7 Life Lessons I Wish I Knew Sooner - Mark Manson

Respect Yourself to Earn Respect

People tend to respect you in proportion to how much you respect yourself. A constant need to impress or prove oneself often leads to less respect from others. Instead, genuine self-respect naturally leads to actions of high integrity and value, which then earns respect.

• Confidence is not an expectation of success, but a comfort with failure. Truly confident individuals are comfortable with the possibility of things going wrong and are willing to live with the consequences.
• People unconsciously gauge how they should feel about you by observing your self-perception. A strong sense of self-worth will be detected and influence how others treat you.
• Avoid confusing self-respect with selfishness. Selfish behaviour is often an overcompensation for a lack of self-respect. True self-respect is a state of being satisfied with who you are, without needing to prove anything to anyone.
• Social neediness signals to others that you might be a resource drain, leading to a visceral desire to keep distance.

Cultivating happiness, emotional self-management, and more - Dr Peter Attia with Arthur Brooks

Arthur Brooks is a social scientist, professor at Harvard University, columnist for The Atlantic, and bestselling author. In this episode, Arthur returns to the podcast to discuss his new book, Build the Life You Want. He delves into the nuanced concept of happiness, differentiating between momentary feelings and overall wellbeing. He explains the importance of understanding one’s personality pattern with respect to positive and negative emotions in order to better self-manage emotions. He delves into the three key elements of happiness, offering practical strategies for enhancing those specific domains through methods such as metacognition, transcendent experiences, discipline, minimizing self-focus while directing attention outward, and more. Through personal examples, Arthur demonstrates that one can actively track well-being levels and take intentional steps to cultivate happiness and enhance overall well-being.

Distinguishing Happiness from Feelings

• Happiness is not the same as happy feelings. Feelings are merely **evidence of happiness**, not the phenomenon itself. Mistaking these feelings for happiness can lead to a futile pursuit, making one feel "managed" by their emotions rather than managing them.
• Happy and unhappy feelings can coexist in parallel. Our brains are evolutionarily wired to prioritise negative emotions (fear, anger, disgust, sadness) for survival, as they demand immediate attention. These four negative emotions are considered fundamental building blocks of emotional life, produced by the limbic system. For example, fear and anger are responses to threats, disgust prevents ingestion of pathogens, and sadness signals social exclusion or separation from loved ones, crucial for tribal survival. Positive emotions, like joy and interest, are also evolutionarily advantageous, rewarding desirable actions such as finding food or learning.
• Humans possess the unique ability of **metacognition**, allowing us to experience and control aversive emotions through the prefrontal cortex, rather than solely the limbic system. This enables us to find enjoyment in experiences that other species would simply find aversive, such as cold plunges or spicy food.
• Evolution primarily favours **survival and gene propagation**, not necessarily happiness. Often, cultivating happiness requires consciously acting against our natural, limbic impulses.

Your Future Self Needs Your Help Today - Dr Maya Shankar A Slight Change of Plans with Hal Hershfield

Hal Hershfield is a psychologist who studies the emotional connection we have to our “future selves.” He talks with Maya about tactics we can use to strengthen this connection, and why it matters.

Understanding the "Collection of Selves"

• Neuroscientific studies indicate that the brain activity observed when thinking about one's future self is more akin to the brain activity associated with thinking about others. This suggests that, on a neural level, your future self is perceived as a distinct individual.
• From a psychological standpoint, we do not inherently view ourselves as a single, unchanging entity over time. Instead, the concept of identity over time is better captured by understanding that we are a collection of separate selves, including a current version and future versions existing years down the line.
• A potential downside to perceiving the future self as a distinct entity is a reduction in empathy towards that future self. This diminished empathy is reflected in studies where people express less happiness for future rewards, suggesting future emotions feel more muted. Psychologically, people may also instinctively describe their future self's actions using a third-person perspective ("he is eating") rather than the first-person ("I am eating"), further highlighting this mental distancing.
• This lack of empathy for the future self might be partly attributed to present bias, a tendency to overvalue immediate gratification and undervalue future outcomes, which historically made sense when life expectancy was shorter.

The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating - David M. Buss

A “drop-dead shocker” (Washington Post Book World) that uses evolutionary psychology to explain human mating and the mysteries of love If we all want love, why is there so much conflict in our most cherished relationships? To answer this question, we must look into our evolutionary past, argues prominent psychologist David M. Buss. Based one of the largest studies of human mating ever undertaken, encompassing more than 10,000 people of all ages from thirty-seven cultures worldwide, The Evolution of Desire is the first work to present a unified theory of human mating behavior. Drawing on a wide range of examples of mating behavior — from lovebugs to elephant seals, from the Yanomamö tribe of Venezuela to online dating apps — Buss reveals what women want, what men want, and why their desires radically differ. Love has a central place in human sexual psychology, but conflict, competition, and manipulation also pervade human mating — something we must confront in order to control our own mating destiny.

Mating Strategies are Evolved Psychological Mechanisms

At its core, the book argues that human mating is not a random or purely culturally determined process. Instead, it is guided by a set of evolved psychological mechanisms that have been shaped by natural and sexual selection over millions of years. These "strategies" are the solutions our ancestors devised to the recurring problems of reproduction, such as selecting a fertile and healthy mate, ensuring parental investment, and fending off rivals.