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Micro wisdom delivered to your ears every morning in voice notes ranging from 3 to 15 minutes long. Wisdom on how to live a healthier and more fulfilling life. Every podcast will ground you in the present moment to ensure you know what's important, the here and now.
Hello everyone, hello hello, welcome back. So straight into it today. How expectations affect things. Think about this, you come into a health plan and your expectations are to completely resolve your, what we call, problems or situation quickly. Right?
Speaker 1:We've been told lose weight quick. We've been told things are quick. Everything's quick. It can be done. You've heard your friend of a friend has done it.
Speaker 1:Expectations are crazy going into new things, and that's often the problem, not the actual program that you're going be starting that is slower. It's about expectations. So let's have a look at how expectation impacts a few key things. So expectations affect health and aging, and this is from a book, okay, which is called the expectation effect, how your mindset can change your world. Very interesting.
Speaker 1:So expectations affect health and aging. So old age is where everyone wants to get everyone wants to get, obviously, but no one wants to be. Does that make sense? Of course, you wouldn't go at all. It means you've lived your life, but we think aging is awful.
Speaker 1:A lot of people think aging is bad, bad, bad. Everyone talks again. But in the book, there was a research by this guy called David Robson, and he says, people with a more positive attitude to their later years are less likely to develop hearing loss, frailty, and illness, and even than people who associate aging with senility and disability. If you have a terrible view of being old, you may not get a chance to do it essentially. Then there was another mention in the book from Yale School of Public Health that people with a positive perception of aging live seven point five years longer than those with negative feelings about aging.
Speaker 1:So aging, going through different periods of our lives, we should welcome it, right? We shouldn't look around with disdain, wishing we were forever 21. You can see this with people and you see a lot of people. Everyone's been introduced or was met or seen on TV or whatever like poops, someone in the eighties, nineties, thriving. You know, David Arthur by late nineties, doing what he loves.
Speaker 1:Now, it's not guaranteed for everyone, of course, but people who have a good, optimistic view of that period of their life tend to be moving around. We're quite shocked. We're like, wow, you're 70. He's like, yeah, man. 70 years old.
Speaker 1:Like, moving around. I met a guy in jujitsu in Sao Paulo. He's in his seventies. He started jujitsu in his sixties, and he's now a black belt in his seventies or late seventies, maybe even eighties. Can't remember.
Speaker 1:It just blew my mind. He looks so good. It's He's keeping himself sharp. He's not saying I'm aged now so it's game over for me. If we look after a few key things, if we make sure we do some training to keep hold of that muscle that we need to hold on to as we age, If we do some movement and activity, if we keep our brain working, we can have many decades of prosperity, basically, as long as everything else holds up, health that may be outside of our control.
Speaker 1:So make sure that as we're going through different stages of our life, we're not putting a low expectation on things because we think well I'm not going to be able to lose fat now and gain muscle and stuff because I'm older, it's not true, we know that's not true. Things are different but it's possible. The next one is expectations affect your weight. When people were fooled into believing they couldn't eat more they ate significantly less. So they talk about patient There's a famous case in neuroscience literature.
Speaker 1:He had severe amnesia, he couldn't make new memories. Integral grade amnesia is the actual name, if I didn't just butcher that. If they fed him, right, and he waited a few minutes until he forgot about it, would eat an entire second meal, with the same level of satiation. So, just completely forgot, would eat again, just because he didn't remember he ate, then he would eat again, that was awesome. So memory does play a part in eating, right?
Speaker 1:And it's a much bigger part than we think. So you might feel a limit in your stomach, it's often in the stomach, but it's usually the brain, right? So mild forgetfulness is associated with overeating in some studies. So that makes sense, right? And then there was a woman, Susan Higgs, did a study where she offered students cookies, if she but if she first had them take a few minutes to remember everything they ate for lunch, they consumed 45% fewer of them.
Speaker 1:So do it yourself today. Give it a go multiple times a day. Take a moment to think about how much you've already eaten, and you'll probably eat less. And when you do it, if you pay attention, you remember what you eat and you eat slower, you're gonna eat less in general, but you're gonna make sure you remember what you do eat. If you don't pay attention, it's gonna be hard to bring in the rationality like, I only ate two hours ago.
