TRANSCRIPT LECTURE 4

Neuroticism:
Volatility &
Withdrawal
Lecture 4

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 TRANSCRIPT LECTURE 4

0:05
Alright, so lecture 5. Well, we already talked about positive emotion in relationship to
extroversion, and now we’re going to turn to negative emotion, and negative emotion is basically
what defines neuroticism, which is sometimes known as negative emotionality. So, I’ll let you
know first the flavors of negative emotion, and then we’ll differentiate that a bit, but we’ll start
with the aspects of the traits.

0:36
The overall Big Five trait is neuroticism, and the two aspects are withdrawal and volatility.
Withdrawal. Make friends easily, reversed. Hard to get to know, keep others at a distance,
reveal little about myself.

0:57
Uh-oh, that’s not right. I have to stop for a sec. There’s a mistake in this. Give me one second
to fix this. I have to get a different disc. I’ll be back in one minute. An error in my notes, I
transcribed some separately, so I have to find them. It’s relatively trivial. I duplicated part of
[audio disruption].

[Speaker off mic].

2:02
Yes, I’ll just start right from the beginning again.

[Speaker off mic].

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2:36
--a big part of what’s made the spread of these ideas possible. It also has complications that
some of you may have been following in recent weeks. People will have great support on
different social platforms and different support platforms. Sometimes they’ll find themselves all
on the same platform, so how do you sort of engineer some non-fragility into that process.

3:01
So, these are all things to kind of consider, and then how to make folks that aren’t supporters
feel like they’re doing something worthwhile and getting something for that.

3:11
Not everybody gets to come sit in a room with [audio disruption] all day long. Cool.

3:17
Yes. Ready? Alright. Okay, so this is lecture 4 on neuroticism, and neuroticism is the partner
to positive emotion, so positive emotion is the extroversion dimension, and neuroticism which is
sometimes known as negative emotionality is its negative pattern.

3:40
Generally speaking, we’re more sensitive to negative emotion than to positive emotion, and you
can tell this if you do your experiments properly because people are hurt more by a loss of a
given magnitude than they are rewarded by a gain of the same magnitude. So, they’ll pay more
to forestall the loss than they will to accrue the gain.

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4:03
Then, that skew, there’s going to be individual differences in that skew, the more extroverted
someone is and the less neurotic, the more oriented they are towards gain, and the less
oriented they are towards forestalling loss. So, you can see that there are benefits to
positioning on every element of that distribution.

4:26
Neuroticism as a trait is broken down into two aspects: withdrawal and volatility. Withdrawal I
would say is associated with the animal behavior of freezing. You don’t want to move. Why do
animals freeze? They freeze because they feel that they’re likely to be detected by a predator,
so there’s something terrible out there that’s lurking that’s carnivorous and dangerous, and your
best bet is just to not move. It’s not a pleasant experience, for obvious reasons.

5:02
It’s also associated, even though you’re not moving, it’s also associated with physiological
hyper-preparation because an animal that’s frozen in place, it’s not like their heart rate isn’t up,
way up. Your heart rate goes up because your muscles prepare to move. That’s why our heart
rate is associated with emotion because it prepares your muscles to move.

5:23
So, when you’re frozen like that, you’re also prepared to dart in any direction as necessary, a
very high intensity state, a very unpleasant one. So, that’s withdrawal, freezing like a deer
caught in the headlights. I guess that’s a good way of thinking about it.

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5:41
Then, volatility. Volatility is more, I think it’s probably associated with defensive aggression.
There’s predatory aggression when you’re after something or someone for something, but
there’s defensive aggression when you feel that you’re just rejecting attempts to injure you.
Defensive aggression, that’s actually a hypothalamic function. It’s way deep down in there.

6:04
People who are volatile are touchy, so they’re more likely to hyper-respond to a negative
comment, for example. You’re kind of volatile if you’re one of those people that curses a fair bit
when you’re in your automobile. You know, you drive with—I’m like that, by the way, cursing all
the time when I’m driving. It’s just an appalling characterological fault, but you know you drive
with some people, and they’re just calm, and I wonder what’s wrong with you. Look at what’s
going on. How can you be calm?

6:34
So, if you have a volatile partner, it’s useful to know that not taking what they’re doing with
excessive seriousness is helpful to be detached a little bit and to understand that maybe it’s
more them than it is you and to step back. It’s not an easy thing to do.

