webe Parents
Welcome to "webe Parents" with Dr. Alona Pulde and Dr. Matthew Lederman! We're parents first, doctors second, and life coaches third, blending nutrition, lifestyle, and connection medicine with nonviolent communication to help families thrive. In each episode, we'll share our "Cheers & Tears," dive into our "Topic & Tool," go from "No Skills to Pro Skills," "Bring It Home," and wrap up with "One Last Thing." Join us as we share stories, skills, and tips to help bring your family closer together using our professional expertise.
Thanks for listening!
Dr. Matthew Lederman & Dr. Alona Pulde
webe Parents
Ep. 38: You're Not Stressed—You're Unsafe: Why Your Body Is Paying the Price with Dr. Steve Cole (Part 2)
😳 What if your stress isn’t just in your head, but coded into your biology? In this deeply personal and scientific episode, Matt & Alona sit down with Dr. Steve Cole to explore how your body responds to the vibe of your relationships, your thoughts, and even your to-do list.
💥 The body doesn’t just react to danger — it prepares for it, and most of us are unknowingly telling our systems to brace every single day. From relationship disconnection to unspoken loneliness, these cues are impacting your genes, your immune system, and your children’s well-being.
💔 You’ll want to hear:
- Why finishing your to-do list won’t make you happy—and how it's biologically undermining you.
- How disconnection between spouses creates invisible stress loads on your children.
- Why meaning and purpose aren’t just emotional fluff—they physically change your body’s threat response.
Have a Kinectin Account? Explore these Nudges to see how they apply to your own life — in a way only Amari can.
What is Amari?
webe Parents has partnered with Kinectin to bring you Amari, your personal AI coach. Now you can interact with the ideas from our podcasts, articles, and parenting tips — and Amari will help you apply them directly to your personal life. Don’t have a Kinectin Account? Create one here
To learn more about what Alona & Matt are up to check us out at webeparents.com, or follow us on our socials at Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, or YouTube. Be sure to subscribe to webe Pärents wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.
Hey there! We'd love for you to hit that subscribe button. By subscribing, you're helping us spread the word and connect with more amazing people like you.
Producer:Welcome to We Be Parents, where parent doctors Matthew Letterman and Alona Polday explore current parenting topics, share stories, and help bring families closer together.
Alona Pulde:Hello and welcome back to We Be Parents podcast. If you did not catch part one of this interview with Dr. Steve Cole, we highly recommend starting there. We explored how connection and emotional safety shape our children's immune systems and healing responses. And today in part two, we're turning the focus inward toward you, the parent. and toward us as well. Because as Dr. Cole's research shows, our own internal safety, our stress response, and the quality of our adult relationships are powerful biological signals, not just for us, but for our families. And we'll explore how self-connection, emotional repair in couples, and even the search for purpose can reshape our immune health and restore capacity to connect.
Matthew Lederman:Welcome back, Dr. Cole. Thank you again. Yes.
Alona Pulde:Thank you for being with us yet again. Great to be back. Yes. So we had a wonderful conversation for the first hour, and I highly, highly encourage it. It was all about just the general idea behind social genomics and how that works and how it impacts our children, not only our children's environments, but how we show up for our children. Maybe
Matthew Lederman:we can just do a quick high level for people. One of the hardest things I have to deal with working with clients is that they just can't seem to believe that how, you know, what's going on in their head and in their environment is affecting their body physically. Like how can that cause physical changes in my intestine or on my nerves or, you know, and maybe you could just sort of make that connection for people and then we can jump in.
Steve Cole:Yeah. As kind of a quick sketch. And again, as you guys mentioned, you know, we talk in more depth and detail about this in the previous episode, but basically, uh, you know, nerves connect what's going on in our brain to the rest of what's going on in our bodies. And it turns out that one of the things it's doing is it's coordinating what the rest of our body is doing to adapt to changing life circumstances. And one of the major axes of this coordination involves how you wanna change the way a body works when it's in a safe, creative, generative environment versus a threatening, unstable, risky environment. This is like a fundamental axis of physiology. Many of the things we want a body to do, we wanna change when we leave the world of good stuff and positive emotion and creation and aspiration and sociability enter a world of threat and defense and, you know, sort of think of it as a lack of safety, unsafety. So that computation of the world as safe versus threatening or the world around us as something that we can trust versus something we need to be vigilant and guard against and look for trouble and deal with it, that ends up penciling out in terms of changes in cell biology and the rest of our body in ways that are kind of patterned by our evolutionary history, but may be running very differently today than they were over the many hundreds of thousands of years that we've been evolving as the kind of the social creatures And so in the world we live in right now, this body is running very differently than it used to. It used to run, you know, happy and relaxed and tranquil the vast majority of the time and be acutely stressed at a high level for very short periods of time. Now we live with this chronic, low-grade, constant drizzle of vague threat and uncertainty in our lives, and that changes, you know, the ultimate reality. success of our body in terms of growing and staying healthy versus accidentally precipitating the development of disease.
