Joel Salinas

Yeah, looking forward to the conversation.

Yeah, maybe I can start out and then you can add on.

So my research has been all around understanding how social relationships influence brain health.

And one of the things that I was seeing was social isolation and loneliness have been steadily increasing.

I want to figure out what kind of interventions or what are the factors that are involved here?

And I think one of the things that has stood out is just the difficulty with being able to navigate conflict in different contexts.

And so the idea around conflict resilience is really, even though there's been lots of books on kind of how, like, what to say and what specific tactics to use, I think that there was this skill set around just being able to sit with the discomfort of that disagreement, which will ultimately help kind of make it much more useful to take on those tactics.

One way to kind of think about it, if it's like all these tactics are like learning how to cook with a set of recipes in the kitchen, what we're really proposing here is that you also need to be able to stand the heat of the kitchen to even be able to cook.

Okay.

Go ahead, Bob.

Oh, yeah.

I'm a Teflon.

So, yeah.

So I think I am generally a conflict of what an individual and I think a lot of listeners and viewers can relate with that experience.

And

I think that also kind of speaks to some of the neuroscience that comes into this, which is that our brain has really evolved to be a fortune-telling machine.

It takes all of our past experiences, turns them into memories, and then makes projections about what's going to happen.

And this projection or prediction of what's going to happen might as well be reality for our brain's kind of sake.

And so if we had really negative experiences with conflict in the past, kind of growing up, whether through our families or the schoolyard or others, there'll be likely a very negative charge of negative emotional charge that comes with that.

And what that does is that it increases the chances that you'll trigger this system for salience and arousal, which then sets off the alarms essentially in your body that then kind of creates these kind of fight or flight type responses where you're more likely to fall back on these really reflexive behaviors to make the bad thing less bad.