#87. David Ammerschlaeger: Life's Circus
01:27:29 Share

What's up, everybody? Welcome back to The Honest Drink. Check out the episode description for more details. I'm Justin. Our guest today is the head of psychology at the Qinghou Clinic in Shanghai. As a psychological counselor and psychotherapist, he helps individuals, families, and even companies overcome all sorts of psychological problems and mental distress. Now today, we had a really fun conversation, and we go pretty deep. We explore existential psychology and its relationship with mental health.

We talk about the three consistent times of crisis in our lives. We talk about free will and if it even exists, finding the meaning of life, avoiding toxic positivity and why we should embrace our negative emotions. We get into the concept of normality and what it actually means to be a normal human being. We talk about the construct of self-identity and how that's tied to our looming feelings of frustration, fear, and anxiety. We talk about the concept of self-identity and how that's tied to our looming feelings

We learn about implanted false memories and how inaccurate the story of our past can be. We also learn about the phenomenon of inherited mental and emotional trauma being passed down through generations of individuals and even societies. This was a deeply engaging conversation for us, and it gets really existential, but really fun. This was hosted by Howie, Eric, and myself. So without further ado, please welcome back David Amerslager.

That is real PD. Interesting. Yeah, it's pretty nice.

Oh, God. Okay. Justin doesn't like me. No, no, no. It's a nice flavor. I don't know. I like it. David, it's been a while. Thanks for coming back, man. Thank you for inviting me back. It's good to be back. It's real good to see you again, bro. Very good to see you, too. How have you been? I've been great. Excellent. Very busy. Talk a little closer. Okay. Yeah. So, yeah, I have been super busy. This has been a crazy year for me.

Many new projects, but yeah, it's been exciting. What's any new revelations you've had recently in your line of work?

So I have been discovering some, you know, as a psychotherapist, you're always trying to find new ways to help your clients. And that also evolves very much by the kind of clients you're having. And so I have had two new kinds of clients that have developed pretty much in the past year.

And they actually are both on some sort of extreme. On one side, I have had many more students, teenagers, actually. I think maybe that's because there was so much online teaching and stuff like this that a lot of students had, I don't know, increasingly hardship.

psychological distress and stuff like this. On the other side, I had many more adults with anxiety or existential questions. Existential questions. Existential questions. So yes, so on both sides, I have been delving more into the educational side of psychology. On the other side, I have been more delving into the existential psychological side. Wow.

Wow, okay. Which way, now we're in a fork in the road. Which way do we go now? Whichever road you want. So on one hand, you said you find that many of your clients are actually getting younger in age. Yeah. Right? You know, I think, I don't know, it doesn't have to do with society in itself, but this is just like the...

how my clientele has evolved lately, that I'm getting more teenagers and families than before.

And especially Chinese families. Yeah, I was going to ask, is it your clientele? Is it international? It's very international, very international. Of course, obviously, they have to speak some sort of language that I can speak. But I'm speaking three languages, so I can do therapy in English, German or French. So whichever they want or can speak with me.

And I have had also a lot of people actually coming to see me because they were in a phase of their life where they were really asking themselves deeper questions about the meaning of life. What is the point of life? In which society are they evolving, living? What do they do? What do they want to do? What choices did they make and what choices did they make?

do they want to do and what responsibility for these choices can they take on and so on. I mean, and that's all these questions are existential questions, which we study very much in existential psychology. Well, as we get older in age, let's say when we reach middle age,

Do these existential questions, is that pretty much a cursor of the midlife crisis? So what I have identified so far in my experience is that there are three existential crisis moments, typical existential crisis moments in our lives. That would be teenagerhood.

Because that's the moment where for the first time you're confronted to the reality of life. That basically, okay, you have to grow up in this society. And for the first time you're asking yourself, who am I? What am I? And how do I define myself? What identity do I have? And why should I get up every morning, go to school, learn something? And what kind of job do I want to do? So there's this projection into the future as well. What do I want to become and so on? And then there's midlife crisis, right?

But I don't want to necessarily say it is a crisis. It's more like a questioning. It's more like a redefinition of oneself.

where you have achieved certain things in your life. You got to a certain stage where you know yourself already quite well, whatever, you have achieved certain things, but then you realize, was that it? I mean, what's coming next? And you maybe are on top of the mountain, but then you are like, wow, the view is fantastic here, but now what's going to happen? What's next? Do I go down the mountain?

Do I stay on the mountain? Like, have I already peaked? Have I peaked? Exactly. And sometimes we're just at the pass. It's not a peak, it's a pass. So we say, oh, I don't know, actually there's an even higher mountain that I can climb. And how can I get there? So something like that. And the third existential questioning moment would be later in age, old age, where you say, okay, I'm...

It's the end. It's the evening of my life. So you're trying to make a sort of a conclusion and try to see, to find peace with yourself. What is my legacy? What is really important in my life? And what was important in my life? What can I take out of this life? Well,

How do you approach helping people when they come to you with these sort of questions? I look into the symptoms. What's your problem? When there are existential questions behind, very often they materialize through anxiety issues, a certain level of depression or sadness, low energy, but also sometimes people who just can't make any decisions anymore because they feel like

I don't know what I want to become. I don't know what there is out there. They're like paralyzed. They're paralyzed. They are stuck. I have people who just really feel stuck. And the interesting thing in this situation is that very often the therapy switches into some sort of philosophical debate as well. Not necessarily debate, but more like a philosophical exploration and self-exploration. And...

it's frightening for many people because you have to ask yourself, what is all this for? What, what is that life? I mean, we are thrown into this world. We have no idea where we're coming from. And, and are we really alive? Is that just all fake? You know, are we just puppets and somebody's playing around, having a good laugh at our expenses. And so, um,

We really have to question ourselves as to know, okay, if you look at the whole history of the world, we're just nothing. We're not even a spark in the whole history of this universe and of the planet. So what is that for? Is there a role for us? And how can we find any meaning to this absurdity?

Is there a spiritual way to understand that? And some people turn to religion or spirituality. And many people can't do that. And so when you can't do that, then what kind of meaning and sense do you make out of these things? And so we explore people's belief systems and value systems in order to try to find something that actually in the end helps them to make sense out of things. I have a question.

Basically, what you were just saying right there, I totally get. And I mean, we talk about this all the time. Oh, yeah. You know what I mean? And we're always questioning. You get it. We always talk about the existential stuff, right? But what I really want to know, and this is what bothers me sometimes, is like, I feel like we get it, but there's a lot of people out there that don't think about this kind of stuff. There's a lot of people out there that at least seemingly just don't.

Go through life. Yeah. Right? Just go through the motion and they're okay. Well, do you seemingly. Do you think that's just a mask they put on and inside in the shelter of their own, when they're alone, like, do you feel like they're also asking themselves these questions? Maybe, I don't know. That's why I'm curious. I think there's a lot of avoidance, a huge amount of avoidance. And people just don't want to see these questions. And people, you know,

from these questions, they discard these questions or feel like, oh my God, this is, you know, philosophers. Bah! Or like, useless talk, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. In France, we even make fun of these people like, okay, you're smoking joint and like getting on drugs when you talk about these things. And there's some sort of negative vision of that even like, what the hell are you talking about? It's like, woo woo.

