Anxious? Overwhelmed? Q&A with Dr. Kevin Majeres

Anxiety is rising — but why? This talk surveys current neuroscience on dynorphins, dopamine and adrenaline, showing how “welcoming discomfort” reshapes stress responses, cognition and motivation. Drawing on OptimalWork’s reframing/mindfulness protocol, it highlights practical applications for parenting and daily life, outlining evidence-based practices that convert threat reactivity into goal-directed learning and sustained attention.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

It's uh relatively recently that you've been exploring the idea of optimal work and parenting, right?

SPEAKER_00 0:05

That's right. I had stayed away from the topic of parenting because there are so much bad advice out there. It's you you when you try reading things online, you try to find like who are the authorities here? And what do we actually know about parenting? So I resisted it for a long time. Yeah. And then it took me a while until a couple things came together. But one was Jonathan Haidt wrote a book, The Anxious Generation. So if you all something a lot of nodding, that's great. So Jonathan Haidt, uh, he blames social media. But I think that there is a, there's, there are deeper issues, of course. The central question is, why is anxiety on the rise so much? And there are many, many factors. We can get into that. But part of what is hidden in Jonathan Haidt's analysis is parenting practices that are overprotective. That's how he phrases it. But he has this wonderful line where he said, it's the job of the parents to frustrate their children at least once a day. And at the same time, I was reading about the advances in appointment process theory, that there's this entire new network of, you may have heard this in the recent podcasts, uh, talking about dinorphins. But when it's this uh new system that was discovered. And why when I understood dinorphins and how they relate to dopamine, and how do you help people to be cheerful and happy and energetic? To become cheerful and energetic is actually the work of dinorphins. So when dinorphins are embraced, when the discomfort is embraced with purpose, warmly, in fact, it gives a large boost of dopamine. And that is what lifts people out of even things like depression and anxiety. So helping people to embrace dinorphin, that became for me so much like what we do in optimal work. Helping people to embrace challenge and to see in it a way of living their highest ideals. How do you bring ideals into daily life? Not despite challenge, it's because of through challenge. So, and there's always been this deep sense that when this same as Maria said, no ideal becomes a reality without sacrifice. So, and that the essence of work, in fact, is to incarnate ideals, to take ideals that are seemingly abstract and to make them into reality. So, and in no place is that done more meaningfully than in the home. And so the work in the home, in fact, is where you are instantiating and making substantial these high ideals. But that takes place through sacrifice. So there's something essential then in the work of the home and in the raising of children. And then that's when I started to go more deeply into the literature on parenting and to see that in fact helping children to embrace discomfort is a necessary job of parents. And no one does it better than mothers because it is actually that is the application of warmth and understanding can be done by men, but men are not as good at it. And so I'm sure everyone has experienced, you know, that when you present troubles or problems to men, they tend to just have solutions, right? And to and to give you the problem solving, which is called invalidation in psychology. So as a psychiatrist, I've had to learn to be more validating. Yeah. If you simply validate someone's someone's discomfort and pain, you just acknowledge that it's there, it decreases by at least 50%. So validation causes an immediate decrease in dinorphins. So there's a beautiful thing that's been studied. Validation actually leads to reduced sensitivity of dinorphin receptors. So you become more resilient to pain and discomfort the more validated you are. And validation also leads to a larger boost of dopamine, which after the discomfort passes, gives you a lifted mood and energy. So you feel more cheerful and energetic. And so part of part of the challenge then is how to be internally validating, because it works on the inside too. And it doesn't have to come from the outside. So and you can learn to apply the same warmth and understanding to challenges when they come up. The opposite of that is to be I'm just running around here, Sharia. But if you want, tell me if we want to take this in a different direction.

SPEAKER_01 5:00

No, I think it's good. I was I did have a question, which was I was wondering. So you mentioned that uh embracing dinorphins, which is a thing of sacrifice and pain, uh leads to then a subsequent surge in dopamine, if there's any other ways to get that surge in dopamine besides the dinorphine.

SPEAKER_00 5:18

Well, in fact, all like forms of mastery will produce that kind of surge in dopamine. But there's a beautiful thing now, I don't have the slide projector here, you know, to show you some of the slides. But you have when you see that there's a large effect of dinorphine, that gets less and less over time with practice. And then the subsequent boost of dopamine gets sooner and sooner with practice. So gradually, then, once you've mastered a particular challenge, you just get dopamine. And then once you've really mastered it, now it's totally implicit, you don't really get much dopamine anymore. And then you need more challenge. So what you need then are ideals to inform the practice of these skills and mastery so that you can continually set new challenges for how you want to be. And when you set a new challenge, ideally there's an initial discomfort of awkwardness. So it's going to feel strange. So I always tell couples that if you really want to practice an ideal, you have to surprise your spouse with it. Practice it to a surprising degree. Or the, you know, if you're mutatis mutandis with anyone in your life. Try to think of doing it in such a way that you aim for the quality that you want to have. You're like, okay, now how can I surprise them with it? What that does is allows you to think in a new context and it opens up all these new possibilities. It's not just the same stimulus response, how we interact, and it's just the same every day. So, like, no, this gives you permission to try something new. And that idea of trying something new opens up all this new ground for practice.

