welcome, everybody. Let's talk about Meaningful Sh!t once again. Today, Emotion Regulation Part 2, episode that I am excited about. Put a lot of prep work in and took, you know, more time than I anticipated. This is actually the third time that I'm recording this. Cool. So, it's a follow up from last episode where we talked about sort of like the base skills of Emotion Regulation. The first eight skills, as you will.

So, it's more the skills that we talked about last time. They were more focused on what do I do in the moment to regulate my emotions? How do I handle, you know, when something comes up, how do I get skillful in processing that? And that is very, very essential. But I do approach those skills a little bit like a fire extinguisher, right? It's especially if you work around, you know, a situation where there could be a fire, it's important to know how to handle a fire extinguisher.

But if you're being confronted with a fire every day, unless you're, I guess, a fire safety instructor or something like that, and you set things on fire for training, you're probably in a situation that you want to focus more on preventing the fires than getting very, very good at fire extinguishers or using them. At the same time, it's very important still, because you got to get ahead of the fallout that your fires create first, right?

So this analogy might be getting confusing, but let me explain. If emotion regulation skills focus on you being able to handle emotions in the moment, or challenging emotions, then the fire is the challenging emotion, right? Skills. Fire extinguisher, challenging emotions are the fire. But how do we prevent challenging emotions from presenting itself in the moment, so that we have to bust out our fire extinguisher? Well, that's what we're going to talk about today.

Like I mentioned before, what I'm talking about this from my own personal experience, about these things that have helped me in life a lot, and I've based them largely on dialectical behavioral therapy. So again, I am going to quote a lot of things from the DBT workbook, which I will link in the show notes and what not. But I'm going to try to focus a lot on my personal experience, because you could go ahead and read that book, or go to a DBT group, or whatever, and you would get more or less the same information.

And although I still want to talk about the skills, I do also particularly want to talk about what that means for me, how I was able to improve my life with these skills. So, how we want to prevent these emotional fires from coming up, DBT is described as reducing vulnerability, right? So, the vulnerability to the emotion being like something that creates a fire that is out of control, right?

If you're cooking on your gas stove, you still want a fire, you just don't want it to be out of control. Again, maybe not the most helpful analogy, maybe it is, but the emotions, the fires are not the bad thing. You just don't want to get them to get out of hand. So, there's two parts of that. There's the parts of what we talked about last time, and the parts where we're going to talk about now.

And what we're going to talk about now is reducing the vulnerability to emotion-mind. So, but not by doing anything in the moment, but actually by building a life worth living. And now we're connecting to the bigger picture. And initially, that might feel like a little counter-intuitive, or why that, what does that have to do with emotion regulation? But we'll come to that. So the way to remember these skills are with the letters A, B, C and the word please.

I'm going to take them slightly out of order because I think they build on each other. And interestingly enough, I don't find it most helpful to start at the A. I find it actually most helpful to start all the way at the end. The word please, as often these acronyms in DBTR, it's a little awkward. So please, the P and the L stand for physical illness. The E stands for eating.

The A stands for mood-altering substances. The S stands for sleep and the E stands for exercise. I personally want to add an N to it for nature. We'll get to that. So, that's an interesting enumeration, but what's the focus here? The focus is taking care of the mind by taking care of your body. How often have you been hangry and have you been unable to regulate your emotions?

That happens a lot to a lot of us. And from a certain perspective, that's just kind of like how life is. We can get a pass once in a while if we haven't eaten, or if we haven't gotten sleep or we haven't gotten exercise. So it's not the end of the world if that happens. But at the same time, what we're trying to do by being mindful of these vulnerability factors is to put us a situation that we are able to regulate ourselves emotionally as much as possible.

So these are just helpful generally in life. I mean, if you would be a professional athlete, we would be talking about the same skills. Obviously, you need to take care of yourself. If you were a professional actor, if you were professional anything, because what you're really trying to do is you're trying to prioritize self-care, trying to put on your own oxygen mask first before taking care of others.

Because all these things, think about them, physical illness, eating, mood-altering substances, sleep, exercise, they have to do with your body. Your kids don't come into it, your partner don't come into it, really. It might be a little bit of a basic skill, but it can be very, very important in combination with some of the other skills that I'm going to talk about today. So physical illness obviously is focused on the moment that there is something physically not completely right with you, prioritize that.

There's lots of people that I know that get a weird type of pride that's accompanying with working through physical illness or something like that. And it's just not worth it. And if you're doing that for work or something like that, chances are that it's going to influence things in other situations that you might find more important. It's going to influence them more. Some people can get severely emotionally dysregulated at work as well.

So that's, it is all part of the equation. But it's just important to realize the moment that you are under the weather, you treat it, you treat your body well to allow it to recover. Balance eating comes into the same principle of taking care of your body. And some people like nutrition. Some people hate preparing nutrition and thinking about it. And they find it a nuisance to have to think about in the first place.

And I understand those perspectives. What it comes down to is when you balance your eating well, or eat at all, that's where the hangry comes in. It does affect the way that, you know, the processing power in a way that your body requires. If you're dragging yourself through the day, because you haven't gotten your proper nutrition, and that has something to do with the proper nutrition, but also just following your routine, so you haven't done what your body expects you to do, that is not going to be great if you encounter a situation that is emotional in nature.

So if you encounter that flame, it's going to get out of control. The same goes, it kind of goes without saying, the mood-altering substances. That's even more basic than the others. Everybody kind of knows if they're getting drunk and then an emotionally hard situation comes up, it's going to be a shit show. But that doesn't prevent people from using mood-altering substances. And I'm not even talking about like hard drugs or something like that.

Can be something as simple as drinking 10 cups of coffee if you know that there's going to be a challenging meeting coming up and then you're jittery as fuck and nothing good is going to come out of that. So they all tie into getting your body in a state that is well regulated. The same goes with sleep. Honestly, that's the most important one. I have a bunch of rules about my sleep hygiene and getting the amount of sleep that I need.

