What is Wise Effort?

That's what we're gonna explore today with me, Dr.

Diana Hill and my interviewer, Dr.

Carl Fisher on the Wise Effort Show.

Welcome back.

I'm Dr.

Diana Hill, and it's a big week this week for two reasons.

First, most importantly, it is dessert week on the Great British Baking Show.

And if you know anything about me from Instagram, I am obsessed with cakes.

I will spend weeks on end making cakes, and my son's birthday is coming up in October, so I'm already thinking ahead what kind of cake I'm gonna make.

I think it might be a football cake.

Anyways, so big week for us here in dessert week in our household, and two.

Wise effort is out this week.

My book, my baby, my book Baby, it's being launched and in part of that launch is also doing my best to engage in wise effort while it is launching.

I am not perfect with this, but I am regrouping, and the way in which I'm regrouping is by not overextending myself.

When you have a big thing that comes into the world, it's really important for you to be present for that big thing.

And the people who supported you in making it happen and really absorbing, taking in, savoring the good of what you've created.

So in order to do that, I do not have a new episode out this week.

But I have a favorite episode.

It's actually an interview that you may not have heard because it wasn't even on my podcast in the first place.

It's from Flourishing After Addiction with Carl Eric Fisher.

He interviewed me and he snuck me in as an interview about addiction because I have, uh, some addictive tendencies you will find out in this episode, I share about my history, my history of disordered eating, the history of wise effort.

There's this conversation about what's happening right now in psychology and psychiatry and ai, I think is fascinating.

Carl is a modern voice in the field of psychiatry.

He teaches at Columbia.

He writes widely about addiction and mental health.

He's the author of The Urge, Our History of Addiction.

I interviewed him on the show and now you get to hear his interview of me as I'm out there doing a ton of these.

This one, hands down, my favorite, because he's such a good guy.

You'll hear it.

Okay.

Enjoy this conversation about wise effort, wanting more, and letting go.

Today I am very happy to be speaking with Dr.

Diana Hill.

I've wanted to have Diana on for a long time.

Diana is a true expert at acceptance and commitment therapy, and additionally does a lot of international training, is extremely well positioned to explain and translate some of those core concepts.

A psychologist herself, she's a really vital, energetic, thoughtful, high integrity person.

Who translates the most current psychological research and merges it with contemplative practices as a yoga practitioner herself, she's a host of a podcast called Wise Effort, which I was on recently, author of several books including really Nice Works on Exercise, Self-Compassion, a daily journal for act, and very soon in September she will have a new book out called Wise.

Effort, which we'll talk quite a bit about on this show.

She's been featured on NPR, the Wall Street Journal, plenty of other places, and is just really excellent at translating complex psychological concepts into practical, actionable steps.

Once again, Diana has this great book called Wise Effort coming out in September.

It is worth a look in a pre-order.

Now, I've mentioned this before on the show, pre-orders really matter.

They're great for bookshops, they're great for authors, and I can vouch for this book.

I read it, I got a lot out of it.

It's a very clear, excellent discussion of key act concepts, merge with contemplative practice and other broader evolving.

Perspectives in psychology.

So if you're a regular listener here, if you also are interested in this intersection of modern, high integrity psychology along with contemplative science, I genuinely think it'll be right up your alley.

And I've been looking forward to talking to Diana for a while.

Today we talk about her personal history, her professional history, her own experience with disordered eating, ayia, her experience with traditional treatment.

Talk about concepts related to attachment, experiential attachment, her evolution throughout clinical psychology, her path to also doing serious yoga training.

Talk about energy management, working for change, finding direction, values, talents, and concrete practices for exploring those things.

The plenty of other topics as well, like couples work, intimacy, exercise, ai.

There's a lot.

It's really great.

Really enjoyed it.

So I hope you enjoy my conversation with Diana Hill.

I'm here with Diana Hill.

Diana, thanks so much for coming on the pod.

I'm glad to be here.

So we were talking a little bit before.

I've been following your work.

I really love the way you translate, act.

I love the way you bring in your personal story.

So to the extent you're comfortable, I would love as a lead in to talking about your great book wise effort.

If we could tell a little bit more about your own personal background, some of the story that you share in the book.

You don't identify as far as I know as someone with traditional substance use disorder, but you do have a, a recovery history.

So maybe talk a little bit about.

How that came to be.

I like how you say to the extent you're comfortable, which is very unactive.

Yeah, fair

enough.

To the extent that it is in service of your values and is uncomfortable, please share about your recovery history, which I'm happy to.

It's, it's not comfortable, but getting more comfortable the more I do it.

So maybe I don't have a substance use addiction, but I always liked going into those AA meetings because I felt like they were more my people sometimes than the sort of treatment groups were.

Because my history with disordered eating is one of, I struggled with anorexia when I was in my early teens.

I like to say that was like my slow attempt towards killing myself.

And then I tried to do the faster version in my later teens, but the early twenties and beyond.

Transitioned into bulimia and, uh, sort of like a kinda wild ride experience.

And along the way with all of that, so the depths of my anorexia took me to, you know, hospitalization.

I dropped from like a, I don't know, a 120 5-year-old healthy teenager to 72 pounds.

I remember the morning that I kind of woke up to it.

I, I, I put my legs over the side of a bed and I looked down and they looked like.

Like when you go on the beach and you find like a, a bird bone.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

And it has like the real knobs at the end.

Yeah.

It's like that, that, oh my gosh, I saw it like that, that sort of waking up point that I think many people with addiction have multiple times over.

But that was a pretty impactful one of, of waking up to what I was doing to my body and then led me to treatment many different forms.

AA being one of 'em, but also like.

Hot springs in San as mountains and singing with whales and you know, all sorts of things to find my way to recovery.