Matthew Lederman:So basically, information is coming in through the eyes and the ears and thoughts and all that stuff is coming in. The brain is processing that. And then it's basically saying, how do we want each of our organ systems to run based on all that information that's coming in minute by minute?
Steve Cole:Exactly. And it's making that decision based upon the way we lived tens of thousands of years ago. not the way we live today. So all true with that additional caveat.
Alona Pulde:And I think just a couple of highlights that were resonant for me is that there was a time our ancestors, it was a physical, the tiger coming at you or the occasional conflict within the village. Now with so much information overload coming at us, so many of us living in that survival, productive, efficient, multitasking mode, that just that thinking, that emotional mental stress has the exact same impact as that tiger literally running toward you. And then the second thing that you said last week, just to highlight, is that what happens to our system is we become hypersensitized for attack. So even though our immune system is running, it's focused on the wrong things. And out of that kind of stems disease. And you went into a very eloquent discussion on how that progresses for heart disease, and also for viral load and COVID, which I highly encourage our listeners to go back and listen to. But high level, would you agree with that?
Steve Cole:Yeah, absolutely.
Matthew Lederman:And it was encouraging because you said in a matter of months, you can retune this response. It's not something that you're stuck with because of a bad childhood, for example.
Steve Cole:That's exactly right.
Matthew Lederman:So this is great. All right. Love it. Thank you for the recap.
Alona Pulde:So if you've been listening to us for a while, you know we get a lot of questions about what to do in tricky parenting or relationship moments.
Matthew Lederman:Yeah, and if I'm being real, I'm asking Alona those same questions all the time. I get into those same tricky moments as everybody else does. And as much as we wish we could be there for each other in those exact moments, we just can't always be.
Alona Pulde:Yeah, that's why we partnered with the amazing team at Connecton to create something we truly believe in, an AI coach called Amari. And we didn't just lend our names, we helped build it and train it and brought in everything we've learned about emotional healing, connection and communication.
Matthew Lederman:Yeah, we spent years training and learning and we've created Amari who is so calm and grounded, listens deeply and responds with warmth, clarity and compassion. There's no judgment, no reactivity. In fact, we tasked our children with trying to get Amari reactive and they still haven't succeeded. It's just steady support when you need it most.
Alona Pulde:We use it ourselves all the time, especially when we feel stuck or overwhelmed. And Amari's really helped us pause, reflect, given us insight that helps us come back to each other.
Matthew Lederman:We designed Amari to help you strengthen the relationships that matter most, starting with the one you have with yourself.
Alona Pulde:And we are so excited that you can try it now at WeBeParents.com and click on WeBeConnecting with a K to sign up. And when you have your Amari moment, please let us know as we'd love to hear about it. You've shown that even perception, not just circumstance, can drive gene expression. What happens when someone begins to relate to themselves with more compassion or coherence even if nothing around them changes?
Steve Cole:Well, the short answer, hopefully, is that a sense of threat will recede and a sense of trust or safety will increase. And a lot of that can stem from just more confidence in the worth or merit of who you are and what you're doing. Some of it can also stem from a greater perception that I have control over myself and my emotions. I'm not constantly run raw and ragged by the world around me. I'm capable of intervening in my own sort of experience in ways that will help me be the kind of person I want to be, have the emotional life that I want to be, and contribute to others in the way that I'd like to contribute to showing up, as it were.
