# 34 - Is Follow Through Good for Your Mental Health?

Episode 34

[00:00:00] : Welcome back, everybody. This is Rick Lewis. This is Episode 34 of the follow through Formula Podcast. And this will be the third interview with my friend Dr Musician John Souza. Because I love my conversations with John. And I hope you love them too. And I have some important questions for John this time around. So, John, welcome back to follow through formula podcast. Always a pleasure to be here with you, Rick. Thank you. And just to be clear, he's not actually here with me inside of my shower stall. What he means is virtually a detail. My son was with me. He is the very first interview e that actually entered my studio. And that was challenging but very fun. He did a great interview, by the way. Eso here we are, and I want to talk to you about a couple of things. Here's my first question Put on your doctor hat. Not your musician hat. Well, you can wear the musician had if you want, but is follow through. Good for our mental health. Yes, I would say Yeah. Um, of course, I qualify everything because there's always an exception to every rule. Even that there's always an exception to every rule. Okay, that that goes along with 95% of statistics are made up. Exactly. Precisely. So you know, our brains love toe have hard and fast rules worlds just easier that way. Uh, so this is all qualified with, you know, they're going to be variations. I've made it a point, never toe have hard and fast rules. That's just slow and soft ones. I like it. Yeah, so, yes, I think they are. In general, it's rather follow through is good for your brain in general for your sense of being able to accomplished things self efficacy, you know, social learning theory, which is It's an older theory of human development from a guy named Albert Pandora. He said that basically, we learn by observation we learned by watching other people, and from that was born this idea of self efficacy that one of the things that we're trying to develop in our lives is a sense of being able to handle whatever situations are gonna arise. And so I think follow through increases that I think there are other things that increase that. But in my experience, personally, I would say, The more I follow through with something, the more I feel like I can follow through with things. And then it becomes cyclical reinforcing right. So last week I brought up the subject or the word anxiety, and I loved how you called me out on that. And you said, That's a junk word, man that throw that word of the garbage. That's a junk word. E response to that? No, But, um, just your point that Okay, come on, let's call it what it is. Anxiety is fear. And when we're up against fear neurological e speaking, taking action in relationship to that fear must be good for our mental health. Like to do something with the fear to channel it in some way and guide ourselves back to a sense of agency and relationship to whatever it is where, you know, feeling nervous or scared about that seems positive. Right? Agency. It's another way of saying self efficacy. Um, certainly there are a lot of studies that suggest facing our fears. Behaviors might call it in vivo desensitization. You know where we enter into a situation that would produce anxiety or fear, and in order to expose ourselves to it so that it feels less fearful provokes less of that anxiety response. So, yeah, I think that's the whole idea. Here is, the more you can do something whenever you're experiencing fear, the less like you are to feel as much for your next time. Right? So exposure therapy is a real thing, right? That that's an actual form of therapy. Yeah, in vivo. Call it okay. In vivo, that's the same is exposure in vivo desensitization. How come you always have really fancy ways of saying things that I try to say one way and then you've got a better way of saying it? Why is because I paid I paid a lot more money for my diploma? Uh huh. They I paid a lot of money. That was $69 from that Institute of Bolivian Backwards Institute that I got that from. It's up on my wall. Okay. Um, so we've proven you have better terms for things that I do. That's the first thing we've accomplished so far. This podcast secondarily, um, exposure to things that create ah stoppage in us. And I like to call them stop rules that we have internally. These stop rules and the stop rules are old programming that comes from stuff that happened a long time ago where we got scared or shamed or judged, and a part of our brain just made a little mental note and said, I'm never doing that again. And from that point on, whenever you run into a circumstance in your life that has any associations with those cues that were registered at that moment in time, your brain sends out the stop rule signal goes Well, Caution warning. Don't talk to redheads. Don't pet stray dogs don't stand up in front of the class and say anything. Whatever it is, whatever the rule waas And we carry those for a lifetime unless we update them with adult learning experiences. And I've often referred to these unaddressed patterns as youth learning experiences, and we have toe actually design adult learning experiences into our lives to re map those youth learning experiences. Does that correspond with your thinking about how this can work 100%? I would say that's exactly what all psychotherapy is. Is helping people have these adult learning experiences, and