Why Knowing Better Doesn't Help Part 1

What if your body decides what matters before your mind catches up? We dig into Tomkins’ bold claim that feelings aren’t background noise—they’re amplifiers that turn quiet bodily signals into action, shaping motivation, habit change, and what we call “common sense.” If knowledge hasn’t been enough to change your behavior, this conversation explains why.

We trace the logic from drives that only motivate in the moment to anticipatory affect, the present-tense feeling that lets memory guide behavior. Along the way, we unpack the ambiguity of affect—how the signal is right even when our story is wrong—and show how mislabeling the cause of distress traps us in ineffective fixes. The Richter rat studies make it visceral: some rats died not from exertion but from giving up. Brief exposure with release restored hope and stamina. That shift wasn’t just nervous system regulation; it was a change in meaning. Think of the nervous system as hardware and the feeling system as firmware: hope, fear, shame, interest, and joy set the intensity your body follows.

We connect these ideas to everyday life. Interest pulls us toward the future, joy rewards arrival—lose both, and collapse lurks. This helps explain why screens can spark endless interest yet deliver little joy or co-regulation, feeding anxiety and emptiness. We also examine chronic shame as a self-sealing loop: avoidance brings relief, which prevents learning, which sustains fear. The way out isn’t brute force; it’s de-alarming—shaping conditions with gradual exposure, safety, and guaranteed exits so your system relearns that visibility and effort are survivable. Regulation tools help, but they’re strongest when anchored to meaning, connection, and small wins that reawaken interest and joy.

If this reframes something for you, follow the show, share it with a friend who needs a hopeful model of change, and leave a review so others can find it. What one small “brief exposure with release” will you try this week?

Chapters

• 0:00 Feelings Amplify Body Signals
• 2:20 Drives Motivate Only In The Moment
• 4:40 Anticipatory Affect Explains Learning
• 7:15 Flexibility And Ambiguity Of Affect
• 10:25 Rats, Hopelessness, And Giving Up
• 13:20 Human Collapse And Lost Positive Affects
• 16:20 Screens Give Stimulation Without Satisfaction
• 19:20 Nervous System Hardware Vs Feeling Firmware
• 22:40 Why Regulation Without Meaning Falls Short
• 25:20 Defining Hopelessness In Feeling Terms

