Expert Psychologist: The Hidden Trap Holding You Back - Dr. Diana Hill - #527

Something For Everybody

Dr. Diana Hill joins the show to discuss psychological flexibility and how to navigate life's overwhelming moments by aligning actions with

Key takeaways

• Overwhelm is often exacerbated by the 'storytelling mind' adding narratives to existing physical stressors like lack of sleep or poor scheduling.
• Dr. Hill identifies three distinct drives: experiential avoidance (running from fear), experiential attachment (chasing status/dopamine), and excellence (full expression of self).

Main topics

• Psychological Flexibility
• Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)

Notable quotes

What matters is... how are you engaging with your values?

Conclusion

Listeners gain a practical psychological toolkit for transforming reac

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) Diana, welcome to the show. Speaker 1 (0:01) I'm glad to be here. Speaker 2 (0:03) Yes, me as well. So my first and most important question, really important, how are you doing? Like actually, like for real, tell me please how you're doing. Speaker 1 (0:14) I think the text that I wrote, I can pull it up. My most recent text to my husband this morning was, I'm done. It's too much for any human to do. I'm out. That was while running up a hill. And so you have to put it into context that I was running and I tend to get a little bit emotional while I'm also physically active. But it was that was my 6 a.m. Today at 9, I'm feeling a little bit more put together. I got back from my run. I got my coffee. I'm excited to talk with you. And that is the wave of the human experience, right? Feeling overwhelmed and then feeling grounded and feeling overwhelmed again. And then how do we move through that? Speaker 2 (0:57) Before we jump into today's episode, if you love the show and want to help us keep it going, there are two easy ways to support us. First, join us on Patreon. It's the best way to become part of our exclusive community with monthly bonus episodes, ad-free episodes, exclusive merch discounts, live streams, and so much more. And if you want to rep the show, check out Shop for Everybody. That's where you'll find all the hats, clothing, and merchandise you see on the show, including our exclusive For the Dads. for the moms, and you are loved merch. And here's the best part. Patreon members get exclusive discounts on merch. So if you enjoy the show and want to get more from the community, join us on Patreon or grab some merch at Shop For Everybody. Thanks for supporting what we do. Now, let's get into the episode completely uninterrupted and ad-free. Speaker 1 (1:50) Yeah. Yeah, that's very interesting. Speaker 2 (1:52) I mean, I feel the same way kind of all the time. It's just a constant state of... overwhelmed, but like, I feel like I am doing exactly what I'm supposed to be doing, but then I'm not doing enough of it, but maybe I should do less of it. And then, I mean, you're an experienced parent at this point. And so like, as an early dad, I'm like, should I work more to provide more? Or should I work less to be there more? Will they remember these times? Will I remember these times? What's more important now? Oh my God, my fucking heartstrings are being pulled in 75 different directions. And I feel like that feeling probably never, ever, ever goes away. Cause in my brain, I'm like optimizing my business now. So that when my kid goes to school, I can like drop him off and pick him up. And he just assumes like dad doesn't work. Like that's what I want him to think. And then when we go to sports games or whatever the fuck he does, it'll be sports that I can take him there. But right now I feel like I'm sacrificing a little bit of like bath time or, you know, this or whatever, because I'm, I think in my head that I need to work more and maybe that's an issue I need to sort out, but I don't know. There's no question there, but. You know, what do you think? What's going through your brain? Speaker 1 (2:50) So we spend a lot of time trying to optimize our time. And it's less of that question, I think, for me these days and more of a question, what am I doing with the time that I'm in? So in that example of like texting my husband, this sort of like aggressive text in that moment. I'm engaging in a way that I don't want to be engaging and sending bad energy to him. I'm putting it all on him to fix. And it's not really providing the connection that would help me get through an overwhelming day. So when we think about time management, we're often thinking about it in these like sort of dualistic ways. We're thinking about it's like this period of time. Am I, am I. Am I putting, you know, should I be picking up my kid from school or not picking up my kid from school? And it's much more about like when you actually physically pick up your kid, are you in your head or are you with your kid? And that's what the kid remembers. And even if it's two minutes a day that you are 100 % with your kid, that's all they crave. That's all they want, right? They just want full dad. And I was the same way. I mean, I chose this profession of being a clinical psychologist because I wanted to be done at 233 so that I could be the one that picked up my kid and I could drive them around. I kind of, I never bought a minivan, but I envisioned myself as the minivan mom. But I was like, no, I'm like, no way. And, you know, for the most part, I did that, but not always. You know, it's not, it's not about