unfortunately I think our society has held out hope that there's going to be a fast and easy way to do that. Um, but I think time has told us that's just not how it works. There is no magic pill. There is no magic technique like right now what's called e M d. R uh, I movement, eye movement, de sensitization, re processing, which is Basically somebody moves their finger back and forth. And the idea is that as your eyes go back and forth and you're processing difficult memories, that it gets reintegrated a processed in a way that, uh makes it less present or less controlling of your day to day experiences and thoughts that that's sort of like the big thing. Now everyone's everyone wants Cmdr because it's fast and it's quick and could work through tons of stuff. I just don't see that in my own practice. Uh, I've tried MDR I've gone through some trainings and not calling out MDR specifically, I would say in general, though, our our society is very much looking for fast and easy things to correct what are typically long standing patterns that will require at least half amount half the amount of time it took to form to resolve, right? Yeah, thats a sobering thought, but I right with you I mean, my I've been on what I would call a personal growth path for, um Well, I'm almost 60 and I got really interested in this when I was 14. So it's been 45 years I've been actually studying and experimenting with and actively doing things to free myself from limit limiting patterns. And, boy, does it take persistence and self forgiveness and patience. It sure does. I'll tell you, Rick, I think one of the variables that is often overlooked or minimized in a society that focuses more on individual agency is context or environment and just how much of a part context and environment plays and how we think how we feel and how we act. Malcolm Gladwell in his most recent book, Talking to Strangers. He highlights this phenomenon, and he looks at some different countries and different cultures and how they have different outcomes, partly because of the social cultural environment that's created, for example, around, um, the use of alcohol. He compares college drinking culture with the drinking culture of working class society, where they have no violence when they're drinking versus this college rape culture. So don't dismiss where you are in terms of every day. You're in a different culture, different environment and how that might affect your ability to really work on some of these and internal patterns that you have. You know, it can help move you forward, work and move you backward a little bit. You know, if you're in a happy relationship with somebody, it's going to bring up a stress response, and you're gonna rely on those old patterns that air more deeply embedded in the back of your brain. The Fight Flight place as opposed to the prefrontal cortex, where some of this new adult learning is happening, you know, and that's the whole neuroscience pieces. How, however often the back of the brain is activated, will dictate just how likely you are to be able to create new neural density in the front part of your brain and the neocortex and mitigating both of those. I should say bridging both of those is the the midbrain, which is all about connection relationships being able to relate to people. So the quality of your relationships can also have a huge effect on how well you can move through some of those old patterns that you developed in childhood. Yeah, this is complicated business, like for one person to manage their own growth activity successfully. There has to be Cem riel a real sense of self knowledge and self understanding about what you can digest and what you're kidding yourself that you can digest. Because if you start eating mawr taking in more than you can digest meaning stretching yourself for growth in ways that are really just beyond where you're actually at, then everything works backwards. You're not making any progress. You're just actually triggering the defense postures, that air habitual and kind of getting closed off and shut down rather than moving forward. It reminds me of the Yerkes Dodson curve, the work that they did, where they show that enough a little bit of stretch. A little bit of stressor, to a certain extent, actually will improve performance. But when the stressors reaches, a certain critical mass performance plummets and you just get or incapacitated. Yeah, absolutely. Just to come back to your point there, about whether or not stress goes into enhancing performance or degrading it is the quality of the relationships, supportive relationships surrounding you and that ties to a developmental. Theorists from Russia vit Scott Ski, who came up with the zone of proximal development. He says that to get from your comfort zone to where you can't imagine you could grow. Is this this in between Gap called the zone of proximal development that will allow you to get closer to where you don't think you could achieve. But it has to be done. It can Onley be approached with support of someone else, someone that has a little bit more knowledge, basically a mentor. Cool, well, mentor. You mean someone who's a little in front of you and the path, Or could it be peers who are attempting the same transformation? I think it has to be somebody who's a little bit ahead of you, but I don't know what that means. You know, I don't how to qualify, what a little