Brainstorm Squared

Transcript by Sean Jackson

Full transcript:

Aidan: What are we going to be talking about today Damiano?

Damiano: Today we address a question coming from Benny from Berlin. Hey Benny, thank you for the question. It's about introvert versus extrovert, especially in the workplace.

Aidan: You make it sound like this is going to be some blockbuster movie, where it's the biggest stars introvert fighting extrovert.

Damiano: A wrestling match between them, absolutely. This is the ultimate showdown, because if there are other introverts in the core, they know how it feels, they know why we have to talk about this today and I'm going to come clean first. I'm an introvert, big time introvert. Aidan, are you an introvert or an extrovert?

Aidan: Oh, that's a very exciting question there. You know how I love to bring my games into this podcast. I don't want it to be a one-way conversation.

Damiano: Cliffhanger.

Aidan: Yeah Nah, I'm going to give the listener at home a couple of seconds to guess before I reveal later on in the episode, I'm going to leave a cliffhanger now. Today we wanted to talk a bit about some of the assumptions and stereotypes around introverts and extroverts. I won't leave you hanging for any longer, because I'm actually an introvert. People never guess that anytime I say, "Oh yeah, I was always feeling really anxious that I didn't know." "But you talk all the time. You give presentations, you do a podcast."

Damiano: All the time, right? I think that the answer that I get also all the time they're like, "I can't believe you're possibly an introvert." I'm like, "I promise you, I'm an introvert." What I find incredible is that I think 99% of the people that I'm talking with, there seems to be an association with being introvert equals being shy, being extrovert equals being outgoing and always being in the spotlight.

Aidan: Yeah. Confident or a great presenter. There are a lot of stereotypes attached to it.

Damiano: Exactly. But that's technically not really true, isn't it?

Aidan: Yeah. It's not quite that simple unfortunately. That's why we have different words for shy and introverted, that they're not just synonyms by their very definition.

Damiano: The way we can think about this, at least that's how I approached it, is really thinking about how do we use or recharge our energy. I'm really thinking of a battery of sorts, when I talk about being an introvert or being an extrovert. It's a bit of a crude metaphor, but if you indulge me I think it could make sense.

Aidan: Indulged, please.

Damiano: Please.

Aidan: That was not a sentence there, you have been indulged, please go.

Damiano: I think being an introvert to me means that when I interact with people, when I'm going to this social space, I use my energy, so my energy gets depleted. When I'm on my own in my own time, doing my own things, which could be anything, reading a book, playing video games, watching a movie, my things, I recharge my energy. While extroverts are exactly the flip side of this. When they are on their own, when they're alone, actually their energy goes down and they need social interaction to recharge their batteries. I think this is maybe a simplified way, but to me resounds with how I feel. Does it resound to you Aidan?

Aidan: Yeah, absolutely. Throughout the whole thing I was trying to get rid of the image of when you're playing the Sims and you've got the bars for, you need to eat food, you need to get sleep. For some people it's, "I need this social connection with others and that gives me energy for others." It's like, "This bar is going the other way around."

Obviously it's never a binary thing. It's not a case of, if I talk to one person today, I'll be really tired and drained and panicky and everything, that's not the case. Our brains don't work in binary manners like that. I can still have very lovely conversations with close friends, it doesn't mean I don't enjoy having conversations. I enjoy going to parties, but it's on that higher level. At the end of the day, I am very happy to sit and play Minecraft for 20 hours straight. I will happily do so many things which don't involve people, for others they're like, "Okay, now I need to go and see a pal. I need to do this," that's okay. That's the way we are all unique.

Damiano: Absolutely. I think the beauty of imagining this bar, like you were saying for the Sims, or like a battery, is that I think it changes the perspective on how we understand our energy first, so internally, and then also understanding how we interact with other people. For example, I know that being an introvert I do need to recharge if I spend too much time in meetings at work, for example. I wouldn't know that I prefer in general to have a block of work, like work time for myself in the middle of the day, because it allows me to buffer between the meetings in the morning and the meetings in the afternoon. This is something that I come to understand by simply acknowledging really that my energy level would fluctuate during the day, or the fact that if I have a long day of meetings, I do know that once I close the computer off, I need my hour walk outside by myself, not with friends, not with family, nobody, it's just me because I need to recharge that battery first. Does it happen to you as well during the day?

Aidan: Yes, a hundred percent. This is where people, everyone, some of the team, they're assuming I'm extrovert. I can say that I am now okay at talking now, I didn’t used to be. Sometimes people say I'm too good at talking and talk too much. Not always quantity, it's quality.

This is something I find interesting, I can happily give a presentation and I enjoy doing that. I enjoy the adrenaline, the thinking on the spot, that's all great. I was chatting to my life coach last night about this exact thing. It's something I've been working on for a while, but we were talking about goals and possible goals. My impossible goal for this year was to deliver a TED Talk, obviously impossible is in the name. But it's something to work towards little by little. If you fail that goal, you've still made progress and that's great.

But I was saying that actually now I think about it, if someone gave me the choice right now between delivering a Ted Talk tomorrow or going to a networking event on my own, that kind of thing where you've been invited to a party and your friend goes, "Hey, how's it going? Oh yeah, come on in. Oh, by the way, I've got to go and do this."

Damiano: And they disappear.

Aidan: Yeah. And you're alone and your brain immediately goes into, "You're alone. Everyone's looking at you." I'd rather give a Ted Talk. That's how much I'm naturally afraid or resist wanting to have those open vulnerable conversations where you don't know anything. That's where I'm at in terms of introversion, how about you?

Damiano: A hundred percent. I think this is a perfect example actually, of the difference between being maybe shy in a public situation versus the level of energy. Because you're on Ted Talk, it's virtually like being on stage a little bit, where you are on your own, you don't necessarily need to interact with other people, but it's also like a performance, very powerful example.

Interestingly enough, I don't know if you remember when was the first time you started to really think about you as an introvert? Because I do have these memories and I think it was really when I moved from Italy to Ireland. That was after a couple of years of doing musicals in Italy, where I was performing on stage and then it started to work and a lot of people were telling me, "Oh, well, you're good at talking with people and when you present stuff." And I was like, "That doesn't sound like me at all. What are you talking about? No, I feel really weird all the time." I don't remember exactly when, but there has been a switch where I understood that energy metaphor that we were doing earlier. Did you have a switch moment as well? How did it happen?

Aidan: I did. I don't know if it was an overnight thing. I grew up in a village where there weren't really many people my age. We went to primary school and it was quite a small primary school, so small that when we got to the final year of that primary school, I was the only person in my year. I was the only year 6, which is quite interesting. I did stuff with year 5s, but they were all smart so that was fine. I went from that, a school of 45, 50 people, Seventh Day Adventist Christian school. It's very lovely and chilly that I have fun friends, this is great. And I was like, "Yay. This is fine, a uniform."

I went from that to a school with about a thousand boys, it was an all boys school.

Damiano: Wow. Lots of fun, I guess.

Aidan: Yeah. Of course I was the only person coming from my year, so I knew no one. There was no one else that I knew in the village who was going there. That was like a networking/party dialed up to the max.

Damiano: Squared, yes.

Aidan: Yeah. I struggled then, it got better near the end, but I wouldn't say I enjoyed that.

Damiano: Was it a boarding school or did you have to commute every day?

Aidan: Not boarding. No. I got a bus in every day, which is nice. Eventually, I did get chatting to the people on that, but before it was, get on bus, headphones on my with iPod classic, oh, I remember that, on the bus go there, go to school. It's my two or three friends there, rinse and repeat for about three or four years. Generally it's not a smart idea to completely segregate one half of the population from... Separating anything or segregating by gender doesn't make sense because that's not how the real world is.

Damiano: Society works.

Aidan: Yeah. Toxic masculinity is a thing in its own right. It's only turned up to 11 in that situation. Lots of trauma and therapy stuff to get over there, but then went to uni, studied computer science. That was around the moment I was like, "Huh, I just want to go home and play Pokemon."

Damiano: Right. Did you find that when you were playing Pokemon, you would suddenly feel better? Or do you find patterns where if you're supposed to go out on the weekends with your friends, you knew that you had to play Pokemon first to charge the battery to then go out and have a good time with your friends?

Aidan: Yeah, it's interesting. Sometimes, and I never wanted it to feel this way, but I do feel like there's a certain point, probably university is a better time to talk about here for me, because it was when I was actually self-aware at that point, it wasn't, "I'm sad all the time." It was like, "Oh, actually, I'm going to go out to this party, I'm going to see these people." But there's a certain point where I'm like, "Actually I don't want to go out to the club. I'd happily go home, watch some things on YouTube, read a book and go to bed."

Now it's the same with, "Yeah. Okay. I know there's this post-work call and I really do enjoy the time I spend with you. Oh yeah. Okay. We can do a post-work. I can do a Zoom quiz with my friends from uni, or I could just listen to a podcast and eat some food and have an early night and that's okay." That's something which before I would have judged myself like, "Oh, well you're friends are going out and meeting people and doing a lesson." No, it's fine to read the bloody book.

Damiano: It is, yeah. That voice. I don't know if it's a teenager trend, I grew up in Italy and the idea of going partying on the weekend, it's not even an option, it's something people have to do. What kind of a teenager are you, if you don't want to party on the weekend? I always felt, like you said, very out of place because I'm not the party person to be honest, and this is again a bit unusual, I still judge myself for this. I actually do like an early night if I'm honest with you, because I do like waking up early in the morning. Again, counter-intuitive maybe, I'm not sure, but part of the question that Benny, hello Benny one more time, was asking is that because Benny is actually a people manager. Take everything we were seeing now and the dynamics that we've seen during our teenage, but even university, and now project them into the world of companies.

Maybe you work for a big company where there's tons of people and maybe your career progression depends on becoming a people manager at a certain point, managing other people, and then you tend to have these meetings with millions and millions of people, and you have to stand up for yourself, you have to show what to do if you really want progress. In your experience, when it comes to a company environment, how did you leave your relationship with your job, with your colleagues as an introvert, working for a big company or for a small company?

Aidan: That's an interesting question. It's something I was definitely aware of when I got to first year of uni, I was like, "Right now, I'm always going to have to talk to people." It was something I was always working on. But this may not be relevant for everyone, but for me at least the differentiator that I found when, if I find a conversation difficult or not, there's one or two things, one of them is, can I escape the conversation?

If I bump into someone on the street who I haven't seen for ages, again, it's such a weird dissonance because I act like, "Oh, Hey Jack. I haven't seen you in ages. It's great to see you." I'm genuinely excited to see them. But the other part of my brain is like, panic. Got to go home. I need to go to shops." Even if I haven't got a deadline, it's like, "Say hello, but get out quickly because you can't run out of things to say, if you run out of things say. If there's a lull in the conversation, they're going to judge you, blah, blah, blah."

That's all to do with, I can't remember if I mentioned it before, but I definitely will in the future if not, about how our brains evolved and adapted to fear judgment, because if you are judged and ostracized, then you end up being kicked out of the tribe and then it's more difficult to survive on your own. That part of your brain is always going, "Don't want to be judged," regardless of if you're introverted or extroverted, it's like, "Don't judge me."

What I mean is, can I escape? Because if it's like that and like, "Oh, by the way, I've got to go to the shops." "Okay, cool. Yeah. That's fine."

Damiano: An easy way out.

Aidan: Exactly. Yeah. You've got that escape and, "Ah, it's okay. I can go back to listen to my podcast." The other one is, is there an existing thing in our quotes to talk about? When I'm on a training course, say a training course to do with how to give engaging presentations or crucial conversations. It's like, "Okay, go into groups and roleplay a thing." I'm like, "That's great." I go straight into, "Okay, teams we're going to do this and then you're going to do this and what do you think of this?" It completely flows out of me, but if it's, "Oh yeah, thanks for coming to our talk today. There's going to be food and drinks out in the lobby. Go around there and network."

Damiano: Lost.

Aidan: How do I network?

Damiano: What is the goal of this? How does this work?

Aidan: What is your weather today? Doing good? Hi. Sorry. Got to go. Wash the cat.

Damiano: This is very interesting actually. Do you think it is because of the framework, is that what changes your mindset in that situation?

Aidan: Am getting major déjà vu because this is the exact quote was talking about with my life coach last night (Kate Wiltshere), incredible human. We're talking about, how much of this is actually me? How much of this is actually my inability to talk and how much of it is around that matter thinking? Like, "Oh, I'm not able to talk. Oh, I don't know what say, Oh, I'm worried about having the silence." We can talk, we are having a conversation right now. As long as we find it interesting, that's a loose one. This flows really well.

I'm sure you at home are thinking the same. There are times when conversation flows and there are other times when you go, "Oh, I don't know what to," you have that ability and even if you don't and you struggle to keep a conversation going, that's again in air quotes. That's okay as well. We fear the silence, our judgmental brains go, "Oh, no panic, panic." It's okay, not every conversation has to be an incredible world-renowned presentation, more like conversation.

Damiano: It is true. I was thinking in particular when it comes to in-work situations, this has been, I suppose, the way I've built my own armor, against the judgment and the fear of judgment you were mentioning before, which I completely subscribed to, it's a well known friend for many years. I think the idea for me at least, is to trigger or to deviate the conversation from the ordinary. There are a lot of times where people would start... Imagine your typical video call that starts, "Hi, how are you today?" "Good." "Me too. How's the weather?" "Oh my God is raining for like three days." "Oh Jesus. How is the COVID going in your area?" The usual questions.

I made a point for myself to try as hard as I can to deviate immediately from that. My first question would be something totally unrelated that could be, "What is the last brand of coffee that you drank." This person has no idea, they don't care, but it creates this canyon in their thinking process that literally shutters the expectation of the conversation. Usually I find that because I deconstructed the expectation from the other side, I am able to, "Control the flow of the conversation," a little bit better and make the conversation a bit safer for everyone. Because suddenly everybody's in the same place of, "I have no idea what you're talking about."

Aidan: Okay. That wasn't where I was expecting that to go. You're making everyone feel not a safe level playing field by confusing the hell out of them, is that right?

Damiano: Yeah, in a way. Because it's the moment I think where you deconstruct them, the appearance I guess in a certain way. We were doing a recording with somebody in a company and relatively high profile. I suppose most people that go into this conversation or these meetings they're like, "Oh, hello. Oh, please can I do this for you?" Blah, blah, blah. Again, I deliberately make a point not to do that because first of all, then there is this a stiffness in the air, which doesn't help when you're doing a video work. But on the other side, I think is extremely boring. This is, I think where people would say, "Oh, the man is an extrovert, because look how he's talking to this very important manager," when the truth is exactly the opposite. The truth is look Damiano that is afraid to be judged for being boring and whatever, and he's trying to find another way. Do you use similar tools to achieve a different result?

Aidan: Yeah. You stumped me for a sec, because I've never thought about it that way. I do something similar, with check-ins I like to do the like, "How are you feeling today? How are you really feeling today? Some are like, "Okay. What do you want?" The call thing that's important rather than me talking for an hour. Well, I'm pretty good at that as you can tell right now. I like to ask that random question similar to when we were doing the question from, we're not really strangers last week is anything like that.

Damiano: That was episode seven for the personal user manual, by the way everybody should go back and listen to that.

Aidan: Yes. I might as well to remind myself. But things like some recent questions asked, have you got any role models or heroes? What'd you do on the weekend? Anything that's not work related. Like you say, is unexpected, because if you think, if you're on 10 back-back calls a day, every single call is going to be, "How are you doing?" "All right." "How are you doing?" "Yeah. All right." "What's the next project?" "All right." What's the weather?" "It's good." "How's COVID going?" It's getting better." "Okay."

Am like, "That's it" but if someone asks you, "What's your favorite book series of all time? What good podcasts have you been listening to?" "Oh, this thing called Brainstorm Squared that's all right." Little things like that. I think that's the key that I'm only realizing now is, introverts might sometimes make better conversationalists. Because I'm always thinking I'm going to be judged if I'm not good in a conversation and I'm continuously working on it. It's almost like overcompensating and then almost like, "Oh yeah, he's confident. He's fighting up like, "I just want to go play Animal Crossing and have a quiet sob."

Damiano: This is so true. To be honest, and also connecting to the question from Benny, is the fact that I do believe people managers, when they are introverted, it's more about appreciating the energy expense in having these social interactions. If you're a people manager who's introverted, who understands how introverted people work, I think you also have a much easier time connecting with the people in your team, because by default you understand this level. If you happen to have extroverts in your team, all the better. They take energy from the meetings that they have with you and the rest of the team, fantastic.