Like you're just like talking this mystical thing. Exactly, esoterical stuff. Like I'm here, I need to make money every day. Exactly. And be better at my job. That's the real stuff. Exactly, that's the real stuff. Which is interesting as well, because that actually brings us back to a discussion that actually has spawned during the Renaissance about rationality versus logic.

non-rationality. And if you look at philosophers that came in the later Renaissance, they established rationality and pure logic as the essence in itself of understanding things and actually overcoming even your own personal hardship. They said, if you have a mental health issue or if you feel sad, anxious or something like that, pure rationality should actually help you to overcome this.

And I find that also in a lot of my clients who want to master every little aspect of their emotionality through rationality. And then...

the body kicks in or other areas of ourselves kick in. And then they have chronic stomach diseases or they have migraines or they have some sort of other issues and they can't explain it because the doctor can't. And the doctor said everything is right, but still you have all these migraines or whatever physical ailments you might have. And then you had Sigmund Freud and the psychologist coming in saying, hey, no, no way.

There is a subconscious. There is a part of yourself which you cannot understand fully, which you cannot control, which you cannot rationalize. You cannot rationalize. And you have to deal with that. There's other ways that you can explore these areas of yourself. There's other ways that you can treat these things.

And you have to be open to that. But the problem is it also involves a lot of overcoming your own fear of yourself because the moment that you do this, you understand that there's a whole dimension of yourself which you cannot control.

which you are not really master of. And that feels extremely painful and fearsome for many people because they feel like, oh, in the end, I thought I was master of my life. I was controlling my life, but I'm not actually. Yeah, and that's a very scary concept. It is a scary concept because it really goes into all decisions that you ever made, all the things that you ever do. So...

On one side, yes, there is this huge immensity of choice and all these...

infinite possibilities that we might choose of. And on the other side, well, the subconscious is limiting us, our own cognitive biases and cognitive limitations are limiting us. And then I even didn't talk about the social and even cultural biases and concepts that also hold us back because we are still like thinking in our own bubble of

of social education and only limited belief systems.

Yeah, I think the discussion kind of boils down to, you know, can we, do we have autonomy and control over our stream of consciousness? Absolutely. And that's a huge debate. And I mean, from what I understand, which is really not that much, but from what I understand, most of the evidence right now is pointing to, well, no, we don't have true control over our stream of consciousness anymore.

in terms of what is entering our minds on a daily basis, hourly basis. - So David, what is the, you got me thinking a little bit, what's the actual goal for us as human beings? Like what should we be going after? I know there's, you know, like overthinking and all this stuff, but we just cut through all that, right? Like what should we be striving for? Is it happiness, achievement, family? Like what should we be trying to do every day?

I think this is a fundamental question that everybody has to ask for himself, right? I would say if you look at the existential psychological literature, two streams, two main streams. One stream is the more spiritual and religious stream where you

you find some satisfaction in the religious ideal that there's a higher goal to life itself, to the universe. And maybe you are thrown into this place to transcend yourself, to overcome your humanity and go towards that would be beyond humanity.

satisfaction of the soul. Enlightenment. Enlightenment, exactly. I mean, this is also something that you find in Buddhism and all sorts of religion, right? And on the other side, you would have those who say, okay, no, God is dead, you know? This is a phrase by Friedrich Nietzsche, we killed God.

And if we have killed God and there is no such thing as spirituality, then what are we left with? And then we are in the domains of, for example, existential philosophers like Albert Camus or Jean-Paul Sartre, which actually say that life is a complete absurdity.

there is no point to this whole farce. They're really calling the whole world a farce. It's a circus. It's a circus. Like, what the hell are we? We are just like some sort of like cells and put together the product of some weird evolutionary...

history coincidences exactly a biochemical thing and then because we thrive to survive we have created society and somehow even society is a farce because that's just the thing that we found to make us survive in this world in this hostile world and so on so

So they're really very critical about these things. And they also say about ethics and morality, what are ethics and morality other than rules that actually maintain the status quo of society and that enable society to continue as such and to maintain itself?

But the fantastic thing is also even in these authors, which at the beginning you feel like, oh my God, this is very pessimistic and a little bit cynical about the world. They say in the end, maybe there's a way that we can make sense out of this world by thinking about, okay, what is the fundamental goal? Fundamental goal is continuation.

the continuation of the species, the continuation of society, the continuation enabling other people to thrive just as we did. And maybe the goal is to actually give back this ability to enable other people to benefit from this as well. So this is how we contribute to make a better society, contribute to peace, contribute to wealth,

societal wealth, education of our children and all these things. So, I mean, it sounds almost a little bit like, you know,

what everybody could say. But what I like is the whole logical stream as to, okay, why should we actually be good in the end? They find a very nice evolutionary and very cynical way. Based in cynicism, they come up in the very nice ethical and moral sense of societal contribution. What do you think the role of emotions like joy, happiness,

Like awe, like humor? Why do you think we evolve these things and what's the role of them? So that's a fantastic question too. From a psychological point of view, emotions are all messages, fundamental messages. And what do they tell us? Using that into the mental health area, I would say even negative emotions are not to be discarded. We live in a society that...

gives us this message constantly, negative emotions are bad.

You should not be sad. You should not be anxious. You should not be disappointed, frustrated. And if you are, there's a problem with you. Positivity, positivity, positivity. And this is one thing that I... Toxic positivity. Exactly, exactly. And this is one thing that I don't like in what is called positive psychology because it always just focuses on being positive, being positive. You can't.

You can't. It's like a yin and yang thing, you know, you can't be positive all the time. If you do that, you're suppressing your own subconscious, you're suppressing all your emotions. So something that I'm also doing sometimes with some of my clients is actually training them to feel the full extent of their emotions.

If, for example, so one thing, you have umbrella emotions like anger. Anger is an emotion that never comes alone. There's always some deeper reason for that. And if you're angry, basically, if you really think about it or really feel about it, you are disappointed, frustrated, sad.

anxious and there are many different layers of these anxiety. Why are you anxious? Sometimes I started analyzing umbrella emotions like anger with a client and we came up with up to 20 different emotions that actually build together into this feeling of anger. So once you actually like understand the whole complexity of your emotions and you really feel these emotions, they go away.

And if you are anxious or if you are sad, feel this anxiety, feel this sadness. And the moment you really acknowledge it and you feel it without judgment, without feeling, oh, I shouldn't be sad. I'm so bad that I'm sad. Oh, my God. And so on. The moment that you actually let this go through yourself like a wave, it goes away.