Because what I find interesting about when I get less sleep, I feel that my situational awareness just decreases. So I kind of feel like I'm still operating normally, but actually deep down underneath, that is not the case. And then when I do get a night of good sleep and I look back on a day like that, and I'm like, oh my god, what was I thinking? Well, I wasn't because I was exhausted, sleep deprived.

Still, at the same time, these things are part of life, right? So there are situations where you are not going to be able to balance your sleep. Maybe you're doing intercontinental flight. Maybe, I don't know, do you have a baby that is crying a lot? So, the skill is not about if you miss one of these marks that is like a carte blanche to then fly off the handle.

It's as much preparing to handle emotionally vulnerable moments, as well as like avoiding them at certain times. If you know your sleep has been shit, there is something to be said. And again, there's a skill coming up to not engage with certain type of emotional situations. Right. My rules around sleep are really focused on multiple nights in a row. So, what I'm trying to say here is, I am decently able to handle one night of a couple of hours of sleep.

I have one of those sleep trackers, as most people have, through their watches, and it shows that as I fall asleep, I get my deep sleep, my REM sleep, the initial blocks, pretty quickly. So, if I get four hours in, I'm actually pretty all right. So, I can do that for one night, maybe two. There are sometimes situations that just call for that. Maybe I have like a race in the morning, and like I can't sleep because of that.

And maybe afterwards I'm traveling, something like that. But I keep track of that, and I kind of have a rule. If it's the third night that I haven't slept well, so I wake up and that's the situation, I empty my calendar, right? So, I don't do fun things, I don't meet friends, I don't work. Any of these things, I sleep. So, I treat a lack of sleep for a couple of nights as physical illness in a way.

And you can argue that it is, because the moment that that happens to you, your immunity is going to be down, your resistance is going to be down. So, it's actually really wise over the long term to do that. And we get to exercise. Exercise is very important for my mental health. And over the years, that has refilled itself to me. And I'll give the caveat as well that you can rely too heavily on exercise as well, which has happened to me in the past as well.

So, about exercise, like there's one book that I read, which is called The Real Happy Pill, by, I believe it's Anders Hansen, and it's Swedish. It's not a doctor, but medical professional or something like that. Although it's not the most stellar read and it's really written from one perspective and that exercise is good, he does do a good job in collecting various types of evidence around that.

And I'll pull like a quote from an NIH study that I'll include in the show notes. It's been shown to reduce depression, anxiety and negative moods, which is what we're going for, as well as alleviate low self-esteem and social withdrawal. In place of these negative emotions, exercise boosts self-esteem and cognitive function. What The Real Happy Pill talks about as well is how good it is for memory.

And something that I like to drag in as well, and I honestly don't really know that much from it, from like a professional perspective. But it's something that I read somewhere, someone told me, but something about gene expression, right? And you can imagine this very well, that like we have DNA in our bodies that expresses themselves depending on what environment we are in. How I think about exposing yourself to exercise sort of on a daily basis, exposes you to stress in a certain way, because especially if you've not been exercising and you start, you kind of notice how your body responds to that.

It responds to it as something unpleasant. It is stress, it's hard, it creates, it actually increases your stress hormones as you start exercising. So in a way, it's obvious that a lot of people want to avoid it. It makes sense. But there is something about exposing yourself to a controlled amount of stress. And one of the things that this book, The Real Happy Pill, talks about is, if your cortisol levels, the stress hormone at a certain level, and then you start exercising, they go up.

But after you stop exercising, they get to a lower baseline. So yes, you increase your stress, but in the end, you end up with less stress. So I find that a really important technique because there's just so much benefits to exercise. So it's definitely mental and memory, but then there's all the physical benefits that you get. If you do exercise in the right way and you challenge yourself, then you experience growth in different types in your body as well.

It's probably good for your sense of accomplishments and your self esteem and things like that. It grounds you more in your body. I tend to be someone who is more prone to living in my head and ignore what's going on in my body. And having like focusing on doing a lot of exercise like takes me out of that, you know, head space and puts me more in my body and ends up getting me more grounded and all the feel good endorphins that happen afterwards.

So I'm very enthusiastic about it. I think it's very essential to me. There's a twist to all of these skills, really. The moment that you know about them, you buy into them, they can get to like sort of, and partially it's the point of knowing the skill, but that can get a little bit into an excuse, you know? I haven't had my exercise, so I'm going to be a dick to you.

I haven't eaten, so I'm just going to be, I'm going to snap at you. And again, this is, it's not meant to be used in that way, right? It does allow you to make the decision that you don't want to engage with a specific situation at a specific moment. That is absolutely true. But it's not, you know, you do not suddenly have permission to not emotionally regulate yourself because you're missing one of these check boxes, right?

Last point that I wanted to talk about is nature. So in the DBT skill, nature isn't really mentioned, but I think it belongs in self-care. I have another book that the name escapes me. I'll look it up and put it in the show notes. That was written by a researcher that participated in a group that really dove into the reason that nature is calming to us. They tried to reproduce it in various different ways as well, tried to see why it's calming in the way that it was.

And some of you guys might remember that during the industrial revolution, the amount of green spaces in cities, there were not a lot of green spaces. And at those times in life, you saw that mental health of city dwellers plummeted. So it is actually something very important. And if I remember correctly, it doesn't have to be a ton. I believe you get like significant benefits with like 20 minutes of nature per week.

And then some more if you do it every day, but it doesn't have to be a huge time investment. Another thing that I remember from that book is that they talk about fractals. So fractal is a geometric shape that has a fractional dimension. And maybe famous fractals are self-similar, which means they consist of smaller copies of themselves. And a tree is like that. How a trunk relates to a branch is how a branch relates to a smaller branch.

There's a certain ratio there. And our brains evolved in an environment where there were a lot of fractals. So in a way, we are really good at processing them. So good that it can be relaxing compared to staring at geometrical shapes, right, that you find in an urban environment. The same goes for the sounds that you get exposed to. We were, you know, evolve, we were all evolving like bird sounds around and like wind and water and stuff like that.