But I do think that having introverts as people managers is an incredible resource for a company because first of all, not everybody's an extrovert and to recalibrate the definition of introvert versus extrovert, which is something that we're doing, I think quite well today because, it's very important. But secondly, is then understanding, "Okay, if this is how people work and this is how they prefer to have their workday organized," for example, how many ways we have to then help them understanding that different people in your team allow you to cater better to different team members, and not everybody can be an extrovert or a central stage person, but everybody should be given the possibility to speak their mind, feel safe, psychological safety is priority, and then the question becomes, "Okay, how do we do this? How do we let people, they're not introvert, maybe they're shy, participate?" How do we give them the space to feel like they can belong and they can openly talk about what they thing?

Maybe there are a few examples let's say, that we can think about from our experience because both of us are introvert, secretly introvert, unexpectedly introverts.

Aidan: Which means we know all the tactics. I've got a few there, there's one beckon to recommend before we move away from the high-level definition. That's a book called Quiet by Susan Cain, C-A-I-N. She's also done a fantastic Ted Talk called, The Power of Introverts, which is far better than I could ever explain, but talks about how our world... I don't want us to come across here as, “introverts are great and extroverts are bad,” that's not the case at all. I think I briefly mentioned, it's never a clear binary definition. You're not super shy introvert or super loud, noisy, excitable extrovert. Everyone is a blend of both. I'd probably categorize myself now as an ambivert, the general gist of the whole general gist of the whole, that's as vague a sentence as you could get..

Damiano: That was beautiful.

Aidan: How our Western world is geared towards extroverts. I think you mentioned like, you have to brand and sell yourself and speak loudly in order to get promoted and do all this. A lot of it is catered towards that. If I want to be chill and do my thing and not shout about and promote it on LinkedIn or Instagram or this and that, you're not as likely to get recognized, even if you're doing the same work or even better work. The keeper is to give everyone the opportunity to share their ideas, share their thoughts and be rewarded and recognized for it too. But I want to hear about your life hacks because I love life hacks. Do I want to spend time and effort doing it? No. I want a simple life hack to make this easier.

Damiano: Absolutely. To be honest, I think there are a few, let's say strategies that I found that worked for me. I would be curious if you had similar ones, and to our listeners if you do find yourself in these ones, please let us know. We do have social media now @brainstormsquared.

The first one, I think the golden rule for me is starting with vulnerability first. This goes way back to our first podcast episode about vulnerability. Like I was saying earlier, by starting the conversation suddenly almost puzzling the audience a little bit, shaking the expectations, usually I do this by putting one of my vulnerabilities on the plate for everyone to see and setting the tone of the room. Usually if people let's say respected and usually if you are in a work environment, everybody should, so nobody's going to tell you, "You look horrible today. I hate your haircut," or whatever.

Aidan: That's very fair feedback and I'll take that on board. And cry.

Damiano: Exactly. But usually that sets the mood I think, and sets the tone of the safety level in the conversation. I find that again, for me being introvert but a very outgoing person, it's a place where I want to be, to set the tone of the room because I want to make sure that the people that are maybe less outgoing, a bit more shy, feel that they can participate, one. This would be, I think the easiest thing for everybody to try to do, the behind the scene work that brought me here though, because I was a very shy kid in elementary school and middle school and high school, has been working on acting actually for quite a few years. When I was in my late teens, there is a lot of work that you do when you're acting, especially when it comes to breathing is one of them, but improvisation techniques and literally the most effective magic mantra I would call it. It's the “yes and” exercise, which I'm sure you know, I'm sure you know because I see you smile. This is something that everybody should try because it's one of those things you cannot imagine, first of all, what a difference it makes. It's two words and it breaks everything.

If you never thought about this before, dear millions of listeners, the first thing you should try tomorrow, or whenever you listen to this, it's to end your sentences with “yes and,” or to begin the next sentence with “yes and,” and this is a quick exercise to avoid dropping the ball of the conversation so to speak. It's a way to make sure that the other person has a ledge somewhere or I'm holding... How do you call when you're climbing? Help me here, I'm missing the word.

Aidan: I should know this because I used to do rock climbing, a handhold? I'm trying to think what are they called. A rock.

Damiano: Yeah, exactly. A rock.

Aidan: A conversational rock to hang off.

Damiano: Beautiful. Let's trademark, a conversational rock to climb on. It seems such a silly thing, but how many times in our conversation we are left with nothing from the other person, then of course we don't know what to say next. If we are the person that provides that conversation on a rock, trademark, people on the other side really appreciate this and they feel so much more engaged. Definitely two things to start the vulnerability in the conversation and beginning and ending with the "yes and" framework to provide the conversational rock, trademark. Definitely the first two strategies. What worked for you in the past?

Aidan: Yes, it's something that I've only stumbled across in the past few years. I've only recently started thinking about it in terms of conversations. I've always come at that from like, you come in to see it an improv, but it works very well in podcasting. If you said something like, "Oh yeah. There are these really great exercise of introverts. This one time when I," and I went off on a complete... It feels really stunted, you don't feel great. It feels like someone's not acknowledging what you've said.

Damiano: A hundred percent.

Aidan: The key bit is you don't always have to physically say the words yes and. Often times it is just the spirit of the phrase. You don't want to sound robotic, saying "yes and, yes and" it can come in more subtle ways

Damiano: What about for the sake of argument we do a little demonstration. We can force it a little but using "yes and"  just to bring the point across. What do you think.

Aidan: I am definitely OK with that and I will try my best to not completely forget half way through. I am definitely up for that, who wants to start us off?

Damiano: OK, I'll give the scenario. We are at the supermarket. We are both in front of the vegetable aisle and we are both reaching out to the very last pack of tomatoes.

Aidan: Clean up on aisle four, please. Clean up on aisle four.

Damiano: Oh, our hands touched. How embarrassing. I was looking at these tomatoes because I am going to prepare a stew, a beef stew, were you planning to cook as well?

Aidan: Ah yes I am quite new to cooking and was planning to make a tomato cheesecake. I thought tomato and cheese goes together, so tomato cheesecake. Sorry about brushing hands! We could half the tomatoes if you want to

Damiano: Absolutely yes, and you know what I am also thinking, I dear friend of mine tried to make tomato cheesecake once and she got a terrible rash on her face, she spent months and months with creams and things, what a nightmare. How about since beef stew really is no problem at all, how about I take you to the next aisle where the pickled cherries with cucumber and chillis are, an you use those for the cheesecake?

Aidan: Yeah, yeah, I would love to do that we can go over there and take a shot of the pickled tomatoes, I feel so young again, doing shots in the middle of a supermarket, I wouldn't usually do this, is it safe to do so?

Damiano: Absolutely and just for the record, it's pickled cherries, pickled cherries darling, I am going to keep the tomatoes, I am bringing you to the cherry aisle so you can have the cheesecake with cherries that is still all right with you isn't it?

Aidan: Yeah that sounds lovely, my grandma used to make a lovely cherry cheesecake and pickle I am sure adds a really dynamic flavour to it, but like I said I am pretty new to baking but I trust your judgement, you seem like such a friendly helpful chap. What is your name by the way?

Damiano: My name is Peter, Peter Dressing

Aidan: Peter Dressing, it is lovely to meet you. My name is Bork.

Damiano: Bork?

Aidan: Yeah, it's Scandinavian

Damiano: Absolutely I should have guessed from the combination of cheesecake and tomatoes.

Aidan: Well, it gets cold and we've got to stay warm somehow.

Damiano: Yes, so are you enjoying living in the city?

 Aidan: Yeah, so I grew up on the middle of nowhere, it was freezing cold. Lots of herring, so it is really nice around Manhattan this time of year. How about yourself, are you new to the big city?

Damiano: Well, not really, but I have to say I do enjoy it. It is interesting that in the Scandinavian language, you call, we are actually in the middle of Birmingham, it is interesting you call it Manhattan, is that a local tradition in your area:

Aidan: Yes, I travel around so much these days that I get these big cities confused. Did you say this is Birmingham? Because the ticket I bought was definitely for New York. Or maybe it was York, new York. I did think the flight from the UK to America was pretty short. Is this not the US of A?

Damiano & Aidan - sound of laughter

Aidan: Find out what happens next week in the adventures of Bork and Peter Dressing.

Damiano: That is a pretty accurate representation of my actual geography knowledge. But I think the point comes across beautifully that it doesn't take much to move a conversation forward. It doesn't necessarily  have to be "yes and". 

Aidan: That's a really cool exercise to keep in the back of your mind. Like open-ended questions, the one-one there, that's the key that I've found, which is what I've always struggled with, because it's very easy to say, "Oh yeah, don't ask yes no questions, because it does drop that ball of the conversation or box."

Damiano: Exactly. Thought of next, the conversation. Yeah.

Aidan: Yeah. Always trying to think like that, it's obviously difficult in the moment, but thinking of those open-ended questions is great, and something I didn't do a good job of there I noticed.

Damiano: On the other side, what is your relationship as an introvert with silence in a conversation?

Aidan: Silence. It's something that I'm conscious that I've been trying to work on because naturally I don't like silence. I like silence when I'm on my own, but when there's silence in a conversation, my anxious tendencies go into overdrive. Because when you're having a conversation, you're talking and my conscious go, "Oh, what do I say next? What do I say next?" Pro-tip, don't constantly think about what to say next, instead try doubling down and listening to what they're saying. My mind immediately goes into, "Well, you failed there. You bad. That's bad. They're now judgy." I think most of mine comes from my sense of, "I don't want the other person to feel uncomfortable." The silence and then they don't know what to say and you can't think of anything right now, so they could be feeling bad. No. They're not going to like you as a friend. No.

Damiano: It's all your fault because you couldn't keep up with the conversation, how dare you?

Aidan: Exactly. All that in the space of half a second of silence. But now I'm realizing, I think a nice question I try to ask myself is, "What's the worst that could happen?" Realistically silence, so what? You're not going to be fired, they're not going to go, "Well, it was a good conversation, but unfortunately that was three whole seconds of silence. You are not our winner today. We can no longer be friends. Goodbye."

Damiano: I think it's actually fascinating because I have two approaches towards silence when it comes to conversation. One is the purely work one. When it comes to meetings and you have the small to say, does anybody have any questions? Then you hear the crickets in the background or the coyote singing in the canyons.

Aidan: Yeah, especially over Zoom or the internet.

Damiano: Exactly. I hate that because it's wasted time. If there is no action for more than three seconds, exactly like you, I feel compelled to do something, but in this way I think I framed this in my brain to justify, normally I jump in and I go like, "Okay, if there is no actions, we can close it here. Thank you very much. If you have any questions, let me know, blah." I really like to keep these work meetings really tight, because I think I framed this to myself that people will appreciate that they can get time back on the other side, but also the fact that there is stuff moving all the time and we're not here hanging, we're actually progressing, so we're pushing the envelope a little bit. That's been my mental trick.

Aidan: Yes. There's one bit here, I used to do the same. I still do to an extent, but there was one thing, a lot of the time, three seconds of silence isn't actually that much, especially because it takes... I know we've said we're very talkative introverts, but for some people they'll prefer a little bit more time to digest that, or they may have an idea or similar to what we're talking about with psychological safety, someone in the room maybe thinking, "I completely disagree with what you're saying here, but I don't feel safe to openly talk up about that." Giving people a little bit more time to actually answer those questions and allow the silence to sit there.

I think it was in one of Malcolm Gladwell's books, he was talking about cultural differences. Was it Bernie Brown, Marvin Bernie Brown, can't remember. I'll find it in the show notes, but they asked a question to an audience in South Korea I want to say, they'd asked because I don't got any questions, they went, "Okay. Yep. No one put a hand up, so no," and actually there's a lot of cultural differences where sometimes it's, that person has given the prolonged eye contact. Sometimes you may need to leave 15 seconds because different formalities, different individuals, as well as cultural level, when you're working for a global company, we do kind of go, "Well, no one said anything in two seconds, that's the end of it." It could be that some people are happy sharing via chat or they might not have their video on, so can't exactly raise their hands to talk.

Damiano: Yeah. That's a very good point. This actually leads to my strategy number two more strategy. More strategy I would say mental framework, which is, for example, if I'm giving a presentation where questions are expected or I actually switch actively mindset and I imagine to actually go on stage. Again, it's an association from the memory, if my mind is thinking this is like a performance, silence becomes part of the performance because now I decide deliberately to put that emphasis on something and then I can say, "And we have this system for video making. Any questions?" Then I feel very comfortable holding and stretching the silence further.

Aidan: Yeah. It shows that you want people to ask those questions and not any questions, because I want to go off and have a coffee. You want their questions.

Damiano: I have to say though, for me personally to be able to do that, I deliberately have to put myself into that mindset. It's not something that will happen naturally.

Aidan: I've got one question, where have you practiced this or have you fumbled along and hope that you'll get to a state of confidence all the time, one day, or if you deliberately practice this in any situations?

Damiano: The stories. I would say definitely acting first was the first embryo of more of this. If I'm honest with you, I spent five years at the beginning of my working career in customer support, like phone customer support, when you have to, you don't want to, but when you have to speak to literally hundreds of people a day, there is a moment where you have to come to terms with the fact that you have to do it, and any way to do this has to make do. I've done this literally for years, I really had years to hammer this... Sometimes this conversation automatisms a little bit or making a habit out of some transitioning conversation from one topic to another, especially when you have customers that are angry, sometimes abusive, sometimes really annoyed, sometimes very happy. I think that has been really my battlefield to try and test most of this.

Aidan: Awesome.

Damiano: Yeah. Did you have some battlefield experience as well with this?

Aidan: Yeah. One of them I'd forgotten up until this point, which is why I used to work in a petrol station or garage when I was younger. Again, going through the late years of secondary school, hundreds of strangers a day coming in and going, "Hello, I'd like to pay for the pitcher on pump two please." I don't know where my accents go and stay up. So many different people from so many different walks of life coming in there. Most people weren't angry, some people were on a long journey, but there was a lot of that. The most recent one when we could travel, I used to travel a lot.

One thing I tried to do as I had to get in a lot of taxis or Ubers, and this was almost like deliberate exposure therapy. I said before that when you're trapped in a conversation and that's difficult and I was having to get a taxi to an airport and I be like, "I could sit here in silence and listen to my headphones, but also I could try having a conversation. What's the worst thing that can happen? I have to sit with a taxi driver inside." It's uncomfortable, but that helped me grow. I had a conversation, I found out something new and it was enjoyable. Even though the back of my mind I was like, "Oh, what if you run out of things to say," it's like that exposure therapy going, "Oh, well, remember the last time you felt really worried, you survived obviously, otherwise you wouldn't be having this conversation." I think it's tough, it's uncomfortable, but the more you try it, the more you will grow.

Damiano: That's an awesome story and a fantastic way to wrap up what I think is a great episode, but it doesn't end here because we do actually have social channels now. Of course we would love to hear from literally everyone.

Aidan: I thought you were going to say literally anyone, which is true.

Damiano: I'm definitely more ambitious than that. Homeworks, everybody listen, you go to @brainstormsquared on, where are we Aidan? We are on Instagram, we are on Facebook.

Aidan: I don't know how to Twitter, I somehow missed that one. That's got to be your job.

Damiano: Let's start with the Instagram and Facebook. Let us know, tag us. If you have ideas about next episodes, just like Benny for this one, do tell us, please we will take everything into our master list and of course, this was like a dramatic pause but a bit too early, probably for our closing line.

Aidan: I lost. I thought I was going to say it.

Damiano: We want everybody to know, that it's okay not to be okay.

Aidan: That it's okay not to be okay.

Damiano: We'll see you next time.

Aidan: Take care everyone. Outro music, woop!

Transcript by Sean Jackson

FULL TRANSCRIPT

[Impersonating actor Matt Berry as Douglas Reynholm in TV show the IT Crowd] Hello, and welcome ... sorry, I couldn't resist.

Damiano:

Which voice are we doing today? I don't know. I forgot.

Aidan:

That was a little bit of Matt Berry. Hello, and welcome to Brains- no, I've completely lost it now.

Damiano:

We just literally spent 15 minutes quoting The IT Crowd. If you have not watched The IT Crowd, you should watch it. It's just amazing. It's almost as good as this podcast, so don't forget to tell your friends to listen to it because we need to kind of catch up with Matt Berry. Aiden-

Aidan:

Yeah. You and I, we've got that going on.

Damiano:

How are you today?

Aidan:

I'm probably around a six out of 10.

Damiano:

Okay.

Aidan:

I've been sleeping well, which is good because I still have the mentality of 12-year-old Aidan, which is, "I'm going to stay up until three in the morning playing Pokemon Emerald." But I've been sleeping well, reading books, meditating, and eating well. But yeah, I've recently switched job roles, and I'm now a project manager, and that's just happened. Thank you. [Sound effect of audience applauding.]

