Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Losing weight should't be expensive or complicated. The ideal process would reduce our stress while driving results. Dr. Z weaves together his perspective on physical and mental health and the powerful way that fasting can connect these two spheres of our lives. Let's move toward total wellness and a holistic vision of health and healing. Learn more at SimpleFasting.com
Dial in today on, strengthening our mindset for success. Well, I'll do it together. I mean, I'm I'm loving, the books we've been diving through. I'm working and dialing in with you all. Just like everybody. We're all on a path. We're all on a journey. We're moving toward that mountaintop. On the horizon. May be the path.
We say our path. How exactly does it go? We don't know. That's part of the excitement of it. We've got obstacles. But obstacles can be fun, too. That's what I've been thinking. If life is always just a straight road, it's like, might not be kind of exciting. And like, sometimes the obstacles are so bad in the moment.
Sometimes we look back at obstacles, though, and say, there were things that we used to learn and grow. And so that's what we are doing. We're on a journey. We are moving toward obstacles in the best way that we can. We are not being intimidated by them or if we're intimidated by them, we are stealing our resolve with a powerful mindset that helps us to face the reality, whatever it is, and then move toward it, with grace and power and success.
We're going to be working on that today. How do we really get into our mindsets, strengthen it, start the day, in a powerful, way. If you can win the exercise battle like, right away, like, it just sets the tone for the day and, bring a couple good things and set a movement tone. Get that good energy flowing, open up a fasting space.
Now we're layering on, like, double bonus. Really, really good vibes going in the body. Get the energy flowing, get the good vibes flowing, get the positive thoughts flowing. Stack everything up in our favor as much as possible. We don't know what is going to come in our day, but we are going to confront whatever comes our way.
In the most gracious, thoughtful, positive way that we can. Okay. Yesterday we were talking about anchors doing some talking about anchors. Pat asked, one of my favorite ever questions, like, how do we anchor ourselves to something? That is nothing, I guess. Like, what does that even mean? I this is the sort of thing I really love.
Thinking about yesterday, the way I answered it, was just comparing it to a walk. Comparing it. People say, oh, walking is a practice is something that we do, but not something we can buy at something we can really hold. So a walking isn't really tangible. It's like any kind of exercise is an activity. So one way to think about it, fasting as an activity, even though it's nothing, it's still something we do.
So it's like nothing and something at the same time. As I was thinking about it yesterday, the way that I would, also phrase it as an anchor is just in the simplicity of it. So I've been talking a lot lately trying to get into the struggle of losing weight because it is a struggle. Whatever path someone is on, someone says, okay, I don't want to do fasting or they don't know about it.
Say people struggling to exercise, eat healthy. All these things are, you know, we can think of them as battles that we are fighting. And fasting can be like that. Although I try to help people dial down the intensity, try to use fasting more as a mental health practice because although it's not necessarily easy, we're trying to make it as easy as possible.
Some people do find that it becomes easy. That's the goal. Okay. So the goal is that it can become either easy or easier. Absolutely it is. But if we dial it back in the short term, and let's just take the argument that it's difficult in the short term because this is if it is difficult for you especially, I want to help you, with it.
And just to realize it isn't necessarily always that way. And sometimes learning to do these things takes longer than we wish. And so I, I tell people by bringing down the intensity, dialing it back, approaching it as a thoughtful practice can help you take it in small little steps. Don't feel overwhelmed in any way, because the reality of it in a way that if I was to answer it again to say, how is fasting an anchor?
It's the simplicity of it. Fasting is the simplest path to weight loss. It is much simpler, in my view, than exercise, where you say, I've got to go do a lot. Okay, fasting is not doing so. It's simpler, less to do. Okay. That is like an anchoring, grounding process. It's easier to do fasting than it is to cook incredibly nutritious, healthy meals, which you can try to you can set up in as simple a way as you can, but it's still doing so.
Fasting is like the opposite perspective is not doing. We're just not doing something. And so you think about all the complexity of modern dieting and all the calculations like what, what percent of macros, this and that and what calories this and that, and how many from fat and how many from protein and how many grams of carbs. Okay, that is like getting seriously complex, and you're getting a lot of people saying, oh, you should eat at these times.
