Brad Stulberg
speaker
1,230 appearances
3 recordings
3 series
first heard Jan 2026
last heard 31 Mar
Brad Stulberg’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Now, how do you do this if I just said how easy it is to fuse, especially in meaningful emotional situations?
Researchers call this self-distancing.
And what self-distancing means is creating some space between the thing you're experiencing and your wiser self.
A couple of ways to do this.
One way that I'd love is to pretend that a close friend is in the exact same situation as you and really visualize that friend going through what you're going through and then give advice to that friend.
And then, of course, you actually have to take that advice yourself.
Another way to do this, especially if you're making an important decision that feels really tough, is imagine yourself 30 years down the road looking back on current you.
What is 30 years from you now going to be proud of?
And then that's the thing that you should do.
A third way to do this is through some sort of mindfulness meditation or contemplative practice where your focus is on the breath, you have a thought or feeling, you recognize it, you come back to the breath.
Ultimately, what that's training you to do is to be able to see thoughts and feelings as separate entities from yourself, and it's creating that space.
And then the fourth thing to do that is supported both by ancient wisdom and modern science is to simply name what you're going through.
When we name something, researchers call this affect labeling.
Back in the Bible, the quote is, if you give something a name, it loses its power over you.
And basically what you're doing is once you give something a name, once you put language to something, you allow yourself to wrestle with that thing.
And if you're wrestling with it, then it's separate from you.
So a big part of what I try to do as a writer actually is to help people name things that they're experiencing.
Because once you can say, oh, that's heroic individualism, then instead of just being it, it can be something that you're experiencing or something that you're struggling with, but you're separate from it.
And therefore you can see it more clearly and take wiser action as a result.
Yeah, well, the neutral feeling is important because if you're really charged up, that's going to influence the action that you take.
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