Gabor Maté: Five Steps To Stop Scrolling, Bingeing, and Self-Medicating — And Reclaim Your Brain

Hey hey everybody we're back today with a fascinating and somewhat controversial guest Dr. Gabor Mate, we're going to talk about his argument that childhood stress is at the root of some very common problems, specifically two problems that all of us deal with.

The first is our addictive tendencies and this can range from full blown addictions all

the way down to everyday addictions like scrolling and overeating. So that's one of the problems we're going to discuss. The other is our scattered minds, our distractability. And again there's a spectrum here as well from diagnosis of ADHD to a sort of garden variety,

“distractability that I think many of us deal with.”

Again Dr. Mate's assertion here is that both of these very common maladies, addictive tendencies and scattered minds have their roots in childhood stress or trauma. Now not everybody agrees with Dr. Mate's assertion here and you will hear me challenging on this. But I don't spend too much time on the scientific debate because what I really wanted

to talk to him about is how we deal with our addiction prone and scattered minds. And in my view on this score, he very much delivers with lots of practical tools, including a five step recipe that you will hear him walk through in great detail. A little background, Gabar Mate is a retired physician who has worked in a variety of areas, including family practice and palliative care.

He also worked for over a decade with inner city patients in Vancouver dealing with drug addiction and mental illness. He's written many, many bestselling books, including in the realm of hungry ghosts and the myth of normal.

“Quick before we dive in, I want to say a word about taking care of your own mind.”

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Registered Agent.com/happierfree. Dr. Godbore-Mate, welcome back to the show. Lizard, thank you. I really appreciate you taking the time. Let me set an overall frame on this discussion. You have written a lot about how the stuff that happens to us in our childhood. IE childhood trauma can be the source of both our addictive tendencies and our

scattered minds in its most extreme form ADHD. I want to explore this argument and then

“also get into what we can do about it. So how does that sound as an overall framework here?”

Songs very necessary. Well, I would agree with you there. Before we get into the sort of what we can do about it, I want to ask some clarifying questions. When you argue that childhood trauma is at the root of addiction and ADHD, does that argument scale to the less extreme cases? So instead of full-blown addiction, what happened to me in my childhood? Explain my tendency to overeat or scroll or binge on Netflix and similarly with ADHD, would your argument

about childhood trauma also scale to the fact that we generally have scattered minds, even if we don't have a diagnosis? Well, so first of all, in my book and ADHD, we're just the first book that I wrote after I was diagnosed with it myself. I don't even use the word trauma. Although I'm accused of saying that trauma is the cause of ADHD. If you read the book, 105,000 words,

trauma is spent four times and never is the cause. So it's a bit more sophisticated than that.

And when it comes to addiction, and you talk about a range of addiction, I respect them with it from a full-blown heroin addict to somebody who scores the Instagram all the time. And there's a continuum. So human beings are in a spectrum, on a continuum. And the whole idea that there's sort of one normal and then there's deviations from the normal is totally false. The most recent book is called the myth of normal. So when it comes to addiction,

“I'm going to begin by giving you a definition first of all, which I think will help to cover your”

question. And by the way, as a medical doctor, I wrote in North America's most dire and concentrated and desperate area of drug use, which is the downtown East Side of Vancouver, British Columbia. We're in a few scrublog radius. We have thousands of people ingesting in healing, injecting drugs of all kinds, and dying, and falling sick as a result. And I wrote there for 12 years. At the same time when I worked there with these really desperately ill and driven

young beings, I could recognize in myself very similar addictive drives, not to the same extent.

So it's a continuum. That's the first point. The second point is I'll give you a definition

of an addiction. I don't think it's controversial. So an addiction is manifested in any behavior in which a person finds temporary relief, and pleasure, and therefore craves, but then experiences negative consequences as a result of and doesn't give it up despite the harm. So craving pleasure relief in a short term is the first dynamic. The second one is harm, and the third is inability to give it up despite the harm. Now, notice that my definition said nothing about drugs.