SPEAKER_01 7:00

Great. So a lot of the questions that we got were about helping children navigate anxiety or maybe prevent anxiety or see anxiety in a new light. So uh we're talking here about uh helping kids or really anyone embrace the discomfort that goes along with challenge. Now can you relate that to anxiety and helping it? Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_00 7:20

So anxiety is if you're gonna if you're gonna give a chemical formula for anxiety, which is at least is a starting point to understand it, is adrenaline plus dimorphins. So how many people here love scary movies? You used it. Mark, what happened? So scary movies, why do some people love them and some people hate them? Okay, so what you get in a scary movie always, if it's a really scary movie, you get adrenaline. Right. The question is, does your adrenaline have dinorphins attached? If it does, you experience it aversively as anxiety. But if not, you experience it just as a thrill. So, and dinorphins are under voluntary control. You can deliberately welcome the adrenaline. And then the amount of dinorphins, you'll naturally get through it, and that will habituate with time and pretty fast. So that, and then you can come to love the bounce of dopamine that you get afterwards. But you always get, there is this, it's built into the brain. It's built into the liturgical cycle, right? There's the death and rebirth, there's the cross, there's a resurrection, there's the dinorphins, there's the dopamine. That the sacrifice actually is how you grow in the ideal. So you come to incarnate these things through this process of, and you don't have to go out of your way to embrace the pain. It's whatever is there in the practice of the ideals. So just to be consistent, to be caring, to be connected, to stay connected, there's always going to be a sacrifice involved in that. You know, and that can be seen as very deeply meaningful. But anyway, with anxiety is helping kids to learn to welcome adrenaline. So, and the adrenaline system learns a little more slowly than the dynordine system. But if you can be with them when they're anxious and just validate and normalize the adrenaline, you can help them to see that in fact this is what you want to perform at your best. So if they're nervous about a test, you can help them to accept the adrenaline that's there. Maybe because when emotions aren't accepted, when they're not felt, they go other places. So they go to the stomach. So the kid might then have an upset stomach or there's a problem. So, but that is just what happens when the emotions aren't fully felt. And why aren't they fully felt? Because of the dinorphins attached. So feelings are the things that dinorphins attached to. They don't attach to thoughts, they don't attach to situations. Which is a very interesting thing. So it's been said in CBT forever that situations are only a problem for us if those situations give rise to thoughts, particularly negative thoughts. But then it was also said these thoughts are only a problem if they give rise to feelings that we're unwilling to have. But now we understand much more how that actually works. So if the child is unwilling to have the feeling of adrenaline, unwilling to have that feeling of anxiety, anxiety is just adrenaline with a negative spin. So what they need first is connection. Just to validate the discomfort and to normalize it. So you can see that this is actually a gift you're being given so that you can do better on the test. You have to welcome it. And say mentally, this idea of reframing is bring it on. You know, bring it on means that you can now see how you can utilize it. So there have been all these studies that have been done, you know, with people taking tests and having anxiety. And teaching them to welcome the adrenaline is a game changer for their performance, too. But they also report less anxiety, even though if you measure their adrenaline, it's higher than the people who aren't trying to. Because actually, if you try to suppress it, you can do a little bit of suppression, but it stays negative. But if you welcome it, it goes higher. Now, just to say what I'm thinking about, why I'm thinking of this. The um the mistaken use of reframing in a couple setting or in a family setting is to use it as an answer to pain. So someone's suffering and you teach them how to reframe. That's not the way to do it. Right? So if someone's suffering, what they need actually is mindfulness from you. That's what the bond is. The bond is a shared attention. And so they can be in your attention and stay in your attention and just be held by your attention. It's a kind of mindfulness. So there's this wonderful form of therapy for anxiety disorders in kids called parent-child interaction therapy, which is simply teaching parents to spend five minutes of undivided attention with their kids, not doing anything and not tweaking their behavior in any way, not questioning them in any way, just being affirming and warm. And that has efficacy for every anxiety disorder for kids, which is amazing. Uh, this other guy, Eli Lebowitz at Yale, he's at Yale Medical School, he uh has this whole program, which is as effective as cognitive behavioral therapy given by a trained therapist. And it's just something you train the mothers and fathers to do. And it's three steps. The first is compassion, which I've been talking about. You connect with the pain. The second is confidence that they can get through this and thrive. And the third, most important, no accommodation. You cannot give in to the anxiety at all. So his example is, for instance, as a child's at a summer camp and they're say it's you know 10 years old, they have terrible separation anxiety, they call home, they're desperate to be picked up. And he says, you have to say to them, I know this is hard for you. I'm sure you can be daring to introduce yourself to one new person in a day, and I'll see you on Sunday. That's the idea. But it's the no accommodation, it's actually the essential thing. And that's been shown that strategy used by parents intentionally is as effective as CVT for anxiety in kids.

