An Interview with Psychologist Mark Leary
Dr. Mark Leary is a Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University, and specializes in social and personality psychology.
Maya Hsu: Hi, my name is Maya, and I'm a research intern here at Seattle Anxiety Specialists. Today I am joined by Dr. Mark Leary, who is a professor emeritus of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University. He has made significant contributions to the fields of social and personality psychology, and he has also authored an article titled Self-Compassion and Reactions to Unpleasant Self-Relevant Events: the Implications of Treating Oneself Kindly, which is how I found Dr. Leary. Dr. Leary, would you like to introduce yourself and share how you became interested in social psychology and self-compassion?
Mark Leary: I've been interested in topics involving self-reflection, that is thinking about yourself, for a long time because the quality of our lives and our emotions and our behavior are affected by how we think of ourselves. And traditionally, psychologists have thought of that in terms of self-esteem. But more recently, in the last 20 years, the topic of self-compassion has become hot. And I just sort of tagged onto it and began to do work with my research team on self-compassion.
The difference is that self-esteem has to do with how you evaluate yourself. Do you evaluate yourself positively or negatively? How good do you feel about yourself? So everybody's familiar with the topic of self-esteem. Self-compassion is not a self-evaluation. It's how you treat yourself. Do you treat yourself well, with kindness and caring and understanding, when you have problems in life? I often like to describe it as compassion directed toward yourself.
Think about how you treat other people you care about when they're having problems and they're struggling and they're unhappy and they're anxious and they're depressed. You treat them with care and empathy and concern. The irony is that many of us, when we hit problems, we treat ourselves very badly. We're really mean to ourselves and critical to ourselves. We beat ourselves up in our own heads. And so self-compassion is an attempt to try to lower the degree to which people are mean to themselves and increase the degree to which they treat themselves better, treat themselves kindly and with concern.
Maya Hsu: Great. Thank you so much. You answered my first two questions of what is self-compassion. It's self-kindness. And how does it differ from self-esteem, which is more of a self-evaluation. Which got me thinking, is it possible to have one without the other? Is it possible to have self-compassion without self-esteem?
Mark Leary: Absolutely. Think about it in terms of having compassion for another person. You can have a lot of care and compassion for somebody that you don't evaluate positively. Right? You might even dislike them, but you might be compassionate and try to help them and make them feel better and reduce their problems. A person with low self-esteem can do that to themselves. For the time being, maybe they don't evaluate themselves all that well, but that doesn't mean they have to be mean to themselves. They can treat themselves kindly. I also think there are some people with high self-esteem who treat themselves horribly in their own heads. They're very self-critical. They beat themselves up a lot. They evaluate themselves positively. They have high self-esteem. But they're not very self-compassionate. So these are two very distinct things. They are correlated because the more favorably people perceive themselves, the better they tend to treat themselves. But there's no necessary relationship there. You can have one without the other.
Maya Hsu: Okay. And I know this is true for me and a lot of people that I talk to in my life. Why is it easier to access compassion for others than ourselves?
Mark Leary: That is a really good question. I've been puzzled with that in my own life. It's occurred to me sometimes that if I talked to other people as meanly as I talk to myself in my own head, if I was as critical to them as I am to myself, I'd probably be arrested. I'd be sued for harassment. We harass ourselves in our own heads. And it is a puzzle because in many ways the average person cuts themselves a lot of breaks. There's a lot of research showing that we are nice to ourselves in some ways. But when it comes to self-criticism and catastrophizing and beating ourselves up, some of us are just not very nice to ourselves, and I don't have a good answer for exactly why that is. My hunch is it's because if we treated other people the way we treat ourselves in our own mind, we wouldn't have any friends. Our romantic partners would leave us. Nobody would want to interact with us. They'd say, "You're horrible. You treat me awfully." Some of us treat ourselves in exactly that way, but we can't leave ourselves. We're stuck with the person who is mistreating us, which is us.
