In this episode, Adam Mastroianni explains why you can’t think your way out of overthinking. He unpacks why the thoughts that feel the most important are often the ones that keep us stuck. We also explore what it means to have a “skull full of poison,” how anxiety disguises itself as insight, and why real change isn’t about breakthroughs—it’s about repetition, action, and feeding the right wolf.
Key Takeaways:
- [00:06:07] Anxiety and its misconceptions
- [00:08:21] Overcoming obsessive thinking patterns
- [00:16:25] State of psychology as science
- [00:25:04] Building blocks of psychology
- [00:27:06] Emotions as control system signals
- [00:30:43] Basic vs. constructed emotions
- [00:40:44] Context matters in psychology
- [00:44:31] Mental heater and air conditioner.
- [00:47:01] Happiness set points and variance
- [00:50:42] Control systems and mental states
- [00:54:11] Changing set points in life
Adam Mastroianni is an experimental psychologist and the author of the popular science blog Experimental History. He studies how people perceive and misperceive change over time, both in themselves and in the world around them, and his research has been featured everywhere from Nature to The New York Times to The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon. He’s also the director of Science House, the world’s tiniest alternative research institution. He holds a PhD from Harvard, an MPhil from Oxford, a BA from Princeton, and a certificate of completion from over 160 escape rooms. He’s originally from Monroeville, Ohio (pop. 1,400).
Connect with Adam Mastroianni: Website | X | Substack
If you enjoyed this conversation with Adam Mastroianni, check out these other episodes:
The Purpose of Emotions and Why We’re Not Wired for Happiness with Anders Hansen
How to Find Peace and Balance in Managing Anxiety with Sarah Wilson
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Episode Transcript:
# Swell AI Transcript: 2025-04-01 (T) Adam Mastriani FINAL.mp3
Adam Mastroianni:
I wasn’t worried about things I shouldn’t be worried about. I was thinking very hard about important things. And then I realized like, oh, maybe that’s why anxiety is anxiety. Like if you felt like you were worrying about something that you shouldn’t worry about, it would be much easier to stop doing it when instead it feels like you are spending your time wisely considering all the things that might be wrong or go wrong. That’s why it’s difficult to escape.
Chris Forbes:
Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.
Eric Zimmer:
Do you ever feel like your brain is running some kind of cruel experiment on you? Today’s guest, psychologist Adam Mastriani, calls it having a skull full of poison. And let’s be honest, we’ve all been there. The thoughts that won’t quit, the anxiety that doesn’t seem like anxiety because this time it’s really important. The endless loop of trying to think your way out of a problem caused by thinking too much in the first place? In this episode, we talk about why our minds trick us, how mental health is like a broken control system, and why real change isn’t about epiphanies, it’s about action. I’m Eric Zimmer, and this is The One You Feed. Hi, Adam, welcome to the show. Hey, thanks for having me. I’m really excited to have you on. Your newsletter or your sub stack is called Experimental History. And it’s one of my favorite ones out there. And it’s really a lot about science and psychology. And we’re going to dive into a lot of those things here in a minute. But let’s start like we always do with the parable. In the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild. And they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops, thinking about it for a second, they look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.
Adam Mastroianni:
Yeah, it’s meant a lot of different things at different points. And I think what it has meant most recently is, how do you tell the wolves apart? It seems like it should be easy, right? One’s the good one, one’s the bad one. But it is easy to find yourself inside value systems and to create one for yourself where you get rewarded for doing things that aren’t good. And I feel like this has been the story of the past few years of my life of realizing that like, for me, academia was one of those value systems that I was getting rewarded for doing things that I didn’t actually think were good. And I could see that like, oh, everyone was cheering when I feed the bad wolf. And so maybe the bad wolf is actually the good wolf. And it took a long time to be like, no, the bad one’s actually the bad one. And I need to go somewhere where I get rewarded for feeding the good one.
Eric Zimmer:
Yeah, I think the other thing to continue your point about knowing which one is, you know, a lot of listeners are hearing this and they’re thinking about their internal world. And as your work points out, it’s really confusing in there. And the so-called experts sort of maybe know what they’re talking about some of the time. And our own intuitions sort of maybe sometimes know. It’s just very tricky to know how to respond, I think, to difficult internal circumstances. And I want to start by going to a post that you talked about where you talked about having a skull full of poison. So set up for us kind of what got you there and maybe also set up just very briefly an intro the type of psychologist that you are.
Adam Mastroianni:
Yeah, so I’m trained as an experimental social psychologist, which means I’m not the kind that you go to for therapy. If I help people, it’s only through a few steps and I’m not licensed to talk to someone one on one unless it’s on a podcast. So the skull full of poison story is that in the high point of the pandemic, I just started to feel really bad. And at the time I was a resident advisor, a graduate student living in a dorm, and I had been in the discourse about mental health for a long time. And it didn’t feel like that to me. Like that felt like a very euphemistic way of talking about the way I felt, which is just like undifferentiated bad for no reason all the time. The whole post is about like all the things that are really weird about feeling bad, like things will seem extremely important that aren’t important. things will happen for no reason. It was about like navigating that, which I’m happy to report that I feel like I’m out of now. But I feel like it was this whole story that it’s not the way I thought it would have unfolded.
Eric Zimmer:
Right. So to sort of say that differently, you had some degree of professional training as well as, you know, talking to a lot of people about mental health and you were a little bit shocked by how this thing happened and how its experience was different than what you thought it might be like when you observed it from the outside.
Adam Mastroianni:
Yeah, yeah, totally.
Eric Zimmer:
And so looking back, I want to get more into some of the weird things, but looking back, do you have any sense, would you be able to, and I know you’re not a clinical psychologist, but would you be able to give it a diagnosis at this point with the hindsight of time and knowing what you know?