So exposing yourself to those noises and surroundings and visual stimulation is very important to get to a regulated state. So ever since I've become aware of that, I try to take regular walks, especially in stressful days and look at trees, look at plants and like sort of lean in to the fact that I believe that that relaxes my brain. And there's of course like psychosomatic or that's not what I mean, I mean a placebo effect to that.

So kind of because I believe it, I go stare at a tree and because I'm doing that, I'm going to start to feel better. So in a way, you got to find your own things that work for you. I think that there's something beyond the placebo effect, being around trees and plants and stuff like that. But you know, your mileage may vary. But these are the things that have been essential for me.

So if I focus on my self-care, that I feel good about the nutrition that I'm putting in into my body, in my case, avoiding caffeine and, well, alcohol for sure, what other moods, altering substances. Sugar is an example of that. I can definitely get in a sugar-high state. Sleep, if I get my exercise dialed in, and then if I'm able to expose myself to nature, I'm just, you know, I can resist a lot more in life.

It's much more like, of course, we have a focus now on emotion regulation, but taking care of your body, self-care, has a ton of other benefits, right? So that's the first skill. And again, that was please, physical illness, balance eating, avoid mood-altering substances, balance sleep, get exercise, and the special Vincent bonus of nature. So, as you plan your days out, if you plan your days out, and it's something that I recommend doing, like on a Sunday, as you overlook how your week is going to look, try to remember that.

Try to write this please skill, write it down somewhere, put it on your calendar for Sunday, so that you're like, okay, let's make sure that I build in time in my day, so that I can take care of these things, especially if you're struggling with emotionally regulating in some situations, which you may be, because you're watching this episode. Maybe a loved one does. So now let's switch to the ABC.

And I'm gonna keep doing things in reverse order, because I'm gonna start with the C, which stands for cope ahead, and coping ahead with emotional situations. So what's coping ahead? And actually, as I was preparing this episode, my understanding of coping ahead actually subtly changed. So I'll tell you first, my experience of coping ahead, how you can get quick mileage out of a skill like that, and then more what the DBT approach is, which is a little bit more exhaustive in a way.

So when I think of cope ahead, it is really similar to what I just mentioned at the end of the last skill to look ahead, to actually be aware of what's coming up in your day, in your week, and making sure that you've addressed the please skill. Honestly, so that you know, I'm going to have a busy, busy week. This was actually an example for me. Like I have a co-worker who is out of town, he's on PTO, and I have to take care of a lot of stuff, and this is busy season.

I work in technical sales and the software industry, so June is pretty much, it's pretty peak season for me. So coping ahead partially is just being aware of the future, just being aware of damn, this is going to be a tough week, and just giving yourself permission to plan breaks. So I try to go into my calendar, put breaks on my calendar, that I'm not going to do anything else, right?

So that's like sort of a low level coping ahead. It's just looking what's coming up, making sure that your plea skill is addressed, that you're getting enough time to sleep, exercise, et cetera, et cetera. Very important, but just doing that is in a way, it is coping ahead, but it's not particularly focused on handling one situation that's going to be very challenging in the moment. So if you look at the cope ahead skills, they describe it in DBT, it's really focused on going through the emotional labor of dressing an emotional situation beforehand.

And this is actually sort of a cool trick because you might have read that, seen that, other sources. The brain isn't that good in distinguishing between a situation that's actually happening and a situation that you're thinking about, right? If you are going to have, I don't know, a tough presentation at work or a demonstration or something like that. If you're thinking about that, how that will go, you're going to experience the emotions as if it's actually happening.

But that's actually something that you can take advantage of because you're going to experience the emotions you're going to experience, right? Like it's in a way you're doing a dry run of how that situation is. And this is where the skills comes in. And so first, you want to elicit that state of really like being in that situation, right? Being in that problematic situation. I'm going to give examples later.

And then you want to describe it very well. So you want to check the facts or like try to be factual about what's going on, you know, in the environment, who you're talking to or whatever, what audience you're standing in front of. You want to name the emotions and actions that are likely to interfere with using new skills to self-regulate, right? That helps you to like sort of get in the moment.

It reminds me of acting as well, where the more you describe about a situation, the more it becomes real for you. Another, like the second step is to decide on what coping or problem-solving skills you want to use in the situation. Again, you want to be specific. Now that you're feeling that situation, you're feeling like your emotional urge is where you're feeling pulled towards. You want to write in detail how you want to cope in that situation and with your emotion and action urges.

Anything that sort of like allows you to commit it to memory and writing is very effective to that, acting out can be very effective as well. I like to process through situations by actually with help of recording, actually going through the tough emotional situation, recording myself and looking that back. It's not something that I do very, very often. But I have done it and it's very effective.

I often feel too willful to do it because it's such a pain in the ass to set all of that stuff up, but to be very effective. Third step is imagine the situation in your mind as vividly as possible. Imagine yourself in the situation now, not watching the situation. This is where you comes down to tricking your brain into thinking that it's actually happening. Then you want to rehearse these coping skills.

The beginning of the skill is a little bit more focused on the analytical part, describing the situation, deciding what the skills are that you would want to use. Then more like inhabiting it, like an actor in a way, setting up your scene, and then going through exactly what you can do to cope effectively. So you want to rehearse your actions, your thoughts, what you say, how you say it.

It is like being an actor. Rehearse as well, seeing yourself coping effectively with new problems that come up. So this is also as the side benefit of talking yourself up. Like oftentimes in challenging situations, our mind goes to a place of, oh, I can't do that. And if they say this, I'm just going to lose it. And no, you can be like, if they say that or do that, I'm going to have a strategy for that.

I know that that's a risk and I'm going to have a strategy. And rehearse as well, coping with your most feared catastrophe. So often these situations have some kind of risk, some kind of threat of something happening that you don't like, right? It can be very advantageous to really lean into that and give yourself some time to really like create a great doom scenario. The worst of the worst, right?

And I often think of that in context of asking for a raise, which is something that people find hard, and then actually being fired on the spot. That's probably the worst catastrophe, say from an asteroid hitting your building or something like that. Last step in this skill is to practice relaxation after rehearsing. So that's because you want to sort of reset emotionally, because you've just been in a scene, as you will, if you will.