Maya Hsu: Yeah. I wonder if part of the advantage of being self-critical is that it can act as a motivator for us to improve or work on certain qualities within ourselves. Is it possible to have that self-motivation without the self-criticism? Is it possible to have self-compassion and still be driven to work on oneself?
Mark Leary: I absolutely think so. And I want to make a distinction because you ask a question I've been asked many, many times, because the idea of self-compassion suggests to some people that we just should always be nice to ourselves, only say pleasant things to ourselves, never be negative, never be self-critical. That is not true. There are times that we have to evaluate ourselves negatively. That helps us regulate our behavior. So there's nothing, truly nothing wrong with negative self-evaluations, as long as they're accurate. If I mess up, if I fail or I make a mistake or I engage in a bad behavior or hurt somebody, it makes sense that I have to say, "I was wrong about that. I shouldn't have done that."
So negative self-evaluations are okay. Where they're not okay is when they are inaccurate. And so many people have self-judgments that are just far more negative than they really should be. So you want to have an accurate self-judgment. But the worst thing is that when you have a self-judgment, the question is, how hard do you need to be on yourself? How hard do you need to beat yourself up? And again, if you think about applying judgment to other people, if someone else has done something wrong... Let's say you're a parent and you're interacting with a child. It's perfectly okay to say, "You shouldn't have done that. That was a bad thing to do." But how badly do you need to scream at the child?
Well, the same question can be raised in your own head. Yes, it's okay to say, "Boy, I messed that up," or "I've got this problem I have to solve," "I lose my temper too much," whatever it happens to be. But how mean do I need to be to myself? And my guess is that most of us don't need to be nearly as critical and nearly as mean to ourselves as we are in order to stay motivated, because that negative evaluation is motivating at times. I've talked to many highly achieving people who just insist that their success is based on how badly they treat themselves when they fail. And I can see the truth in that to an extent. But I always ask them, "Okay, I agree with that. But how bad do you have to treat yourself? Isn't it enough just to know that you messed up and that you need to do better, or do you need to lie awake at night and feel badly about it?"
Maya Hsu: Yeah. It sounds like you're making a very clear distinction here between negative self-evaluation and meanness, because you can have one without the other.
Mark Leary: Yes. That's right. That's exactly right.
Maya Hsu: And you can acknowledge that you might have done something imperfectly or you might have harmed somebody without reprimanding yourself to the point where you feel awful.
Mark Leary: Yes. And there's a couple of other considerations there. When you do something badly or something's going wrong or you're afraid of something that's going to happen, it's okay to think about that in a very concrete and specific way that focuses on the actual problem, the failure, the mistake, the bad behavior, the threatening event, to think about that very narrowly about, "Well, what can I do about this? What's going on here? How do I solve this problem?" The problem is many of us over-generalize from that thing, from that failure. Yes, I failed this test. But the thing I say to myself is, "God, I'm stupid. I'm always going to be a failure. I'll never amount to anything." You've taken one specific thing and you've blown it up, or you're rejected.
Yeah, we all have rejections. And yeah, that hurts, and it's a problem to be solved. But it's one thing to say “I was rejected.” It's even one thing to say, "I didn't behave as I should have in this relationship." It's another thing to say, "I am a horrible person who will never be loved by anybody." We over-generalize. So as we evaluate ourselves negatively, it's very helpful to keep those evaluations really focused and specific.
It's also important just to be able to solve the problem. I can solve the problem of doing badly on this particular test or taking care of one bad habit. I don't know how I would solve the problem of just being a loser or a failure in all areas of life or a horrible person. Those are just so global, there's no way to begin to solve the difficulty that started the whole problem.
So I think people need to be very attentive to how they talk to themselves in their minds because it makes their life worse. It creates negative emotions in ways that aren't beneficial. It's okay to have unfavorable evaluations if it helps you correct a problem, it helps motivate you. That's fine. But so much of this is not helpful. It just makes us miserable.
