Noam Shpancer’s Mental Fitness: 101 Principles for Psychological Well-Being is a straight-talking guide to building a healthier mind. He boils human motivation down to two core drives: the need to belong (connection, love, community) and the need to be (agency, competence, identity). The principles in his book are practical ways to balance both.
- Knowledge matters, competence counts– Opinions are cheap; evidence and skill win the day. Most “deep problems” are just missing skills, and those can be learned.
- Honor, but don’t worship, experience– Life teaches, but experience isn’t infallible. Trauma doesn’t automatically strengthen you; sometimes it just wounds. Learn, but don’t deify the past.
- Things are not what they seem– Surface impressions mislead. Defenses, biases, and unconscious processes twist appearances. Dig deeper.
- Favor flexibility– Rigidity is a trap. Adapt like a car that can shift speeds. Habits are useful until they aren’t; awareness lets you pivot.
- Face your fear– Avoidance soothes in the short term and multiplies problems in the long run. The way out is through.
- Manage your emotions– Feelings are data, not commands. Don’t deny or obey them blindly—accept, then consult values and goals before acting.
- Think about thinking– Thoughts are products of the mind, not gospel truth. Try them on like shoes; keep the ones that fit reality best.
- Consider context– Behavior takes meaning from setting. What makes sense at a football game may be disastrous at a funeral. Context quietly rules.
- Try to love– Strong bonds and secure attachments are the best predictors of health and longevity. Relationships aren’t just nice—they’re medicine.
- Remember your death– Mortality check-ins reset priorities, sharpen gratitude, and put life’s real goals back in focus.
Shpancer doesn’t sugarcoat it: mental fitness takes work. But the payoff is huge—better health, more meaning, and a wider horizon of possibility. Start small, start now, and keep going.
FULL PODCAST TRTANSCRIPT
Dr. Kaplan: I met you, I believe it was about two or three years ago. I had you on, and we did an interview about principles of psychotherapy and what makes good psychotherapy. That was a real popular episode. It was really enjoyable to meet with you then. And so I’m really excited to have you back.
Dr. Shpancer: My pleasure. I enjoyed our initial, and you know, when you do a book, the publisher asks you to send names of distinguished psychologists who can read the book and comment on it. So I sent your name. I apologize, I didn’t consult with you, but you were maybe the only prominent psychologist I know. So I had to.
Dr. Kaplan: Well, I appreciate that. You know, Noam, it’s interesting because I first heard from your publisher about the book about a year ago when I was in Vietnam. I was literally in Saigon, and they sent the thing saying, you know, we’d like some feedback. This guy, Noam Shpanser, the psychologist is interested in publishing this book. Here’s his idea. What do you think? And I thought it looked really interesting and really amazing. So I gave them very positive feedback about your book. And here we are a year or more than a year later, and you’ve been a busy man. You’ve actually written this manuscript and congratulations.
Dr. Shpancer: Thank you. It’s been a few years in the making. I want to say, you know, during the pandemic, I was like many people kind of find myself with time on my hands. So I started kind of thinking about the project. And I have a literary agent because I published fiction in the past. And she said she read my Psychology Today column and she said, you know, you should do something with that voice, that more academic scholarly voice. And so that was on my mind. And then my daughter kept reminding me I’m an old person and I may want to leave something useful behind. And she said, Jerry, why don’t you write a book with some of your so-called wisdom to leave for us? So those things came together and I sat down and wrote it and it kind of rolled from there.
Dr. Kaplan: Well I actually got the sense from it when I read it that it really was like listening to a prominent, well-versed psychologist giving his wisdom about life and psychology. And we’ll talk about some of those during this podcast, these principles that you talk about. But it really had a nice voice to it. Like I could really hear your voice coming through, your wisdom coming through. And I think these principles that you talk about are really core key important principles to people living their best life. So I guess that was another good thing that came out of the pandemic, right? Just people getting to work, really thinking about things and doing great stuff.
The book is called Mental Fitness 101 Principles for Psychological Well-Being. When is it going to be released and where? Let’s start with that and then I want to ask you more about the book.
Dr. Shpancer: The Kindle version is out December 2nd, I’m told. And the soft cover version will be out January 13th. And the book is already up on Amazon and the other sites for pre-sale.
Dr. Kaplan: So tell us a bit about the book, just sort of like big picture first. What is this book about and why did you decide to write it? Aside from giving people wisdom, what is it specifically about the contents of this book that were so important to you?
Dr. Shpancer: I think part of it is I’m a creative person. I like to do creative work and I’ve been writing a column for Psychology Today for the online magazine and often for the print magazine too. They asked me to do pieces and I write about stuff that interests me, you know, with no agenda, no plan and no strategy. And I’m interested in many things inside psychology. And during the pandemic when I had time and I had the thoughts of maybe I’ll do a scientific writing project, I started looking at my columns and trying to see if there’s a theme, if there are themes that connect all these disparate points and insights and ideas and studies that I spoke about. And it kind of came together gradually that there’s some principles that underlie a lot of my interests in mental health and psychology. And it will be interesting to organize this and try to present it in a way like you said, in a voice that’s not dry scientific voice, but is more sort of friendly and informal without being uninformed. So you want an authoritative voice that’s not dogmatic and do you want it to be interesting and storytelling. And I had an ambition also to bring my parents’ story into it in a subtle way, as an homage to my parents who were both passed away. And I felt it would be nice to have something, their story out there in the form of a book. And I tried to weave these themes together and create this telling.
