Emily Falk

Well, in our brains, we have a system called the value system that helps us evaluate whether things are good or bad, likely to be rewarding for us.

And we also have a self-relevance system that helps us decide whether things are me or not me.

And interestingly, those two systems are really intertwined with one another.

So the same kinds of brain patterns that differentiate between whether I think that a particular trait like messy or intelligent applies to me can also differentiate whether I'm looking at an image that I think is positive, like a birthday party, or negative, like a pile of trash or a gory scene.

And in our day-to-day lives, this comes up in so many different places, starting with the physical things that we hold on to.

So right now, I've been thinking a lot.

I've been helping my mom navigate clearing out stuff in her house.

And we have movers scheduled to come and take the rest of the stuff out of her house next week.

And in preparation for that, I have spent so much time recently going through a lot of my childhood things.

So some of those things are really important and things that I'm going to hold dear, like the stool that my dad made for me, the little wooden stool that has an E on it when I was a kid, that 100% I'm keeping.

But then there's also stuff that would just be clutter, like all of the textbooks and notebooks that have hundreds of pages of notes that I took in high school and college.

Like the things that I learned about, you know, revolutions in Central America in high school, there are books that do a much better job of describing those situations than my, you know, partial understanding as a 16 year old.

And yet, going through those notebooks and seeing my handwriting and thinking about who I was at the time, it feels so hard to let go of those things and throw them out.

And I think that comes from this idea that things that I think of as me are also then kind of inherently valuable in a different way than, you know, looking at somebody else's notebook.

I can see that that's probably not something that I need to keep.

And so that intertwining of self and value is sometimes really beneficial because it helps us maintain a positive sense of self.

But it can also get us in trouble because we hold really tightly to the things that we've done in the past or to things that we think of as being part of us.

Yeah, I think that the ways that we tend to conflate self and value can get us in trouble in exactly that way, that somebody is giving us advice or coaching or input that might otherwise be beneficial for us.

And instead of hearing the potentially valuable kernel of truth, we hear something that is suggesting all kinds of things about who we are and maybe what we're capable of or evaluating something bigger than might be at stake there.

That's a really interesting way of framing it.