Damiano:

Congratulations for that changing role. Full disclaimer, I thought you already were a project manager because you are so phenomenally well-organized and everybody should know that that's what I think. 

I'm doing all right. I would say I'm probably six or seven out of 10 as well. I just feel extremely tired at the moment. We're preparing, of course, a lot of virtual events at the moment, and I think we've come to the point where we're really burning the midnight oil in the sense that I am starting to feel that there is a lot of friction in a lot of the communication that is happening with everyone. Have you had this experience in the past few months? It's like those magnetic levitating trains, and it's almost like the magnetic field is reduced so the rail and the wheel is starting to touch ever so slightly.

Aidan:

I wouldn't say I've been experiencing friction on a personal or interpersonal level, but I think, a year of lockdowns on, like we're all starting to feel a bit more stressed out, it's about how our surge capacity has been depleted because our bodies are still kind of running on adrenaline and an entire year of this, I think, is really starting to take an even bigger toll.

Damiano:

A little spoiler, Aiden and I have prepared a little surprise, a little tip that we will give everyone at the end of the episode to spice up the conversation you're having with family and friends and colleagues and everyone, so stay tuned. It's going to be amazing.

Damiano:

So, what is the topic we want to cover today?

Aidan:

So, today ... I know you said that you've been experiencing quite a lot of friction. I think that one thing that I've definitely been experiencing is kind of loss of connection, or at the very least, I know I may not seem it with my very confident Matt Berry impression, which just keeps getting worse. It's like, as soon as it's recorded. I may give you my Gollum impression later, that will make up for it, but I won't do it now, because I'll lose my voice box. But where was I going on that tangent? I was talking about connection. I've found that I'm struggling to reach out to people more, and I think that's to do with the fact that I'm on calls all day and also just because I'm out of practice.

Damiano:

Interesting.

Aidan:

I may not seem it, but I was very socially anxious before and I still am at the moment. When I'm in a presenter workshop kind of setting, that's more a performance, but when it's like, "Oh, have a one-on-one conversation," with just a conversation, not like, "Oh, have a conversation about putting this Lego together, about this project," like when there's something to talk about, I'm fine. I'll chat for ages. I'll be fine. But when it's like talk as humans, it's like, how do I do that? Do you get the same? Or are you a bit more ...

Damiano:

Well, when you said before that in presenter mode, you go into this sort of performance, I think this is the best description. That's exactly how I feel, and it's one of the paradoxes because I love presenting. I've acted in the past, like in theater and musicals, and I love doing it because ironically it protects me somehow from the audience. Between me and the audience there is a character normally, there is this sort of persona that is actually presenting. So I completely feel what you say there, absolutely. Do you think the lack of connection or the difficulty, is that a function of how much you're working, or is just like the collection of lockdown and being maybe a bit out of practice, or cherishing more this sort of alone time that you can have?

Aidan:

I think it's a bit of both, probably more the latter. So I live on my own, again, very smart decision at the time, right next to the train station in the middle of Cardiff, so I'd be able to see everyone all the time. Yeah, starting to slightly regret that. But at the same time, it does mean that I do have control over when I do want my controlled introverted downtime, which is very much appreciated. But it also, like you say, does lead to less just practice in having conversations, which is quite weird seeing as how much I'm talking to a webcam for most of the day. I realize I went on such a wild tangent that we didn't actually cover what we're going to be talking about today. So you may have guessed-

Damiano:

Cliffhanger after cliffhanger.

Aidan:

Yeah, it's like a really bad mystery show. We set up all these plot points and then completely forget about them. No, so the theme today, if you haven't guessed, is about finding ways to connect with one another. For me, I love life hacks, anything that makes it easier. So we're going to try and do ways which help you to connect deeper with the people that you work with, that you live with, that you're friends with, but also give them opportunities to understand you on a deeper level as well.

Aidan:

Synergize, because it's very difficult to say it with a straight face and not go into like a "Today, we're going to be synergizing management strategies." Firstly, I really liked the way that you described how acting and performing is almost you're showing an illusion, a perspective, a version of yourself that you control rather than the full intimate, vulnerable version of yourself, which is ...

Damiano:

Absolutely. It's a puppet, right?

Aidan:

Yeah. It's always going to be very scary to show that intimate side, so yeah, I think making those opportunities to connect with people and being vulnerable there and also opening yourself up through things like personal user manuals and more, I think they definitely compliment one another quite well.

Damiano:

I was asking because I find that I would say it's more mainstream, the idea of improve the communication and try to speak up about your feelings and try to, I don't know, not be passive aggressive when you express how you feel about things. All good reasonable points, but what I found to be, I guess, a couple of layers deeper and dramatically more difficult for me personally, is to really get in touch and being able to express the triggers that cause something to happen internally.

So it's not just about optimizing communication between you and I, for example, but it's being able to gain the awareness and then articulate things that cause friction. And that's why I was curious to see how you think about these two things, because to me they're slightly different. It's kind of two slightly different vectors, but I do see that they work in tandem absolutely. So you improve communication overall, of course.

Aidan:

Yeah. I don't think it's really something that I've thought about in that way before, so that's really cool. You've kind of thrown me off my own thoughts there. I'm now going, "Oh, what if I change this? What if I change this?"

Damiano:

No, it's interesting because I read ... I think there was an email thread a couple of weeks ago where we were talking, I think it was in the neurodiversity community, regarding the trigger words, right, or trigger sentences when people say things like, "Oh, you're giving too much thought," or "You are really overthinking this." And I thought how, for some people, for example, for me, the "you're overthinking this" is one of my main trigger phrases, if you want. It's really something that, regardless of the context, regardless of the person that says this, it always, always triggers negative emotions. And this is something that I've come to realize very slowly, thanks to one of my best friends actually, who taught me one of her trigger sentences, and when I finally realized the power that was behind the word, it's something that I've actually started to actively tell people, in a bit of a other primitive user, personal user manual, if you wish, because I've realized that there is an intrinsic energy behind that sentence that just makes me go completely ... there is an irrational reaction to it, right? And so I find it very useful to tell people rather early, "Look, please be careful when you say this, because I don't take it as a joke in any circumstance when you use it."

Damiano:

Maybe it's an intro for the personal user manual, because you are actually the person that told me about this in the first place. I never heard about this before. So maybe you can tell the audience. What is a personal user manual?

Aidan:

Absolutely. That's a personal user manual. It's basically a document. There's no prescriptive format it has to be in. I've got a version that's just like a paragraph long, I've got a version that's a slide deck. But what it is, is similar to how you'd get an instruction manual for, I don't know, an electric screwdriver. You know?

Damiano:

An IKEA cupboard.

Aidan:

Yeah. Something like, "This is how you use the tool, this is how you don't use the tool. This is how you fix it. This is what it's made of."

Damiano:

Maintenance.

Aidan:

Yeah, anything like that. Really useful. If every single tool and item you ever bought, you had to figure out how it worked through trial and error and you couldn't go onto the internet and Google and figure out how it works, if you just had to do it through trial and error, that'd get pretty annoying fast. Or, I don't know, if someone gave you a keyboard, but there's no key caps on it, so you've just got to guess. I know you've touched-

Damiano:

That's a beautiful, beautiful image, I have to say. That was really classy. I'm very proud of you.

Aidan:

Thank you. Yeah, I'm already thinking, "Oh, I should've put that in the presentation." So yeah, that's kind of how we approach our conversations and how we communicate with people. We assume how they work. We kind of guess how to interact with people, usually based off of how we like people to interact with us. Our brains just assume that that's how everyone works. What a personal user manual is, at its core, is just a document written by you, the person in question, and you can cover whatever you want in there. So for example, how you best work. So, for me, I still find it interesting that you think I'm organized, because I am not. I think that's probably why you think I'm organized is because I work so hard to be organized, because I know that I'm not. I know I'm a-

Damiano:

It intrinsically makes you organized. There, I get you.

Aidan:

Yeah, I can't argue with that logic. He's got me there. Things like that, like I can say I am not a long-term planner, but I am great at doing work under pressure or last minute. You can cover who you are as a human being, so for me I'm ... who am I? I'm Aiden. I am a project manager. I like talking about mental health. I have ADHD. Little things like that. Best ways to interact with me: I like feedback to be direct. I need time and space to get stuff done. I prefer having a goal and a reason to do something, rather than a set of instructions. I don't know, strengths and weaknesses of yourself. Just that alone, you could cover that off in a paragraph.

Aidan:

If you were joining a team, say for example, in the middle of a pandemic, where you don't actually have a chance to see people face-to-face, just something like that already means, "Wow, I understand more about this human. I know how to work with them. I know a little bit more about them," and I, for example, put on loads of stuff about what do I like doing in my spare time? Lots of pictures of my Lego. Boom, already there. Aiden likes space, Star Wars and Lego. If you're new on a team, you're like, "Oh, I don't know anyone," and someone else is like, "I like Lego too," boom, instant connection.

Damiano:

That was beautiful. And actually I was curious, because I'm sure there is a process behind these and I know that you mentioned you have not only one, but multiple versions of your personal user manual. How did you decide what is relevant? What is useful for people to know? And how did each of these items come to your attention, as in, how does this belong into my personal user manual?

Aidan:

I'm probably not the perfect example of this, because I am always ready to overshare, and like I said, monologue, and I tend to be quite wordy. My audience is primarily work-focused, so the first sections I've got is conditions that Aiden likes to work in, so like team, environment, workspace, et cetera, my times and hours that I like to work, like my working hours when I'm most productive, out of hours contact. So for some people, they're fine with replying on the weekend. For me, I might read it, but there's no expectation. And the same, if I reply to something out of hours, I'm not expecting you to match that.

Best ways to communicate with me, how I best receive feedback, things I need, how Aiden learns best, Aiden's strengths, which was a very difficult part to write because I, every time, which we'll see in the things Aiden struggles with, is imposter syndrome and low self-esteem. So trying to write that entire, "Here are the things I'm good at," I felt like I wanted to go, "Oh, but you know, I'm not really, or I'm only good at that because of this."

Aidan:

And I'll quickly go through things that I love. This is where I go books, Lego, mental health, rugby, video games, blah, blah, blah, all that kind of stuff. Things I like values-wise, my favorite word, sonder, I love that. And then contact details and fun links to click through and learn more. And that's it, at a high level. I never prescribe or say that you must have this in your personal user manual, you must not have this, you must this, because "personal" is the key word in it. It's what you want to share with people. If it's just two pages or three sentences long, that's okay. If you go really in-depth on the exact kind of feedback you like and the content and how you'd best like that phrased, that's great. It's really entirely up to you.

Damiano:

I have a question actually on this one. When was the first iteration that you send to colleagues, for example, of your personal user manual?

Aidan:

I think my first one was my one-paragraph version, which I've got a copy of here. Was just "Aiden (pronouns he/him/his) is at his best when people give him direction, a goal, and a deadline, rather than a set of instructions." You'll notice I wrote this in the third person. That's because, for me, I found it easier because it kind of combated that self-esteem imposter syndrome side. "He gets easily distracted. He's diagnosed with ADHD, so is happy for people to send multiple reminders or requests of how things are going. He likes feedback to be direct and not sugar-coated. He's not great at planning things in advance, but performs exceptionally well under pressure. Aiden is comfortable talking about mental health or how you're feeling. He also uses exclamation marks and emojis a lot, but means it in an excited/not aggressive way! :)"

Damiano:

I find it very, very interesting because it's a mixture of your work optimal spots, so to say, your patterns, so people can also understand, "Okay, I can expect this range of, let's say behaviors," or, "He is going to perform this way." And then there are these sorts of best practices or recommendations, so like you perform best when you have a goal rather than a set of instructions, I think is super interesting. And let's take this as an example. How did you find this out?

Aidan:

Great question. I've always loved learning about self-improvement. Again, I think that comes from the imposter syndrome/low self-esteem. I've always liked to find ways to do things in an easier manner or to do more with less or just to improve in general. So, I've always been looking for new ways to do things, but also I've always been very self critical/overly critical. So that's not great long-term, to be constantly beating yourself up for stuff. But it does mean that I think a lot about what I do and I can analyze that from an external perspective, but it's also because I've chatted with a lot of people and asked for that feedback and figured it out through trial and error over time. Yeah, a lot of the time it's just, say, working on projects when I realized I wasn't given a goal, I was just given a set of instructions and no context, and I didn't enjoy it and I didn't do well in it.

Damiano:

Right. And do you find that, after writing the personal user manual, some people started to actually change, a little bit, their approach?

Aidan:

Yeah. So, on the previous project I was on, it was always really lovely to hear someone use an example from my personal user manual. So one of them is to do with ... phoning is not the best way to get in touch with me, but if you need to get in touch with me urgently, calling me twice in a row is the best way to get ahold of me, because then I know it's important. And I've got a smart watch, so my wrist will be buzzing. I can't ignore it. About a month or two ago, someone actually used that and they called me twice, and I was like, "Oh, hello." They're like, "Oh, hey. Yeah, I thought I'd call you twice because I saw it in your personal user manual." And I was like, that is absolutely awesome, because I ignored it the first time. Second time it must be important, and it was. And it was so great to have just that little thing, it was just such an awesome thing to get out of that.

Damiano:

That is pretty brilliant. And I'm thinking really now from our million listeners that of course will try to write their own personal user manual. What happens? You spend the time to write it, and you, of course, are happy when people use it. How do you feel when people don't? Do you invite them to, "Hey, please check this out"? Or is it something that you leave more as almost an exercise of self reflection at times?

Aidan:

So, to your second point, it's really powerful for self reflection. If you write one and don't share it with anyone else, it's really powerful, just in terms of having a chance to be introspective and try and think about how others will perceive you and what you need. That in its own right, taking time to do that, you'll learn a hell of a lot about yourself. But there's a question around how you want to share it, really. So I, again, possibly oversharing, I have this attached in my email signature, so every single email I send, there's a link to this. For other people who aren't as comfortable with sharing it, again, that's completely okay, possibly just sharing it with one or two people in your team.

Aidan:

So someone's got to be the first person to introduce personal user manuals to their team. You're not all going to wake up on a random Thursday and all happened to have written one at the same time, so there's always going to be a case of vulnerability, but gathering up, say, just one or two people on your team who you're close with and encouraging them to create personal user manuals as well, and then as soon as two people do it then people are like, "Oh, okay."

Damiano:

It's a movement.

Aidan:

Exactly, yeah. There's a great video of someone dancing.

Damiano:

Dancing in-

Aidan:

Yeah, on the hill.

Damiano:

Exactly.

Aidan:

Encouraging you're not alone is probably a powerful thing.

Damiano:

Good one. And especially in the context of a team, right? If I was a team manager or a team leader, would you recommend the team leader to propose this to the team, and to invite them to do it? Or do you think it's something that is so intrinsically personal that it should actually come necessarily for everyone spontaneously? Because I can understand what you say, right, that some of the things may actually be quite maybe intimate. Maybe you don't really want to share with the whole team, because ...

Aidan:

I'd say, if you're a manager, the best way to get people to talk openly about this is to model that behavior yourself. If you try and mandate everyone and say, "Oh, everyone must do a personal user manual, and you must talk about your deepest, darkest fears and traumas," it's never going to happen, or if it does happen, people are going to talk very surface level. But if you're in a leadership position and you create one yourself and share it with the team, it's modeling that vulnerability, it's showing people it's okay to talk about this stuff. You're not going to be discriminated against. You're not going to face judgment or stigma, because we're doing this too. I think that's possibly the best way to encourage a team to do it. But yeah, if you're just an individual and you hear about this and you like it, I think creating one yourself, sharing it with one or two people, seeing what they think, if you don't feel comfortable sharing with everyone at once, is a great way to go about it.

Damiano:

Now, as we start to get towards the end of the episode-

Aidan:

Already?

Damiano:

I know that we have the cliffhanger of the event that you were talking about before, and I absolutely wanted to touch base on that. What was that event? Tell us more. What happened?

Aidan:

Okay. I'll give you the short version of this, which is very powerful ammunition. I know you thought you'd got me earlier, when you were saying that I'm organized. This is where I have a counterpoint, which is a very weird battle to be fighting, but I can let the imposter syndrome have this one. Long story short, Mozilla Fest is an excellent festival where they talk about all sorts of stuff. Wonderful world of open source technology, they're also talking about neurodiversity. I delivered a talk earlier this week, on Monday, about personal user manuals and how to connect with people, and I'd been preparing for this for a couple of months.