6:52
It’s probably better for people who are high neuroticism to have partners that are low in
neuroticism. Most of the time, if you want a partner, you want them temperamentally matched
with you, but if you’re both high in neuroticism, then you’re divorced. I actually mean that
technically because the best personality predictor of divorce is neuroticism because neuroticism
is the best predictor of general unhappiness. So, it’s not that surprising.

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7:17
So, anyways, this is withdrawal. Seldom feel blue, reversed. Filled with doubts about things.
Feel comfortable with myself, reversed, so that’s self-consciousness. Self-consciousness loads
on neuroticism, by the way, so that’s interesting because self-consciousness is kind of a
cardinal human trait to be aware of ourselves and to be aware of our limitations in the world and
our mortality and all of that.

7:41
It’s something that in some sense we also regard as an accomplishment to be self-conscious as
compared to animals, but it loads directly on negative emotion. You know that because
generally you don’t like to be made self-conscious.

7:56
You say you’re on stage. You think well, I got really self-conscious. It’s not like people are
happy about that. I’ve hit a higher level of cognitive achievement. No, you start to, what do you
do, you start to reflect on your own insufficiencies and faults and limitations, something like that.
So, anyways, that’s what happens with self-consciousness.

8:16
Feel threatened easily. Feel depressed, it’s rarely feel depressed, reversed. Worry about
things. Easily discouraged; am not embarrassed easily, reversed. Become overwhelmed by
events, am afraid of many things. So, not pleasant and quite stressful. So, that’s withdrawal.

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8:45
Volatility, the second aspect. Get angry easily. That’s that defensive aggression. Rarely get
irritated, reversed. Get upset easily; keep my emotions under control, reversed. Change my
mood a lot, reversed. Rarely lose my composure, reversed. Am a person whose moods go up
and down easily. Am not easily annoyed, reversed. Getting easily agitated, can be stirred up
easily. It’s hyper-reactivity to frustration, disappointment, and pain.

9:20
So, it looks to me like the withdrawal aspect is more associated with freezing-related anxiety
and that the volatility aspect is more associated with sensitivity to punishment.

9:34
Okay, so now we can take negative emotion apart a little bit. Let me tell you, before we do that,
let me tell you a little bit more about the difference between someone who’s high neuroticism
and not. Worrying versus calm. Nervous versus at ease. High-strung versus relaxed. Insecure
versus secure. Self-pitying versus self-satisfied. Vulnerable versus hardy. Irritable, moody,
touchy.

10:01
So, now let’s take negative emotion apart. You can differentiate it, and the basic elements of
negative emotion, I’ll list a bunch of them. Frustration, that’s when you’re approaching a goal,
and you’re blocked. Disappointment, that’s when you’re pursuing a goal, and it doesn’t work.
Greif, that’s when you lose something.

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10:27
Pain, threat, uncertainty, anxiety, those are all somewhat separable systems, too, like the pain
system and the anxiety system actually function separately because anxiety is a marker for
pain. Imagine pain is a marker for damage, and anxiety is a marker for pain or for the possibility
of damage. So, you feel anxiety so that you don’t have to feel pain, but that doesn’t mean that
feeling anxiety is particularly—well, it’s not pleasant by any stretch of the imagination, but
perhaps it’s better to be anxious than to be hurt.

11:04
Well, that’s how you’ve evolved. You’ve evolved with that assumption. Better to be anxious
and careful than to be hurt and damaged, but you sill pay a pretty high price for that because
the thing is when you’re hurt, you’re only hurt when you’re hurt, but when you’re anxious you’re
anxious when you could be hurt, and you could be hurt all the time. That’s a big problem
because it means that there is reason to be anxious all the time, and there’s a lot more people
than you think that are anxious all time. That’s a very difficult thing to cope with, but that’s how
it goes.

11:35
So, pain related to emotion seems to be, first of all, you can identify them neurochemically
because a pain-related emotion can be quelled by opiates. Opiates are analgesic. You take
them for pain, but opiates work for things that aren’t exactly just physical pain. So, they reduce
frustration. They reduce disappointment. They reduce grief, so if you’re frustrated,
disappointed, and grieving, then opiates actually happen to be a pretty good drug for you.

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12:09
You think about the opiate epidemic in the United States and is association with phenomena like
unemployment which is also associated with depression and chronic pain. Depression seems
to be a pain-related condition. That’s my take on it, and a lot of people who have depression
also have chronic pain. Anyways, opiates are good drugs for pain.