Dr. Kaplan: Yeah, you do a really nice job in the prologue, laying out the landscape of your parents and they’re growing up and coming and settling in Israel and meeting there and it’s a fascinating story, really. I don’t want to spoil that in this interview and I really recommend people grab the book and read that part of it. I don’t think we need to go into the details about that today, but it’s a really nice way to start the book, a really moving story about resilience, displacement, and the fragility of being human, I think.
So let’s talk in the beginning of the book, you kind of lay out these ideas about the need to belong and the need to be. I was wondering if you could just tell us a little bit what is meant by those concepts and why they’re important.
Dr. Shpancer: I approached this storyline, this mental health idea from the angle of motivation. I was looking for sort of the ultimate human motivations. And my idea was if you take an example of biology, you know, so we know of revolutionary theory, you know that the biological organism is basically motivated to survive and reproduce. And these are the main engines of the storyline. And if you reverse engineer any of the vast machinations out there, biologically, physiologically, you end up with those purposes animating everything. Then I thought, you know, how do we define someone who’s healthy? Well, someone who’s healthy in a biological sphere, someone whose systems support the motives of reproduction and survival. And I figured, can we juxtapose that in some way onto the realm of psychology? And as I’m reading about theories of motivation, and I talk a little bit about the survey, the history of that a little bit, came apparent to me that there’s two sort of underlying large sort of meta motives that all the theories sort of converge onto. One of them is what I call the need to belong. And that has to do with the human documented human need for companionship, for intimacy, for affiliation, for tribe, for community. The other one is what I call the need to be. And that is the documented human sort of motive to autonomy and agency and voice and identity. And I figured those two, in a sense, fit well onto the biological understory. You know, so the need to belong is reproduction, you know, mating. The need to be is survival.
Dr. Kaplan: Yeah.
Dr. Shpancer: So these are the sort of psychological manifestations of these basic biological motivations. And then I began to think about, OK, so if your need to belong, affiliation, intimacy, community, and you need to be agency and autonomy and competence, to the extent you are healthy, to the extent that those are fulfilled. And that was sort of my framework. And then I decided to think, OK, what are some principles that can help someone, habits of mind and psychological skills, that can help someone move in a direction of fulfilling their need to belong and their need to be? And the principles came from that.
Dr. Kaplan: Right. That makes sense. And you weave the need to belong and the need to be throughout these principles in the book and tie it back to that, which I think is really, really helpful. Yeah. Why don’t we spend some time talking about the principles? I’d like to do that. Each one of these principles, we could do probably an entire hour long podcast episode about, and I know that I can’t take up that much of your time. So I’m thinking maybe we’ll just sort of go through them and you can give us a few thoughts and ideas about each principle. And then, of course, I’d really recommend to listeners to grab your book and dig into it in a little bit more detail. But let’s let’s try that. So to begin with, the first principle has to do with knowledge and competence. Tell us a little bit about that principle and why that’s important to these concepts.
Dr. Shpancer: Yeah. So I say knowledge matters and competence counts. The knowledge matters idea is, I think, fairly basic and uncontroversial, but sometimes overlooked, perhaps in the current cultural environment. Yeah. And that is, you know, in a nutshell, everyone has an opinion, but a knowledgeable opinion is worth more or should be worth more in a system that operates well. So I expand a little bit about why this is important. And I make the point that in mental health, a lot of approaches to mental health and therapy essentially boil down to asking, inviting and guiding the client to check the facts and notice what is and follow the evidence. We want to live in a society where the person who goes to prison for the murder is not the one we all expect or wish or hope, but the one to whom the evidence points. And it’s true about the social context. It’s also internally. We like to follow the evidence to a kind of a trust but verify approach towards our own internal machinations to see if what we tell ourselves is actually true, if what we feel relates to the reality out there. So that’s one point that I make in that principle. And the other is that competence counts. And here I make a basic claim that a lot of psychological problems are not due to some deep, dark injuries of the psyche, but to a lack of competence in basic mental health skills. And this is, I think, fairly evident in people’s experience and in the literature that you can only do what you know how to do.
Dr. Kaplan: Yeah.
Dr. Shpancer: And they don’t teach you mental health skills in school.
Dr. Kaplan: No, they do a lousy job of that.
Dr. Shpancer: Yes. And so some people just don’t pick up the pertinent skills. So they struggle, but it’s not because something is broken or injured or traumatized internally. It’s just because they don’t know how. So, you know, if you put someone who doesn’t know how to drive in a car, it’s going to be problems. But it’s not because they lack something because they just don’t know how.
Dr. Kaplan: Yeah, you talk about the skill acquisition and there’s some sort of ties back to self-compassion about that that you touch upon. Where’s the connection there?
Dr. Shpancer: So the connection for me is that what I see in my students who are coming to college, wanting to up their skills in various ways. But a lot of times when we are, you know, poorly skilled, then we realize that we want to improve. We approach it for a very self punitive angle. We beat ourselves up when we fail or when we come up short. And most people do it. And I see it in the clinic, too. And most people do it because they think, well, if I punish myself for messing up, I won’t mess up again. But human psychology doesn’t work this way. What happens when you beat yourself up is you, in effect, devalue yourself. And we tend to protect and nurture what we value. So if you devalue yourself, you lose the incentive to protect and nurture yourself. And there’s a kind of a vicious cycle. So my argument, and I think it’s backed by the research, is that if you want to change and you want to improve your skill, which is what I suggest, you have to come at it from a place of self-compassion, like you would do when you try to teach your child how to ride a bike. And they fall. You’re not going to slap them upside the head, call them stupid and think you’re helping them. So don’t do it to yourself.