Does it go away? Like for most people you see and study? It's, you know, everybody's different. So for some people, it would not go away that easily. So don't say, hey, David, I tried it. It doesn't work. I felt that anger. Exactly. I really feel it, you know. But it's more like...

a way to actually appreciate it's like tasting whiskey you know if you have whiskey and you feel all the different flavors all the subtleties all the things

This is a little bit how you should do it with emotions. You need to taste these emotions. You need to really start to like embrace them, take them in and analyze them and also feel like, what is that really saying about me? Anxiety or fear is never...

You are anxious because of so many different factors. You're peeling back the layers, right? Exactly. You're peeling back the layers and you really let this go through you. And the moment you have peeled away all these layers, yes, it starts to go away. Yes, it starts to leave. Is this something like, for example, you're saying how...

If I felt angry at something and then I'm feeling it, right? And I'm asking myself, why am I so angry? And then next thing I know, I'm like, oh, it's disappointment, right? Okay, well, what is the disappointment? Why am I feeling disappointed? And then you keep digging down until finally it becomes meaningless. I can give you a simpler example about myself. So, for example...

I have been experiencing something that is called Season Affective Disorder for decades. Season Affective Disorder is something that many people have, about 25% of us. What is it? I've heard of it, but I don't really understand what it is. So it's when you are basically affected by the changing of seasons.

Many people feel it's only when you go into autumn and winter time, but some people experience it also in spring and summer. Some people hate summer. Like they get depressed when the seasons change. Exactly, exactly. So it's affective disorder. So it's more like mood will be impacted. Depression, yes, but it's a feeling of some sort of

decaying maybe or anxious feeling it's complicated as all these emotions or mood disorders it's complicated so for me I know that every year when comes September end of August September October

I my mood will start to like go down a little bit. And for years, I have always like tried to hold on to that and say, I'm good. I'm good. I'm good. And October, I'm still good. I'm still good.

And then came mid-November. And every year, it was really funny. When I look back, every year, mid-November, boom, I would clash. I would collapse. I would have like a moment of two or three weeks of some sort of like depressive episode.

because I couldn't hold back anymore. I couldn't hold it anymore. And very often I would feel sick at this moment. I would have a flu. I would have one or two weeks of sick leave as well. My employers already knew that. Okay. It's like clockwork. Really, it was really like clockwork. And so what I have been doing for the past five, six years is that every...

Every time autumn comes in, I just feel this sadness, this mood coming in. And then I just look at myself and say, I feel sad. I feel bad. I feel anxious. I'm not good. And that's fine. I don't judge myself for that. I just like, yeah, fine.

I'm down and that's okay. I'm still okay. And then maybe I just sit for 10 minutes and look outside and I see the grayness of the sky and rain coming in. And I feel the cold also coming. I feel like, yeah, it's cold. And I just like take all this in

And believe it or not, I never got these depressive episodes again. I never had any issue for the past five, six years because I just accepted these emotions. I just said, yeah, that's it. We feel so judged whenever we feel sad, we feel bad. I have clients who lost family members. Father died, mother died, brother died, whatever. And...

And they come to see me and say, oh, I feel so depressed. I feel horrible, grief, and so on. Give me some sort of pill, an antidepressant pill that I feel better. And I say, no, sorry. This is grief. It's normal. Your father died last week. You have to go through the grieving process.

Now, if in six months you still feel sad and depressed and so on, okay, maybe then there's a problem and maybe we can work on that. But people have this feeling that I can't be sad anymore. I can't be depressed anymore. I can't be anxious anymore.

- It is normal. - Well, they fight it. And it's funny you bring up grief, 'cause I was, as you were talking before, I was thinking, it reminds me of the different stages of dealing with grief. And one of the most notable ones is, the first stage is usually denial, right? And you deny, deny, deny, and you can't resolve the grief until you accept it.

I feel like that's kind of like what you're saying. It's like, you have to accept it. You have to, you have to bathe in it and analyze and break it down and let it wash through you. And that doesn't mean like you never are sad anymore or you never grieve anymore. Exactly. For a lost one, but you go through that process. But if you're constantly like, I think what,

What many of us do is we always fight these emotions. We fight it. We're always kind of stuck at that denial stage. And we don't let the stage proceed through its steps. The stages you refer to are absolutely an application. They are an application for a very powerful moment, which is grief, right? But that is applicable to all sorts of emotions in everyday life.

this acceptance that you're talking about grief, yes. But it's also the case for a bad performance review. It's also acceptable for any moment changing of seasons, just as I mentioned. It's also applicable for everyday frustrations where you have to accept this thing. And it doesn't mean that you're not going to change things in your life, maybe.

My client, definitely she ambitioned to improve her performance the next time. And also I have a client whose spouse, whose wife died. So I was helping him through the grieving process.

And it doesn't mean that he will never find anybody else or that in the end life stops here, of course. But you have to accept this situation just precisely because accepting that without judging yourself for that is what helps you to go to the next stage, to continue in life. Yeah, I feel like that concept of grief and accepting in order to be able to move on

And I find it interesting because you said something before about it's normal. Yeah. Right. And you're like telling the person like this is normal. Yeah. I feel like when it comes to, I guess, human behavior and just psychology in general, I mean, personally for me and other people around me that I've had conversations with,

we always i always hear this word normal right and i want to just like quickly just touch upon that for a second which is you know whether it's someone saying oh god i wish i felt normal i wish i was a normal guy i wish i was normal right i'm so like fucking weird or whatever right yeah and then and then you'll be like well isn't that normal i mean isn't life normal that way like oh no i don't know that guy's normal i want to be like that guy like what is normal

I love your question. It's a fantastic question. Some geekish psychologists try to build the normal human being. And that normal human being just was a robot. In the end, they found somebody who was just like action, inaction. It doesn't exist. It doesn't exist. It absolutely doesn't exist because normality as a human being does not exist.

Now, of course,

we have archetypes and stereotypes. Like we are trying to put people into boxes. And this is where we think things are normal. Oh, you are like all the bus drivers, you know, or women are all like this and men are all like that and blah, blah. So we try to create some sort of categories. And because people fit into our conception of this category, basically that would be normal.

But in the end, normality does not exist. There is no normal. And this is also why we have to accept our abnormality and stop judging ourselves for not being just like my neighbor here.

It is normal that we have different kinds of feelings, of kinds of tastes and ways of living. And this is the fantastic thing about people too. And even opinions as well and ways of living. Dale Carnegie said, when two people agree on something...

One of them is redundant because in the end, we're not learning anything, right? So in the end, the whole concept of normality is a concept that we have to rethink. And I have a lot of clients who come to see me and ask me, oh, David, is that normal? I'm doing this. Am I normal? Yeah. And I say, of course you're normal, but...

Do you feel normal? Why do you think it might be abnormal? And then starts the real conversation. Why do you think you're abnormal? Because what you just described to me is something that is just human. You're just describing some sort of human behavior, which is perfectly fine. And why do you think it's abnormal? Do you think is it because, I mean, growing up, whether it's,

through society, through familial values, you paint this picture of standards in your head of what is normal, right? And that becomes the standard that you're always either trying to achieve or trying to compare yourself against. Is that where that bar comes in, where people come in and be like, well, that's not normal, but that is normal? I think it's actually also a little bit of our ego, right?