Alona Pulde:I love that. So that's compassion and agency changing your perception. Because so many people, and I hear that all the time, and I know it's my inner dialogue too, well, when this settles, I'll have time for that. But this never settles or it just blossoms into something different. And so by making the choice, by kind of having agency around choice and perception i can actually stay in it without having the same consequences in my body mind and soul
Steve Cole:yep that's right and the the other point is you know it's never too late for it to be now um you know that it's easy to put off almost anything it seems um you know, sort of to be low cost. And many times we feel exhausted and like, we just can't take on things. Now, what we often overlook is the power of, you know, sort of, you can think of it as like mindfulness, this ability to recenter and recollect your thoughts attentional and energetic resources, which might now be distributed over a large number of different engagements, and reel all those resources back in so that you can just do one thing right. Whatever that thing is, whatever you decide is at the top of your stack right now, doing that, doing it well, and doing it now is probably going to do better at moving you in the direction you ultimately want to go. And it's certainly more likely to create a short-term success or win. And that kind of reward that comes from the short-term success or win becomes a resource for the next thing that you're going to tackle after that.
Matthew Lederman:And it shifts your physiology towards safety.
Steve Cole:Yeah, especially that it gives you a sense of hope and it gives you a sense of efficacy as well. So it has multiple positive effects in sort of shaping which of these biological modes our body are actually operating in.
Matthew Lederman:So parents who are listening, who have a list that goes out the door of things that they need to get done to slow down, be present for one thing, do that well right now, not only helps them, but it probably ultimately models for the children and helps the children's system too. So it sounds like that's, even if you don't get to the rest of your list, The big win is slowing down and doing that now?
Steve Cole:Yeah. The big win is having any win. The problem with the big list is it's really hard to knock anything off that list. You're going to sort of amortize your efforts and your capabilities over a large number of things, none of which actually get totally done. And so this idea of actually I'm going to do one thing right and well, and the rest of it will just have to take care of itself for a while. And that once you do one thing right and well and have a clear win, even if it's not totally done, but even if you just feel like, okay, this no longer needs to be on my immediate to-do list. I'm in a good place with this. And a lot of child rearing is that way. Child rearing is going to go on you know, for decades, right? I mean, we're not even going to be done with them when they're 30. We may not have the same kind of investments or, you know, sort of, you know, requirements as, you know, those are definitely going to change with time, but kids will always be part of our lives. So that's not, you know, like raise my kid is not an item that's going to go off the list, right? And so this idea of like, okay, actually raise my kid is too big a chunk. Let's think about what does my kid write now really need. And many times, we get so caught up in, if I don't play the Mozart music, they're never going to Harvard or something like that. Whereas in fact, the reality is, they're going to be fine even if they don't go to Harvard, number one. And number two, what they really need right now is someone who will just play with them. And that's the stuff that we get. We feel like, I'm responsible for all of this future. It's all loaded up. And so everything you're doing becomes overwhelming. But what really builds strong, capable kids is this sense that they have a warm, supportive, caring, reliable, familial environment, a safe nest, a safe base from which they can go out and take chances and learn about the world and become a stronger, more capable person. And that... And so,
Matthew Lederman:protecting or enhancing their nervous system and physiological state. For me, with these lists, now I'm sort of embarrassed to admit this, but I think of I got to get the list done and then I'll be happy.
Steve Cole:Yeah, but you better start being happy now because the list ain't never going to be done, number one. Number two, you want a happy kid. You don't want your kid to do what you just did, right? Would you give them this advice? Be miserable until you get it all done, right? So what the heck are you doing?
Alona Pulde:Exactly.
Matthew Lederman:There was a wake-up call right there. Can
Alona Pulde:we get that clip
Matthew Lederman:on repeat? Yeah, we're going to get that on repeat. That'll be my phone ringer. Just
Steve Cole:don't attribute it to me. I don't want to be in trouble every time
Matthew Lederman:you guys fight. Oh, no. Not at all. It sounds like you talked to her before the call. But I like that. It just feels so doable. What's one thing that you can do today, you know, not... Don't worry about the whole list. What's one thing? And then we talk about play. When you're not sure what to do with your children, play with them. And that's P-L-A-E, which stands for presence, loving attention, and empathy. And if you can just do those things, and it sounds like you're saying a lot of that is really good for the nervous system, too. It's not just...
Steve Cole:So is P-L-A-Y. So add that one to the list as well. I mean, there's a brilliant... sort of neurobiological analysis of what we're doing when we play that turns out to be like we're rehearsing for all of life. We're learning how to use muscles to get things done. We're learning how to coordinate with other people. And we're doing that in a way that has low stakes but high opportunity. So all of the above,
Alona Pulde:yeah. Can you talk about, you know, We've shown that chronic conflict, emotional disconnection in relationships activate the same immune response as loneliness. And we talked about being lonely alone or being lonely in a marriage. What's the impact on couples? How does that relate to couples?
