Spencer Greenberg
speaker
1,056 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 28 Jul
Spencer Greenberg’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 — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Or the psychologically healthy thing is not to avoid it.
But there's this really strange thing about the way anxiety works, which is there's exposure that works.
It hardens you and makes you stronger to the thing.
And then there's exposure that doesn't work that ends up being kind of an unproductive just kind of worry.
And I think it's useful to give an example here.
So I have a friend who's extremely afraid of flying.
And he flies regularly.
And so you might wonder, well, if exposure works, if being exposed to things you fear makes you less afraid of them, which is generally a true principle by and large, then why does he not become less afraid?
And you can kind of expect, what is he doing?
What is his mind doing when he goes to fly?
And it turns out what he's doing is he's constantly checking the weather reports.
And he's always on top of exactly what the weather is, and then if the weather's perfect, he'll fly, and if the weather's iffy, he'll cancel the flight, right?
Or he'll find some other way to get there.
And so you can think about what is his brain learning from this process?
His brain doesn't learn the rule like flying is safe.
His brain learns the rule.
If you're hypervigilant and you constantly check the weather and the weather's perfect, then flying is safe.
But that's very far from the rule of flying is safe.
It's actually a really, really different rule.
It's a rule that actually will maintain anxiety rather than reduce it over time.
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