perfection. It's more about here and now, how are you engaging with your values? Speaker 2 (4:23) Yeah. I want to jump in a little bit more to overwhelm and then we'll get back to some of the other stuff you just mentioned because I feel like a lot of people right now are dealing with a sense of overwhelm, whether it's about world issues, their own issues, personal issues, all issues combined. Scrolling on social media, you see a bunch of stuff that could possibly bring you overwhelm, just possibly, or you could scroll on this podcast and maybe it'll bring you some sort of peace. But how do you maybe deal with that emotion in the moment? Like someone's feeling it right now, but they still have some stuff to do in their life. What would you say is like a pathway to work through that? Speaker 1 (4:56) I think there's two different avenues. There's overwhelm. I mean, I think one way we can think about it is like a faucet that's on that's filling the sink and it's spilling over into the floor. And do you like turn off the faucet or do you clean up the floor? And how do you, where are you responding to it? So the first thing is to notice the overwhelm and that overwhelm has a combination of factors. It has a story that you are telling yourself. But most of our overwhelm is us adding on to the current conditions. So we're adding a story on to, like already you're fast forwarding to, you know, what's your son going to think about you when he's, I'm sorry, was it your son? Did you say? Yes. Yeah, Speaker 2 (5:39) yeah, yeah. Speaker 1 (5:40) What's Speaker 2 (5:40) your Speaker 1 (5:40) son going to think about you when he's 13? I don't know how old he is now, but like, you know, instead of. You're adding the story onto the current condition and we need to look at our storytelling mind. And that's one of the sort of specialties that I do as an ACT practitioner, acceptance commitment therapy, but also as a meditator is getting really clued into my mind. And what is my mind? How is my mind making this worse right now? Speaker 2 (6:03) And Speaker 1 (6:03) there'll be some themes. There'll be some like, there's like some like current, like regular radio stations that your mind goes to. I'm not doing enough. I'm a bad dad. All these I ams. So we need to get to know our stories and we have to step back from them. But another really important thing about overwhelm is how our context is shaping our current. experience. And what I mean by that, by context, is sometimes our overwhelm is because we didn't sleep enough, we drank too much coffee, we booked our day so that we don't have... Sometimes I'll just book my day and it looks so perfect on my calendar, like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. But what I forgot to book in there was any margin. It would be like when you open up a book. The first chapter of a book never starts at the top of the page. That's true. Have you ever found a book that ever... Why? Because it would overwhelm the reader. Speaker 2 (7:05) We're just going Speaker 1 (7:05) to give you half a page. But when do we ever give ourselves half a page? Never. We're like, no, we just started at the top, you know, fill the whole page. So the context that's contributing to your overwhelm in terms of your physical context, but also your daily schedule, getting a little bit better about your daily schedule. And then the third thing that I actually think is the most important thing about overwhelm is. Speaker 1 (7:29) what is this overwhelm telling me about what's important to me and where I'm not investing my energy that I want to be? Because usually when we're overwhelmed, it's because there's this discrepancy. It's like, I don't want to be doing all these things because this thing is more important to me. And I find myself doing all these things that are pulling me away from something else. And the overwhelm, if you can stay with it for a little bit. you might be able to figure out what that is. And just investing a few minutes into what that is could help you in your day. So for me this morning, it's like, okay, get back from my run and give my husband some attention, like physical, physical touch, love. Speaker 1 (8:13) solves a lot and then go on with your day. Yeah. Speaker 2 (8:16) Yeah. Yeah. Very interesting. Um, yeah, just thinking about it, but anyways, uh, so, okay. I kind of want to ask more generally about you before we jump into kind of more of the work that you're doing, even though I'm just kind of going random different places, but that's how we go here. Um, did you always want to be a psychologist? Cause I speak to a lot of psychologists on the show and some of them always knew some of them kind of knew come, some of them fell into it because something happened in their life. You know, what was your story there? And then we'll jump off from that. Speaker 1 (8:44) I fell into it because something happened in my life. I knew I wanted to be a psychologist when I was 14. It's like typical. The very thing that destroyed me is the thing that I want to go in and help other people with. And I was at 14, I became really severely anorexic. Like I was like, you know, I was a 14 year old that. looked like a 16 year old. So I, or maybe even 18 year old, I had 19 year olds who were interested, you know? So I, early on, um, I developed really quickly and I was also really, really, really, um, academically, uh, advanced. And I, um, got into a position where I couldn't, I was overwhelmed by life. I couldn't handle life for lots of other, for many different