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Anyone who s been seriously depressed or knows someone who s seriously depressed knows that cheer up and look on the bright side is like just completely useless advice.
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Welcome to the Art of Charm, I m Jordan Harbinger.
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Today we re talking with Oliver Berkman, author of The Antidote, happiness for people who can t stand positive thinking.
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You should listen to this episode if you want to understand how avoiding negative thinking is actually a big part of what s making us unhappy in the first place, something called ironic process theory, and why it s probably slowly driving you insane.
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a tool called negative visualization, which is essentially an effective and useful form of worry, but with some key differences that make this a much healthier practice.
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So enjoy this one with Oliver Berkman.
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And by the way, if you re new to the show, we d love to send you some top episodes and the Art of Charm toolbox, where we discuss things like body language and nonverbal communication.
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persuasion, networking, negotiation, mentorship, and just about everything else we teach here at The Art of Charm.
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If you re in the USA, you can text charmed to 33444, that s C-H-A-R-M-E-D, to 33444.
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Everywhere else, go to theartofcharm.com.
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Also at theartofcharm.com slash podcast, you can find full show notes for this and all previous episodes of the show.
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Alright, here s Oliver Berkman.
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Well, I ll say first of all, this book, it s pretty heavy duty.
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And it s funny because I thought, oh, the antidote, great, people who hate positive thinking, I m definitely in that category.
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I heard about this from my friend Jenny Blake, who was just on the show recently.
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So I expected kind of one thing, right?
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And I got this book and I m reading it and I m like, all right, great.
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And I noticed the reviews of the book and the write-ups of the book avoid a lot of the deeper philosophy that I found in the book.
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about stoicism and Buddhism and things like that, so it was not bait and switch because you didn t do it, but I expected one thing and I got another.
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Do you hear that a lot about this book?
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Occasionally, yeah, I think I am out to try to blow your mind in some way.
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I mean, that s an exaggeration, but I think, yeah, I think you have to get fairly into some of those ideas to really do the perspective shift.
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While I was prepping for the show, I kept being bombarded with ads for Tony Robbins, and I think it s because the posts are tagged as self-help or something like that, so I m reading online about the people who hate positive thinking and how self-help is largely smoke and mirrors, and I m getting ads for
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Date with Destiny, or Unleash the Power Within, or whatever it is at the same time.
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Little internet fail there.
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Tell us what happened when you went undercover at the Get Motivated seminar, when you went to your own sort of self-help seminar for the book.
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Yeah, right.
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Well, I decided I wanted to write this thing, and I had some sense of what I thought was wrong with positive thinking culture, but I needed to experience it.
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up close at the sort of the height of it.
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So I went to this thing called get motivated, which has an exclamation point in the name.
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So it s get motivated in a basketball stadium in San Antonio in Texas.
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Um, this is like, it s kind of a weird setting for anybody to be in, but it s so against everything that I am as a kind of slightly pessimistic
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slightly reticent, downbeat Brit to be in this room with, I don t know, 11, 12,000 people leaping out of our chairs on instruction from the people on the stage and fireworks going off around the place and huge pumping music as we were told to express how motivated we were.
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But I kind of got into it, weirdly, which I think happens at these kind of huge events.
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You catch the atmosphere.
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It was an all-day thing, so there were a whole lot of veterans, self-help people on the stage and a few celebrity guests.
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The keynote speaker was former President George Bush, which was kind of weird to see him doing his post-presidential thing.
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The person I write about in the book is a guy called
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Dr. Robert Shula, who actually passed away in the last few months, but he was a sort of a real veteran of the self-help industry.
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And he really put forward this message that if you want to succeed,
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all you need to do is eliminate the word impossible from your vocabulary.
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And that was really the whole ethos of the day.
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It s like you just decide to be incredibly successful and never to meet with pitfalls.
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And that s the way.
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And you know, there s an implication there as well, which is that if you don t do that, things are going to go wrong because you re not thinking positively enough.
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But it was a strange experience because, as I say, I probably did go in there a little bit cynical, certainly skeptical.
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As the months went past afterwards, I discovered research and talked to people that broadly supported my skepticism.
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But in the moment, in that sort of huge arena setting, it s pretty hard not to be part of the thing.
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I actually think that s sort of how those events work, right?
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I don t think they necessarily are lasting techniques or a lasting change of perspective.
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I think they pump you up for a day or two afterwards.
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you think they were the best thing ever because it s like physiological.
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Right, and they do this on purpose because otherwise there s no substance whatsoever, right?
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So they have to distract you from that.
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And one of the reasons that I really wanted to talk to you about this is because very, very few people are willing to write about the reality of this stuff because a lot of the people that understand the reality of it are making a lot of money from it.
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And the other sort of portion of people that
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maybe are jaded enough to do that, they don t have much incentive.
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You know, oh, I used to work for Get Motivated seminars, and yeah, it s a bunch of fluff.
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Or there s, I guess maybe another camp where people know about it, but they go, crap, I ve spent like 80 grand on going to these things, I don t want to admit.