12:37
Antidepressants are better drugs for depression, but they also work on pain. This is a useful
thing to know. If you know people who are in chronic pain, antidepressants are good
medications for the alleviation of long-term pain. There’s a drug called Cymbalta, in particular,
that’s good for that, and if people are extraordinarily stressed as well, antidepressants can help
with that.

13:03
Now, what antidepressants do is actually increase the levels of available serotonin by stopping
cells from taking it back up once it’s been used as a neurotransmitter, and higher levels of
serotonin are associated with less sensitivity to pain and negative emotion, and they’re also
associated with higher positioning in a dominant hierarchy, as we already talked about.

13:27
So, the rule seems to be that if you’re higher up in a positional hierarchy, and you’re life is more
stable, than it’s not necessary for you to feel as much negative emotion when anything painful
or threatening occurs because it isn’t evidence that’s as profound that everything is likely to fall
apart right now, but if you’re barely clinging on to the bottom of social reality, and one more bad
thing happens, that could be enough to tip you over the edge.

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13:55
So, anyways, what antidepressants appear to do is to increase serotonergic production and
mimic the state of being higher up in the hierarchy. My observation is being, and this is just
clinical observation, and it’s not supported by any relevant research because I don’t believe the
research has been done.

14:12
What I often did in my clinical practice when I was thinking about whether or not to recommend,
suggest let’s say, that the client have a conversation with their physician about antidepressants
because, of course psychologists can’t prescribe, was to find out how’s your life generally
speaking compared to other people’s lives.

14:36
Do you have a job that’s reasonably productive and reasonably secure? Are you about as
educated as you should be given your background and intelligence? Do you have some
friends? Do you have an intimate relationship? How’s your family life going? Are you suffering
from any severe physical or mental illnesses of the sort of non-psychogenic type? Do you make
reasonably productive use of your time out side of work, at least in principle?

15:04
If the answer to all those question was yes, but you were still depressed, then my observation
was you would respond well to antidepressants because something had gone wrong. You have
a life, but your emotional reactions aren’t with keeping with that reality. Then, you see people

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sometimes, too, you meet people or you seem in your clinical practice, and they answer all
those questions negatively.

15:31
They don’t have a job, they’re not as educated as they should be, so their probability of getting a
job is low. They don’t have any reliable friends. They don’t have an intimate relationship.
There’s nothing but trouble with their family. They have something wrong with them physically,
and they don’t know how to make structured and productive use of their time. It’s like, well
those people are often in very, very rough shape, as you might imagine.

15:52
Sometimes, maybe an antidepressant can help them forestall the probability of suicidal thought
or intent, but my experience has been that although the antidepressant might help them start to
get back on the right path, there was so much about their life that was in disarray that the
chemical means of treating it alone was insufficient.

16:13
So, that’s another useful thing to know, and I said already researchers haven’t done a good job
of differentiating those two things even though I think they’re of critical importance. You know
there’s some dispute about whether or not antidepressants work, and the answer seems to be
for some people they really work, and for other people, they don’t work at all.

16:31
I suspect there’s multiple reasons for that, but I do believe hat one of them has to do with
whether or not you’re actually depressed, which might mean that there’s a discrepancy between

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your actual position in the world and your perception of that position, or whether you just have
an appalling life, and so that’s also extraordinarily and painfully common.

16:56
Now, the pain-related emotions that are associated with frustration and disappointment and
damage tend to elicit anger and aggression whereas the anxiety-related emotions tend to elicit
freezing, but if you’re more prone to pain, you also tend to be more prone to anxiety and anger,
so you could imagine the negative emotion system as a tree with a thick trunk.

17:27
If you think about the branches as the cortex so the uppermost part of your neurological being is
the very, very powerful trunk that emerges. One of them is positive emotion, the other is
negative emotion, and the negative emotion trunk branches into defensive aggression and pain
sensitivity and anxiety, but they’re still fundamentally related to an underlying sensitivity to
negative emotion as such. That’s neuroticism.

17:54
So, why does neuroticism function that way? Why do we function that way? We can go back to
the idea of the story and the map that I used to outline the situation for extroversion. So,
imagine we’re going from point A to B again. What are the options? Well, the first thing might
be let’s say there was an obstacle in my path like, I don’t know, just a footstool or something like
that.