SPEAKER_01 13:23

So with the the first one is compassion, which is what you were talking about earlier with uh connection and warmth and validation, especially in times of pain. Uh can you also just clip to help us better understand this to see what are the alternative approaches to that that parents might take in in dealing with the challenge? Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_00 13:43

So there are two ways. And in the parenting literature, these are the the two extremes that on this idea of connection. And it's how can the bond go wrong? Have you all heard of attachment theory? Yeah. So you know about anxious attachment and avoidant attachment and stable attachment, but in parenting styles, those are mirrored. So you have enmeshed parenting, and you have detached parenting, and then you have connected, like optimally connected parenting. So enmeshed parenting in the research, and this has been well replicated, is associated with the children then having an anxious attachment style. And avoidant the avoidant attachment style comes from more detached parenting. Uh it's not completely, there's met it's these things are multifactorial, you know, but there definitely is an association that's held up, right? And this is a really deep vein of research. But it's interesting when you look at what's going on with enmeshment and detachment. And they both are about pain. Right. And this is the strange thing that you wouldn't think of necessarily, but with detached parents, a child's pain is a problem that they ignore. And for the enmeshed parent, the child's pain is a problem that they solve. So instead of connecting through the pain, so pain makes us connectable. Yeah, and so when someone is really suffering, they are bondable. It's one of those beautiful things of the week coming up, is that our Lord Himself is suffering and bondable. And we can be validating and being empathic with his pain, that actually produces the strongest bond with him. So we can experience this in the next week. But pain makes us bondable. So when a child is in pain, if you try to solve the pain by making it your own, that now is a common problem you're trying to solve, that's enmeasurement. So the goal is then to get rid of the pain. But that's not validating the person. That's actually not empathy. It's a kind of misguided sympathy where now the feelings have become one. It's better than apathy, probably. Apathy produces detachment. You know, but the goal is in the middle, the real empathy. Because empathy is a charged word, I just use compassion because at least that's like a that's in scripture. Compassion is a good word. So uh and it's not so potentially laden with problems. And so the but it's interesting to think that what causes enmeshment is when there's this shared emotional life caused by kind of a shared dinorphine state. And as soon as the child is in a bad mood and suffering, then the then the parent is in a bad mood and suffering. What compassion allows you to do is to separate the right distance from the pain. But this is true even on the inside. If we get immersed in a pain state, which can happen when you're very irritable, you're in a bad mood, you're just you're having a something is not going well. When you get stuck, if you are unwilling to experience it and fighting it, you get it's enmeshment, actually. But what happens is you get blended with it, is what we say in psychology. And compassion is how you unblend from your own pain. And if you're compassionate with it, now you can feel it willingly instead of fighting it unwillingly. The more unwilling we are to feel pain, the more it drives automated behavior and tunnel vision. But if you're stuck in a bad mood and in a negative view of things, the way you get out is actually with compassion on the inside. And to learn to welcome the pain, to learn to like normalize it, let yourself feel it. Validation works even when done on one's own. Yeah. So to be willing to have the pain means that you can welcome it, you can even savor the feeling, whatever it is. The height is you can pass love through it. So you're lovingly offering it. If you can pass love through it, now the pain becomes a way of loving. Love is the shortcut to the highest dopamine. Now, meaning gives purpose to this, and it feels bearable and beautiful. And then it feels temporary. When people are stuck in the trying to escape the dinorphins, uh, there's this funny time thing that happens in the brain, which we can experience, which is called here we go again. Time becomes cyclical. It's very strange, but you we all experience it. It's like, oh, here it is again. It's happening again. That cyclical time is a sign that we have gotten trapped in one of these dimorphic loops. And we talk about in the recent episodes of the podcast, the dorsal striatum. That's the hallmark of it being activated. Here we go again. It's the same thing over and over. So the way you break that is with reframing and mindfulness of challenge.

SPEAKER_01 19:01

So I imagine that uh, you know, always being open to your child being in pain is, I mean, it has its limits, and we're applying this to specific things like doesn't want, you know, doesn't like dinner.