Adam Mastroianni:
Yeah, one of the more surprising and weird things that happened was when I ended up working with a psychotherapist, which is sort of its own story. At one point, she was like, oh, this sounds like anxiety. And it had never felt to me like anxiety, that I always thought anxiety was people being like, worried about things that they shouldn’t be worried about. But I wasn’t worried about things I shouldn’t be worried about. I was thinking very hard about important things. And then I realized, like, oh, maybe that’s why anxiety is anxiety. Like, if you felt like you were worrying about something that you shouldn’t worry about, it would be much easier to stop doing it when instead it feels like you are spending your time wisely considering all the things that might be wrong or go wrong. That’s why it’s difficult to escape.
Eric Zimmer:
Yeah, you say something that I think is really profound. You say, I wonder if this is the secret behind a lot of skull poisons. You secretly think you’re not sick at all and you believe that what you’re thinking about is actually extremely important. And I think that’s really very insightful to what happens to a lot of us because I’ve always said that one of the biggest problems with mental illness or skulls full of poison or addiction like my background or depression or whatever it is, is the thing that is trying to figure it out is the thing that’s, I’ll just use the word broken for now. I don’t like that word in general, but it’s easy to use. The thing that’s trying to solve the problem is the very thing that is malfunctioning. It makes it extremely difficult from your own side of things to sort it out. because the thoughts seem really, really true and real.
Adam Mastroianni:
Yeah. And so to overcome them, to deal with them, you’re going to eventually have to do something that feels crazy. The idea of, I don’t need to think about this, it feels stupid. It feels like, no, this is the most important thing to think about in the world. And even if part of you knows that like, no, it’s actually, it’s the thinking about it over and over again, that’s making me feel really bad. Those thoughts go like, no, no, we really need to get to the bottom of, well, why are we thinking about it over and over again? Let’s think about that.
Eric Zimmer:
Right, right. And so what did you find that helped you? Because I think a lot of people do get to the point where they recognize that this rumination, we’ll call it that, is problematic, right? They now suddenly are like, okay, these thoughts are intrusive. I don’t like them. They’re probably, they’re not good for me. I want them to go away. And it’s not that simple. So what worked for you?
Adam Mastroianni:
Yeah, a few things. One was accepting a longer timeline. So at the beginning, I always felt like something’s broken, but it could be fixed immediately. And so all solutions are going to be solutions that work right away. Obviously, none of those end up working. And even when people would tell me this, I’d be like, no, you think that because you haven’t found yours. I’m just looking for mine. And instead when I was like, you know, what if the way that I deal with obsessive thinking is like each time it happens, I go like, oh, there it is again. I’m going to stop and do something else. And even if like half a second later, I start doing it again, then I have to respond the same way again. And what if I have to do that a thousand times in 10 minutes? And what if I have to do that over and over again for three months before I start to feel even a little bit better? But that was the only way ultimately that it felt like I ratcheted toward feeling like it wasn’t important to think about that over and over again.
Eric Zimmer:
Yeah, I’m writing a book that right now is loosely titled, How a Little Becomes a Lot. And it’s based on that very idea, particularly with thought patterns, that the good news is I do believe you can change them. The bad news is it often takes a long time. And the longer you’ve had them, the longer that time period might be. And so it’s just that repetition. And I think you’re right. This desire that we are going to have an insight or epiphany of some sort that is going to suddenly fix it keeps a lot of us really stuck and not buying into what you’re saying, which is, okay, I kind of know the issue. There’s no blinding insight to come. There’s just a really hard work.
Adam Mastroianni:
The insights and epiphanies I think can help, but they’re not the final moment. So there was a moment where I had a really long drive back from my campus to home, like Boston to Ohio. And as I was like an hour into it, I had sort of this moment where it kind of the clouds opened up and I was like, wow, my thinking has been really obsessive and repetitive recently. And even in that moment, I felt like, wow, it’s so helpful to have this moment of realization and it’s going to come back again. Like my head’s above the water for a second. This is what it’s like up here. I got to get back here again.
Eric Zimmer:
Totally. I think the insights or the realizations are critical to know what direction to go. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Like until you have that, you don’t even know what direction to go. But once you have it, there’s still a ways to go. But again, I love that that’s what worked for you was just a little bit by a little bit changing those things.
Adam Mastroianni:
Yeah. Yeah. And I worked with a psychotherapist too that it was also helpful for pointing these things out and was helpful too for like giving me a kick in the pants a couple of times where I had sort of thought because of the discourse that we have around mental illness that like, now the way you need to treat it is with, you know, sensitivity and that’s true. But also sometimes I needed to be told like, no, stop, like stop doing this. But like, you know, I care about you, but like this thing that you’re doing, you do need to stop doing it. It is unacceptable.
Eric Zimmer:
Yeah, I think about this a lot because on one hand I think we have become a lot more sensitive and we’re a lot more understanding and we recognize that people need to feel seen and heard and understood. But I sometimes wonder if we’ve gone too far in that direction. or we just stop there. And my experience, and I got sober 25 years ago in a pretty hardcore 12 step area program. And there wasn’t a lot of, I mean, the sensitivity could have been dialed up and it certainly is part of what eventually made me not want to go. But also just being told very directly, like, here, do this, do that, turned out to be really, really helpful. And I think sometimes somebody just needs to be heard culture. I think sometimes we also need the next step, which is yes, no one until they feel heard will listen to anything you say. So don’t bother to try and shortcut that step. But there are other destinations beyond that where we do need people who are on the outside to say, well, here’s something I see, or why don’t you try this?
Adam Mastroianni:
Yeah, a big one for me was thinking less about myself and more about other people. The thing about obsessive thinking of any kind is it’s usually about you. And when I could realize that, like, wow, I feel better when I think about other people a little bit more and think about myself less. Or when someone could point that out to me, it was really helpful because I’m like, I don’t want to be the kind of person who is only thinking about how bad I feel all the time. I feel a lot better when I can when I help lift other people up.
Eric Zimmer:
Totally. I think this can sometimes take a interesting deviation, which is that the worry begins to be about people that are around you. And so it seems like it’s not self-referential, but it is in a way ultimately, right? Because whatever that person is happening or whatever they’re doing is causing an emotion in you that you don’t like. Yeah. And so it can be tricky.