Maya Hsu: Yeah. I think you touched on a really important piece there, which is the accuracy of that self-evaluation and self-reflection. And I definitely have engaged in that globalized, fatalistic thinking where you do one thing imperfectly, and it's like, "Well, I suck at everything now."
Mark Leary: And we all do. The challenges are the people who just get stuck in that mode of reacting to their problems, and those are the ones that really need to think about how do we deal with this in the long run.
Maya Hsu: Right, because it can be very cyclical. And you can then enter into confirmation bias where then you expect yourself to do that in the next situation, and then it's just a self-perpetuating cycle.
Mark Leary: Yes. Let me add one other thing. So far we've been talking about not being mean to yourself when you have problems, when you've done bad things or bad things have happened, to be less mean. But the other part of self-compassion is to actually be nice to yourself, do pleasant things for yourself. So often when we have problems, particularly if we feel like we have caused the problems, it's almost like we feel like we ought to punish ourselves and push ourselves harder and hold our feet to the fire. But that might be the time to be nice to yourself. And again, if you think of a friend who's really struggling, sometimes we'll say something like, "Hey, let's take the evening and go have dinner. Hey, let's talk. What do you want to do that would be fun? You had a bad day." We don't do that. When we have a bad day, that's when we push ourselves the most sometimes.
This really dawned on me. I had a graduate student who was working on this. In fact, she's one of the co-authors on that article that you mentioned at the beginning. She went away one weekend to visit her grandparents. They were in their 80s, I think. And like all older people, they were starting to suffer some cognitive issues. Their memories weren't as good. They were clearly physically more frail and had health problems. But she came back very impressed by the difference in how her grandfather and her grandmother coped with those problems.
Her grandfather was a poster child for low self-compassion. He fussed and ranted about his memory is getting so bad, and he would criticize himself and, "I'm not strong enough to go out and mow the yard without stopping now. I just hate getting old, and I can't do anything anymore. I'm worthless." Her grandmother was a poster child for high self-compassion. What she said was, "Yeah, I've got good days and bad days. But when I'm having problems and my joints are hurting and I can't get around much, that's when I treat myself particularly well. I'll fix myself a cup of tea and watch the birds in the yard, and I won't try to push myself to get the housework done." And it was such a striking difference. And it wasn't just that the grandmother wasn't being mean to herself. She was actually treating herself more nicely.
And this student went on... they gave her the idea for her dissertation. She did three studies of self-compassion in older people, people 65 to 95 years old that we recruited as participants. And consistently, the ones who treated themselves more nicely, who were higher in self-compassion, were psychologically doing better. They were less anxious. They were less depressed. They were more healthy. It's the same kind of finding we find anytime we study self-compassion. You get positive psychological and physical outcomes. But it was particularly striking when I thought about it in terms of aging. And that was 20 years ago. I'm kind of more conscious about the psychology of aging now than I was 20 years ago when we first did that research. But I can understand the importance of self-compassion in that context.
Maya Hsu: Yeah. That's an important point that it's not the absence of meanness, but it is the presence, the addition of self-kindness. And I like the anecdote. Thank you for sharing that. It reminds me of family members who berate themselves when they gain weight and that kind of thing, when they could access self-compassion and do something kind for themselves, which ties into the previous point of not having that motivator. I think that self-criticism is like, "Well, if I'm kind to myself after I've gained weight, then I'll just gain more weight."
Mark Leary: Yes. But then again, that person who's gained weight and is unhappy with it knows they don't want to be overweight. They already have a motivator. They know they'll feel better and they'll look better and be happier. Do they need to go through their entire life until they lose weight beating themselves up? And the answer is no, probably not.
Maya Hsu: Right. You touched on some of the positive effects that can accompany self-compassion, like better health and psychological well-being. How does that work? How does it moderate the effects of more negative events?