Exactly. And have this many snacks and do these things, like all these practices. That's what I describe as like the storm. That's what I was saying. Like, if our sailboat is in a storm, we're talking about anchors yesterday. If an anchor is something you're dragging along the bottom of the lake while you're trying to sail, say, is an impediment.
But if you are feeling overwhelmed with the nutrition landscape, with dieting recommendations, with all these things, a sudden, a fasting perspective, it's like, whoa, wait a second, are you telling me, like, is it okay to like, actually do nothing for a period of time? I don't have to do so much shopping, cooking, cleaning, like office stuff like like there could just be openness, open space.
So simple to me. That's the part that I mean is the anchor, the most? So many people telling, oh, you need to take this supplement. You'll never, you'll never have success. And unless you buy my special product, it's like all of a sudden if you have an anchor, like fasting, if you know, like, hey, I'm actually fine with nothing, okay?
I don't need your product. I don't need your idea. I don't need your ideology or thing like fasting, like a lens. Here's my rack that I call a lens. Help us filter out all of this information from so many perspectives so that we don't feel overwhelmed. Like whatever dietary framework you come from, say, fasting can work with almost any kind of dietary framework, especially if it's focused on eating natural, whole, healthy foods.
Like, this is the thing that we should all strive to do as much as possible. Real foods that come from the earth in a natural way, not from a factory, not from a lab, you know, this sort of stuff. That's what the body thrives on. The body thrives on real, whole, healthy food. Probably the most important health decision that we make.
And then fasting is a process that can put that eating into a physiologic package that the body really understands helps to align the digestive hormones with when we are eating, keeps everything in alignment, brings everything into balance. So when I think of fasting as an anchoring process, that's what I especially mean. Simple direct cutting through confusion, difficulty, too many numbers.
You know, sometimes people come into my consulting practice and say things like, like I'm overwhelmed. Like they have spreadsheets, you know, Excel files tracking all this stuff. And I'm here. I'm like a doctor. I'm kind of a geek, you know, I'd like data. I will read that. But I'll tell you, like, we can get overwhelmed by data. And I tell people, so many people are like, oh, am I going to have to like, track stuff?
Do I need this? I'm like, the thing I really care about, like the numbers is like one, 2 or 3. It's just so simple. How many times are you eating in a day? And and people are like, can it be that simple? Yes, it can be that simple, you know? And that's a place to start. Way easier to track something like that.
Then, so many Excel files of how many calories and percentages of this in that. Just in the big picture, I tell people, okay, count, share one, two and three. You know, that's like a a place to start and then just have like the general ballpark. Like how would you answer the question, are you getting a lot of carbs or not?
You know, I like to me it's much more important to look kind of qualitatively than quantitatively meaning like, what's the general gist of it? You know, like, how is the general gist going? Are you getting a lot of carbs? You don't have to, count that all out. So especially the processed carbs is like, are you getting processed carbs or not?
Like, in an ideal scenario, if you were really dialed in on a day, we got our three dials right. We got our fasting dial, our exercise dial, our healthy food dial, which really, if you want to simplify that healthy food dial, it's like a processed carbs, a dial. Those are the things that are really driving, insulin production in the body.
You get a processed carb coming in. There's no context to it. It's a processed carving. It's stripped out all the natural fiber out of it means there's nothing holding it back. Right? It can think of like a skittle you eat. A skittle is pure sugar. It dissolves within seconds. It's dissolving. As soon as that hits the small ball right as directly flowing into the body.
Whereas, like, let's say you took a skittle versus an orange, you know, like an orange. You have some fiber there, and then we move it. You can take the same amount of carbs, go from skittle to orange, and then you go from orange to carrot, say, right, you can take an equivalent amount of carbs out of all those, but the skittle gonna flow right in, which means it's having a big hormonal effect spiking up the insulin.
Where is the carrot? Because it's trapped and all that fiber body has to work on it, expending energy to get the energy out, and then carrots going to flow into the bloodstream over, you know, hours, you know, and it's going to barely take any insulin to handle it. And so a big thing of what we're trying to do in the body, if we're trying to lose weight, is to change the hormonal state in the body.
Insulin is like a switch. I've got an article on simple fasting.com three step weight loss plan, got a big switch where you can just grab the mouse or your finger on the phone and swipe it back and forth fed state, fasting state. And that switch is basically insulin. It's other hormones in the body too. But we can. Insulin is the easiest to understand.