You know, like, because it works in reverse too, even when it's things that we're proud of or even things that we might be ashamed of. It's just like that ego that kicks in is like, oh, well, we're special. I'm special. I'm different from people. So therefore, what I'm doing isn't normal.

And you're talking about the opposite now. It can apply to both positive things. You think about yourself and negative things. You think about yourself where, Oh, well I'm so abnormal because I'm doing this because no one else is like the artist. Exactly. But even when it becomes like something like,

If you're worried about your own anxiety or depression or something that you're just not happy with yourself about, it's still the same mechanism, I think, kicking in just in the opposite direction where you're like, well, I'm not normal because I'm doing this and I'm so much worse than everybody else. And I'm special in that way of being terrible or being not positive about it. And it's that ego where we all just think we are so different and we're so much more special than other people.

I love both what you say, because basically this brings us to the complexity of identity. And what you're talking about is actually on one side, the individual identity versus the social identity. If you go into social identity theory, there's an author, Henry Tashville, who wrote a lot about this and

Basically, as a human being and a social being, we need to identify ourselves with a group. And because we have this need to be in this group, we have also the need to identify and to define what is outside of this group. And there's very interesting psychological research that shows that you will systematically try to devalue what the out-group is doing.

Even if you put people exactly in front of the same results and so on, but whenever something concerns the out group, you will systematically give them slightly less good grades or values or something like that, less good attributes. So this is how in the end we come up with these patterns.

very biased stereotypes and perception of things. And then, of course, looking at ourselves in this group, we want to be normal. And the normality here, I'm coming back to the concept of normality, is normal within this group. So you define your normality as normal

Am I still part of this group? And this is how you actually would perceive this normality and try to judge yourself relating to these group values. Now, we all have the need for individuality, for being ourselves, for being different, for being unique and to feel unique and so on.

So in this case, we want to be sometimes out-grouped and we can also define ourselves as an outsider in any case because I just don't want to be in this group. Yeah, I'm special. I'm special. And we have the need for being special. So in the end, if you look at people, they will choose some things where they feel like anyway, okay.

I'm different. You know, you recently did a TED Talk and it was about identity, right? And I feel like it's such an interesting question because at the same time, it feels so basic of a question yet interesting.

I feel like we rarely ask ourselves, like, who am I? - Who are you, Justin? - Well, no, that's the thing, right? So I tried to ask myself this, and what I realized is that the tendency and the reflex

to answer is usually relating to some sort of utility you have in society. So I think most people, they will respond with, "Who am I? Oh, I am a lawyer. I'm a businessman. I am health professional. I'm an athlete," whatever. It's usually some sort of social role they have

And they're answering it in the perspective of trying to answer someone in the value that someone else would see in them to society. - Absolutely. - Or it can be some sort of other type of responsibility. I'm a father, I'm a husband, I'm a wife. - Yeah. - I'm a mother. - Yeah. - And it's still that same, I think, line of thinking where it's some, I'm fulfilling some sort of responsibility and utility.

But that's not really answering the question. It's a social role, basically. It's a social role, but it's not who you are. Absolutely. And you realize that asking who you are is...

an extremely difficult question to answer, at least it is for me. - But can you even answer it? - Exactly. - Well, is it the right question? I think that's what it is. We can, you know, I think you wanna ask the right question, which is like, what are your values? What are your beliefs, right? And so we don't wanna get caught up in that particular question. I think it's trying to figure out the right questions to ask yourself. - I would argue that, I mean, I don't know, but I would argue that

It is, it could be the right question. It could be the right question because I feel like to your earlier question, Eric, and it was a brilliant question is like, okay, well, what's the goal here? Like, what are we trying to achieve here by asking ourselves all these existential questions, all these philosophical questions? Like, what are we trying to achieve? And for me, I feel like when it comes to mental health, when it comes to the health of

of our emotions and our being and happiness and all these terms that we can throw in there. It's about finding some sort of center. Because we've had this discussion many times. We know that money is not going to buy you happiness. We know that that promotion is not going to buy you lasting happiness, right? We know a lot of things that we routinely chase in our daily lives is not going to be permanent happiness or even happiness at all for us. So I feel...

The question could be is who am I in terms of finding some sort of resolution and some sort of acceptance of who you are as like kind of your spiritual center, for lack of a better term. And if you are well-centered, it's a lot harder to phase you. It's a lot harder for these kind of daily trivial things to kind of nudge you in any sort of direction than

that would be negative because you kind of are confident and grounded in what your identity is. And I think your identity and your concept of self, as I feel you would argue too, David, is it has a huge influence on your mental health. Absolutely. Many psychologists agree that the psychological identity that we have is divided in three areas.

On one side is the past, which is the narrative of a life. And if I ask you, who are you? If you are able to go past the social role and say, I'm a lawyer, you know, and I say, okay, but more than that,

Who are you really? And then you can actually go into the whole narrative of your life. - I'll give you a whole sob story of my whole past. - The whole story, your whole past. And then we have the presence, which is what you're really feeling right now, the state that you are right now, the things that you have right now, the felt perceptions that your body is integrating and registering right now, and all the thoughts that you have and emotions and everything.

And this is a little what mindfulness focuses on. And then the next is the future. It is part of our...

human built in system that we are expecting to continue, self-continuation. We don't expect to die tonight. So we are projecting ourselves into the future. There is a self-projection. Now the question is, what do we project? And on one side of the spectrum, we would have the ideal self or the...

hoped for self, right? And on the other side of the spectrum, we would have the feared self, the thing, the worst case scenario. And somewhere in between, we have the realistic self, the thing that we actually probably might get. Now, the interesting thing is that the difference between the realistic self and the ideal self triggers frustration, right?

Because we always feel like we're not really getting there. You know, I want more. And we have this idea of ideal that we want to achieve. And the difference between the realistic self and the fear self is anxiety. Because we're always afraid that, oh my God, this realistic... You'll become that. You could become this thing that you really hate most and that you're most afraid of. So there's always this...

kind of balance between frustration, not becoming enough, not being enough, and the fear of, oh my God, I don't want to avoid this. I don't want to be this. And please help me to not be in this situation. So this is like the whole dynamic of the identity construct. And even looking at the past, it's also a dynamic because we're not really sure of

What is actually a narrative? The narrative of a person will change over time. And if I ask you, tell me your life story right now, or you would write your autobiography right now, it would probably look differently from what you would say about yourself

In 40 years, hopefully we'll still be here. Or maybe even in a few weeks. The memories evolve, right? The memories evolve. And you can even implant memories. You can create memories for people. There's very interesting research done by a psychologist whose name is Elizabeth Loftus. And she implanted false memories

Really? Inception. Successfully. That's inception. Absolutely. It is inception. How does she do that?