And it can be important to have to reset emotionally from that, to it's the same way, actually, as you would do, as you, if you actually had something stressful happen to you, it can be very important to have your own relaxation techniques that you know work for you. For me, it's often like, that's the walk that I was talking about, it's deep breathing as well. Progressive muscle relaxation, where you tighten muscles and then relax them and do that all over your body.

But yeah, deep breathing is always available, splashing cold water in your face, like whatever really works for you. I have some personal examples. And I'm actually thinking of something that was actually kind of funny. So this is the, I mentioned, this is the third time I'm recording this episode, right? And this is partially part of the work of doing a podcast like this. You record it, you get to a situation, you listen back, and you're just like, ah, no, there's just some elements of it that I don't like.

And because it's like a sort of a single take kind of thing, I don't really edit it. And I like material myself where it's not like really edited like that, I'd like more like a conversational style. It makes it really hard to go in and, you know, insert something, something new. I could, but I prefer to do a whole new take. So as I was actually listening to my own recording, walking outside, I actually got very frustrated with the fact that the quality wasn't what I wanted to do, or that I, the quality that I didn't want.

I'm getting very self-conscious now before I know it, create another take that I don't like. But that created in me one of these situations where I realized that when I'm going to engage in like a creative endeavor, is that I need to cope ahead with the situation, that when I'm done with the creative endeavor, that I can be frustrated. I can be, you know, you're putting a lot of effort in it.

In this case, like, I get up really, really early to do it, but I have, like, you know, work calls coming after. But I can go through that situation where I can describe, I just described the situation to you, recorded something, listening back to it, realized that I made some mistakes, some editing mistakes, or I don't do a lot of editing, but audio, video, syncing mistakes, won't bore you with the details.

That was the situation. So the problem-solving skills in this situation that I would want to use is to slow down. The mistake that I've made in these situations of wanting to push things out too quickly through the pipeline, put like episodes live, and one of the problem-solving skills I have here is to not do that. So whenever I do my quality assurance rounds, make sure although maybe at first glance, things look well, give time, resist the urge of actually putting things online.

Imagine the situation in my mind is vividly, that's hard to talk about, but I can think about it. I can feel that frustration of seeing those mistakes and being like, ah, shit, like I've got to do the whole thing again. And coping effectively in my head is partially, I've learned something where I don't get in that emotional situation quite in the same way, because I'm not just going to throw things live.

I'm going to give myself time to properly review it. So that's partially like a different type of coping head, because I'm avoiding that emotional situation for myself. But for the rest, if something similar happens, maybe I decide that this take that you're looking, you're watching, or maybe not watching, but that I'm not happy with it. That's like in the situation that I want to rehearse, is that it's like maybe the worst situation is actually that I didn't record well, you know, the video is not being captured correctly, or the audio that's going to be really frustrating as well.

But as I'm doing that, I'm like, have skills for all of these, right? Skills involved in being like, okay, of that, if that happens, I'm just going to invest more time in it. And every time that I do a take, you know, the material is going to be better anyway. So if that's how it has to be, I can live with that. Practicing relaxation after rehearsing, that's kind of hard to do on camera.

But I can do a couple of deep breaths. Something like that, but then a lot more. And even though, like I'm doing this in the moment, it's very relevant for me, because I'm going to be in a situation that I'm going to hit the stop button at one point. But it does make me feel better prepared for what's coming, right? For another example, and I'm keeping it close, and it's actually this week I already talked about it a little bit.

So it's a week where I'm doing the work of two people, and I've created other goals for myself, such as working on my content creation, my self-expression. I've exercised goals that I'm working on meeting new people. It's a bunch of work in this week. Plus, there's just the normal week-to-week stuff that's going on. And the situation that I'm describing the situation in a way to you, is like I have a lot of back-to-back calls.

I have some of the calls that are important for the company that I'm working for. And I'm going to feel and I feel obligated to do everything, right? The moment that people ask me questions, to immediately start answering that, even if I'm on calls. And oftentimes, like feeling guilty in situations where I can't quite get to answering people. And I'll then get into a state of decision paralysis, right?

Where I'm don't really quite know what to do. I'm just busy and I'm just like sort of wasting time until the next call starts. And, you know, that's kind of like a doom loop. So the skills that I want to use during this week is opposite action. So not doing what we talked about that last week. Not giving in to the emotions, right? So not doing what I immediately want to do.

And that is react to a situation. I want to pause things. I want to put a pause in situations. So I reflect on things first, before I respond to a slack message, or something like that. second, I do want to lean in to problem solving. If it is something that after I've reflected on it, I feel like I really have to do, I want to solve it in an effective way and not like blow it out of proportion.

I am prone to not just solving the immediate problem, but just trying to tackle world hunger while at it. So, just trying to scope it down to what needs to be done. I also want to make sure that I'm set on my please skill. I actually went to bed very early last night, so I could get up early to record this. Prioritize my goals so that I'm taking care of the things that I want to take care of in my week.

So that comes down to exercise as well. Practice a skill called Dear Man, which I will get to in a different episode, but it's interpersonal effectiveness. So making sure that if I have some kind of interpersonal situation with someone, or I have to make a request or give them some feedback, that I'm using a framework to do that, that I'm doing that in an effective way. And focusing on dialectics.

So in form is that, what dialectics in this context means is that two things can be true at the same time. The classical example is, I want to radically accept what is, and I want to change. These things seem diametrically opposed, but they're not really. There's a middle path there. So in this situation, I want to walk the middle path as well. So that was the problem-solving skills that I want to use.

Imagine the situation in your mind as vividly as possible. A funny part is, I'm kind of in it right now. I'm in the middle of the week now. It's a Wednesday morning, 6:12 a.m. I have my first work call at 7 a.m. So I'm in it right now. So I'm going to feel overwhelmed. I do feel slightly overwhelmed. Luckily, I'm not tired because, again, went to bed very, very early.