So we want to flip this metabolic switch over in our body. See people understand okay we get some sugar coming in had the skittle and then blood sugar. Reactive body doesn't like lots of blood sugar floating around in the body. Body likes little bits of blood sugar floating around that it can thoughtfully use and keep from reacting with everything, like our blood vessel lining.
This is how we get damaged by too much sugar and fasting. A big open space lets the sugar level drop. Nothing coming in. Insulin level can drop. Insulin. We get it's driving sugar into the cells. Okay, but the part that people don't understand insulin is blocking access to body fat in the body. And so we have an energy equation that we're trying to solve.
Ultimately we have, stored energy in the body in the form of blood sugar and body fat. And we say, I want these numbers to go down right. We want number on the scale to go down. So what we're really trying to do, we want to unlock body fat. Body fat is kind of locked up. It's kind of in cold storage.
It's like the freezer and not the fridge. I've seen the analogy is like the fridge, very easy to access. You can get at it easily. Freezer. Okay. You gotta like, unfreeze it, unlock it, get at it. Like, how do you get at this kind of more deep storage system? There's hormones saying whether you have access. If our insulin is always high in the body as, like the energy's all in the freezer like means the fridge is full.
So like if the fridge is full, why are you going to get the stuff out of the freezer? You're just going to do the stuff in the fridge, right? So that's the short term system. This is what fasting is doing. Fasting is giving space so we can clean out the fridge. Let's use up all the stuff. It's like now as we're bringing it down, that's like our glucose level.
We store sugar in the liver. We got about a day. On average we can store about a day of sugar in the liver sick, but we can start to draw that down as a we bring that sugar storage level down. Now the body's saying hey like what do we do as like it's a holiday. The grocery store is closed.
You know, as I go, we got the freezer right. It's like we can fire the stuff out as the insulin levels dropping. It's like taking stuff out of the freezer. Set it on the counter, let it thaw out. Okay, so the ways we get at that fasting space, like super powerful open that up. Right. And then like we are saying eat the carrot instead of the skittle.
Same amount of carbs, but it's helping the insulin level to be lower. And so therefore keeping us closer to being able to get in the freezer, if you see what I'm saying. Okay, I hope those are helpful fats that kind of dive in on some carbs. Thinking about carbs is great. And so you say, okay, but like there's the challenge.
Say eat the carrot and not the skittle. They're both orange, right? But we can be for many reasons. We make the choice for the skittle. Oh, it looks good. It's colorful, fun, exciting. It comes in a pretty package and it tastes so good. And it's giving you this spike of sugar, which it's a it's a drug. Let's be honest.
The sugar is a drug. Very hard to define sugar in any way. That is not a drug. It's a highly refined, powdery white substance. You basically get high on it when you have it. It has also, a lot of metabolic physiologic effects in the body is clearly a drug. And so sugar, like any type of drug you can become addicted to it.
You give can become dependent on it both physiologically and psychologically. And so if you say, okay, I want to be in a state where I'm overcoming something like that, where I'm more and more picking the orange at least, and the carrot over the skittle takes a powerful mindset to do it. And if we're being fully honest, the deck is stacked against everybody who's trying to do that because we are in this crazy, context of multibillion dollar, corporations, global giants controlling vast swaths of the land and the marketing space and the ills of the places where we get food.
And it's on the billboards and the commercials and YouTube ads and everything that we want to watch is just constantly sending these messages that is trying to shape our experience of what normal is. And, I'll just tell you from my perspective, the experience that we're having now in the modern society is not normal. It's, it appears normal to us because we have grown up and lived our lives with it.
But in the grand sweep of human history and the experience on this planet, nobody experienced anything like this. Like synthetic food that is not natural, never even existed. Every human being that existed until, I mean, less than 100 years ago basically never had synthetic food. How crazy is that? To start to think about it, there's there were no factories.
There could be no factory foods. There's no factory farms. Like we just the whole experience of having even a tractor and, and gasoline, like, the stuff is pretty new. We drove a little in that talk, but I did The Hidden History of Obesity as we just go back and we can see the roots of the problems that we're having now sprung out of the industrial revolution, as best I can tell.