It certainly includes drugs. It could be legal drugs like nicotine or caffeine, alcohol, could also be illegal substances like heroin, cocaine, crystal, and so on. But could also be internet scrolling, work, shopping, eating, bulimia, self-cutting, extreme sports, pornography, gaming. So the issue is not simply the behavior, but one's relationship to it. So for example, you could eat in a non-addictive way, or you could be addicted to eating, depending on how

all spectrum of addiction shares is behaviors that cause temporary relief, cause harm, and we don't

“give it up. And what I'm saying is it's a universal addiction process in the brain, in the psyche,”

that all people addicted share, doesn't matter what the target of the addiction is. If that makes sense to you, allow me to ask you a question. If I may. Yes, of course. According to that definition, I'm not going to ask what, but they behave in an addictive pattern in your life. Because if you ask me, yes, I have. How about you? Many of them, yes. Okay, so let me ask you this. Not what's wrong with the addiction, which is obvious,

what's right about it? What does it give you in no short term? But you want. You made it not at this in your last answer, which is it gives me temper or relief from some sort of a reflective emotion. Okay, so give you relief for some kind of pain. Yes, that's my whole point. Addictions are not a choice that people are making, and it's not a disease that they've inherited. It's an attempt to solve the problem of human suffering. And what happens is that the

suffering comes first, then the addiction comes along to transfer the suffering, hence my mantra.

“Don't ask why the addiction asks why the pain. If you want to ask why the pain, yes, that”

goes back to childhood experiences. Now, childhood experiences can be of different intensity, and people can experience them differently, depending on how sensitive they are. So, the more sensitive you are, the more things will hurt you. But in the downtown East Side,

where I wrote for 12 years, I never had a single female patient who had not been sexually abused as a child.

And if you look at the lower scale studies on substance addicts, that's what it shows. That severe childhood experiences potentially ate. Addictions later on in life, it's not even vaguely controversial. But children can be hurt, not just by terrible things happening to them, but also by their needs not being met. And so there's a whole range of experiences that can wound the child that can lead later lead somebody to seek relief from the pain. And that's all

“addictions are. It's an attempt to seek relief from the pain. I've said it mouthful. But that's why”

you see it. No, it's fascinating. This is a podcast of mouthfuls are encouraged. So, your argument that addiction is a spectrum and at the root of all of it is, it's not a good of pain and good in childhood. Yes. Is that also true for ADHD in the sense that while I personally don't have an ADHD diagnosis, I am definitely prone to being distractable. And so, would you say the same thing is true that there's a range of continuum of attentional faculties and attentional

faculty challenges. And that the same thing is true that it also, those challenges have their root in childhood. Yes. So, I have an ADHD diagnosis. I was diagnosed in my early 50s. That's when I wrote my first book, scattered minds. Sure, 26 years ago, but even a few months ago, it was in your time best color. ADHD is another one of its conditions, which medical ideology says it's an inherited disease, no reason. It runs in families, a couple of my kids were diagnosed, but things can

run in families without genetic transmission. So, here's what I'm saying. If you take the hallmark

of ADHD, which is tuning out up in mind, it's not a disease. It's actually a coping mechanism. If I were to stress you right now and you'd have the options of leaving, just hang it up on me or fighting back and say, "No, you can't talk to me that way." But if I were to create stress for you and you couldn't escape and you couldn't change the situation, one way that your brain would do with it will be tuned out to dissociate to protect yourself from the stress. What I'm saying

is, when genetically highly sensitive infants are living in a highly stressed environment, which is not a question of necessarily the parents being abusive or bad or unloving, but just the parents are stressed themselves, which increasingly is the case in this culture, this kids are stressed. In order to cope with it, it's like tuning up. It's a coping mechanism. And when does that happen, when the brain is developing? And so if you look at the brain science or

brain development, I could quote you an article from Harvard University and this is an article published in 2012 from the Harvard Center on the developing child, which is the was leading child development and institution, the article appeared in a major medical journal of pediatrics, which is the official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics. If I may read

is not taught in the medical schools, so the average doctor has got no clue how the brain actually

“develops, which is astonishing. Here's what they say. The architecture of the brain is constructed”

to an ongoing process that begins before birth, contains into adulthood, and establishes either a story or a fragile foundation for all the health, learning, and behavior that follow. So that the architecture of the brain is constructed by a process that begins before birth, which means that already the emotional stresses of the mother when she's pregnant is affecting the brain development of the child. And in my most recent book, The Myth of

Normal, there's a chapter on it, about how stresses on women in this society, which there's plenty, affect the brain development of infants already in the womb, the schools of scientific

appearance for that. That's the first sentence. The second sentence is the interactions of genes

and experiences, literally shapes the circuitry of the developing brain, and is clinically influenced by the mutual responsiveness of adult child relationships, particularly in the early childhood years, and what they're saying there is that the actual circuitry of the brain is shaped by the environment

“acting on the genes, how the genes are turned on and off by the environment, and the most important”

aspect of that environment is the call to the emotional relationship within the child and the nurturing adults. Now, if you're the society like ours, which puts so much stress on parents, for economic and political and racialized reasons for reasons of unresolved trauma, for reasons of increased isolation, less social support, less community, less cohesion. A lot of parents are really stressed, and these kids were generally very sensitive,

they pick up on the stresses of their parents, and that affects what their brain develops,

which goes back to addiction as well, so that essential brain circuits that are involved in addiction

and/or in ADHD have been affected by stresses or in some cases traumas in early childhood years. It's pure brain science. That's all I did. Let me say a few things to the listener, Dr. Montec, dear listener, you may have heard Dr. Montec refer to the myth of normal, his most recent book.