Dr. Kaplan: Yeah. So in a sense, that psychological well-being and skills related to that are acquired skills just like any other kind of learning is. And if you’re not great at them or you’re learning how to do them, especially if you’re a young person, but it’s never too late to learn psychological, I guess what you call mental fitness, right? To be kind to oneself while you’re acquiring and learning that.
Dr. Shpancer: Yes. The kindness and not to fall in the trap of perfectionism, which is, you know, often for many people, when you do the perfectionism mindset, you set yourself a trap.
Dr. Kaplan: Yeah. Back really quick to the knowledge part too. One thing that I was thinking about when I was reading that about the facts, the scientists, the scientific aspect of it and really understanding what it is you’re thinking and what it’s based on. It kind of reminded me of sort of principles of cognitive behavioral therapy, where there’s a lot of fact checking about the way that you’re thinking about yourself and using ration and reason to decide about how things are going. Like that’s a very important part of that.
Dr. Shpancer: Yeah. And I think in other psychological traditions, you see this in other ways, you know, so the newer kind of mindfulness approaches, you want to focus on what is and learn to tend to that, you know, non-judgmentally. So and the old Freudian storyline was about shoring up the ego, which is reality based so that can manage the demands of the impulsive aid and the, you know, the superego social moral demands. So in many traditions, there’s a thread of follow the evidence and check the facts and get to know what’s going on. I think that’s important.
Dr. Kaplan: Let’s take a look at principle number two. This one is honor, but do not worship your experience. That’s kind of an intriguing one. Noam, tell us a bit about that.
Dr. Shpancer: Our experience looms largely in our internal architecture for obvious reasons. We sort of go through experiences every day. That’s how we live. And experiential learning is very important. People pay a lot of money to go to Florence to see Michelangelo’s David. And they could see it for free on their couch on the on the on the computer because they want to experience the presence. And so experience is a very important way we learn about the world and about ourselves. That I think is true. Intuitively, if you ask any person, they will point to their experience as great teachers and shapers of their personality and so on. At the same time, you have to be careful with experience because it’s a powerful force. All powerful forces need to be managed carefully, just like natural powerful forces, you know, fire and water. And it need to manage carefully. And all force, powerful forces have limitations that need to be considered. So I talk a little bit about the limitations of experience, you know, that certain things don’t lend themselves to trial and error experience. Like, you know, how to throw a hand grenade is not something you want to learn from trial and error. And our experience is limited to a range of phenomena that may not be the full range because we’re all limited, you know, in our energy budget, time, attention. So you see a chunk of the story and you often jump to conclusion, that’s the whole story and you will be wrong. So, you know, the old country song is even falling feels like flying for a little while.
Dr. Kaplan: Yeah.
Dr. Shpancer: So if you look at just a minute of falling, it does feel like flying. But that doesn’t give you the full picture. Our experience often does that. It’s the restricted range problem in psychology. That’s one issue. And the other issue I highlight has to do with adversity and trauma. Experiences weigh very heavily in our internal architecture. And we know this is for evolutionary purpose, you know, if I went into the forest and a lion attacked me and I survived, I shouldn’t forget there’s a lion in the forest. That’s survival.
Dr. Kaplan: Yeah.
Dr. Shpancer: So we tend to cling on to negative events and remember them and ruminate on them and attribute a lot of meaning to them. In our self story. And we understand why that is. At the same time, you want to be careful when you make the experience of adversity and trauma, the cornerstone of your identity or your self understanding. Two things you don’t want to do, you know, one of them is you don’t want to sanctify adversity and kind of say that I can explain anything that’s happened to me here. It all has to do with early adversity. You know, we know that that’s just not the case for various reasons that I discuss. And the other piece kind of the inverse piece is that people tend to romanticize adversity and say, well, I came through the school of hard knocks and that taught me. And we know that that’s also false. The school of hard knocks usually just knocks you hard. Most things you learn the hard way you can also learn through positive experiences. And a lot of the time people think what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger. But the evidence is against it. The evidence is that the strong injury, psychological injury and trauma makes you more, not less vulnerable.
Dr. Kaplan: Interesting.
Dr. Shpancer: So, you know, kids who grow up on the street, you know, we say they’re street smart, they’re tough, but they’re not. They’re vulnerable and they can’t handle life. They’re much more at risk for further damage and so on. The analogy I use often is like, you know, your parents are very important in your life. When you grow up, you know, your parents are everything. But as you mature, you learn that your parents are just people and that they have limitations and weaknesses. And some of the stuff they say is not necessarily accurate. So when you’re a child, you worship your parents. When you’re an adult, you honor your parents, but you don’t worship them. They taught you what they knew from their perspective and their history and their learning, and a lot of that could be very positive, good stuff for you. But it’s not the only story, right?
Dr. Kaplan: Yes.
Dr. Shpancer: And so I say, you know, don’t worship your experience just like you honor, but don’t worship your parents. You understand the limits of your experience. And one way to remedy that is by learning from other people’s experiences. And I talk about how important it is to incorporate other people’s experience and knowledge and wisdom and into our knowledge of ourselves and the world. And that we’re well equipped for that. We’re a very good modeling animal.