Aidan:

And so, I'd made sure that it was all finished on the weekend. It was on the Monday, at around three o'clock. So everything was prepared. I'd had all my calls in the day, I was standing up, I'd had a cough sweet, I'd had lots of water. And I was like, right, I'll do some more stretches. And I thought, I'll do a quick 10 minute meditation, just to fully clear my mind. I had all my speaker notes ready, slides were all available, so I was like, "Cool. Yep, I'm ready to go." Did that, joined the call, I was like, "Cool, yeah." I was like, "Wow, everyone's already joined the call. This is great." There was 20 people there already. I was like, "It's fantastic." Doing the whole, "Oh, right. Okay. Which video call? Yeah, Zoom. Okay." Claim the host key, set that up. Got a message from their facilitator like, "Oh, is everything okay?" I was like, "Yeah, yeah. I'm just going to share the screen, and then I'm good to go." They're like, "Oh, okay. Yeah, we were just wondering, because it started at quarter to."

Aidan:

I was like, "Yeah, that's fine. Wait, what?" "Oh, its started at quarter to." "I'm sorry. What?" This is now two minutes to three. I was like getting ready to start out at three. At some point, I thought that I'd moved the event forwards by 15 minutes in my calendar, so that I wouldn't miss it, and I hadn't moved it forwards.

Damiano:

You had the right time in the calendar?

Aidan:

I had the right time. It just didn't start on the hour. So then, all of a sudden, I was like, "Okay, this is fine. Hey everyone. Thanks for coming to talk about personal user manuals. Today we're going to be talking about why they're really important and how you can use them." Luckily, because I had prepped everything, I was like, "Right, okay. My apologies, everyone, for my lateness, but I'm going to go straight into this." I thought to myself, right, I can't go back in time and make myself any earlier, so panicking about that and going, "Oh, well this is terrible, ah!" ... I can't control that, that's already happened. What I can do is, from this point, I can try and make it as calm, as professional, as valuable a session as possible. And I think, given the situation, I tried my best to do that and not rush through and panic, and it was okay. Okay.

Damiano:

This is not only a very good example, and I still don't take this as a counterpoint to me saying that you are very organized, but we will also have a link in our show notes, possibly, of the speech, right? We do have it. Wonderful. I'm looking forward to that. I'm really looking forward to that. Because-

Aidan:

Yes. Yep, if we forget, it's tinyurl.com/MozFestPUM, which is M-O-Z-F-E-S-T-P-U-M. PUM is just a shortened word for personal user manual. It's good fun to say PUM.

Damiano:

Wonderful. Because I think it's super interesting to see how people manage mishaps in presentations, because I do think it's one of these moments where you really see the ability of a speaker to react quickly, and I think the way you explain this is actually incredibly thoughtful and interesting, and it's something probably most people can really learn something from. So looking forward to checking that out.

Aidan:

If we look back on it and on my actual thing is, "Hi, I'm really sorry guys! I'm so late!" I don't think I did that. I hope.

Damiano:

And now, Aidan, as we have the last few minutes, this is the very first cliffhanger we had at the beginning of the episode. We want to give this super life pro tip to our audience on how to spice up a little bit the conversation with family, friends, even colleagues at times. You gave me this idea earlier. I thought it was brilliant. Can you tell the audience what the idea is?

Aidan:

I think we've chatted a little bit before about check-ins and that's what we kind of do at the beginning, and I like to bring it into all calls. So I do a lot of, "How are you doing?" Ask a completely random question, so on this recent project, I've been asking things like, "What are your top three books of all time? Favorite film? What did you have for dinner last night? What'd you get up to on the weekend?"

Aidan:

But the thing that we're talking about today, which is a fantastic coincidence that we happened to have the same thing, is the game called We're Not Really Strangers. And the initial intent behind this was it was a card game, which you play with absolute strangers, and there are three levels of deepness, let's say, connectedness of the questions. And I've been using it when having conversations with friends and family. So for example, I just started a wonderful call with my mum about a week or two ago. We ended up going on such a deep and wonderful conversation that covered like so many things about like growing up, why she chose to go to university, how she met the people there.

Damiano:

That is incredible. So you were using the card as like a prompt, almost, for the conversation?

Aidan:

Absolutely. Because I don't know about you, but how are you doing with conversations in day-to-day life, when we spend so much time on video calls?

Damiano:

You know, I think I do quite all right. I think most people say that I'm usually very energetic in calls, which is actually true. The thing is, for me, this is totally a persona, right? For me, this is stage performance, and it's just something that I know that it works for me and I can go in and out of this persona extremely easy. It's very taxing though, from an energy perspective. I'm an introvert. So most of my days have like six to seven calls every single day, which means that by the end of it, I need to literally go back into a corner and stay completely alone for at least a couple of hours to recharge the batteries. But what I wanted to ask you is, to close the episode in a very interesting and unexpected way, would you like to ask each other a question from We're Not Really Strangers?

Aidan:

I would love to ask each other a question from We're Not Really Strangers.

Damiano:

Which level should we pick? One, two or three?

Aidan:

So level one is perception. And again, for everyone listening at home, if you don't have this card deck, you can just like grab some piece of paper and just write down some questions, just random questions, and just go into the conversation and say, "Oh, do you want to just ask and answer some random questions?" And just asking that permission already puts you into, "Oh, this is different to the usual." This is my last tangent I promise, but Daniel Sloss on his podcast came up with a great thing, which is called the COVID silence, which is when you have a conversation like the ... it wasn't an awkward conversation, it was a lovely conversation, but I felt awkward when I met my friend in Sainsbury's in a supermarket by chance last night and I'd forgotten how to talk. It was like, "Hey, how are you doing?" "Yeah, I'm good. How are you?" "Yeah, I'm good. How's work?" "Yeah. It's all right, you know. How's work for you?" "Yeah, it's all right." "What are you doing on the weekend?" "Yeah, not much. What about you?" "Yeah, not much." And then there's the COVID silence.

Damiano:

Yeah, I know what you mean.

Aidan:

And then it's like, "Anyway, got to go. Yeah, great seeing you."

Damiano:

"Bye!"

Aidan:

"Great seeing you too." And you're like, "Bye!" Yeah. And this is so great to counter that. So the levels are one for perception, two for connection and three for reflection, I think?

Damiano:

I'm taking a level one, perception, because I think it's a very good way to break the ice with people, especially ...

Aidan:

[crosstalk 00:31:02]. Okay.

Damiano:

So who starts? Shall I start? I have a very good one here.

Aidan:

Yeah. Okay. Go for it.

Damiano:

Right. So Aiden, how likely am I to go camping, and how high maintenance is my setup?

Aidan:

So, it's funny, this, because by its nature, it's not intimate, and you can get as intimate or not as you want. It's definitely a lot more intimate when it's not just two people, there's an entire podcast listening as well, which is interesting. I think you'd enjoy camping. I don't think you'd initially be very good at switching off from the world of emails and phones and things, but I think that after the initial five or six hours, I think you'd turn into like quite a zenful ... you'd bring a bunch of books along with you. How high maintenance do I think? Yeah, I think medium maintenance. I don't think you'd be full-on, like, "Oh, I've got a 12-person tent. It's got all this rigging, it's got this, I've got like a stove and I'm catching fish with my bare hands." But I also don't think you're going to be like a £5 tent where you can't even sit up. So I think you'll be middle of the road. But I think you'd enjoy like a weekend away from society.

Damiano:

Very interesting. That's why I love this game. Because of course, the next question would be, why is he thinking this about me? Where did he get that impression? Because frankly, we never spoke about camping before. It's not fascinating. Question for you Aidan. When you play this with your-

Aidan:

Cool. Oh, before we do, how far off was I?

Damiano:

Quite far off, I have to say.

Aidan:

Oh, interesting. And that's great, that means I'm learning more.

Damiano:

Because interestingly enough, I'm not a camping person at all, actually.

Aidan:

Really?

Damiano:

Yeah. I've had a few experiences when I was a kid in something ... in Italy, we have these groups called like the Boy Scouts, right, where you go out and they try to get you to, I guess, learn about nature and go camping. And I had terrible experiences back in the day, just because the kids were horrible, the ones I was with. And so, I think this kind of extended into my idea of if I spent a night in a tent, in a place, blah, it never really appealed to me. So probably there is still a bit of a story behind this. But I love what you said, that you think I could switch off after a few hours, and I hope it's true because boy oh boy, at the moment, I really would have a hard time. What is your question? What is your question? I've got a surprise-

Aidan:

What about me is most strange or unfamiliar to you?

Damiano:

The most unfamiliar ... you are the first person I've ever met that, well, at least that told me they had ADHD and was able to clearly articulate how this works. For me, it's been like an epiphany moment. It's when I really felt I understood, which was very unfamiliar for me, so I don't know if this can count, but for me that would be the most unfamiliar thing. The thing is, you're a great conversationalist, so you really manage to make things feel extremely familiar, even though most of the topics we cover, even in this podcast ... you are the brain, right, besides most of this. So I would say you're really good at making people feel very comfortable. And the most strange ... right now, I would say the sweater you're wearing, with this very interesting eighties orange and black pattern. And I'm like, did I just insult an Arsenal t-shirt, and all the soccer fans ...

Aidan:

No, not at all.

Damiano:

Ah, okay. For a second, I thought it was a soccer t-shirt.

Aidan:

No, I was just bathing in the ...

Damiano:

In the compliments?

Aidan:

In the incredibly kind words. Thank you so much. Yeah.

Damiano:

But this is why I think it's actually great. So for all the audience, we'll put the link, of course. We are not affiliated.

Aidan:

Not yet.

Damiano:

But it's a very good way to get the conversation started, even with people you already know. Aidan, I thank you so much. As usual, it's been a wonderful, wonderful conversation.

Aidan:

I did mention that I was going to a Gollum impression at some point.

Damiano:

You did.

Aidan:

I did.

Damiano:

Then you have to do it.

Aidan:

Have we got time left in the episode for me to do that [crosstalk 00:35:19]?

Damiano:

Of course. I'm going to cut another part of the podcast to make space for this.

Aidan:

I think that's fair. Yeah, we can just get rid of all the nice things you were saying about me. What would you like me to talk about when being Gollum?

Damiano:

Well, I most definitely want the Gollum reaction to being late to the MozFest.

Aidan:

We're late to the presentation, precious. We thought it started on time! No, you always do this. You're wrong. Stupid, fat hobbit! You can't even turn up to a thing on time! No, it's okay. I can't change it anyway, precious. It's already happened. We just need to do the presentation. No, you're a failure. Stupid Aidan! Give up now. No, I'm going to use this in the presentation! You haven't got a presentation, precious!

Damiano:

Oh my God. This is amazing.

Aidan:

And the reason I did that at the end is because that wrecks my voice.

Damiano:

It destroys your voice, but that was brilliant Aidan. It was well worth waiting until the end of the episode. Yes, to spare your voice any further, thank you for sharing this with us.

Aidan:

Thank you.

Damiano:

Thank you for everybody listening, and as always, as we say at the end, it's okay ...

Aidan:

... to be okay, precious!

Damiano:

See you later.

Aidan:

Take care, everyone. Bye bye.

Damiano:

Bye.

Transcript by Sean Jackson

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Aidan Cammies: Hi and welcome to Brainstorm - the podcast exploring how our minds work, how work affects us and how we can best deal with it. We are Aidan Cammies 

Damiano Tescaro: and Damiano Tescaro. Explorers of the office jungle and mental health aficionados. Buckle up, because ideas are about to get wild.

Aidan:
Hello, Damiano. How are you today?

Damiano:
Hello, Aidan. We said we were going to start with the radio voice. Come on, give me some radio voice.

Aidan:
Hello, and welcome back to Brainstorm. My name is Aidan Cammies, and I'm here with Damiano Tescaro today to talk to you about...

Damiano:
I'm not sure we chose a title yet, but hey, I thought it was about negative bias and emotional hygiene.

Aidan:
That sounds fascinating. What are we going to talk through today? We can cut this out if it doesn't make sense because we never stick to what we plan.

Damiano:
We literally never do. And first of all, communication of service, we do have a new name. We are now known as Brainstorm Squared.

Aidan:
Brainstorm Squared episode one/episode six of Brainstorm. This will not get confusing.

Damiano:
And you may wonder, but why? Why did you change the name? It was already fantastic before. You will be right. We don't really know why we did it, but we really felt we wanted to be really extra special, and there might be some news coming up in the next month. Maybe you will be able to listen to this podcast in other places, in more convenient places who knows? Right, Aidan?

Aidan:
Correctamondo, we're trying to make this go as far and wide as possible, make it easy for you to access as possible. Because if you're at all like me, I don't really want to browse through all of these internal sites. I want to be able to listen to this whilst I'm chopping up vegetables and then shovelling chocolate cake into our mouth.

Damiano:
We would like fantastic, like the shiny thing effect on the teeth when we smile.

Aidan:
If I could wink, that came across in that podcast.

Damiano:
Aidan, so first of all, happy 2021. Right, the new year has started-

Aidan:
Happy 2021 to you too.

Damiano:
Even though I feel that we are all... This is how I tell every single time people ask me how I am. I'm suspended in an eternal presence.

Aidan:
That's deep.

Damiano:
Right?

Aidan:
Yeah. I mean, definitely a Groundhog day, Groundhog year has definitely been the feeling for a while.

Damiano:
Yeah. I think we chose a very good topic for the first episode of the year because there's been a ton of stuff going on. We are three weeks in the year and it feels like we've been here for months already. There has been the US election, Brexit has finally technically happened. We're still in lockdown and there are mutations of COVID going around. There is so much stuff going on. So we decided to talk about emotional hygiene in the first place and information diet in general.

Aidan:
Yeah. This year has been a lot already. And if you're anything like me, it's been difficult to stay away from the news, especially when there's something that's new and exciting is definitely not the word. New and impactful and big, and ah, that happens a lot.

Damiano:
The expression emotional hygiene, I think for most people will sound a bit like eww. Because hygiene is a word that I think most of us feel very prudent about in a way, but this is why I think it's actually, it's good because it triggers something in the brain. And most of us probably don't really associate the word emotional with... Hygiene is very physical, right? It's very practical while emotional is kind of abstract. The inspiration for this comes from a TED talk from a psychologist called Guy Winch.

Damiano:
It's a beautiful talk actually, because he describes in such a beautiful way how the emotional ritual of taking care of literally our emotional hygiene, our cleanliness in a similar way to how we're taught by our parents wash your face, take a shower, clip your fingernails, comb your hair, all the basic things that we assume it's common knowledge. And we assume everybody does. And if you don't, it's kind of just despicable and terrible. He points the spotlight in saying we're not really taught to do this with our own emotions yet our emotions have such a powerful impact on how we are with other people. And it's extraordinary that we don't. So I thought it was an interesting point to start the conversation.

Aidan:
Yeah, absolutely. Up until earlier today, when you first put that in our chat message, I'd never... I don't really recognize the phrase emotional hygiene, but I immediately love it. It kind of shows self-care which we'll chat a little bit about later on. God, I wanted to say chat a little bit about later on.

Damiano:
A me tongue twister by Aidan Cammies.

Aidan:
Daily podcast tongue twister. Self-care has this weird connotation where it feels like it should be very, yeah, you need to be mindful, but also treating yourself. And also you should be having a bath with candles and chocolate-

Damiano:
Oh, yeah, the candles, scented candles everywhere, right?

Aidan:
Yeah. You can't fully relax unless there's fire present. It's got this weird reputation. I always feel guilty when I'm not making myself a priority and not doing self-care, but emotional hygiene seems a lot more practical because as you said, things like brushing your teeth, keeping yourself clean is something that you don't just do once. You don't go, "Oh, it's been three weeks of working hard. Now I'm going to have a hygiene day." It's something that you do little often. Kind of like we chatted about in our last episode about habits and how if we make something as small as possible for it to count as a success we're more likely to do it more. So, treating your brain in the same way rather than going, "Oh, well, I'm going to work really hard and then have an entire week off where I'm going to relax and do all of these things and treat myself." I can speak from experience over Christmas. It doesn't happen that way.

Damiano:
Absolutely, no. Yes. Such a good analogy by the way because I think it's the trap, right? It's the mental trap of thinking that one bath with candles, that one weekend at the spa, it's going to fix everything. It's going to fix your anxiety. It's going to fix the fact that you feel stressed because of, I don't know, what's happening in the world or because you broke up with your partner. That's not really how the mind works. And it's also this, I would dare to say, disrespectful approach to how our mind works, how our brain works in the sense that it's just a one fix thing. You're only going to do one thing and it's going to be all right, but it's not really the case. I'm thinking we were talking last time about the rituals of course, and strategies for this, which path would you like to take today to talk about emotional hygiene? What can we focus on today?