Well, we don't have to dwell too much on.

What's not working or what's broken in the treatment system because I think a lot of people are familiar with that.

But I'm just curious when you say sometimes it felt like the 12 step community were more your people.

What, what didn't work about traditional eating disorder treatment?

Well, what didn't work I think is continues to be, what I see as a psychologist now is the medical.

Model medicalization of a human being, pulling a human outta context.

And the 12 steps also didn't work, uh, for me fully either.

I mean, these are just all bits and pieces of a fabric of the weaving of, of how I found my way to recovery.

But there was something about the, the vulnerability of the share of someone standing up and sharing.

I love those open meetings that were just basically like someone.

Talking about their worst, lowest low that I was like, yes, this feels, there's something about this that's so desing and feels so good, and feels so like that.

My, my shame was okay, like the, the compassion and the flow of compassion that can happen in those rooms, that really is a parallel to what we see in something like act.

Because it was a really familiar feeling when Kelly Wilson, who is one of the co-founders of Act, came to.

My university many years later, I'm in my late twenties and I'm still freaking struggling with this thing that comes and goes, and comes and goes.

And he, he came as a, the founder of athletes, a super highly respected academic who shared about his own story of addiction and cried and talked about his brother committing suicide and, and, and that he held both right?

That he could.

Have that history and use that history as sort of the compost to which he now is, is serving in a very science-backed academic way.

And it was okay for all of it to be together as one.

So less medicalized, more whole person acknowledging science and the value of science.

But science isn't all of it.

Spirituality.

For me, a big part of my recovery and a big part of the work that I do with clients is this sort of secular but sacred.

So the, the roots of finding that a sort of like greater expansive awake awareness of leaning into the bigger cosmos of love is like part of it for me.

And I don't think you're gonna find that at the.

Hospital that they were having me drink three insurers a day and weighing me first thing in the morning and making sure that I peed before they weighed me.

Sort of a little bit of a different angle.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That struck me.

I mean, the thing that got me convinced that I could invite you on flourishing after addiction and actually have.

A reasonable conversation without like square peg, round holding.

It was, I heard you on your own podcast sharing about that process of shame and also sharing about that process of wanting to combine rigorous science.

I think I remember right, you were in your PhD program and then you left like almost immediately to a yoga ashram.

Yeah.

C, can we talk about how hard it is to get into a clinical psychology PhD program?

It's like 1%.

It is so freaking hard.

Yeah.

To get into these programs and, uh, my commitment.

When I went, I remember packing up our U-Haul with our black lab in the middle.

Me and my husband, well at the time he was my partner, we're like driving across the Rockies and I'm like, okay, no matter what, I'm committed to my recovery and I'm committed to serving people.

And within the first few months of my program, I, I'm already relapsing and I was working with.

This really well-known researcher in the area of eating disorders.

You know, I'm, I'm there to research bulimia and I was throwing up in the hallway up in the cognitive wing because I was smart enough to like leave the clinical wing to go to the cognitive wing, to go purge.

And then being able to, to let it all go like to, to give it all up and which was actually like, like this huge surrender.

You know, we talk about the surrender experiment, like the, the huge surrender.

That's necessary, but that also opens the door to receive so much more that I didn't even know I was gonna receive.

That was the early parts of my academic training of how to, how to do this thing differently.

'cause the, the track I was on wasn't a match for me,

wasn't a match in part because of like, perfectionism, workaholism.

'cause those are the parts of your, your book and the parts of your story that you shared that I really identify with as well.

And in my own twenties in medical school.

Having the sense that like I had these two parts of my life that were completely and totally incompatible, and I had no hope that they could match.

One was being interested in meditation and mindfulness, and one was just grinding, just grinding to get papers out and try to establish myself as an academic and my case.

I just stayed.

I stayed, I mean, like I left, I left to go to rehab, but then I, I came back and I reentered the right.

I guess it did work.

It didn't work, and then it did, or it made, it did, or I made the adjustments necessary.

I just still don't totally know.

I mean, what was it about that time and that setting that made it not work for you?

What is it about putting someone with a history of anorexia into a setting of seven people that are like highly high achievers competitive, more workload than you can possibly ever get done with this like intense praise for destroying yourself.

Like there was this paper that I was working on with Joe Ciarrochi, who's part of the process-based therapy revolution.

So there's act and then the next one out.

Coming our way is process-based therapy and the paper was on attachment and looking at an act.

We talk a lot about experiential avoidance.

So avoiding discomfort is the root of much of our suffering, which is in alignment with like aversion and Buddhism, right?

The poisons of aversion.

And uh, for a long time act had talked about that, like the reason why we have addictions or we have depression or we have anxiety is in part because we're unable to be with discomfort.

That drives a lot of our addiction, sort of the negative reinforcement of removing the aversive stimulus, but what was neglected for a long time and is coming more into view with ACT and with process-based approaches.

This is all gonna make sense in a moment, is experiential attachment and that we can be become experientially attached to good feelings, to praise to, this is why we wanna go, go back to.

Our Instagram account and see more followers.

Like we want that feeling even though it makes us feel worse.

And this experiential attachment, for me, part of my addiction is the attachment to you liking me.

Mm-hmm.

To your praise, to the good girls and the good jobs.

And the Rhonda Merwin, I had her on the, she's the the president of A CBS and she's like this phenomenal researcher and I had her on my show once and she talked about eating disorders as being the Olympians of striving.

Like you learned what you're supposed to do to be liked, and you got really good at it.

Like I got an a triple plus in it and that a triple plus was what I, what my addiction was to, and that destroyed me.

So these environments are really dangerous for me.

It's like the alcoholic in the bar situation of that experiential attachment.