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18:21
Then, I take a look at that pathway, and I have an emotional response to it. It’s going to be a
pretty minimal emotional response because this is a trivial operation, but let’s say I wanted to
get to the podium, and there’s a footstool in my way right there. I look at this part of the
environment. I’m going to have slightly more negative emotion and slightly less positive
emotion. If I see an occluded pathway, even if it’s something trivial, then I would be—let’s say I
moved over here, and the footstool is no longer in my way.

18:50
When I look at that, it’s going to make me slightly happier and slightly less possessed by
negative emotion. That’s kind of a useful thing to know because one of the things that
determines negative emotion, maybe a primary thing, is how cluttered up is the pathway to your
goal. The more cluttered it is, the more negative. It makes sense because the more negative
emotion is a sign of cost, something like that.

19:17
If I can move right from where I am to where I’m going, straight, that’s a low-cost solution, but if
my path is full of obstacles, then I have to meander around, and that means that I’m burning
more resources to gain whatever I’m trying to gain. So, obviously, I should be less happy and
more displeased about that.

19:37
So, one of the things that I’ve recommended to people that’s becoming sort of absurdly well
known for how simple and obvious it is that they start by cleaning up their rooms. It’s actually a

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useful mental health exercise because it is the case that landscapes that are cluttered by
obstacles produce negative emotion.

19:59
So, maybe it’s not that easy for you. I say straighten out your life, it’s like oh God, straighten out
my life. How am I going to do that? It’s complicated. It’s like well, let’s make it simple. Let’s
focus on something straightforward. Like, what sort of shape is your room in? Well, it’s a
complete disaster. It’s like well, how about the closet? I haven’t touched it for five years. How
about the left hand side of your closet. Could you do—really, I’m dead serious about it because
especially if you’re dealing with someone who’s depressed, it’s like I could never face my closet.
It’s like well, could you pick up two pieces of clothing this week and only throw one on the
ground because that would constitute an improvement?

20:42
I’m dead serious. What you do in behavior therapy, especially when you’re dealing with
depressed people, you imagine that hierarchy I talked about, a good person all the way down to
implementable actions, and the implementable actions are very small. You say, well you can
barely do anything because you’re paralyzed with anxiety and pain. You can barely get out of
bed.

21:00
I had one client who was just depressed beyond belief, and he had his reasons. He was like 86,
and he’d fallen off a ladder, and he’d broken his neck, and they had to fuse it, and so it was
fused forward. He was in chronic pain. It’s like, you know, it’s no bloody wonder he was
depressed because well, for obvious reasons.

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21:20
He couldn’t get out of bed, so what did we do? Well, I started by trying to figure out if there’s
anything he could do. Could you read? No. Could you read anything? Well, I don’t think so.

21:35
Could you lift up a magazine from the bedside table? Yes. Could you look at the cover? Yes.
Could you do that for 15 seconds? Yes. It’s like well, what happens? That’s movement
forward isn’t it? The goal is to get out of bed hypothetically.

21:55
Well, what does it mean to get out of bed? Well, normally it means just to move your legs and
get out of bed, but maybe that’s way beyond you. Well, you decompose that into the smallest
possible implementable units. So, we started with him just picking up a magazine and looking
at it.

22:11
Well, that’s a move towards reading, but it was also an indication to him that he could actually
do something more than he was doing. Now, it wasn’t much. It wasn’t much in and of itself, but
it was also an indicator of something broader. Then, he’d read a sentence aloud, and then I’d
get him—I think I got him the next thing I think I got him to do is to swing one leg over so that it
was out from underneath the covers because that’s part of what you have to do if you’re going
to stand up.

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22:41
Then, I think—I don’t remember—it’s quite a long time ago that I did this. I think it took about
two weeks before I had him standing beside the bed, which is a lot different than laying there
doing nothing. Then, I think it as another week or so when he was walking up and down the
hallway. That’s a h*** of a lot different than being stuck in bed.

23:00
He was still in pain, although one of the best treatments for chronic pain is to get moving again.
Now, you have to talk to your physician because maybe you’re in one of those rare
circumstances where movement will make the pain and damage worse, but almost always the
treatment for chronic pain is get moving, and that’s part of the reason for that is, again, it has to
do with the relationship between the positive and the negative emotion system.

23:26
So, the negative emotion system is freezing you, but the positive emotion system which moves
you forward towards a goal releases dopamine. Dopamine is analgesic. Cocaine,
amphetamines, drugs like that, those are the drugs of abuse that people often use because they
potentiate positive emotion, so they potentiate positive emotion, but drugs that potentiate
positive emotion also alleviate pain.