I want to hide, procrastinate, act unskillful during downtime in between meetings, and want to snap at people, at those around me. So that's, that's, I mean, usually when you would go through this skill, it's more focused on getting in that emotional state, right? Again, like an actor entering a scene. So, I would take more time to really imagine that. Like, that's not that interesting to look at or listen to.

But you can imagine how that is. Again, going through what are going to be the exact problematic things that are going to happen. I can imagine having had like a hard call that was challenging for me with an important prospect or something like that, and just wanting to waste away that half hour doing things that are not actually important. I can like sort of like feel that situation because it happens to me a lot.

And then I can reaffirm or get back into rehearsing effectively with that, to really focus on the fact that I don't want to react to things. I want to put a pause in that. And I want to focus on the things that I've put on my calendar, which can involve taking a break, you know, making sure that I eat at... I rarely eat at exactly the time that I plant, but I do focus a lot on that my nutrition is good and that I take as much of a break, like I don't eat at my desk, for example.

So this rehearsal step in this case is a little dry. I just went through it. It's in a recording like that, it's a little bit hard to bring across, but think of your own personal example and how powerful that principle can be, right? To really imagine yourself in that situation, the exact thing that you're afraid of. For example, maybe you want to confront a friend or your partner about some situation and you know that they're going to respond poorly.

Like maybe they're gonna like storm out of the room or something like that. Imagining that situation and just having your plan, that can be very effective, right? Because then you can feel grounded in what you're going to do. So in a way, the examples that I have for you were on the meek and mild side. They're just there in the present for me. That makes them powerful for me to talk about.

But you can use this very effectively against like more crisis type of activities as well or confrontations or whatever it is. Things that are related to serious stuff in your relationship, for example, that you know is not going to go over well. Yeah. So that's the cope ahead skill. Well, we have two more skills on my list. And in a way, the C skills, so the coping ahead and the please skill, they're a little bit more in the ballpark of the skills that we talked about last time, right?

They are still pretty decently, like in the moment, they're preparing for reducing your emotional health and vulnerability, but they're kind of still like all short term kind of things. Like the examples that I talked about is things that are going to happen in my week. I would say that the A and B skill are more long term. And that's also why I sort of took them out of order.

So I'm going to tell you what the A and B stand for. The A stands for accumulate positive emotions, and the B stands for build mastery. And they kind of bleed together. And why is that? So accumulating positive emotions is focused on, in order to reduce your vulnerability, you wanna make sure that you ground yourself in positivity. Not toxic positivity, but positivity nonetheless. There is short term focus there, and there's a long term focus as well.

The long term focus on, if you're long term focusing on making sure that you have positive emotions in your life, bleeds into building mastery as well, because they are related, and I'm gonna take you through that. So short term, why is this a principle? Why is this present in DBT? Partially because it's a therapy modality, right? So people that are trying to regulate their life through DBT are sometimes in really, really tough situations, right?

Abusive relationships, addiction, things like that. Sometimes when you're in a slew of negativity, or in a very tough situations, people just don't do anything positive in the short term. If you have a family member that is very sick, and you just have to go to the hospital every day, it feels very selfish to plan something for yourself, to take care of something that's not even needed, not even like something like sleep or something, but do something pleasant, right?

In some situations, that can be warranted, like life is like that sometimes, but what I notice, and especially in like my male friends, is that they don't often take care of putting positive things to do on their calendar. And I mean, me as well, because often I think about positive things in a way of like, okay, but how important is it really for me? Wouldn't I like to be a little bit more productive instead?

Right? So DBT skill talks about building positive experiences now. So that's the short term and being mindful of positive experiences. That's also very important. Maybe you have fun things planned in your day. Maybe you're getting a massage or you're going to the movies or something like that. But then instead of doing that activity, you spend that time worrying. Well, that doesn't help. So focusing, being mindful of what you're doing is very important.

And then as well, sort of the polar opposite of that, being unmindful of worries. There's a time and a place to worry. Worry comes with its benefits. But as you're building positive experiences in your day, in your week, it can be very advantageous to the moment. When you're planning positive experiences, to really commit to that being a positive experience and not having worries take over, there's going to be a time to worry.

There will be a time for that. Now, this advice might apply to you, might not apply to you. I know people as well that avoid worrying by just doing positive experiences and just being in the moment. And ignoring their responsibilities. Tends to not be the case. I see that less than the other way around. But do reflect on that if you're one of those people. Maybe for you, the solution is not to plan more fun stuff.

So personal, for me, short-term means partially plan things that I put on my calendar, but also knowing what I like as an emergency. Like something to regulate in the moment, or to find positivity in the moment. Because our brains weigh negative stuff more than positive stuff for evolutionary reasons. And I understand that, that there is a benefit to weighing something that's negative more heavily, because you want to prepare against that.

It requires effort, where positive stuff doesn't really require effort. It's just pleasant. I actually have an Evernote that's called Stuff That Vincent Likes, because sometimes in case of an emergency, I just don't know what's the pleasant thing that I want to do. That's not how my brain is tuned. So it can be really hard to have coped ahead, and having a list beforehand that shows these kind of things.

So for example, mindfully making and drinking a hot beverage. For me, funnily enough, doing financial stuff. I like numbers. So sometimes when this is more regulating than actual positive things still, but I have a programming background. So these things are positive for me. So it's a positive experience. I don't do these things as a job every, so it's not an every time thing, but it can actually be a pleasant activity for me.

I do get a little bit like tunnel vision, and you call it get really in the zone, but at the same time, that can be something that very pleasant to do. So I use that strategically. Things like going to see a movie. These days, I don't do that a lot, but whenever I do, I'm happy that I do partially, because it's usually not really about the movie that I'm going to see.

It's just about taking a break. Workout for me fit in there as well. That was related to the please skill, but it is positive. There are positive experiences when I do that. I run a lot, and I do F45 functional training, where it really matches my personality style. You're doing all these jumping up things, and swinging around weights, and stuff like that. And I do like that explosiveness of it.