And what's, what's interesting when you, in the paper, Joe did this really beautiful review.

The biology of that, the neuroscience of that, and how there's sort of two things that are happening at the same time, right?

So there's the habituation that we have to, the good feeling, right?

You keep doing it.

It doesn't feel as good.

So you're doing the thing that you crave, but you like it less and less.

You have to do more of it.

I mean, this is just classic addiction research, but then there's this other part of it, which is the sensitization that you have, that you crave more.

Those systems of craving get more and more activated over time, so you need less and less to have them get activated, so you end up wanting more.

And liking less, and that is the sort of biology of.

What was going on For me, I wanted more, like now I'm at the 1% of the top university.

I'm getting like the, the prize of the prize of the prize, but liking less and less and less of it.

So I had to remove myself and go to an ASAM to get my head on straight.

Yeah,

to figure that out.

So did you have a turning point moment, like was it at the ASAM or was it just continued work and then steady gains?

How did you get from there to.

Like feeling like the grounds underneath your feet.

That's an assumption that I feel the grounds underneath my feet.

Yeah, fair enough.

Enough.

I'm actually, I abide by the, uh, the Tibetan principle of Groundlessness.

The ground is never underneath our feet.

It is constantly changing.

So is my sense of recovery and sense of self and sense of everything.

My own practice, the way that I practice my own spirituality is in constant state of change.

So I've gotten better at being in the state of groundlessness.

And how do we.

Find that are both our center.

In the Groundlessness.

So I spent a lot of time in the concentration practices, more of the Zen, uh, and that was through, um, my connection to Han.

So I am lucky to have come from a lineage of Buddhism.

My dad was a longtime Buddhist practitioner and was introduced to Buddhism as a, as a kid.

I went to Catholic school.

But then my dad was Buddhist.

It was this bizarre situation, but my dad was studying with Tek Hanh and he'd go on these like 21 day retreats every summer he'd go to Plum Village and when, and I was 19 in my sort of early recovery, was went and, um, walked with him and learned about.

This, this very basic concentration practice, this simple breathing in, I'm aware that I'm breathing in, breathing out.

I'm aware that I'm breathing out.

How closely can we follow the breath?

How closely can I stay here?

So that's the centering practices.

And he taught the centering practices in a lot of different ways.

Walking through the aspen trees, we can center eating mindfully.

We can center in loving conversation with another person we can center.

So I learned those centering practices for a really long time, and I, and those were like my, they talk about the rope of mindfulness.

So those are my rote.

And then, then I started to learn, okay, it's not just about centering 'cause what am I centering in?

I'm centering in groundlessness, but what is that groundlessness made of?

And some of the Tibetan practices about sort of the awake awareness and the expansive awareness.

In, in act, the closest thing we get to is self, is context.

That they're, they're centered in a spacious emptiness.

I would say it's empty of, of separate self, but also full of love.

And how do I lean back into the groundlessness?

In that space of love.

And that's more of what my, the later parts of my work have been about in terms of sort of the, the wise effort and the wisdom practices that are about this more interconnected sense of self.

Mm-hmm.

That's where I'm kind of, what I've gotten interested in more recently.

Some of the Tibetan practices.

Well, thank you for that.

I think it's a great organizing principle for the book.

I personally loved it.

It was always the question I asked whenever I met Buddhist teachers earlier on in my practice, and continuing to this day out of the whole eightfold path, I was like, effort.

What do you mean wise effort?

Like is in more better?

Or like how do I know it's wise?

Like if I'm at the basic level of mindfulness versus more complex phenomena.

It's like that that.

I've always been and like to this day for sure, still extremely uncomfortable with that tension between the discernment between making the effort to change versus relaxing into an acceptance.

The way that the very title of ACT puts it or like the dialectic and DBT, like I always come back to that, that point.

I think you could have a whole career about wise effort, and I've

made

that in my career recently.

I've made it your career.

And we even define what wise effort is.

I mean, we should probably.

Talk a little bit about that.

'cause that's just like my,

yeah, yeah, yeah.

So that's like whether related to the book or to your overall practice.

I was just curious like how you sum up, like if somebody came like Allah me 20 years ago, like what do you mean?

Why is that?

Like what is effort?

How do I know what's wise versus unwise?

Mm-hmm.

Well, the way that I've gone about, so just the orient, I'm stealing a word that is.

You know, sometimes it's called right effort that is part of the eightfold path.

So, you know, Buddhism has all these lists, right?

So there's the, there's the four Noble truths, the sort of source of our suffering, the cause of our suffering.

And the, the fourth noble truth is that there's a way out of suffering.

And the way out is the eightfold path.

On that eightfold path, there's eight things that are, even though it's a path, it's, it's not linear, it's circular.

You're going around them and around them and around them over and over again.

And those eight things are things like.

Wise livelihood.

How, what, what are you doing with your life and your time and your making of money?

Like this is Wise livelihood for Carl Fisher and for Diana Hill?

Um, wise, speech wise concentration.

So wise effort is one component of that.

And I originally learned about wise effort from Tek Hanh and later on I started getting into this idea about like energy use, because I have, I'm like a force.

I'm a generator, I'm a force.

I have a tremendous amount of energy.

I can use that energy in one direction.

That would take me down to 72 pounds, right?

Or I could use that energy to be of service and to create things that are helping others, right?

So one aspect of wise effort is, is our energy and our energy that we channel, and can we channel it in?

A way that's aligned with our values, but another aspect of it is this sort of like the original sort of Buddhist story around wise effort.

Is sauna in the or Sonya and the flute or No, the, the loot.

The string?

Yeah, the string.

Like are you tightening it up?

Are you loosening it up and.

There's places where we need to loosen up our energy.

There's places where we need to tighten up our energy.