Adam Mastroianni:
You think you’re thinking about other people, but really you’re thinking, do they like me? Did I hurt them? Rather than like, are they achieving their goals? Like, what do they need from me? And like, how can I help them do the things that they’re trying to do?
Eric Zimmer:
Yeah. Yeah. This is funny. This is just coming to mind because a friend of mine, he’s much younger than me, told me recently he’s, they’re starting to try and have a kid. And it’s like, I think parenting just adds a whole new dimension of weirdness to dealing with your own mental stuff. Because on one hand, you are ostensibly thinking about someone else a lot, and yet it’s a weird space. One of the other things that I read, and it’s not exactly a secret, But as you have a tendency to do, you wrote about it in a way that makes it so obvious, is that you say, if you want to get a taco, the world comes rushing to your aid. Everybody’s got a taco. Everybody wants to talk about their taco. People will vehemently defend their taco stand versus that taco stand or whether al pastor is better than carne asada. But you need a therapist. You’re on your own.
Adam Mastroianni:
Yeah, it’s wild, but like, there’s no Yelp for therapists, at least not one that I found or that worked. Which ones take my insurance? Which ones will take me? When I was the person who was telling someone like, hey, have you ever thought of talking to someone? I had no idea that that’s the gauntlet that they had to face if they decided to do it. At the point where they are least equipped to do it, to deal with a system that makes no sense, is super annoying, doesn’t give you feedback, And then even when you start talking to somebody, they don’t tell you. I mean, a good one might that, like, we’re going to take a while to make any progress here. The first time we talk is maybe even just to see if I think I can help you. I’m not going to be able to do much for you the first time around. It might take a couple of months before we start working in a new direction,
Eric Zimmer:
Which is really difficult when you have a skull full of poison. Yeah. Right. I mean, it’s the same thing I’ve dealt with my mother and chronic pain for years and years. And you, you finally find a new doctor who’s like, okay, we’re great at what we do. And you go and they’re like, well, now we’re good. I mean, and you’re just like, I could be months from any relief. It’s just really, it’s really challenging.
Adam Mastroianni:
Yeah, especially when our level of understanding is so early and so rudimentary for anything psychological. We just haven’t been at this very long. And even though, you know, we produce these big book of diagnoses, like that book is going to be different or entirely gone, hopefully, you know, 50 or 100 years from now. And so the limit on what we can do for people is also often like not that high. And it really varies by what you present with. And a lot of things we can help a little bit, but few things do we know exactly what they are or what to do about them. And this is like a limit that you have to accept if you’re ever going to get better.
Eric Zimmer:
Right, right. I think that is a good segue here for us to sort of talk about the state of psychology as a science. And what we think about the state of psychology and what we know is very helpful in how we navigate the journey, right? And one thing that studies that seem to keep showing is sort of, I guess for lack of a better word, disconcerting. is that we don’t really know what makes a good therapist, or one type of therapy doesn’t seem to be better than another type of therapy. Sometimes it doesn’t even appear to be better than talking to a friend, and yet we know it can be. Talk to me about what we know about the role of therapy. I think you would say you were glad you did it,
Adam Mastroianni:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The way I think about it now, especially in retrospect, having had a good experience, was that, like, the part of it where I think of this person as a practitioner of science, like, didn’t actually add anything for me. I would rather think of them as someone whose job it is to help me navigate the issues in my life. And, like, they come from this tradition where they’re very interested in the inner workings of my mind rather than, say, theology or whatever else way that you could get there. But that doesn’t mean that we have all of these studies that are going to make it very clear what they should do with me and how I should accomplish my goals. We’re not there yet. But it did matter a lot to have someone whose job it was to pay attention and listen closely. But a lot of experience helping people navigate these kinds of situations was informed somewhat by some of the things that we know. But it isn’t like taking an antibiotic when you have an infection, like that’s just not the kind of result you’re going to get, because that’s not the level of understanding that we have. And so mentioned the study that I almost wish we could do again. Now the window is closed on doing this study. But in the 70s, there was this very small study where people got randomized either to go to a professional therapist or to a professor of history or engineering or whatever, who’d been selected for being empathetic. And this study is really small. It’s not very well conducted. But as far as they were able to tell, they couldn’t see any difference between the outcomes of the people who were assigned, you know, an older person who’s empathetic and understanding versus someone who is all those things, but also trained in the ways of psychology. And that was that was 50 years ago. But I think you’d get a pretty similar result today.
Eric Zimmer:
Yeah, and without going into the science to the degree that you do and are capable of, it seems to me that general thinking is that rapport is the name of the game, right? If you have a good rapport with your psychologist, that’s far and away the most important thing.
Adam Mastroianni:
Yeah, I think especially if you don’t have that somewhere else in your life, that if you’re at a point where your relationship’s afraid, or you don’t have many of them, or there’s no one that you feel like you can talk about this stuff to, it’s a no-brainer that you could go and work with someone whose job is to do that. And then I think there’s plenty of things probably above and beyond that they can do, like be an outside observer on your life, note things that you do over and over again, just ask you the question, what have you done to try to solve this? and has that worked for you? All these things that seem really obvious you could conceivably do with a friend or with the mirror, and yet we don’t because we don’t have the structure around it.
Eric Zimmer:
Right. Well, there’s this idea, I believe, that Dr. Ethan Kross at the University of Michigan was one of the coiners of this term, Solomon’s Paradox, which is an idea based on King Solomon that we can have a lot of wisdom towards someone else. But it’s really hard to have it towards ourselves. And I find this to just be amazingly true. And I also have found, I had to write a little reminder to myself at one point that even if I think I know what somebody is going to say to me when I bring them a problem, They’re going to just pare it back my own advice to me or whatever. It still helps to talk to them about it. It still helps somehow to get it out of the squeamishness of my own brain. That’s the wrong word for it. Not squeamishness, just amorphousness of my own brain. And talk about it with someone else.
Adam Mastroianni:
Yeah, yeah, that like your own thoughts are squishy. And when you have to express them to someone else, you suddenly realize like, oh, I really, I need to put this into words. I need to frame this in some way that makes it make sense. And when you do that, you can get it to a level of specificity that you couldn’t get to on your own. I mean, this is also what I find when I’m writing, that like, you can think the same thought over and over again. When you have to put it into a sentence, you suddenly realize like, oh, I didn’t get this, or I didn’t really know what I wanted to say. And I think these are all tools of nailing down the thoughts that you’re trying to have.