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:02

Hi, I'm Dr. Scott Conkryt. What if your body is holding memories your mind can't access? Hi, I'm Scott Conkrite. Welcome to the Meaningful Happiness Podcast. We're now on chapter two of Tompkins Affect Imagery Consciousness. In chapter one, Tompkins argued that feelings are primary. Now he goes deeper. He asks, what exactly do feelings do? How do they relate to the body's basic needs? His answer is amplification. Think of a microphone. The sound exists without it. But without amplification, a whisper in a stadium reaches no one. The microphone doesn't create the sound, it makes the sound matter. That's what feelings do for your body's signals. Your body has drives hunger, thirst, the need for air, sexual desire, pain avoidance. These are real biological signals. But here's Tompkins' radical point. These signals have limited motivational power on their own. Hunger is just a stomach sensation until distress amplifies it into urgency. Sexual arousal is just a physical state until excitement amplifies it into desire. Pain is just nerve activation until fear or distress amplifies it into suffering. The drive sends the signal, the feeling determines whether that signal becomes loud enough to act on. This is why two people can have the same level of hunger and respond very differently. One feels mild discomfort and keeps working, another feels unbearable urgency and has to eat immediately. Same drive signal, different feeling amplification. And here's where it gets interesting. Most of your biological processes are silent. Your heart beats, your cells divide, your blood clots, all without conscious awareness. The body only sends a conscious signal when something needs your attention. When it, as Tompkins puts it, beats on the door of consciousness. But even then, the signal needs amplification to motivate action. And here's the crucial insight that changes everything about how we understand motivation. Drives can only motivate you while they're happening. The memory of yesterday's hunger doesn't make you hungry today. The memory of last year's pain isn't painful right now. Remembering how bad something felt doesn't bring it back. This sounds obvious, but the implications are profound. If drives only work in the moment, how do we ever learn to avoid things? How do we change behavior based on past experience? This is where feelings become essential. The memory of pain plus current fear equals motivation. You don't avoid the hot stove because you remember the burn feeling. You avoid it because remembering the burn activates fear right now. The fear is present tense. The fear motivates. Tompkins calls this anticipatory affect. It's the missing link that explains how learning works. Without the ability to feel now about something that might happen later, you could never learn from experience. No matter how many times you've got burned, you'd keep touching the stove. Because the memory of the pain isn't painful. Only current feeling motivates. This explains something that puzzles many people. Why can someone know perfectly well that a behavior is harmful and keep doing it anyway? Because knowing isn't feeling. The memory of past consequences doesn't motivate. Only current core feelings, current affect does. If you want to change a behavior, intellectual understanding is not enough. You have to connect that understanding to current feelings. You have to feel in the present moment about future consequences. This takes effort that most of us won't make. Tompkins also points out an important feature of the affect system. Let me give you a quick recap of chapter one, last week's podcast. Drives have a tight, predictable relationship between trigger and response. Hunger signals that your body needs food. Thirst signals that your body needs water. The signal maps directly to the actual bodily state. You know where you're hungry. Your hungry is in your stomach. Thirst is in your mouth. They're directly mapped onto each other. This matters because it means drives are relatively simple. When you're hungry, there's not much mystery about what's going on. Your body needs fuel. The signal tells you that and where to put it, what to do with it. But affects are more flexible. And that flexibility changes everything. Many different things can trigger the same affect. A baby can cry from hunger, cold, wetness, pain, or fever. All different triggers, same response, distress. And many different things can reduce the same affect. Feeding can stop crying. So can cuddling, warming, cooling, or removing a diaper pen. Many solutions, same result. Reduce distress. This flexibility is what makes the affect system so powerful. It's not locked into rigid stimulus response patterns. It can adapt, it can learn, it can apply to new situations. But the flexibility comes with a cost, and that cost is ambiguity. Because many things trigger the same feeling, you may not correctly identify what's actually triggering it. You may feel distress and think it's about the meeting when it's actually about the conversation you had that morning. You may feel anxious and blame your job when the real source is a relationship. The feeling is accurate. The feeling's almost always accurate. It's genuinely detecting that something matters. But your story about what caused it might be wrong. This is where feeling and emotion separate. The feeling is the signal. The emotion is your story about the signal. And that story can be mistaken even when the signal is valid. I want to pause on something Tompkins described that I find compelling. A researcher named Richter did experiments with wild rats. He would catch them, put them into a bag, and then put the bag in water to see how long they'd swim. Here's what he found. Some of these wild rats would suddenly die. Not from exhaustion, not from drowning. They'd just stop. Give up. Die. When he examined them, he discovered something surprising. They didn't die from a fight or flight response, from sympathetic nervous system overload. They died from the opposite. It's called parasympathetic dominance. Their hearts slowed. They gave up. Richter interpreted this as hopelessness. When escape seems impossible, the animal didn't fight harder. They surrendered. And the surrender killed them. And here's the remarkable part. If he caught the rats, held them briefly, and then released them, and repeated this a few times before the swimming test, they didn't give up. They swam just as long as domesticated rats. They learned that escape was possible. The difference between life and death was whether the animal believed escape was possible. I think about this research often because I see the human side of it in my office. You've heard of fight, flight, or freeze. Those are the classic stress responses. But there's a fourth response that doesn't get talked about as much. Giving up, collapse, surrender. It's not dramatic like fight. It's not active like flight. And it's not tense like freeze. It's the opposite. It's letting go over the rope and can be lethal. What do you think the giving up response looks like in human beings? It looks like the elderly person who becomes isolated after losing a spouse and stops eating, stops going outside, stops engaging with life. The body is still working, but something