bit ahead of you means. It could be a peer who is literally just like E don't know, a couple of steps ahead. Well, maybe what's needed is you need to see an example of someone who to some extent has made the leap you're trying to make, because when you see it, you go Okay, I know it's possible, and that moment of seeing someone else who has taken the step you want to take or made the leap you wanna make is so powerful. And I can just I can say that in my own life experience. There's so many times where I've been tryingto I've been hitting my head against the wall and then I get myself around somebody who's actually done it, and I don't even They don't even have to give me the play by play of how they did it. It's just being around that person and saying, Oh, they did this. That somehow shifts something in my cells and I'm just like, Okay, this is possible. I'm looking at it. It's right in front of me, right? So what is that? That's fascinating. It's a fascinating dynamic, right? Yeah, there's that modeling, you know, somebody. Social learning theory again, coming back to Bangura social learning theory. When we see someone else doing it way learn, we learn how to do it. I'm reminded of the four minute mile. No, I don't know if you're right No one thought that was possible for a long time. Yes, Yes, he comes along and he does it and it says, Great. I guess we could do it. Yeah, that's cool. Well, so like, now you know that place where you get to where there's that leap you have to make. I would just call the hard part. Now I know I can call it the Zone of Proximal Development. And so I've just made a big leap in my ability. Thio sound more like I know what the hell I'm talking about. Perfect. And you didn't have to pay anything for the diploma. That's great. Uh huh. So, okay, here's an interesting twist on the conversation. So my first question Waas does follow through, help your mental health and we're agreed. And the research is agreed that when you take action steps towards something that feels impossible or beyond your limits or difficulty or scary, it frees something up in the neural pathways or reorders something that makes it easier to take those steps the next time. And so from there, the next question I have And this is something I've just been thinking about today because I spent some of today practicing a game that I wrote probably a year ago, and the game is called Pause Before Mawr Mhm. And the game essentially says, when you're consuming an experience or an activity, we could use a simple example like desert if you're eating dessert, if you're eating really quickly and it just tastes really good, you can wind up having four helpings without pausing without even registering that you Onley needed two helpings. You really only need two helpings, though. I mean four sounds really great to me. Oh, and how much you need is dependent on the quality of self reflection that's inserted in the process of you consuming the thing. So for me, I was just moving that over to my work life, my work schedule and being on the computer. And I brought this up in a recent episode because I was sharing with the audience that I had gotten into kind of an obsessive, addictive habit of checking the number of downloads of the podcast throughout the day. And I keep refreshing it like a rat, pressing a lever for just the most delicious rat food that has ever been created and I'm like, Oh, boy, three more people looked at it. Oh, boy, 20 people just listen to it. Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh. And I'm like pressing the button over and over just to see how many people have downloaded. And so I think it was just two days ago. My It all blurs together now because since I'm doing one of these every day, But anyway, it was a couple days ago. I said, All right, I have noted that I'm doing this repeatedly, and today I was recording at, like, five AM and I said today I will not check even one time. I'm making this commitment and I had the most wonderful day. It was hard at 1st. 1st, few hours were hard because I wanted that little hit, that little dopamine rush of Oh, a few more downloads. I refrained, and then it was just so nice to be free of that. It didn't take that long, took half a day, and then I was over it. And it was just such a sense of relax ation. And it helped me to keep my attention on what really matters on to follow through on what's actually important, which is the thing that would create that kind of result, not in checking if the result is happening. So I'm trying to set the context for this next part of the question, which is in that episode where I was speaking about refraining from that I was just reflecting on how follow through can be as much about what we don't do or what we stop doing, as it does what we start doing. And we typically think of follow through as an action step. But I think follow through has to include in our self examination of our behavior steps of restraint, where we just stopped doing certain things, and that actually helps us maintain focus and energy and attention for what were they matters Well said. That's brilliant, man. You got all that for free. You don't have to pay for that thing is this is the fruit off overthinking to a degree you can't imagine that is so spot on man. It's the absence of things that can actually improve your ability to do things. Lots of people I think have framed this differently. I