Mark Leary: It does a couple of things. One is that it takes away that extra layer of negative self-evaluation and self-criticism. The average person thinks that their reactions to events are reactions to the events themselves in the world. So I have an experience or I do something and I feel bad about it, but that's sort of like a natural reaction. That's partly true. But so much of our reaction has to do with how we think about it and perceive it and think about ourselves and talk to ourselves. So self-compassion takes away that extra layer of negative emotion that occurs when you berate yourself, when you don't treat yourself nicely.
The way I often explain it to people is when you have a problem, you really do have a problem. Whatever that problem is, whether it's your weight or a bad habit or you failed or you were rejected, you have a problem. Why make that any worse than it already is? But we all do that. I do that. I don't want anybody to get the idea that I'm always self-compassionate. I'm not. I'm more self-compassionate than I was before I started studying this. I absolutely am. But still I have a problem, and now I'm going to make that problem worse just by how I talk to myself about it. So self-compassion takes away that extra layer of negative emotion, and I think that's why people high in self-compassion are happier. They are more satisfied with their lives. They rate themselves higher in serenity, even. Why? They don't pile the extra stuff on there. It doesn't make their problems go away, but it changes their reaction.
In one study we did with university students, at the end of the semester, we asked them, "What was the worst thing that happened to you this semester?" And we got a whole range of things, from very trivial things like "I lost my chemistry book" or something, to very serious, traumatic, life-changing events. But regardless of what we asked them— this worst thing that happened to you, how upsetting was it and how disruptive to your life was it?— And what we found is the students higher in self-compassion said that the worst thing that happened to them was less upsetting and less disruptive to their life. And they had the same kinds of problems. We thought maybe people high in self-compassion somehow have fewer problems. But we analyzed the content of the problems. That wasn't it. It was the fact they were not adding the extra emotional baggage on top of the original problem. Whether it was a lost book or a traumatic event, they weren't adding to the trauma of the situation through how they were talking to themselves.
So the big thing that self-compassion does is it takes away that extra layer of stuff. And then to the extent that you can treat yourself more nicely, it can actually make you feel better. When we're having a problem and a friend treats us nicely and takes us out to dinner, it doesn't solve our problem, but it does enhance our positive feelings because now we're doing something nice. So self-compassion just corrects for the fact that we don't treat ourselves as nicely as we should.
Maya Hsu: So to clarify, it strips away the globalization thinking and the self-judgment and just kind of the inaccurate thoughts and the meanness. And that is what leads to improved health and improved cognition and better physiological benefits.
Mark Leary: As a very general statement, that's true. I wouldn't quite say it strips them away because that sounds like they're never there anymore, but it reduces them to where they're not as much of a problem.
When it comes to health, there's some interesting research trying to understand why it is that people higher in self-compassion do show better physical health. They have fewer symptoms, and they just seem to be better... They have fewer stress reactions physiologically. We know that stress makes people unhealthy. There seem to be two processes by which self-compassion improves physical health. One is it reduces the negative emotions and stress. And we know that negative emotions and stress undermine health, interferes with the immune system, so it reduces the stress and unhappiness. But also, people higher in self-compassion take better care of themselves. If you think about that, when you care about somebody, when you're concerned with their wellbeing, you treat them better. And you would tell a loved one if they're doing something unhealthy, "Maybe you need to stop eating all that junk food, or, "Maybe you need to go and get a flu shot," or whatever it is. I think people higher in self-compassion are more likely to do that.
In the study of the older people I mentioned a moment ago, we found that participants higher in self-compassion were more likely to take daily multivitamins, even, which is really interesting. If you care about yourself and your own wellbeing enough, it not only leads you to treat yourself well and not beat yourself up, but you take better care of yourself physically.
Maya Hsu: That's so interesting. It sounds like there's a certain sense of empowerment that you have to embody. You have to kind of step up to the plate and take ownership of yourself and be willing to treat yourself kindly, which takes effort if you've been treating yourself poorly your whole life, to take your multivitamins.