essential has been surrendered. It looks like a teenager who spends all their time online, has thousands of followers, and feels utterly alone. They're connected to everyone and attached to no one. They're surrounded by stimulation but starving for something real. It looks like the successful professional who has achieved everything they've aimed for, but feels nothing. No joy, no excitement, just going through the motions. What these have in common is the loss of the two positive core feelings. Remember, Tomkins identified two positive feelings that pull us towards life. Interest excitement and enjoyment joy. Interest pulls you forward. Joy rewards you for arriving. When both of these go offline, something essential dies, even if the body keeps walking around. Here is why isolation is so dangerous. Not just uncomfortable, but dangerous. The research on loneliness and mortality is clear. Isolated people die younger, not just from depression, though that's part of it. They die from giving up. The title of my podcast is The Meaningful Happiness Podcast, and that's not a random title. Meaning comes from interest excitement. Comes from engagement with something that matters. Happiness comes from enjoyment, joy. Satisfaction from connection and accomplishment. Without both, you can survive, but you can't thrive. And sometimes you can't even survive. Digital natives, people who grew up with screens instead of faces, are showing as something alarming. You can have endless stimulation and no satisfaction. You can have constant, indirect, connection and profound loneliness. You can have a feed full of content and a life empty of meaning. Screens can spark interest, but they're not very good at triggering joy. And they're terrible at the kind of face-to-face connection that human beings evolved to need. When I see rising rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide among young people, I don't think the problem is that they're broken. I think the problem is that they're being fed information without connection, stimulation without satisfaction, interest without enjoyment and joy. The two positive core feelings need each other. Interest and excitement without enjoyment and joy become obsession. Joy without interest becomes stagnation. You need both. And increasingly, our world is structured in ways that make getting both very difficult. I want to pause here and make an important distinction because if you've been paying attention to psychology and wellness in the last decade, you've probably heard a lot about the nervous system, especially polyvagal theory, regulation, ventral vagal states, fight-flight freeze, as I mentioned earlier. This language has become popular, and for good reason, it gives them a way to understand their body's stress responses. It normalizes experiences that used to be pathologized, and it points towards body-based interventions. But I want to be careful here because something is getting lost in the conversation. The nervous system and the feeling system are not the same thing. Let me use Richter's rats to show you what I mean. When those wild rats gave up and died, it was a nervous system event that killed them. Their hearts slowed, their parasympathetic system took over. Specifically, what Stephen Porgius would call the dorsal vagal circuit, the oldest, most primitive part of the autonomic nervous system, came online shutting everything down. This is different from Freeze, by the way, though people often confuse them. Freeze is a hybrid state. Your sympathetic nervous system is highly activated, your heart is pounding, adrenaline surging, muscles ready. But you're also immobilized. Think of the deer in the headlights. It's locked in place, but there's tremendous energy in that stillness. If something shifts, the deer bolts. Dorsal vagal collapse is different. There's no energy in it. The system has given up on fighting or fleeing. The heart doesn't race, it slows down to almost nothing. The muscles don't tense, they go slack. It's not tense immobility, it's surrender. In Porges' model, this is the oldest circuit, the one we share with reptiles. When a mouse goes limp in a cat's mouth, that's dorsal vagal. The system has concluded that escape is impossible, so it shuts down. Sometimes the mouse dies during the shutdown, not in the cat's teeth. That's what happened to Richter's rats. They died from giving up. Now here's my question. What caused the nervous system collapse? The dorsal vagal shutdown is a nervous system event, but what triggered it? Hopelessness. The rats concluded that escape was impossible. They lost something essential, the felt sense that they could get out. And that loss, that affective event, triggered the nervous system to shut down. When Richter gave them brief exposure with release, catch them, hold them, then let them go, he wasn't directly manipulating their nervous systems. He was changing their relationship to possibility. He was restoring hope. He was reigniting something in the feeling system that said, escape exists, fighting matters, life is worth continuing. That affective shift is what prevented the nervous system from collapsing. Do you see the distinction I'm making? The nervous system is hardware. It's the circuitry that produces states. Calm, activated, or collapsed. Polyvagal theory maps the circuitry beautifully. But feelings are something else. Feelings are the system that evaluates, amplifies, and motivates. Feelings determine what matters, and feelings can trigger nervous system states. If you want to use computing metaphors, affects core feelings are firmware. Hopelessness, the loss of the two positive affects, interest, excitement, and enjoyment joy, can trigger dorsal vagal collapse. Fear can trigger sympathetic activation. Safety and connection can trigger ventral vagal engagement. The feelings come first. The nervous system state follows. This matters enormously for how we think about healing. Right now, there's a lot of emphasis on nervous system regulation. Breath work, vagal toning, polyvagal exercises. These are valuable. I'm not dismissing them. But if you only work at the level of the nervous system, you're working with effects, not causes. You can tone your vagus nerve all day, but if you're living in chronic hopelessness, if you've lost access to interest and enjoyment, your nervous system will keep getting pulled towards shutdown. You're fighting the current. You can do all the grounding exercises in the world, but if anticipatory shame is running constantly in the background, your system will keep activating as if threat is present. Because to your feeling system, threat is present. The shame is the threat. The nervous system doesn't evaluate. It doesn't decide what matters, it responds. The feeling system evaluates. It determines whether this moment contains possibility or threat, connection or isolation, something worth approaching or something to avoid. Working with the nervous system asks, how do I calm this activation? Working with the feeling system asks, what is this activation about? What is being evaluated as threat? What is being evaluated as hopeless? What has happened to interest and enjoyment? These are very different questions, and they lead to very different interventions. I'm not saying that one is right and the other