reasons. And I became anorexia. I learned that I could turn down the noise of my emotional sensitivity, turn down, put my, put all of that drive into something, which was my body and basically dropped from like 120 pounds to 72 pounds. And that it pulled me out of school. I had to go. I was in treatment and it was many, many, many years. I mean, I like my first goal was get to a hundred pounds, you know, and then the next goal was get to. And I had many years of struggling with disordered eating that. Speaker 1 (10:14) led me into some really beautiful relationships with people, mentors, people that just went out of their way to help me recover. And it wasn't always like a, actually, to be honest, it wasn't really therapy. It was other really important people in my life. But I got really clear at that point in time that I wanted my life to be of service in the way that people were of service to me. And that led me to go into clinical psychology and then eventually get my PhD in that area. I was a biopsych major. I was always interested in biology and physiology and the role of the brain in behavior. So that's how I went on to. I was a clinical director of a treatment center post-graduate in my PhD program. But now I've kind of steered away from that. And I'm more interested in this just like people that are highly driven and when their drive is turned against them, which was me at 14, right? And how to harness that energy, because I don't think you need to get rid of your drive. Actually, I'm really interested in drive, but how to harness that energy. towards more compassionate means. So I work a lot with leaders who like start businesses and are super successful and then are at the point where they're like, I don't know what to do with my life. And I help them identify actually what, what, what do you care about? And if you put an ounce of that energy and that money into what you care about, what could happen? Like really phenomenal things. Speaker 2 (11:48) Yeah. Well, thanks for sharing that. It's so. It's so interesting because a similar reason why I have this podcast is I, you know, I have something happen in my life as well. And it's so interesting kind of the, I would, in my life, I would least expect to be having this type of conversation with you if I picture myself 10 years ago. And it's, you know, I, my situation, I'll just, you know, tell you is that my sister passed away in 2018. She died by suicide. So that's why I'm very interested in mental health and things of that nature. Speaker 2 (12:20) And I have like a weird relationship with the word gratitude around it. I don't know how you feel about your situation and how you are now and raising kids and all that type of stuff and all the things you've accomplished and like how beautiful it is. And maybe it all stemmed from the hard experience that you went through. But it is interesting when we go through something challenging, where we go from it, because everyone goes through something challenging and many people come out of those situations very, very, very, very differently. And so I think about that a lot in terms of, you know, not always optimizing the situation because I think we're in a culture that tries to optimize everything all the time, which can also hinder people's ability to actually just be a human in the world. But there is a place where like maybe 95 % of things that we go through in life, we can learn from and grow from. I think there's like 5 % that just like is the worst fucking shit that could ever happen to someone. If you just survive it, great, good on you. But maybe 95 % is like, okay, what can I build from this that can make me in the human that this is trying to sort of, you know, build from or if that made any sense. Speaker 1 (13:26) Yeah, I mean, there's terms in psychology, things like post-traumatic growth. And there's pushback from these terms. If you try and get somebody to engage in post-traumatic growth, it has these features of things like. Speaker 1 (13:44) gratitude for being alive, greater spiritual sort of connection and understanding, a sense of meaning, a desire to give back. These things that can naturally bubble up from having a very painful, challenging experience. But if you hand that to someone on a platter and you say, this is an opportunity for post-traumatic growth, it's so infuriating. I mean, I would never do that with a client. At the same time, like every baby that's born, if you were to like, take out that perfect child and hold them in your hands and then you could have a magic ball and tell them all the shitty things that are going to happen to them in their life. They wouldn't want to take another step. I mean, life is a series of painful events. Everything will go possibly wrong that you think could go wrong. And then things that are impossible to happen that are amazing will also happen as well. And the question is, how do we become psychologically flexible enough? to be able to respond to the waves of living and get under them in a deep way, like to the quiet waters within to figure out. Kabat Zinn, who's a meditation teacher, kind of like guru in the area of mindfulness. I was on a retreat with him once and to figure out, he called it your karmic assignment. Like, what do you hear for in this moment? And then when you can catch that wave and you can point your energy in the direction of your heart, then you have a momentum that can help you surf them. It's just inevitable. I just, I look at my kids and I'm like, oh gosh, I don't want to, I