23:53
It’s another thing to know. So, if you know somebody who has intractable cancer pain, the best
medication is a combination of opiates and psychomotor stimulants like cocaine and heroin.
Now, finding a doctor who will prescribe both of those is not possible, but you can use attention
deficit disorder medication, Ritalin and opiates together, and you might want to keep that in the

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back of your mind because maybe someone’s nearing the end of their life, and they’re in terrible
pain, and you crank the opiates up enough to reduce their pain, but they’re so sedated that then
they can’t function.

24:24
It’s like well, if you cut out a little bit with an amphetamine like Ritalin, which is kind of a low-level
amphetamine, then that potentiates the opiate effect because it’s analgesic in and of itself,
raises positive emotion, and increases alertness and activity. Remember, kids are more
extroverted are more active when they’re little, so that’s a useful thing to know. There may
come a time when you really want to know that.

24:48
Okay, so anyways, you know you get the person moving, and because now they have a goal,
and maybe the goal is nothing more than well, I’m going to get to the end of the hallway and
back, but it’s a goal. It’s something, and so now that they’re perceiving that goal, they can feel
some positive emotion, and the positive emotion that they accrue as a consequence of
successfully moving towards the goal is analgesic, and that helps treat the depression.

25:13
So, you can get sort of a virtual cycle going again. You know, we got the old guy back home. I
think it took two months. It might not have been that long, but that was pretty good from
basically catatonically frozen in bed to, as functional as you could hope for under the
circumstances, and so that’s a little bit on the treatment of like severe depression and anxiety.

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25:45
Alright. So, now we can talk about as well differences in childhood. You see the same thing in
childhood. You see the positive and negative emotion systems coming online both pretty early
You can see marked differences in children with regards to their anxiety levels and their
soothablity and their ability to tolerate frustration and disappointment, their proclivity to
withdrawal in social circumstances.

26:13
So, there’s a guy named Jerome Kagan who studied inhibited children, and he had a very
interesting methodology. He would, let me make sure I have this exactly right here. Children
were assessed in the lab at 21 months for behavior manifested to novel people, rooms, and
objects. So, they were 21 months old, and then he screened a fairly large number of children,
and he found the ones that were the most reactive negatively and the least reactive.

26:50
So, the more reactive kids, the ones who had more negative emotion showed what Kagan
described as long latencies to interact with unfamiliar adults. Okay, so how would that manifest
itself in an actual child?

27:04
So, I was at my son’s wedding a month and a half ago, and the boy that was going to be the
ring bearer was very, very probably both introverted and high neuroticism, so he’s an inhibited
kid. His father had to walk down the aisle with him. He was probably about 4, I would say, and
the little boy basically hid behind his father’s leg as he was walking up the aisle and would peek

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out. He was pretty much clamped to it, so he had dorsal contact, which is very soothing.

27:38
So, this is one of the things that’s kind of cool about pain-related negative emotion is that
physical proximity is analgesic. That’s another thing that’s useful to know.

27:47
So, what do you do when someone’s grieving? What can you do? You express your
condolences obviously, but about the only thing you can really do is give them a hug. That’s
what you do to a child that’s in pain as well. If they’re scraped their knee or whatever, you give
them a pat, or you give them a hug. That close, physical, proximal contact is actually analgesic.

28:10
That’s another useful thing to know because if you happen to be grieving, or if you know
someone who’s grieving, then one of the things that you could recommend to them is a
massage because that touch is actually going to be directly helpful to them.

28:22
You know, you soothe an irritable baby usually by rocking it but by touching it, and babies are
very, what would you say, part of their sense of security is actually established as a
consequence of close, physical, proximate touch. Babies actually die without touch. That was
discovered almost 100 years ago.

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28:47
So, even if they’re given enough food and enough liquids and enough shelter, if they’re not
attended to and touched, then a lot of them their gastrointestinal systems will shut down, and
they’ll die. Even if they don’t die, they’re unbelievably compromised in their future development.
So, touch is analgesic, so that’s kind of a useful thing to know.

29:08

So, anyways, this boy was clinging to his father’s leg, and he’d sort of peek out. If he would
have practiced it 20 times, he probably would have been able to detach himself from his father
and go down the aisle by himself, but the father would have had to do it really slowly.