Dr. Kaplan: Yeah, we’re very good at imitation and modeling, and we should make use of that. So let’s talk about the next one. This is a personal favorite of mine, of course, as a psychologist. And this is, you know, the pretty deep stuff. Things are not what they seem. And you’re obviously you’re talking about unconscious processes and whatnot. But just tell us a little bit about where you went with that one.
Dr. Shpancer: It’s an attempt to point out that appearances and first impression and official versions of things are often not the whole story. We do well by our own health if we don’t rely just on surface level appearance or first impression or the formal version of things. But look more in depth about the stuff that may be happening underneath. And my argument is that this goes both ways on one level. Our brain is complicated.
Dr. Kaplan: Yeah, so it operates and perceives and calculates on multiple levels.
Dr. Shpancer: And we should be aware and attuned to that. Also, the phenomena of the world, you know, that there that’s out there is also complicated. It’s a danger to try to oversimplify the world and ourselves. You know, children learn very quickly that there’s a difference between appearance and reality. What something looks like and what something is is very important to be able to decipher. They learn it quickly because this is important for adults also. So we talk a little bit in the book about that piece. And then I use this to make a point, kind of a case in point about the concept of defenses.
Dr. Kaplan: Yeah, psychological defense mechanism.
Dr. Shpancer: And starting with the Freudian with the classic Freudian story, because we use defenses to protect our just like we have an immune system. That’s a biological defense. We have psychological defenses to protect our integrity and identity and so on. And those defenses often create scenarios by which the behavior looks like one thing, but actually serves a different purpose. And so, for example, you know, Freud spoke of reaction formation, this idea that when we have some anxiety provoking impulses that we can’t own and don’t want to leak out, we cover them up by overcompensating by behaving the opposite of what we feel.
Dr. Kaplan: Yeah.
Dr. Shpancer: So if you understand that, then you understand, you know, when you see, I don’t know, a mother doting on her baby. And it’s baby is my life. And so my baby is everything and everything. Instead of saying, well, that’s wonderful, you know, mother’s so in love with the baby, you may take a step. I can say maybe mom has some stillity towards the baby. The babies are very demanding and difficult and they take away a lot from you. And they, but she’s not, she can’t own up to this. So she’s covering this up. So it’s a similar thing, like maybe the overly macho guy is insecure about his masculinity.
Dr. Kaplan: The mother example is a good example, because, you know, if you are the mother and you are going overboard doting on the baby and neglecting your own needs, because you’re, like you said, a reaction formation, you know that you have these needs and you have some resentment that you don’t want to deal with. So you’re overdoing any other direction by doting on the baby. Then ultimately you’re not acknowledging your own needs, right? And that is, I think, what you mean by things are not what they seem. I have these needs here that I’m not recognizing and acknowledging. And then I’m using defense mechanisms to cover them up. And then, I guess, not living my full authentic self. I thought you did a really good and really nice job in the book talking about, you know, the role of defense mechanisms.
Dr. Shpancer: Yeah.
Dr. Kaplan: I like the next one, too. The next principle of you call favor flexibility. And of course, this concept of psychological flexibility is really important in the literature. And I think that really ties back to this honor, but do not worship your experiences. This idea of, like, I have a way of looking at things. And if I’m too rigidly set in that, then it could cause some issues. Let’s talk about that a little bit more. Let me hear your take on the favor flexibility.
Dr. Shpancer: Well, the basic idea is fairly simple, I think, and intuitive. And you’re right. Recently, there’s a lot of research that ties robust mental health to psychological flexibility. And that’s essentially by way of analogy. You know, if you have a car that can only drive 55 miles per hour, you don’t have a good car. Why not? It’s not because there’s something wrong with 55 miles per hour. It’s because life demands different speeds at different times. There’s an emergency. You have to go 80. There’s a traffic jam. You have to go 15. If your car can’t adjust to the demands of life, it’s not a useful car. And you’re going to run into trouble with a car like that once you put it on the road. That is the idea of flexibility. Just like the car needs to be flexible in terms of speed, we need to be flexible in terms of how we adjust our reactions, our responses, our thinking, our behavior to the demands of our situation. One size doesn’t fit all. And to the extent that you can do that, and it’s a skill that you can work on and develop, just like you work on your physiological flexibility. If you want to be healthy, your body needs to have some measure of flexibility, not a coat of armor. It’s the same psychologically. You may not be a great gymnast, but you can develop adequate flexibility that will allow you to respond better to different situations. And so you have more success and so you have more health.
Dr. Kaplan: The importance of being able to pivot and look at things and do things differently, given the demands of the situation, not be so linearly focused on, this is how I do it, this is the way it’s done, that gets you into trouble, just like the car that can only go 55 miles an hour.
Dr. Shpancer: Yeah, this is the base. And I go into, in the book, into some of the obstacles to that, because people often are stuck with the kind of a rigid, futile persistence, what I call, when you continue to do the same thing, even though it hasn’t worked. Like there’s multiple reasons why that is. I think it’s a good idea to become aware of those situations where you are, you’re knocking on the same door and nobody answers. You want to develop an awareness and the ability to maybe think of a different approach.
Dr. Kaplan: How would one do that? Is that sort of like just being aware that like, hey, I’m trying the same thing over and over again, and it’s not changing and I’m just getting frustrated?