Steve Cole:Well, in a lot of different ways, but the most important way, remember that the linchpin of this physiology is this sense of trust and safety versus threat and insecurity. So you know, in a household, there is no relationship that matters more than the bond between parents in terms of creating, not just between them, but for the whole family system, the kids and even the more distant relatives, a sense of, you know, trust and safety in this environment. So, you know, this I think is one of the, you know, sad but true, most central truths is that how well you can maintain that relationship and its core sense of trust and safety and collaboration, which is exceptionally important in child rearing, I think is obviously important for the biological wellbeing of the spouses, but perhaps even more so, for the kids that are around those spouses who live the, if you will, the consequences of all of that and who are basically imprinting on everything that they're seeing as, you know, a worldview, as a sense of what's possible or desirable or, you know, sort of virtuous and healthy. So that, you know, that kind of biology doesn't just stay inside one body, right? It creates a kind of a cultural atmosphere within the family that ends up affecting everybody, even visitors.
Alona Pulde:So if you're going through stress or rupture in a relationship, how do you blunt that impact on your children?
Steve Cole:Well, a lot of it has to do with making it clear that children are loved and will be safe, in some weird sense, regardless of what happens between parents. So this is especially important in relationships that are suffering or actually deteriorating or going to the point of disintegration. Most parents know that even though they're fighting with their spouse, even though they think their personal relationship is irrecoverable, they know that they will still work together to do what is needed for these kids' well-being. It's very uncommon. It's not 100%, you know, impossible. This does happen occasionally. But most of the time, even the most combative parents can still effectively co-parent somehow. They might be doing it as, you know, sort of opposing silos with like a big courtyard between them. Or sometimes it's much more warm and intimate. I don't think even in the most bitter divorce circumstances, you'll find any parents saying, you know, I'm done with you as a kid, or I'm going to stop you from getting the support you need. So this often gets forgotten when people are preoccupied with navigating the, you know, sort of the, you can think of as the interspousal relationship. And so, you know, perhaps I would say the most important thing is to, you know, quickly consolidate relationships around this idea that you know you as a child will be safe no matter what we will always love you you know that person that i'm not going to be with will always be your father that person that i'm not going to be with is always going to be your mother you know, we, you know, she, he did, you know, they, they created you. Um, you will always be part of them and we will always love both of you consolidating that sense of kind of long-term safety, even amidst what sometimes are like necessary adjustments in what's happening in short term, which will, you know, often include the rupture of, of relationships that it's, it's completely doable. It gets done all the time, but it, it's just so easy to forget about when you're actually dealing with the frictions itself. So in the extreme version, this is another version of the slowdown. Talk to the people who are affected. Don't just look where the drama is. Look where the quiet is, because that's often where the deepest pools of suffering are taking place, especially for the people that don't know how to talk about it, don't know how to think about it, are suddenly shocked by the idea that a family could suddenly cease to be So those you can think of as like extreme versions of this, but even every intact successful marital or spousal or co-parenting relationship is always going to have to contend with stuff that is qualitatively similar, even if not as quantitatively extreme. And so... I do think that consolidating this basic sense of safety amidst overt friction is probably, from a biological standpoint, probably the most important thing to do for everybody involved.
Alona Pulde:Yeah, and that makes a lot of sense. What would you say to couples... though, that are, they're functioning, you know, and maybe even they've made that very clear to their children, but their own disconnection or, you know, they might just not be, it becomes like transactional or comfortable or familiar, taken for granted, and they don't feel that deep connection. Does that still register as threat to them? And then if so, translate it into the family and How do you kind of manage that?
