Welcome to Joy Lab!: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Joy Lab podcast, where we help you uncover and foster your most joyful self. Your hosts, Dr. Henry Emmons and Dr. Aimee Prasek, bring you the ideal mix of soulful and scientifically sound tools to spark your joy, even when it feels dark. When you're ready to experiment with more joy, combine this podcast with the full Joy Lab program over at JoyLab.coach
Henry: Hello, I'm Henry Emmons and welcome to Joy Lab.
Aimee: And I'm Aimee Prasek. Here at Joy Lab, we infuse science with soul to help you build your resilience and uncover your joy. And today we're opening up virtual letters from our community mailbox. And the one struck our attention, had to do with judging. Judging everything, especially ourselves, but also others.
And we hear you. We want to talk about this. I [00:01:00] guess the first thing to talk about here is why does this matter? Why is judgment a problem? I'll just note very quickly, specifically as it relates to our mental health. I want to cite a study here that I like. And I like it because of the title. Here it is. "The more you judge, the worse you feel. A judgmental attitude towards one's inner experience predicts depression and anxiety." Mic drop. Very clear.
So this is a
Henry: pretty straightforward.
Aimee: It's like, am I reading a normal magazine? It's very clear. And because the findings are so clear,not just in this study, but breadth of the literature here in judgment and mental health. In this one specifically, there were 274 adult participants, and they found that a judgmental attitude toward oneself was the largest predictor of the factors they tested when it [00:02:00] came to depression and anxiety.
So it matters.do you want to add anything more here, Henry? how can judgment get us into some snags with our mental health?
Henry: Sure. I'm sure people have, many people listening have heard this notion that depression is anger turned inward.
Used to be a really kind of popular theory about depression. I don't think that theory holds true really in all cases. I don't totally buy it, but I do think that there are some forms of depression that actually might fit that or where it's very clearly a factor.
I think what your study said is just so clear and so true that if you're filled with judgment, you're just going to feel worse. It's a very simple and straightforward connection. But there are forms of depression that I think do [00:03:00] fall into this category. So I just want to give a real quick background now about how I have come to think of this. There are three distinct sources of unhappiness according to the psychology of mindfulness or Buddhist psychology, which I think fits with these different forms of depression. One of them is grasping, the other is aversion, and the third is delusion. So the middle one, aversion, is really referring to judging.
It means that what we see we don't like, we don't want it, we don't want it in our lives, and so we seek to push it away. So it is an energy of pushing things away. And this can show up in different ways in one's life. One is that you might see this in yourself. You might look at yourself and see yourself as flawed, as fundamentally wrong, so the judging [00:04:00] is directed toward you.
Other people the judgment is directed towards, not themselves, but virtually everybody else in their lives, you know, that other people are wrong, or they're flawed, or they're simply annoying to be around, what have you. And then they're kind of pushing others away. And then there are some who it just seems that it's the world at large, we're living in terrible times, and, just everything they see seems to be tinted, maybe tainted with a sense of judgment.
So the emotions that this brings out in us are things like anger, irritability, being moody or agitated. It's what I think of as an agitated depression. And the point here is kind of what you said earlier, Aimee, that it simply doesn't feel good to be in this state. It [00:05:00] feels so much better if we're able to, instead create a state of acceptance or maybe equanimity or just non judging.
You know, if we can hold things in a gentler, more open way, we simply don't feel as bad. There also are some really significant and well known physical consequences of this. This hurts the body. our bodies to go through life this way. High blood pressure can be associated with this. Some people will develop more problems with their gastrointestinal tract, their bowels, physical restlessness, muscle tension.
There's sort of a general sense of clenching, of holding things tight and clenching. And heart disease can be associated with this, autoimmune problems. And I am not saying that any way that [00:06:00] everybody who has a health problem like this is because they're angry, and that's not what I'm saying at all, and I don't think that's true.
But if we do go around carrying this sense of anger or tension, and we have the genetic susceptibility to these things, I think they're more apt to come out. Obviously this isn't good for our minds either. It's no fun to be caught up in these loops of thinking and rumination and it's the kind of thing that often will wake us up in the middle of the night to ruminate about.
And it also, because it is this energy of pushing things away, it also disconnects us from others. We've talked a lot about connection and how super important and helpful that is. Well, the last thing we want to do is to carry ourselves in such a way that we're disconnecting from others more and more. It's just so lonely to go through life feeling angry and bitter and [00:07:00] pushing people away.
Aimee: It is so disconnecting. I think that's a really important thing to highlight. You don't realize it when you're in the soup of it all. The other thing I want to note, Henry, when you were talking about the objects of aversion or judgment, is that, grasping, aversion, delusion, and then those objects; yourself, others, and the world,they are not mutually exclusive. There's like a reciprocal causation there where the products and the causes are just feeding each other. And I think that's what the research is finding. you just can't be hyper judgmental on yourself without having that spill out into the world and the other way around.