think of Stephen Covey and his seven habits of highly effective people or one of his follow up books. First things first, and he talked about production versus production capacity. You have to maintain your ability to produce by tending to the machines that allow you to produce. That means taking breaks, Um, meaning you're not going to produce for a while. But that is productive. Miles Davis. You know, he said, it's music is more about the spaces of silence. Between notes, nothing notes themselves. Yeah, uh, my wife, who I consider to be an expert pretty much every way. She is always telling me, reminding me to take a break in between things that I'm doing. She notices that I'll go from Project to Project Project, she says, You know, if you take a moment in between, you'll find that you're more effective and all of your projects and it's true. And then, just in my own experience, relating back to your checking of the podcast downloads or listens, I I found myself doing that with Instagram. No, I was getting carried away with checking to see how many people had liked my whatever or falling my page. Um, and I was getting obsessive about posting stories and posts. And yeah, I had to recognize that that was not helpful. It was degrading my ability to do those things well. And in fact, there is something called the shallowing effect. It's a theory that came out when texting started to really come into the mainstream, and there was concerned that youth were shallowing their ability to think by texting. It limits how much you think, how much you say so that your thinking becomes just like you're texting a Siris of short bursts of thoughts that air impulsively sent, as opposed to longer trains of thought that are more thought out, two more comprehensive and that that can transfer into our own moral reasoning on how we think about the long term effect of our decisions. Wow. So, yeah, there's a lot that suggests the more we can slow down and take breaks, you know, pregnant pauses, if you will, that it will increase our ability to pay attention, to think more deeply to think more critically, and to have I think of the increased capacity to prioritize what came up for me around This idea that follow through requires restraint and refraining from things. Of course, brought to mind meditation and meditation is a practice, any form of self reflection. I was just sitting in the living room at lunchtime, sitting in the sunshine next to a window. It's cold outside. I'm sitting in the warm sunshine, having lunch and just thinking. I can't imagine being happier than just doing nothing in my home having a meal with nothing. There's nothing going on. There's I'm just sitting in the sun and I've had that experience often in my life, there, these touchpoints of the sublimity of just being present, just how wonderful it is to just be without doing anything in particular. And it seems to be a very important ingredient in the the follow through stew. I think that's right. E Think the quality of that. Nothing something to be paid attention to, such as If you're sitting and enjoying the landscape and getting some nourishment for your soul for your body. That's high quality of nothing, as opposed to scrolling through instagram. You're not doing anything per se. Just be hanging on the couch. But it's not the restored of kind of nothing. So you need. We all need restore tive. Nothing's in our lives more often. There's a guy named Bill Dougherty at the University of Minnesota in the family social science department. Hey, talks about business as sort of a disease of our time, of modern times that it is a problem in our society. It degrades individuals and families and communities. Um, and I just think it's it's spot on. That's what we need to pay attention. Thio. I'm speaking from my own struggle with it. Boy, I struggle to not be busy, but like you said, I think if you are able to spend some time thinking about where that's coming from, for each person, that might be different. For me, it is definitely to feel a sense of worthiness that my worth comes. My value comes from whatever I can produce. Um, you know, over however many degrees I could have, or however many places I could get a position as a the faculty member or a clinical member, however, many likes I could get Whatever your metric is for me, it has to do with self worth, and I guess for a lot of people would have to do with that sense of self worth. I was taking some time. Even before that, before I was sitting for lunch to really give thought to what I want to be doing right now, who do I want to serve and in what way? What's most important to me? What do I want to be communicating? And that in itself was also ah, form of doing nothing. But it was reflecting on. It was reflecting on the future, but I wasn't busy executing on something that wasn't fully examined. And that seems to be unimportant. Distinction. Like what? When I'm if I'm executing on something, if I'm getting stuff done that isn't fully examined like the why What is this connected to? What's my aim? What's my purpose? What am I really here to do? And it's so easy for me to fill my day with. Get Aiken, be getting stuff done from, you know, moment my eyes were open to when I hit the pillow. That's not a problem, but the quality of those activities and their connectedness to a sense of something that's really important, that's the challenge. Well, said an