So for you, 20 years ago, I would be curious, like, where are you put, where are you putting your energy?

Carl?

Partying, dude.

Yeah, partying.

And is that, is that aligned with your values?

Like who you wanna be, how you wanna show up in the world?

What short term?

The consequences, long term, the consequences, right.

Where would you wanna be putting your energy, even if it was uncomfortable?

So wise effort isn't about comfort and we've started the show with like it's share about your story is comfortable.

It's not about comfort.

It's actually sometimes quite uncomfortable to engage in wise effort, but it's about a deeper, wiser, interconnected self.

It's help helping you channel like the banks of a river that force, that life force that moves through you and how to get it unstuck and get it redirected and then dial it back.

Dial it back or dial it up if you need to dial it up, depending on what's happening in the situation,

I'm gonna take it in a slightly different direction than I had planned actually, because it strikes me you're, you're an ACT trainer too.

Very clinically skilled at this.

You're not just, it's not just that you've written a book, but you have a lot of on the ground experience working with people trying to make changes.

And a comment, as you well know, a common clinical scenario is someone might say, and I'm even thinking of myself 20 years ago, someone might say That all sounds well and good.

I could talk about my values, I could write it down in the moment though it feels impossible and I think act is very good at the sort of verbal juujitsu of unpacking the can't there.

Like there's probably some selfing, like what kind of person am I?

There's also just like just straight up fusion, whatever.

What can you suggest though for someone who has that feeling like, this is not that complicated.

I just can't do it.

Like I feel too bad.

In that moment, I can't go out.

That's not a feeling.

That's a thought.

That's why I'd start there.

Yeah.

In the moment it feels impossible is a thought.

So first, just to be aware of, of your thinking and the fusion that you have with your thoughts, because if you write in the moment it feels impossible across your palm, and you hold that right up in front of your eyes and you walk around your life like that, then yeah.

You're believing that thought to be true.

So with Act We and with Buddhism, we're, we're not assuming that the things that our mind is telling us is all that helpful.

And that, that we can actually, we can act independently, we can behave independently from our thoughts.

And when you actually do that, you already do it.

You wake up in the morning and the alarm goes off and you say, I can't get outta bed.

And while you're saying I can't get outta bed, somehow your legs get outta bed and you go and you make a cup of coffee, right?

Or you say.

Like a really classic one is like, oh my gosh, I'm gonna, I always say this one, 'cause Robin Walls are tied to me.

I'm gonna die of embarrassment.

I'm gonna die of embarrassment.

So I can't get up on the stage, or I can't dance at the wedding, or I can't tell someone about the truth of where my addiction has taken me.

Right?

But what if you actually observe what's happening there?

Is that.

You will have an increased feeling of flushness in your face, and your heart might be a little bit quicker, and you may have the thought, I'm gonna die of this, or I can't stand this.

And it'll get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger.

And no one's ever died of that.

You're never gonna die of an urge.

You wrote the book on urges, I wanna read it.

Um, you're never gonna die of an urge.

You feel like you will die if you not give.

You've not given to this urge.

I will tell you like guaranteed, a lot more people have died from giving into urges.

From urges.

I've never met anyone that's ever died of an urge.

So we have to look at our thoughts and we have to practice doing something different.

Than what we've been doing, and there's all these processes to act.

So that's one of them is, is acting independently from your thoughts.

Another process has to do with how you're relating to your, your feelings, your affect, and being able to identify that.

Sometimes our feelings, we just need to just allow them to be there.

Sometimes we need to listen to them.

And then there's processes that have to do with your sense of self and, and then there's the real boots on the ground behaviorism, which Kelly Wilson, the psychologist I talked about earlier, was such a staunch behaviorist.

He was like, so.

Into behaviorism, which I think we all need to, if you are recovering from addiction, you need to freaking learn about behaviorism because it is like your environmental control.

Don't put Diana Hill in a PhD program and just assume that she's gonna be okay.

Right?

That that's like the context was a cue that triggered my addiction.

So we need to know that the basics of behaviorism and positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement.

Environmental control over our behavior.

Inter behaviorism as well, how we interact with our context.

There's a lot there that if you just had that.

I can't handle this or just use wise effort, that's not enough.

And I have a whole, in the book, I have a, I map it out.

Like I, basically, I help people identify their struggle and the sort of three components that keep us in.

And we can talk about this, three components that keep us in an addiction, and then how to open up our mind.

How to open up to feelings.

How to open up our sense of self, how to open up to change, and those are all based on these processes from ACT and from science, but also from contemplative.

Wisdom.

Wisdom that I've learned over time.

Yeah, I thought it was a really nice structure and a very useful book.

Very like rigorously in line with act.

One of the things that struck me as like a nice addition or an elaboration or like, I dunno if it's the ACT Acts sacked, religious, or something to say it's a embellishment, but you have a discussion of genius before.

Values.

It's very anti act.

It's anti act, right.

I didn't want to say it that strongly, but,

oh, there's a lot of anti, yeah, I, I've had long discussions about this concept with genius.

A lot of people.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tell me about that.

'cause that, that jumped out in me.

Like I thought, like classical act would probably be like, you do values exercises, you determine your true north, and then you try to orient your behavior to it.

But you have this other investigation or this inquiry into genius.

Right.

Which it also could be.

Anti Buddhism too.

I, so the first person I had read my book was my dad, and he was like, I don't like this genius stuff.

And then I.

Went on to, um, I actually was at a table.

I was at a retreat in Costa Rica, and if you can imagine this table, so at the table was Jack Kornfield, Dan Siegel, Truda Goodman, who's another meditation teacher, a good friend of mine, and the an artist, a Grammy Award winning artist.

Talks about like self-love and and his work.