“I will drop a link in the show notes, not only to the Amazon link, if you want to check out that”

book, but also to the last time Dr. Montec was on the show when we talked about that book in an extensive way. Second thing I want to say to the listener is I'm going to get to Dr. Montec's practical advice soon, but let's just take a minute to talk about this assertion about ADHD and difficulty in childhood with what you call trauma or whatever you want to call it. That's called stress. Stress? Sure. You've tangled with lots of folks over this claim,

so I want to just note that, but also to ask you, you know, I believe there are some twin and adoption studies where twins, one twin stays with one family and the other twin stays with another family and some of these studies show or seem to indicate that actually there may be a genetic influence here for ADHD. Yes. And in both my book and ADHD scattered minds and in my book and addiction in the wrong of all your roles, I show how useless those studies are and I'll tell you

why they're making a assumption. The assumption is that first of all, identical twin studies are

the gold standard because they're the same genes, right? So if they're the same genes, they should have the same condition, theoretically. Well, the twin studies show that if you take identical twins separated the birth and you bring them in different environments, the concordance, which means the ratio by which, if one is diagnosed, so will the other, is about 70%. So if one kid identical twin is ADHD, but they're brought up in a different

family from the other twins, the other twin will have a 70% chance for having ADHD. Now what does that tell you? It tells you it can't be genetic because if it was, it should be 100%. They have the same genes. So it's at 30% difference that we should be interested in. Number one, number two, there's a false assumption. The assumption is that these kids were brought up in different environment. But what I just read you, I just read your article from Harvard University

that says that the brain starts developing in the womb. So these kids shared nine months in the same womb. And by definition, any woman that's going to give up a baby for adoption is a stressed woman. If she wasn't stressed, a single mom, a poor mom, an abuse mom, an addicted mom, a traumatized mom, an unsupported teenager, she wouldn't have to give up the baby for adoption. So for nine months,

So share the same environment. They both had the shock of being separated from the biological

mother, which is a huge shock to the baby. So to say that they didn't have the same environment, it's other scientific nonsense. And there's a whole book in written called the Fallacies of Twin Studies. So those Twin Studies are simply false flags when it comes to generating information about genetic causation number one. And number two, even if it was true, that there was a 70% inheritance, we can't do anything about people's genes. How about that 30% that isn't genetic?

“That's what we could work with, is the environment. Okay, one other question on this score.”

If ADHD is based in childhood stress, what do we make of the fact that stimulant medications

appear to reliably improve symptoms? And those medications aren't going right at the stress, as I understand it. But in a written manner, remember I talk about bandival moments. No child is born with attention. Every matter one day old, they don't have no attention span whatsoever. It has to develop. Another feature of ADHD is poor impulse regulation. Believe me, I know that one. It's my wife quickly clear. No child is born with impulse regulation. It has to develop.

The circuits of motivation and curiosity and seeking. They have to develop. And the chemical that they run on is dopamine. And those dopamine have to develop. As soon as you talk about development, we have to talk about which circumstances were support healthy development and whatnot. So, yes, the ADHD brain has poor attention skills, poor impulse regulation, and difficult to concentration. That's biological. But here's the whole point that people miss. I just read

you two sentences from Harvard University and brain development. The biology of the brain is shaped by the environment, acting on the genes. So, it's not surprising environments are stressed. Or, in some cases, traumatic, the brain doesn't develop properly, biologically, sending happens in debated people. You've been along a chemical that helps to regulate the biology you're going to get good results. But the original cause of the biology going awry

was the stress or trauma during that period of brain development. If you're a plant in your garden,

that wasn't going properly. Your first idea wouldn't be that there's an ingenuity wrong.

