Emily Falk

So what do you mean we're not spending time together?

I definitely initially was like, no, you're wrong.

Like, we do spend time together.

Look, what are we doing right now?

It's the same kind of defensiveness that I feel when, you know, somebody calls me up and says, like, why haven't you called me?

And it's like, well, we're talking right now.

What do you want from me?

So, I mean, yeah, I definitely felt some defensiveness in that moment.

Yeah, I think this is an incredibly common experience where, you know, we point out something that somebody could be doing better.

Like, for example, you know, maybe your partner could be taking out the trash or your kid could be doing their homework or somebody on your team at work could be responding to your collaborator a little bit more quickly.

And when we point out these things that we wish other people were doing differently, the things that are most salient for them are all the things that they're already juggling, just like you said.

You know, with my grandmother, I was juggling a lot of different things having to do with my work and my kids and getting dinner on the table.

And those things were front of mind for me.

And so when we point out the ways that other people could be improving their health behaviors, you know, choosing healthier activities, quitting smoking, drinking less, drinking

getting more exercise or studying harder or, you know, making choices that are different than the choices that they're making, that really can feel threatening.

It can threaten our self-image.

It can threaten our sense that we're making good choices.

I mean that our brain has these systems that help us think about what's good and bad, our value system, and brain systems that help us think about what's me and not me, which I call our self-relevance system.

And the self-relevance and value systems are really intertwined with one another.

So when we make decisions about what's good and bad, it's tapping into the value system, but that's overlapping with our self-relevance system.