Eric Zimmer:
Yeah, it’s funny. The book I’m writing is based on a program that I’ve taught for a number of years called Wise Habits. But in writing it, you know, sitting down and trying to write the book, I’m like, huh, I didn’t think that all the way through. Or, well, I’m saying this here, but then I’m saying something very like almost the opposite that like just inconsistencies that were not immediately apparent to me in putting it into presentations and talking it out loud.
Adam Mastroianni:
Yeah, it’s a way of dispelling what we call the illusion of explanatory depth, of this feeling that you know something when you don’t actually know it. But like, you know it as well as you need to know it for the purpose that you’re doing. But like, you know it at this level until you bump into something. that requires you to understand it better. And so like writing is a way of doing that. Talking to people is a way of doing that. Teaching is a way of doing that. Breaking through that superficial level of understanding to the level below.
Eric Zimmer:
Right. There’s that idea that if you want to learn something, try and teach it to someone else for that reason. And the fact that we have that illusion is enormously helpful in most areas of our lives. Yeah. You and I are both talking into a microphone. I couldn’t do the most basic job of explaining to you what is happening there. Despite having been around microphones, not just as a podcaster, but a musician my whole life, I have no idea. Now, I have friends that could take this thing apart and explain every bit of it and fix it, but I don’t because I’ve never needed to.
Adam Mastroianni:
Yeah. If you didn’t have that illusion, if when you got to the studio, you were like, Whoa, what’s, what’s this? Like, how could I possibly use this thing if I don’t know everything about, or you’re constantly distracted by that? when you were in a world filled with things like that, like we could never survive or get anything done. If there was an alarm in your head that went off every time you didn’t understand something, because it would always be going off, like you’d never have any peace, right? And so it’s helpful to have this thin film of understanding. If what you want to do is get by if what you want to do is understand, then you have to puncture that envelope.
Eric Zimmer:
Yeah. So let’s use this idea of understanding to go back to psychology and the state of psychology because I, like you, believe we don’t fully know what is going on. in people’s brains. I mean, I’ve worked with enough people one-on-one into my programs to know that for some people, you say this, and for other people, they need the exact opposite thing. And these could be two people who demographically look the same, two 35-year-old men. But one of them has a problem speaking up. And so you’re like, hey, we need to work on that. And the other has a problem of just being aggressive in conversation. He needs something completely different, yet they look exactly the same. And so the number of variables that go into, even when we’re trying to blind control or control a study seems crazy to me. And it makes me doubt that we’ll ever get a lot further. And a lot of people share this view. The mind’s too complicated. We’re not going to get there, but you don’t share this view. You believe that, well, you say what you believe instead of me saying what you believe.
Adam Mastroianni:
Well, I certainly agree that it’s complicated and it will be difficult to get farther. And it’s also possible that we’ll never get farther. But the fact that it is difficult and is complicated is not, in fact, evidence that it is hopeless that we’ll get farther. And the examples that I take are from the rest of the history of every other science where there are plenty of periods where things seem like hopelessly complicated. How can we possibly make progress? And eventually we do because we discover the underlying structure of the system that we’re trying to work with. And so if you think about the alchemists who are trying to change elements into other elements, and they have no idea what an element is or what they’re made of, or that like the position of Venus does not affect the result of the reaction, but like some things that they consider one element are in fact a mixture of two things. If they don’t understand any of these things, there’s a real limit on how far they can get. But when you start getting those little building blocks of like, oh, there are things called elements that cannot be reduced further. Just from that, you start to be able to do a bunch of things. Now you can ask like, well, how many are there? How does each one react with the other ones? Are there ways that we can predict those reactions? What we don’t have for psychology yet is the equivalent of those elements. We don’t have a good idea of what are the units that make up the world we’re trying to study and what are the rules that govern the interactions of those units. I think we’re still in the prehistory of psychology.
Eric Zimmer:
That’s a really good point to think about the periodic table of elements as a reference because it’s not simple, right? We haven’t simplified it, right? There’s a lot of elements. And as you mentioned, how do they combine with each other? We begin to learn that. But by having a certain number of building blocks, we can begin to make progress. And it seems that perhaps with psychology, like you say, we don’t have even these basic building blocks. We have these diagnostic ideas that are, I use the word amorphous earlier, are very amorphous. Almost to the point of being useful to a point in some cases, I think is the best way I could say it for them. So where do you think if you were given the reins of psychological science, right? You talk a lot about how you think we should and shouldn’t do science. If you were just for some reason, I mean, our president’s doing all sorts of what seems to be kind of crazy things. So this would be no crazier. He comes to you and says, Adam, you are in charge of psychology for the next four years. You’ve got all the budget you want. What would you do? Two things.
Adam Mastroianni:
One would be diversify the budget, in that I have the things that I want to do, but I also want to hedge against it by trying to fund a bunch of other different crazy ideas. Because this is what I think we haven’t been doing, or what we’re really bad at doing in science, is diversifying the ideas that we’re working on. The one that I would want to work on, and I’ve been working with some friends on this, and they’re just starting to release the series now, is basically a cybernetic proposal for the way that psychology works. Cybernetics being the science of control systems, and control systems just being a few units that work together to try to maintain something at a certain level. So like a thermostat is a control system. It reads what the current temperature is, it has the desired temperature, and it tries to reduce the difference between them. And I have some friends working on a proposal for like a lot of psychology can be thought about in terms of control systems, that there are many things that humans have to keep at the right level or else they die. We need some salt, but not too much. We need some sugar, but not too much. We need to be at the right temperature. We need to interact with other people, but we can’t spend all of our time interacting with other people. And so when you start to think about that, You might think like, man, the error signal in each of these control systems, the thing that says when it’s out of whack, could be what we think of right now as an emotion. The feeling of hunger is an emotion, your nutrition intake control system saying it’s time to eat. The feeling of loneliness is a feeling from your sociality control system saying that I need to be around other people. And now we might start thinking, well, how many emotions are there? Which ones are stronger than other ones? Like which ones get to take precedence? You know, not all of these go from 0 to 100 quickly. Some go slowly. And now we can start to get something that looks a little bit more like a table of elements, because we start asking, how many? How do they interact? We can try to start filling in the ones that seem to be missing.
