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Hi, everybody. Thanks for joining me today on our new year's week episode. Happy new year, first of all, to all of you. At this time of year, we have a tendency to look toward the future. And I'm going to talk today about how we predict the future and how that actually affects how we are able to meet the future. How our appraisals about the future will affect our coping resources, our ability to meet the stressors that we face. And I want to advance an idea I'd like to talk to you about today, which is the idea that optimism, or a challenge mindset, best prepares us for the stressors that we will meet. And I'll be referencing a Ted talk by Kevin Kelly with the title "the future will be shaped by optimists." I do encourage you to look at that Ted talk and watch it because I'm not going to address everything that he talks about but I'm going to talk about a few points that he brings up and how they interact with what we have learned about the science of emotions, and how those emotions affect our ability to meet the stressors that we face.
So we've talked from the beginning of this podcast about how our emotions are determined by our appraisals, our mental appraisals of the situation that we're in. And we've compared those appraisals to the story or the mental story that we tell about the situation, that kind of fills in the blanks of all those things that we don't know and predicts what is going to happen. Another way of conceptualizing appraisals is that they are predictions of the future, that our brains are prediction machines and that they are constantly involved in making appraisals or predictions about how the future will develop, so as to help us to act in ways that will be most adaptive, according to what our brains think will happen, right? So our brains are constantly asking, how will this affect me? What's my coping potential? How will this develop? And according to the way that our brains answer those questions we have an appraisal, which then organizes an emotional response. We know, we've talked about this also the emotions are much more than just the feeling of sadness or anxiety or happiness. There's more than just the feeling component in an emotional experience. Emotions also create physiological changes in our bodies, our autonomic nervous system, our neuroendocrine system is triggered in certain ways, certain systems are turned on, other hormones are turned off depending on the appraisals that we have and the emotion that our brain is organizing. Besides this, we also have motivations that are generated. Emotions motivate us to do certain things. And we also have a behavioral component. So emotions will affect not just the way that we feel, as far as feeling happy, sad, angry, whatever, but they will also affect our bodies, our physiology. Hormones that will be turned off or turned on, the way that our heart is able to pump blood even, and they will also affect our motivation and our behavior.
So for this reason, our brains predictions about the future will effect how we are able to meet the future right? Our brain is trying to help us to act in ways that it feels will be the most adaptive possible, according to what it predicts will happen in the future. And so everything hinges around this future prediction, our brains trying to predict the future. The trouble is that we don't ever have all of the information that we would need to be able to with 100% accuracy predict the future. We don't always know what the causes of certain events are. We don't always know what the intentions of other people are, and how things will develop in the future. And so what our brain does is it takes what we know, it looks at the facts of the situation, and then it extrapolates, it imagines, it fills in the blanks based on those facts and also on your prior experience. So if you have certain experiences in the past that have always tended to turn out a certain way, your brain will use that information to predict how this particular present situation might develop in the future.
We've talked about challenge mindsets and threat mindsets many, many times on the podcast. And you may remember that we've talked about how the challenge mindset triggers a certain package of resources for us because it affects our motivation and our physiology in a certain way, which helps us to be able to rise to meet the challenge. Whereas a threat mindset affects our physiology and our bodies and our mental motivations in another way. It, it triggers us to avoid the stressor and to basically minimize our losses. So these are two very different pathways that our bodies can go, that our brains can go, depending on how we predict how the future will develop.
So I thought this was an appropriate topic and episode for today as we look out at the new year, because on the new year, we have a habit of looking toward the future, trying to assess what it is that we want to make out of this year, how our last year went and how it measured up to what it was important to us. And we try and make new goals to the direct our lives toward things that are important to us this year. And to try and make headway toward those, towards solving those problems that we're confronting in a, in a positive way.
So I want to present to you three different ideas that Kevin Kelly brings up in his Ted talk. First of all, He says that unless we believe something can happen, it's not going to happen on its own. It's not going to happen inadvertently. And so how does this fit into the challenge and threat model? Well, when we have a challenge appraisal, we are motivated to approach the problem. We are motivated to meet it, to solve it, to find ways to solve it. And not only that, our physiology is prepared to meet it. Our whole body, our autonomic nervous system, our neuroendocrine system works together to help us to rise to meet the challenge, to maximize our resources, both physiologically and cognitively, to solve the problem. And this comes from an appraisal, a belief, a prediction that our resources can meet the demands. When we're able to see the future that way, when we're able to see that we can meet the demands that are before us then we will have more cognitive resources, we will have more physiological resources, and we will have the motivation and the capacity to approach the problem and solve it.
What does threat do, on the other hand, when we have a prediction in our heads, When our brains appraise that the demands before us are too much for our resources? The problem with the threat response is that it's not good for any type of problem that requires thinking to solve the problem, right? Because it, it debilitates your cognitive performance. So if we decide that the demands of our world today are too much and that we cannot under any circumstances meet these demands and solve our problems with the resources that we have, or will have, then we will collectively generate a threat response and not be able to meet the problem. So unless we believe that we can solve these problems, they will not be solved because we will all be having a threat response And we will all be, in our own ways, individual ways, avoiding the problem.
