And these people in Turkey really took this value seriously and they went outta their way to make us feel ultra welcome. One time, for example, we were at an a restaurant in a rural area, and we went to go and pay the bill after we had finished, and the waiter told us that another customer had already paid the bill for us. We looked over and, and saw him. He never came and spoke to us. We didn't know who he was, but he just wanted to help us to feel loved and [00:23:00] welcome. And so he paid for our dinner. Another time we arrived in a little town, went to a local eating place and ordered something to eat, and the owner came out to start to talk to us. He was interested in us being there and wanted to get to know us a little bit. And, uh, of course we couldn't really talk the same language. We were communicating, words at a time with our dictionary. But he ended up, um, he asked us if we had a place to stay. We didn't have a, a place yet, and he ended up inviting us to his own house and they borrowed a crib from one of their neighbors for our baby to sleep in. And I remember the, the mother and daughters sitting around braiding my hair and feeding us cherries. And I, I remember commenting how beautiful one of their embroidered headscarves was, and they, they gave it to me. And this was a town where they did a lot of weaving, rug weaving, and they took us on a tour of the, [00:24:00] the factories there. They were just so incredibly kind to us. It was almost like we were family coming to visit, and yet we had never met these people in our lives. Another time, uh, earlier in the trip when we were traveling in Palestine, we were in Bethlehem at one point and met a man at a restaurant and started asking him some questions about his life and about his religion, and he ended up inviting us to his home and fed us a great big meal at his home and spent hours with us talking to us about how he sees his religion and, and his life and the different things that he believes in and treated us really like ultra special royal guests, even though he was extremely poor and had, uh, basically a one room house with many, many children. So these are just some small examples of how people that we met on our trip, Muslims that we met, bent [00:25:00] over backwards to make us feel welcome and respected and loved, even though we were so different than these people and, and had maybe almost nothing in common with them. We didn't speak the same language. We didn't have the same religion. We came from a different culture. In some ways, we may have seemed threatening to them because we cl clearly didn't believe the same things that they did. But instead of reacting with suspicion, they reacted with love and generosity to us, and I will never forget that.