SPEAKER_00 19:14

Pain is good for them. You know, a fever of 105, you might want to problem solve a little bit. So yeah. Yeah. So yeah, so it but within, you know, but for the ordinary pains, the best per like the whole purpose of having consistent family practices is to actually produce a little bit of pain. And that keeps their mood up. So good family practices keep a good tone in the house. It stays people stay cheerful. Uh no dinner table can be really cheerful with picky eaters. Picky eating is the number one cause of mental illness. So trust me on this. There's a book called The Better Brain by Bonnie Kaplan, which shows how the brain is the organ in the body most sensitive to nutritional status. So if the diet, I mean, when I see, I I I have I see sometimes, I see um, you know, um my my patients, their children who have attention deficit and issues, I have, in every single case, it seems, diet is a huge issue. If you're living on pizza rolls, like there's a good chance you'll have ADHD. So I tell people, ADHD is a nutritional deficiency until proven otherwise. Or a sleep deficiency, which is another screen issue. If screens are keeping kids awake, sleep deprivation and ADHD are indistinguishable. Maybe they are different, but you cannot tell which it is until you ensure the child is getting sleep. And the way to make sure they're getting good sleep is actually food. That they eat a wide variety of whole foods. Because you need all the nutrients to make all the neurotransmitters to be able to sleep well. So I do believe that in fact we have to take nutrition very seriously. And so picky eating uh is one of these things where children cannot help themselves. There needs to be an adult who can help them to suffer the pain. We know that you don't like this and we know it's tough. But we're sure that you're gonna be able to be brave in trying new foods eventually. And this is all we're serving. And there's no other food. And you and so one test of you know enmeshment is can you let your child go to bed hungry? You should be able to and be able to sleep yourself. So, but this idea is like it's great that kids get hungry. If they don't eat, fine. But their nutritional status will improve if you help them to overcome being a picky eater. So there's um there's a great uh book called Bringing Up Baby. Has anyone read that? It's like the same idea, right? Yeah, people love this book. A friend of mine is just telling me that when his wife read the book, it's about how French mothers teach their children how to eat. And the short thing is they have no toleration for picky eating at all. You know, and they don't give snacks. They're not giving snacks and sugar, and they don't have dessert all the time. They I think that's a much better way of I don't think that like dessert should be a reward for eating the meal. I also don't think kids should have to clean the plate. You know, so you they shouldn't be forced to eat, but it's an option, and here's what we're serving. And there's actually a lot of data behind that.

SPEAKER_01 22:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 22:32

So great.

SPEAKER_01 22:33

I was gonna ask about what you thought about the clean plate rule and just rules in general.

SPEAKER_00 22:38

Yeah, just telling kids like you have to eat those to me seems kind of coercive. Uh but this is healthy for you. This is good. I'm sure that eventually you're gonna like it. And this idea of an acquired taste, I like that idea. And acquired taste means, yeah, we don't like it at first. But stick with it and you'll come to like it.

SPEAKER_01 22:55

So on the topic of ADD, ADHD, I'm not exactly sure what the difference is, but uh is uh is that something that can be improved with uh doing homework, trying to focus in your work? Like focus is a skill that you can improve in ADHD, is that they have a lower ability to focus, and we just need to work on that through practice.

SPEAKER_00 23:16

Yeah, I think another thing that it that does play a large role is their um their theory of how do they get better at things. It would be wonderful them to see their work in school as a game that's winnable. So that they can start to get into like, okay, now I'm just gonna get better and better at practicing this. Rather than seeing it as a test of intelligence. So there's a lot of mischief done in the idea of IQ. Yeah, IQ is meant to be constantly changing. You know, it's measured age divided by actual age, which are both changing. So it's like the idea is it's not meant to be a fixed number. There are no brains, I'm convinced, that are essentially better at math than other brains. What you have, and there's research in this, is the framing of math. Do you hate math? Do you dread math? Well, then you're not going to see it as a skill to get better at. But if you see every problem as a kind of skill and you're just going to get better at it, it becomes a game. And then you can do it better and better and better. So I think that there is something in ADHD that resembles chronic PTSD, where the children are often in threat mode and they're kind of stuck in threat mode. And they seem to have the neurological profile of someone in threat mode. So there is something about it that that might be related to the nutritional things, because that's very tied to anxiety as well. Uh and it might be related to adverse experiences, you know, that that there is a relationship with ADHD. Uh but so I think none of these things are totally simple. Uh my concern is with stimulants, because if it's a nutritional issue, stimulants as a rule decrease nutritional status because they don't eat as much and they get pickier. So that you don't want that. So then they get more and more picky. And then so it's like they are helpful in the moment, but in the course of things, so, and this is the misuse of medicine in psychiatry, particularly child psychiatry, there's no off-ramp. Things are started with no off-ramp. You know, there should always be an off-ramp. There should be a titration down that's built in. So we could see what they're like with a little bit better functioning, and then find other ways of keeping them there. But I do think that for that to change their to help them to reframe the problems that they're coming up with in school, I think is a is a big part of the issue as well.

SPEAKER_01 25:38

So now we're kind of getting into the second uh step here. We have uh compassion, confidence, and no accommodation is kind of the three. Yeah. Uh so because I think with uh with compassion, we're being warm and validating when they're facing a problem or when they're feeling pain. But then we also want to help them to uh develop the capacity to overcome the pain on their own, right? Overcome the challenge on their own. So that's where we get into confidence and helping them to develop skills, especially informed by ideals.