Dr. Shpancer: Yes, so there’s several answers, but one is mindfulness, because we often do things, you know, habit is automatic, so it’s mindless. And there’s advantage to that automatic, it doesn’t break, you don’t have to think about it, it’s seamless, it’s easy. But the situation may have shifted a little bit and your habit is the same, and you’re doing it automatically because you haven’t paid attention. You know, I was, I had a habit of talking to my daughter a certain way. And I did this and I didn’t pay attention that she’s not a kid anymore. Suddenly she’s like 20 and at some point she’s like, you know, I’m an adult. Why are you talking to me like I’m a child? We always did, that’s automatic.
Dr. Kaplan: That’s tough for parents because we’re used to having our little kids, you know, and nurturing them, taking care of them. It’s tough to see them grow up and change and relate to them differently, but it’s a necessary part of development.
Dr. Shpancer: Absolutely. So if you are mindful and you can actually take the time to observe what’s in front of you, you can sort of move from automatic habit process to a controlled and aware process and say, okay, let me adjust. Once you have awareness, you can actually change. Without awareness, it’s automatic. So that’s, I think, one important piece of that story.
Dr. Kaplan: Yeah, you know, I had a patient once who, he must have been around 40 or so, but he finally realized that like he puts on the same pair of old worn out shoes and the shoes just don’t fit anymore. But every time he puts them on, he’s expecting to be able to go where he used to go, but he can’t because they’re worn out. And so he said, oh, I put those shoes on again on Thursday and I caused the problem.
Dr. Shpancer: So, yes. And I would add one piece that when you are becoming aware of rigidity that’s not working and you need to act with some flexibility and make adjustment, basically, there’s going to be a period of discomfort.
Dr. Kaplan: Yes.
Dr. Shpancer: And we thought I talk about it in the book throughout and as we progress. So managing a discomfort is an important part, not to run away from it, but to realize a period of short term discomfort is the price of adjusting. And you end up where you actually want to be once you go through that discomfort. The ability to tolerate and accept that and walk through it is really important for mental health.
Dr. Kaplan: Well, you know, Noam, I think that is a perfect segue into your next one, which is face your fear.
Dr. Shpancer: Exactly.
Dr. Kaplan: So let’s talk a little bit more about that. Of course, like this concept is a favorite of most psychologists for obvious reasons, but let’s develop that one out.
Dr. Shpancer: My argument is that all therapy at the core is about guiding people in how to face stuff they have been avoiding. And you can do it with different terminology in different ways, you know, but there’s good evidence that the active ingredient in most therapy is that in therapy, people are forced. I mean, they’re willing, but they’re sort of guided and compelled to face stuff that they have been avoiding to their detriment. Once you face it, you can change it. You can correct it. You can learn how to handle it. You can solve it. You can move forward. So this is the overarching argument that we are healthier when we face the challenge life put in front of us, as opposed to avoid it.
Now, it’s a shaded complicated story because avoidance is part of our repertoire. It’s very seductive because it gives us a very quick gratification. You know, if you’re uncomfortable right now in this room where you are, just walk out and you’ll feel better. And we are designed for favor immediate gratification. So avoidance is a very good short term solution. And our brain is a short term brain. It’s hard for us to consider the long term. So avoidance is available to us and it’s very tempting.
And in certain situations, it’s called for. I mean, if I’m on the tracks and the train is coming, I don’t need to confront the train.
Dr. Kaplan:
I avoid it. You get the hell away from the train.
Dr. Shpancer:
I get the hell away and that’s very smart. And avoidance also works. We know it works if you’re trying to deal with temptation. So if you want to, you know, eat less chocolate, don’t have chocolate in your house. You know, if you have chocolate in front of you, you’re going to eat it. Clearing your environment of tempting, you know, objects as it were, is the first step towards changing the habit. We know that it’s a necessary step really. I mean, if you hang with your drinking buddies, you’re not going to quit drinking.
Avoidance sometimes is helpful when you try to manage temptation. If I want to drink less coffee, I’m going to make a path to work that doesn’t go past the coffee shop.
Dr. Kaplan:
Yeah.
Dr. Shpancer:
We understand that. And we also understand that avoidance is just the way where you manifest your preferences. So, you know, certain things you don’t like. I don’t like, you know, mangos. So I avoid them, but it’s not fear based. I just curate for myself the life that I want and that’s okay.
Avoidance becomes a problem when there’s fear or anxiety underneath and an inability to tolerate the discomfort of facing up. And we know from the psychological literature that when you talk about fear and anxiety, the way out is always through. And I talk in the book about, you know, exposure therapy and the principles of it and how it works. But the upshot is face the fear.
The analogy I like to use is, you know, if you find a rat in your basement, your first impulse, you hate rats, is to close the basement door and walk away. Yeah, you’ll feel better in the moment. But two weeks later, you have 20 rats.
Dr. Kaplan:
I know that from personal experience and that is very true.
Dr. Shpancer:
So what you need to do is go down there and face the rat. And catch it and deal with it. It’s hard, but that’s the way to solve the problem long term. The way I look at it, most people, when they feel anxious, they often will become anxiety prey. You know, they run away from the fear. And I say you should develop a mindset of an anxiety hunter, meaning if you locate where the fear is, you go after it. You go into that and you learn the terrain. And then certain processes also work to, you know, help you. You work your courage, you habituate, you replace old associations, you learn new skills, you manage the fear, you conquer it.