Aidan:
We are doing choose your own adventure. Where do we start? The tangent I want to go on first when you're chatting about how already this year a lot has gone on. I think chatting about negativity bias and the information we consume could be a great start. I definitely want to chat more about emotional hygiene and self-care with you later as well.

Damiano:
Love that. And the information part, I think is probably top of mind for everyone. Literally everyone in the world probably feels this at the moment. So I would definitely say, "Let's start with that." How does your information diet look like at the moment, Aidan? Can you give us a bit of a panorama?

Aidan:
I can definitely tell you about what it's like at the moment, and then I can tell you what it used to be like. And I can tell you what impacts that's hard because I used to read the news all the time. Not quite non-stop, but very regularly. When I was, I don't know, years ages 12 and under, actually probably more like ages 15 and under, I was still very much, "I don't have any responsibilities. I'm going to go home and play with my Lego and Pokemon," which I still do now, which is actually probably a fun tie-in.

Aidan:
Then kind of came that, "Oh, you're a teenager. You're an adult now. The world is bad. Everything's bad. You need to think about what you're going to do with your life. There's all this pressure, responsibility, choose what you're going to do. Ah, and then you're kind of, I don't know if encouraged as the right word, but you have to know what's going on in the world. You need to be a well-informed citizen.

Damiano:
It's your responsibility.

Aidan:
Responsibility, definitely a balance there that isn't really talked about because we can't change everything. We as individuals have the power to change a lot of things, but we can't change everything. And it's important. Stay up to date with politics. It's important to stay up to date with the general state of the climate. News flash, not great, still needs work, but we can't fix everything. If you tried to be... I'm pretty environmentally conscious. I've definitely been hit by eco guilt a lot, especially this past week. I always try and buy things used instead of new, even that eventually becomes so all-consuming. You're like, "Oh, I don't know what to do. I don't eat meat. Wow, it's not the first time. Have I managed to go five episodes without mentioning the fact that I'm vegan?

Damiano:
I think you never mentioned that before.

Aidan:
I won't talk about that for now, because the main point is you can't do everything. You can't be environmentally conscious and help to end homelessness and fix the state of the political landscape at the moment. There are so many things and we can't fix them all. But when we're bombarded by news about all of them all the time, knowing that we can't do anything, it's going to make us anxious. It's going to make us feel stressed knowing that there's all this stuff that we can't control. Do you want to play a little game with me? I've decided I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it.

Damiano:
Please, please.

Aidan:
Yes. Okay. So, I am going to go onto a UK newspaper website. I'm going to go for two separate websites, which are on a general different ends of the political spectrum. I'm going to count out the top five or six newspaper articles from each website. How many do you think are negative? How many do you think are neutral, and how many do you think are positive? Feel free to play along at home as well.

Damiano:
Okay. So coming from marketing backgrounds, knowing how powerful negativity is in terms of attention and click through rate, I would say 70% negative. None is neutral. The remaining is positive.

Aidan:
Oh, okay. First one, definitely negative. The headline is Fury at EU Brexit tax. Interesting.

Damiano:
Thank you.

Aidan:
Second one, Wedding with 400 guests was held in COVID test centere. Police raid secret party in Jewish girls school in North London as organizer is fined £10,000. So, again, very negative one. Look at these people, doing these bad things, also.

Damiano:
Shame, shame, shame.

Aidan:
General anti-Semitic vibes. Don't really know why you need to point out there's a Jewish girls' school there.

Damiano:
Very good point.

Aidan:
Prime minister will hold press conferences as up to 70 furious MPS demand a roadmap for lifting lockdown amid fears. There's a celebrity divorce. Oh, God. I hate that. Elegance coach reveals the clothes that make you look common and turn off classy, man.

Damiano:
What?

Aidan:
God, it's not the '70s anymore. Okay.

Damiano:
I'm actually on a good trend, right? Because we are what? The six out of 10 actually already negative?

Aidan:
So far, yeah. Five or six out of 10. British gap year students are quarantined to a French ski resort after 16 tested positive for COVID-19. Seems neutral, sparking anger among locals. Okay. There it is. Already in talks with hotels. Minister refuses to rule out closing borders to foreigners all together. There's a lot of caps in here.

Damiano:
Eight out of 10.

Aidan:
Ethnic minorities, we're up to 50% more likely to die from COVID at peak of first wave from white Britain study fines. I mean, that's a negative thing for sure.

Damiano:
Yeah, yeah. I mean, he's kept capturing the negative attention, right? Because it's scaremongering, basically. It's trying to, yeah. So it's nine out of 10. Last one. Does this save the category? No? You're laughing already.

Aidan:
It's just another mess. Heathrow travellers blast plans to force all UK arrivals to quarantine at hotels for 10 days. They still face hour-long queues to share negative COVID test paperwork. So that's a 10 out of 10 for negative right there.

Damiano:
10 out of 10 negative.

Aidan:
That's one newspaper.

Damiano:
I lost actually my bet.

Aidan:
So, that little game was to prove a point that overall, newspapers and most media we consume is very negative.

Damiano:
Indeed.

Aidan:
Because it ignites those parts of our brain that elicits an emotional reaction. I may say, "Oh, that's terrible. Oh, I can't believe that." Because people get paid for clicks. People get paid for newspapers sold.

Damiano:
And this is such an important mindset that we have to adopt now when it comes to consuming media because we believe that we are reading news because we are supposed to be informed. The truth is 90% of what we see is designed to trigger analytics, marketing analytics, sales figures. Their editors will show the investors and show their shareholders.

Aidan:
Absolutely, yeah. Without, touching on the general political landscape at the moment. And we all know our friends' algorithms and how they create echo chambers. But the key point I want to talk about is how to try and limit that because I realized thanks to Tim Ferris is the first person I heard about it from is how to help to limit this level of kind of exposure.

Aidan:
And there's something that he has, which is called a low information diet. And this has been really powerful for me for the past, I think I started five years ago, which is I removed all bookmarks to newspaper websites, anything like that. Reduce the amount of stuff that I follow on social media by just going through and going either unfollow, unlike, whatever.

Damiano:
Can I ask a question? Sorry, In case somebody maybe doesn't know Tim Ferris. Do you want to maybe introduce him in two words?

Aidan:
Two words, Tim Ferris? Human Guinea pig? Human Guinea pig, I think is what he used for his one sentence sales pitch. Yeah, for a long time, he's got a very, very excellent podcast and tries out all sorts of things to be more productive, to be happier, mindful, et cetera. Interviews some really awesome people so Tim, if you want to come on the podcast there's your free advertising spot.

Aidan:
Yeah. But I tried this out and it's been great. It's also been interesting because I chat about with family quite a lot and they go, "But you need to be informed. You need to know what's going on at all times." Do you though? Do you really need stay informed about everything all the time? Because there's a balance. I'm not sticking my head in the sand. I'm just not checking every day, every five minutes. The kind of mantra that I go for is if it's not important and it doesn't affect me, I won't find out about it, and that's okay. Not stick my head in the sand. What I do is counteract this is. Well, like I said, if it doesn't affect me, I probably won't hear about it. If it does affect me, someone's going to mention it on an email or a group chat or a message to me and there we are, I'll find out, it will come to me. I don't have to go looking for it.

Aidan:
If I want to learn more about particular topics, say know what's happening in this country over here at the moment, I'll chat to friends that I know have a keen interest in this. And that already is a great source of delegation/outsourcing because am I going to be able to keep up to date with a completely unbiased understanding of what's happening in US politics and also environmental and also this and this, or do I just reach out to people who already consume all this media? Say for example, my old housemate, Jack who did law and politics. I can just reach out to him and be like, "Yo, what's happening here?" And rather than me going through all of this effort. Again, I'm lazy, but also I don't want to be bombarded by negative stuff all the time.

Aidan:
I can still know what's going on there, but also have time and more positive head space. And when I start the day, I'm not starting off with here are all the bad things that happen that you won't believe I can wake up. And this almost sounds selfish, but this is where it actually does become a self-care, a me focused mindset. I'm starting the day by going, "How can I look after myself? Rather than, "Oh, all these things about, oh, that's bad. Oh, I can't do anything about that," but I'm still taking on those feelings. And going, "How can I help me to feel good today to allow me to help others?"

Damiano:
That is brilliant. And I love in particular that you start with something that you can influence and can control, which is your actions towards yourself. The other question that I wanted to ask you is how long have you been practicing the low-information diet and what are the results that you've seen ever since?

Aidan:
I think I've been doing it for, I think five years. Started probably the second year of university. Like I said, it definitely helps me to have more space, to think about the things that I want/need to do. Our brains haven't really changed much in the past 10,000 years, 5,000 years. We're still biologically designed to go pick up some berries, eat the berries, chat to a maximum of 150 people because that's what Dunbar's number is in the maximum number of relationships we can really hold, but then we've got Twitter. And we've got like you say, a constant bombardment of information that is always there.

Aidan:
There's never been a day where there just hasn't been any news. I've never woken up and go, "Oh, I wonder what the news is today. Nothing happened. You good, carry on about your day. There's always going to be a new thing. It's always like, I don't know, like a soap opera, TV show, which is just always running. There's always going to be another thing.

Damiano:
Ever flowing.

Aidan:
Absolutely. And again, that doesn't mean cut it out completely, but trying to be mindful of that. Trying to restrict it until it's something that you actually want to view. Even if you think you're pretty stoic and mindful, there's only so much you can take of that constant, here's a negative thing. Here's what's going on. Here's what's going on. Here's what's going wrong. Probably that first part of the newspaper game probably wasn't very fun to listen to because it's all negative, negative, negative. It definitely wasn't fun to read through that page, but knowing that that's why I think it felt so intense right then because I don't regularly check it. That is at a low level what we do feel. We may not be conscious of it. If we're conscious and we read a thing and went, "That makes me sad." And your brain goes, "We should stop doing that because there's nothing we can actionably do about that."

Aidan:
But it doesn't, it goes, "Oh, no, that's bad." Scroll. What's the next thing? Exactly. And we talked a bit in the last episode about how I definitely suffer from the infinite scroll and not being able to get off stuff when I get on it.

Damiano:
I raise my hand as well.

Aidan:
Yeah, as much as we try to be mindful, it's always going to be a struggle. Yeah, just trying it out for like a week is a really nice way to start, especially when so much tense stuff is going on right now. Ask a friend to tell you if anything really major that I need to do anything about comes up. Like, I don't know, if I need to evacuate the country, probably let me know. But again, you'll probably hear about that.

Damiano:
Yeah. When you were saying this being mindful because this is really like a word that comes forward on and on and on when we talk, which I love. I think it's one of the key words of our show in general. What I realize is that I make no mystery that I'm slightly addicted to using my phone, infinite scrolling. I tell myself that I'm doing really important things when I'm using my phone. I'm really keeping myself informed, and this is brilliant. I am so smart. I love this. I should always be doing this. And it's a very easy trigger to click because of the dopamine, every time, every time. I have to be honest, for me doing the completely unsubscribed to everything or just stop using, reading Twitter and Reddit all together will be really, really difficult.

Aidan:
Oh, God. I can't do that.

Damiano:
I mean, right, because the addiction is there, of course. The filter that I'm to implement for myself is to be the most cynical marketing person I can.

Aidan:
Okay.

Damiano:
Because if I put my marketing glasses on and I look at my timeline, I start seeing dollar signs when I see things that are clearly targeted towards promotions. And I found that for me using this sort of marketing glasses when I'm reading content, keeping in the back of my mind that there is a social media team, probably a paid team, helps me be very, very critical of the content. It acts like a buffer between me and the emotional response to the content because I look at it from almost "a professional standpoint" where I rate more of the marketing efforts rather than necessarily immediately the content provided that this doesn't work 100% of the time, of course.

Damiano:
The other thing that I've started to do, and I wanted to ask you if it's similar for you, that I tend to follow more like, I guess, projects is how I would call it rather than news specifically. For instance, in the last couple of months, I've been following a project for a markdown editor that I'm using now for the podcast to take notes. And I've been learning a little bit about markdown. So I'm trying to follow now people that are interested in that. A friend of mine is working on eco-sustainable machine learning, for example, algorithms. And I've been trying to catch up. It's a huge topic, but I've tried to catch up a little bit. And what I found is that this opens different bubbles. So, it's not the bubble of the political discourse or the celebrities or whatever.

Aidan:
Eco chamber, kind of.

Damiano:
Exactly, right. It is a slightly different eco chambers that talks about different topics that frankly are less emotionally charged, like battery technology. How is the battery technology evolving and how could this influence the electrification for the future when it comes to manufacturing, transportation, and so on? It's an interesting topic. I must be honest. I don't feel rage or I don't feel absolute joy and happiness when I read these kind of things. But I found that creating these alternative bubbles relieves some of the stress. Did you have a similar effect when you did this?

Aidan:
Yeah, absolutely. And I've got another game I'm going to play in a sec. First of all, I really liked that. That kind of helps to explain it. When you were saying you're approaching advertisements articles that you're seeing with that kind of marketing mindset. That's really interesting because you're pulling away from the emotional standpoint. You're pulling your brain towards that. Okay, very logical. Why am I looking at this? Why am I viewing this? What do I want from this? Which is really powerful because then it's that added a little bit of higher level mindful thinking, which means you go, "Do I actually want this?"

Aidan:
I've got a side tangent of how I like to occasionally visit websites, which I would never usually visit just to mess up people's targeted ads and stuff just a little bit more. I got onto Instagram pretty late. Okay. I'm going to walk you through your first of all, because this is relevant to last week's episode. For me to open Instagram I am required to do this. Swipe up, swipe to the right, confirm my password to get into my hidden space. I then have to swipe down from the top, scroll all the way to the bottom, turn off focus mode. That disables set and enable break. So, I'm going to then click, take a break then click 15 minutes. Then go back onto that list, swipe up, password or finger. And now I'm looking at my Instagram timeline.

Damiano:
That's like 37 clicks.

Aidan:
But I can do it all really fast, which is the problem. But the important thing is it's giving me steps to go, "Wait, do I really want to do this? It's at work." I will talk through what's on my timeline right now. So, used to be very not fun politics, try to be more of a ruthless. So I've got a picture of a friend, talking about mental health. Nice. My auntie, oh, they've got a mouse that's broken into the house. That's fine. A sponsored ad for dogs. I love that. I'll ask to sponsor that for my friend who is now running their own dog thing, that's fun. My old housemate, just some nice pictures. Football, acapella, love that. A fun wholesome webcomic, ADHD, another picture of a dog. I try to be rigorous and go. If I see a page that doesn't make me feel good, then I'll go eh, go away. Because I want this to be a space where I can connect with my friends.

Aidan:
This is kind of the crux of it, which is what is the goal behind going onto a thing? For me, Instagram, I want to have things that make me laugh, that make me happy, ways to keep in touch with my friends or weird stuff like ADHD, mental health, from that positive view. I want to be able to learn, but in a nice creative way, which isn't just, here's a bunch of articles, which is better than endless scroll through negative stuff.

Damiano:
Absolutely.

Aidan:
Phone addiction is kind of separate here, but I'd much rather be infinitely scrolling through stuff that brings me a little burst of joy than something which doesn't. So what does... I'm now intrigued? What does your Instagram look like?

Damiano:
Well, I have to be honest. I really like what you were saying here because I've not been as rigorous as you are. To be honest, I've not been as mindful as you are. Now that you've told me this, I will definitely spend probably the next couple of days going through my Instagram feed. But I use Instagram mostly for photography inspiration.

Aidan:
Oh, fantastic.

Damiano:
So I would say 90% of my Instagram is either food photography or portrait/fashion photography. Not because I am a great food photographer, fashion photographer. It's just because it's a visual cue that gives me a lot of happiness. When I have this, sometimes it happens that I say, "Oh, look at this, the light on this portrait is gorgeous. Maybe I can try to do this. And it gives me an idea on something that I could try one day.

Damiano:
So 90% is really about photography. And I think the remaining 10%, I have maybe like 1% of people that I actually know to be honest, very little though, because I don't usually read the descriptions on Instagram. I am sorry, but it just doesn't work for me.

Aidan:
No, that's fine.

Damiano:
And the remaining 10% is a mix of interior design, which I also find very calming from a feng shui place.

Aidan:
Very nice.

Damiano:
And funny comics like The Oatmeal. There is any Italian guy called Instasio, does hilarious illustrations as well. As you said, it's this moment of, for me, it has to be either something artistic that makes me say, "Wow, this is really beauty." Like, look at the colour correction with this picture. I love this. I want to try this. Or it has to be something that makes me kind of smile. If it's neither of the two, like you said, I've started to be quite drastic in saying, "Sorry. You're out of my timeline now."