SPEAKER_00 26:10

So Yeah, that's right. So confidence is this expectation that you have that they can grow through deliberate practice. Right. So confidence, that's what it comes down to. It's about expectations. So, and that you know that especially even you know when there's awkwardness, that awkwardness is part of a learning curve. Things are awkward at first, but they get easier with practice. And if we can break down, if something is too hard, then we break it down into smaller steps. So if you can know how to navigate a challenge step by step, you know, so that you can successfully get through it. And what does success look like? Not the outcome, an ideal. What does it look like to thrive in the challenge? That it brings out your best and make you better, make you a better person. That will give you the best outcomes, but aiming for outcomes ends up making people too demanding. So the hallmark of parents who are too demanding is an outcomes focus, and there's no ideals. The opposite of that are indulgent parents. You know, and indulgent parents have no expectations for the children. So the kid, there's no there's no tension, there's no expectation that they're gonna be growing, and that this is what they need to be doing, and that these challenges they're facing are good for them. And there's social challenges at school. How can this bring out their best? There's a particularly hard teacher, wonderful. This is good for you. We know it's painful, we don't expect you to get perfect grades. We just want you to see what it's like to make the most of this. Let's make the most of it and then make it easier for them. So this all comes down to Albert Bandura's concept of self-efficacy, you know, which is he's the third most ref, you know, cited psychologist in history. Uh, he is uh after Skinner and Piaget. Uh he is uh his work is very solid and extremely replicated. Self-efficacy is what I've defined here as confidence. It's just the expectation you have that you can successfully navigate a challenge step by step. And so to help children become more confident is to teach them how to break challenges into steps. And then each step is a skill they get better at. That's why musical instruments and acting and sports uh and foreign languages, all of them involve an initial awkwardness. And what we would like the best thing we can do for children's confidence is to celebrate awkwardness as a learning curve. It's okay to not be good at this right away. So this idea that I like Andrews Erickson, as we've talked about this roof a number of times, his book Peak. Uh his this book Peak is dedicated to investigating child prodigies and debunking them. There are no child prodigies. There are no inherent skills and talents, which is interesting. He investigated every case, for like 40 years. He's a Swedish researcher. Um, and what he found was you can always explain the level of excellence attained by the kind of practice, the deliberate practice they had when they were young. And the children learned to love improving in this. And they did it more and more. Children can obsessively improve if they get directed. And that's what some children love doing with different things, and they became prodigies at it. So he ends up saying that don't think of children as having particular gifts and talents. The primordial gift is human nature itself that is perfectible in endless ways. So wonderful. I don't know if he says it exactly like that, but it's pretty close, you know, to how he how he frames it. Uh so that idea of having a growth mindset, Carol Dweck is another one of my favorites on this topic. You know, because we can all look at kids, being understanding with kids is not about giving them accurate fixed labels. That's not the exercise of being understanding. Being understanding is being warm and responsive when they're suffering. That's so it's more mindfulness, actually. You know, and but here it's like we want to be helping them to see whatever outcome happened, that's okay. And this is a starting point. And if you want to improve in this, we will support you. But not that like we're gonna force you to improve in these things either. There should be a sense of freedom, you know, but that there's a sense of confidence that if you put your mind to this, we're gonna help you do well with it. That's great.

SPEAKER_01 30:54

So you make it sound really easy, and one of the questions is about uh, you know, after 10 hours of taking care of the kids, being kind and patient the whole time, I feel uh I can't regulate my emotions anymore. So what do we do? No, that's exactly right.

SPEAKER_00 31:10

So um that's it's it's a great question. Uh the I would say that the there needs to be a way of making that moment beautiful. There has to be a way of thinking of what are the precise what are the qualities I would most want to have in that moment. So to sustain motivation, you need an inexhaustible quality to aim for. You need an inexhaustible ideal. It can't be about attaining certain outcomes. So the way outcomes work and ideals work with dopamine is that when you achieve an outcome like getting something checked off on your to-do list, you get a little bit of dopamine, but then it's gone. So that can keep you checking things, but then life becomes a checklist. Right? So that's what causes burnout. Burnout is when a person has had a regular diet of small dopamine hits. There needs to be progress that is unlimited. That is, you're making, but you're actually making progress along that way. That you can tell that you're growing in an important way by doing this. So you're aiming for a process goal, not an outcome goal. And the process goal, the ideal, actually gives you endless dopamine. Because as long as you see you're making progress, you get more and more dopamine. So traditionally, we've talked about the purgative way, the illuminative way, and the unitive way. So the purgative way is when you're breaking vicious cycles. And that comes down primarily to embracing the discomfort. Because all of those bad habits that are automatically done, the addictive type habits, all of that, and any regularly like having emotional outbreaks or say the yelling, that that's that's it's the exact same machinery as addiction. Right. Because there's some kind of um there's a stimulus response, there's reactivity, there's automation. It happens quickly with tunnel vision, right? With insensitivity to outcomes. That's all the hallmarks of addiction. That's and so this is what we call the dorsal shift. You know, that you go from being in a normal kind of state to the dorsal shift where now you're reactive. So how do you go back? How do you reverse that? And the first thing you need to do is change the context. In intellectually, that's reframing. If you can see this setting where I normally, where this normally happens, this is gonna be my new arena. And that's the main thing I'm gonna be focused on is what I can do new and different in that moment. What's a new thing I could practice? This intention to implement a new practice for your brain is a completely new context that will not trigger the same automated response. Reframing shifts the context enough that you do not kick in stimulus response behaviors. So that's actually the solution to this. So this is about being willing to like to feel the pain, to feel the stress, and to think what do I most want to be like in this moment? And it will be hardest at first, but then it gets easier and easier and easier. You have to be on a trajectory. If you cannot see a trajectory of growth, you are in here we go again, a carousel of time. And it's just gonna keep happening and happening. In fact, the question is a carousel of time, it just keeps happening. Every day is cyclical, right? And so that's just a sign of one of these dynamics we're talking about. Um it may so you know it could be that you think that um I am convinced that reframing takes no effort. It takes being deliberate. But trying to be deliberate when you're in a tunnel takes enormous effort. Trying to be mindful of outcomes of your behavior while you're in a tunnel takes enormous effort. That is draining. But to reframe in advance takes no effort. Yeah, and and to be trying to do one thing differently takes very little effort. Mindfulness actually takes no effort. So, yes, it's it sounds easy, but if we approach these things in the right way with a growth mindset, the growth mindset is continually renewing the context so you don't fall into automated habits. It's continually undoing it. And then it is an easier way of living, right? So the better we get at aiming for ideals, which is the illuminative way, the more we can start to think of how this is now merging into just being loving all day long. And there's a way of being loving in the morning, there's a way of being loving in the midday, there's a way of being loving in the end of the day. And that's actually the unitive way, which has the least effort of all the stages of the spiritual life, but it is the most deliberate, the most meritorious. It has the most number of internal acts, because everything is more deliberate, because love is deliberate. So the goal is to get to a point where, yes, we're aiming for these very high goals, which is being loving in every circumstance. But I think that in the end it's actually easier.