Mark Leary: I've never thought of it that way, but that sounds accurate. For those of us, myself included, who were never particularly self-compassionate, it does take effort. It takes a change of habits to do that. I think some people somehow grew up just naturally being nicer to themselves, and I envy those people because they don't quite have these struggles. I have talked to people who just are kind of puzzled. They say, "Why would anybody be meaner to themselves than they need to be? I've never done that." And that amazes me. That's great though.
Maya Hsu: In your years of studying this, what have you seen are the biggest barriers to people sort of shifting into a more self-compassionate mindset?
Mark Leary: I think the biggest one is something we've sort of talked about indirectly, and that is, people are afraid that if they're too nice to themselves, they'll turn into slackers. Because it does sound like if you're not careful that self-compassion is something where no matter what happens, you go, "Well, that's okay. No, I'm fine. Oh, I did this horrible thing. Well, that's okay. Everybody does horrible things." But that's not what it is. You still take your behavior seriously. You just don't add that extra layer.
And there are some studies that show among university students, higher self-compassion students take more responsibility for their bad behaviors. Like after failing a test, students higher in self-compassion take more personal responsibility and then work harder before the next test. And that might seem counterintuitive because it sort of sounds like if you're nice to yourself after you fail, that's sort of like you're taking yourself off the hook. Why would you go ahead and work really hard? And I think it's because if I don't beat myself up, I'm not adding a lot more negative emotion to the whole situation of failing that would lead me to avoid the whole thing. If I'm really, really mean to myself, my life is a wreck when I fail, and I just sort of tune out. And I say, "Well, there's nothing I can do about this." And I pull back, and I over-globalize and I can't fix this problem. But if I can accurately say, "No, I didn't do very well on this, and I'm not going to make a big deal out of it, but I'm going to do better in the future," it actually increases students' motivation.
So I want to encourage anybody who says, "I'm afraid to be self-compassionate because I'll turn into a loser or a bad person, who just will do anything and not worry about it.” That is not what happens. When you're compassionate towards someone else, and they have done something bad or they have failed, you don't tell them, "Hey, that's okay that you failed. Don't worry about it. Don't try to improve." You would never say that. Or if they did a bad moral behavior, you don’t say, "Well, that's fine. That's okay. You stole the money. Who cares?" You don't do that. And we don't do that to ourselves. We know how we're supposed to act. We don't cut ourselves that much slack.
Maya Hsu: Yeah. It does seem a bit surprising at first that people with self-compassion after failing a test would work harder and achieve higher the next time. But it does make sense when you break it down because when you do layer on all the judgments and it becomes this insurmountable task, then it would definitely make sense that people would just give up.
Mark Leary: Yeah. That's right.
Maya Hsu: Yeah. Let's see. How might someone journal self-compassionately for anxiety management, or just use self-compassion for anxiety specifically?
Mark Leary: There are writing exercises out there, including journaling exercises that help promote self-compassion. And I think what those kinds of exercises are useful for are two things. One is, if a person wants to change unhealthy habits... And low self-compassion is just an unhealthy habit. It's changeable. It's just a pattern that we get into in how we think about ourselves and think about the bad things that happen to us. The only way to change a bad habit is to begin to really monitor yourself for cases in which you do it to understand, when do I do this thing? Why do I do it? What form does it take? And journaling, in which you analyze your day in terms of how you talk to yourself about the things that happened, particularly after a bad event, I think is really beneficial in terms of just opening people's eyes to how much they really do this. And that's the first step. So journaling is beneficial just in terms of alerting people, putting them in touch with how they're talking to themselves.
The second thing then is you can begin to journal in ways that promote your own self-compassion, or do writing exercises of other kinds. There are exercises out there, for example, where people are told to give themselves advice about a problem the way they would give that advice to somebody they really cared about, with kindness and concern and compassion. In fact, write it in the third person. You're writing it to yourself as if you were somebody else. And that's often eye-opening to people to realize that “the advice that I would give somebody else for how to deal with this is very different than the advice I've been giving myself in my own mind that's making me so miserable.”