Eric Zimmer:
I love this idea of control systems because I’m a big believer in, I would just call it the middle way, meaning that, you know, you can look at most things in life and there is a too much and there’s definitely a too little, right? And when we’re at either of those, a really great solution is just, you don’t have to abandon whatever that thing is. You just have to turn it up or down a little bit. But even this idea of emotions, right? I mean, people have been arguing about what the core emotions are for a long time. How would we even get past that to a point that we could begin to say, here’s our periodic table? Because every book I read, there’s four, there’s 12, there’s 79 shades of blue.
Adam Mastroianni:
Yeah, it’s a great question. And I think the cybernetic approach finally has an answer to it, which is first a conceptualization of what an emotion is in terms of like the units and how they work together. So when we talk about emotions, we’re usually like, you know, that thing you feel. But in this paradigm, an emotion is something very specific. It’s the error signal of a control system. If we don’t have a control system for it, we can’t have an emotion about it. And thinking this way leads to like calling some weird things emotions. In this system, the need to pee is an emotion. we don’t think about it that way. But obviously, sometimes you need to urinate. And that feeling is an error from your control system. That too is an emotion. It would also lead us to think about like, you know, this thing that we call hunger, that’s an emotion too. But it’s probably a confederacy of many emotions, because there’s many different kinds of nutrients that we have to intake. And so there’s probably something called salt hunger, or sugar hunger, or protein hunger, And this is easier to do in animals than in humans by depriving people of one thing and see if they feel hunger and eat another thing. It’s just one way. It’s a very schematic way of investigating this. And so I think the way we make progress is by treating this like we’re trying to figure out the rules of a board game by reverse engineering it. We don’t know exactly what the little tokens mean or what they can do, but we do believe there are tokens that can only go to certain spaces. And now we’re trying to figure out what those are rather than the squishy idea of like, well, you feel a certain way. What are the tendencies that you have or are they constructed? That’s the difference.
Eric Zimmer:
Okay. Because one of the core emotional theory disputes, and again, I’m a lay person in all this, is that there are these core irreducible emotions. Every human has them. They’re the same group. And then there’s the, as you just said, the constructed theory emotion, which is that there’s basically just a stimulus of some sort. And then from there, we build everything that goes on top of that. Do you have a feeling there? How does thinking through that issue tie into, you know, control systems?
Adam Mastroianni:
So this view, I think would be much closer to the idea that there are basic ones and all the labels that we apply to them are sometimes pointing to emotions that really exist and sometimes calling things emotions that are not productively called emotion. So also in this paradigm, happiness isn’t an emotion. It’s a thing that we feel, but it’s not an error signal. which means that whether it’s constructed or not now becomes a nonsensical question. It’s not part of the list of elements. Original attempts at a table of elements included things like light and heat, which didn’t end up being elements. And a moment of progress was when we realized those things are different. And so it’s possible that happiness is actually a different thing. In this proposal for a paradigm, happiness is actually not a signal that something’s gone wrong. It is the feeling that you get for correcting an error. So you really have to pee, you find a bathroom, happiness is the feeling that you get from your need to pee error signal going to zero. But the same thing you get for, you know, I feel lonely, I talk to someone, the happiness is the thing that you get for reducing that error. So it is a different thing. We don’t have a word quite for it yet. But there’s a weird way of thinking about it, which is part of what makes me excited about it, that like, it uses words in ways that are really counterintuitive, because it has a strong idea of what are the components of the system and how might they work together.
Eric Zimmer:
Right. And I would love to actually spend about an hour and a half on this because I am fascinated. However, I don’t want to make the whole interview about this, but I’m going to use it as a pivot point because one of the things that you say about psychology as a field is that we keep producing paper after paper, after paper, after paper, and that by and large, none of it moves the needle much anywhere. Yeah. And that the way that we’re going to make more progress than we have in the time we have so far is to begin to think about what you call alien ideas. And so I have a question. This relates to something else that you talk about strong link and weak link problems. One of the things about alien ideas is I agree with you, we need them. And when we’re in the middle of say something like a pandemic, they seem dangerous. And alien psychological ideas seem like they could be dangerous. So how do we allow ourselves to take some of the shackles off psychology so maybe we can make progress in a different direction, but maybe not loose a bunch of craziness into the world? Yeah, we need to do it all in secret.
Adam Mastroianni:
No, I think really what you’re pointing to there is there are at least two separable problems that we’re trying to solve at the same time. And that’s why there’s a tension here. When I say science is a strong link problem, which is to say that we proceed at the rate that we do our best work, not at the rate that we prevent our worst work is to say, I’m talking about science is like the process of trying to understand the structure and function of the universe. which is separate from how do you make sure that people believe the right things, which is a totally different thing. Science communication or public health dissemination or something else, the way that you make sure that people don’t believe crazy ideas that are wrong is different from and sometimes contrary to the way that we would discover truths about the universe. So recently when I brought that post back up again and someone was like, you know, but look, there is this paper about vaccines causing autism that like caused all this trouble before it was retracted 12 years later. And I’m like, totally. That’s a big problem from the standpoint of how do we solve the problem of making sure that people don’t believe the wrong thing? It is actually unrelated or mainly unrelated to the idea of how do we understand autism? So it wasn’t the case that when that paper came out, all the scientists who study autism were like, wow, vaccines must cause autism. Many people were like, oh, I don’t believe this paper at all. And at the time, it might have actually been reasonable to think about like, oh, is this a possibility? Like, it’s better for there to be more information rather than less. That is different from the kind of person who’s going to look at that and go like, oh, this means I should change my vaccine behavior.