You'll be asking yourself, what conditions are lacking, irrigation, sunlight, and so on. So,

“that's what we have to look at is what conditions do we need to support healthy,”

biological brain development. So, I've taken stimulant medication and they help me write my first book. When I would my last book, I didn't need it anymore. My brain had developed differently. That's the whole point. How do people move to healthy brain development? So, that's something that's biological. It doesn't mean that it's a genetic. Coming up, Gabur Mate talks about some practical strategies for dealing with your addictive tendencies

and your scattered mind. The practice of compassionate curiosity and a five-step mental framework for breaking unhealthy habits. Let's talk about some of your practical advice for dealing with both our addictive tendencies

“and our scattered minds. My understanding and I believe this applies both to our addictive”

tendencies and our scattered minds. My understanding is one of your top-line recommendations is something you call compassionate curiosity. Can you describe what that is, compassionate curiosity? Sure. People with both with ADHD by the way end with addiction and there's a huge link between Toronto because very often people's addictions are actually in at the temps to deal with the ADHD like people that are addicted to stimulants like cocaine and crystal matter,

nicotine and caffeine. They're trying to elevate the levels of dopamine in their brain, which is exactly what you get from riddle in our dictionary. So, a lot of addictions are self-medications in one study 40% of male out-of-the-art colleagues that met the criteria of ADHD why because alcohol suits the hyperactive brain. This is a huge link between addictions and ADHD. So, both conditions carry a lot of shame, a lot of self-blame. That's a result of child distress or trauma.

with addiction and, you know, I've shared it myself and the tend to be a self-activization.

“Why am I doing this? What's wrong with me? Well, if I was talking to you and if I said to you,”

why are you doing this? What would you emotional response be? Fight or flight? Exactly. Defensive. But if I said to you, he'd add, I'm curious. I wonder why you're doing this. Can we talk about it? What would you respond to then be? Approach state, like openness. Yeah, that's the whole point. So, if we can have that developed its compassionate curiosity to about ourselves, my colleague and friend Bruce Perry wrote a book with Oprah called What Happened

to You. Now, what's wrong with You? What Happened to You? So, if we can start compassionate, one of the asking ourselves, "Well, how did they become this way?" Somebody wrote me an email to the other day. The idea they said, "I was the hellish child. Nobody's a hellish child." But that means she took on a negative view of herself that her parents had over. Who didn't understand her? Nobody's a hellish child. Nobody's a bad child. Nobody's a rotten apple.

“Nobody's damaged words. So, if we can ask, why? What happened?”

With the sense of curiosity, there's a special teacher who said that only one compassion is present, what people love himself to face the truth. So, we want people to help them explore what is the truth of their lives and for that you need

compassion. And so, I teach self-compassion as an essential step towards self-awareness.

And once you start asking questions compassionately for yourself and for everybody else, then the answer starts coming. So, take me into a moment where we can think about how to apply this for ourselves. So, I've just reached the bottom of a pint of ice cream or I've just finished 90 minutes of scrolling on TikTok when I had a deadline. And I'm tempted to go into a shame spiral.

If I can channel Gabor Mate, what would be a healthier move? Well, four weeks ago or three, so, Gabor Mate deleted Instagram from his cell phone because he was spending too much time scrolling on it. But, true, I did that. And...

Wait, I have to jump in. I never interrupt my guess, but I just want to tell you.

I did the same thing three weeks ago, myself. I deleted Instagram. Karma adds an arms then. So, here's the first question. Ask yourself, "Not what's wrong with the addiction was right about it." In other words, from this 90 minutes of scrolling or from this pint of ice cream, what did I get? And the answer is going to be, "I got relief. I got relief from some emotional attention from some emotional pain for some stress." And I'll say, "Good for you.

Good for you that you're seeking relief from your stress." Can you find some other ways of doing so without harming yourself or you're interested in that? So, that's the next question.

“And also, are you interested in exploring where that stress came from?”

There is a thing about stress. It's a part of life. There's no life without stress. There's no life without pain. That's not negotiable. We're all going to have grief. We're all going to have losses. We're all going to have setbacks. We're going to failure. We're going to have people not treating us well. Disappointments. That's just a part of being a human being. Ideally, as we do all of properly, we learn how to handle those stresses. Those setback to those appointments.

What happened that I didn't learn how to do that? So, that again, it calls for compassion, curiosity. And then, what support can I get? What conditions in my life can I create? Where I can relieve my stress is in ways that are not harmful to me. So, that's the nutshell response. So, those questions that you just laid out, including, you know, what did I get from this pound of ice cream? That seems like a really great reframing in the moment. Are there further

steps that I should pursue? Because I'm not quite sure that fully pulls me out of the shame, just by reframing it? Well, it doesn't fully perhaps, but the next question is, how is it that I'm not able to handle stress differently? What would happen to me? So, that calls for an inquiry, because stress regulation, which is one of the circuit studs, impaired in addiction, is a developmental attribute. No infant, no sort of regulator stressics. You know, infants

That's why infants regulate stress. So, as Dan Siegel, the psychiatrist said,

“infants use the mature circuits of the adult brain to regulate their own immature circuits.”

