Hello everybody. This is Vincent for the Meaningful Show and today we're going to talk about overwhelm. Or are we? We're also going to talk about self-deception. We're going to talk about a bunch of things. Feynman, the first principle is that you must not fool yourself. And you are the easiest person to fool. A meditation recently told me that my overwhelm is probably just my ego. And I went, "What? That's unexpected." Then the second reaction was to agree with it a little too quickly, as in, oh, you're right. It is just ego and I should choose differently. I was tricked all along. And then I caught it. Both reactions actually were my ego talking.

Both were ways of in a way getting off the hook. And that's when I realized this episode because I immediately wanted to shoot an episode about it. It's not really about overwhelm at all. It's about self-deception. And overwhelm just happened to be the place where I caught myself self-deceiving myself. Self-deception is a fascinating uh topic. So that's the thesis for today is the capacity for our self-deception is vast. It is the easiest most natural thing in the world to fool yourself you know as as Feynman said and you are the easiest person to fool. one could say is that our brain was specifically built to fool ourselves because we're operating in this, you know, perceptual bubble that's going on, which, you know, is an approximation of what's happening uh on around us.

But if you really go deeper into how awareness works, and this is not woowoo overwhelmingness, but wo woo uh perception that this is actually science, is that what we're mostly interacting with with the reason that our perception feels so complete is it's because it's more like a simulation. Again, I'm not I'm not saying that we're in a simulation. I'm not saying we're not in the simulation, but the whole focus about this on this is is that our brain is very predictive. So the fact that we have a complete perceptual bubble going on like now I'm aware of like sort of like 180 degrees around it and I get the feeling that it's completely filled in.

Although I kind of know that there's blind spots but I'm not aware of those blind spots. It's because my brain is um presenting like a simulation of an approximation of what the environment is. And only if sensory input uh indicates that it's different from what my brain expects it to be, that's that's the moment that I actually, you know, um become aware of that and the whole nervous system uh starts acting on that. Long story short, it it's a lot of our perception, a lot of our reasoning is built to convince ourselves so that we're not constantly doubting ourselves and that we feel uh right, which is so interesting because there's so many people in this world who think they're right and they're they're right in in ways that don't agree with each other.

So anyways, overwhelm is going to be the case study, right? So let's see. Uh spiritual bypassing is going to be the trigger that started. And this is actually a new word that I that I learned. Spiritual bypassing. More about that later. But the self-deception is the engine underneath both actually. And I mean there's a trap here and it's it's beautifully symmetrical. So the meditation suggestion that your overwhelm is just ego choose differently is a classic move that has a name. Masters called it spiritual bypassing. Actually fascinating paper on that. It's using spiritual sounding ideas to skip over an uncomfortable feeling instead of actually dealing with it. And it can be genuinely harmful.

It can harm people. It can make you feel like you're doing something wrong. You're not trying hard enough. spiritual enough, you're failing at being a good person. It also isolates you because nobody seems to be struggling with something so basic, especially your woowoo spiritual friends. So, here's guardrail number one. And I want to be pretty clear about it that make no bones about the fact that there is true genuine overwhelm. I don't want to poo poo that. a car accident, a sudden loss of life, a major life change, lose your job. The these flood your nervous system and they create a real overwhelm. Um, and let's call it big O overwhelm.

So, here we lean on trauma research and you guys know that I love learning about that and I know quite a bit about it. You need to complete your stress cycle as Nagoski talks about that. Animals do this very well. after a danger passes, they literally shake it off. You've seen dogs do this, right? Uh and humans, we've made that culturally unacceptable. You don't really shake things off generally after a really tough business meeting, right? Our body doesn't naturally shake anymore. Uh usually our mind races, our emotions stress spike, but we tend to play it cool like there's this mask of uneffectiveness and we don't let our body finish the cycle.

We think that is silly. And then stress accumulates in our nervous system because as the popular book by Bessel van der Kolk called the body keeps the score. If you don't complete the stress cycle, your body doesn't really quite know that it's that it's over. Needs to be queued pass back and forth. And that buildup is called allostatic load. And so allostatic load um and that's actually something new that I learned about uh Peter Levine and Bruce McEwen talk about that. Wow I really butchered those names maybe. So it's the wear and tear of chronic stress linked to cardiovascular disease, diabetes, depression. This is what you generally hear about. And you cannot spiritually bypass a a nervous system that's overwhelmed.