Dr. Kaplan:
Yes. And that’s a very tough concept. It’s counterintuitive for a lot of people to do the exact thing that is frightening for you. But you’re right. I think that’s the way to go.
So the next principle, let’s talk about manage your emotions. That is kind of an interesting principle, an interesting concept. You kind of talk about this tendency people can have, this blind obedience to their emotions. Tell us more about this concept.
Dr. Shpancer:
Yes, in a nutshell. So the idea is that the emotions are data. So you want to, you know, you want to use that. You want to listen. You want to—the emotion—you want to take a look at the data it provides. But the argument is that the emotions are not the only source of data. There’s other sources that we can use. And as a source of data, it’s sometimes unreliable.
My argument is that when people deal with emotional difficulties, usually it’s not the emotion itself that’s the problem. It’s the absence of proper management of the emotion that tends to be the issue.
The two big mistakes that I think the literature points to as creating a lot of emotional turmoil for people, the two errors in handling the emotion, as it were—one is the emotional denial. You know, where you say, I’m not feeling it. I can’t feel it. I’m not allowed to feel it. It’s not here. You know. That’s a mistake because, A, it never works. Whatever you tell yourself you can’t feel, you’re already feeling.
Secondly, when you push against the emotion, it’s like a tree pushing against the wind. You just give it the power to damage you. And you spend a lot of energy doing this and you won’t get results. So it’s a futile approach. So that’s one mistake people make—the denial.
The other mistake is what I call emotional obedience. People think, Well, I feel it, therefore it must be true. Must be the whole truth and nothing but the truth. It must be the state of the world and I need to do what my emotion tells me.
Dr. Kaplan:
Is that sort of like the concept of emotional reasoning? Is that connected as an idea?
Dr. Shpancer:
Yes, yes. So, you know, people sort of—I feel it very strongly, therefore it’s true. And that’s an error for obvious reasons. You can feel a lot of things very strongly that are not actually true. And if you obey your emotion, if you assume my emotion is right and I need to do what it tells me, you end up in a lot of trouble.
I mean, in essence, what we try to teach toddlers when we parent them is not to act on the emotion. So you’re scared—doesn’t mean you have to run. You’re angry—but you can’t hit, you know. And later on as a teenager, you may be horny—but you can’t jump on someone on the street.
So I’m arguing that you don’t want to deny your emotion and you don’t want to obey the emotion. There’s a third way, and that’s the healthy way. And the healthy way is managing the emotion through kind of a two-step process.
The first one is emotional acceptance. And we know from the research that emotional acceptance is a very important part of learning how to deal with emotions. You have to accept this is what I’m feeling right now. So not judging myself: I have this emotion, telling myself it’s wrong, or I’m bad, or something like that. No—it’s human. You’re a human being. Human beings have emotion. This emotion is part of my experience right now. And I should listen to it. You know, it has information, and I should let it be and let it have a voice. That’s the first move.
Second move is: once you accept the emotion and listen to what it’s egging you to do or not do, then the second step is to consult your other sources of information. And those are, you know, your goals and your values and your experience and your logic. And it’s like, you know, you’re the boss and the consultants are—you’re going to listen to them. And then you’re going to make an executive decision about the correct course of action. And often the right course of action is not what the emotion recommended, you know. It’s what some other consultants recommended.
So, you know, if I’m on the highway on the way to my daughter’s wedding, and I want to be there on time—it’s important to me—and someone cuts me off on the highway and I get mad. My anger tells me to chase them down and teach them a lesson.
Dr. Kaplan:
Right.
Dr. Shpancer:
I accept that. I accept that I’m angry. But then I consult my other consultants. So I’m like, Okay, what are your goals here? Why are you on the highway? To get to the wedding. What are your values? Well, nonviolence is a value of mine. Okay. What’s your experience? Well, highway altercations don’t teach anyone any good lesson.
So I do this math and I say, Okay, my considered decision here is to continue on to my daughter’s wedding. And that’s the right move. And by the time, you know, we’re dancing, the anger was long dissipated.
Dr. Kaplan:
Yeah. So the emotion in a way is sort of like a board member. You’ve got a board, but maybe there’s ten people on the board. The emotion is one of the board members. But there has to be a vote. And the board—and the emotional board member—gets one vote.
Dr. Shpancer:
Exactly. That’s the idea.
Dr. Kaplan:
Got it. Okay. Good.
So the next one has more to do with thinking. We were managing your emotions. Now we’re at think about thinking. I love that one as well. And you just—as a sidebar—you talked about this concept of cognitive diffusion, spelled D-E-F-U-S-I-O-N, which I had to do a double take because I’m thinking “diffusion.” So I’d like to hear just a little more of an explanation of what diffusion means.
Dr. Shpancer:
Yeah. That comes—the contemporary version comes from ACT, you know, from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, from that work. But it’s an idea to take a distance from your thoughts, not to confuse your thoughts with yourself. So, you know, they say your thoughts are not you in the same way that the waves are not the ocean. They’re a product of the ocean. Your thoughts are products of your mind.
And if you take some distance—so you don’t—defusion here is to de-fuse. So you’re not fused with your emotion and mistake it for you. But you notice that they’re, you know, they’re mind products, they’re mind events. And as such, when you take some distance from your, you know, emotional entanglement with your own thinking, you take some distance, you look at them as products of the mind, you can judge them more accurately and you can regard them more accurately. You know, you’re not thrown into a mindless action or erroneous judgment by your thinking.