So there are ways to begin to give yourself advice. If there are personal characteristics that a person has, they dislike a lot, and that's making them beat themselves up for whether it's academic or intellectual or personality problems or social problems, you can do the same sort of thing. What would you say to someone else who had these characteristics, somebody you cared about? How would you talk to them about these shortcomings that you think you have? And again, you wouldn't deny them to somebody you cared about when they realize they're having problems in school or something like that. But you would talk to them about it in a proactive, healthy, somewhat positive way.
I would recommend to any listeners who want to try different kinds of exercises, whether they're writing exercises or exercises that you do just in the course of everyday life, there's a website, self-compassion.org, self-compassion hyphenated.org. This is the website of Kristin Neff, N-E-F-F, who started the study of self-compassion in psychological research about 20 years ago. If you go back through the research literature on self-compassion, you can't find the term in psychology until Kristin's groundbreaking work. She developed the idea, developed a scale to measure it. And she's got a fantastic website at self-compassion.org that has, last time I looked, a couple of dozen exercises and lectures, little lectures, five minutes up to 20 minutes, along with a number of different exercises for people who want to begin to explore, how do they promote their own self-compassion a little bit more. Kristen's great at doing this stuff. She's been doing self-compassion workshops around the country for years now, and she can give you a lot better advice about how to deal with low self-compassion than I can. Self-compassion.org.
Maya Hsu: Awesome. Thank you. Okay. And can people acquire trait self-compassion, or is it only possible to acquire state self-compassion over time?
Mark Leary: Okay. Let me define those terms for your listeners first. When psychologists talk about people's characteristics, they often make a distinction between a trait. And a trait is a general tendency. So there are some people who have a general tendency to be low in self-compassion. We would say that's trait low self-compassion. There are other people who have a tendency to be high in self-compassion, high in trait self-compassion. It doesn't mean they're always that way, but if you look at them over a period of time, across different situations, yeah, we lean in one direction or the other. State self-compassion refers to how self-compassionate am I behaving at this moment. In this particular situation at this particular time, am I treating myself with self-compassion?
And there's obviously a relationship. People high in trait self-compassion are people who engage in state self-compassion more frequently. But there are some people... And I would put myself here. I think I have emerged as a person high in trait self-compassion after working on this, but I still can be really low in state self-compassion. Sometimes I just lose it over that stupid thing I did because I'm an idiot and a loser, and I don't know that I'll ever amount to anything. The thoughts just start running.
So the question is, can you change? In a state way, it's not all that difficult now and then to catch ourselves. In that moment, we can say, "I'm not going to engage in this low self-compassion stuff. I'm going to treat myself nicely." That is not all that difficult to do from time to time. The bigger question is, can a person who generally does not treat themselves well, a person low in trait self-compassion, ever become high? The answer is absolutely yes.
People just need to realize, again, this is a habit. We all have habits, and we can change habits, including unhealthy and bad habits. This is a way of thinking that some of us have developed— who knows how. There's not much research on this. By the way our parents talked to us, perhaps, the way people taught us to think about our problems and mistakes and bad behaviors along the way. Maybe some of us just drifted into it, started not being very nice to ourselves. But regardless of where it came from, we can always change bad habits by beginning to monitor them, by doing exercises, by accepting the fact that we're going to fail at this from time to time.
You're never going to be always high in self-compassion. There's nobody on the face of the earth who never criticizes themselves unnecessarily or beats themselves up. That's fine. What I tell people is what you really want to do is just reduce this a little bit. It takes the edge off of life if you can just reduce your negative self views, your beating yourself up, not being nice to yourself, by even 15 or 20%, for example, your life will improve.
So yes, this is changeable. And again, I'll refer people to Kristin's website as a good way to start to really understand self-compassion, to monitor how they're treating themselves, and then to start taking steps through exercises to try to become more self-compassionate.
Maya Hsu: I think that's very encouraging to think of it as a habit that can be changed and worked on through practice. Is there anything else that you would recommend for our listeners about self-compassion just broadly?