And then really exploded in this, century. And, you know, the modern medical landscape is really dialed in on labeling, people struggling with obesity, struggling with a disease. And the more I have dialed into it, I think it's just the wrong way to look at it, because the justification within the medical system for calling it a disease is to tell people is less stigmatizing because there's there's so much, you know, there's the paradox in our society, the vast majority of people struggling to maintain a healthy weight.
Yet the, you know, the society is like a society that is about vanity and, and thinness and these sort of things. And that's something that I want to stay away from is like some sort of culture, especially for young people. You know, there you get into like fasting, people struggling with weight. It's like a lot of people really in a very bad emotional space.
And I feel this is what we have to navigate in our culture, like really thoughtfully to say, hey, why are the things the way they are? And how do we approach all these things in like a really thoughtful way that isn't hurting people when we're trying to be helpful? You know? And so what I see is much less stigmatizing than label labeling people as a disease or disease is to just realize this is normal physiology that is happening in the body.
Our body, incredibly can store energy for us, and we are experiencing a societal process. That we're a part of. And to me, that is the part that is I mean, tell me, do you agree? Does that resonate with you as a process just to realize, okay, we are part of a societal process. It's not an individual thing like that is just happening all to me.
It's like we're all like little cells in this greater societal organism. And the thing that is, more encouraging to me from a mindset is to say like, hey, how can I help recognizing this situation, recognizing that, okay, we're all part of this very difficult emotional, physical, cultural system. How do we actually do it? How do we help ourselves to be healthy just to keep it so positive?
Say we need to learn. We need to be humble. We need to see, okay. It's like we don't have all the answers, but how do we start moving toward it with things that are tried and true, simple base layer of things, and then helping people to do these actual simple, basic things to me is the thing that it is.
How do we move forward in the face of all this knowledge? I think, well, we take the best care of ourselves that we can. That is what we are, trying to do. And that's where we're going to go in the rest of this session. Building a powerful, strong mindset help us move toward like we have our goal, we want to move toward it.
And then how do we actually do it in the face, of these things. So what is normal, right. What gets constructed as normal is just normal. You know, people throwing cigarets in the sailors lunchboxes back in the 60s is just normal. You know, it's like that's like today we just throw sugary stuff in the kid's lunchbox. And I think, you know, probably 50 years from now, people look back about the way we treat kids and nutrition be like looking at us like throwing cigarets in the kid's, kid's lunchbox.
You know, it's like it's leading to great disability. So we need a new culture, and we need a subculture. And this is what I want to create here, a little community of people who are saying, like, I see what is happening here, and I see the difficulty and we don't sugarcoat for real anything. And we recognize, okay, the struggle for better health is real, but we are going to build a powerful mindset that is just taking us on our journey in the very best way that we can.
We're going to have grace for ourselves. We're not going to guilt trip it to say there's no standard like, look, we haven't signed any contract. There's nothing that says I have to do this or that. We're all just doing our best. Okay, so, if you're new following along, I've been reading through, this book, Thinking Fast and Slow by Nobel Prize winning economist Daniel Kahneman giving really, really interesting behavioral cognitive insight.
And today, I think, no exception. This, chapter is on availability or called availability bias. And our emotions. And so I read just a couple little passages for you, which I thought reading it here, was a little thought provoking. See what you think availability effects help explain. And we'll define more what that is. Help explain the pattern of people buying insurance after a disaster.
Dismissed it. Victims and near victims are very concerned after a disaster. After each significant earthquake, Californians are for a while diligent in purchasing insurance and adopting measures of protection and mitigation. They tie down their boiler to reduce quake damage. They seal their basement doors against floods. They maintain emergency supplies. However, the memories of the disaster dim over time.
So do the worries and then so does the diligence. The dynamics of our memory explain the recurrent cycles of disaster, concern and then complacency that are familiar to all students of large scale emergencies. So I thought this this, description that he's saying, okay, with disasters. You know, to me as a physician, I was saying, oh, this is mirroring the experience that I've had, you know, with so many people, it's especially, you know, the thing that strikes is the heart attack.
You meet somebody after they have a heart attack. It's like, oh, it's such a wake up call that some people say like, whoa, wake up call. Health scare, right? Could have died. And then then it's like people will change their whole life. It's like in the emergency and the crisis is like. That's when most people change here. They're illustrating it just like a disaster, an earthquake, a tornado or something.