And we were talking about genius and I brought it up to the table like, what do you all think about this concept of genius?

And half of 'em hated it.

Like, no, I don't like this idea, like this.

And the idea of genius being that we all have a unique source.

Of energy within us.

The things that make you, you, you know that if you, the things that come easy easily to you, that your talents, your character strengths, your emotional intelligence, that your interests with it.

When you are in flow, when you're, when you are doing your best version of you, it just comes easily to you.

And other people are like, how do you do that?

Like, that's so hard for me, but it's so easy.

For you.

Do you have something like that, Carl, do you have aspects of you that are like that

working on it?

I would say writing.

I would say like flow writing comes easily to you.

Hey, I mean like I hesitate because.

It can also, as you well know, it's, it could be the most torturous thing on the planet, but yeah, sticking it out for like that 15, 20% what it really feels like flow, whether it's in the, the research, the processing or the writing phase.

Yeah.

So you can get into flow with writing.

Yep.

Sometimes when you are in flow with writing, what aspects of you are, are coming to the surface?

Is there like sort of a ability to put things, uh, sort of divergent ideas together?

Is there.

Aspect to writing where you can like write really technically, you can translate things for people that other people can't translate.

You're generating cre, creative new ideas.

What's your thing in writing?

Yeah, it was related to the first thing you said.

I would say making connections and like this is not my original idea.

A lot of people have described this, the sense of.

Transcribing rather than initiating out of my own like small self e effort to listening and just almost like transcribing the connections that come.

It's not quite as spiritualistic as it, it might sound me saying it right now, but like there's, there's an element of me getting out of the way.

Yeah, and

that feels like flow and especially in the active synthesis.

And that doesn't, that's, that doesn't shortcut the fact that like, at the end of the day, I still have to write a shitty first draft and I have to go through many, many drafts.

And that's never, that's never flow.

It's just, you just have to get it out in my experience and then go through it.

No.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I was at a concert this the couple weeks ago where the Glen Phillips, who's a, he's a friend of mine, but he's a, it's like.

Old school had this band called Hold the Wit Sprocket, but he was talking about creativity in terms of, oh sure, I love to it.

It's finding the walls, like which, which is, which is a weight bearing wall.

And in, in doing that, you're gonna build up a lot of lot walls and a lot of walls are gonna crumble and then you're eventually gonna find sort of what are the weight bearing walls of your creative project.

Right?

So genius.

So genius has is that is when, when unobstructed.

And you're in your genius.

And your genius is directed by your values.

You're engaging in wise effort, but what often happens to that energy flow?

I mean, I gotta talk about energy 'cause I'm like a yoga, like my roots are in yoga here, so, right.

The prana energy.

But there's energy is talked about in so many different ways.

Like we can think about energy in the mitochondria of the cell.

The source of source of energy.

We can think about energy and sort of polyvagal theory of like the energy exchange between two humans.

When you smile, it activates me, my energy, right?

So the energetic flow of our genius when it's when it's directed by our values, really rad things can happen.

But what can also happen is our genius can get.

Blocked, underused or overused, which is my case, overuse of my, my persistence, overuse of my emotional sensitivity to people.

Please.

People as opposed to using that genius wisely.

So what what I work with people in, in this book and in this project is identifying that sort of what is your genius energy and then how do you use some of these principles of psychology and contemplative practice to channel it into the right spots?

Use it in the, in the, the Sonya, in the loot story, use it, dial it in the right amount.

In Buddhism, they talk about near enemies, which is.

Sort of a similar concept, like you can have, maybe you have a, a genius around humility.

My husband has this, he's like the most humble human on the planet that I've ever met.

He has a, he has his PhD in education.

He's super smart, and he works with teachers.

And he would never, ever, ever call himself a doctor, ever or ever say that he has a PhD in education and he is on teacher salary.

He would never ask for more, right?

So he has this, this humility to him.

But the, the near enemy of that humility could be, um, being like playing really, really, really small and, um, hiding parts of yourself and never really stepping in and saying like, Hey, I have some education here.

I have, you know, I could, like, I have, I could draw upon some of my leadership skills.

So, um, with near enemies, with our Genius, we wanna just start to look at what is it that is causing us to play small, maybe hold our genius back, or what is it that's causing us to put too much.

Of that genius in the wrong direction, that's leading us off track.

So I, I think a lot of people struggle with that, and especially in the dialogue around young men.

There's a lot of discussion about like meaning and purpose.

It doesn't have to be gendered, but I think it, it, like the point of that example is that it comes up in different for, with different language in different ways, and I think it's nice of you to repurpose some of the language around Genius to make it.

Actionable, and we could have like a half day, four hour podcast just like describing all of the different practices you have in the book.

But maybe you could share that as a starting point.

Like how, how does somebody actually explore some of those questions around genius energy values?

When somebody is struggling for a direction,

struggling for a direction?

Well, struggling for a direction is you need like the, the engine for the car.

What kind of car are you?

Mm.

Are you a Porsche or are you a Volvo?

I had a, like one of those old Volvos when I was.

Like first out of college or my first car was a Volvo and it, but this was like back when Volvos weren't sleek.

It was like a tank and you had to like turn the wheel four times to get it to turn right and it couldn't get damaged too much because I got in so many accidents.

Really smart first car for a, a teenager, right?

So I was a Volvo.

But that kind of engine, maybe like, that's sort of your genius.

That's the genius of the Volvo, right?

The a Porsche is another type of car where like, you turn it a tiny bit and it goes zoom, right?

People with anxiety, I, I call 'em Porsches.

It's like you're, you're just like uber high anxiety sensitivity.

You just like turn the wheel a tiny bit and you're off.

Right?

It's another beautiful car.

There's a lot of benefits to it, right?