Eric Zimmer:
Right. And I think part of that comes from something that I don’t think the genie goes back in the bottle on, which is the popularization of and the bastardization of science into the public consciousness. I mean, you don’t have to look very hard to suddenly start seeing that there’s a study. There are people whose job is go find a study and then write an article or a news article about it. And Sometimes they’re reporting the study relatively accurately even though there’s still a lot of nuance getting lost and other times it’s just near nonsense. And so I understand what you’re saying on one hand that science itself, the process of science needs to be a problem where we don’t worry about the bad ideas because the scientific process will eventually weed them out. And what we need to be focused on are the really big, good ideas. And the only way sometimes to get those is to venture way off course from what everybody else is doing. And then you have what’s done with that science. Is this just a problem we have to live with?
Adam Mastroianni:
That’s a problem that we can get better at. And where it starts is in how we teach students about science, like, from elementary school onward. Right now, when you get your scientific education, it’s like, oh, you know, we thought atoms were plum pudding, and then we thought they were this other thing, and then finally we discovered the real thing. not understanding how that process unfolded. For a long time, we went off in this direction, and then we did this other direction, and it took a long time for us to figure out what was true. And so when you see a scientific claim, you should go like, yeah, maybe. Precisely, yeah.
Eric Zimmer:
We don’t follow that with the thought of, and by the way, this current understanding could go through the same revision, right? We just take it as now we know. And if you look back at scientific history, you realize it’s kind of a silly position to take.
Adam Mastroianni:
Yeah. Anybody should be able to trace this through like the evolution of nutrition recommendations over the course of their own lives, if you’re old enough, right? That like, I grew up when every cereal box had that pyramid on the back that was like, you should eat six to 11 slices of bread per day. And then like 10 years later, people were like, you should never eat a slice of bread. And like both of these extremes, and the next year, it’s going to be something else. And what this means is like, we’re still figuring out how nutrition works, like we’re very early on. And the only mistake that we’re making is being extremely certain at each stage that now we know for sure.
Eric Zimmer:
Yep. Before we dive back into the conversation, let me ask you something. What’s one thing that has been holding you back lately? You know that it’s there. You’ve tried to push past it, but somehow it keeps getting in the way. You’re not alone in this, and I’ve identified six major saboteurs of self-control. Things like autopilot behavior, self-doubt, emotional escapism. that quietly derail our best intentions. But here’s the good news. You can outsmart them. And I’ve put together a free guide to help you spot these hidden obstacles and give you simple, actionable strategies that you can use to regain control. Download the free guide now at oneufeed.net slash ebook and take the first step towards getting back on track. And part of the problem with nutrition is part of what we wrestle with in psychology is not everyone is the same. You know, my partner and I wore a continuous glucose monitor for a while. We just kind of wanted to see like what’s happening with blood sugar. Her mom had Alzheimer’s, my dad has Alzheimer’s. And one of the theories is that there’s a metabolic issue here. So, okay, we want to study our metabolism. And it was fascinating to see, like I can eat brown rice and it’s okay. She eats brown rice. She might as well have drank a Coca-Cola. It’s just insane. And so as people, you know, we keep saying like, you should eat this, but people are just very different. And we don’t know what constitutes the difference enough yet to be able to make any sort of like recommendation that I should eat the same thing as you. We just don’t know. But yet we think we do.
Adam Mastroianni:
Yeah, this is a problem that I really wish that it were so much more apparent to people that like, whenever you want to make a universal recommendation, you need extremely good evidence. But like, we’re really willing to just like make universal recommendations.
Eric Zimmer:
I think it’s partially that’s a human tendency. And I think that people want it. I mean, I think that it goes back to what you were talking about, you know, when you had a skull full of poison, what you wanted, the desire that emerged from that was not to listen to an hour long nuanced conversation about the science of psychology like we are doing right now. You wanted somebody to say, here’s the one quick trick to get rid of your skull full of poison. Right. And so we’re just in a world that nuance is not incented. I find it personally semi painful. as a person who my brand is nuance, I think.
Adam Mastroianni:
Yeah, and I also think it’s on the part of experts making the recommendations, there’s this fear that like, oh, people are too stupid to understand nuance. So we can’t give it to them, even though we know it might be there, we just need to tell everybody the same thing, or else they’ll get the wrong idea, or some of them will do the wrong thing. And so we just need to be really confident and conclusive about telling everybody what they should do, which ultimately just leads to the erosion of trust, because why would you trust someone? who’s going to knowingly tell you something other than the full truth of what they know.
Eric Zimmer:
Yeah. We sort of hit this and you may have already answered it, in which case you could say we’ve already covered that. What are some of the ideas in psychology that you find interesting, promising, new? So you’ve just mentioned one, which is this idea of control systems. Yeah. Are there any others out there that you currently are like, wow, that’s really interesting.
Adam Mastroianni:
That’s the one that I think is most promising. But I think it is worth looking back at the ideas that we have had that were productive and good. And now there’s a temptation to keep doing them forever, even though I think we’ve gotten out of them what they had to give us. So some of those dominant ideas in psychology were like, oh, people aren’t perfectly rational. They don’t obey the rules of optimal decision making. This is an idea that’s been so successful that it’s won the Nobel Prize twice. And I think it’s a great one, and it started all kinds of lines of research. I also think that now we’ve pretty much gotten everything out of it that we’re going to get out of it. Same thing with situations matter. So this is like a revolution in the 60s and 70s that at the time it was reasonable to think that like, you know, there’s just different kinds of people, and some people are good and some people are bad. And then people started creating these like little pantomimes and situations where you put someone in it, someone who seems normal, and like now they’re shocking someone to death in the other room, or at least they think they are. That was a really important point to make, but we can keep doing that forever. We can keep inventing new situations and showing like, wow, when you do this, like some people do that thing. And I think here too, we’ve gotten most out of it that we’re ever going to get out of it.