Steve Cole:Yeah, that's a tricky one. I mean, the honest truth is we don't really know very well. There have been very few studies of this directly, so we don't know. I mean, the tricky part I described earlier in the previous episode is there's a disconnect between what's going on in our conscious minds and our thoughts and that we have conscious access to and can talk about, and what's going on in our brainstem in terms of how we feel in this automatic non-conscious sense. Is the world okay or is the world not okay? So there's very... surprisingly weak connection between those two things. There's lots of people that feel stressed out and overwhelmed all the time, irritable, but in fact, their brainstem says, hey, you know, this is fine. You know, it's like the way life is. And then vice versa, there's brainstems that are working really hard to keep everything together, even though the conscious mind says, yeah, yeah, this kind of chaos is normal. That's just the way the world is. I'm not particularly worried or whatever. So You know, it's hard for me to answer without more direct data on this kind of thing. And I would say, you know, I'm especially cognizant of this in that Life is hard. Family life is hard. Marital life is hard. And in some sense, what works, works. There's all kinds of unpredictable, unconventional ways to get to life circumstances that are basically okay. And I think what's most important is actually making sure that people are not running a lifestyle of threat and uncertainty. and are also not running a lifestyle of hostility or desire to escape. And, you know, if that's what the slow disconnect, you know, adds up to is, you know, one or two people in constant chronic threat and uncertainty, that needs to be dealt with because that will, you know, undoubtedly undermine not just your biological health, but will probably, you know, like kids are great at picking up the vibes on this kind of stuff. Like they, you know, I'm sure we've all heard of the stories of the kids that beg their parents to get divorced because it's just driving them crazy, right? So this is going to, in a vibe sense, sort of transmit out to others. And so the stakes are pretty high on this kind of thing, but we also know that there's times when– not all of life will always be a honeymoon. And so there's times when actually this is fine, this is good enough, and we're still able to work together to create the kind of life for our kids that they want to have and that we want them to have. So I regret that I don't have clearer ideas either data on what works or what doesn't, or even this, this kind of psychological wisdom, all I can do is bring us back to the basic principles from all of social genomics, which is, you know, threat and uncertainty, mistrust are surprisingly toxic. They, they don't just stay in your brain. They get out into your body in a family situation. They get into other people's bodies as well. And so to try and just kind of wait those things out or to, um, sweep them under the rug or whatever, that probably is a fool's errand. We're always going to have to put up with some days where we just don't feel that great. But if this becomes a lifestyle and it's there more days, day in and day out than not, that's when we probably have to think about doing something significantly different because we're going to build different bodies based upon that kind of lifestyle.
Matthew Lederman:So that's where you would start to change how you show up or change where you live or change your work, but you have to You have to make a significant change at that point.
Steve Cole:Yeah. Although sometimes the changes are just in the way you think about things. I mean, I think we've all, you know, heard stories about people who become complacent and take their spouses for granted. And then suddenly there's a crisis, either a health crisis and you lose them or you might lose them or an infidelity crisis. And you just have to kind of like think about like, okay, you know, is like, you can get reminded that this person is much more important to you than you were kind of giving them credit for. So I won't say again, you know, there's like a magic solution for this kind of thing, but there is, there is a way in which the way we structure relationships, particularly in, you know, in our society that, that does lead to a certain amount of monotony and complacency. And there probably does need to be periodic reality checks on, does this still make sense? Is this still the way we want to do things? And I guess what I was pointing out is that, you know, if, if we don't do this as parents consciously, I can assure you the fates will eventually toss you, you know, a brick and, and, you know, you're going to have to, to deal with it somehow. So, um, A lot of that, obviously everybody's gonna have to come to their own solutions on this, but this idea of checking and saying, is this still fundamentally a safe and trusting environment Even if we're not necessarily having fun all the time, can I still trust my spouse basically to be the co-parent of my kids? Can I still trust myself to show up the way I want to show up if I'm feeling this way? These are the things that it's easy to sweep under the rug and to just keep doing the same thing that I've been doing for thousands of days before this, but which end up at some point actually so far askance from legitimate reality that it can be surprisingly destructive.
Matthew Lederman:Very well said. This episode of We Be Parents is brought to you by We Be Calm, the child calmer designed by doctors and loved by parents.
Alona Pulde:Struggling with bedtime routines or managing your child's anxiety? We Be Calm transforms deep breathing into a fun and engaging activity, helping kids find their inner calm. Perfect for bedtime stressful moments or any time your child needs a little extra help to stay calm. Visit WeBeCalm.com to learn more and bring tranquility to your family. We be calm because we be in this together.