29:25
Like maybe the next thing to do would have been say, look kid, I’m going to go five feet here,
and you can just grab on my leg, but the next five feet, all you can do is hold onto my pant leg.
So, you say to the kid do you think you can do that? The kid says yes.

29:40
Well, let’s try it, and then you see if he can do it. Then, you say okay well, for the next five feet,
you can hold on, but every third step, you have to let go. Then, you can grab on again.

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29:50
So, this is what you’re trying to do when you’re trying to potentiate development in people is you
want to find a step forward that actually constitutes an improvement. It has to be a step forward,
and it has to actually constitute improvement.

30:06
It can’t just be you’re good the way you are with a pat on the head. There has to be
improvement built into it, and then you want to find a magnitude of improvement where it’s
relatively probable that the person will do it correctly, not 100% because then it’s not challenging
enough.

30:24
It’s the same when you’re setting yourself a challenge. You don’t want to set the challenge so
that the probability that you’ll attain it is 100% because that means it’s something that you
already know how to do. Maybe you want to set the challenge so that your probability of
attaining it is 75% or something so that you have to stretch yourself. That stretching is actually
useful because it propels further development.

30:47
Anyways, so imagine you’re doing this with this kid, and maybe the third or fourth time you go
down the aisle, he’s five feed behind you, and the second time he can walk halfway down with
you sitting in the middle. That works. They call that habituation, but actually what’s happening
is the child is learning through observation that their lack of proximity to a figure of security does
not result in the apprehended catastrophe because the anxiety that freezes the kid is part of that
predation response that I described.

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31:21
There’s something terrible out there that might get me. The safest place to be is right here. It’s
like how do you find out if there’s something terrible out there to get you, and the answer is by
exploring a little bit and finding out what happens. So, all of that separation from the parent is,
in fact, that exploratory behavior, and that’s also something that’s very useful to know if you’re a
parent because what you want to do is facilitate that independent exploratory behavior to the
degree that that’s possible.

31:48
Now, Kagan found that these kids that took a long time to interact with new adults that would
cling and move slowly had other, what would you say, behavioral—there was other observable
behaviors as well. So, if there was an unfamiliar adult that entered the room, they’d stop
playing, and they’d stop talking, and that’s another example of that withdrawal and freezing
because if it’s a predatory response, and you’re freezing, you don’t want to be playing because
that’s pretty obvious, and you certainly don’t want to be talking because that’s going to identify
you.

32:25
So, a novel adult comes in, the kid freezes, stops playing. You can tell that your children aren’t
anxious and that they’re well adjusted to the circumstance if they’re playing. That’s also
unbelievably useful to know. Playing actually has its own circuit. It’s a mammalian behavior,
and it has its own biological circuitry, and it’s very easily disrupted by any other motivational
state.

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32:53
So, if you see a child playing, you know that all’s well with the world. So, one of the ways that
you can tell if your household is well structured, and you have small children, is that they’re
comfortable playing there because that indicates that everything else that they might need has
been taken care of because if it wasn’t it would disrupt the play behavior.

33:14
Long periods of proximity to the mother. So, then he analyzed, he took the kids who were the
most like that and the least like that, and then he followed them up for five years. The kids that
were reassessed at four years of age—remember this was from 21 months to four years, so
that’s a long time in child development. The behavioral differences between the groups were
preserved. You could still identify the kids who were more inhibited.

33:37
They were reassessed at five and a half, and the formerly inhibited children were all less
talkative and less interactive across all settings, laboratory testing situations, play with a single
unfamiliar peer, and a child’s school setting.

33:54
Reassessed again at seven and a half. So, Kagan established that there was long-term
temporal stability of high levels of negative emotion, and that goes along with the evidence
indicating that there’s pretty high test, retest reliability among the same person on scales of
neuroticism. So, if you’re high in negative emotion when you’re 20, you tend to be high in
negative emotion when you’re 30 and when you’re 40 comparatively speaking.

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34:20
What Kagan did discover, and this is also useful for people who have high levels of negative
emotion as adults, is that voluntary active exploration did normalize the children’s behavior. It
would move them closer up to the normal range. That’s exactly what you see when you’re
dealing with people who are anxious in a clinical setting.

34:43
So, what you do is you find out okay, what are you anxious about. Well, maybe I have no plan.
That’s certainly a source of anxiety. Let’s say you experience anxiety within your framework
going from point A to point B, but one mode of being anxious as well is to have no plan
whatsoever because then everything—like there’s no constraints on your anymore.