Eric Zimmer:
So these are both good. Let’s take that second one there, which is essentially is another way of saying context really matters. Yeah. I get on one hand how like we just said it, right? Context matters. Okay. Move on. Right. But are there useful ways of showing in what ways context informs or changes based on different things? Like, I still think like you and I know that. But a lot of people are going to take a personality test and they’re going to go off and believe that that personality test is telling them a lot about themselves. And I would argue the primary limitation to a lot of those is context matters. I hate these things. They drive me up the wall because it’s like, would you rather read a book or go to a party? And I’m like, well, I have nine questions I need to ask you before I make that decision. You know, what’s the party? Who’s going to be there? What book am I reading? Am I tired? Like, I mean, is it cold outside? And so it seems like on one hand, we know context matters and yet, broadly speaking, I’m not sure that most people do. But is that a communication versus a research issue again?
Adam Mastroianni:
Yeah, I think so. I don’t know how many more demonstrations we can do. I mean, the Milgram shock experiments from 1963, this is the famous experiment where probably a lot of people have heard of it, but in case they haven’t, you get brought into what looks like a lab and you think that you are doing a learning task with someone who’s in a different room and you’re supposed to give them a little shock when they get the question wrong. And they set it up that like, oh, the person gets so many questions wrong that eventually it seems like you’re shocking them to death Even when you’re and there’s this whole like recording here, you think it’s real, where it seems like they have a heart condition and they maybe pass out, whatever. And like in that situation, two thirds of people kept shocking someone until they ostensibly died because the person behind them was like, no, no, it’s very important. You can continue. Like, I don’t know what better demonstration you can do. And by the way, people have tried to debunk this a couple of times, and I think it has survived the debunkings. A lot of great research from that era hasn’t. Like, I don’t know what else you can do to show people that, like, no, that you, a very normal person, could be put in a situation where you could do something that you look back on it and think that it is horrifying. Like, I think the only way that you can drive that point home better is by bringing that person into the lab and doing it to them. Right. Otherwise, it’s not going to land.
Eric Zimmer:
Yeah. Okay. So let’s go back to, for some reason, I don’t like the word cybernetic because it makes me think about a cyborg or something, but I get it. We’re talking about systems. And I’d love to talk about one of your posts that’s all about systems. And it’s really about the idea of us having a mental heater and a mental air conditioner. Kind of walk me through this idea.
Adam Mastroianni:
Yeah. So this comes from my thinking about the control systems of the mind, that there’s this naive idea that we just want to be maximally happy. I mean, literally, psychologists will write this in their papers, like, well, obviously, people want to be happy and not unhappy. And they’ll give six citations for it. But I actually think that if you watch people, this doesn’t seem to be the case. People will do things all the time that do not seem to make them happy. Like, why do we go to haunted houses? Like, why do we watch movies about the Holocaust? If you ask people afterward, like, did that make you happier? People would be like, no. Okay, well, why did you do it? And I think part of the reason is we don’t actually desire maximum happiness. We desire the right level of happiness. It is dangerous and bad for us both to be too sad. It is also dangerous and bad to be too happy. Like we call that mania. And when people are stuck in that mode for too long, they end up doing things like thinking they’re the reincarnation of Jesus Christ, or they do a bunch of drugs, they spend all their money starting a stupid business, and they end up in the hospital. And so it is bad for us to max out this system. It is also bad for us for the system to be working at its minimum. This seems like a case in which we have a control system governing, trying to keep us at the right level. And so when we’re too high, it tries to bring us down. And when we’re too low, it tries to bring us up. And that’s the thermostat that runs with the furnace and the air conditioner.
Eric Zimmer:
So with mania, you know, my favorite example, what we’re not getting across well enough in this interview is how funny you are in your writing, right? Like, I mean, you’re genuinely hilarious. And one of the things you did when you’re writing about mania is go look at like Reddit forums for what people did when they were under mania. And my favorite was collected enough signatures to become mayor. And if you’ve seen it, and I’ve been close enough to people with addiction problems and severe psychological problems to have been on some psych wards visiting, and mania is terrifying. When you see somebody who’s in mania, it is genuinely frightening. So I get the idea that, okay, we don’t want to get too high. We don’t want to get too low, right? You get too low, you basically don’t move. And as humans, we need to move and do things. You also talk about how happiness doesn’t tend to change a lot over time. Do you then believe that we each have an individual happiness set point that we’re largely going to return to? And if so, why would mine be 40% and someone else’s would be 90%? And is the fact that I am reporting myself as unhappy simply my error system? To use your theory, my sense of unhappiness is simply my internal control system saying, you need to be up there. Because one of the things that I’ve found, I’ve said before about having depression, is one of the things I’ve done, I think, is get better at it. And what I mean by that is I often just don’t make a very big deal out of it. There are times where I’m like, it is what it is. No existential crisis needed.
Adam Mastroianni:
Yeah, I mean, to your first question of whether I think different people have different set points, that seems to be true empirically, that you track people over time, that some people are consistently at a 6 out of 10, and some people are consistently at an 8 out of 10. And even when disturbances happen in their lives, even when they get a new job that they love, lose a job that they love, find someone they love, lose someone they love, they obviously go up or down, but they come back to that point. And so that seems to be empirically true. Now, why would it be that some people are stuck at 6 when they’d rather be at 8, or why can’t we all be at 10? I think for the same reason that we differ in all other kinds of ways, like other control systems also have different set points. So we think that weight is probably also governed by some kind of control system. Some people weigh 150 pounds and some people weigh 200. Why is that? The ultimate answer is genetics and then what you get exposed to in the environment. But from a broader sense, why would there be variance across humans? Like, because it is actually useful for people to be different, I think is the ultimate answer. The way that humans have succeeded is by producing a diversity of humans who have different ideas and behave differently so that we can benefit from the different strengths that different people have. And so, like, there may be a reason why we don’t all have the same level of happiness. That would be my guess. We don’t really know, but that’s my guess.
Eric Zimmer:
Now do you think that then what we might think of as extreme levels of high, which would be mania, but the opposite seems to be far more common, which is being very low. is a control system failure? Because when you talk about weight, right, yes, we all have a natural weight. We also know people who weigh 75 pounds and people who are way on the opposite end of that, that are not in what we would probably consider the natural range because we’re exposed to all sorts of different things. So is that what mental illness is, is a control system failure?