There might be one that's more dominant, but it certainly impacts the others as well. I sincerely believe that. So there's this viral nature as well to these, to [00:08:00] judgment that it feeds so much more than just cutting people down. It feeds so much of our inner experience, landscape, our connection, as you said. to maybe to explain this better, there's a study we referenced in an earlier podcast. I'll put it in the show notes because I'll find it. I'm not sure which one it is, but we talked about this study and it's a great title, again, here it is, "From Me to You, Self Compassion Predicts Acceptance of Own and Others Imperfections."
It's not a new finding, As I said, we judge ourselves more, we judge others more. And it goes all the other ways around. So the skill of self compassion. Let's talk about this practice of self compassion. It can help us to accept our own perceived imperfections and then others. When we get nicer to ourselves, we get nicer [00:09:00] to the world. And thinking about this study, I noted at the beginning, actually, we will then judge ourselves less, which then means that we are less likely to experience depression and anxiety. So self compassion is a really powerful antidote here when we're talking about judgment, I think. And I would, I want to also add that I would say the best way to quote, "stop judging ourselves and others," then is to practice self compassion and to also stop trying to stop ourselves from judging. Trying to stop ourselves from judging can be like trying to stop a freight train with your pinky finger. It's not going to happen. You are going to get hit by that train. And so instead of putting so much energy into trying to stop those freight trains of judgments and thoughts, we can then put our energy into self compassion, which we know is an effective antidote.
And in effect, what then happens is we don't believe as many of those [00:10:00] judgments, those false judgments, oftentimes. When we stop fighting them, we stop feeding them, and those thoughts can start to show up less as well. That's one key.
Henry: I think that this is one instance where finding your way out of this is probably easier for people who tend to judge themselves rather than people who are judging others because, I think those who are doing the self judgment are more open, better able to see it. They can see it happening.
It's easier to kind of accept my part in this. Whereas those who are caught up in judging others or things around them are often kind of blind to it for a while. They really have to work at being able to see what's happening. And then be willing to change it. So the first step in non [00:11:00] judging from a mindfulness perspective is to be able to see it, to see that you're doing it, to own your part in it.
That's the first step, but that is not enough. We can't stop there, because seeing what is always has to be followed by accepting or embracing whatever is happening. Now, this is a little bit subtle, but I think it's worth talking through, and that is that what you can do, this practice that I'm referring to, is that you can learn to accept yourself as you're doing it in real time.
You can see that you are judging. Let's say I'm kind of being hard on myself. I can see that and then I can know that it is only my thought about myself. This [00:12:00] is something that I am doing without meaning to, but I'm being kind of harmful to myself. That is real time seeing and accepting yourself as you are.
You're accepting that in this moment, I'm being judgmental and then letting that go again in real time. And it'll keep happening. It keeps coming up. we don't stop this one time and then we're done. It's, it just keeps happening. But that is also in a real sense, that is the practice, is that you recognize that this keeps happening and you keep working at it, and every time that these thoughts come up is another chance for me to become a little better, a little more adept at seeing it, accepting it, and letting it go.
And maybe replacing it with something that's just a little more loving and accepting toward [00:13:00] myself. Like, I can say it once I see it. Yeah, I can be hard on myself. I am also a gentle person with others and generous with others and I can be that with myself or something that really feels true.
We don't have to make stuff up. But saying something that you recognize that's a deeper truth about who I am that can replace this momentary thought that I am flawed in this or that way.
Aimee: Momentary thought. That's all it is, right? Yeah, we can exchange it. I love that. We have some great self compassion episodes that I want to link in the show notes. like Henry, that wonderful little practice of,true for you, meaningful affirmation. We talked a little bit about that in a previous episode.
I'll link to that. And then also I'm thinking about an episode that we did [00:14:00] on hope from the outside in, thinking about judging the world around us. That can be a hard nut to crack, to shake away. But there are some really great, I think, strategies in there. So I'm going to link that as well.
So I hope this conversation was really helpful. Cause, this is universal. You are not alone in those momentary thoughts of self deprecation and thinking we're flawed. That's the thing. it's just, I don't know, the thoughts, they pop, but we can do something. And that's why we're here. We're gathering to build skills. So do check out the show notes for those resources and continue on. And to close our time today, I want to share some succinct wisdom from poet Rudy Francisco. This is perfect. Here's what he wrote. "Perhaps we should love ourselves so fiercely. That when others see us, they know exactly how it should be [00:15:00] done."
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