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that they re completely useless and that I m addicted to the high of going to this thing and then coming off of it and then a week later doing another one and two weeks later doing another one.
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You ve probably come across this in your research, people who do things like follow these self-help gurus to every seminar and buy their unlimited plan for 50 grand so they can go to 80 seminars over the next year.
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And I think there s a sunk cost rationalization going on here with a lot of this.
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The point you ve managed to make in the book right early on, which is the reason we re having this conversation, is that trying to avoid negativity is a big part of what s actually making us unhappy.
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Right.
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Absolutely.
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I think you re totally right about the sunk cost and people getting addicted to these things or just that they haven t worked.
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But I think the big problem at the heart of it is that the model of the human mind that is implied and occasionally sort of explicitly set out by the people that I m thinking of as positive thinkers and positive thinking gurus is like, it s just the exact opposite of how the mind works.
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And there s a bunch of research in recent years, especially that s come to back this up.
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So one of the examples I like just quickly is this Canadian study where
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It was done in certain kind of conditions that attempted to measure the effects of saying these affirmations.
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And they were asked to repeat at certain regular intervals throughout the day the phrase, I am a lovable person to themselves.
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And the finding is that people with low self-esteem, people who go into this with low self-esteem, which are the kind of people who are in the market for affirmations to make them feel better about themselves, obviously, they end up feeling worse because they respond to that message that they re hearing, that they re lovable, by coming up with all these counter arguments like, no, I m totally unlovable.
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terrible person.
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The message is coming from them, but we still respond to it like we respond to any message that doesn t fit with our existing sense of identity.
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We try to reject it.
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We push back against it.
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I think the easiest example that I also give in the book is just like, you know, try not to think about a polar bear for two minutes.
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Well, the moment you try to control your thoughts in that way, all you can do is the opposite.
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You just think about polar bears all the time.
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That s like an analogy for an awful lot of these approaches, and all you re doing is constantly scanning your mind for the presence of negative thoughts, and that s sort of a stressful way to live, not a happy one.
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If you build up the idea of failure in your mind to the point where it would be an absolute calamity because you are so hell-bent on success,
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then it s going to be worse.
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When those setbacks happen, you re going to be more sort of brittle and fragile and less resilient in the midst of them.
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So, you know, but I tried to then spend a good chunk of time being more constructive and saying like, well, is there some alternative?
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Is there a way we can think about negative emotions and feeling insecure and uncertain and prospect of failure in a way that is
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more fruitful in the long run than this positive thinking mindset.
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things like that where you never would have thought about it, but then you see, oh, well, wait a minute, this other person has this, and that means they re doing better, and you set these arbitrary measurements in your mind.
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Positive thinking can t just get rid of that.
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All it can do is distract you from that temporarily, but it always comes back.
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Right, and it almost fuels it, right, because it s turning the whole thing into this competitive race to reach a state
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of unbroken excitement or whatever your definition of positivity is, that idea that you re always looking at how well other people are doing and how they re coming across, that s ramped up by this kind of positivity approach because you feel like you can t let yourself waver in that.
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You refer to this thing which I think is so essential to why people are not happy and why happiness techniques fail, which is that we compare
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ourselves with other people, we have access to our own insides and we don t have access to anybody else s insides.
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So if somebody s coming across as confident, we take that as meaning they re confident.
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If we re coming across as confident, but inside telling ourselves all these kind of negative messages or we re feeling bad or scared or whatever, we think we re
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doing less well than them because we can t hear the voice in their head.
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So all of this stuff is there to begin with.
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And then if you start putting all this effort into like getting the right mindset and feeling motivated, I think, you know, it just adds another hurdle.
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I think that this idea of motivation is kind of really weird when you start thinking about it because, you know, here you are, you want to take some action.
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But instead of just trying to get yourself to take the action, you first of all, now tell yourself you have to feel like taking the action.
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That s kind of a higher bar to reach to say, like, I got to get my mind exactly right, then I can do this thing.
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Just as one example, writing a book, it s incredibly like big deal.
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And there are days when you don t want to do it.
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And if you get to your desk telling yourself, I got to get myself pumped up, and then I ll be able to write this book, you just end up in this kind of
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internal wrestling match with yourself.
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If you just say, look, I don t feel like writing it.
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Those feelings are fine.
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I m not going to try and get rid of those feelings, but at the same time, I m going to
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open up my laptop, open up the file, start, you know, fingers against the keyboard, the result of that is that you get more done than if you had focused on trying to get motivated.
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So what do we do to get there?
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I mean, how do we start to enjoy uncertainty, and how do we get out of this pattern of, all right, I gotta get motivated and get into the right track of thinking?
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From your question, I know that you want some practical techniques, and I think I have them, but I really do think
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very first thing is a kind of a perspective shift.
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And I think that is actually way more important than any individual one of the techniques, because I think lots follows when you ve done that.
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It s like looking at an optical illusion, you know, is it one image or is it another?
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Once you can make that switch, then everything is a lot easier.