Matthew Lederman:You talk about the power of meaning and purpose and its impact on the CTRA community. response. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Steve Cole:Yeah, happy to do that. So this idea really came out of questions about resilience. So we'd been studying for a decade at this point how stress and adversity activates this biological threat reflex and that in turn drives the production of diseases. So obviously we don't want those diseases. So what are we going to do? What can you change in a life to make that, that thing, that molecular reflex not happen? And so one idea is be happy, right? So I was, you know, thinking about all of this stuff and talking to some happiness researchers that I happen to have gone to graduate school with. And they said, yeah, we're happy to help you look at the effect of happiness on, on gene regulation, the way you've been doing it with stress. You just have to tell us what kind of happiness you're interested in. I'm like, what do you mean? What kind of happiness is there more than one? You know, like, I'm a grant-funded biomedical researcher. I don't have that much personal acquaintance with happiness. Tell me, people, what is it I'm missing here or something? Traditionally, in happiness research, we distinguish between, you can think of it as this Epicurean version of happiness that comes from seeing beautiful sights and hearing beautiful music or laughter and entertaining whatever TV or movies or just feeding the the simple kind of emotional hedonic machinery of our brains, they would call it. And then they say there's another kind of happiness. This conception goes at least back to the ancient Greek philosophy philosophers like Aristotle talking about eudaimonia, which is the type of happiness that comes not from sort of feeding your own hedonic machinery beautiful sights and sounds and tastes and all that kind of stuff, but from doing something noble or virtuous for the world. It's the type of happiness that comes from transcending your own self-gratification and making some kind of essentially noble contribution to to the world. It can be pro-social, but it doesn't have to be. It could be creative. It could be discovery-based, all this kind of stuff. But it goes beyond just sitting there and sort of feeding your own brain happy sights and sounds. So interestingly enough, when we actually got a chance to look at these two types of happiness, it was really eudaimonic well-being, that second sort of happiness that comes from pursuing something noble or worthwhile or having some significant self-transcendent purpose that correlated with lower levels of this kind of threat biology and this sort of molecular threat reflex that so promotes disease. So we were interested in that and actually spent more, and we're not even done with this yet, but spent about a decade trying to figure out why it was that having a strong sense of purpose or meaning in your life was exerting such leverage over this threat-related biology. We knew there weren't purpose nerves or hormones that were somehow directly influencing the cells. What seemed to be happening is that having a sense of purpose or meaning in your life was essentially, in your brain, vetoing stress responses that would otherwise have gone out into the body and activated this molecular threat reflex. So surprisingly enough, we know a lot about the brain circuitry involved in hoping and seeking and wanting these values, things like purpose and meaning. And we also more obviously know about the kind of the brain circuits involved in threat detection and stress responses and driving this fight or flight stress biology out through our nervous system. So it turns out that the way the human brain is put together, when you're doing something that you care about and you think is good and you really value, that leads this sort of self-conscious, self-aware, worrying stress threat system to say, okay, I'm doing the right thing. I don't need to... brace myself as much for injury. I need to just keep doing this other thing here. I need to kind of marshal my resources for doing good stuff, not spend all my resources essentially bracing for the injury that's going to come in this bad situation. So this is kind of a weird idea. I mean, when we think about therapeutic responses to suffering or injury or something like that, we often think reduce the suffering. One of the interesting implications here is like, you may not be able to reduce suffering, but you could enhance contribution. You could enhance, you know, sort of seeking value. You could enhance helping other people. You could enhance doing something magnificent. And in fact, when we look at people who are diagnosed with life-threatening diseases, you know, they often are shaken out of a certain kind of complacency because most of us feel like we've got lots more days. And then when you feel like, hey, I may not have that many more days, people have to sit down and decide, how do I want to spend those days? And usually it's not just going to the same job and seeing the same people and doing the same thing and watching the same TV shows. Usually it's like, if I've only got some days left and not infinite days left, I'm going to spend those doing something different. I'm going to spend those with the people I care about doing the things that matter to me and sort of sometimes discovering new things that I care about or matter in my life. Sometimes that's even just helping other people who are confronting the same kind of threat I am. So one of the interesting things you hear from people that encounter these life-threatening conditions is that they'll say crazy things like, you know, oddly enough, cancer is the best thing that ever happened to me because it caused me to stop leading my life in this sort of pedal to the goal line way and caused me to have to think about what I'm doing and why. And I stopped doing a whole bunch of stuff that wasn't that important, spending time with a whole bunch of people that didn't really matter that much to me. Instead, I doubled down on the things that really mattered and my life has been way better since then. That doesn't make my disease go away. It's not magic. But at this point, I'm living better than I did before I had cancer and I love it. So this sounds crazy, it sounds like a too good to be true story, happens all the time. And it even happens as people get older, as the number of days we feel we have left, shrinks our investment in the people and the causes that we care most about generally grows. So people at old age often experience higher levels of emotional well-being. Even when they've got disease or physical limitations that are related to age, they're often nonetheless happier because they've invested more of themselves and their time in the things that really matter. And what we know is that from the neck down, the rest of the body can feel that same glow. Like when we're doing what we care about that, Threat biology basically gets shut down, not 100%, it's not like it's completely gone, but it gets throttled back a huge amount and we run basically a healthier cellular and molecular body than we would have otherwise.