Right? If you're in Big-O overwhelm, you need to take care of your body first. So, I wanted to state that clear. Now, watch the symmetry because this is what the episode is is about. Deception in the first direction, the bypassing direction is telling yourself this is just ego. Transcended. Transcended when it actually is genuine body level overwhelm you need to actually move through. So you use spirituality to avoid the feeling and that's the wrong use of spirituality in my in my in my opinion. Then there's the second. It's the victim direction. This is telling yourself, oh this is this is genuine real overwhelm. Poor me. Poor me. I need to like hide away.

When actually there's a part of it that's manufactured. It's your ego being um a conspirator in producing overwhelm on purpose to get you off the hook because if you're overwhelmed, you don't have to do the thing. So from the inside, they both feel completely reasonable, right? To a certain extent, you could say that they feel spiritual or wise or self-compassionate. You can post talk reason anything. And that's why it makes self-deception so hard, right? I love self-deception. The ego can uh weaponize spirituality in either direction. It will happily reach it will co-opt spirituality for its own purposes. So whatever serves the goal of avoidance in that moment. So when we think about that second direction um it's the one that I tend to catch myself in both.

So I start from a belief. My belief that I adopted at one point is that our capacity for self-deception is vast. And right alongside it, we have a capacity for self-sabotage, which is also pretty substantial. So yes, I think we can be overwhelmed by our own ego because overwhelm makes a very effective excuse. It lets us avoid responsibilities, challenges, and it's procrastination, right? You're trading when you procrastinate, you trade short-term relief for long-term pain. Pychyl calls it mood management. Remember my episode on choosing your pain? It's the same principle. Do you want the pain of facing the overwhelm or the pain of avoiding it and letting it fester? There's there's there's a choice.

There's not necessarily a right or a wrong one. And self-sabotage has a hidden appeal. It is the path of certainty because when you self-sabotage, you can absolutely guarantee the outcome failure. Success can never be guaranteed like that. That's always a gamble. manufacturing overwhelm thus keeps you in your comfort zone and even when that comfort zone is subjectively objectively bad full of stress full of anxiety but it's known so when I heard this meditation after the defensiveness passed and I was like thinking about it I thought okay fair point how did I allow this overwhelm to manifest so now we get to the owner versus victim shift I talked about in

episodes 10 and 14 moving from oh wo is me I'm overwhelmed I need taken care of to how is this overwhelm happening for me like stepping in your big person shoes how do I allow it how did I allow it to come to rise and I realized yes when I'm overwhelmed it's uncomfortable But I do get off the hook from others but like primarily from from myself when I don't want to face something I can manufacture the conditions for overwhelm consciously or not. And in that moment, I had the distinct feeling that I caught my ego red hand red-handed with the hand in the cookie jar. Or if you prefer this framing, my ego got a glimpse of how it works itself.

It's it's like this very interesting feeling of seeing yourself on the security camera. So remember when I talked about awareness alone can be curative. that is uh I looked it up. I used it in episodes 7 8 9 13 12. I don't know why I went out of order there and probably more. So the principle there is um you don't immediately have to change something but you can change what you can't measure or observe. So observing is the first step and you can't stop deceiving yourself. But first let let me talk about that. So u because it has something to do or a parallel with DBT. DBT is all about dialectics.

These seemingly opposite conditions such as radically accepting the situation and wanting to change it. And awareness alone can be curative is is is a step in that because it leans in the direction of radical ac acceptance. Right? When you do a problematic behavior, you allow it, but the only thing that you're asking of yourself is to be aware. What you're doing in a way is you're radically accepting it. You're not uh I don't I don't know what your particular variant of that is. But let's just say that it's um overwhelm. That's what we're talking about. And in order to not be taken over with that overwhelm, you go turn on the TV and you eat a bucket of ice cream, right?

And if you do that unconsciously in in a way it it doesn't help you get any further because then maybe the next morning when you wake up it's more like you time traveled uh time went away from you and maybe you have some negative feelings about but you can't really you have didn't observe it you didn't measure it you didn't really know what happened. So radical acceptance and therefore awareness alone can be curative is the principle of um doing the first step and accepting that the behavior is happening and instead of being furious being curious that's a quote from something I forgot which I used it in one of my episodes but curiosity.

Okay. So, because you can't stop deceiving yourself uh if you can't observe or measure, right? You can't change what you can't measure or observe. Like what are you changing? So, you can't stop deceiving yourself until you can first watch yourself doing it. Right? I've said it in multiple different ways. In fact, as I was writing the script, I was aware of overwhelm rising being manufactured by my ego, one could say, because I have a deadline for this episode that I did not meet and I have a lot on my plate, a lot of stuff that I'm doing. And I can feel that rising. I can I can feel the action urge.