The second thing that Kevin Kelly brings up is that we need to be optimistic about the future, because only optimists are willing to trust other people and collaborate. Now, how is it that these challenge threat models help us to understand how this works? Well, when we predict that our resources are up to the demands, then we will be motivated to approach the problem. This approach motivation helps us to connect not only to the problem and the situation, but it helps us to connect to other people around us who are also resources for this problem, right? It helps us to connect socially as well as to the problem itself. Now the threat response on the other hand is gives us um, an avoidance motivation, which we just talked about. This avoidance motivation ends up affecting not just the stressor itself, but it affects us uh, as far as everyone that we're around. It makes us feel that the people around us are also not safe to connect to. As an example, there's a study that has been done that has talked about people who are in this threat state who are already in this isolated threat avoidance state, when they see a facial expression of someone else that is neutral, a neutral face facial expression, it's neither happy or sad, it's neither welcoming or unwelcoming, it's just neutral. When they see the neutral facial expression, they interpret those as threatening. Instead of motivating us to connect with our problem and with other people around us in our network, who could help us to solve the problem, it motivates us to feel that we are surrounded on all sides by enemies and that we just need to minimize losses.
Collaboration from the beginning of our species is what made us able to thrive, right? We're not the fastest animal on earth or the animal with the biggest claws or the most protective armor. But what we were able to do well is collaborate and work together with each other, share ideas. Plan and build and work together. And this is what made us able to solve all of the problems that we have solved up until now in our history, right, is through collaboration and challenge, a challenge mindset, which leads us to approach and to trust. And to look for collaboration is what will enable us to solve the problems collectively. The challenge mindset is where we will find that capacity to connect, the motivation to connect, the ability to trust other people, instead of feeling that they're a threat to us, but to be able to feel that they are actually willing to help us and that we can trust them.
The third thing that Kevin Kelly brings up that I want to bring in to this challenge and threat model is that he talks about how optimists are able to see problems as opportunities, right? They are problems that make solutions, and problems don't impede progress, but they are a conduit toward progress. And this goes along again with that challenge mindset, right? Because when you believe that there are resources or that there will be resources, or that we'll find resources to meet these problems, then that allows you to see those problems as opportunities, which then invites you to come up with new and alternate ways to solve the problem that you might not have seen before, because you believe that it actually exists.
The threat mindset, however, will make us run away in various ways , from the problem. And we, instead of trying to meet it and see it as that as an opportunity and look for all of the many possible ways to solve it, we will be looking for ways to avoid it. We will be looking for ways to minimize our own losses.
Now, this type of challenge mindset can be difficult to coat, to cultivate, we all know, when there is a large body of people around us who are engaging in a threat appraisal. Who are basically predicting that we cannot meet the challenges that we face, that we cannot meet the stressors that we face adequate adequately, that we do not have the resources that we need in order to rise to the occasion, to meet these challenges. When we are surrounded by these types of predictions, what can we do? Well, how is it that we can cultivate a challenge response when this is what is happening around us? Well, the first thing is to remember that nobody knows the future, not a single person on this planet knows what is going to happen. Everyone is working from facts and conjecture, right. So the first thing is to consider what you actually know. And be able to label things, in appropriate categories, be able to identify this is something that I know. And this is something that I don't know, that I'm just imagining right? And also, as we said, remember that nobody knows the future. We need to consider what other people say, but we also need to remember that they don't know the future. Just like we don't know the future. We have, as a social species, we have a tendency to adopt the opinions and the predictions of people around us. The appraisals of people around us tend to have a lot of weight on our appraisals. And we often end up just assuming that things are 100% going to be a certain way, just because there are a lot of people saying that it's going to be that way. But we need to remember that even that big group of people is working with unknowns and they don't know the future. So that's the important thing to remember. So we need to explore different mental possibilities and remember that there are signs, there is evidence that could contradict what that particular group of people is assuming, right? And we can ask ourselves, how could someone come to a different conclusion based on these facts that we have right now? So being able to label the facts that we have, distinguish between facts and conjecture, and then consider other possible mental maps that we could construct that would still have these facts at the basis of them that we're working from, but filling all the unknowns in another, in a possibly different way.
I'd like to suggest a goal that you find ways to cultivate a challenge mindset this, this year. Try and be more sensitive to the moments in which you are cultivating a threat mindset or you're defaulting toward a threat mindset. Those of us who have a tendency toward anxiety unfortunately have a tendency toward this threat mindset, which is what creates anxiety, right, as one of its byproducts. And so it is something that's not going to happen on its own. We're going to need to consciously cultivate it. But look for ways that you can cultivate that challenge, mindset. Look for evidence that your resources, that our resources as a species, are up to the demands or will be up to the demands that we S, that we face. Look for ways that you can cultivate this prediction about the future, despite what the social group around you is tending toward, even if you're surrounded by negative predictions. Your cultivating challenge appraisals will make a difference because we are a social species. Our appraisals do have an effect on the people around us. Appraisals are contagious because of the social nature of our brains. And so if you are tending to predict that we can have the resources to meet our demands it will make it easier for other people to predict that as well. And especially if you are actually doing things motivated by your emotion to show that you believe that.
The more you practice a certain mindset, you practice a certain way of seeing things, you practice a certain uh, perspective and prediction, the more, your brain will return to that. We can create lasting change in our brains if we will practice something enough to create a default toward belief that, an optimistic belief that you can rise to the occasion, that you can meet the stressors that you face, that you can solve the problems that you have. That problems are a conduit for solutions. They are opportunities to create something new and important. Optomize the resources that are within you through this challenge response. I want to encourage you to do that. Thanks for listening. Thanks for considering my challenge. And I wish you a very happy new year.