That's assuming that the parents have mature circuits. So, nobody's born with stress regulation, given the right environment, stress regulation, and the circuits of stress regulation, and employing to them right here, will develop properly. So, you can ask what what happened to me, that my stress regulation circuitry did not develop, it's not my fault, and not here to blame anybody, but what happened to me? Then the next question is,

actually you know what I would say to somebody with the ice cream example,

asking these questions may not stop you next time, but the next time you're stressed,

and you want to eat ice cream, do it, or do it consciously? Say this of, "I'm stressed right now, I don't know how to regulate my stress." That's not a scale or a brain circuit that I developed yet. So, I'm going to use the ice cream now, but I'm going to use it very consciously. I don't know that I enjoy each bite of that ice cream and I'm going to be conscious, I'm eating ice cream right now to regulate myself. That's called harm reduction. Believe me, if you do that a few times,

your tendency to realize cream will diminish. And then, you know, he might need to join a group, or go to therapists or engage in some practice to help you regulate yourself, and this plenty of those, but the point is to do so consciously and compassionate. When you talk about eating ice cream consciously, I believe you've written about the power in this regard of mindfulness and bear attention. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, say a little bit more about that if you're a four.

Bear attention is a capacity to be aware of something, without any judgment, or without any agenda, just be aware. The reason it's important to develop that capacity is that when you ask yourself what part of me or who in me can pay bear attention without reaction, without judgment, without agenda, that's your tool as deep as self. If you can observe yourself and your impulses, for example, you might say,

“I need to eat ice cream right now. Watch that you don't need to use right now. All you need to do is breathe.”

You can live without water for a while. You can live without food. You can't live without breath. The only thing you ever need is breath. So it's not true that you need to eat ice cream, but bear attention will tell you, I have this belief that I have to eat ice cream right now. That's all really very different. Now you've separated yourself from that impulse. So I recommend exercises to strengthen or capacity for bear attention.

I assume those would include meditation. Yeah, well, as I said in one of my books, I said, it's that I have a very profound relationship with meditation. I think about it every day. With my daily brain meditation, it's like going short. If I can sit there for 20 minutes and 30 seconds, I'm actually crunches. I'm doing well. So I do recommend meditation. I also acknowledge that for me and lots of people will like me. It's a heck of a job. The board has talked about

where the handles ancient talk about the monkey mind. Well, it's a spectrum. Everybody's got a monkey mind and in this culture, that monkey mind is encouraged by the social media and so many other influences. The ADHD mind is an extreme example of the monkey mind. It's a spectrum. The ADHD is like on one end of that spectrum of the monkey mind. It's a meditation for me is a real challenge. I have a lot of sympathy for that. For people like you who either really

struggle with meditation or just don't feel like meditating, how can we develop bear attention or

mindfulness in other ways? First of all, feeling like or not feeling like doesn't get you through

life very well. If you're like getting up in the morning, some mornings you don't. But you're

“going to do it because you have to. It's necessary. Do you feel like brushing your teeth? I never”

feel like brushing my teeth, but I happen to know the consequences of not doing so. So I do it twice a day. You know, I'm flossing my teeth. Who feels like flossing their teeth? So I'm not sure that feeling like there's a way to approach this meditation can be approached the same way. Just as the teeth pushing is dental hygiene. Meditation is mental hygiene. So if you can go to dental hygiene,

yeah, other ways, conscious movement, conscious walking, connecting with nature, this tremendous unity are oneness, serenity, and the coherence and nature that can help to create coherence and settling in your mind. Breath practices, which don't take the sitting stillness of meditation, active yoga, not just the physical movements of it, but consciously doing the movements,

“that can make a big difference as well. I'll tell you for me swimming is essential. It's”

almost every day, and when you're swimming, you're taking deep breaths, and you're calling a nervous system, you don't want to talk to me if I haven't swim for two days. So there's all kinds of ways, music, and I've even found a music, some kind of music is very educating, and sometimes you might want that, but there's lots of music that can soon be concentrated and calm. So there's lots of practices. You have some quite practical strategies for dealing with, I don't know what

you might want to call them, maladaptive habits, difficult urges. You describe them as the four steps plus one. Can you walk us through what those are? Sure. So these steps, actually, with permission adapted them from the work of psychiatrists that you see a lake called Jeffy shorts, and shorts were the book on OCD, obsessive compulsive disorder, which is similar to dedictions in some ways, and that you engage in behaviors that are harmful, and you can't stop yourself.