I felt as I wrote this the action earths to get up do something else anything that you know buys cheaper dopamine or to get approval or to make some money to avoid this feeling but that doesn't get me to my actual creative goal which is to make long- form content which spoiler is hard especially in the age of AI it's also easier in the age of AI but that's that's a story by itself all right so I think we have to develop a tolerance for the discomfort Not just a tolerance like um a gusto. Both the discomfort of overwhelm itself and the sharper discomfort of admitting that we might be fooling ourselves.

Like enjoy that. Enjoy catching yourself. We have to be able to say okay I'm feeling overwhelmed. I'm not sure whether it's real or manufactured and I'm going to take a breath. I'm going to take one honest step in the direction opposite action. Anyway, so that's the antidote to overwhelm. So I think I'm going to go come to this later, but that's what in DBT would be called opposite action. Your action urge is when you're overwhelmed is to not do the thing, right? Your action urge is procrastinate. Okay? And then the second the second part of this, the honesty is the antidote to self-deception. But that's that's that's that's a little bit different, right?

Because self-deception is not as much um like an exper uh that you're having experience that you're having. It's more hidden. Like the whole point of self-deception is that you need to be work do work in order to become aware of it. Like you're you're tricking yourself, which is mind-blowing if you think about how good we are at tricking ourselves. But I really nerded out about that. So, so this meditation also said overwhelm is a habit rooted in earlier memories or patterns that once kept us safe. How can overwhelm be a habit? So if we have a history of avoiding challenges, we may have learned overwhelm as a coping strategy.

A reflex triggered by certain situations because as the meditation said and I agree with can be rooted in patterns that once kept us safe by getting us off the hook from a parent, from a partner, from ourselves. That's learned helplessness. But in adult life, that same reflex won't let us rise to our biggest potential. You won't self-actualize on self-deception. The self-deception that once protected us now limits us. So we have to see the pattern. We need to be willing to face the fear and act even when it's uncomfortable, especially when it's uncomfortable, even when people around us disagree. Because overwhelm keeps us small. It avoids risks. It keeps us procrastinating over and over again.

And self-deception is what let it lets it stay hidden. So I'll admit it's not always obvious what action to take. Sometimes it's breaking the task into smaller steps. Sometimes it's actually saying no to things that aren't aligned with our goals or values. Right? The only certainty is that giving into the action urge of procrastination is a guaranteed path to failure. This is the short-term relief, the long-term pain. A circular pattern that's hard to break. So, let's go to the DBT side. How does DBT help us tell the truth to ourselves? I love the DBT lens here precisely because DBT is dialectical. It refuses to do this bypass. It holds two things at the same time.

Your feeling is valid. You're overwhelmed and you still have to act. That is basically the opposite of self-deception which always wants you to pick the one side that lets you off the hook whether it's left or right. So first this episode came from meditation I will share it in the notes and meditation cultiv skill mindfulness and uh it's about being present and observing our thoughts and feelings in current moment without judgment. That's the definition of mindfulness and DBT and that's exactly what lets us notice when we're feeling overwhelmed and notice the story that we're spinning about it. So wise mind lives here not our DBT thing the balance between emotional hot mind and rational cold mind.

emotional mind may say it's all real poor me right the rational mind may be may be saying oh it's all ego transcended be logical right and the wise mind is where you get honest about like sort of the intersection of both of those make room for both second for the big O overwhelm the real overwhelm this is where the distress tolerance skill is about it's about tolerating and managing difficult emotions without engaging in the harmful behavior when you feel like you can't take it anymore. This helps you to get regulated and return to baseline. The whistle was not in the script. Okay. The crash course, stop, which stands for stop, take a step back, observe, proceed mindfully.

The TIPP skills, temperature, intense exercise, paced breathing, and progressive muscle relaxation. accepts AC ACCEPTS to do uh to do some of that. Cool. So, you cannot honestly assess a situation uh while while you're flooded. So, yeah, you can't honestly assess a situation while you're flooded. So, you need to regulate first. That's the point of that. So, third, for small O overwhelm or once you're back at baseline, the emotion regulation skill is about identifying and managing emotions in a healthy way. So the crash course here, check the facts, opposite action problem solving. Check the facts is the anti-self-deception skill. It's looking at the situation as objectively as you can and naming the cognitive distortions feeding the overwhelm.