Matthew Lederman:So I love that it's like you were telling me before, stop waiting to finish the to-do list to be happy, pick something important off the list and be happy right now. I wonder if there's a way, is there a way to help children access this? Is there meaning of friendship, being helpful? What would you say to parents who want to support their children to experience this type of shift?
Steve Cole:That is a great question. There's relatively little research on this right now because we often think of children as invalids. But in fact, they are not. And in fact, when you watch very young children play, you realize surprisingly early they learn the power of helping other people, of doing good things for other people. Because if you do that, they will play with you. And life is pretty boring if you don't have anybody to play with. So... Very early, kids learn about social routes to their own self-happiness and satisfaction and positive emotional states. Eventually, and that actually ramps up very continuously into adolescence. That's why adolescence... leave their families, right? Much to the consternation of most parents. It's like, wow, they don't talk to me anymore. They're always out of the house doing this other stuff. Or sadly, these days, they're always online with other people. And be that as it may, they are doing this stuff because that is where they get the feedback in the world, in the currencies that they actually care about. But it is very much about feedback. If those things were not providing happiness back to them, they wouldn't be doing it. So... Then a terrible thing happens, and that is, you know, they grow up, they go to school, and then they have to start being an adult. And that's when they start getting distracted from the things they really care about because they need to pay the rent, they need to, you know, feed the kids or the dog or whatever. You know, like you start to develop dependencies that, you know, for all very noble reasons, you want to make sure, you know, continue to be, you know, taken care of. But that leads people to become often focused on these other activities, and they start to lose track of what they actually care about. This happens very early, and by the time you get to middle age, of course, this is the architecture of midlife crises, where people have been operating for decades doing these extrinsically required and intrinsically motivated things. Like people do want to keep the rent paid. They want to keep a house for their family. They want to provide. They want to be there and take care of their kids. But if you do that long enough to the exclusion of what you want, you will start to feel sort of slightly dead. And this is a real thing. And trying to kind of work through that, obviously, is one of the big challenges of adult existence. So anyway, back to the kids here. So against that normal developmental trajectory, at every stage, kids do have the capacity to make contributions to others. It's just they don't necessarily make the kinds of contributions that adults would make. But make no mistake, Early in life, they are very much learning about how to contribute to others. Now, in today's day and age, as we discussed previously, there's an extra threat landscape related to sort of the social media world, the digital world that's so full of punishment and retribution and threat. without the kind of reputational capital that we used to have. If we live in a village, not only did the other people in the village know who you were, they knew you were a good person, even if you did something bad, but they also needed you. Once upon a time, there just were not enough people to plow the fields and milk the cows. There were not enough people. Even if you disagreed with the butcher about politics, it doesn't matter. You had to be nice to him because you needed the meat, right? So now the world has become more commodified. No individual is needed for anything. Like, you know, most adolescents these days think that you can get anything you need by swiping an app, and they're not wrong about that, right? Now, that app is controlling various people, but those people are themselves commodities. Like if this person doesn't bring you the meat, that person will, right? Like the app, that's how the app works. It's a marketing system for recruiting, you know, ad hoc labor into some kind of need that we have. So that has complicated the ability to make contributions to others that are sort of genuinely i guess how would we put it rewarding to ourselves and that actually i think you know that that sounds kind of trivial and arcane but i think the loss of individualized capital this like i've done good stuff for my community i've got a certain number of brownie points people know who i am they know i'm you know honest and trustworthy in general even if i say something wrong here. They know, actually, that's not the way he really is. Or she's in the process of growing or something like that. So that's made it harder for kids to make contributions, honestly. Making a contribution always involves taking a risk. There's a risk that you'll fail to make the contribution. There's also a risk that the contribution won't be accepted in the way that you intended it. And as people feel the world becoming more threatening, They were more inclined to kind of recede, which is fine. It seems like short-term safety. But the problem is it undermines the long-term growth that's actually going to lead you to be a generative and productive member of society in a way that actually rewards you and feeds all of this positive pro-social biology.