Mark Leary: There are probably some people listening who right now are beating themselves up for not being sufficiently self-compassionate, because I do that sometimes. It creeps in through the back door, low self-compassion and this meanness that we have for ourselves sometimes. So just cut yourself a break. Accept the problem a little bit more. It doesn't mean they're not problems.
I always want to make the point as well, sometimes if you're not careful, what sounds like high self-compassion is trying to tell yourself you don't have problems. It's like it's positive thinking. Self-compassion is not positive thinking. I'm not a big fan of positive thinking, in fact. I am a fan of accurate thinking because being too positive can create almost as many problems as being too negative. So it's not just telling yourself happy stories. It's not just being optimistic about the future for no reason. It's not building up your self-esteem artificially. It's not telling yourself that you can do anything you put your mind to, because that's not true. All it is, is not making your life worse by treating yourself badly. It's not just positive thinking. It's accurate thinking and not being mean to yourself. And when you look at it that way, it shouldn't be that hard. We're nice to other people. We have a lot of experience being nice to people. Why can't we be that nice to ourselves? That's what self-compassion is about.
Maya Hsu: That made me think of one last question I want to ask you. With failing a test and with gaining weight, those kinds of measures are more objective. But with the situations that are a bit more ambiguous, maybe social situations where people might feel like they failed, but it's hard to know for sure, how does one access accuracy in those situations?
Mark Leary: Wow. That is a really, really, really good question because we all know that there are times in which we misinterpret what has just happened in the situation, whether it's a social situation or a romantic situation, or it's just me working in my yard and I mess up something and cut down the wrong tree. What happened there? And I don't know. I think the best thing is just to be aware of the fact that the beliefs we have about ourselves and our behaviors and the causes of what happens to us are partial and sometimes incorrect. They certainly don't feel that way. We believe that we understand what has happened to us and why it's happened. And we have to go on those beliefs. We just can't sit and say, "I don't know why anything happens."
We do infer things correctly sometimes. I just encourage people not to take their judgments and their beliefs about themselves too seriously as if they're completely accurate, because everybody knows they're not. Everybody could think of times in which they misjudged a situation or they misjudged themselves. One question you could ask yourself is, “how sure am I that this was my fault?” And there's often a little bit of ambiguity there. So there's no good answer to your question in terms of how do we increase our accuracy except to be open to the possibility that we're sometimes inaccurate and be able to live with that.
Some people would be paralyzed by uncertainty. How do I know what to do? I don't know who I am or why I did this or what happened to me. That's not it. You have to go ahead and make behavioral decisions, but just don't be too certain that you think that this social event went badly and everybody thought you were an idiot. Was that true? Maybe not. We know that people sometimes overestimate negative situations. Our threat detection system is on high alert. And all animals are made that way. They're more likely to treat something that's not dangerous as something that's threatening and risky than they are to treat something that's dangerous as safe. And we do that throughout life, throughout our jobs and our social lives and our family lives and our academic lives. We put a negative reading on things. And that's adaptive because it makes sure we don't miss anything bad, but it also is a downside because it makes us react to things as if they're bad that aren't really.
Maya Hsu: Yeah. So there are some situations where it's kind of ambiguous and unclear, and that's something we have to accept. And it sounds like what you're saying is that in those situations, the best thing we can do is just be on alert for inaccurate thoughts and judgments and just to not engage in those. And then what's left is kind of the more accurate ambiguous truth.
Mark Leary: You said that better and more concisely than I did. Very good.
Maya Hsu: Collaboration. A collaborative effort. Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Dr. Mark Leary.
Mark Leary: Well Maya, thank you very much. I've enjoyed it. I hope it's been helpful.
Maya Hsu: Definitely. It was wonderful to have you.
Mark Leary: Thanks.
Please note: The views expressed by the interviewee are for educational and informational purposes only, are not meant to diagnose or treat any condition, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Seattle Anxiety Specialists, PLLC.
Editor: Jennifer (Ghahari) Smith, Ph.D.