Aidan:
I like that. So you saying that you didn't really go through monitor, check, but for Instagram at the very least, does it do what you want it to do? Does it match the goal regardless of tech addiction and infinite scrolling?

Damiano:
Yes, absolutely. Instagram is I think for photographers is a bit of a curse at times because there is this like a hyper competitive way of using Instagram where I actually spoke about this with a lot of my colleagues because I think the feeling on Instagram is you have such a high level of quality. You have the best photographers posting amazing things. It makes us feel, I guess, very self-conscious. It's very easy to fall into the imposter syndrome. And I think if that's the case, that's the day I would unplug Instagram. If I start to feel that way because that is a very negative feedback.

Aidan:
I think, I think it's interesting I think you say about how hyper-competitive Instagram is. I can definitely say, especially for Instagram photography, but I'd argue that kind of like that with everything because back in the day it's easy to be the best photographer in a village, in a town. It's difficult to be the best in the world, but you don't necessarily in ye olden times you don't get to compare yourself to everyone else. But right now it's impossible not to compare yourself to-

Damiano:
Very good point.

Aidan:
... to every other person out there. So I think that's another really important thing to do is ask... One of my favorite things is a thing called the five whys, which is where you ask the question why five times. So for example, I want to learn more about politics. Why? Because I want to know how to vote and what changes I need to make in my life. Why? Because I want the best for the people around me, people and community and wider globe as a whole to feel good. Why? Because I care about other people's wellbeing.

Aidan:
And once you keep going down, you eventually got to a point where you're like, "Okay, does this goal of, I care about people's wellbeing and wants to do better for them? Am I going to achieve that by reading this article that's got lots of capital letters and exclamation marks?" Maybe not. And also does it make me feel good? No, it doesn't make me... Are there other things that I can do that would achieve this goal of helping other people without having to go through this? And once you get down that low, either you realize actually what I'm doing isn't matching that or yeah, it is, but there's a different way I could be doing that.

Damiano:
This is really nice. The five whys exercise.

Aidan:
Five whys. Yeah.

Damiano:
Well, people, you've heard it here first.

Aidan:
I did not invent that. No, no, no.

Damiano:
Let's not tell anyone.

Aidan:
I can remember where I first heard about that, but it's probably through Scrum or Agile. It's to do with a lot of the time when you're doing work in an IT project. I'm changing it from just pure HTML to unplug and react. In that, okay, why are you doing that? Because it makes it look better. And also it's easier to do. Okay. Why? Why do you want to make it easier to do and look better? Because if it looks better than people are more likely to use it and why do I want to make it easier? So it's less hassle for me to do in the long term. Okay. So, why'd you want to make it less hassle in the long term? And then you eventually go, "Okay, that makes sense to do that." But oftentimes you'll do that and you go, "I don't really know," or, "Because that person told me to." And when you get to that you're like, "Right. Should you really be doing that?" It's like, "No, I probably shouldn't." And that's really good.

Damiano:
That's brilliant.

Aidan:
Yeah. It was a whole thing about sunk cost fallacy and I'm like, "But I already started it ." knowing when to say no and get rid of it is really powerful.

Damiano:
And this, ladies and gentlemen was our connection to the, I guess, dev environment that these are the things that we do here at Brainstorm. We are just like that. We are just like that. Actually, we are basically at the end of the episode. So, do we want to maybe-

Aidan:
It's gone so quickly.

Damiano:
... recap quickly what we were talking about?

Aidan:
Absolutely. So-

Damiano:
Definitely the five why's. I think it's brilliant, unexpected, and fantastic. So I'm going to use this definitely.

Aidan:
Fantastic. I'll scribble that one down so that I remember to put that in the show notes. Just to talk a bit about how newspapers and articles and information in media in general tends to be negative and sensationalized often disguised as, "Oh, you're going to be a good informed citizen if you read this. And how we can't solve everything, so trying to do that all the time is only going to make us feel worse. That doesn't mean you shouldn't ever learn about anything and stay deliberately ignorant, of course not. But there are easier ways to do this. Try and find people or reliable sources of information that you can check at your own pace, asking yourself, "What do I really want from this? And is this actually a positive thing?"

Damiano:
That's really good.

Aidan:
There's a great newspaper in the UK, I think they're also on Instagram called The Happy News by Emily Coxhead. This was basically built on this principle. It's just a paper or online account, which just talks about the happy stuff in the world and focuses on gratitude. And again, not to deliberately go, "Oh, nothing's wrong." But here's the thing, how Tasmanian devils returned to mainland Australia after 3000 years, after a 10 year breeding. Every single one of these things I look at I go, "Oh, that's great. I didn't know about that. Oh, that's great. I didn't know about that."

Damiano:
So glad to hear, so glad to hear.

Aidan:
Yeah.

Damiano:
That is wonderful. That is wonderful. And it goes very well as well with the low-information diet that you mentioned by Tim Ferris, of course. And also like the general umbrella that we started from the emotional hygiene for which we will link the video to the TED Talk. I would really think everybody benefits by watch. It's a very nice video. It's a feel good video, but also is a very insightful video. So hopefully there are a few strategies. Here in Brainstorm Squared, we're really trying to get some actions at the end of the day that you can try to apply. So if you do, please do let us know. Let us know if it works. If it doesn't, if you have other ideas, we'd love to hear from you. And as always it's okay-

Aidan:
It's okay, not to be okay.

Damiano:
... not to be okay.

Aidan:
Have a good day everyone.

Damiano:
Have a great day, bye.

Aidan:
Yeah.

Damiano:
And a three, and a two, and a one, and done.

How to start a conversation around the topics of psychological safety, mental awareness, mental health, plus everything that has to do with diversity and inclusion.

Damiano Tescaro: damianotescaro.com -

Aidan Cammies: acammies.com

FULL TRANSCRIPT by Sean Jackson

Hi and welcome to Brainstorm - the podcast exploring how our minds work, how work affects us and how we can best deal with it.

We are Aidan Cammies (AC) and Damiano Tescaro (DT).

Explorers of the office jungle and mental health aficionados.
Buckle up, because ideas are about to get wild.

Synopsis

DT: So, Aidan, what are we going to talk about?

AC: Today we’re going to go on a massive tangent filled adventure through the wonderful world of habits, accountability and setting goals.

DT: Say no more. No, actually say more, please say more.

AC: We’re going to talk about how to plan the environment around you, making habits easy. The last thing you want to do is force yourself into habits. We want to make habits as easy as possible and as enjoyable as possible. So hopefully in this slightly longer episode you’ll pick up some practical tips that will help you do the stuff that you want to do.

DT: Sounds like a plan, and off we go.

Full episode

DT: Hello Aidan.

AC: Hello Damiano, how are you today?

DT: Very good, and welcome back it feels like only a couple of days ago we were doing the previous episode. Which is kind of true.

AC: It’s quite nice, I could happily do this every week.

DT: I am delighted, we actually had some people reach out and ask if we were going to do a December episode of Brainstorm and the answer is yes and we’re very happy to hear from people who are listening to the episodes. So thank you.

AC: Absolutely, it’s great to be able to put one out. This is episode numero pump [Welsh for five]

DT: We are going to have a special episode in Welsh of course, and one in Italian maybe.

AC: I feel like the quality of the Italian one might be slightly better than my Welsh.

DT: For this episode I love the fact that we don’t have any secrets from our listener. We didn’t decide the topic, but we found the perfect topic to talk about right before the New Year.

AC: That we did. It is a personal favourite of mine, we’ll be chatting about habits and accountability and all the fun things that surround that topic. That is part of the reason I mentioned learning Welsh. Because that’s a habit, people learning things. So people might say as a New Year’s resolution I am going to stop eating chocolate, and become fluent in French. I am going to go to the gym 20 times per week, just non-stop, always in the gym and then two weeks in, it’s all gone. Has there ever been a New Year’s resolution that you have managed to stick to?

DT: I have to be honest with you, I don’t believe in New Year’s resolutions, hence I have never ever done one. I am very resistant, and I like to brag that I have been saved, it does not stick, it is such a weak link in my brain to habit and I know as a creature of habits, I do love my habits, but I also know that it is very hard for me to build new ones. So I am very curious to hear what you have to say about habits because I feel I need some help.

AC: It is something I love talking about, but it is something I can get better at. There are always going to be ways to improve on this. I am in the same boat as you, I have never failed a New Year’s resolution because I have never tried. And that’s OK. Part of the problem is it is not the time of the year that you set it, it is how you do it.

The way that our brains work, if you have a goal like I’m going to go to the gym every single day for an entire year, that is a big goal that requires a lot of discipline and will power and simply put, our brains are not great at that, they are not designed to be powered by discipline or will power. It can help us along the way and it’s a very cold morning, and it’s six in the morning and you’re in Wales and it’s grey and rainy, you don’t want to go to the gym. You don’t want to do it for just one day, let alone an entire year.

So, we have to use a different technique to do this, and a lot of the time properly setting habits is to have a driving reason, rather than having an arbitrary I want to go to the gym four times a week, which doesn’t mean anything, that’s not something that when it’s cold you’ll think “yay, I want to do this”. But if you have a higher reason behind it like I want to have rippling muscles for that beach bod, or I want to improve my PB, or run or climb a mountain on a trip I’ve got planned. Those are all reasons that in the moment you will think of when you’re asking yourself why you’re doing something. 

DT: Aidan, I have to ask, what is a PB?

AC: It’s a Personal Best, so if you’re running or lifting weights, it is specific goal.

DT: Is the distinction between having a generic I am going to go on a diet, without a metric, you can’t quantify what does it mean to be on a diet or going to the gym more often is not something you can quantify, versus giving yourself a goal. Is this the first distinguishing thing you were talking about?

AC: Absolutely, this is one of the first things you can take away and immediately make your resolutions better. Because you can answer the questions, did I achieve my resolution. And I think that can swing into one of the things we do, which is that we set too high short term targets. I don’t know if that is the right way of wording it, but often we’ll say something like I want to go to the gym, for 30 minutes, three times per week, for a year. That is better than saying I am going to go to the gym and get really strong. I can say this because I know. I bought an entire year’s gym membership and I used it once. And then I just felt guilty for the rest of the year.

DT: Of course, it backfires, because not only are you not going, you also know that you lost money.

AC: Yeah, and then you’re just beating yourself up about it, which does not make you go to the gym more often.

DT: That is a good point, because it backfires from a motivation standpoint. So if we’re debunking the New Year’s resolution, how can people build habits that are realistic and that they can stick to.

AC: This is something that I’ve said before, it’s something I am really interested in, but also something I am really, really bad at. Because I don’t like doing things that other people tell me to do, I don’t like doing things that the past version of me told me to do and I don’t like doing things that are difficult. Because getting out of bed at 7am to go to the gym is not appealing. I want to lie in bed, or watch TV before starting work.

DT: This is all sounding so relatable.

AC: I know, so many people will tell you that you need discipline and willpower, you need to hustle, but that’s not how our brains work. What you need to do, and there are many different parts to this, and they all help, but when they’re all put together than help you absolutely stick to these habits, and it doesn’t require beating yourself up, because I don’t want to tell people to do that. But there are little things we can do. One of them is make your targets small, which at first your brain might fight. Say you want to do yoga more, I’ve got an app, you click one button and it goes onto the TV, and I have my yoga mat set out. But if I have to do 20 minutes each day, that is difficult, sometimes I will have days when I wake up late or I’m busy, or my knee hurts. And as soon as we don’t do it, our brains goes oh well. So habit change is really powerful. So a way to combat that is make it as easy as possible.

I had a thing where I wanted to do push-ups every single day and I was building up to do 50 push ups every single day, which right now off the bat don’t try to do 50 every day. But I said to myself, I can do one push up every day. Even if it is at the very end of the day, just one. And I can count that as a success. Because so often you’ll find that when you do that one, those five or 10, that no matter how tired, hungry or sick I am, I can do 10 push ups and it becomes habit.

The data is conflicting on this but of you do something like 60-66 days of doing something  every single day is how long it takes you to form a habit where you don’t have to consciously think about it and it happens automatically. 66 days of working out every day for an hour is not going to happen, but 66 days of just doing one yoga pose and meditating for two minutes is do-able. And rather than going into the beating yourself up mode, you are happy that you at least did a little bit and you get comfortable with it, and getting comfortable is not a bad thing. It takes away this big terrible scary thing and makes it more realistic.

DT: You know this last thing you said clicked and connected to wires in my brain that I had never really considered. I was about to ask, if you say “just do one push up” my brain immediately goes “ha, one push up, what kind of a weakling does one push up?” My subconscious will trivialise it, and say that one push up is useless, that there’s no point, so why even do it?

But then you said this incredible things about becoming comfortable, this made me think, and this is something that I would tend to say in connection with marketing, the foreground and the background attention, when something goes into our background attention and it becomes comfortable, like driving, you know how to drive, you don’t think how to drive and it frees up attention for other things, so it becomes a habit. And because it becomes effortless, the brain does not perceive it as a chore or something that is painful or bothersome, so it short circuits the brain. I love it.

Ladies and gentlemen, I was not prepared for this, I am genuinely surprised and delighted. Fantastic, thank you Aidan, this was worth it for the entire episode. But please tell us more.

AC: I’m so glad. Well, what you were saying about driving on autopilot. It’s something I do, I don’t drive as much as I used to, but I used to think to myself “I am driving down the road. I am going at 17 mph. My hands are on the steering wheel. My feet are doing stuff. Yet I have been thinking about Pokemon for 20 minutes. I am driving a heavy vehicle. But yeah, your brain going into autopilot.

I agree that when I think about doing one push up per day, my brain will think “what’s the point”, but then you flip it over and think what’s better doing 100 push ups on one day or five push ups for 100 days, that second option is going to do a lot more. Not just for the habit itself, but for building up your muscles, building up your mental approach and when you get to the point of thinking, is there any point just doing one push up? It sounds stupid, but one push up is better than zero push ups.

DT: That is a very good point. When you have the inner voice that questions the effectiveness of one push up, what is the best approach to quieten the voice down, is it replying to the voice, is it waiting a month to see the results? What makes that voice weaker and weaker over time?

AC: There is an excellent book by James Clear called Atomic Habits.

DT: Which is sadly not sponsoring this episode of the podcast. Yet.

AC: No, not yet, but I will definitely drop him a message. The book itself was great at providing an explicit framework to a lot of this stuff, and four of the areas that he talks about are these, almost scales from one side to the other and overall that is from habits being difficult to habits being effortless and the four things he talks about are the obvious to invisible scale, attractive to unattractive, easy to hard and satisfying to unsatisfying.

Some things like making it obvious, so I chatted a bit about me and my yoga. I had my yoga mat already laid out on the floor in the lounge. It is pretty obvious, so when I walk into the room, I am literally walking on the yoga mat. It is difficult to ignore it when it’s there. It’s easy, I don’t need to unroll the yoga mat, lay it out, find the YouTube channel. I’ve made it so that on my phone an alarm goes off at a specific time, which opens up an app. I then click one button which shares it to my TV screen and the yoga mat is already there.

I’ve got a specific time of day, making it attractive, and I have a reason for doing it. I know that I spend a lot of time sitting at a desk, I’ve always had a bad back and I know that yoga helps. Focusing on those things and setting up the environment beforehand helps you before you get to the inner voice that tells you “oh you’re s failure because you have not done this thing”. You’re making it as easy as possible.

You don’t want to beat yourself up, you want it to be there and be natural, you want to send yourself notifications and reminders on your phone, you want a higher reason for doing this.

DT: I have now a very practical example and I would like your thoughts on why this is failing at the moment. I started to meditate using an app. It was the Waking Up with Sam Harris and this is someone I admire for his work on meditation. So I did the 30 days introductory course, but I did not build The Habit, so I put a notification on my phone that as soon as I wake up, I have a notification to meditate then a second one to read right after that. So the whole idea is that before I start work in the morning I should have at least 20 minutes of meditation and reading. Yet I have literally never once done it. Every day the alarm goes off on my phone and very diligently, I dismiss them. What do you think is behind this? Do you think maybe I am not fine tuning it, or is it just the methodology wrong.

AC: Well, although I am chatting about some great theory behind habits, and there are some habits that I’ve stuck to, like religiously writing in my journal, every single day for two years now. But I too have an alarm that goes off at 8:30 which says “Open up Waking Up app and meditate” and how many times have I clicked on that notification and actually done it? Twice? Three times maybe.