People say, oh, we got to be prepared, right? But then these things fade and the immediacy of it fades out of our mind because there's only so much, you know, whatever it is, ram or whatever in here that we, we load in only so many experiences into our active working space. And this is what they describe as availability, that a certain amount of emotional, cognitive, factual, experiential things can only fit in like the really active part and everything else that is in the past.
It kind of fades. Have you experienced that for a while? There was urgency is like it's really loaded in and then the urgency kind of fades and then that's where people say people end up in a place of complacency. Complacency is something that we can all struggle with. And and when you start to get into the workings of the mind, complacency almost is like the default state is like things kind of will push us in a direction just in general.
Whatever it is we get excited about anything. But these these biases kind of kick in and it kind of brings everything into this kind of like less intense intensity of all kinds, kind of fades over time, brings us into this kind of neutral state, whereas complacency can be the default in the long run. Have you ever struggled with complacency?
I know I have. I mean, I can see definitely times I've flowed through season of complacency is like constantly a struggle to say like, okay, are we really stepping forward? Are we taking powerful action? Are we dialed in on the mindset, or are we just kind of like, you know, five out of ten, you know, very easy to do.
And so as we're thinking about we're on our steps. What are we like day 57, 57 steps. We're counting down or moving toward 2026, our most powerful, healthier ever. While how do we dial it in? How do you maintain a state that is intense? Like maybe you don't do it, maybe you recognize, okay, like, oh, like we kind of dialed in for a while and then see, this is complacency, right?
You don't even realize it. Like, oh, we're now we're back in this space. It's like, okay, that's a natural cycle. There's like flow to things like, I'm definitely not saying like, oh, we need to be, you know, dialed in 100% all the time, can't do it right. But this is like the process of building awareness. It's like, okay, here's that.
That's why I journal is so helpful because you can go back through and read it like, oh, I remember like in May, man, I was really dialed in like I am that up. Is complacency coming back? What does that mean? What do I truly want? Are we keeping our eyes on the vision out in the mountain, in the distance?
And so I think that's kind of like breathing. That's a cycle between cycles of intensity. Maybe dial it back seasons of kind of rest and contemplation and then always being on guard, for the complacency. This section then is dialing in further. And these effects what they call availability effects. And so I think this is interesting to think about.
Okay. How do we move forward. How do we stay dialed in. How do we. And this is what a lot of it is. How do we create the environment and the habits and the patterns during seasons of intensity when we're really leaning in, how do we channel that energy into creating the environment, the habits, the practices that are going to serve us during the more complacent seasons so that we can kind of be floating through that space without, you know, sliding backwards.
Remember, kind of in that complacency space. My one of my favorite quotes, preservation is progress. We don't have to be so dialed in every day, but we want to keep our direction in the right way. And we and we want to try not walking backwards. Right. So if you're if if ever you're feeling like, oh, like this intensity too much, just realize, hey, it's perfectly good space.
Let's just dial back like, you know, and go on a path like stop and look at the flowers. You know, you don't have to be sprinting all the way. You can stop and look at the flowers, and that's a perfectly good thing to do the most. Here's what they say. The most influential studies of availability biased asked participants in their survey to consider pairs of causes of death.
They listed diabetes, asthma, stroke and accidents, and then pairs between all of these and for each pair, the subject indicated well in their assessment was the more frequent cause and estimated the ratio of the two frequencies. And then they compared, the judgments that people made to the health statistics of the time. Strokes cause twice as many deaths as all accidents combined, but 80% of respondents judged accidental death to be more likely than stroke.
Isn't that isn't that interesting? Tornadoes seen as more frequent killers than asthma, although the latter caused 20 times more deaths, while death by lightning was judged to be less likely than death from botulism. Even though it's 52 times more frequent. Whoo! That reminds me. I was hiking in. Where were we? Estes Park at Rocky Mountain National Park, and we're hiking on some backcountry thing.
There's a ranger there. And the weather, it was still okay, but they were saying it could get bad, like, later, and you got to be careful. And then, you know, my wife and I were talking with a ranger, and they just said, scouts are funny. She's like, did they? Did you know, I think they said, like, men are like something like 4 or 5 times more likely to be struck by lightning.
And I was like, why? And it's because, like, the guys will go out when the the storm is so bad and the girls don't in general. I just thought that was funny. That's why lightning strikes are still very, rare, but much more common than botulism. But like the cases, this is what they get into. The cases get put in the news.