And you switch around stations a lot as well. So, it's very, you switch it up a lot, which is different from running. Running, you're just doing the same thing a bunch. So they do something else for me. But they're positive moments in my day, for sure. Interacting with animals is high on my list as well. Whenever I get in a situation that someone's bringing a dog to work, or I'm able to spend some time with my own dog, it's just a positive experience.

It levels me out as well. I have self-care on that list as well. That has to do with the police skill. It can be very pleasant to do self-care, even if it's things like getting a haircut, like a nice haircut. Reading is a positive experience for me. Surprising someone with a favor as well. If you become dependent on them really appreciating what you've done, then it doesn't work anymore.

But just doing it for your own pleasure of doing someone a favor can be positive for me as well. Key with these things is to not make it compulsive, to get into a state of like, I need this, or I deserve this, or like, you know, things like that. Positive emotion, it's about the emotional state, right? So it's not about getting just a dopamine hit. So for example, you can otherwise revert to like vegging out and doing non-restful activities.

And then you can just, that's not, that feels pleasurable in the moment, I guess, but it leaves you agitated. Like scrolling on social media is a good example. Playing games on your phone, oftentimes reading the news, things like that. Watching pornography in a way, like that. In the moment, it seems like positive and a good idea, but generally afterwards, there's downsides to engaging with that. So these days, avoid all of that.

Like you never escape completely from reading the news, right? But almost completely. And I do have stints of that. I play a game on my phone, but I tend to delete them pretty quickly because they're not really positive experiences if they're dopamine hits. It does create this little blip of pleasure, but in the long term, it's more dragging you down the other way around, and your mileage may vary, right?

Then there's the long term part, and this is where building a life worth living comes into play, right? So, the main reason I read this very fascinating book by Gabor Maté in The Realm of Hungry Ghosts, about like hardcore addicts that he worked with. The main reason that addicts stay addicts is because they don't build a life worth living. So they are in a situation that their past sucks, is traumatic.

Their present is barely bearable, and their future is bleak. So in that situation, yeah, it kind of makes sense that you stay in an addiction because you've got like nothing really going on for you that much. If you're building a life worth living, I also think about it of egoic versus egoless, right? I'm not a hater on ego. I think that that's a very essential part in life.

That's like sort of the existence that we find ourselves in. We have to be selfish to survive. Survival is optional. That is true. Clinging to survival is something that you can stop doing. But I do feel that we have a purpose of taking care of ourselves and ensuring our survival as long as we can. Kind of programmed for that. But there is egoless stuff, altruistic stuff that you can hang into or lean into as well.

So instead of asking, what do I want from life? A more powerful question would be, what does life want from me? Which is a quote by Eckhart Tolle. Right. So not just focusing on what do I want, what do I deserve, but more like, where can I, you know, through which way can the universe work through me? Right. What skill set do I currently have? What set of ambitions and passions do I have that create some kind of value, the value that I want to create?

I know that note that all of these are, they're not absolute, they're preferences of you. So, that means that you can't, or you can if you want to, but I don't recommend you get very self-righteous about those things. I'm doing these things and other people, no, no. Other people do what other people do. And I mean, this is a little bit of a tangent, but I feel like I mention it often and I'll mention it again.

If you're working on yourself, you're going to see a lot of people that are not working on themselves. If you're spending time practicing these things, learning about emotion regulation, interpersonal effectiveness, and your family might just still be doing the same thing. And that doesn't feel fair and maybe it isn't fair, but it ultimately still creates a better life for you, even if you have to be the one that builds up all the skills.

So the fact that other people aren't doing it, again, doesn't give you a carte blanche to then act out and do whatever, right? Hold yourself to your own standard. Don't compare with other people how well or how bad they're doing it. It doesn't matter. It's about your preferences, the things that you want to grow in, not what other people are doing. The later you get to life, the more important that seems to me to get, because you want to be chipping, you want to work on things that build you into a direction that you want to go to.

And this is where we get into the long term, the building of life worth living. Because really what we're going to talk about, it's just, we're going to back, we're going back to the episode, values about values, right? Really, when we're talking about long term building positive emotions, it's not about getting more pleasure, getting bigger cars, getting more sex, getting more money, getting... Because these are all fleeting things.

It's fine to have these things, and we need these things and et cetera. But they're more related to dopamine hits. They're more like blips that short term, in the moment, motivate you to do something. But they're not the type of things that come from work that is important to you. If you're talking about getting money, that's work that's important to someone else, because that's where you're getting paid for it.

Now, that's not literally true in every sense and in every situation, but it oftentimes is. Like, money is your reward for doing something that someone else doesn't want to do. And I'm not trying to be bleak in a way, just trying to focus on where these stimuli come from. And the things that are most important in life, I think, do not have those dopamine stimuli attached to it.

There are not instant gratification things. This is where the long-term stuff comes in. So there, you want to avoid avoiding. So not do the things that you know that you want to be doing. Identify the values that are important to you. Go back to my episode about why values are so important and how do you do that. And work on them. Right, so these are the things where you're chipping away at something that's important to you, to you, not your mother, not your partner, not your brother, not your friends, not your pastor, your rabbi, your guru, your imam, like you, just if you look most deep inside yourself, what are these things?

And if you don't have these things, that's completely fine. I feel you, I've 100% been there. But then that's your work at that moment, because these preferences, they don't magically appear. Like some people really refer to it as like their innermost things that were always there and blah, blah, blah, something like that. And that can be their experience, and that's wonderful if you have something like that.

But for a lot of people, like for myself as well, it's actually been work to cultivate. Like you have to try little bit things left and right to see what like gels for you. What are the things that you can stick with, right? So it's really focus on, it's really important to keep working on that. Making small action steps towards your goal, towards the person that you want to be.

And first, before I tell a personal story about that, like, why is this important? What does it have to do with emotion regulation? What I very clearly notice, and this is, I believe, the reason that the skill is here, where it is in DBT as well, is the moment that you feel like a fulfillment, you feel on being on your path, that creates so much more calm in yourself, that you can handle a lot more shit that's being like thrown in your direction, if you know what I mean, right?