The reason I wanted to shout about this today was because for the past two weeks I went back to this book and shared with an external coach about how I could do this differently. And now rather than success being, did I do the 10 minutes on the Waking Up app, it is now, did I meditate for one minute. And over the past week, I’ve done at least one minute every single day and the day after I did two minutes and then last night I did five minutes.

The amount of times I will be sitting and think “I’ve done it for a minute, I managed to survive, there were no emergencies, OK maybe I’ll open up the app for 10 minutes” Our brain just builds up a feeling that everything is terrible and you can’t do it, and instead you crave notifications on social media. A lot of these habits that we do are not instantly gratifying.

And there is a flip side of habits which are bad habits. I too have an ideal morning routine where I wake up, do yoga, meditate, have a cold shower. I set my intentions for the day. What happens most days, I wake up, I walk into the lounge, I snooze the alarm, I go back to bed for 10 minutes, I repeat that three or four times. I get up, I check my phone for ‘five’ minutes, an hour and half later, I’m sitting in the bath on my phone scrolling through Instagram before realising I have a meeting in 10 minutes.

That all happens because negative habits are a thing too. So when I chatted earlier about the sliding scales of obvious to unobvious and attractive to unattractive, for negative habits you need to flip them over. If you get distracted by Pokemon Go turn the notification off and make it invisible. On my phone I’ve got a focus mode from 8-5, meaning notifications from friends show up out of work hours, but during work hours I need to enter a code, and that extra barrier makes it more difficult and I am less likely to open up and click.

DT: That is super interesting. You briefly mentioned your personal coach. How did you arrive at the decision to hire a coach? How is it working out? Would you recommend it?

AC: The big part that helps with habits and goal setting and tasks is accountability. So when I was living in a previous house with old housemates and it was cold outside, knowing that I had agreed the night before that I was going to go to the gym at 8am with my two housemates. And because we didn’t want to let anyone down, that would work.

Right now, I’m working with a personal trainer and that has removed some of the barrier to entry at a gym, which was imposter syndrome, where I thought everyone else was really muscly and scary and knew what they were doing and would be looking at me and judging me. In reality that does not happen, no one is looking at you, they’re all too worried about that other people think of them. When I go, I don’t know what exercises to do, and I don’t know what time to go. But having a coach to tell you what days and exercises to do makes it a lot easier.

I went to the gym this morning, I am very glad that you can’t smell through podcasts because I’ve been on back to back calls since coming back from the gym. I was five minutes late because Taylor Swift released a new album last night, so I was busy having a little cry to that, but the important thing is I still went.

My life coach is Kate Wiltshire one of my close friends’ mum who has recently got into life coaching, so having a group of people who you are accountable to, like I have a group colleagues fellow grads and we have a Telegram group called #Goals and at the start of the week we put in our intentions for the week. And then on Friday we do checklist style what did we achieve and not achieve, and just having that level of accountability, knowing what you’ve got people you are going to do and you are regularly going to check and see how much people achieved, and no one is going to judge you. Most of the time it is not external accountability, although that is strong. But it gives you space to talk, think and express these things in a different way.

When it’s just up in your head that you need to go to the gym, you forget it seven seconds after having that thought, but the process of writing it down, telling someone else make it become a thing. And it’s really great to have someone to bounce ideas off.

DT: So you find in this case that the life coach is an official accountability buddy or are there strategies she uses? Is this something a friend could do? If this is something people are struggling with would a professional life coach help?

AC: You’re right in that life coaches do so much more, it’s not just someone who I can share my goals with and these are the things I’m sticking with. We chat about all sorts. It’s all the things I like to chat about, so combining strategies for working better, and also I get to talk about me. I enjoy the cognitive side of talking, but for accountability, like I say I’ve had that group with my peers for over a year now and we’ve stuck to it nearly every single week. Even if it doesn’t work all the time, but it is important and this year especially, recognising when good enough is good enough.

You don’t need to be doing 3000 push ups a week, if you’re doing three per day for a long period of time, it is sustainable and it will get you better results in the long term. Life coaching is definitely an interesting thing to chat about.

DT: I think we might come back in a couple of episodes to find out how this is going. I think most people are going to be interested in that, but maybe there’s a bit of resistance because you might not want to ask your friends for it. I think it is interesting to see in the long run, the drip effect. Drop after drop it all builds up.

There was one thing you mentioned earlier, I think it was habit pairing?

AC: Yes, this is something I really like. The idea where you link two things together. You can do this for habits that you might not enjoy, but you can also do this when pairing a good thing with  something you find difficult. So for example, I stopped drinking coffee because caffeine and me disagree now. When I used to drink it, I’d make it in the morning and I’d have my housemate’s fancy V60 dripper and it takes five minutes for it to drip through and pour, so I know I have those five minutes every single morning, so why not pair that time with something like doing push ups? Because I know that every single day I will have five minutes and I know I can do 10, 15, 20 push ups. Because realistically what else will I do in those five minutes? Scrolling through bad memes again.

DT: So it’s like a sandwich technique almost where you squeeze a relatively less enjoyable habit in between a nicer habit. Like an ice cream biscuit but with not your favourite flavour in the middle.

AC: Yeah, an ice cream sandwich with a bit of cucumber or onion, yeah ice cream and onion sandwich.

DT: Well you could get used to it, I suppose. I think of the coffee and my brain thinks, ah this will never work because we are so special and different from everybody else. I remember you mentioned the habit pairing and the coffee specifically, it reminded me of video games, for example I would have a very good window of opportunity with video games because there are loading screens all the time and sometimes they might take a couple of minutes and as you said, if one or five push ups is all it takes to build a habit that could be a very good time to squeeze them in. It’s a very good point.

AC: Yes, just little things like, every time you lose a life in a game, do a push up. When you were talking about loading screens, I was thinking, well I’ve now got 3600 MHz RAM, so I don’t know what loading screens are. That has been my lockdown obsession, let’s make the computer shiny and new again. But yes, the core idea is spot on. Just find something that you already do, or for me I do the at least one minute of yoga and I usually end the yoga with a pose that ends up with me lying flat on my back, and so them I just go into the meditation. The opportunity is there, it is more difficult for me to get up, make food and then go back to meditation. I’m already lying on the ground so I might as well do two minutes of meditation.

DT: Of course there are a tonne of things that we, and by we I mean me, needs to try and talk about and for the millions of listeners to the podcast,  one thing I wanted to cover was cold showers. I was professing my absolute dislike for cold showers, there is no way I am ever going to enjoy them, but you were giving me as good technique on how to approach them.

AC: So this is a technique that I’ve been using since I was about 12. I remember reading an article and for whatever reason it just stuck with me. Because there will be times when we need that little bit of discipline and willpower, like getting up early in the morning for the gym, in the long term you might be ok with it, but for now it is difficult. So, cold showers work for me, they wake me up, they’re good for my skin. I don’t spend too long in the shower because it’s not very nice, but afterwards when you step out of the cold shower everything feels warm.

But stepping under the cold stream is a horrible experience and for things like that, this technique is very simple. It just involves counting down from 10. This builds on something I need to chat about called the chain rule or habit tracking. Every single time, you count down from 10, when you hit zero, you do the thing. Whatever it is, you have to do the thing, and this is a difficult thing to start. But once you start making that thing a habit in its own right, every single time for the past… what 12/13 years ago since I started doing it, every time I’ve counted down from 10, I have done the thing on or before zero.

For whatever reason, I don’t know how it trips my brain, I’m like well every time I have counted down from 10 in the past, I have done the thing and I am not going to break it now. It I do break it, I think everything in my life will crumble down around me. But so far, little things like having the shower, big things like having to start a presentation or run an extra five K or something like that, just having that as a back up technique for whatever reason, short circuits my brain and says, we’re going to do the thing now.

We spend so much time going, what about this, what about that, we have these arguments with our inner voice. But counting down from 10 all of a sudden removes the thinking time about having to make a decision.

DT: Twelve years is like a lifetime of practice and it clearly works. If you’re able to withstand a cold shower, which is one of the worst things humankind has ever invented. The thing that scares me, and I guess this is the resistance that most people feel that as soon as you are under the cold water stream, you are going to feel really uncomfortable, and there is a very strong negative reinforcement there. How does this play with your 10 seconds rule, do they neutralise each other, do they come oner after the other?

AC: If you’re having a cold shower for the first time, I think it would be a different thing, but because I’ve been having cold showers for quite a few years now, I know that the worst part is the first few seconds and I know that I can survive a few seconds, and then when you’re under there, it’s not great but you wake up and your body is like ‘endorphins! Dopamine! Let’s go!’ and that’s the same for a lot of things like starting meditating or starting doing yoga, it is the initial act of resistance but then when you do the thing, there is as great psychological effect that is similar to the chain rule, where once you start doing something, your brain doesn’t want to stop doing it, it is always that resistance to starting that is the strongest.

So if there is an email I have to send and I don’t want to send it, or it will be difficult, just opening it up and writing someone’s name in the ‘to’ column, then writing Dear Person’s Name and Love from Aidan, or yours sincerely Aidan, the amount I’ve put Love From in a professional email is too many times for some people’s tastes, but the important thing is to add the things you know you need to add anyway, and when you’re doing that you brain goes ‘Oh, I need to talk about this and I need to talk about that’ and if you’ve cleared out all of the other distractions then you tend to follow up with that.

There is a thing called habit tracking, and there’s an app for your phone that has a really simple layout with weekly and monthly views and dots, and each dot is a day. For me, I’ve got meditation, yoga, duo lingo, writing in my diary, setting intentions. Every day that I do one of those, I click on the dot and it fills it in and I can see the past progress.

For meditation at the moment I can see there are two weeks of consecutive dots, and now I don’t want to break that, because your brain once you start doing it really doesn’t want to break that. And again, if it was 11pm and I still didn’t have the exercise box ticked, I don’t want to do a half hour workout, but I want to do one push up.

The important thing is even if it doesn’t feel like much, you need to think long term. When the inner voice says “this is pointless” you may feel like that time is pointless, but do you feel like the habit itself is pointless, no otherwise you would not have done it, or if you do feel like the habit or new year’s resolution is pointless, then don’t do it, it’s OK, don’t beat yourself up for changing that rule.

There is another rule, but this has not worked for me, it is if you do have to skip a day for any reason, and there are always good reasons, like if you injure your knee, don’t allow yourself to break more than one day.

Some people say it is OK to miss more than one day, but don’t miss two days, because as soon as you miss two days it is very difficult to get it back on track. But just missing one day and carrying on is OK. It takes between 20-66 days to form a habit.

And the final thing, rather than telling people that you run every day, making it an identity thing, I am a runner, even if you don’t feel like a runner, or a meditator, if you tell people that you’re a meditator it does something weird to your brain, in that all of a sudden it becomes and identity trigger.

There’s lots of research around this with David Rock and his SCARF model, where we don’t like things that disagree with our identity and that includes ourselves. So if I say that I am a meditator who meditates every day, when I get to the end of the day and I have not meditated. All of a sudden you break away from all of these individual things.

Rather than saying I am going to go to the gym twice a week, saying I a person who cares about my body opens the door to considering how much protein you take on, what vegan meal replacements do I need, rather than just focusing on that one tiny habit, it starts to become a big identity change in your life.

DT: That is wonderful and super powerful. I feel like this is an episode that I hope people will take notes and taking actions. If anyone out there has taken notes or has started a habit please let us know. I certainly want to try some of these techniques and it would be nice to catch up in a few episodes and see how we go.

AC: I have a challenge linked to accountability which is do you want to try 30 days of mindfulness, so meditate every day for 30 days?

DT: Are you publicly challenging me on the podcast to do this?

AC: I am publicly challenging you and myself (and anyone else who is listening) to try it out. It doesn’t have to be meditating. But set it small, 30 seconds counts as a win. Thirty seconds for 30 days, do you reckon you can do that.

DT: Absolutely, let’s do this.

AC: There are plenty of free YouTube videos or apps that can help, or just set an egg timer or timer on your phone.

DT: It sounds like a plan. I have to say that this episode has helped activate so much information in my brain, I feel so grateful for this Aidan. Thank you so much as always. The challenge is on 100%. We hope to hear from other people if they are taking up the challenge or trying something else. We’d love to keep the conversation going. If you want to send an email or anything, we always love to hear from you. So with this, thank you Aidan so much.

AC: Thank you Damiano, and thank you to everyone at home. 2020 has been a weird year. I was going to say it’s not selfish to be selfish, but it’s OK to put yourself first. And we look forward to seeing you back here next year.

DT: And remember, it’s OK.

AC: Not to be OK.

DT&AC: Take care everyone.

Transcript by Sean Jackson

Aidan Cammies (AC): Hi and welcome to Brainstorm - the podcast exploring how our minds work, how work affects us and how we can best deal with it. We are Aidan Cammies 

Damiano Tescaro (DT): and Damiano Tescaro. Explorers of the office jungle and mental health aficionados. Buckle up, because ideas are about to get wild.

DT: Hello Aidan

AC: Hello Damiano, how’s it going?

DT: It’s going quite well this week in particular has been a nice, open, different week that the past couple of months which have been extremely intense. How about your week, how have you been?

AC: Yeah, these past few weeks have been bad for various reasons, which I will touch on. But today I am feeling like a human again so I am very happy about that.

DT: Yeah, that’s a good place to be.

AC: Yes, I feel that’s probably a good base level.

DT: Definitely and I think this will be an interesting episode because we skipped one month - which is unusual for such a successful podcast as ours with millions of subscribers.

AC: I really missed you.

DT: Part of the reason for this [missing a month] is in EMEA we had a virtual event and there was a ton going on on both sides. While you were doing some experiments, I understand, can we call them experiments?

AC: Yeah, for a bit of backstory - although I have probably talked about this on the podcast before, I have got ADHD. It is still relatively new to me, I was diagnosed maybe a year and half ago, so am still pretty new to it all and the medication that I was on which is Xaggitin (which acts as a stimulant) one of the annoying side effects was my stomach was not feeling great in the mornings and it has had a negative impact on my appetite. I just wasn’t hungry, which isn’t great for staying healthy.

DT: I am not super familiar with this, but do you have to take the medication every day?

AC: It is once per day, though occasionally you can take a tolerance break at the weekend, or if you’re not especially busy. It is mainly to help regulate a person’s energy levels. Without it, I have always been dependent on caffeine or sugar, or to release enough norepinephrine or dopamine - the things in your brain that help you focus on stuff, and the happy chemical that rewards you for doing something good.

Recently I moved houses, I switched GPs and mental health teams and I was chatting to the new doctor and we decided to try a new medication to see if we could get rid of the side effects. On the face of it, we thought they were very similar, they had the same active ingredient, methylphenidate hydrochloride, but the difference is it released 30:70, which means rather than 20% of the medication being immediately absorbed by the bloodstream and 80 is released slowly over the day, instead you have 30% that hits you immediately and 70 over the rest of the day.

My thinking was, that’ll be good because when it comes to the evening, it’ll be out of the system, I’ll be more tired and ready for sleep. But for something that on the face of things looked so similar it has been absolutely terrible. The last three weeks I’ve had really bad headaches, which get worse when I am upside down or feeling more pressure - obviously the standard response to that is ‘don’t go upside down’ - but it’s really weird how many times I’ve found myself having to go upside down!

DT: I was about to say, were you doing a lot of handstands, training and yoga?

AC: Yeah, I am also Batman, so the night job gets in the way. But I was also getting the side effects that I was trying to avoid of bad stomach, no appetite, but have also felt a lot more lethargic and have been experiencing depression symptoms, which I’ve not had for a few years, and I have not missed.

DT: It was such a tiny change, it doesn’t sound like it would be so bad.

AC: Exactly, that was my thinking. I thought it would be fine. Is it me, is it the lack of sunlight, am I not doing a good enough job at work, classic mental health conditions, trying to trick you that it’s not their fault. But as of today, I am back on the old medication and I am no longer feeling like a sad zombie. I am super excited to be back, and I think you mentioned this earlier, it is interesting how clear it is once you get past a bad time that you’ve been through. You realise ‘oh wow, I was really not having a good time there.

DT: It is good to be able to look back and have perspective on things. But also, and I don’t want to sound like I am sugar coating this, but you have the element of experiencing and enduring through this. There was a phrase that I heard in the past associated with LGBTQ Trevor Project was that it gets better afterwards. I think we’re much more resilient than we think we are. And yes, not everything is a successful experiment, but the fact that we do it and get to the end on the other side is a testament to our strength. I am delighted to have you back, I hope that you find something that helps you wake up in the morning with a healthy appetite.