Speaker 1:Like, surely my body's not hungry right now. This is a craving, and the craving doesn't mean I'm hungry and my body needs it. Does that make sense? So when you savor your food, you notice your food, you'll enjoy it more, and you'll probably end up eating less over the long the long term. That for sure are true, and it's obviously backed by research, but I think it's important that eating slowly, you're gonna eat less, and if you wanna eat more calories, eat faster basically is the advice.
Speaker 1:And if you wanna eat more calories or you struggle, know, for people who need to put weight on, what we say is like super shakes, loads of stuff blended, thousand calories shake, drink it, it's easier to do it that way. If you're gonna have to eat whole foods it's gonna be bit harder because you have to chew it all down, take some more energy and it's gonna fill you up a bit more. So you can use those to guide you, yeah, make sure that you do not confuse craving and hunger. Most of the time it's gonna be craving, sometimes hunger. If you're in a deficit, you will feel mild hunger from time to time.
Speaker 1:Don't Part of the process because you are in a deficit, so make sure you're hitting your protein and stuff. How expectations affect mood. There's a number of states that have no excuse, for themselves. Like, what I mean here is depression, anxiety, where we hate feeling down, and we should feel better is what we think. We always should feel different.
Speaker 1:If we feel anxious, we shouldn't feel anxious. If we're depressed, we shouldn't feel depressed. If we're sad, we shouldn't feel sad. And these ups and downs are normal, but when we have the expectations that we're supposed to always feel happy and joyous, we think something's wrong with us, and then we're broken. This is a problem, by the way.
Speaker 1:I think, like, the push always be happy, always be happy, always be happy, I think it's false false advice. Like, I'm not gonna always feel super happy, but at the same time, I'm not all like, I'm not expecting to always feel anxious and, like, shaking with an eyesy all day and sad. I'm just, like, days of waves. I'm just a wave coming in and out, and that's my day. And I ride the waves.
Speaker 1:And what's important is if you ride the waves, instead of fighting them, they tend to come and go. And yes, sometimes you have more waves of happiness or more waves of joy, and in other periods of life there's waves of grief and sadness and stuff, but that is part of life. And if we try and always try and resist it and change it, we're going to be crashing. It's going to be hard for us. There's obviously some things we can do here, like cognitive behavioural therapy or stoicism and stuff can help us reframe events that's happened to us in a way that doesn't catastrophize them and doesn't bring on more catastrophic waves that we don't need.
Speaker 1:But we can't get rid of everything. It's impossible. And in this book, talks to the psychologist called Iris Mouse who found that more people criticize themselves for having negative emotions or judge those emotions as wrong. So the more people that did that, the worse they felt. More depression, more anxiety, lower life satisfaction.
Speaker 1:Meanwhile, people who accepted their feelings without judging them were much more psychologically healthy. And this ties into the research on flexible eating patterns versus rigid eating patterns. The people that had rigid eating, the same as people have rigid approaches to they should always feel happy and never feel sad, were more likely to be overweight, more likely to have anxiety and depression. And the people that had a flexible approach to eating, which meant, yes, I can eat multiple different things in context of a diet, I can have my Mars bar, I can have my whole grains, can have my fruits, I can have my crisps and all that stuff. A flexible approach, wasn't rigid, good and bad thinking, black and white thinking.
Speaker 1:Lower BMI, lower body, lower weight, lower chances of depression and anxiety comes back. This is the same in anything, it's not just food. The food part, if you're rigid with your food, this is good and bad, I judge myself on that, you're going to be in for a tough time, you're going to struggle big time. If you don't judge yourself because you've had a cookie and you let it go, like you let go of a wave of anxiety, you're going to have a much better day, basically. And the more you fight these things, the bigger they get and the worse they get.
Speaker 1:And that's really what happens. And I think we have to take this seriously. It's clear, actually, in the research that this is flexible, adaptive mindset, nonjudgmental approach Seen in the research, seen in Buddhism, seen in stoicism, seen in cognitive behavioral therapies, seen in other therapies is kind of like third person view of things, the view from above, as they would say in stoicism, looking down, view from above, pulling yourself away, cognitive, you know, getting some distance away from yourself in the situation to have a cleaner approach. All of this helps a lot because it removes us from black and white thinking and it gives us more of an objective view, and if that objective view can be nonjudgmental as well, that is it. And it's quite hard not to judge because the brain quickly comes in, bam, bam, bam, bam.