The difference is the person at OCD does not crave these behaviors. Whereas the addictive one does, but you know, a lot of the features are similar, and so you ask psychiatrists, is it okay if I adapt your four steps, calm, dealing with behavior dedictions, or more broadly, to any subject-recating thought, or habit? And he said, "Yes, so here they are." With gratitude to Dr. Schwartz, he had four steps out of the fifth one. And step one, it's called Relabel. So I already,

actually refer to that. I talked about this thought, I need to have ice cream. The Relabel is, I don't need to have ice cream right now. I have a thought that I need ice cream right now. So that way, it's no longer a reality that I need to adjust the thought you've created some separation with yourself and the impulse, that's called Relabel, or take a thought like on worthless. A lot of people handle such things. When you do this exercise, it's not that I'm worthless,

“it's that I ever thought that I'm worthless. I believe that's already a big step forward.”

So that's called Relabel. The second step is called Relia Tribute. In this step,

you put the blame against how do you work your lungs which is on your brain. So, when you react to it, you say, "This thought that I'm worthless," or "This thought that I need to learn ice cream right now is just my brain sending me a false message." That's all it is. It's not true, but your brain is programmed with it, programmed with it a long time ago. So just your brain sending you on all message. That's the real tribute. And this is an exercise that people can do once

a week or once a day, in writing. And if they do it regularly, it makes a big difference to you.

That's the second step. It's really attribute. The third step is V Focus.

And then we focus step, you just buy yourself some time. So I end this thought that I need to have ice cream right now. This thought is my brain sending me an old message for five minutes and I'm not going to do it. For five minutes, I'm going to go for walk, put on some music, arrange some flowers, make a cup of coffee, but I'm not going to put the attention on the impulse.

“After that, if you want to go and have the ice cream, go have it. It's the same thing. This thought”

that I'm worthless. It's not true that I'm worthless. It's my brain sending me an old message. I think of all the times that you've been kind, that you've been present, that you've been helpful. Where life has meant something to you. Write that down. It's an antidote to the

worthlessness. The first step, it's called V Value. But if we're also called V Evaluate. In fact,

you could call it V Value. Because what has been the actual value of this composition of mine? To eat ice cream when I'm stressed, the value has been it's put fat on my belly. It's giving me

to an internet screen, here's what it's done to my life. Or, it's thought that I'm worthless.

What's been its actual value? It'd be if you'd ashamed. I studied it from people. It failed with relationships. Stop me from expressing my truth. Stop me from developing myself, that's its actual value. When you're doing these steps, Dr. Schwartz says anticipate and accept and anticipate that these beliefs or these patterns will come back. Why would I come back because you're human being? So anticipate that they will and accept that that'll happen. But you can keep

working on improving your impartial observer, your bare awareness. I added the fifth step, which is called recreate. I just read that to you. Life up till now has created you. You've been acting out of

ingrained mechanisms wired into your brain long before you any choice in the matter. And it's

all those automatic mechanisms and long ago program beliefs that you created the life that you

“have now. It's time to recreate to choose a different life. So what kind of life would you like?”

So write down. What kind of life would you create if you would create a life of meaning, a life of connection, a life of truth, a life of authenticity, a life of creativity, write it down. That doesn't mean you're going to create it immediately. But here you're moving into the position of being a creator of your life rather than just being the effect of the past. So those are the flight steps. Coming up, Godboard talks about placing blame versus taking responsibility,

repairing practices for your nervous system and much more. So these five steps just to restate them, relabel, reattribute, refocus, re-value, recreate. You'll tell me if you think I'm correct about this. They sound to me like a recipe for agency over automaticity. That's the whole point. Thank you for seeing now. And we talk about

the ease of healing and the first one is agency. We all want agency in our lives. And agency means

rather being at the effect. Like so much of my behavior, if I look at my past, has been the effect of previous events. It doesn't have as much agency as I thought I did. And so it's all about gaining agency. And this is an exercise that you can go that'll help you regain or at least gain or develop a sense of agency. I'd love to hear a little bit more from you about how to actually bring these five steps to bear in the moments we need them. Do you think the smartest use case is to get them

into your molecules by turning it into a writing exercise so that when your zombie arm is reaching you to the fridge or reaching for your phone, you're kind of trained to be able to handle that

“urge in a different way? Yes, let me ask you a question. Do you play any sports at all?”