So let's say you have suddenly your mother or somebody you trust and who knows you for a long time says, hey, Justin, you know what? Do you remember the moment that you actually got lost as a child in a mall and you were completely lost and we looked for you for the whole day and then suddenly we found you in the basement all crawled in, crying. And you were like, huh?

Okay, don't remember. And then suddenly, like, she was, yeah, but you know, there was that old lady who found you. And the mental imagery starts forming. And suddenly it was like, ah, maybe it could be, yeah, that something comes up. And then two weeks later, I would say, you remember this moment? Of course, yeah, you know, the moment. We're in the big moment.

And we're actually looking, I think we were looking for some sports clothes for my brother. So you start filling in the blanks, the details yourself. Exactly. And yeah, I remember this old lady. Oh my God, she has this weird blue dress and everything would come up to light. Oh my God. That's so funny because that exact same thing just happened to me this morning. What? What do you mean? Like almost like to the...

Well, first of all, my mom has an incredible memory. And I, at some points in my life, have. But then I feel like we've talked about memory. So she has like incredible memory. She remembers every single detail of her entire life. And she's like in her 70s. So she... But is it an inaccurate memory she has? Well, I don't know now because of David, right? I think it is because she's so... She's accurate with the current memory. So I know what's recent is accurate. Right.

So I have to assume that that stuff is not made up. But she said, you remember you were in the mall? And then, well, there was like, you remember in the mall, you got in an argument with your cousin? Because she links everything together because her mind is this incredible web. So that's why, like, it's just really crazy what goes on in her mind. Her mind's like very, very busy.

And so she was talking about, oh, my uncle's going to go visit my cousin first time, blah, blah, blah. And then all of a sudden her mind just tracks like every single memory connected to this person. And she's like, all of a sudden, you remember when you were in the mall with your cousin and then you guys got in an argument and then we couldn't find her and then we had to call the security, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then she linked that to me getting lost. Oh, you remember the other time and you were at Macy's and then you got lost and then, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, no.

And then she keeps it like, right. So now in two weeks when she's like, Hey, you remember you got lost? I'm like, yeah. Yeah. Clear as day. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But, but, but, but this thing actually, what I was describing is actually a research that she did. So, so this, the story of the mole, you got lost and you got found by an old lady is actually a research that she did.

And that is exactly how it happened. People started to, they were interviewed several weeks later in different moments. And the more time went on, the more people actually started to find some details about how this old lady was dressed. Oh yeah, there was a loudspeaker announcement. I remember the music. They were playing the Beatles or something like that. People suddenly filled in all the blanks in a completely amazing way.

Is it because of imagination? Because, for example, I don't want to hijack what Eric was just saying, but years ago, my mom told me a story, same thing, of me getting lost in the mall. And I don't remember it at all. That was before Eric told you. So you got it first. I just implanted you, dog. No, no. So I don't remember it at all. But while Eric was telling that story, I pictured myself.

being lost in that mall. The thing is, the thing is our brains hate blank spaces. Our brain really can't bear blank spaces. So it is built in to make sense of things.

And when your mother tells you this story, you don't have any reason to distrust her. And because she's your mother, she knows you for so long. Basically, you kind of think, yeah, what she says is probably right. So you are accusing yourself of your own faulty memory and say, OK, so trying to like find things. And I mean, you have a ton of memories which you're not really like really aware

linking together anymore. I mean, you have so many decades of

Like buried. Exactly. Just like debris just floating around in your mind. Exactly. Debris, memory debris. And then your mind takes here a little bit something, here a little bit something, here a little bit something. So maybe this, I don't know, this old lady in a blue dress, maybe it was in a completely different situation or completely different things. But, oh, a debris floating here. Yep.

- Combined. - And then here combined. And so your mind starts to create some sort of like rationally logical story that makes sense and that suddenly feels satisfactory to you. And in the end, this is the power of our mind, our mind is made to make sense out of things somehow. And even if that means, you know, Travis stating the truth. - Fabricating something. - Fabricating something.

in the end, as long as it is satisfactory to you,

It's okay. - God, our mind is such a tricky asshole, huh? You are starting to also work with some schools, is that correct? - Yeah. - So what's the mission there in terms of what's the main message you're trying to get across to, let's say, the younger kids who are growing up now in terms of helping them improve their mental health, I guess, or avoid mental health issues?

So what I first note is that more and more schools...

are realizing the importance of mental health care and well-being in the curriculum that they're teaching and in the way that students experience school. Here as well? Yeah, yeah. And that's the positive side. I really see that. That's true for international schools and for Chinese schools, public schools. Wow. I mean, there's a raising awareness that a child...

only can become a functional adult if you have also ensured the level of well-being and personal growth, psychological maturity during the school years. So we are shifting from a vision of just like

filling up a brain with knowledge. It's like creating... I think traditionally we saw a child like a computer without any software and we wanted to install as many softwares as possible into this computer. Now we understand that by just doing that, we are just overloading the computer with stuff and we're not really helping the computer to function by itself and create a functional...

coherent machine or something like that. - You're just testing their memory, basically, how well can they memorize facts and regurgitate. - Exactly, and we are just trying to put them into a mold.

So now it's more and more about how can we help children to grow into functional adults, into adults that are able to learn by themselves, but also to find happiness by themselves. And what is the concept of happiness? Now, something that I find like answering your question is mainly just make it a thing.

Make it a thing throughout the child's education to actually address well-being, mental health, personal growth, understanding of oneself. I'm working a lot with...

with teenagers, basically, mostly from age 12 to 18, 19. Now, even in this time span, the problematics are very, very different. But as I said before, we have the first existential crisis here, the first existential questioning. We have the discovery of relationships, of love, of

physical change, poverty coming in and relationship as well. We have changes in the family dynamics. It's a very chaotic time. It's a very, very chaotic time. I remember. And just helping the kid to sort out this time. This is probably one of the most chaotic times in our lives.

And we are burdening the kids with performance. You have to have the best grades. You have to perform. You have not just to be good in your school subjects, but you have to learn sports, music, dancing, whatever, arts, and all these things. And we are burdening the kids with performance when they're not really able to understand themselves and what they are doing on this planet, basically. And for what? Exactly. Exactly.

And so in the end, also maybe helping parents to reassess expectations, to think about what is that really, what is education really about? I will tell you honestly, 80% of the kids I'm treating, it's not the kids that I need to treat. It's the parents.

It's the parents. I was going to say that. I feel like you need to have that as part of your package deal. I would feel like a lot of parents, they have to be willing to learn. They don't see the problem. Many parents bring me their kid into therapy and say, oh, my kid has these and that issues. They constantly get punished, detained, or whatever. Their grades are dropping. And so help the kid.

And I have the session with a kid and fundamentally I want to say this is a perfectly normal kid. It's just a teenager, you know, and he has all these struggles, all these chaotic things, feelings, hormones, and everything is kicking in. And then I talk to the parents and I say, oh, yeah, now I know the problem. Now I know what's going on. What are the parents usually like?