Adam Mastroianni:
Yeah, there are lots of ways that the systems can break that end up looking like different kinds of mental illnesses. So my friends who write under the name Slime Mold Time Mold are releasing a whole series about this. So hopefully by the time it comes out, it’ll be out there for people to read. They have a whole series of papers about how different ways that you break the system produce different things that look like depression or anxiety. So for instance, If you turn down the errors on all of your control systems so you get no error signal, you will look like someone who is extremely depressed. You won’t do anything because you have no errors to correct. This looks ultimately like that kind of bedrock depression where that person doesn’t move. Yeah. If you increase the sensitivity on all of your control systems, so you’re getting super high errors all the time. Now you start to look like someone who’s manic because you’re rushing around all the time trying to correct your errors and you’re feeling great about it because you’re always corrected and then they pop up again and correct them again. You’re playing whack-a-mole and it feels wonderful. There’s like 10 other ways that you can, you can break this system, but it starts to lead you to think about like, okay, when people feel bad or feel really good, like what is going on underneath? Like not necessarily the level of like chemicals, which is, I think has been a real dead end for us. Like what’s the software that’s running on the mind that could possibly produce this pattern of results.
Eric Zimmer:
obviously at the end of the day, the brain is firing off electrical signals and chemicals. Is your belief that that software is ultimately, that’s how it does what it does, right? Is through those things.
Adam Mastroianni:
Yes. So like often when I tell people about this, they’re like, Oh, okay. So you think all psychology is just neuroscience. And I’m like, no, ultimately it does have to work on the machinery of neuroscience. But this is just like saying, if you want to understand how a subway system works, You’re not going to talk in terms of atoms of carbon and oxygen moving around. You’re going to talk in terms of there’s trains and stations and passengers. And all those things are made up of smaller things. And whatever I say about a train has to be possible at the level of the elementary particles. But that it makes no sense to explain it in terms of like, oh, a massive carbon is moving. What you want to say is the train is arriving in the station. So there’s different levels of analysis that are useful for describing things that are happening in that system. The train and station and passenger level is the one that we’re trying to get to in psychology.
Eric Zimmer:
Got it. When we talk about happiness set points, sometimes people just take that as like, well, this is just where I am. I’m fixed. Right? We do know that if we follow your theory, it’s possible that you’re not at your actual set point of happiness. You’re at the point that you’re at because of these errors in the control system and we can do things to fix that. And so I can look at myself and be like, okay, 24, I was a homeless heroin addict, which I’m going to just make a grand interpretation here and say, I wasn’t doing so well heading into all that, right? Yeah. And I think I can look back and go, okay, there was depression happening and all of that. And so I think that I’ve changed obviously from there to here. And then within that, I think there’s this point where things get tricky and this gets back to kind of some of what we talked about with your skull full of poison. Let’s just say that I’ve got my control systems kind of working fairly well. and I’m a 6. If I keep thinking I have to be an 8, I might be then turning myself into a 4. From everything that we’ve talked about and from your own experience with this, how do you think about this in navigating your own internal world?
Adam Mastroianni:
Yeah. So I guess one thing to say is that like consistency over time is in itself like not necessarily evidence of a control system. It’s consistency against disruption. So if you put me in a cell for the rest of my life, I’d be pretty unhappy. And you could say like, well, you know, I came back and checked you 20 years later and you were a four. Four must be your set point. But actually to know that four is my set point, you have to put me in a cell versus like, you know, I have to dive into a swimming pool full of gold coins. Like if I’m a four across every situation, it’s just something that’s trying to keep me at a four.
SPEAKER_03:
Yeah.
Adam Mastroianni:
So when you’re in a situation like situations can keep you at a four for a long time if they’re really strong. These things can change over time, and we can see this in some of the systems that we understand a little bit better. For instance, if you take lithium as a psychoactive medication, which usually they do for bipolar, for a lot of people that causes them to gain weight. For some percentage, they lose a lot of weight. On average, they gain weight, which is also interesting that there’s these paradoxical reactions. We know that it is possible to change the set point of people’s weight by introducing foreign substances. The fact that that works for one control system suggests it’s possible for other ones that you can change these set points either by like introducing chemicals that at the chemical level make things different, but you could probably also do it at the trains and stations and passengers level to make things different. So I think this is what a lot of us are trying to do when we’re trying to live a more balanced life is like, okay, this isn’t going to be a matter of what substances, I mean, some of it might be a matter of what substances I put on my body that change my set point, But what are the things that I might consistently do that could keep me artificially lower than I might otherwise be? For me, some of these things are obvious. Like, well, if I don’t sleep enough, if I eat poorly, I’m gonna be consistently at a low level.
Eric Zimmer:
Before we wrap up, I want you to think about this. Have you ever ended the day feeling like your choices didn’t quite match the person you wanted to be? Maybe it was autopilot mode or self-doubt that made it harder to stick to your goals. And that’s exactly why I created the 6 Saboteurs of Self-Control. It’s a free guide to help you recognize the hidden patterns that hold you back and give you simple, effective strategies to break through them. If you’re ready to take back control and start making lasting changes, download your copy now at oneufeed.net slash ebook. Let’s make those shifts happen starting today. Oneufeed.net slash ebook. Wonderful. Well, I think this is a good place for us to wrap up. You and I are going to continue in the post-show conversation because we need to talk about eating frogs and the statement that demons are real, which seems like an odd statement from a – I guess you wouldn’t call yourself a rationalist, but a guy who’s on that side of the spectrum. Listeners, if you’d like access to this post-show conversation with Adam, as well as ad-free episodes, and to support this show, then go to oneufeed.net slash join and become part of our community. We’d love to have you there. Adam, thank you so much. I’ve gotten so much pleasure out of reading your sub-stack. We’ll have links in the show notes to where people can get to it, and I highly recommend it.
Adam Mastroianni:
Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.
Eric Zimmer:
Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought-provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend. Sharing from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don’t have a big budget, and I’m certainly not a celebrity, but we have something even better, and that’s you. Just hit the share button on your podcast app or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom one episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the One You Feed community.
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