Death by any type of disease 18 times as likely as death by accident. But the two are judged about equally likely death by accidents judged to be more than 300 times more likely than death by diabetes. But diabetes is actually four times more likely than accidents. That's that's wild. Now I just I would like to believe that I wouldn't have done that on this.
I don't think I would have. I'm dialed in on diabetes. I get it. Oh, man. The lesson is clear. Estimates of causes of death are warped by media coverage. It's the availability bias is how much we're exposed to something is loading in these most recent slots in our mind. And it warps our thinking. It warps our perspective of what reality is, he says.
The world in our heads is not a precise replica of reality. Our expectations about the frequency of events, as well as many other things, are distorted by the prevalence and emotional intensity of the messages that we are exposed to, the experiences that we more recently had. Are you kind of getting the whole big picture? Okay, a disaster strikes.
People act in a certain way and then they become complacent. That whole construct that is operating is operating across many different domains in our mind. And like think all of these effects, especially like where we started, our session today on food advertising, right about like all the messages that are taking up these slats in our mind and warping our reality.
And just like he says in this book, the world in our heads isn't a precise replica of reality. It's distorted by the prevalence and emotional intensity of the messages that we are exposed to and think of the messages, the culture, the consumption, the money being spent really to control our thinking. You know, like people want us to act in a certain way, buy specific products, consume, eat in a certain way.
And so if we are trying to be mindful and strong, how do you combat something like that and the the way that you combat something like that is by being extremely intentional and thoughtful about the messages that you're exposed to to realize, oh, people aren't spending billions of dollars on these annoying commercials because they're pointless. And even if you don't agree with it, it's they're still taking up these limited slots in our availability section, and it can warp our experience.
And so the best way to do it is to eliminate them as much as possible. You know, if you're going to watch a TV show or a game, I mean, just shut the things off and set a timer and come back. And if you don't have a DVR, like if you have to watch it live, it mute, like look away, guard our mind.
Right? The mind is what drives the process. And our mind as we see it, has many potential ways that it can be biased and influenced in ways that are not serving us right. So we want to protect it. We want to protect our thinking. We want to protect our limited cognitive ability. And so okay, we wall off. We say, I'm going to shut off all these negative influences.
I don't want people paying money to insert ideas into my brain that I don't support, because even if we disagree with it, it's still going to be there. So we just wall that off. This is a big part of creating an environment for success. The whole thing this idea has, the book has been showing us, which I just love, is these priming effects.
What ideas are we surrounding ourselves and shaping ourselves with? So we load all the best thoughts into here. We're giving ourselves every advantage to in the in the critical, difficult point in the day. You know what I'm talking about. You've been doing really good. And then something comes where you say is not really in alignment with the path that I'm trying to do.
Have you built up the mental capital? Have you surrounded yourself with every good, experience so that you can make a decision that is in alignment with the path that you're trying to go? And we always have grace with ourselves, we never having to be perfect. And there's certain good things that come safe from even something isn't perfectly good for us.
We can bring joy and connection. See, we're always gracious. But as a general rule, are we bringing the intensity of our being to strive after health and make healthy decisions? Do you see that as difficult to do it? And we need to be vigilant and protective, of our ability to do it. That is a powerful idea just to realize it, how this process, the culture, the advertising, all this stuff is, is shaping our experience.
Here's a slightly different, perspective on it is more like when we were talking the other day about how we'll answer an easier question, like we have a tendency to answer an easier question. And this section is like that. People make judgments and decisions by consulting their emotions. In large measure, the way we're flowing back into this space is to realize that our emotions a lot of times, can be programed by this availability, like what is available in that kind of short term programing can really affect our emotions.
And so this is why I'm saying is very important to we need we want to be emotionally centered. If our emotional center is getting loaded with a lot of stuff that isn't thoughtful, reinforcing messages, saying like, you are strong, you are resilient, you are a patient and content person. You know you can do it. You know, very positive.
But it's like the things that are loaded instead are like, you need this, you need that. Your life would be better if you bought this thing, if all that's loaded in there as like loading in an emotional space, it is not about contentment. It makes it very hard to make these decisions. So here's what they say. We consult our emotions.