is wrong. I'm saying they're different levels of the system. And the feeling level is, in Tompkins' view, primary, and I agree with him. Let me put it another way: you can't bore yourself into dorsal vagal collapse. Boredom is uncomfortable, but it doesn't shut down your heart. You can't be mildly annoyed into sympathetic overdrive. Annoyance is activating, but it doesn't flood you with adrenaline. What makes the difference is the intensity and meaning of the feeling. Terror activates differently than mild fear. Despair activates differently than disappointment. The feeling system determines the magnitude, and the magnitude determines the nervous system response. This is what Tompkins meant when he said that affects are amplifiers. They don't just accompany experience, they determine the intensity, they set the volume, and the volume is what the nervous system responds to. So what is hopelessness in feeling system terms? I think I hinted at this. It's the loss of the two positive affects. Interest excitement is the feeling that pulls you towards the future. It says there's something worth moving towards, something to explore, something to engage with. It's the forward lean into life. Enjoyment, joy is the feeling that rewards arrival. It says, this is good, this is connection, this is accomplishment, this moment, it's satisfying. It's the contentment that makes effort worthwhile. When both of these go offline, what's left? The negative affects are still there. Fear, distress, shame, anger, these can still fire. But without interest excitement, there's nothing pulling you forward. And without enjoyment, joy, there's no reward for getting anywhere. That's hopelessness. Not as a thought, things are hopeless. It's not a cognition. It's an affective state. The positive affects have gone dark. The future has no pull. The present has no reward. And when that happens, the nervous system gets the message. There's nothing to fight for. There's nowhere to flee to. The only option left is shut down. This is why hopelessness is so dangerous. It's not just a sad feeling, it's the absence of the feeling that makes life worth living. And that absence tells the nervous system that there's no point in continuing to mobilize. Richter's rats didn't die from exhaustion. They died from the conclusion that escape was impossible, which collapsed their positive affects, which triggered dorsal vagal shutdown. The intervention that saved them didn't just reduce their fear, it restored their interest excitement in the possibility of escape. It turned the future back on. Let me take this idea of anticipatory affect and apply it to something I see constantly in my practice. Chronic shame. Remember what Tompkins said? Avoidance behavior doesn't go away even when the punishment stops. Why? Because every time you avoid the feared thing, you're rewarded with reduced anxiety. The avoidance works. It successfully decreases your anticipatory fear. So what do you do? You keep avoiding. And you never learn that the fear thing might actually be survivable. And this is the neurotic paradox. You're trapped by a solution that worked too well in the short term. Now apply this to shame. Someone grows up in an environment where they were shamed for being themselves, for having needs, for making mistakes, for standing out, for not being enough, being too much. The specifics vary, but the pattern is the same. Being seen meant being shamed. So they learn to avoid being seen. They learn to hide. They learn to perform, for example. They learn to anticipate what others wanted and deliver it before anyone could be disappointed. They learned to keep their real self out of sight. And it worked. Every time they hid, they successfully avoided shame. Every time they performed, instead of being authentic, they reduced their anticipatory anxiety about rejection. But there's a trap here. Every successful avoidance reinforces the avoidance. Every time hiding worked, they learned that hiding was necessary. They never got the chance to discover that being seen might not result in annihilation, that shame while painful is survivable, that some people might actually want to see the real them. This is what I call chronic shame syndrome. It's not that shame happens occasionally, which is normal. It's that the whole system is organized around avoiding shame. Anticipatory shame runs constantly in the background, scanning for any possibility of exposure, and avoidance has become the default response. The cruel irony is that the avoidance that protects you from shame also prevents you from getting what you deeply want. To be known and accepted as you actually are. You can't be truly known if you're always hiding. You can't be accepted for who you are if you only show people what you think they want you to be. The protection that you have becomes your prison. And the anticipatory shame keeps the whole system locked in place. You feel the fear before anything actually happens. You avoid before there's anything to avoid. You're being rewarded constantly with reduced anxiety, so the pattern never extinguishes. So what's the way out? This is where I want to introduce something I call de-alarming. And Tompkins gives us some clues about how it works. Remember Richter's rats, the ones that gave up and died? The intervention that saved them was simple brief exposure with release. Catch them, hold them, let them go, repeat. They learned that escape was possible, and that knowledge, that felt sense that they could get out, changed everything about how they responded to the next challenge. Pavlov found something similar. He could take electric shocks, painful stimuli, and turn them into neutral or even positive signals. How? By introducing them gradually and pairing them with something positive. If the intensity was slowly increased and the animal was fed during each stimulation, the shock stopped being alarming, it became a signal that food was coming. Same stimulus, different response, because the gradient and context had changed. It's one way to understand my concept of de-alarming. It's not about feeling the fear and doing it anyway. It's about changing the conditions under which you approach the feared thing. The gradient matters. What's terrifying when sudden can be interesting when it's gradual. The context matters. The same stimulus paired with safety and reward becomes tolerable. I know this all sounds a little bit complicated, but I'm going to break it down in a minute here. The sense of escape matters too. Knowing you can get out changes everything about the experience of being in it. This is where agency actually lives, not in overpowering your alarm system, not in ignoring it, but in working with it intelligently. You can't talk yourself out of feeling in an alarm state. The alarm system doesn't take orders from the thinking system at all. But you can change the conditions. You can adjust the gradient, the steepness of it. You can create contexts that pair the feared thing with safety. You can build the escape routes so your system knows it's not trapped. That's agency without self attack. That's the alarming. Well, folks, that is the end of Why Knowing Better Doesn't Help Part 1. Thank you for listening, and Why Knowing Better Doesn't Help Part 2 will be out shortly. See you then. Take care.