Generally speaking. Overexpecting, anxious, putting all the pressure on the kid. Perfectionist. Perfectionist, putting their own issues on the kid. The feeling of lack of achievement, parents who feel like I didn't do well enough.

I want my kid to overperform me. So I need to pressurize them. I wish I had been a better, whatever, musician. So I want my kid to play three instruments, you know, or I always wanted to do dancing. No, Eric's against it. I was just going to say like, I mean, this connects back to some of the stuff we were talking about earlier, which is like, where do these invisible scripts actually come from? And it can be a vicious cycle because it's,

And I think it's also self-correcting as well. And so imagine you do have a really overbearing parent. Imagine you have an overbearing parent and it causes a lot of this pressure for performance or whatever it is in the child. And then maybe the child passes it on to their kids. But I think there are also cases where the parents

the child grows up and then realizes this stuff and self-corrects and then decides that they want to raise their kid in a totally different way. Like an opposite way. Yeah. But I guess my question for David is that, I mean, that makes a lot of sense. How does that change your approach to therapy when you know that

you might need to solve things at the family level. And so do you have an approach to get everyone to sort of buy in and to solve things for everyone? Because I imagine everyone needs this. - So one thing, just a comment on what you said, there's something very interesting.

that you see sometimes family traumas that go from generation to generation. And so in psychology, we have a debate about nature versus nurture. What is due to genetics in terms of mental health issues? And what is actually due to epigenetics, which is like the whole educational system or education of the parents? And

So I had cases, for example, where the great-grandmother suicided in the most dramatic situation, which created like 80 years ago, a huge family drama. And since then, generation after generation has to bear in a certain way that trauma. And I had one of my clients who had

a family history of borderline personality disorder.

Borderline personality disorder is one of the things is about abandonment, feeling of abandonment. I'm not good enough. I'm going to be alone. Nobody loves me. I'm not important for other people and so on, which actually was the great grandmother's issue, the reason why she killed herself. And all the people basically followed that afterwards. Is that genetics or is that baby genetics? Is that something that is transmissible through the education or is that somehow coming to

I don't know where from the genetic code. So it's very interesting to see how through this education, you can have a follow-up in terms of traumas that are passed by generation after generation. Now, to your question about therapy, it's a very delicate situation.

Because then you have to try to kind of get the parents into the thing and then make them realize that maybe there is an issue about themselves. What I do in this case is that I try to...

First of all, identify the family dynamics. In a family, everybody has a certain role. And that's true for siblings as well. So I try to see which is each person's role and try to see, okay,

If I change the dynamic inside of the family, can I already change something? So what I try to do is already trying to change the dynamic. I had a few weeks ago, for example, a kid who was deeply...

anxious about death because the grandfather died. And the mother was increasing that because she was talking about her own health issues all the time and which also actually mask her own fear of death. So instead of saying, okay, exchanging this anxiety between those two, I said, why don't you like work together on that? And I made them

research partners in terms of exploring the existential question about death and fear of death and so on. I said, look, I want you both of you come up. I played the teacher and I said, I want both of you to read some articles, some existentialist philosophers and so on and tell me what you think about this. So instead of like having the mother

child's relationship, I changed the dynamic into making them partners in the research project about the fear of death. So very often we switch from the therapy for the kid to a therapy for one of the parents or maybe both parents. Sometimes it even goes into couple therapy because the tension between the parents is actually the cause for the kid's distress. Hmm.

I had kids who were deeply anxious because they were afraid that the parents would get divorced because they see the parents fighting all the time. And I see, oh, I told the parents, I think your kid is very anxious because there's some tension at home.

Do you want to talk about that? And they say, yeah, we're fighting a lot and so on. I say, why don't we talk about this in a separate session and we can try? I'm not talking about couple therapy, but I say, why don't we talk about this in a separate session? I feel like that is so important, right? The idea that it's just not like stage one. It's like stage one and two. Absolutely. I mean, I'm listening to this right now. I'm digesting it and I'm relating it to

my family, for example, and the need sometimes I think for the whole family or members of the family to go in together to discuss issues. Because right now it's very solo as opposed to, you know, really digging in to the group or, you know, the different stages of the relationships. Yeah. And it is very delicate. I'm sure that you've developed a lot of techniques. It sounds like

one thing is just to be very compassionate and not blame the parents. Like you might know that the root cause is actually the parent and their daddy issues, right? Because it's all like daddy issues. But maybe you do it in a very compassionate way. And I'm guessing you probably ask a lot of questions. And by asking questions, you get people to kind of talk and think, and they recognize the need. And

and they become part of the overall solution. I can imagine also that people are resistant, but if you do it in the right way, you don't blame them. Be like, oh, the reason your child's fucked up is because of you. But if you ask questions, then I think that they come up with the self-realization that they might be part of this dynamic. And they also probably...

actually want to see someone they're just not aware i mean the good thing is that they're aware that they need to take their child somewhere yeah that's like so they believe in this process to some extent it's probably just awareness and once they realize that oh i could also do this then that unlock happens and this whole like multi-generational thing i think we all have to bear that just because that's how culture gets built like there's literally collective mentalities and cultures for a whole country yeah like there's certain countries that have victim mentality

And they've had it for hundreds of years or thousands of years or whatever. And like, that's gotta be that same trauma that gets passed along. Exactly. And not, not to go on too much of a tangent, but real quick, like I think you're exactly right. This applies not only to families, individual lineage, but also entire societies, um,

I think a great one of that, I was like recently listening to this talk and it was about like the founding of America. And even now, if you look at like kind of the main phrases of why Americans think their country is so great, everything, it's the exact same verbiage that is used in like the Declaration of Independence when they fought for their independence and freedom from, you know,

And so it kind of transcends and builds this whole culture where American ideology is really defined by freedom and liberty and the individual right to bear arms and all these things that we associate with being American is that, is exactly what is rooted in the founding of the country. And that's been passed down. And I first read about this and I'm kind of curious,

to hear if David's studied this or heard about this is like the cultural evolution or like I read that read about this in blueprint with Nicholas Christakis. Right. And he talks about the evolutionary origins of society genetically speaking, but he also talks about like cultural kind of genetics. And so like,

The gene itself, there's a physical aspect manifestation, but then it actually gets transmitted from a cultural knowledge perspective over many, many generations. But I don't know if that's something that you had studied or you know about. Yeah. Yeah.

You have this cultural identity of countries, but it's also true to subcultural groups or something like that. And they define themselves a little bit. So back to identity, to a narrative.

And so what is our past? What is our history? What are the things? What's the story? What's the story? Exactly. We work in stories. We're emotional creatures. We need a story. We need a story. We love stories. This is why when you read an article, people love articles that have stories inside and not just like facts, you know? That's why we don't read the dictionary. Exactly. You're absolutely right. You're absolutely right. So, and just as you said, Eric, the whole...

Culture can have also traumas, collective traumas. So I'm German and French, both nationalities. And on my German side, there's the clear collective trauma that happened with the Nazis and World War II, where we discovered that we were the bad guys of the world, you know? Like we were really...