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And the switch basically, which is familiar to anybody who has had any experience of meditation, Buddhism, those kind of Eastern things, but it crops up elsewhere as well.
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is to understand that thoughts and your emotions are in some sense not you.
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The Buddhists have this great idea that things that arise in the mind are a bit like sense perceptions.
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So in the same way that you can taste something, see something, hear something, you can sort of have something arise in the mind.
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Well, we don t go around identifying with our sights and tastes, like you don t think I am the thing that I can hear or the thing that I can see, but we go around thinking we are our thoughts.
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And if you have that sense, the only way you ll ever be happy or successful is by changing the content of these thoughts that you identify with.
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If you can sort of make that switch and be like, okay,
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These things arise, but it s kind of like weather arising against the sky.
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It comes and it goes.
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I don t need to identify with it so much.
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Then right there, instantly, you have a different attitude to take to discomfort, uncertainty, insecurity.
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It s still there, but it s not a big deal.
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And I think that that kind of flipped.
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is really sort of crucial.
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And of course you go back and forth, right?
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And then you forget it for weeks at a time.
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But I think that s sort of the beginning point of it all.
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We do get a lot of questions about positivity, the secret, negative emotions, all these things that people think we re not supposed to have because YouTube or whatever.
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And because a self-help book written in the 90s by somebody who
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I can t stop dancing, I feel so good all the time.
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And we just know it s not true.
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We end up with problems like you mentioned before, ironic process theory.
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Trying to avoid thinking about something makes us think about it more, like negative emotions.
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Yeah, that s the technical term for all these effects, right?
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So, you know, you go around to somebody s house and they pour you a glass of red wine and they ve got a beautiful white carpet and you re so focused on not spilling the red wine on the carpet that that s exactly what you do.
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And it s kind of the same idea, just applied inside the mind, yeah.
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Yeah, and I think we re very conditioned to not believe that that s the case.
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And I don t mean by nature or anything.
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I just mean by absorbing way too much rubbish and bad science.
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And we see this running amok in mainstream culture as well.
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The example you gave was subprime mortgages.
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Can you discuss that a little bit?
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Well, yeah, right.
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This is partly with attribution to Barbara Ehrenreich, who s a social critic who s done a bunch of stuff on the effects of positive thinking at a sort of economic and political level.
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And she talks about the financial crash of 2007-2008 and its relationship to positive thinking.
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This idea that legions of bankers who thought that as long as they believed in their incredibly impossible to understand
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and kind of deeply dubious new financial instrument that it would work.
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You had a whole bunch of homeowners who had a dream of owning a certain kind of mansion and they thought, you know, they re reinforced in this cultural notion that if you really dream it, you can have it.
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And then they find themselves allowed to get mortgages that they probably shouldn t ever have been given for dream homes.
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And you get this whole situation bringing down the global economy on some level because nobody thought that
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failure was an option everyone thought that if you just really really believe in something then that makes it happen and of course it makes the opposite happen to make the bankers lose their jobs it makes people lose their dream homes and have no home so i think it s the same thing really because it s this idea that the way to have success.
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never contemplate failure to try to rule it out.
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This idea that just the force of will is gonna bring about the results.
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You mentioned The Secret, which is the self-help book I enjoy beating up on the most.
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I mean, tell me about it.
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The problem is every time I say, ah, and then The Secret, this, that, the other thing, and talk about how silly it is, I get email from people that are like, well, you just don t get it.
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You just don t understand, it works.
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I just want to see those people s life and just go like, why do you believe that?
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Because there just has to be so much more going on, because it is ridiculous, and even the people that wrote it ended up not being successful.
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The guys who created it, one of them ended up in jail, and the other guy, da-da-da, there s so many things wrong with it.
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You never hear of anybody actually using it, and yet so many people believe in it.
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There s a corollary here, I don t want to get into it.
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We stay away from spirituality on the show, but you know what I m saying, right?
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I mean, it s just ludicrous.
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But I also understand, to a certain extent, not being able to fully swallow the jagged pill of doing things the other way, because it sounds like, and correct me if this isn t what you meant, but it sounds like in order to be happy, we almost need to be able to endure more negative emotions.
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I think that s what it comes down to, but I think if you follow this through and you try some of these approaches, it s actually easier to endure them, right?
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It s because less is riding on them.
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Yes, a full life is one way you re there for the lows as well as the highs.
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But I think that when you drop this idea that positive thinking reinforces, which is that
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negative thoughts and negative situations are the worst thing in the world, then it s actually easier to endure those things because you see them as part of the flow.
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You see them as things that come up.
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You probably know about this idea of the fixed mindset and the growth mindset.
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Yes, Carol Dweck.
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Carol Dweck, yeah, exactly, exactly.
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That s an idea that says,
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If you take a different stance towards failure, if you see it as a sign of growth, which is sort of by definition is right, because you only ever fail when you reach a limit of your abilities or your resources in some way.
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So you must have been pushing that far in order to get to the failure.
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If you just kind of
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flip your perspective in that way, it doesn t mean that it s not unpleasant to lose a job or to have someone criticize you or flunk a test or something, but it s a different kind of unpleasant because it means something different and less catastrophic.