So what are we gonna do with that?

What direction do we point that?

And that's where we look at.

Look at our values and our values are things that have to do with sort of the how of living.

So, so yeah, you've got some Volvo qualities to you.

Now, how do you wanna use your Volvo?

How do you wanna use your Porsche?

And we can identify those values.

We can go down and, you know, there's like a million you can ask chat to produce a values list for you.

And chat will give you VA a list of values and.

I really feel like we don't, we don't really know values until we've experienced some form of pain in our life that points to our heart and how we wanna show up and how we wanna be.

Or until we've experienced some kind of vitality in our life that points to our heart and how we wanna be.

So our values are reflections of what brings us vitality and also what brings us the most pain.

And when we have clarity around that, like what brings me a lot of pain is, is human.

Human suffering and actually plant suffering.

I'm really connected to plants in our planet and like see like a plant that's hurting and it makes me hurt.

I have like empathy for plants, so human suffering.

Plant suffering.

And so it gives me a little bit of direction of where I wanna put my Porsche or my Volvo energy.

Right now I'm working, I'm working on this project with Alyssa Apple, where we're doing climate resilience training for college students across the use of the 10 uc campuses.

So it's values aligned.

It's like, that's a direction for me, but the way I got to that direction was, this brings me pain.

And then the other aspect of values is what brings you vitality?

When, when, what lights you up?

What, what energizes you?

What, when.

You're engaged with it, you feel like a sense of meaning and purpose, but it doesn't have to be something giant like doing a big climate research intervention.

It could be something like a client that I write about in the book who was a, a petter and whenever she worked with animals, it brought her so much vitality and she turned that into her, her business, and she turned it into her volunteer work, and she's making big impact from that.

From pet sitting.

So we all can find our way to our values, but then we bring our Volvo or our Porsche to sort of drive it.

Right?

Yeah.

And I'm interested in exploring the Volvo, Porsche.

Like the, the genius stage a little more because like, I think that's, personally, I feel like I have a repertoire of how to explore values and I think even people who are not into acts in substance use disorder treatment or addiction treatment, they might know some of the basic interventions, like a values card sort or things like that.

But you write, you write in the genius part of the book about things like talents and interests.

And I think in a lot of domains of life now, but especially among younger people, and this is something I worry about for my own kid, there seems to be a sort of pervasive, call it anhedonia or a.

A lack of hope that might relate to climate resilience or otherwise, or, or just the difficulty identifying interest?

The word interest jumped out at me because I've seen many situations where people have said like, I don't, I don't really know.

It's hard for me.

Is it because my brain is fried because of social media?

Is it because the world fe feels like a dangerous and and scary place?

So.

I'm just, that strikes me as a useful addition before jumping to like values work can feel very big sometimes.

It's like sit down and write about like if the next year of your life is one of the biggest years of your life, or you fully step into who you are.

I mean, that's like a really tall order.

Yeah.

Am I right that like focusing on.

Smaller bites or like interest and talents could be a way of taking smaller bites at the problem.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So interest is an interesting, it's an interesting concept.

We don't know what we're interested in until we try a million of things.

A million things.

And so when you ask like why, why is it that young people may be feeling like don't know what they're interested?

Well, first we're figuring it out, but part of it is probably a couple of things that are happening with young people.

One is the.

Over, I guess putting them in one lane too soon.

It's like, if you haven't played baseball by the age of 12, don't even try and join a team.

You're done for kid.

Are you kidding?

You're gonna like stand up there and look like a complete moron.

It would be embarrassment to our whole family.

No, you're out.

So sorry.

That interest, like, you'll never know if you liked baseball 'cause you didn't try it before the age of 12.

And, and we're, we're like streamlining these kids into these, these highways, these super highways.

That they're supposed to go really fast on to get somewhere.

Meanwhile, we're all like, and the education system is gonna blow up at some point.

So where are they going to?

So that's one problem with, with our, with our teens, with our, with our kids, is we're making them focus up way too early and we're not.

Encouraging exploration, right.

We're not encouraging.

Try a, try a lot of different things.

I mean, I have like, I have one kid in my house that likes horseback riding.

He like got into like roping and then he loves theater and now he plays five instruments because no matter what, whatever he picked up, I'm like, go for it.

I don't.

Oh, let's try it.

And then I have another kid that's surfing and mountain biking and really like getting on, like has a band that goes out and, and play plays in a band.

And these are just, none of these things were ever things that I ever was interested in, ever.

But they're just exploring.

So even us as adults, we, we tend to become psychologically inflexible.

Because to explore some of those interests, maybe you, maybe you would like horseback riding Carl, but that would require at your age, getting on a horse and with like the eight year olds and looking really bad.

Like there's an element of you gotta look bad.

So how do we tolerate that?

This is how we explore interests is the same way that you explore foods.

You can, you can stay in the same lane and order the same thing at the same restaurant, or you could try and explore other types of food and you may discover that you really like something that you didn't even know existed.

This is how, also what keeps us in sort of our, our boxes in terms of our.

Cross-cultural conversations.

Like we say, you look at everyone in your little group and everyone is white, right?

Because in order to have more diversity in my friend groom, I'd have to expand beyond what I know and what's comfortable.

Um, so I think with Genius Energy, it's some of that, like the the willingness to experiment and what we do know in terms of the psychological research on that, which is.

Fascinating is that the more that you experiment, the more behavioral stretching that you do outside of your comfort zone, it feeds back to you in terms of wellbeing and energy, and especially when they looked at this research, especially when you are stretching yourself, behavioral stretching outside of your comfort zone when you're really low, when you have a really low mood, and especially when you're doing, it acts in the service of kindness when you add.

Acts of kindness to it so we could expand our interests in that way as well.