AC: That is a really nice way of putting it. I would not have known it was as terrible as it was unless I tried. A lot of mental health is trial and error. I might have mentioned this before, our brains are so complex we know more about the nearest star system than we do about how our brains work. If they were so simple as to be understood, we would be so simple we wouldn’t understand.

DT: It is interesting to think about it as an outsider to this world. You’re taking medication to influence your mental energy levels, but this has dramatic consequences on things like appetite, on how you feel in the morning, on how your stomach feels. It is a side effect that influences so much more, it is your energy level, it is literally how you feel. It is something that most people can relate to.

AC: It is really interesting. Some of these things seem disconnected. But our mental health is not just in our brains, we’ve got plenty of nerves and essentially a ‘brain’ inside our stomach, our spine, our nervous system, we have neurons all over our body. It’s not like when you have a broken leg, where you can use localised injections and that’s the only area it is affecting. Our brain controls everything, therefore everything is connected to it.

DT: I was talking to a friend of mine a couple of weeks ago, and this comes back to the general situation where the lockdown is going on and on, and conversations like this are becoming more frequent certainly in my group of friends, I don’t know if for you it is the same?

AC: Oh yeah, it’s all we talk about. It’s like non-stop therapy sessions. I don’t know if other people love it or hate it, but I love it.

DT: Do you find that people are getting a bit bored somehow? It is still top of mind, but it is still there, it’s still happening. Or do you think that people are getting more interested to really understand what is going on behind the scenes?

AC: Good question. There was a great article I read about how our search capacity feels depleted. Our brains have been running on this adrenaline driven, high alert. A pandemic is an existential threat and our brains perceive it as such so it is difficult to wake up in the morning and think calmly ‘I’m going to do some yoga, I am going to meditate and focus on my work’. Your brain wakes up and goes “arghhhhh, OK, food. Work. Everything is terrible.” It would be great if the brain woke up and went “we’ve been doing this for three months now, it’s all cool, this is normal.” Unfortunately this doesn’t happen. But you’re right, the fact the people are talking about it or are more likely to talk about it does make it seem easier, or if it doesn’t make it easier at least it show people that it is a very human normal thing to go through rather than feeling like you have to do something on your own.

DT: One thing that struck me and tells me how weird I am sometimes, is that this friend of mine and myself are quite introverted, we like staying at home, watching a movie with a cup of tea, the usual stuff. But even for her, and she lives in London with her husband, she has started to miss the interactions. I guess in Lonon you have daily habits like the Tube in the morning that almost like social rituals. She has started to miss that. I was very surprised, I thought of all people she would be the last to miss social interactions. But on the other hand, I was surprised to find that I was almost fine with it. I am in a place where I am not tired of the pandemic. I miss seeing my friends more often, but working from home is such a comfortable way to work, just because I have the space to recharge. As introverts we need to recharge when we expend energy and being at home for most of the day gives me so many opportunities to take the 10 minutes and quickly recharge.

The other thing I have noticed, while we’re on the subject, is for the past two or three months, preparing for the virtual events, I had so much work and I didn’t realise how much time I was putting in, working to unspeakable hours. But I think it acted like a protection ring for my brain. It kept me so busy that I never really had a moment where I thought ‘Oh I miss XYZ’. My brain was constantly thinking about the next thing to do.

I would often work late into the night, which is not something I am a fan of doing, I don’t think it’s healthy. But I was surprised to discover that the side effect of this was my brain did not have the time to linger in that feeling of isolation. I found it interesting because it was like anti-venom to the loneliness. Have you ever felt like this, has your perception of the lockdown changed in this time.

AC: It is really interesting, I have definitely noticed in the past when I’ve been like that. I know a lot of people, and my dad is definitely one of those people, without being able to work they feel a bit lost. I definitely am not like that. I appreciate sometimes having a single point of focus. I notice that when I’m doing something that does not have a clear definition of ‘done’ sometimes I will spend far more time than is necessary and not recognising when good enough is good enough, or sometimes I don’t know how I can finish something so I never start it.

I was giving a presentation earlier about how it’s OK to not be OK, one of the things I chat about it is when I was doing my dissertation which should have taken nine months but I did it in three weeks and I do not recommend doing that. It was not good. It was all about procrastination, but I got it done and it was absolutely terrible. I had eight months of stressing about how I needed to start it, then three weeks before the deadline I realised I really needed to start.

But during those three weeks I could not think of anything that was not to do with the dissertation. So much so that I slept in the Students’ Union, 70/80% of the days. I bribed the security guard with Kit Kat Chunkies, cos technically you weren’t supposed to stay overnight and you definitely were not supposed to sleep overnight. But I was still working at 4am in the morning powered by horrible sugary energy drinks. In hindsight maybe I should have used that experience to inform me about talking to a professional about this because this is not a normal way of doing things. Did I do that? No I didn’t. I was worrying about what I would do for a job or how I would get food, or my eczema that had flared up. But I wasn’t thinking about during the three weeks. I don’t think the whole stress fuelled, procrastination powered approach is worth it.

DT: I get you, absolutely. To be honest, I surprised myself when I was talking to my friend and came to that realisation when I looked back and saw I was powered by adrenaline. But I realised it kept me in a strange suspended balance. But I also realised it put me in a high frequency mode that this week as the workload returned to normal, I am having a bit of hard time going back to normal. I am so over-activated all the time, that I had a couple of conversations with my partner and he was like “ok, let’s chill for a second” I’d be up at 7:00 am and eating biscuits and be like “what if we made a YouTube series where we talk about your experiences when you were a child, and I do the subtitles,” and he’d go, “wait a second, what? No. Why do you think I’d want to do this, I don’t want to do this.” I was thinking, ‘but this is an opportunity, you don’t understand, there is a market for this, we should think about it’.

Being so hyper all the time it is tricky to bring it back. There are times when falling asleep becomes strange and there is also an inner sense of guilt that is linked to that. I think there has been a connection between my performance workwise and my state of mind

I don’t think I fully processes how these things went, but I am happy that this week things started to go back to ‘normal’ because I’m not sure if that was healthy either.

AC: If you need any help finding ways to procrastinate, Aidan from the past three weeks can find plenty. I definitely find it easy to go ‘oh what if we did this? Is this a cool thing? Maybe there’s a niche in the market for it, maybe it will help people’ When in actual fact I just want to collect Pokemon cards again - ok, that’s find Aidan, you can do that now…

DT: How did you cope in those three weeks, knowing that you were doing this sort of experiment, I guess you were mentally prepared for some side effects, but at the same time were you able to maintain clarity in your goals?

AC: No. It’s one of those weird things that because it is very meta in that I was prepared to think that these meds could be bad, but I was not expecting them to be causing that level of brain fogginess. Looking at it in hindsight, if I had that clarity in the moment, I would have recognised three or four days in these meds aren’t working. Sometimes there is an adjustment period, but with stimulants they are generally pretty fast acting and it does not have to build up in the system for too long over time depending on the medication, obviously everything is slightly different. But I should have recognised that I should have called the experiment off, but because I had resorted to that really brain foggy lethargic ‘ah well maybe it’s just me’, I continuously put off calling the doctor, which I could have done at any point, I have the number and can call any time, but I just though ‘no, it’s fine,’ until I eventually did call and I thought ‘why did I not do this sooner?’ It is really interesting how the main means of thinking about stuff and being aware of how you’re actually feeling is compromised it becomes very difficult to not get stuck and spiral.

I was quite lucky, and this is one of the things I wanted to talk about today, routine, satisfaction and managing to still do things even when you’re not feeling great, because I did not feel great, I didn’t feel good or even OK. But I still went to the gym and that was because I’d set up accountability with a friend. Most days I set daily intentions, I’d write three intentions and what the first step was in achieving them. I didn’t get them done all the time, but sometimes I would, little and often, I’d stick to the routine of writing in my diary about how I’m feeling every evening, even when I was not feeling great, I’d still keep those routines going because I know they help. And as much as I wanted to go to bed, or stay up until 3am and play more Pokemon, I realised that if I set up routines when I am feeling OK and I am very grateful that I did do that, because it is difficult to start doing those things when everything feels sucky.

DT: It feels like our mind tripping our good intentions. Why is it so difficult sometimes to start when we are at our peak feeling good and things seem to be in a balanced state, and sometimes it feels easier to start when we are at our lowest. It is like the paradox of the artist who unless you are in complete pain, how can you produce art? Because the best love stories and songs all originate from a breakup. I have no idea why this works, do you have any idea why this happens?

AC: I see parallels between that and the news. I try to stick to a low information diet, I try not to check the news every single day. If there is something that is really important I will hear about it from someone, but I don’t need to check the news every day or every hour, because so much of the news out there is negative or exaggerated because that’s the stuff that elicits an emotional response. A story about how wild fires are raging and the planet is doomed in X years unless we stop global temperatures rising by 3 degrees, which is very true, and I am aware of that, but I don’t necessarily need to be reminded about it on a daily basis. If you compare that to ‘on the whole literacy rates, pregnancy survival rates and poverty overall over the past X years. Which one are you more likely to click on when you wake up in the morning?

If you see that sort of thing every day, I’d ideally go for the nice one, but in reality you will be drawn to the bad news, here are the top ten bad things of 2020, your brain is drawn to it, you internalize it. That’s one thing that I’ve done which has definitely helped.

DT: Did you find that limiting or controlling your information diet allowed you to find more energy to start new projects or ideas when you feeling good?

AC: Yeah, it was something that I started when I was feeling good.

DT: The reasons I ask is because I’m thinking about my creative process. There are times when I feel as though I would love to take some pictures, completely randomly and the only rule that I abide to is the 15 second rule, which is that there is a window of reward mechanism that the brain has when you get the inspiration you get a dopamine rush in your brain that rewards you for your good idea, I find that I respond quite well to that, but I am very bad at planning. So it is hard for me to say “this weekend I will spend two hours taking pictures because I feel the artistic need to express myself”. This literally never happens, but it is very possible that at 6:30 tonight I will decide to take some pictures for no reason whatsoever and if I can jump on this 15 second train I will be very happy. This makes it difficult for me to be predictable and plan ahead when it comes to these little good moments. But it is more about recognising when the train comes and to jump aboard as quickly as possible. 

AC: I find it interesting that your default is to fight. My immediate reaction when I’ve come up against a challenge has been ‘turn off laptop, I’m going to go and lie on the floor now and stare at the ceiling, roll on a yoga mat and inevitably pick up the Nintendo Switch.’

Obviously that is not a long term way of doing things, things are never going to be great 100% of the time. That’s something our brains don’t like thinking about. The analogy I like to use is, we’re not really that much more complicated than SIMs characters, we have a hunger bar, tiredness, need to go to the toilet and at any point those are all there and if they are not all full, we are not happy. We’re constantly going, ‘oh I am a bit hungry, oh I’m a bit tired.’ And even if all those base needs are met you’ve got ‘oh I can’t go and meet my friends, oh I still have to do the washing up, oh I still have to send all these emails.’

We’re constantly playing this impossible game where we’re always chasing this imaginary feeling of zen-like satisfaction where I have done all the things. My email is empty, I’ve just had some great food, I’ve watched a show.’

DT: My house is perfectly clean.

AC: Have you ever felt like that, where you have done all the things?

DT: No. Hahaha

AC: Has there ever been a time where you have done some of the things and felt good about it?

DT: Definitely. To me this is a question about triggers, like in the example before, I think I trained my brain to see some of the triggers that give me the highest efficiency of pleasure. I have friends who enter a meditation phase when they clean their house or they do the washing up or they iron their clothes. I loathe doing all of those things. But give me a guide on how to tune my video recording software to do the latest codecs and I will spend weeks.  We were talking about keyboards earlier, I’ve spent I don’t know how many hours watching videos of people clicking buttons. And this to my brain feels like a perfectly reasonable and productive use of my time. It gives me joy and I am content with that. There is a point where I stop myself from over analysing it and just say “I really enjoy this”, I am going to just enjoy this. But the overall feeling of completion when all the stars are aligned, I don’t think I’ve ever been there.

AC: No, I don’t know anyone who has. It is so weird that our brains are always striving for something that doesn’t exist. I like what you mentioned about the codec tuning and specifica about finding the best keyboard because that’s life. We’re always going to have some bad stuff and some good stuff. You can always do some researching. For me, it was finding the best humidifier, I spent about two and half hours doing that, because my skin gets really dry in winter. I could have spent that doing two hours focusing on something else that needed doing, yes the house needs cleaning, yes I need to reply to those emails, but I don’t need to do it in these two hours.

It is definitely something I have been struggling with and obviously it’s more difficult when our offices are our homes. We have location triggers, it is difficult to go into the lounge and sit down to relax and enjoy a show, I sit down, I turn on the TV, my brain goes, you have 789 unread emails, I am sad.

I think something that we need to do and something that is very easy to say or share, but actually doing it is so difficult is accept that you are going to feel bad, like I definitely have these past few weeks. There is no way we can chase this impossible nirvana state of everything being completed, even if we do the house gets dirty over time. So rather than striving for that, strive to not necessarily enjoy but to experience the bad stuff.

DT: I love that word that you use, experience.

AC: There are going to be some way that you can’t make the experience itself more enjoyable. There are going to be times where you made a mistake and you did something wrong. Hopefully you’re in a psychologically safe team where people accept that it just human, but sometimes you are just going to do something wrong. You’re going to say the wrong thing, or feel in your chest or wherever you experience that notion, anxious or terrible. Rather than immediately trying to get away from this emotion, try leaning into it. The next time you feel anxious about all the things you need to do, try and fully experience it, it is something your brain does not want to do. Your brain reacts like ‘but that’s a bad emotion. We don’t want to do that.’ Try and fully focus on it, go ‘oh no, I haven’t done the emails, that’s bad that’s terrible, what happens if I fully focus on this feeling right now, and you feel it and you’re still there and it’s not a big scary monster even though your brain thinks it is. Counter intuitively chasing those bad feelings actually makes you more satisfied overall. I don’t use the word happy, because happiness is a fleeting emotion.

DT: Being a verbal thinker myself for me it is really important to have people around me that I can trust and confide in and talk about these things, just verbalising these thoughts and feelings with somebody allows you to gain a different perspective, it is almost like looking at things from a car. You’re not in the street, you’re in the car, driving by those feelings and those thoughts, you can still see them, and you can still feel them, but they are somewhere else. This is around a conversation on meditation that I hope we will do. As a take away I think it is brilliant. And we are perfectly on time to wrap up. Unusual for us, but there we are.

Not only am I super happy to have done this episode after this long break, I want to say “thank you Aidan for this, thank you for sharing your experiences with us, because I know it is a very personal thing and it means a lot not only to me, but the millions of listeners that we have.

AC: I know it sounds cliched and I say it all the time but things are easier when you share them with other people. Obviously that’s not the same as walking up to the person serving you coffee and going ‘do you want to hear about the past week of depression I’ve had?’ There is obviously a fine balance, but like you say for some people verbalising it is not always the best way. Some people might find they can more easily gain self awareness of their thoughts by writing it down.

I still do that, I’m not sure it helps in the moment, but it is nice to go and look at what you wrote three months ago. Oh three months ago it was summer and I went for a nice walk in the park and I had a happy day. This again relates to what we were saying earlier about doing those habits, doing those things when things are going well, first makes it easier because once you start a habit it is more difficult to stop, and I think in the future we should chat about habits. But doing it when you’re feeling great, makes it easier when you’re not feeling great. It reminds you that you can’t get away from the bad stuff, the bad stuff is always going to be there, but the good stuff is going to be there too.

DT: This is beautiful, I want to clap and wrap this into a little gift and send it to future Damiano whenever a moment, or a little dip. Thank you always Aidan.

AC: Thank you. Hopefully we don’t have another month gap.

DT: Yes indeed. Also in the last episode we had some guest and want to remind people if you want to join the conversation we’re delighted, if you have ideas, or want to speak with us shoot us an email and we’re more than happy to talk

Take everyone and remember, that it is ok

AC&DT: To not be OK

Damiano and Aidan interview Alexis Monville and Bastian Schwippert on how to build a psychologically safe environment at work

We’ll talk about the four stages of cue, craving, response reward, if you want to know more about that, I highly recommend James Clear’s book Atomic Habits which summarises lots of excellent stuff around habit forming. And you recommend a book by Barbara Sher (I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was) which is all about building rituals and routines, making it so you don’t have to think ‘I need to do this, I need to do this’. We suck at things that we have to consciously think about. No one wants to stand-up, go to the gym, do this, but if you can give yourself a reason why and make it a habit of ‘I’m only going there for five minutes, I can do that, then it starts to get easier over time. And do check-ins - ask each other how you’re feeling.