35:08

So, not only do you not experience much positive emotion because you can’t identify a goal an
move towards it, but because there’s no constraints on your perception, and everything’s there
to make you nervous, which is why maybe you have a job and you’re nervous about the job, but
if you’re unemployed, you’re a lot more nervous about that. It’s like the range of terrible
possibility is broader without a plan, something like that.

35:30
Then, when you have your plan, and you’re moving forward well, obstacles can get in your way,
and that causes negative emotion. The other thing that causes negative emotion is if something
unexpected occurs. So, that’s another thing is that negative emotion is not only related to pain
and the possibility of pain, but it’s also related to uncertainty, and that’s also partly why people
don’t like uncertainty.

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35:55
If you’re an anxious person, there’s something to be said for a routine. So, I would say two
ways of handling high levels of negative emotion, three. Good to have a plan, one that’s there’s
a reasonable probability of implementing successfully. You make the simplest plan that you can
that is also motivating, so something like that.

36:20
The next is don’t underestimate the utility of routine. It’s not such a bad idea to get up at the
same time every day, for example, and go to bed at the same time every day, and to eat at the
same time. If you have an anxious child, putting those islands of stability in their life is a
good—like, you don’t want to overdo it, but you want to scaffold that predictability so that they
can explore around the margins.

36:44
Then, the next is to expose yourself to unfamiliar situations voluntarily. One of the things that’s
happening in the universities and something Jonathan Haidt has written about recently is that
the idea seems to be that if you have people, young adults who are easily, let’s say they’re
volatile, and they experience high levels of withdrawal, what you want to do is protect them from
anything that would upset them. If you wanted to design a system that made anxious, neurotic
people worse, that’s what you would design because what you actually want to do with people
who are anxious is you want to identify the obstacles.

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37:23
It’s like okay, assume you have a plan first or not, maybe you make one. Once you have a plan,
it’s like well, what do you wee getting in your way, and what has emerged that’s been
unexpected and that’s making you nervous. So, you get the person to lay out what’s making
them nervous. Then you do with the adult the same thing that you do with the inhibited kid.

37:43
You say okay, here’s the obstacles that you’re encountering on your way to this desired goal,
and you’re avoiding the obstacles. They’re putting you in a position of withdrawal, or they’re
making you volatile. Can we break down your approach to the obstacles in such a way so that
we can find some way that you’re approaching that’s going to be valid and that’s going to be
productive and move you forward?

38:05
That’s the trick with anxiety, so if you find yourself paralyzed with anxiety, maybe this would be
part of procrastination, especially if you’re low on conscientiousness.

38:15
One of the things you want to do is to reduce your ambition. Reduce your ambition to the point
where you find a move forward that you’ll actually implement, and you can learn to negotiate
with yourself that way. It’s like you notice you’re avoiding something. You’re frozen in fear.
Maybe it’s your tax return or something like that, something you’ve been putting off at work. It’s
like you notice that you’re avoiding it, and you can berate yourself for it, but it’s not that helpful
because that often just makes you more depressed and anxious.

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38:41
What you might do instead is well, the same sort of thing that I did with the old guy that was
laying in bed. It’s like well, I don’t want to do my taxes. It’s like okay, do you have everything in
a file folder? Well, no. Do you have a file folder? Well, no.

38:57
Would you go to the store and buy a file folder? Yes, I would do that. Okay, day one. Go to the
store, buy a file folder. That’s all you have to do. Why? Well, at least you’re on the way.
Maybe the next day collect 80%, 50% of the relevant papers, and just shove them in the file
folder.

39:15
You don’t have to look at them, you don’t have to organize them, you don’t have to get all of
them, but now you’re halfway there. You have the mess in one place, and you’ve also
demonstrated to yourself that you’re larger than the predator because what you’re doing is
you’re responding to that threat as if it’s something that’s there to devour you. Then, the issue
is well, who’s bigger?

39:39
I saw this fascinating movie once, The Gods Must Be Crazy, Part 2, I think it was part 2, and
there’s this little kid, a bushman kid in Africa, and he was being stalked by a hyena. The hyenas
was trying to figure out if the boy was bigger than him or smaller. So, what the boy would do is
he had a block of wood with him that was about this big. He just put the block of wood on his
head. When he put the block of wood on his head, the hyena would back up, and when he took
it off his head, the hyena would come forward.