When I was a kid, I played sports. Okay. So let's say zombie plays pickleball or zombie plays tennis. When is the time to practice when in the middle of the game or before the game? Yes. You've better not start practicing. If you're going to play alcoholize or joke over it or nagal or fed over on a tennis court, you better not start practicing. When you'd stop on a court, you better practice before. So this is a written exercise to be

practiced daily or weekly or as often as you're up to it. So that when you against the moment you have something with you. So yes, it's a practice. That makes a ton of sense to me. It is really all based in the word we used at the jumping off point for this practical part of our conversation, which is compassion. It is just this is kind of a warm relationship to yourself that helps you behave in healthier ways. Yes, the American cycle there

is called Rogers called it unconditional positive required, which means that you accept somebody

“with all your flaws, however they overdo you accept them. And that's what parents need to give”

their kids. And so when it comes to ADHD, for example, rather than trying to control the behaviors of the child or simply to medicate the behaviors of the child, as if it was a disease, not that I'm against medications. But what environment can we create in which healthy development can unfold in the family, in the schools, in all the institutions that kids are cared for. And so that compassionate approach to what are the needs of me as an adult or what are the needs of

my child? How do I understand the internal dynamics that drive me or that drive my child?

questions. What are you dealing with ADHD or addiction or anything else? And that's what my

“books address this best they can. Let's talk about parents for a moment. I'm going to ask this”

question from two angles. One, I is a parent and I'm sure many other parents can hear this argument about ADHD and addiction really having its roots in childhood stress and feel like a little defensive are you saying, you know, if my kid has extra-why problem, it's because I was a bad parent. That's one aspect. I know you're not, but I'll let you explain that in a moment. Then the second part of the question is, I can imagine if I am, and I think this describes everybody, if I have any

addiction tendencies or any attentional challenges, I might just blame my parents and not take any responsibility. So can you address both of these canards? Sure, I'm telling in each of my books. I explain how it's unscientific, inappropriate and cruel for blame parents.

Look, I was a parent. I passed on some of my dramas to my kids. I never woke up one morning

“and said, I'm going to screw up my kids. I just couldn't help it. That's why I was,”

given of what I knew at the time. No parent that I know weeks up and says, I'm going to screw up my child. So there's no blame whatsoever. It's an nature of stress and trauma that is multigenerational. Georgetown University psychiatrist, Louis Bohn and Michael Carr, called the multigenerational emotional family process. And I didn't begin with anybody in particular. So yes, it's true. Had I been more conscious, more or less more present, more healed, I would have been a parent who

would have done things differently. But there's no blame there. There's just an understanding of what happened. So forget this idea of blame. And forget this idea of guilt. Nobody's guilty and nobody's to be blamed. It's a question of understanding what happened. Let's say you come to me with a five year old with ADHD. Which were you out of here? That your kids got this genetic disease. There's nothing we can do about it. It controls behaviors and maybe Medicaid in that'll temporarily help,

“but in the long term they won't help. That's what the study show. Or if I said to you, you know,”

then your child is probably very hypersensitive genetically, which means they pick up a lot on the environment. And if we can create an FM environment that's calmer, less stressed, more understanding. Do a child can develop in healthy ways. What would you rather hear? Which message could you actually work with? And so I don't blame parents. I don't blame myself. I'm just trying to show scientifically how stress, trauma, psychological traits can be passed on through the environment and more we can

understand it and work with that environment. The more we can promote our healing and the good news is there's something called no plasticity which is the capacity of the brain to develop new circuits

in response to new experiences. To give my personal example when I wrote scattered minds my first

work, I took medication. When I wrote my most recent work to met a normal, much more complex, much longer, took much longer to write, much more research. I didn't need medication. My brain's different now because I've created some new conditions. Now if you've got a five year old or a 12 year old boy, you've got lots of time to work with. So I'm saying to you, no blame, but responsibility. Don't take on blame, but take the responsibility of working with the environment for promote healthier pathways.

Okay, so let's talk about the flip side of the question. It goes right to that word of responsibility. I can imagine some people listening to this conversation could weaponize it in ways and would not work to their benefit in that they would just go into the mode of blaming their parents for whatever problems they have as opposed to taking responsibility themselves. It feels to me like both things can be true. Sometimes our parents skirt us up, but it's also true that

this is our life and we have to take responsibility. Yeah, so here's the deal. My elder son and I Diana are writing a book together and I'll called Hello again, a fresh start for trans and adult children. It's only a fact that in a lot of families kids have been hurt. In my family, my children have been hurt. That's just a fact. So our child might have anger about that. That anger is totally legitimate. I've said to my kids, I'm not worried you'll be angry with me.