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Right, it doesn t have to have that signal that reflects on your identity as a human.
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Exactly.
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The thoughts and the emotions are not like who you are.
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And therefore, if something goes wrong with your attempt to be happy in life, it s not because something s gone wrong with you.
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It s just like, you know, okay, it s a negative emotion.
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Now, back to the show.
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So, removing a sense of identity from an event of failure seems like a prerequisite for success, and I don t mean that as a clever bumper sticker, but it seems like if your identity is attached to failure, in other words, if you fail and you go, this means something about me, I m not good enough, that would almost inevitably stop you from succeeding.
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because you will fail and it can t be an important thing when you do.
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It can t signify anything about who you are as a person and definitely can t signify something negative because nobody wants to run headlong into a miserable downward spiral of essentially deep personal rejection.
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So you can make it not that, right?
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But it requires a major shift in perception.
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Yes, I think there are some incremental ways to get there, which we can talk about.
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But no, I think that you re right.
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I think that it s the idea that if you encounter a failure, then you are a failure.
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That is the toxic aspect of this.
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If anything, what it says about you is that you are somebody who pushes beyond your comfort zone, because that s the only place that you ever encounter failures.
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There was some fascinating work that I actually mentioned in the book about when Americans started describing people as failures, rather than
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Businesses or ventures that they started so and i think you know couple of centuries ago you would say or even less you would say that somebody made a failure or they had a failure but the idea of somebody but they were a failure is a very modern.
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linguistic development.
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And it sort of in some ways comes into being with the birth of the credit rating agencies.
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They have to decide, are you an A or are you a B?
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And now are you like 850 or are you 650?
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They have to give you a global rating for the banking system to work.
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But there s no reason why, psychologically speaking, you need to give yourself a global rating off the back of any individual action.
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The harder part is when you have a success.
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in some ways, not concluding from that that you are simply a completely successful person in all respects, sets you up for worse shocks later on as well.
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So it s kind of both directions.
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A failed action doesn t make you a failure, and a successful action doesn t make you the perfect person for all time.
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That s a good point, right?
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Because you could attach your identity to success as well, and that would cause probably the same type of problem, just maybe later on down the line.
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Exactly, yes, I totally agree.
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Man, something to look forward to.
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This isn t about trying to be less positive or doing everything backwards.
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So is this about not striving so hard to make everything right or okay?
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It seems like there s an element that looks backwards here, but it s not entirely so.
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Right, I think that s right.
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We re still on the path here to some kind of real happiness.
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I m occasionally accused of telling people that they ought to go around being really depressed and pessimistic and feeling terrible about the world.
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That s very English of you.
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There is something kind of British in this attitude.
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You know, there s a reason that this kind of humorous focus on bad stuff has developed in Britain since it lost its empire and started going down the tubes.
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You know, there is something kind of
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There s something rather sociable and fun and friendly about having a certain taste for laughing at yourself, for screwing up.
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So I m not actually saying it s always a bad thing.
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But I think, yeah, mainly, we just need a completely different route to happiness that we ve been looking for.
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It s not just like, give up.
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If you are a person who gets out of bed every morning feeling totally on top of the world, I don t want to be the guy who comes along and says, maybe you should consider feeling worse about things.
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On the other hand, anyone who s been seriously depressed or knows someone who s seriously depressed knows that cheer up and look on the bright side is like just completely useless advice in that situation.
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We need something else.
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Right, and one of the solutions that we ve seen commonly
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in self-help, personal growth, are things like visualization.
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And we had Gabrielle Oettingen on the show a few years ago who talked about visualization actually doing the opposite.
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Can you speak to that a little bit?
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Because it s been a while since she s been on the show and I think there s still a lot of people saying visualize it, you know, field of dreams, build it and they will come, but it s kind of more like think about building it and they will come.
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And that s not quite how it s done, right?
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Yeah, I think that the real state of the research, there are certain contexts in which certain kinds of visualisation have a positive effect.
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There are certain sports contexts.
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But the basic idea, and the stuff that Gabriel Oettingen has done such great work in, is this idea that if you convince yourself in your mind, almost subconsciously, that you ve achieved something,
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All this self-help advice says your brain can t distinguish between imagining an event and really achieving it.
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You should visualize celebrating winning multi-million dollar investment for your startup or whatever, and that ll make it happen.
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There s so many flaws with this.
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Firstly, if your brain really couldn t distinguish between those two things, then life would be impossible.
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There are a million contexts in which if your brain couldn t distinguish between imagining something and it really happening, you d be dead.
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But secondly, and this is what
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Gabriel has shown is to the extent that that does happen, you stop wanting to achieve it so much, because on some level, you convince yourself that you already have.
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She did this great set of experiments where people were made dehydrated, just in a sort of mild way.
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Their energy levels were measured using their blood pressure as a proxy for that, I think.
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And some of them were asked to visualize drinking an icy, refreshing glass of water, and others weren t.