One of the ways to think about it is, you know how it’s easier to give advice to someone else—
Dr. Kaplan:
Yes.
Dr. Shpancer:
—as opposed to yourself.
Dr. Kaplan:
Yes.
Dr. Shpancer:
And part of it is because you are very attached to yourself.
Dr. Kaplan:
Yes.
Dr. Shpancer:
And if you can create some distance between you and some aspect of yourself, you will have better vision of it, a better perspective. If I put my hand right in front of my face, I can’t see anything.
Dr. Kaplan:
Yeah.
Dr. Shpancer:
If I put my hand away, I can see my hand, but I can also see the world. That’s part of the principle—how do you treat your thoughts.
A large part has to do with what you and I know from sort of the cognitive reappraisal technique. The CBT approach is basically: don’t believe everything you think. Evaluate your thoughts like you evaluate other products. And I give the example—I say, treat your thoughts like you treat your shoes. So you go to a shoe store, you don’t buy the first one you see. You walk around, you pick a few pairs, you try them on several criteria, you pick the one that fits best.
Dr. Kaplan:
Yeah.
Dr. Shpancer:
Your brain is a thought store. Don’t pick the first thought that comes to mind. Generate some alternatives and then weigh the evidence. Which one would you bet the house on? Which thought is most likely to be true? Buy that one. Tell yourself that and act on that.
So that’s the process that we know from the therapy literature—that if you train yourself, when you’re feeling distressed, to ask yourself, What am I telling myself that’s making me feel this way? Because we know that cognition drives a lot of the emotional reaction.
We interpret stuff. If there’s a noise at my window, it’s an event. How am I going to feel? Well, if I think it’s snow fell from the roof, I’m going to feel fine. If I tell myself it’s a burglar, I’m going to feel scared. So you want to check what you tell yourself, because that guides your emotional reaction and your behavior. And try to make what you tell yourself align with the evidence.
That’s the essence of the principle, and I think it’s the essence of cognitive behavioral therapy.
Dr. Kaplan:
Yeah. Well, I’m seeing a lot of patterns here in these principles, both with the emotions and the thinking. Kind of the idea that you have to sort of detach yourself a little bit—you talked about mindfulness, detaching a little bit and examining them more objectively, more rationally. You talked about using knowledge to inform the way you think about yourself and things. So these are some patterns here that make a lot of sense.
And the next principle also I thought was quite an interesting one. And you don’t really hear people talking about this as much really, but it’s really important—the idea of considering context. So tell us what that is about.
Dr. Shpancer:
Well, this is something that emerged, I think, from my work as a teacher at the university and talking to young students who often have limited life experience and also maybe are not—don’t have trained minds. So it’s often difficult for them to see that things can look very differently and mean a different thing—the same thing can have different meanings in different situations.
And I give an example. I don’t know—when you go to the football game, you’re going to cheer your team and cuss at the ref and drink your beer. But if you go to a funeral and you do the same things, it’s going to be a problem.
Dr. Kaplan:
You get locked up.
Dr. Shpancer:
Now, why is that? Well, my argument is that context makes meaning. And nothing exists independent of context. Everything exists in some environment. And to understand the thing, you have to understand the environment.
And often my students come in and they don’t appreciate how important it is to ask questions about the context and to appraise the context if they want to understand what they’re looking at. And I emphasize particularly the social context, which I think is dominant in our lives in terms of how important it is and how influential and how powerful. So appreciating the power of social context and what influence it can exert on you, I think, is really important if you’re going to maintain good mental health.
Dr. Kaplan:
The next principle: Try to Love. Love is obviously an important one. And on face value, this sort of seems like an obvious one. But then you kind of bring it back into attachment theory and you get sort of deeper into that, which I think is a really important point here. So why the love and why is the attachment part of it so important?
Dr. Shpancer:
Well, I think when you look at the literature, it jumps out at you that your best predictor of health, longevity, physical, mental well-being has to do with social connectedness and relationships. That’s the most robust finding in psychology, I may say, in terms of health. And so you begin to break it down and it becomes apparent—and I think it fits with the theme of the book—that the need to belong is basic. The most intense or intimate, potent way of belonging is found in intimate connection.
And if you begin to peel the onion, to reverse-engineer, you realize that the baby has to have some competent adult who cares about them or the baby dies.
Dr. Kaplan:
Yeah.
Dr. Shpancer:
So that means that we are wired to elicit and receive these kinds of signals and behaviors—the attachment connectedness behaviors—in a personal way, intimate way. That’s the most powerful impulse, the most powerful arrangement of our internal architecture.
And then I kind of track some of the classic research that’s been done on love and attachment, and some of the newer research that shows that pair bonding in adulthood—you know, your romantic relationship in adulthood—can be seen as attachment relationships.
Dr. Kaplan:
Yeah.
Dr. Shpancer:
And they offer the same benefits as the good attachment offered to the child. Good romantic relationships offer to adults. And so the argument is that it’s a very good idea to invest in and recognize intimate relationships in your life as super important for your health.
Dr. Kaplan:
So Noam, are love and attachment the same thing, or are they different in some way?
Dr. Shpancer:
They’re both the same and different. So there’s evidence that they share some neurological substructures in the brain—child attachment and adult romantic bonding, or what scientists call pair bonds when they study it. So there’s some connection. But they’re not exactly the same.