Opposite actions means acting against the emotional urge, breaking the cycle. Problem solving means finding practical solutions so you feel empowered rather than stuck. So for more, see my episodes eight and nine. In summary, the real subject of this episode apparently is not overwhelm, it's self-deception. And I honestly want to talk about that more, but it's a capacity to fool ourselves. And that's vast. And we are the easiest person to fool. The deception runs in both directions. in the genuine overwhelm, just being just ego, spiritual bypassing or calling manufactured overwhelm genuine and getting stuck in victimhood. Both feel reasonable from the inside. Big O overwhelm is real when it occurs. You cannot bypass a disregulated nervous system.

You need to complete the stress cycle. Reduce the allostatic load. Take care of your body first. Your body keeps the score. Small overwhelm can be manufactured by the ego as well as self-sabotage because failure is the one outcome that you can absolutely guarantee. And then of course awareness alone can be curative. You can't stop deceiving yourself until you can catch yourself in the act. We want to develop tolerance for the discomfort even joy and take one honest step in the right direction. Action is the antidote antidote to overwhelm and honesty is the antidote to self-deception. There's a bunch of sources that I am going to list. Richard Feynman, *Cargo Cult Science* that's where the uh the quote is from Emily Nagoski we talked about that the burnout cycle waking the tiger by Bessel van der Kolk the body keeps the score.

Um, Gabor Maté, when the body says no. Bruce McEwen, the end of stress as we know it. I I could go on. I'm not going to go keep going on. Terry Real, I don't want to talk about it. I um used that in previous work. Steven C. Hayes, a liberated mind. I apparently I am continuing solving the procrastination puzzle puzzle and two papers. There were two papers that I found very very interesting. and these um these papers that I'll link in the show notes as well. So like we can make sure that to check those out where one of them was about spiritual bypassing which was which was new

not not not the practice of spiritual bypassing I think we all know that pretty well but like the term spiritual bypassing and someone that analyzed all like the different types of spiritual bypassing and the uh the consequences of that and that's that's really helpful because it gives for me at least um like a term for people that kind of hate spirituality and self-help because that's all about when spirituality goes goes bad. It's basically uh the woo woo stuff I would I would say. And um yeah, I don't know. This is pretty uh pretty much it. I think this was a good 20 minutes. Uh it's been a minute since I

recorded long form content has something to do with the fact that like I'm out out of DBT chapters and that's originally I think really where I started doing this podcast like because I was doing DBT therapy and it was so helpful for me and I wanted you know to talk about that share um I was inspired by other people that make the same type of talking hack content. and it helped me a lot. So that's that's all the reason for that. Um it's also been weird. I mentioned it before a little bit in the age of AI because it's so easy to ener generate slop and I remember when I started doing this this this work this podcast um AI wasn't as much of a thing.

So research was a lot more work and then I also had these thoughts of like but am I going to be the best DBT teacher there is? No, there's DBT materials everywhere. You should go to a DBT group. What's the point? So it's partially just because I like to talk about that and doing the research helps me to understand the material better. So that's that's definitely an aspect of it. Um but now in the age of AI, um one has to be make pretty good decisions on what you do with AI and what you don't. And I do think that it's almost it would be silly to not use it to identify the right material because then you're just using AI as a really good search engine.

for this episode. I also used it to like not only find the books that are very useful for this, but also to grab the chapters. I mean, I got the books and then I grabbed the chapters that were most relevant so that I don't have to go through the entire thing. I'm just reading the chapters and or the summaries of the chapters which contain information that was uh that was useful. So that's like sort of my ethical framework uh there. I wrote the script and the outline like these thoughts were obviously mine because ultimately whenever this is like in a way um what they uh in social media world call

the UGC user generated content although it's like slightly I only recently learned that term as well and the entire point is that it's more about the personal angle of someone that isn't really quite a professional and what they do with that. So like I'm I'm happy that there's like a label for what I uh what I do but also creates lots of questions on how you create the content and some of you are aware I also have a substag Instagram which I use this long form as like the source format for that and then I do use AI things to generate carousels and identify like the parts of the episode that I could share by them uh by itself.

So that's um yeah that partially also distracts from the long form content. Anyways, um yeah, I think um that I would want to dive deeper into self-deception because self-deception is one of these topics that I mean I read a lot about and I listened to a lot of like talks about it, but you have to like re-engage with the material over and over and over again because of course you have a way of hiding it away from herself because it's really exhausting to keep uh catching you in the act like get your brain out of like what's it called again? Default network, default mode or something like that where you're just you know buting along not spending too much energy versus from like stopping that entire train of thought and like breaking it down.