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And the people who visualized drinking the water had a decrease
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in their energy levels, the hunch being here that they were less motivated to quench their thirst because in some subconscious way, they d gone through the motions of quenching their thirst.
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So that s an example of visualization setting you back on the path.
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I think a useful way to think about what visualization works and what doesn t is that process visualization seems to be pretty good.
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So whenever I talk about this, people say,
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But what about runners and sports people and don t they all use visualization to succeed?
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I think the answer is they don t visualize, I believe, like running across the finish line or wielding a trophy above their heads or seeing the prize money come into their bank account.
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They visualize the perfect golf swing or the perfect pace or step in a run or swimming stroke.
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So they re focusing on the process rather than the outcome.
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I think this idea that
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if you convince yourself the outcome is already achieved, that ll make you more likely to achieve the outcome.
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It s just kind of, it s pretty obviously useless.
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Right, I mean, if that were really going to happen, I would ve been 12 years old and I would ve actually gotten stuck in a closet with Vanna White.
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That s what would ve happened, because if you think about it enough, it ll happen, did not happen.
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Relegated to just listening to the Weird Al song to that same effect.
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But it seems like
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Successful people, especially, don t end up doing a lot of that stuff.
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In fact, successful people that I know, and I mean financially or business-wise successful, they seldom have any motivational practices at all.
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Because I went around for years trying to figure out, oh, what s getting people motivated?
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Because I didn t know how to help the Out of Charm clients get motivated as much because I didn t feel like I needed to get motivated.
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And I asked a bunch of entrepreneurs, and everybody just said, ah, just start working.
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and I ve spoken about this to loads of people on this show, and the truth is that this is pretty universal in my experience, not a formal study, but I don t know any successful people who need to get motivated at all, ever.
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Usually it s harder for us to take a break and just breathe for a minute.
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So what s going on here?
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Well, I think that s probably absolutely true.
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I think there s some subtleties here, right?
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Because firstly, you get people who are just born with a certain personality or raised with a certain personality, and if you have that sort of constant drive and energy, then you re never gonna need to feel motivated.
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But for people who are prone to procrastination or to feeling like they re unmotivated, and you know, I think that would describe me at certain periods in my life, the crucial point then, as I sort of previewed a bit earlier, the motivation, like trying to get motivated is not the solution to that problem.
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So it s really a question of like, don t feel bad if you re not the kind of person who just naturally is
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the energizer bunny all day that s ok the place not to go wrong is to think what you need to do about that problem is come up with some technique where you will visualize being filled with energy and you will pump your face and robin s jumps in sub zero temperature.
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water, and that s probably like, you know, okay, or liquid nitrogen or whatever, I m sure that has a short term effect.
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But the really resilient approach, I believe, to this motivational issue is to work on letting go of the need to feel motivated.
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So I m less involved in, I guess, business world people, and more involved with artists, authors, you know, people who produce in that sort of creative context.
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And what you find again and again, is that the closest thing those people have to
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a motivational technique is really just a routine that is designed to ignore motivation levels.
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So they will have started 8 a.m.
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every day and work for X number of hours.
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The point is you do it whether you re feeling like it or not.
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The point is not that you try to get yourself into a mindset, but that you say, okay, well, I m not in the mindset today.
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That s fine.
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And not in a way that involves like fighting against your emotions.
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There s nothing wrong with
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with feeling like you don t want to do something.
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You just don t need to listen to that voice in the same way that I think we tend to.
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And I think that positive thinking reinforces the idea that we need to.
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So one of the things, the most powerful piece of advice I ever came across, it s in the book, but also helped me get the book written, was just this one sentence, like, you don t need to feel like doing something in order to do it.
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It s just so weird how powerful that is, whenever I remember it.
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And of course, usually, 10 minutes in to the job that I didn t want to start, you do feel like you want to do it, you get absorbed, you get into the flow state.
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But you know, maybe that doesn t always happen.
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That s okay, too.
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This is
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really just a lesson in learning to separate action from mindset and being pretty skeptical, I think, about the whole idea of mindset.
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And I want to be really clear here.
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This doesn t mean that creatives or entrepreneurs never procrastinate and that we never sit around going, uh, I should totally start writing, but I don t want to.
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It just means that we create routines around this, right?
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I get up in the morning, I have a hard,
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wake up time because I schedule a Chinese lesson early which just forces me to think about something and not lollygag all morning because I ve got a teacher going, hey, what s your problem?
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She s in China and she wants to speak Chinese.
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So my brain gets woken up with that and I ll make a cup of tea or something like that and I go right into the studio, everything s on the calendar, that s what works for me.
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I ve got a lot of writer friends like Neil Strauss, for example, will go into this like cave mode and he s like, hey man,
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I m not gonna answer your text for three months.
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It s fine, it s gonna be my assistant, so don t send anything crazy.
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He ll just be in the cave writing, and I think Tim Ferriss do something similar, like he ll fly somewhere.
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J.K.
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Rowling checked into a hotel for a month or two to write Harry Potter.
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People like us struggle with this all the time.
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We just also strive to create routines that defeat that element of our psychology.
