Dr. Edward Hallowell
speaker
246 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 24 Feb
Dr. Edward Hallowell’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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some hobby that you've wanted to take up, even something as simple as crocheting or cooking or, you know, starting a little garden inside your house or, you know, there are things you can take up that will serve as points of connection. And then you can find other people who are interested in that, you know, and, you know, one of my favorite lines, I use it all the time.
It really, it's a line to live by, never worry alone. So when you're feeling upset, worried, concerned, reach out somehow. It doesn't have to be in person. It doesn't have to be, you know, against your grain, but don't worry alone. That's when bad things happen. That's when you do self-destructive stuff. That's when you feel intense despair.
That's when people commit suicide, you know, when you're worrying alone. So never worry alone is a really good watchword. And another reason thing you can do is when you're feeling these bleak black moments where you're sort of ruminating, we know from brain science, there's a certain network in the brain that takes over. It's called the default mode network, the DMN, which I call the demon.
What you want to do is don't feed the demon. And what do you feed it with? Your attention. Well, do something else. Fry an egg, dig a hole, do a crossword, do something else. Shut off the DMN's oxygen supply, which is your attention. And by the way, the reason that we feed it is contentment is too bland.
You don't say he or she was riveted in contentment, but you do say he or she was riveted in despair, loneliness, misery, foreboding. It's riveting, and that's why you keep feeding it with your attention. You got to be ruthless and shut it off, redirect your attention onto something else. And it literally can save your life if you do that.
But try to keep those two phrases in mind, never worry alone and don't feed the demon.
It's magical. It's magical. And it really is. Suddenly the worry turns into problem solving. It is magical. It's like my thought experience. Imagine you're standing in a big, dark warehouse by yourself. You feel terrified, paranoid. If you're there with someone, you laugh. There's something about the presence of another person that instantly, as you put it, lightens the load.
And the next thing you know, you're problem solving. How do we get out of here?
I take issue with that point. It's all a matter of how you use it. My family, for example, uses social media to great advantage. We have a, you know, I don't know what the word for it is, but we're all on the same little platform and we send each other messages and it facilitates, deepens human connection. Now the danger is when it replaces human connection. That's the danger.
So it's all a matter of how you use it.
I'll tell you a quick story. Do we have time for a quick story?
Oh, great. Okay. Well, so I consulted some 20 years ago to the Harvard Chemistry Department because they had their most gifted graduate student committed suicide and left a note explicitly blaming Harvard. As we looked into it, the chair of the department, Jim Anderson, a wonderful man, basically put his research career on hold to figure out what was going on.
And we discovered it was one of many suicides in that department in the previous decade. And the reason for it was the community was horribly disconnected. It was like a dungeon. It was just, there was no connection. Everyone was paranoid. There were two coping styles, work harder or get drunk. And most people did both every day.
So you had an entire department with five Nobel Prize winners in it and some thousand brilliant little genius postdocs and graduate students miserable because they were so disconnected. So we had to figure out a way to connect them.
Now, with that group of people, really smart, often Middle European, barely English-speaking, very high IQ folks, if you said, let's have a mixer, nobody would show up because it's not in their comfort zone. And so we had to figure out how do you bait the trap? How do you bring people out of hiding? Because they were hiding. They were paranoid.
Well, you know, one of the universal answers to that question is food. So we'd reach out to the best restaurants in Cambridge and we'd cater weekly buffets where, you know, there'd be wonderful good food. There'd be some beer and wine. And these introverted, shy grad students would come out of hiding for food. And the next thing you know, they get talking to one another in spite of themselves.
And the next thing you know, there's a softball team. There's a symphony club. They started putting wax boards next to the elevators. So instead of making small talk at the elevator, they could draw equations and tell each other what they were working on. You meet them where they are. And lo and behold, over the course of the year, we really changed the culture of that department.
So it's a grim statistic, but it's very significant. There have been no suicides since. The proudest award I ever got was the chemistry department gave me the department medal. I'm the first non-chemist who has ever received that. Well done. Yeah, thank you. But it really drove home to me. Number one, how lethal disconnection is.
I mean, literally people dying, but how plantable it is, how startable it is, because it's in every, even the most introverted reclusive person wants to connect. Loneliness hurts everybody. So if you just have to find the right way,
and like in in our case food was was the was the catalyst food was what got the ball rolling then then people jump in and take over and the next thing you know the the town can go from being isolated and separated and paranoid as so many places are these days to connecting maybe you have a block party maybe you have a yard sale maybe you have a
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