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40:10
So, that’s kind of what you’re doing—I know it’s a strange example, but that’s kind of what
you’re doing when you’re wrestling with things that freeze you. The question is well, are you
bigger than the things that’s lurking, the menace, the IRS, or the Canadian Revenue
Association, which is a pretty decent predator.

40:27
So, it has its eyes fixed on you. Are you bigger or smaller? By facing the thing and
approaching it, you indicate to your anxiety systems that you’re more competent than the thing
is dangerous. That’s a really useful thing to do. It’s not exactly that you reduce the danger
because it’s still there, but that’s not the issue because things are dangerous.

40:51
The question is whether or not you can cope with the danger. That’s really what you want to do
with yourself and with your children is that you want to raise them to be people who are
convinced that they can face the things that are the threats, but then who also develop the skills
that are necessary to deal with the threats because you don’t want just foolhardiness.

41:13
So, if you’re avoiding doing something, then reduce your ambition. You might have to do that in
a negotiated way because you’ll have to imagine you’re frozen in place, so this system has you,
and it’s trying to protect you even if it’s gone a little bit astray. You have to have a conversation
with that little sub-personality.

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41:32

It’s like, okay, what is it that you’re willing to let go of. What level of risk are you willing to
expose yourself to? You have to find that out. It’s often that you have to aim pretty low, and it
might even be humiliating to some degree. You think jeez, is that really all I can manage? It
doesn’t matter because if you’re stuck at zero, and you’re not moving forward, any movement
forward is better than zero. You can really learn to negotiate with yourself and other people that
way. It’s like find out what you are wiling to do.

42:02
It’s very rare, even if you deal with people who have levels of anxiety that are unbelievably
extreme. I’ve had clients who they couldn’t use the phone. They couldn’t have coffee with me
even though I was their therapist. They’re really just terrified into immobility almost all the time.

42:21
One person that I worked with, but took a long time, this guy went from being unable to have
coffee with me as a therapist to doing standup comedy and reading poetry in front of groups. It
took about eight years. It was a tremendous amount of work and also expanded his social
network dramatically as this occurred. It was all incremental movement forward.

42:45
So, anyways, that’s neuroticism. It’s the response to chaos. It’s the response to the unknown.
It’s the response to emergent obstacles. It’s mediated by the right hemisphere. We’ll close with
that.

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43:03
So, the left hemisphere seems to operate when you know what you’re doing, and you’re
implementing it at a pretty high level of resolution. The right hemisphere seems to be instead
responsible for freezing a negative emotion, but also for kind of global pattern recognition.

43:18
I think here’s an example of how it works. Imagine you’re alone at night in your dark house.
Maybe you’re watching a horror movie just to put you on edge. Now, you’re on edge, and your
right hemisphere is on, and you hear a kind of weird rattling noise in the room that’s next to the
living room.

43:37
You decide just as an experiment that you’re going to snake your hand in there with the door
only partly open and turn on the light. Just watch what your imagination produces. So, it’ll
produce all sorts of images of what might be in there. So, what your right hemisphere is trying
to do, it looks like, is to try to get a quick and dirty picture of what the thing that you’re afraid of
might be.

43:59
So, that’s part of the imagination for horror. You can think of it as part of the mechanism by
which that which is totally unknown becomes increasingly knowable until it’s masterable.

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44:14
Let’s see, is there anything else I want to tell you about neuroticism? Yes. I guess I should
close with this.

44:26
It is definitely the case that everyone has real reason to be anxious and also that we all have a
high probability of experiencing pain-related emotions because we’re going to be damaged in
one way or another.

44:42
So, that’s very depressing, hence depression, and it’s very anxiety-provoking the fact that all
that is true, but what’s equally true and perhaps even more true is that people have an
incredible ability to overcome what they face. I’ve seen people revitalize themselves under
circumstances of almost unbelievable difficulty once they were able to turn around and start
implementing small-scale, voluntary, approach-related changes.

45:14
My conclusion as a clinical psychologist has been that as paralyzing and terrible as our
propensity for negative emotion is, and as grounded in reality as that propensity might be, it’s
more the case that our ability to overcome it is actually stronger than it’s grip on us.

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45:38
So, if there’s something that you need to manifest faith in, that’s a good thing to manifest faith
in. That’s probably a good place to close off that lecture.

Discovering Personality​ with​ Dr. Jordan B. Peterson