Yeah, I love that because it brings it back to some of the core themes of your book.

So your wise effort tasks are get curious, open up, focus your energy, and those are very active.

They, at least to me, they imply be real behaviors in the world, being a human being in the world, whereas.

Especially in a Scholastic context, but also in other context, this idea of like interests or directions or values, you can feel very heady.

Like, oh, I'm supposed to go off with a journal to a library and, and write it down and then figure it out.

But, uh, if you don't know your interests, then one of the key suggestions I'm hearing is make that a pursuit.

If you want interests, then go out, get curious, make effort.

Try different things and that inevitably recurs to, I'm, I'm going to have problems along the way.

The things that are going to be difficult and the point is not to be comfortable.

Yeah.

And you have to prioritize it and make a commitment to it.

And it may mean letting go of some other things that you're spending your time and energy on to prioritize interests.

I work a lot with people in their forties in their relationships where they just like, no one wants to have sex, and they're like sitting across the way from each other.

They don't even know each other anymore.

Like talk about loss of interest, like total loss of interest in this other human being who is so inter every, every human As as a therapist, I don't care who you are, if you're my postman post person, ca male carrier.

You are interesting to me.

There is so much.

There is something super interesting behind those eyes.

If I were to get curious, if I were to open up, if I were to focus my energy on this, but that would require, if we go back to the couple relationship that would require me letting go of some stories that would require me being able to let go of my thoughts that would require me to get present, that would be required me to engage in intimacy and the discomfort of that.

Or engage in change.

That's wise effort.

So you can put wise effort in your relationships.

You can do the same thing with your exercise program.

I'm like really into movement.

I'm into plants, I'm into movement, I'm into people.

So movement, same thing.

You're been doing the same ridiculous weight routine or walking the same path, or on the same stair master at the boring gym for X number of years.

What if you got curious?

Like what is my movement genius?

When I was a kid, how did I, how did I move?

Did I roll down?

Was I the kid that rolled down from the really steep hill?

Was I a kid that was out on a bike or was the kid that was picking flowers or was I the kid like that?

It was dancing.

And you get curious.

You open up to your mind the possibility you could do something different here that's more aligned with your values, but also uses your genius.

And then you focus your energy there.

You try new things.

So this method.

Wise effort that I've developed in this book applies to so many different domains.

I'm doing it with therapists now, or I'm helping therapists like get out of wearing turtle Nhat sweaters and sitting on a couch for 50 minutes because that it's all changing.

Folks back to groundlessness.

It is all changing and unless you learn how.

To engage, you know, your energy with wise effort, you will get stuck and stagnant, or you'll be putting a lot of energy into things like addictions that completely drain you of your life force.

And there's, there's a force there that we need.

We need every, every human on this planet that's here to be contributing their beautiful life force to our collective.

Good.

Speaking of change, you mentioned

AI before, you said like, I could go into chat, I could come up with a list of values, and then that combined with what you just said, makes me wonder, are you, are you involved with like technological innovations in psychotherapy?

Are you doing AI based stuff

A little bit behind the scenes?

So.

Steve Hayes, who's the founder of act, the other founder of act, the main founder of act, I don't know, he's really gotten into AI and I'm part of his app, which is called Cycl Flex and he'll love that.

I'm plugging it for you right now.

I don't get paid for Cycl Flex, but I'm part of that app and, and what Steve is looking at in terms of the future that's coming up in, in therapy is, and it's already coming, like I already have clients that are doing this, but is basically.

The potential of therapists uploading their transcripts from a session and using.

AI to help give the therapist feedback on their intervention, but then also potentially having, like making a little mini, like a little mini Diana that then the client can interact with to outside of session, between sessions.

There's also, AI is definitely being used in terms of we're collecting ecological data, so we're take, we're collecting data on people.

Daily data on people through the app and then using that to look at what are the, the primary.

Processes, the primary mechanisms that are contributing to this individual struggle.

So then I, as a therapist can go in and target that specific thing because, you know, the way that sort of therapy is thought of is now is like we, we think we have just like these big interventions that we can just plop onto people and based on their diagnosis.

So like, oh, you have a, you, you struggle with addiction, therefore you should do some mindfulness.

And what they're finding.

In terms of the analyses of at the individual level, like when we move out of the these big normative analyses and we actually look at the individual.

For some individuals mindfulness is not the thing that is gonna be helpful for them.

For some individuals, self-compassion is not the thing, and for some individuals, they need to be doing.

X, Y, and Z.

So once we start colliding, collecting more individual data and we use the power of AI to help analyze that and to give feedback, then we can get much more individualized, much more specific, much more targeted interventions.

And it's here, it's already, it's happening.

It, the dissemination, the, the sort of the interface to make it user friendly and to get therapists on board is, we're still kind of a little bit out from that.

No, I'm interested in that.

I think that there's some real potential benefits to applications like that.

I do have a lot of concerns too.

I actually wrote a academic piece on this pretty recently.

Mm-hmm.

Called the Real Ethical Problems with AI for Clinical Psychiatry.

And I, I wrote a, a brief summary of it on my substack too, but.

First off, I think the disclosure and privacy issues are really complicated.

Like even state by state.

I know California recently issued a thing about disclosing whether or not you use ai, how many people are actually keeping up to date on that.

Like it's very easy for, for just individuals to run afoul of using these tools.

But I also like, at a deeper level, I guess one of my bigger worries, which I haven't fully, it's not fully baked.

So I'm just speaking off the cuff with you right now, Diana, but like, and you might be interested in this with your background in yoga and otherwise, like I feel like there's an experiential turn in psychotherapy, which is largely useful, where people are getting back to sort of a felt sense all the way back to like Glin and focusing like back to like a felt sense.