I'm worried you won't be angry enough. I want them to feel the anger. That's healthy. But there's a difference between blame and anger. Anger is a healthy natural human motion.

differently and you're a bad person. That's not true. So people have the right to their anger

and in fact if it's there I encourage them to experience it because if they suffer down, they're going to get depressed or suffer some physical disease. But that's different from blaming. So if anybody weaponizes my words, they just don't understand what I'm saying. So taking responsibility means to be a response able in the present. Not to take on blame about the past, but how can I respond to the present needs of myself or my

child or my spouse or wherever? How can I respond in a way that will make a positive difference?

“That's what responsibility means. And Prince Kenneth knowledge, yeah, you know what?”

Have I known better? Have I been different? I would have been done differently. That's healthy remorse.

But that's not blame. And unfortunately, believe in a society that's addicted to blame.

So if there's something wrong, let's find somebody to blame. I don't like that. I don't agree with it. It makes no scientific sense. It makes no psychological sense. So I think in part what you're saying is it can be helpful for us to ask the question, what happened to us, you know, what happened to you?

But understanding your past does not absolve you from taking responsibility. No, it doesn't. If an adult child says I'm this way, because my parents did this to me and I can't be any different, then they're playing victim. I don't promote victimhood because victimhood says I'm

“helpless. Now, whatever you parents did, it's not your responsibility to do what you can't support yourself,”

you know, psychologically emotionally, whatever. So that understanding would happen in the past,

does not absolve your responsibility unless you want to play the victim. We should keep you stuck. I don't recommend victimhood. So recognizing that yes, I was hurt and those hurts or those either in the stakes or the missions of my parents have had an impact on me, recognizing that I'd help you understand yourself. But then saying it's their fault that I'm not any different and I can't do any different,

then you're playing victim. The responsibility is no yours. Even if your parents are acknowledged, which some parents do and I hope many can, they wish they had done things differently, that wouldn't heal you. The responsibility of healing is still on you in the present moment.

“Before I let you go, I want to go back to ADHD and what you've learned yourself through painful”

experience. You know, we talked about the four steps plus one, but are there any other practical tools that you've picked up in learning how to manage your own ADHD that might be worth sharing with the audience? Well, I mean I wrote a whole book on the subject and a lot of it is to help people understand what happened to them and how the brain works and what parents can do in a home environment or schools can do in the school environment to create new conditions for healthy,

believe-album and of children. So that's a big part of what I wrote about. When it comes to adults, mostly what I talk about is re-parenting, because your parents are not going to create the conditions for you anymore, but you can. So I do talk about that. I talk about the heart of the ADHD. Relationship is one of the partners at the ADHD. What do they have to understand? Or if you have ADHD, what do you understand about

how your partner experiences you? So you can take some responsibility for that. I talk about meditation. I talk about the various ways to look after yourself. I mean, look, there's no way around it. If you have ADHD, you're likely to be addicted to junk food, because it's very soothing. It comes a brain. It's designed to be addictive, by the way, junk food is. You're going to have to eat properly. Your rehyper sensitive by nature, that's your genetics.

You're going to have to protect yourself from harm as best you can. I talk about nature, very talk about various practices, getting help, getting therapy, getting support. All these are ways of repranting yourself, giving yourself conditions for health development. And, you know, I've been working at that for a long time. What you're saying remind me of something an expression that I've heard from Kristen Neff and Chris Germer, the two leading researchers,

pioneers, really, in self-compassing yet. One of the questions that they recommend people ask themselves, all the time, is, what do I need right now? And that strikes me as in the realm of repariting. Exactly. I've talked with Christine and Brady, where we'll invite her to teach my students one time, not long ago. This has been phenomenal. I'm really, like I said at the

hello again, would you and your son come back on the show? I'd be more delighted. Thank you.

“That should be next year sometime. Also, I'll mention that on May the 12th, I'll be giving”

your free webinar on ADHD at three hour webinar along with the colleague. And we're going to

cover many of this in much more details. So, anyway, it's interested. They can look at my Instagram for a notice about that or with my website, but it'll be a totally free online event on ADHD. We'll drop a link to that in the show notes, we'll also drop links to your Instagram and your books and your prior appearance on this show, all things got more Mante. In the meantime,

I just want to say thank you again. Really appreciate it. Thanks for having me. I'm always

“grateful for an opportunity to speak about what matters to me. So, thank you.”

Thank you again, too, Dr. Gabor Mante, love talking to him. Also, please don't forget to check out our new app 10% with Dan Harris. You can get it at Dan Harris.com. There's a free

“14-day trial, if you want to, try before you buy. Finally, thank you so much to all the people”

who worked so incredibly hard to make this show. Our producers are Tair Anderson and Eleanor of Silly. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at pod people. Lauren Smith is our managing producer, Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our executive producer at Nick Thorburn of the band, Islands, Rope R. theme.