Speaker 1:And sometimes we just notice that pattern as opposed to fighting the pattern. Maybe it's not possible to break that pattern immediately because it's so hardwired into you that you're always judging yourself, but just notice how many times you judge yourself a day and take an interest in it like a child is talking to you about a story. You're gonna listen to it no matter how crazy it gets, no matter how many ghosts and these monsters they've seen in the corner of the room, you're listening intently. And I think you listen and observe these phenomenas in our own minds because they are interesting to pick out. And I think that starts helping us realize.
Speaker 1:Expectations are powerful, guys. It's not just about expectations from productivity and stuff, it's really if we have expectations going into a program, going into the next phase of whatever to you do, your mood to be handled differently, your health, your eating, your weight essentially coming from it, how you age, all of these expectations. If you have a healthier expectation in general, it's going be better. The last thing that comes in the book is expectation of willpower. Basically it says that if you think you can handle it, you're going have more willpower and if you think you can't, you're going have less.
Speaker 1:I know it sounds obvious, but we've noticed this a lot. There's some projects you've worked on, there's some projects you've done or things you've done in the past where you've got an unbelievable source of energy. You have worked days, weeks on it and you can't wait to get stuck into it. And there's some things you work on and you don't got willpower to start a day on it. And I think it's our expectation on it if we can do it or not, and also our motivation to do it as well is huge.
Speaker 1:So the more motivation we have, the one we will challenge, the more stamina and motivation we have. We can handle a lot more than we think as long as you believe you can do that. That is a finite amount of willpower a day of course, but if you believe you can do it and the expectation is you can do it, you perform better. I was gonna say fun stories, it's bit weird to say, it's not a fun story I think, but it was not even funny to read, to be honest. It's interesting to read.
Speaker 1:So to finish off, there was a story about this little five year old tomboy and didn't get much attention, rebellious, getting into fights in school, La La Land, San Francisco, nobody expected much of it. That year, Robert Rosenthal showed up to do a study. He told the teachers some children were bloomers, and then they would experience a huge burst in the IQ over a short period of time compared to their peers. So he said, listen, some of these children are bloomers. And the teacher said, oh, really?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So he did this test to the children and gave a list of the bloomers to the teachers. And Rawson's thought was right.
Speaker 1:The kids he designated as bloomers got smarter, much faster than their peers, an average of 15 IQ points smarter. Sure enough, little Violet was a bloomer, the problem child I mentioned just now. So over the course of the first grade, her IQ shot up an incredible 37 points, the difference between average and genius and nobody could believe it, but there's the twist. Rosenthal's test was a sham, there were no bloomers, he was actually testing how teachers belief in students affected the children's performance and when given that list of gifted students the instructors inevitably and unconsciously treated them differently. The bloomers didn't even get more time with the teacher, in fact they got less time, But the subtle positive feelings instructors had about them changed how the kids felt about themselves.
Speaker 1:The teachers felt they had potential, and so the kids did too. So little Violette was no bloomer. She did better because someone changed her expectations about her, someone believed in her. So, yeah, quite an interesting story I would say myself. And on that note, have a good expectation of the day.
Speaker 1:Don't expect too much, but, you know, take everything I've mentioned. Don't expect to lose 10 pounds today, but do expect waves of different types of emotions, and don't try and fight them. Accept them. Look out for them. And make sure that when you do eat, you eat slowly, and you do remember it.
Speaker 1:Because if you don't remember it, you're probably gonna eat more later on. But other than that, I hope this was useful. I hope there was something in there that would help you in your day, but remember to focus one day at a time From now to bedtime, that's it. Get your stuff done. Do the healthy habits you wanna get done, and it will build up over time.
Speaker 1:And these are gonna add years to your life, and not just years to your life, but make the years themselves better, healthier, and, with more vigor and energy. But see you back tomorrow.