SPEAKER_01 36:50

So for someone who maybe has just tons of tasks, small things to do, who you might feel like you're you know swimming against the current or drinking things. Okay, what do I actually do? Should I in the morning, should I set apart some time to reframe everything that's going to happen in advance? Or because then once I get into the day, it's tunnel vision and I just feel, you know, it's it's tough to then shift gears and get back on track. How do I how do I do that?

SPEAKER_00 37:18

Yeah, this is where, well, there's there's no perfect answer, but there's consistent practices go a long way. So if you had a regular practice of meditation that you did every morning for a certain number of minutes, and in that time you're trying to think, like, what can you do to be most loving today? That would be a wonderful use of that. So a time of morning prayer is a wonderful time to be thinking of pre-framing the entire day. Right? And so that would be a great use. If you can be finding little ways of incorporating prayer throughout the day, that would be another wonderful practice. So the practice of the faith actually teaches us all the necessary ingredients to work in a more recollected way. So, but recollection doesn't take any more effort. To be more recollected might just mean being more silent. Trying to be interiorly silent. Yeah, with not saying the children should be silent, right? But but that we can interior when you know, to try to practice a sense of just mindfully attending, mindfully being present. Uh one of the problems, you know, if people are too focused on order in the home is they become rigid. And what happens with that is just like being too demanding. There's no ideals in it. Charity is the source of true order. You know, he said charity in order within me. It says in the Song of Songs. Charity is ordered of its very nature. Charity sometimes requires disorder in the home. It's better to focus on the bond and let there be some chaos. You know, and but as long as the bond is being prioritized. So the fundamental thing is always the bond. So, and trying to strengthen the bond with each child. Because how bondable your child is is largely determined by how bondable they are with you. And that is the very substance that charity will activate. Charity is going to be the exercise of their capacity of bonding. So the natural ability to form bonds with others is raised to a supernatural level by charity. Charity is the bond with God. So it's the loving him and dwelling with him all day. So that sense of charity as the bond, you see, then helping the children to form healthy bonds means we always put the bond first. And when there's problems, you first connect with the child and then redirect. That's Daniel Siegel's language. But it fits really well with this idea. So connection is always first. Then have high expectations for what you do expect of them, because your expectations are a gift, as long as they're realistic and you have a sense of a trajectory, how they're going to get there. And then these consistent practices in the home. And that's where discipline comes in. So there is probably no topic in parenting as confusing right now as discipline. You know, if you spank a child, they will be taken away. Right. I mean, it's like practically many plus in Massachusetts, it's like that. Yeah, it's like I'm a mandatory reporter for spankers in Massachusetts. So don't tell me if you spank. There is no data against spanking. I'm not going to say I'm in favor of spanking, because I'd lose my license. Right? And I'm not, I actually don't think it's great. But just to say, like when you look at the research worldwide, it does not harm the bond at all. And in cultures where spanking is common, you see strong bonds. So these things don't have to be against each other. You know, I think we have this maybe caricature, you know, of mommy dearest. That was like a 1980s movie. I don't know if anyone saw that. Yeah, which is which is a horrifying movie, you know, very brutal mother. Uh so um but I think this this idea is that discipline, are timeouts okay? Like, okay, let's say spanking. We're not gonna we're let's say we're not gonna do spanking. Great. Timeouts, is it okay to do timeouts? You have all these traumatologists now on YouTube, you know, saying that if you, you know, Gabriel Mate, if you, you know, give you if you force your children to do, you know, to be alone when they're neat, you know, when they're melting down, you're traumatizing them again. Is that true? That's absolutely not true. There's no data on that. What seems to be the case, and what the research does support, is that when children are emotional, giving them space to calm down is the kindest thing you can do. And the probably the worst thing you can do is to keep talking. Children get overloaded by speech. So there's a wonderful book, which Jonathan Haidt in Anxious Generation says is his favorite parenting book. It's One, Two, Three Magic by Thomas Phelan. Phalan is a Ph. One, two, three magic is about how do you discipline kids. And so let's say the child is doing, let's say the child is whining. Whining is one of those obnoxious behaviors that has to be ended. So he says that parents have three roles. One is to stop obnoxious behaviors, the second is to help them to build good habits, and the third is to build the bond. Now, he's just a pediatrician and psychologist. But what he just reproduced is the purgative way, the illuminative way, and the unitive way, which is very interesting. You have to first stop the vicious cycles, start the virtuous cycles, and then they get simplified over time into love. So, but that idea, so what do you do with children then when they start whining? You say that's a one. Five seconds of silence after. And it's the silence after that is the powerful part. Because the mistake parents would do is that's a one, you keep doing this, this isn't right, you shouldn't, and all of that's adding fuel to the fire. And he said, if you just say that's a one, if g give them five or more seconds to think. And this starts working at age two. It stops at age 12. Uh so but it starts working at age two. Actually, it works on high schoolers. It doesn't really. That's great. So but it's the silence after that lets them think. Wait a second, what did I just do? And then they identify it, and then they can stop doing it. And then you just make sure you connect. Yeah, and and get them redirected. So and then but they see they keep whining, that's a two. Five seconds of silence. Yeah, and then after a couple of minutes, you can give them a three. And then it's a timeout. And it's usually one minute per year of life. So something like that. Uh it's a good book. One, two, three magic. I I recommend, I recommend taking it and taking a deep dive. Knowing how to, he says that if you don't enjoy being with your children, it's usually an issue of discipline. And knowing how to discipline them well will make your children enjoyable again. And he's worked with thousands of families. And what they all say basically, and you see the reviews on Amazon are very good, which is a nice way of telling, you know, but uh the it is actually a game changer. And then parents love being with their kids again. So a lot of times, just giving in to the whining is not being connected and compassionate. It's just problem solving, whatever the pain is. It's not having high expectations, you know, and that's breaking your whatever your consistent rule was. So it's actually against connection, confidence, and consistency. So that's precisely the kind of thing where the shaping has to take place. But bit by bit, not all at once. Try to have easier victories at first so that they're redirected, you know, and then you can you can start kind of building momentum with them. That's great.