The most basic one, like, do I like it? Do I hate it? And then and then there's somewhere in between there. How strongly do I feel about one of these? That's the the simpler question that gets asked. People form opinions and make choices that directly express their feelings, often without knowing that they're doing so. We answer the question, how do I feel about it?
Instead of the much harder question, what do I think about it? This is really deep, right? And like and and you can see they're so close. How do I feel about it versus how do I think about it. You can see how you could get lost in that one. You get mixed up like, hey, what do you think of this?
Well, we subtly replace how do I feel about it and how we feel about it could be shaped by all kinds of priming and and loading of all kinds of things versus how do I really think about it. And so this is where we want to really get in. This is how we really are dealing in make change move in a different direction.
It's like pushing the rudder on our sailboat so that we just move like, oh, we're kind of going this way. We want to go this way. I would encourage you really think about times in your life, how do I feel about something versus what do I think about it? Because when we think about it, that's really setting our intention to try to take the emotions out of these things, meaning stealing our mind to act more rationally instead of impulsively and emotionally want to act more rationally in a health space when we're trying to do it.
Of course, there's many times where we say it's much better to, you know, say go with a gut feeling and so perfect. I think we got to bring all these things into balance. But if we are trying to really center our life in a powerful direction, move powerfully toward better health in the midst of this kind of storm, of this crazy culture, like an arrow heading right to the target?
We want to be rational. We want to be thoughtful. We want to think through what are the steps that actually would take us there? How do I actually physically take those steps in the midst of an emotional landscape where my emotions might be warped and influenced by marketing and cultural ideas that aren't healthy or positive? But then because they've been loaded in there, they feel like there are ideas, they feel normal, and so we don't necessarily question them if we should question it, though, why am I feeling this way?
Are my emotions being manipulated by other people's experiences? So what? This is why how we have to be true to ourself to really realize that's the rational part of emotions can be an illusion. Emotions can be an illusion. Wow. I gotta I gotta definitely do some thinking about that today. Here's a part that's just a little different.
I thought they did an interesting experiment. They read. They read, you know, participants in the study, brief passages in favor of various technologies. Some of these technologies were controversial. Some people might think they're dangerous or not. Like, I think nuclear power was one. Like some people might say, oh, that's dangerous. And then some people feel very strongly that it's not.
Some people were given arguments that focused on the numerous benefits of a technology, and other arguments stress the low risk. The messages were effective in changing the emotional appeal of the technology. The striking finding was that people who received a message extolling the benefits of a technology also changed their belief about its risk, without being given any evidence.
That's what's amazing. Although they had received no relevant evidence, the technology they now liked more than before was also perceived as less risky. Isn't that interesting? Similarly, respondents who were told only that the risks of a technology were mild also developed a more favorable view of the benefits. The implication is clear the emotional tail wags the rational dog.
Isn't that the case? It's our emotions driving the rational or so-called rational decisions. The affect heuristic simplifies our lives by creating a world that is much tidier than reality. Good technologies have few costs in the imaginary world we inhabit, and bad technologies have no benefits. And all decisions are easy. In the real world, of course, we often face painful trade offs between costs and benefits, so I thought that section was so interesting because it's showing how information in one domain flow over and affect a totally different thought process without our being aware of.
And I thought it was so interesting, you know, with technology that they're focusing on, what about when food becomes technology? That's what I was thinking, like when I was reading that food should not be technology, really, in my view. But this is where we're at, synthetic food. And you think of all the marketing of saying, like, all of these things are good, just like in that study, you get convinced that this is something you like, that it's something that's good.
We also automatically see it as less risky. Isn't that interesting? That's the connection that I think is so interesting because we like something more. We perceive the risks as less, but that is a mental construct. It's a warped version of reality that only exists in our ahead. And so I say, think about that. This, day going forward.
Okay. Let's protect that beautiful space in the mind loaded with only the most, thoughtful, encouraging thoughts protect ourselves from these influences that are trying to warp our thinking in different ways, deviate us off the path. And I think we will find that that process strengthens our mindset, strengthens our resolve, helps us dial in, more thoughtfully, intensely in the direction that we're trying to go.
Really nice to have you here with me today. I wish you the very best in this day. Have a beautiful, day full of health and strength. And kindness to yourself. We'll talk to you soon. Bye, everybody.