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Right, exactly.
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There are routines that are there as a backdrop, as a handrail, I guess, even when you re not feeling particularly like doing it.
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So I think it was Somerset Maugham, the novelist, who said, I can only write when inspiration strikes.
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Fortunately, it strikes at 9 a.m.
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every weekday morning or something like that, which is a kind of slightly one to punch him for being so smug.
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But I think that there s something deep in that.
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A quote that gets passed around is from Chuck Close, the artist.
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Inspiration is for amateurs.
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The rest of us just get to work.
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Now you can interpret that in a really kind of self-punishing way, which is, I m not feeling inspired.
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That makes me a bad person.
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I ve got to like duct tape myself to this chair and not get up until I ve written a thousand words.
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And I personally don t think that kind of fighting with yourself approach is very helpful for creative work.
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But the approach that says,
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thinks about the voice in your head as a sort of lovable but slightly tedious relative who has taken up residence in your brain, who, you know, is going to be there, okay, that s life, but I m not going to listen to you.
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Elizabeth Gilbert, the novelist who wrote Eat, Pray, Love, and who just had a book out called Big Magic about creativity, she has this great analogy that fear, fear that stops people creating,
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It s like creativity is a road trip.
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And like fear wants to get behind the wheel and steer the vehicle.
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But what you do is you say like, okay, look, you can sit in the backseat and keep like, jabbering on saying whatever you re saying, and that s fine, but I m going to be driving the car.
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And I just like these little analogies, because they kind of, they don t say you got to stamp out the negativity, they just say, hey, you know, okay, it s there in the background, fine, whatever, I m going to carry on doing what I want to do.
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Thanks for listening and supporting the Art of Charm.
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For a list of all the amazing sponsors and discount codes, visit theartofcharm.com slash advertisers.
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Now, back to the show.
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I also think that there s a big difference between J.K.
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Rowling saying, oh God, there s so many distractions at my house.
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I got kids, this is happening, all this other stuff s happening, I can t get to work on Harry Potter, I ve gotta go check into this hotel.
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You re familiar with this story, right?
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How she checked into some hotel where nobody would bother her for like a month or so.
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And it was a pricey hotel, so the idea was,
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Alright, I m spending 1,000 bucks a night to be here.
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This needs to be productive time or I m gonna feel really bad.
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So she cranked up the pain level, right, and made it happen.
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But there s a difference between, well, I m distracted by my kids and I can t seem to get time and make time to get this started, and the other side of that coin, which is, oh, I really don t feel like writing this book about this magical wizard kid anymore.
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This is gonna be terrible, right?
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There s a big difference between those two things.
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And the motivation isn t always painted with the same color.
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Right, absolutely.
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I mean, you say there s a difference.
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I also think they re both kind of legitimate things to feel right in the midst of a long novel.
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I mean, novelists, I know they get bored of what they re writing, which is kind of sounds terrible, because, like, how could a reader be interested?
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But actually, that s just because they ve been living with the thing so long.
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So no, I absolutely think this is very specifically not about
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if you don t feel motivated or if you feel like you don t want to do the work.
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And you know, there may be days when you have to be so friendly towards yourself that nothing s going to get done.
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Okay, fine.
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But it s just about taking a sort of friendly but not too serious attitude towards those voices and being like, okay, yeah, it s you again, the voice in my head that tells me I
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I don t want to do any of this stuff. 
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It s like, oh yeah, hi.
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So not the attitude that says I ve got to make that voice in my head be positive, but also not the attitude that says I ve got to destroy the voice of fear in my head.
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Just something about that sort of slightly eye-roll-y, friendly attitude towards the negative emotions or the negative thoughts that I think is really powerful.
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What s this negative visualization that happiness from positive thinking is brittle and shallow?
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We ve established that, but what s this negative visualization that you re talking about in the book?
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I love this.
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This is one of my favorite techniques, and this comes broadly from the Stoics in ancient Greece and Rome.
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They had a fancier name for it in translation.
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It s called the premeditation of evils.
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And the idea here basically is that
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When you are feeling anxious about something because you are about to take some risk, you re about to do something that might fail, but would be awesome if it worked.
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There s a very, very natural instinct to reassure yourself and persuade yourself that it s going to be great.
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It s going to go great.
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And visualization is part of that.
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We also do this with friends and kids, whatever, you know, somebody is anxious and worried.
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You re like, no, don t worry.
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It s going to be fine.
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It s going to be fine.
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You re going to do great.
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Sometimes that s okay.
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Sure.
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Whatever.
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But there s a hidden catch here, which is that
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Every time you try to convince yourself that things are going to go fine, you reinforce this notion that it would be really bad if they didn t go fine.
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You have to keep replenishing these levels of optimism and enthusiasm.
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You have to keep doing more visualization or going back to the secret or the positive thinking seminar.
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And I think what the Stoics saw thousands of years ago, and that is still totally relevant today, is that if instead you really very calmly and soberly think through how badly things could actually go,
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And you really imagine putting yourself in the situation where it s all gone totally wrong.