Alona Pulde:You know, I'm wondering, though, how that applies also and if it applies. I was thinking our daughters love musical theater, for example, and we support their enjoyment of it, but not pushing them to be the star the lead my nephews are in sports and you know my brother is very kind of active around there being a team player not you know the most valuable player does that Versus, you know, there are times where parents push kids and we've been, you know, I've been on the other end of that too, but where you push the kids to be the most productive, to be the most efficient, to, you know, highlight them as the star.
Unknown:Yeah.
Alona Pulde:Does that impact how they show up in contribution?
Steve Cole:Yeah, it probably does. Again, I can't speak about that directly on terms of molecular biology because we just don't have the studies of that kind of thing. But if you think about that fundamental proposition I talked about earlier where it's really about some combination of trust and safety and making a contribution to something that you value a lot, that it will likely unfold in different ways, especially if kids are being you know, extrinsically motivated. There's some kids that just love the game, but there's many kids that are told they love the game and want to make their parents happy and, you know, that kind of stuff. And there, it's tremendously fraught because if you don't love it yourself and you're really doing it for somebody else and that other person is very, you know, demanding and themselves need, you know, validation and success through their children as a vehicle, I mean, that is a situation where, you know, both individuals' sense of self-worth is placed at risk by virtue of the fact that they've kind of outsourced it to somebody else. The kid is outsourcing their sense of self-worth to parental approval. The parent is, to some extent, outsourcing their sense of self-worth to their children's performance. That is a classic problem in both directions because you cannot control your own outcomes. And that in turn creates all kinds of friction between people and all kinds of conflictual motives and things like that. So it does seem like that would be a very difficult lifestyle. And we see this anecdotally in the lives of child stars of all sorts, sports and entertainment being two examples where typically the adult outcomes are not great. There's a lot of casualty stories that come out of of that lifestyle. And it certainly does not create a kid who has a sense of, you know, unconditional safety in their house. In fact, if anything, the most dramatic, you know, antithesis of that.
Matthew Lederman:Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Well, we're getting to the end here. And I'm wondering if there was one thing that you wanted people, parents to leave with, you know, for the relationship or for the, as with kids. Is there anything that you would say, hey, if there's one thing other than get rid of the to-do list and just pick one thing, I got that one already. What would be the one thing or something that really stands out for you?
Steve Cole:I think the two one things that stand out for me, one of them is always remember that there's this fundamental sort of thermostat in our non-conscious brains asking every minute, are we safe? Is this a trustworthy world that I live in? Am I okay? Are things unfolding the way that I want them to, or at least that I expect them to? Or is something wrong? You don't even have to ask for it once things are not going as predicted. Even if you're just uncertain, you're not outright afraid, your body's going to start, I think, working differently from that kind of thing. And that's okay a few times, but again, if you create a life where that's everything that happens all the time, It's going to slowly kind of corrode, rust, basically, your health and well-being. And the second is this attention to the outside world and making good stuff happen that, oddly enough, should become ever more important the more we ourselves are in pain or suffering or threatened. It's not our natural instinct. When we're in pain, we think about ourselves. That tends to promote anxiety and depression and things like that, one of the most reliable way out of that is to be able to redirect your attention to someone else or something else that matters to you and that is a worthy competitor to your own sense of You know, regret or insecurity. So being able to make contributions, even in times when you're feeling weak or beleaguered, is a surprisingly powerful therapeutic response to, you know, individual, you know, sort of misfortune and disadvantage.
Alona Pulde:Thank you so much, Dr. Cole, for being on our podcast. We have been so honored to have you, and this has been so powerful on so many levels, and we just really appreciate you joining us today.
Matthew Lederman:Thank you so much. We really appreciate it.
Steve Cole:Sure. It's my pleasure, and good luck to you and all the work you do.
Matthew Lederman:Yes. Thank you for the work you do, and keep it up. We love it.
Alona Pulde:Your experiences and feedback are invaluable to us.
Matthew Lederman:Please email us at parents at webetogether.com with your own cheers and tears as well as any questions or stories you'd like to share. And
Alona Pulde:we'd love for you to hit that subscribe button. Bye for now.