example of that for my own life recently. This last week, as I told you before, I've been working on this song. It's a little bit more complicated than on other tunes I've made because there's so many individual guitar parts. And I was so worried. I've been so worried about being able to play those parts Well, you know, doing take after take after take and getting the parts down. And so I get up super early. I can't. I gotta try to record all these guitar parts before I lose this capacity at you know, this peak performance capacity that I have right now. And I ended up having to rerecord some parts because I just didn't you know, it was not right because of the the sound, the recording, background, noise and whatnot. And I was getting increasingly frustrated. And I recognized that that that lack of pausing to really reflect and examine what's going on ended up I ended up wasting more time. Maybe not wasting okay, but it's all experienced potentially. It's all useful information if I take the time to reflect on it. So I'll take that back, not necessarily wasting time. It's not as, uh, high quality time I will result. It will lead to me feeling more frustrated than satisfied because I didn't take the time to pause and reflect in between my sessions or in between my recordings had the sense of urgency or what Stephen Company called Covey calls that scarcity mentality that I'm going to run out of something if I don't get it all done now. So instead of taking that reflective time to assess, I thought of wanting to start a club called the One Hour Down Club. And imagine if we just had a group of us and somehow people just get together and you just daily chime in and go. Did you manage to clear an hour where you just did nothing? And you know, nothing could be any type of self reflection. Digestion, contemplative could even be physiologically based, like you know, you're going for a walk or having a bath. But just how many people could use that? Well, I think it's a great idea, and it would. I almost guarantee it would lead to an increase in productivity, not a decrease. It's It's amazing, though, just thinking about that. I notice my own fear responses coming up like what? An hour a day I could barely find 15 minutes a day to sit down and you don't take a breath. It's this sense of this, this deep ideology, especially in Western cultures. I'm just speaking to the United States here that this your worth is in how much you do, how much you can dio. And if you aren't able to succeed, it's your fault. It's a deep ideological truth in our society. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps. You know anyone can succeed in the United States, that kind of mentality, and it creates a real sense of isolation and potentially shame. You aren't able to do that. It's your fault. So I don't know what the answer is that I think it's probably a both end that. Yes, you can do something and you have to pay attention to your context, your relationships, because they can support or hinder your ability to be productive. For example, having a spouse who says, Hey, did you take a break? Don't forget taking a break here, and there is a good thing that's helpful. Think as opposed to If I had a partner who was herself just totally while she was pretty driven, but she's she held. She's pretty good at maintaining perspective, too. But if she didn't have that, um, it would be really easy to just produce. Try to produce all the time. Doing nothing is a great idea. Sign me up. Okay, you're in. You're a founding member. All right. And so for the audience, that would offer, Well, it it is definitely a goal toe work towards, Let's say, an hour of pausing a day doing nothing. There is, um there's no shame in trying and not succeeding the first time. The second time, the third time, the 20th time. Just continuing to take each day each hour as a chance to start over. And maybe I'm saying this somewhat for myself, too. I mean, most of what we share with people's. We're trying to learn that lesson ourselves. Well, so just reiterating the importance of being kind to ourselves, being gentle with ourselves, you brought up earlier the should. You know, we call shooting on ourselves. Don't Don't shoot on yourself. Don't ought on yourself. Don't must on yourself. Um, And if you recognize that you're doing that, that's the time to step in to ah, software compassionate place for yourself. And if you can't do it for yourself, reach out to somebody and asked them to offer you some compassion and kindness. You might need to get it from outside of yourself for a time. That is where the only things that can really bring you out of, ah, low space or a funk get you back into the the process of following through. I love that closing wisdom. Thank you. Thanks for the opportunity to share and dialogue back and forth. I love our conversations. Me too. As always. All right, well, we'll stop here so that you can get back Thio All the things that you ought to be doing that you must be doing. You should you should really? Dio All right, John. Thanks very much. Thank you, my friend Rick. And look forward to another time. This has been Episode 34 of the follow through formula podcast with my good friend, musician and wise Dr John Souza. I'm Rick Lewis. John won't be back tomorrow, but he'll be back soon because we like having him here. But I'll be I'll be back tomorrow. Alright. Thanks. Everybody. Take care