SPEAKER_01 45:26

So uh those are the three connection, confidence, consistency, consistency, which is no accommodation.

SPEAKER_00 45:32

You don't accommodate whining, you don't, you know, but the idea of is there what do we do at bedtime? You stay in bed, right? You don't come out again. Like that's that's important. What do you do at at dinner? No screens. You know, so you never have screens at dinner. You know, and we at dinner we pay attention to each other rather than our phones or computers or iPads. Um so these like there are pretty good, like healthy best practices for families. You know, we we eat what's served without complaining and expressing gratitude. That'd be a wonderful kind of practice to have. But those practices make life for children predictable. Interesting that being lax on these things is as anxiety-provoking for kids as being rigid. Both laxity and rigidity produce anxiety. Both indulgence and demandingness with expectations, being unrealistically demanding and being too indulgent, produce anxiety. Both enmeshment and detachment produce anxiety. So we're looking through these things. These are the three curvilinear uh findings of developmental psychology. The the connectedness and the expectations, which I call confidence, having good confidence, and then the consistent practice. Those are the three things where you can have too much or too little, and there's something in between that you're trying to always aim for. Um interesting that each extreme produces anxiety as an outcome. And so I think that's one of the answers to the question: why is there so much anxiety? And in general, it's actually gentle parenting. Understood as no and no discipline, no rules. I'm sure you've all been on planes, you know, where there's an eight-year-old having a meltdown. You know, that's that's the sign of gentle parenting down the ride. So, and it's interesting that these kind of concepts, like I just everything I've just said, I told the residents that I teach at Harvard, you know, so I have a group of residents that are in psychiatry. Psychiatry residents are extremely left-wing. So they're they're very liberal. But and all these things, they loved hearing it and they agreed with everything. It's interesting that this is there is like a thirst right now for good perspectives on parenting. So um, so we actually, in optimal work, we built into the reframer the entire approach to parenting. So if you go to our reframer and and click reframe a challenge, it's one of the tools we have in Optimal Work, and you just say whatever the problem you have with the child, it will walk you through all these steps to be thinking through and then offering different things you can actually start working on with them. Uh because so much of this has to just be personalized. Anytime we have gotten in a in a carousel where now here we go again, it's very hard to think creatively. Creativity requires dopamine. And dinorphins directly counteract dopamine. So when we have pain and discomfort, we cannot think of doing things in a new way at that moment. So that's just is a but you can flip it around. Try to reframe, that takes a microsecond. Be welcoming of the discomfort, that takes a few more seconds, but not that much. And then you can start to be more creative again.