If you look at it from an evolutionary perspective, they won’t be, because they don’t serve the same purpose. You know, the pair bonding in adulthood helps you find a mate and bring up an offspring from an evolutionary perspective. Attachment helps the child survive. These are two different things. So they have some different functions, but they’re connected, kind of joined at the roots in some way.
And one of the ways they’re joined is that both are super important for health and well-being. We know that secure attachment in childhood puts you on a safer trajectory in terms of your well-being, health, and so on. And now we have evidence that good pair bonding—love relationships—in adulthood also set you up for health and well-being ultimately, and physically, by the way.
Sometimes we may overlook this when we pursue other goals. At the time when all the data points out that if you want to be healthy psychologically, and happier and more content, life satisfaction, and so on—you should invest a lot more in your close relationships.
Dr. Kaplan:
Well, the best for last here. The last principle, which is Remember Your Death. And you talk a bit about the ideas about regret and appreciation for life and that kind of stuff. Let’s dig into this a little bit.
Dr. Shpancer:
Well, this is the one my students tend to resent a little bit or resist. Because I teach a course based on the book. I’ve been doing it for the last few semesters. And when we get to that principle, students are very receptive to all the others and they can see fairly clearly why that would be helpful. But when I ask them to periodically reflect on their death and mortality, a lot of them kind of recoil.
There’s anxiety associated with it. There’s a taboo. We don’t like to talk about death. We moved death from the home as a culture. It’s uncomfortable for people.
Dr. Kaplan:
Of course.
Dr. Shpancer:
And it’s very scary, of course, because our impulses are all designed towards—kind of aimed at existing. It’s a difficult one and it’s a little counterintuitive for many people. I don’t want to think about my death, you know.
However, there’s good emerging literature from various sources and also kind of historical philosophical writing from way back that insistently points to this idea that periodically contemplating the fact of your mortality resets your priorities in a positive way, in a healthy way. And resets your perspective on life and gives you an opportunity to kind of reassess your goals and your habits and your values in a good light—in a way that opens a path to make good adjustments.
Both in terms of looking at stuff you don’t have that you want to have, and also looking at stuff you already have but you haven’t noticed. I talk a little bit in the chapter about the, you know, the research that relates to this—the evidence. And I recommend that you, you know, face the discomfort and periodically spend some time reminding yourself of this fact and let that inform some of your self-appraisals and life appraisal and thought processes and problem-solving and reactions and responses.
Dr. Kaplan:
I think that’s really important for people to do, because it reminds them of trying to find their own meaning and purpose. You know, something about mortality gives a person a sense of urgency that that’s an important thing to do. And paying attention to that—I think is what you’re saying—like from time to time, thinking and paying attention to it, do a bit of a reset in terms of Where am I at in my life? And am I on the path that I want to be on?
And I see it—you know, I have a client who recently just told me, you know, he says, I have this sense that I’m going to live forever. And if I’m going to live forever, then the changes that I want to make are not urgent. I can start, you know, my diet tomorrow, or the next, or in a month, or next year. What does it matter? I mean, he’s actually coming out overtly stating that. But how many people are just sort of going through life with that same kind of attitude, but not even really consciously paying attention to it? Which is, I think, what you’re kind of getting at with this principle.
Noam, this has been a really fun conversation. I’ve loved talking with you about these various different core principles in psychological health and hearing all about your book, which is now being released. I’m really excited for you about that and just wish you the best continuing on this important work you’re doing and spreading the wisdom that you have pulled together. And now you’re writing about—and you’ve been writing about in your blog for Psychology Today as well for quite some time.
Do you have any final thoughts on this topic of mental fitness that we’ve been discussing that you’d like to leave us with?
Dr. Shpancer:
My final thought maybe is that if you want to be healthy and psychologically healthy and healthier and more fulfilled, there’s work that needs to be done. Anyone who sells you that this can be done without work is selling you something—not telling you the truth. There’s work.
At the same time, working on your psychological health and well-being is probably the best investment you can make in terms of its returns. Because life—the foundation of everything—is your mental psychological health. If that’s in good place, possibilities open. If it isn’t, possibilities close for you. So it’s a very, very good investment.
And my thinking is you can start the work now. There’s a low barrier to entry into this kind of work. You don’t need to pay dues and stand in lines and be technologically savvy or anything. You can start now. It’s not too late and it’s not too early to start investing in yourself, in your health. And these principles can provide some guideposts for you.
Dr. Kaplan:
Wonderful. Very wise words, Noam. Thank you so much for that. And also importantly, I forgot to say happy New Year to you.
Dr. Shpancer:
Thank you.
Dr. Kaplan:
So on Rosh Hashanah, it’s great to have you on the show on this particular day. And may your year to come be healthy and prosperous, especially with your book being released. Thank you so much for being with me today, Noam. I really enjoyed having you.
Dr. Shpancer:
My pleasure, Aaron. The joy was all mine. I appreciate your help and support. And I appreciate what you do, which I think is very important. I hope to one day make it to Hawaii and then we can process the resentment I feel since I’m stuck in Ohio.
Dr. Kaplan:
No. Okay. Well, you’re welcome anytime and I’d be happy to see you and allow you to process that on a nice sunny beach.
Dr. Shpancer:
Okay. Thanks, Aaron.