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This is really empowering because firstly, you find your anxiety was crazily exaggerated relative to what really could go wrong.
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We tend to approach things whether it s like asking somebody out or launching a new project like the anxiety is a little bit like
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the anxiety you d have if you thought that a nuclear bomb was going to fall on your city the following day.
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There is no proportionality between the anxiety we feel and the real thing that could go wrong.
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Then secondly, even if that s not the case, and occasionally it isn t, occasionally things would be really bad if they went wrong, you will still have had a sort of mental rehearsal for that eventuality, and it will have been sapped of a little bit of its blind terror because you ll have thought about it.
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instead of trying to keep this idea sort of like a helium balloon, like trying to keep inflated this idea that everything s fine, if you just let all the air out of it, all the helium out of it, and you re just like, okay, it s really very empowering.
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And I think it sets you up to take wise risks in a more sort of calm and bold way.
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So just as one very quick, obvious example, if I m feeling nervous about some speaking thing or whatever it might be,
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It s so useful to just remember that the worst thing I can do is look like a fool in front of a few hundred people or something.
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One can always imagine worse scenarios and experience a little bit of happiness despite almost any outcome, right?
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What s the difference between this and just worrying?
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There s gotta be a difference.
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Absolutely.
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Firstly, worrying is done with less clarity of thought, right?
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So you just sort of find yourself idly sort of half-imagining things, and that usually involves imagining catastrophic worst-case scenarios.
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It s not a kind of rational process, so you just end up daydreaming, and before you know it, like, the possible failure of this next project has led to you
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living under a bridge without a dollar to your name.
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And you know, that s what happens when you worry.
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I think when you do this negative visualization, you re saying, well, what could actually happen?
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And what can actually happen then?
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And what could actually happen then, you know, and also what is within the realms of probability going to happen?
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Because clearly,
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a piano could drop out of a tall apartment building onto your head tomorrow.
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I mean, things could happen.
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It would be terrible.
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But you want to have some level of rationality in thinking about the probabilities of certain things happening.
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And so that s one difference.
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The other difference with worry, of course, is it s just circular and endless.
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It s sort of fueled by this idea that we seem to have deep in our subconscious that the act of worrying will somehow stave off bad things happening in the kind of superstitious
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fashion, that at least if I sort of spend the whole of today making myself feel terrible about a thing I m due to be doing tomorrow, then I ll have done something to try to ameliorate it, which is totally ridiculous and just a sort of downbeat version of the secret.
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But this kind of negative visualization, it s just a very simple, you know, asking yourself questions and answers and sort of doing it stepwise, you almost always discover
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that it cuts your anxiety down to size.
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It puts a ground floor on things and says, okay, you know, this could happen, this could happen, but this, that is either impossible or very unlikely.
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And, you know, I think the result is you re kind of strengthened to go forward.
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Sure.
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And first of all,
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Well, the reason I m having this clarified is because I did a show where I talked about worrying is a big problem for a lot of people, and some people didn t seem to understand the difference between worrying and planning for a potentially negative outcome.
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And you can plan for that potentially negative outcome, you can do the negative visualization, and then it s done.
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You don t think about, what if this happens?
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For the next three days, you ve already visualized the negative outcome, maybe you ve planned a contingency if that actually happens, but then you don t have to dwell on it.
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And that s where the worrying is, right?
4
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The worrying is what you do between visualizing that negative outcome and the actual event, where you have this kind of gap.
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And you re like, well, I should fill this with a lot of stress and anxiety.
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Yeah, exactly.
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No, I use negative visualization as a antidote to worry.
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It s not the same thing at all because, you know, the worry runs rampant and negative visualization, as I say, sort of cuts it down to size.
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You know, a lot of this comes in the modern world.
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A lot of this comes from cognitive psychology and cognitive behavioral therapy, which is the most sort of popular form of
4
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psychotherapy these days by far and this is this idea that the reason we upset ourselves and worry and feel anxious is because we bring very sort of irrational approaches to our thinking so we either catastrophize so we take a situation that could be bad and we imagine that it could be absolutely terrible, we globalize, we think that if something bad happened, if we did something bad that would make us bad people or we make it sort of the things are permanent so we think that if something went bad tomorrow things are going to go bad
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every day for the rest of our lives.
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And these are kind of almost automatic.
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They are not fully conscious.
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And CBT, though it has its critics, including me in certain veins, is all about trying to spot those automatic thoughts and change them.
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Negative visualization obviously is not automatic or subconscious.
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You are very deliberately doing it and asking yourself, you know, what s the worst thing that could happen here?
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That it should be immune, or indeed as an antidote to that tendency to suddenly go from like,
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a mildly bad thing to my whole life is terrible forever, which I think is what is motivating a lot of worry and anxiety.
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Sure.
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Going back to your comments about the Stoics in the book, it seems like they believe events themselves are neutral, right?
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And our beliefs change them into something that s emotionally charged.
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So if we can do the negative visualization, we can sort of ideally step back and see if the event bothers us or if it s more caused by our beliefs.