The bad guys. You guys were pretty bad. But that's something that is intrinsic in the way you subconsciously thought. But absolutely. And when I was growing up in Germany, even in primary school, I was reading books about the Holocaust, the Shoah, and all these horrible stories about the Nazis. I was not...

in an age mature enough to understand what was happening. I didn't even know exactly anything else about history, but one of the first historical events that I ever learned about was the Shoah and the Holocaust. So, and when I was born, my grandparents, who actually experienced World War II, said, oh my God, his name is David. If the Nazis come back, you know, he might have issues because it's a Jewish name. Wow.

And so there was this collective, this continuous trauma of, oh my God, maybe there's something going back. You guys might fall back into that darkness. Exactly. I'm sorry. Were you growing up? Where were you? So I was growing up in Germany until my teenagerhood and then in France. Okay. So, yeah, I have... And...

If you talk to people of my generation and all the generations until recently, we grew up with this idea of maybe we are not so good, you know, maybe we are bad. And if you look at many movies, the bad guy always has a German accent. Yeah.

That's so true. Some sort of like evil German scientist or something. The pervert, the bad guy, always a German. God in America, just blame America for that. Even like in Die Hard or something. Yeah, Die Hard, the bad guys are the Germans. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So, and I think the like,

And cruel guys are always Asian, something like that, I think. And like a little bit crazy guys always has always a French accent or something, you know, anyway. So there's all these like stereotypes about who is good, who is bad. But again, coming back to this, yeah, collective trauma,

World War II was one for Germany. Now, interestingly, the newer generations are going past and revolting against this trauma and saying, hey, guys, we have nothing to do with that. Stop blaming us. And let's stop, you know, like hitting ourselves and bashing on ourselves for that. It happened 100 years ago. Let's move past this. And that is actually an example of a country or a culture, a group of people who actually understand

this and realize that this was something. Something that is, for example, a different thing and maybe not so clear is what happened for the

for the French during Napoleonian time. You know, Emperor Napoleon, who early 19th century invaded all the rest of Europe. In a matter of 10 years, France...

invaded the whole European continent and established a huge empire. For French people, Emperor Napoleon is like, wow. Yeah, like this hero. This national hero who made France the most powerful nation in the early 19th century. But actually the way he did it was horrible.

He exterminated populations. And because he didn't have the money to pay his troops, he said, you do whatever you want, which actually resulted in pillaging, rape. If you think about the Sack of Nanjing thing,

think about the way that actually that's what he did in Germany. And we still, so on the German side, we remember the negative side. We remember very well what the Napoleon, the French troop did to us in the early 19th century, which France never accepted. And I could, I don't know if it's appropriate, but I could make a little bit of a parallel with France

Japan and China, where Japan never really acknowledged the horror they unleashed in Nanjing in 1937. And France never really acknowledged the horror they unleashed in Germany in the early 19th century when they invaded Germany. They're stuck in that denial phase. They're stuck in this denial and say, no, no, we invaded. And because...

the reason, you know, every war has also a rationality. And for them, it was actually the rationality of the French Revolution because they were the bearers of liberty, freedom, equality, against the aristocracy, against, you know, and so for them... Sounds familiar, huh? Yeah, yeah. So they were actually the bearer of true values and the good side. The ends justify the means kind of mentality. Exactly, exactly. They...

Did we rape, pillage things? Oh, no. Bad apples. Exactly. Oh, yeah, maybe some bad apples. Shit happens, you know, whatever. But actually, we brought and we transmitted the French Revolution over the whole continent with values such as freedom, liberty, equality, and stuff like this. It's like the big message. It was good.

You're just talking about the bad apples. Exactly. The main message was good. But just in the way that Japan would say, hey, we brought civilization to China. Wow.

by what means you know so david you got both ends of it i know you're complicated david it's no wonder you're a psychologist yeah he's been working out his own stuff this whole time working on myself the layers of david today trying to like tears are streaming down his eyes right now the um

When I had you on the show last, I asked you a question and the question was, you know, in your opinion, what is the biggest modern threat to our mental health in society? And you said anxiety. I'm wondering now, you know, that was, I think, a little over a year ago. I'm wondering now, would your answer be different? And if it's the same thing,

Is it trending? What direction is that trending in? - I think it has become worse, even worse. - So you would still say anxiety is still the modern-- - Anxiety is still the modern main threat to our mental health. And it's becoming worse because,

the world has become so much more unstable, complicated. And again, what we said before, the mind wants coherence, making sense out of things. And the world is just becoming so complicated that the normal person or any person actually struggles with making sense out of this. So there's a lot of consequences to that. On one side, fear,

and trying to blame other people and trying to blame whoever you might fit to blame. Or just like withdrawal. I don't want to know anything anymore. I'm out of this, you know, like fight it out. I'm out of this. So this triggers a lot of negative behaviors and thought patterns that might result in anything. Now, from a mental health side,

we don't know exactly what is the future made of. And coming back to the existential question of self-continuation, we don't know how we are going to continue or how we can do anything. And you see that even in businesses. Businesses nowadays don't know how are they going to be able to continue.

we thought that multinational companies were somehow established and wouldn't crash from one day to another. But we have seen in the past 20 years that even big companies, I mean, I'm still a bit outdated, but I'm thinking of Enron, Arthur Anderson. Well, a very relevant recent example would be Didi. Yeah. That's up here about the news about Didi. Absolutely, absolutely. Didi threatened to- They're fucked now. Yeah, exactly. They're gone. Yeah.

Maybe, I don't know. They're pretty much gone. They're pretty much gone. Yeah. So see, even a company that was so established, but Ofo is another example as well, right? I mean, so we really see that established companies, rich companies can suddenly disappear in a matter of days, weeks or something like that. So...

things become unstable and fear-triggering and fearsome in many different ways. So, yes, anxiety more than ever is the biggest threat because of so many reasons, because we can't make sense out of the world. We can't project into the future anymore. We don't have the stability. We don't have any standards anymore. Even like looking at our understanding of the world,

I always thought I was somebody culturally educated enough to understand things in the world. But then, so...

An example, I was in the United States for a project in 2016. And I was actually working in an office on Fifth Avenue with a lot of finance guys and so on. And we were so sure that Hillary Clinton would win. Everybody was like, oh my God, this is going to be the clearest landslide. No way, no way. No way, no way. It's 80% for Clinton.

And then we saw the results and I really saw like CEOs, top managers, people who really were amongst the leaders of the world, like completely in disbelief and say, I didn't see that coming. Nobody saw that coming.