So it just creates more resilience, because you know that you're doing you, right? You're taking care of the self-care part, and you are growing in the way that you want to be growing. You're doing the things that you want to be doing, even if there's no monetary rewards, if there's no, like all these things, all these common things that people normally tell you. I have to caveat that immediately.

So I'm like in my early 40s, and leaning into things that don't get me like that much of societal support, or maybe I'm not saying that right, but not doing exactly what society drives me to do is appropriate for my, where I am in life. Like I have a career that I've built up over the years and, and that allows me to, to live a comfortable life.

Like in a way, I've built up a lot of skills. And although I'm not doing that right now, I could be coasting right now. I'm working for an early, earlier stage startup kind of company. So that's actually a lot of work. But I'm getting to have a skill set that allows me to take back more of my time. Like I can provide value for others really quickly with my experience, which gets me monetary rewards, which allows me to focus on the, take back my time and focus on things that I wanna focus on, which I don't always do, but because I'm partially still sucked into doing the things that other people want me to do.

But the reason that I'm telling that is, depending on the phase of life, you do have to focus on getting your base needs met. And that can be very complicated, right? If you're an artist and you're in your 20s and your soul is an artist, like what do you do? Do you first focus on your art, but then you have no pot to piss on, you're just poor and broke?

Or do you do something where you do what society wants you to do, you become like a stockbroker or something like that, you make a bunch of money, and then you do what you want? The answer is, it depends, right? I have one of the guys that I did backcountry skiing tour with, he was the type that first worked at Wall Street, he was in New York, he made a lot of money working at Wall Street, and then he said, well, fuck it, now I'm going to start my own outdoor company, I mean, he does like rafting, rock climbing, like things like that.

Enough to, I imagine, like make a decent amount of money, but it's not comparable to the amount of cash that he stacked up when he was working on Wall Street. So the answer is just, it depends. How I, like what I've gotten taught, and that's just one perspective, is that it is very important to have a skillset that you can fall back on in case of needing it.

Like something that you can do for a society that's valuable, even if at times you don't really do it that much. And you see that a lot in people that, for example, are like medical doctors or psychologists or something like that, that are more diversifying into like public speaking and writing. They don't really wanna keep doing their job because it's draining. But it's always still there in case they need to fall back on it.

So from that perspective, I am in the camp of, yeah, in your early life, focus on these things. But then again, it all depends. But the main reason that I'm going on on this tangent is that I wanna underline that there's two sides of the coin, that you have to choose carefully. All right, my personal story. Obviously, I refer back to the values episode, the value of values.

And doing this podcast, for example, that's great, of doing things that are in line of my values, right? So it's for me, it's self-expression. I get to talk about the things that I think are important, that I think people should know, which is vulnerable, by the way, to do, because people could criticize me for that. And contribution as well, because what I hope is that I get to speak to myself ten years ago, provide that information that I didn't have ten years ago.

There's not a ton of reward that you get, that I get in this example for doing this. Maybe over time, I would, but it's not that that is a direction where I'm going to bake a bunch of money. That's actually pretty hard to monetize being a content creator. I have to do things with ads and subscriptions. And I like to listen to Kevin Smith a lot, movie director from Dogma and Clerks and stuff like that.

He does a ton of content, and he has multiple podcasts. But you see that even for him, he has to put in a lot of ads and have a lot of sponsors and stuff like that. That hugely distracts from, and even if you listen to Jordan Peterson or something like that, for his podcasts, it's the same thing, right? So all that to say is that some of these things, you only do that if it comes from inside, from one of your values.

Cool. So that's an example for a long-term life worth living that I'm working towards. A ton of examples are from a personal development perspective as well. So doing DBT, doing my various types of work where I'm addressing childhood wounds and stuff like that. Where I'm trying to take responsibility for it myself. To focus on where are the things that I haven't matured fully. How can I mature those versus being in victim mode of how my parents should have done this or that better.

And being resentful. It's just hard sometimes. And that's the long-term accumulating positive experiences. The last one that we have remaining is to build mastery. And really for me, these bleed together so much, the long-term accumulate positive emotions and build mastery. Because what's building mastery? It's really for your self-esteem. To plan something, to build a sense of accomplishment in your life. So as far as I'm concerned, that's those long-term positive experiences.

So, and maybe I made that distinction, maybe DBT would do it in a different way and actually shove everything that's learned long-term into mastery, who knows. So examples for me of doing something that builds accomplishments as I mentioned it already, like working on personal growth, seeing that I am able to handle emotional situations in a different way, being more empathic, like seeing other people's perspective and exercise goals.

Exercise goals are great for like just moving the goalpost continuously and doing something that you haven't done before, especially if you switch up slightly what you're doing. So I think that there is always like a good sense of accomplishment in that. So Build Mastery is focused on planning in your day to do something every day to build that sense of accomplishment, to find whatever value you feel is important and put effort into that.

Planning for success, not failure. I see that often in people that have a lofty goal, but then know that they're not going to actually do the things in a way. So they want the outcome, but they're not really on board with doing a process or planning for that process. Planning for success means doing the things that will get you there versus setting you up in such a way that you keep failing over and over again.

So, that means starting small. And an example that I have, I've multiple times in life tried playing the guitar. And in this case, this is not something, if I just look at my values, that isn't strong enough in me. It doesn't vibe enough with my personality, maybe sometimes in the future. But what I've noticed when I did the that is I would create goals that were more related to doing things that were outside of my capacities.

I just wanted to be like a really good technical guitarist instead of having a simpler goal of playing songs with like one scale, two scales. And it's hard enough because you have to switch and you have to keep measuring and stuff like that. But I didn't plan for doing something like, I didn't plan for something that I could actually be successful at in like a span of a couple of weeks.

So then like sort of you at one point just lose interest because you're trying to build up to something, but you're playing something that's so difficult that you play it at one-eighth the speed and you're not consistent, etc. It doesn't really work. So you have to make the difficulty like you have to dial it way down to get somewhere. Doing the thing is more important because you never know what it's going to turn into.