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And of course the answer is always beliefs, generally.
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And so then we can kind of get a handle on it, right?
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We re putting a saddle on this beast, instead of just letting it take us for a crazy ride.
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Exactly, yeah.
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And I think there s an interesting distinction here, right?
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The Stoics sort of figured this thing out, that it s not events that cause distress, as you say, it s the beliefs we hold about them.
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And actually, that s kind of always true.
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So even something that we would all want to be upset by, I think, you know, like you imagine the worst thing that could happen to the loss of someone incredibly dear to you or something like that.
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Like you could in principle, I m not recommending this, you could in principle not care about that thing.
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It s not the event, but it is the event in combination
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with your beliefs, and the Stoics sort of take this to a crazy extreme, and they do sort of imply that the perfect Stoic would be able to watch the whole of their family die and be just totally fine about it, and I think that is A, impossible, and B, undesirable, and I do not encourage anybody to try to develop.
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I thought you removed the word impossible from your vocabulary.
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Well, that s another problem with that advice.
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You failed there.
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Yeah, exactly.
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You know, there s a point at which I get off the train with stoicism because I think it goes too far.
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But that basic idea that you can only feel distress about an event by combining the event
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with some set of beliefs is incredibly powerful, because it makes you realize that a lot of the time, almost all your worry and anxiety about almost everything results from a sort of exaggerated belief about the implications of that thing.
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Now, of course, you could take that in a positive thinking direction and say, if it s our beliefs that cause all the problems, we need to make our beliefs endlessly upbeat and excited.
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But the Stoics don t take that route, as you can guess.
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just knowing this relationship between events and beliefs.
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That s all you need to do.
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It s not a question of trying to force yourself to feel really upbeat about events in the world.
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It s just like, as soon as you see what s going on, there s a huge amount of relief right there, and you don t need to feel bad about some traces of negativity that happen to be present in your mind at the time.
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Oliver, thank you so much for this.
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Is there anything else that I haven t asked you that you want to make sure that you deliver to the AOC fam?
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I just want to go back to that very beginning idea, and you can get there through meditation.
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This basic idea, your thoughts and your emotions, you don t have to completely fully identify with them, and that means that you don t have to eradicate the negative ones the moment you see them.
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I want to get to the end of my life and think, I was present for the highs and the lows.
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It was intense.
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It was amazing.
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amazing stories to tell, although perhaps not as amazing as some of the stories I ve heard you tell.
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But rather than, oh, look, I managed to keep my life on a single note of really simple but kind of boring positivity the whole way.
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That s really what I m trying to communicate here, I think.
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Perfect.
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Oliver, thank you so much.
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The book will be in the show notes, The Antidote, Happiness for People Who Can t Stand Positive Thinking.
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I love it.
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Thanks so much, Oliver.
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Thank you very much.
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It s been a pleasure.
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Interesting stuff, you know, the negative visualization is differentiated from worry, as opposed to worry, is extremely useful, and I think a lot of people don t really get that.
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They go, well, I don t wanna worry about anything, so they go straight to positive thinking, or they start thinking, well, I ve gotta think about everything and think my way through it, and they end up doing that, and then worrying about it anyway, all the way to and through the event, and so there s a balance here, and these tools are very useful for making sure that we find that, and being aware of this process in the first place.
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So if you enjoyed this one, don t forget to thank Oliver on Twitter.
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We ll have that linked in the show notes, as well as the book that we talked about here on the show today.
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And you can tap our album art in your podcast player, right on your phone.
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You can tap that little show art there, and the show notes should show up directly on your phone.
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I am also on Twitter, at The Art of Charm.
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It s a great way to interact with me, should you feel so inclined.
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Boot camps are live programs that we run every week here in LA.
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We sell them out a few months in advance.
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If you re thinking about it, get in touch now so you can plan ahead.
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Bootcamp.theartofcharm.com is where that s at.
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And of course, we ve got our social capital challenge at theartofcharm.com slash challenge, or if you re here in the States, you can text charmed.
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to 33444, that s C-H-A-R-M-E-D to 33444.
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That challenge is about improving your networking skills, your connection skills, and inspiring people to develop relationships with you.
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We ll also send you our Fundamentals Toolbox that I mentioned earlier on the show, and I do regular videos with drills and exercises to help you move forward every single week.
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It ll make you a better networker, it ll make you a better connector, and it will definitely make you a better thinker.
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That s theartofcharm.com slash challenge or text charmed here in the U.S.
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to 33444.
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For the full show notes for this and all previous episodes of The Art of Charm, head over to theartofcharm.com slash podcast.
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This episode of The Art of Charm was produced by Jason DeFillippo.
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Jason Sanderson is our audio engineer and editor.
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Show notes on the website are by Robert Fogerty.
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I m your host, Jordan Harbinger.
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Go ahead, tell your friends, because the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to someone else, either in person or shared on the web.
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So stay charming and leave everything and everyone better than you found them.
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Thanks for listening to the Art of Charm.
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Get more confidence, relationship skills, life hacks, and more at theartofcharmpodcast.com.