Internal exploration.

We see that in act, but also IFS also in like third wave cognitive therapies and I worry about the potential for a certainly AI delivered applications to kind of put people into a very cognitive kind of figure it out kind of mode rather than an experiential mode.

I think that's a definite risk.

And then I also worry even.

Even within the therapeutic interaction, like if I'm a therapist and if I have a little like sidekick next to the screen where I'm doing video therapy and it's like telling me, Hey, maybe you should act, ask her about her mother like that, that seems to me like takes me outta the human contact.

And even if that was asynchronous and I got like a little brief before or after a session.

I worry just for me as a therapist, I worry that it takes me out of the mode.

It takes me out of like a being mode.

You know what I mean?

And I don't know how to correct for that danger.

Yeah.

So here's the question.

'cause I, I absolutely agree with you.

Steve would say, we are making, we are a.

Currently developing another species

like the AI as species.

I saw he posted about that.

Yeah.

AI is a species, right?

And so, and these species are either gonna be collaborators or not, and we gotta figure that out.

I fully agree with you.

So in the exercise realm, the Apple watch you go, I was like going for a hike with someone and they're like, oh, I didn't turn on my Apple Watch.

I, oh, okay, well I'll just have to like add those later.

And I'm like, wait a minute, I'm, I'm in the hike.

I'm not thinking about.

The steps that I'm gonna get on this, I'm in the hike.

And, and, and when we turn around isn't based on what my watch tells me to turn around, right?

And how much it dis embodies us, how much these technologies take us out of this embodied presence.

And so we could say that on our hike, we could say that with our eating, how disembodied and how disconnected we have gotten from the food system.

Every, at our family dinner, we read the five Contemplations for eating.

This Food is a gift from the universe, and we talk about where it came from.

Not only where we came from, from like the soil and the sun, but where it came from, from the people that made it and the love that we've put into it.

And may we eat this food in a way that is.

Giving respect, right?

So put a calorie count on the Starbucks Frappuccino, and you're a little bit disconnected from this whole gift of the universe of food, which makes you disconnected from the gift of our planet.

So there's a, I, I mean, I really do believe that our, our embodiment is part of our.

Experience of connection to living beings and our living planet, and that includes in the therapy space.

So my favorite thing to do is take people on retreats where I have no slides, no handouts, no nothing.

We're swimming in the ocean at five o'clock at night at sunset together.

And we're learning act together and we're practicing wise effort together.

And it will, that week with me, and whether it's in Costa Rica or wherever else we go, probably has a bigger impact on these people's lives than a whole year of 50 minute sessions.

With me and with the, not even with me.

It's with each other.

It's with our group.

Right.

So that, how do you.

How do you put that in a little avatar of Diana on a phone?

I don't think so.

Or an a or, or a Zoom screen with like lines of people on 'em.

And now we're all part of a group together.

Something is getting lost.

But I also think there's some people, just like people who have, I do these, you're in a, a conference room for three days with 500 people at tables inside with no windows.

And I'm dying from like, not really dying, but inside I'm like, this is.

Like I'm unwell from like deprivation from nature because I grew up with that.

It feels I need it, right?

If you grew up with an iPad in your shopping cart while your mom was pushing you around, you may, I don't know, how is that gonna change your brain?

You may be okay with the avatar therapist, like you may not have made those neural connections of needing that type of.

Human interaction in that way?

Well, we'll just have to see.

I mean, what's definitely true is that it's happening and it's, it's open season, both in the therapeutic space and otherwise how people interact with these technologies.

And I don't know, I have a lot of concerns, but I think as long as we make space for it, live through your retreats is a great example.

If nothing else, people realize, ah, I'm burnt out.

I need to go on a retreat.

And then they go on a retreat and hopefully it's a course correct.

And it's not just a nice experience.

It, it also gives some insight and some clarity such that people have a new direction.

Tools to practice.

It's a wave.

I mean, AI is a wave.

You, you gotta learn how to surf it.

That's the deal with waves.

Like you can't fight a wave, you know?

So learn how to surf it.

Be a good surfer.

Look at the other surfers that are doing a better job than you at surfing, but you also are in charge of your, of your board on that wave.

You can't stop the wave, but you can control your board and how, how you're surfing, how you're on it.

And I, at least that's what I'm trying to do.

I know very little about.

I'm like, not a super technologically savvy person scares me.

I'm on board with you.

Like I have so many fears about it and that's why I'm staying really close to it.

Yeah.

And with with other people, you're not out there surfing by yourself.

Don't stress at a scary looking break without anyone in sight, which is also a very, very good principle in surfing.

Yeah.

And then you gotta look behind it all and see like who's making the waves, who, who's behind this wave machine and be concerned about that.

That's true.

That's the, yeah, that is where the analogy breaks down.

Totally.

That's where it breaks

down.

No, that's,

that's wild.

That is wild.

Well, Diana, I really appreciate the time getting to know you a little better and talking about this book and you're sharing your personal history.

I really think it'll help a lot of folks.

I think people are always on the lookout for ways of making sense of these huge heady topics, and I think you've written something that is really high integrity, but also tangible like is graspable.

It's useful and I'm really grateful for your work.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Wise Effort podcast.

Wise effort is about you taking your energy and putting it in the places that matter most to you.

And when you do so you'll get to savor the good of your life along the way.

If you would like to become a member of the Wise Effort podcast, go to wise effort.com.

And if you liked this episode and it would be helpful to somebody, please leave a review over at Podchaser.

I would like to thank my team, my partner, in all things, including the producer of this podcast, Craig.

Ashley Hiatt, the podcast manager.

And thank you to Ben Gould at Bell and Branch for our music.

This podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only.

And it's not meant to be a substitute for mental health treatments.