Third step here is to gradually increase the difficulty over time, right? If it is too difficult, do it something that's a little easier. Plan that, and for me an example is this is the third take of the recording, and one of the things that I made easier on myself is more notes, so that I don't have to think about these things in the moment, and take out things that I didn't think that worked really well.

Step four is looking for a challenge. So if something is too easy, try something harder next time, so that's the polar opposite of the previous point. So, I think building mastery really speaks to itself, and it's another one of these interesting ones that's in the DBT skills here, where it's partially focused on, again, remember that a therapy modality is focused on people in all kinds of like phases of life and proficiency.

So it can be, for me, it seems pretty obvious, right? Like, for me, that is not that surprising to me, that you have to build mastery in order to be resilient for the rest of life, because I just kind of know if I don't do that, I get crabby, it's the same thing with exercise. At this point in life, I just know that it's part of the upkeep.

And if I don't work on a mastery, or like sort of doing what the universe wants me to, or whatever, or you can frame it in a, if that makes you heave in the direction of like, focusing on what your preference is, that you do not really have a lot of incentive from the rest of the world for. That is very essential for just feeling good, for self-esteem.

It reminds me of that book that that guy wrote about the 10,000-hour rules, like you have to do something for 10,000 hours, and then you become proficient at it. The main thing that I relate to there is like the aspect of deliberate practice that he talks about, so that anyone who becomes really, really good at something is great at setting a goalpost that motivates, and I'm moving it, I'm moving it, I'm moving it, I'm moving it, but not setting out to do something that's impossible, right?

I find that building mastery is also really helpful for like, it's almost like a spiritual thing for me, it's like what I said is, it helps me to not veg out or dopamine seek. It helps me to be like, but I don't care about what other people are doing, this is what I want to do with my life. If other people are vegging out and watching porn and seeking dopamine and eating junk food and whatever, that's fine, I don't have to stop doing things because I do those things better than other people, that just leads to a mad comparison game that doesn't create that much more happiness, which is something that in my 20s, I was very, very prone in 30s even, very prone to.

This prevents you from focusing on other people's problems. That's a major one for me as well. If I have sort of like creative time on my hands or this kind of, where that energy can go towards is deficiencies that I think other people have. Right. No, that's usually not what you want to be doing. Although this content, what I'm creating, I'm hoping to help other, other people, like so in a way that is a focus for me.

But at the same time, self-expression is a large part of why I'm doing that, doing this as well. In addition to the moment that I talk about that, I become better at the skills as well. Like one major reason that I'm doing this as a next step, actually, is to more embody these things, to analyze them from different perspectives, to look at how can I explain it to other people, and through that, I of course become better at it myself.

So that's where mastery comes in for me. There's more that I could say about exercise as well, but I see where the timer is. I think it's been good for today. I moved on to my next thing here. So I generally like to talk a little bit about backlash from your environment as well. So all of these skills, if you start implementing them in your life, what are things that can happen in your environment that can get you some backlash?

So if it comes to accumulating positive experiences, what I often see is backlash is people being threatened by that you're taking time to take care of yourself. So this is true for the please skill. This is true for accumulating positive emotions, because generally you have to set some boundaries suddenly. Boundary is about when you're going to sleep. Boundary is what you're going to eat. Boundary is about how often you get takeout, things like that.

So people generally around you generally don't like you changing. They want you to stay the same. So be aware that if you're trying to create some goals for yourself to create some boundaries around them as well, so that your partner or a roommate or parents or whatever, that you can make it about you and that you want to do that for you in your way and that you don't have to like, you know, get them get them on board, because that's a whole different ball of wax to convince people of doing something like that.

So make sure that you create some distance there and that you can do it for yourself. If it comes to long term building positive emotions and building mastery, same can apply if what you're really trying to do is embed yourself in a positive world, if you want to work on things that are like lofty, often like creating mastery, sometimes they're just about things that you can make money with, I get that, but oftentimes they're more about like passions that you have.

That can get you a lot of backlash as well, because your environment might point out that you really have to get that raised, or get that more money, or we want to move to a better place, or your kids need this, that, or the other thing. And that's true, that there are other priorities in life. But often this can be a defense mechanism of someone in your environment, and it's kind of like your job to preempt that.

So it's your job to use a soft touch to communicate that to the people around you. I have the propensity to sometimes start to, you know, forcefully and my environment that notices that and that doesn't really work that well. It doesn't work well for me, and it doesn't work well for the environment if I do something too hardcore right out of the gate. So that's why I'm recommending like a light touch.

Like the important part here is consistency. It's not like, it's like marathon training, right? Like, you don't get to a state of marathon training by running a fuckton in one week and then not doing anything else. Now it's about consistency, and then it's more important to do something every week, rather than just everything in one concentrated effort. So, you know. So the way that actually these skills are oriented, they are already oriented in a way that you do things with a light touch.

And the light touch is great to prevent backlash because your environment can get used to it. Coping ahead is not a skill that I foresee you getting a lot of backlash from your environment from. It's pretty straightforward. But it's also pretty contemplative and something that you do by yourself. If someone is close around you and you're doing this out loud or you're talking about that, it might raise some eyebrows, but it's not particularly threatening to anyone unless you're coping with a situation that involves them directly.

In which case, don't do it around them. Okay, so I've talked about the backlash from your environment. And of course, throughout this podcast, we've been talking about decision making things that allow you to make the decisions that make you happy in life. The link here, I think, is pretty clear. As I talked about in Motion Regulation Part 1, being able to be well regulated has a lot to do with your happiness in life.

If you're unable to regulate in the way that you want to, you get sort of stuck in a pattern that you don't want to get stuck in, then this Emotion Regulation helps you very much to rise above, get peace and calm and quiet to take high quality decisions. So that all is part of the same theme of things that we've been talking about. Well, I thank you very much for tuning in.

If you've made it all the way to the end of this episode. So if there's any questions, I would like always be happy to answer that, and you can reach me in the usual ways. But for now, I thank you again. This was Vincent for The Meaningful Sh!t Show, and thanks for joining me and talking about some more meaningful shit today. Bye.