And that's denial too, right? Because if you actually watch, like you should have seen that coming. Of course we should have seen that coming. How is that possible that people who are supposed to be leaders in the country, in the world...

can't see something that clear. Well, I think that's the narrative. It goes back to the narrative we tell ourselves. We are stuck in this narrative of normalcy, of what is the status quo, and we expect the future to be that way, to align with our narratives. So when we saw someone like Trump, we were like, well, that's not the narrative. That's like...

an outlier like that, no way that can happen. The narrative is the status quo. Politician, this is how it goes. And confirmation bias. And confirmation bias and you deny yourself the realities of what's happening. And you're looking for the information that you want to see that actually reassures you that's the confirmation bias that you really like...

only registering the information that fits your own belief system and whatever you want to see. And I think this is even enhanced because of COVID-19, because people have this social withdrawal, social isolation. And the main way that we communicate nowadays is social media, which increases the confirmation bias. Yeah, and I think that, I mean, you're just talking about anxiety getting, you know,

bigger bigger problem as time goes on I mean it works perfectly because I feel like the world we live in now I mean we used to live in a very micro level where you're only concerned with what's within reach but now we live our lives in a macro level where everything is affecting you yeah like like for example you're talking about the like the politics of Trump and Clinton but back in the day you

you know, maybe you were not following as close to what, how we follow now, you know, before you have a couple of the debates and then maybe a couple of, you know, news press conference, or even earlier you read an article in a newspaper and like, you know, that's about it. Of course, anxiety is going to increase. It makes sense because you're living, you're, you're concerned with so many more stuff than, well, also I think it's, I feel like we, we've taken a detour, right? It's like, it's like before COVID, um,

I feel like the world was on a track and we were, everyone was living our lives and, you know, you kind of knew what to expect tomorrow, more or less. And then now I just feel like we've taken this detour, like you're on a trip and you have your, your, your route planned, but then somewhere along the line, for some reason, you cannot continue on that route and you have to detour. And now you're off the beaten path.

trying to find your way back or trying to find a new path and it's this feeling of like you're not sure what the road ahead is gonna bring because you've gone off the normal pathway.

And that is a very scary thing. And I feel it too, whether it's with cultural tensions, social tensions, political tensions, COVID related issues. And trickles down to your own life as well. Just like your own personal life every day. Exactly. Compounded. So everything is just combining. And now I can totally see how

is becoming a much bigger problem now. It is. It is. Than just even a year ago. Absolutely. And I'm alarmed, actually. You remind me that I forgot, actually, that I already said that one year ago. And I... So...

I'm working with kids and it's true through all ages. Anxiety, anxiety, anxiety. When I look at my clientele, I would say fundamentally 80, 90% of the people that I'm treating have anxiety issues.

Anxiety, it doesn't mean that they only have anxiety. And that's the notion of comorbidity that you have several issues at the same time. But anxiety is somewhere in there. You know, I just want to make one more comment. So I had somebody that I was working with and that person had to leave.

because of this depression and anxiety. And it was not because of any particular familial reason or life, it's existential. Literally this person said, and through sessions, whatever,

I just don't know what the fuck is going on in life. You know what I mean? And this anxiety of nothing is right. You know, everything's a mess worldwide. Yeah. You know? And something that COVID-19 changed, I think, for many people is also the illusion that leaders know where we are going. You know, kind of coming full circle, we're going to wrap this up, but I just want to kind of

give some final thoughts from this conversation, which I found very profound. One of the things that we were talking about in the beginning was asking ourselves these existential philosophical questions. And as I'm thinking about it, I'm thinking a lot of people

think it's useless and think it's like, well, why are you wasting your time? Like we have real issues day to day you should be worrying about. Why are you like up in the clouds asking yourself these existential questions? But I feel like they're worth asking. They're worth contemplating about. And I feel like the tendency for us to not

want to deal with it or to dismiss it is that because we feel we can't answer these questions. They're so hard to answer. Like, what is the answer? We believe that we'll never find the answer. So since we'll never find the answer anyway, why even bother dealing with it? Why even bother spending the time? You're not going to find the answer. But, you know, who knows? I feel like in terms of our own mental health, our own health in general, because it even translates to physical health,

is to try to find some degree of resolution in your own existential questions of who you are, why you're here. And like you said, David, this is individual. This is different for everybody and you can only answer it for yourself. But for me, I found a degree, a great degree of kind of acceptance of peace and

finding some sort of center with myself in terms of having some sort of foundation of who I am beyond the things that I may or may not have accomplished in my life, which was giving me a lot of anxiety before. But now I'm more at peace with who I am, so I'm not as bothered with

what I may or may not accomplish. Not that I'm not motivated, I'm still just as motivated, but it's not something that's gonna get me down into a dark spiral of hating myself. And I love the visual because when you were talking about the difference between frustration and anxiety, and frustration is...

the kind of, well, I'm not at my ideal self yet. And anxiety is I may fall to what my worst case, worst self may be. I visualize it as we're walking, we're crossing this ravine, this huge cliff, and we're walking on a tightrope. And we're in the middle of the tightrope.

And the frustration is how come I haven't reached the other side yet? Why cannot, why can I not reach the other side onto safety onto that platform quick enough? I'm still like on this tightrope. And the anxiety part of it is, well, I can fall off this tightrope any fucking minute. And I love that visual because we're all standing on that tightrope, like in the middle, trying to reach a perceived goal yet scared we're going to fall off.

And this is the absurdity of life. And the absurdity is the thing is this tide will never stop. You will never reach the other side of the cliff. You will never be off that tightrope. You will never be off that tightrope. But the other thing is also even if you fall, you're not going to fall that deep, you know. Even if you fall, maybe what you think is a cliff and like an endless fall, you're not going to fall.

It's just like one meter. And in the end, you're all like getting crazy about things that aren't really there. It's just vertigo because you're looking down. You're just like a foot off the ground. Exactly, exactly, exactly. I think these existential questions are precisely what we need to ask ourselves most. I see a lot of people being constantly judgmental about anything.

Like you should do this, you should do that. Why don't you do this? Why don't you do that? And so on. But what are the standards and what are the criteria they are actually judging other people and themselves around? It's just, I mean, like do's and don'ts.

Because somebody told them this is good, this is bad and so on. And you should achieve something. Kids, you should achieve the best grade possible to go into the best university. Is that really the most important thing in life? Is it important to know whether you are going to Oxford, Cambridge or Harvard?

Manchester University, Birmingham University, is that really the most important thing? If you have a, I don't know, an A or a B in a subject and so on, what is the most important thing? And so in the end, people are judging constantly everything around some sort of criteria that are not that important.

And if we were looking a little bit more at the more deeper question, at the more fundamental existential questions, maybe we would judge less. And maybe we would be a little bit more at peace with everybody, not just with ourselves and with people around us, but a little bit more with everybody. And we would have a little bit more peace saying, look, guys, we are all just human beings. And also about all these...

and conflicts that arose through COVID-19. In the end, what fundamentally are we all trying to do? We are trying to survive, create a safe place, and also a place that we want to live in, that we want to feel comfortable with, that we want to see our friends and stuff like this. Well, David, I think that was really well put. It was...

as usual an awesome pleasure talking to you awesome thank you thank you a lot of fun for me too cheers cheers cheers again cheers all right that's it folks i'm justin and i'm howie i'm eric that was david cheers all right guys be good be well peace

I wish she was I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I,