SPEAKER_01 48:58

So uh a question about the golden hour. Uh and uh we often talk about the golden hour as a way to practice reframing mindfulness and challenge so they they become habitual. And then when things get you know, in in a uh a task where you have more solitude or more quiet, then that way when you face a more difficult or demanding situation, then reframing mindfulness and challenge are habitual, and then you can you can more easily do it on a in a spontaneous situation. So uh for someone who's constantly facing a barrage of things, how can they uh what would be the equivalent of a golden hour uh for that person? This is in a day spent taking care of the home and children. Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_00 49:39

That's it, that's a great question. The golden hour um the purpose of the golden hour was actually to teach people how to bring ideals into their work. But it wasn't meant to help people do work per se. So it's not about productivity. Productivity is an a great benefit, it's an outcome. Having the hour of work done is great. But the real thing, I mean, all of those things are what I would call transitive goods. They pass out of you into the thing done. But the growth that's attained in the hour of work is intransitive. It stays in your soul and it's everlasting. You can make sempeternal gains through the everyday moments that come by. So you translate, you know, it's like translating something that has almost no worth or existence, which is now, it's one that you know that has no extension, has no duration, you know, and then translate it into something that's eternal. So that's what ideals do. Growing according to ideals is something that is permanently going to be with you forever. So helping people grow in ideals is helping them grow in sanctity, which is everlasting. So that was the goal of the golden hour, is to teach people how to really grow in a lasting way by how they do an hour of work. Along the way, you're teaching them how to be reframing the challenges that come up, but precisely because you want them eventually to bring higher and higher ideals into it. So that you can eventually fit the highest ideal into the smallest action. You know, so you can have this in it's about the intensive incitivity of it, how intense it is, rather than the how extensive it is. So it's not about extensive impact, it was this intensive quality, you know, that you do it with greater and greater love ultimately. So, but for most of us, our work does have recurring hours. But for others, it has recurring rhythms and moments. So there's gonna be a rhythm to the day, there's gonna be these recurring moments. That is what has to be reframed. That's what you had to be prepared to be mindful in the course of it. So it's better to think of if you could just it's like you aim first to see what is the thing I want to practice today. Like what's gonna be the moment of practice? And you can think of that in the morning. And just choose one of the carousel issues that happens in your life. It just keeps happening again and again. That now, what is the pain I want to be especially mindful of, to be welcoming with, to be warm and greeting? And there's gonna be some species of pain you can get ready to embrace. Right? And then to be thinking of the game, which is now that once I embrace that, what would that free me up to do? How could I do this in a new and better way? That's it. It just takes a few moments to do it in the morning. But if you can target a recurring one of these things that recurs frequently in your life that's part of the rhythm, that is accomplishing the same idea as the golden hour. Because I was seeing hours of work as what recurs. And if the hour of work recurs again and again, and you can change how someone does an hour of work, that change is multiplied every day, every week, every month, every year. So changing how someone does an hour of work is the most effective and fast way of building the skills of reframing and mindfulness and setting challenges. But it can be done in any kind of setting. So I say target a rhythm, target something recurring.

SPEAKER_01 53:24

Can you give an advice to help us be more detached from outcomes?

SPEAKER_00 53:33

Well, if you had the right outcomes in mind, it would be okay. So this is where so sometimes routines and outcomes have to be sacrificed for the sake of charity. Right. And so even order in the home has to be sacrificed for the sake of charity, right? So there are times when that that that's needed. Where enforcing something would would fray something at that moment, right? So charity is the ultimate rule, right? Um, so we couldn't even really um, yeah. So charity tells us where can we make sacrifices, because it gives the meaning why, um, and what is worth sacrificing. So I think that there's no universal answer, but detachment is really a willingness to sacrifice things for the sake of love. So the willingness to make sacrifices, if it's not helping you to be loving, if it's not love a way of loving God, then you should have this total willingness to let go of it because it will be impeding love of God. It will be harming bonds. So there is so charity is the ultimate judge of all these things in life. And then charity is what actually guides prudence. So it's what makes us prudent in the long run, meaning eternal life.

SPEAKER_01 55:09

Uh one more question. All right. Uh which is I'm interested in introducing my children to optimal work. Uh, do you have any advice for presenting these ideas to high school or even elementary-aged kids?

SPEAKER_00 55:22

I would my main thing would be if um if you can start to think of how to present ideals to children. So, and to get them excited about so one of the one of the ideals children learn the earliest is being tidy. I love that word. Tidy. It's so tidy. It has nothing, it's is is it's so compact. And it's perfect for kids. And being a good sport and being sharing, and learning how what you're actually teaching them is the essentials of the faith. That that that when ideals are put in the front of family life, children are the most likely to continue practicing their faith. So the consistency of practice is a function of self-motivation. And self-motivation is very tied to this idea that you have given a why behind everything. And the why is what transmits the faith. And ideals are a why. So the main thing is learning how to express ideals in a language that children can understand. And uh and I think that an optimal work, a reframer, um, we've been teaching it age appropriate ideals, uh, so that we can we can actually help too with thinking of that list. Thank you both.