The Secret of Charisma

0:00This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. In the 1930s, an unlikely man from rural Louisiana rose to political stardom. Huey Long appealed to working-class Americans with fiery speeches and a populist agenda. He promised free textbooks, better infrastructure, and redistribution of wealth. That while we might have millionaires, and men worth two million, and men worth three million maybe, and men worth maybe five or six million, but nonetheless I must see a limit on how big any one man could get. Thousands gathered to hear him speak. His promise to make every man a king soon on him and nickname, the Kingfish. But Huey Long also made powerful enemies along the way. Critics saw him as a dangerous demagogue. They warned that he was crooked, cunning, and completely unconcerned with checks and

1:02balances. He fired those who opposed him, took over state agencies, and appointed loyalists. When Louisiana State University published a newspaper article criticizing him, Huey Long sought to it that the seven students who wrote the piece were expelled. Huey Long wasn't just popular. He was magnetic, dangerous to some, divine to others. He rewrote the rules, and dared the system to stop him. In 1929, after he became governor of Louisiana, Huey Long was impeached on charges of bribery, corruption, and abuse of power. Rather than prove his innocence, he orchestrated a political blockade in the state senate. He persuaded senators to sign a letter, vowing not to convict him, which made a trial pointless. He went on to become a U.S. Senator. His popularity didn't just survive. It's sword.

2:13Today on the show, we take a deep dive into the psychological forces that draw us to charismatic figures in the worlds of politics, sports, and religion. The science of loyalty and the building blocks of devotion, this week, on Hidden Brain. We often turn to history to understand how the world changes. We examine the lives of leaders who sparked revolutions and gathered thousands behind their cause. We ask, what made these leaders so powerful? What explained their influence? How did they manage to change the course of history? At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, historian Molly Wurden explores how individuals inspire change, create movements, and sometimes change the world. Molly Wurden, welcome to Hidden Brain. Thank you for having me. Molly, I want to talk about some unlikely leaders in American history.

3:18Let's start in the 18th century. Jemima Wilkinson was born in Rhode Island in 1752. When she was 23, she fell ill and was on the brink of death. When she recovered, she claimed to have undergone a profound spiritual transformation. What did she say happened to her? She reported that she had seen two angels, and they had delivered this amazing message to her. They told her that her body was a vessel for the Holy Spirit. That in fact, Jemima Wilkinson, the 23-year-old human female, had died, and now her body was a vessel for this androgenous, divine presence. She stopped dressing like a conventional woman of her time. She stopped using female pronouns whenever she could, wore her hair long and wore a large gray felt hat, began dressing in a smock that concealed her figure, looked a bit like a dressing gown,

4:24sometimes wore a purple cravat, and she launched a preaching campaign. Her message in the context of the revolution, right, this is 1776, that she has this attack and is reborn as the public universal friend, is a kind of vague one that is compatible with a lot of different theological questions and doubts about existing churches, questions about the end times, that a whole range of followers were having in this era. And she begins speaking to all kinds of crowds of people who are out of sync, I guess you could say, in some way or another with the prevailing rhythms of society. So she goes to funerals. She speaks to prisoners. She also addresses kind of open-air markets. If a sympathetic minister will give her his pulpit,

5:27she takes advantage of that. And some wander end to hear this unusual person who they can't quite place, maybe they can't quite figure out if this is a man or a woman, they can't quite make out the actual import of the kind of vague theological pronouncements. Some find it ridiculous. They see this as a young woman who's kind of put on a costume, but a surprising number, I mean eventually a few hundred people, are compelled by the public universal friend's invitation to step out of whatever role you've been handed by your place in revolutionary American society and find something new. And so we're talking about followers who range from young women who perhaps had not quite landed in a family arrangement that was acceptable in society to very established kind of senior

6:34men in the community. One of her most prominent followers is a Rhode Island colonial judge, named William Potter, who puts a lot of his personal fortune to the service of her growing ministry. By the 1790s, she is leading a crew of about 400 followers to found utopian community that she calls New Jerusalem in upstate New York to fully break from the rhythm of life in ordinary communities in revolutionary era America. I want to jump forward to the 19th century. Marcus Garvey was born in 1887 in Jamaica. He spent his teenage years working as a printer as apprentice and eventually joined a nationalist club that promoted Jamaican independence. He spent some time in Europe working as a journalist

7:38and then founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association and moved to New York. I understand that he was an unlikely leader, Molly, not a great speaker and with lots of critics. Absolutely. The type of African-American leader that the mainstream media, Black and White, paid attention to in the early 20th century, tended to be college educated, tall, lean, fair-skinned, handsome, eloquent by the standards of upper-middle-class, white-educated, English speech. Marcus Garvey was none of these things. He shows up in Harlem in 1916. He's fairly short, kind of built like a wrestler, very dark, complex, not a great public speaker. I mean, we know that he got heckled whenever he went to the street corner to try to practice. He was fearless, though. He just kept at it. He had no financial resources. I mean, he lived on

8:39cans of corn, beef hash, and beans in this tiny, squallet apartment. While he was beginning to try to interest African-Americans in Harlem at this time in his message of pan-African unity, which as it emerged through his speeches and his publication, The Negro World, was, I think, it's clear a really creative combination of previous iterations of this message, of the dignity of African people and the need to unite with other kind of spiritual and economic and political strains that proved to be this kind of amazing, combustible mix. Especially when enacted with Garvey's flair for ritual and uniform, he really,

9:41he himself loved to wear a plume helmet and purple gold and green sashes in a kind of military regalia. So this movement over just a few years developed significant momentum. So, he also had unconventional views about black liberation. I want to play you a clip from one of his speeches. We want to do like the decoration of this country. We want to work for what covered objects, that of building a nation of his own, of the great continent of Africa. So that recording is not great, Molly, but what he's saying is he wants African-Americans to leave America and build a homeland in Africa. Now, wasn't that also what white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan might have said? Marcus Garvey was, we would say, a separationist. He had meetings with segregationist politicians from the South, with Ku Klux Klan members, to discuss their

10:43mutual interest in keeping their races pure. He wanted, in the context of America, he wanted African-Americans to achieve economic autonomy. With an eye toward eventually returning to Africa and establishing political independence for people of African descent on the African continent. Often framing it in a way that was rather condescending to the African's already living there. But it was a message that had a great deal of appeal and it was a spiritual message as well. I mean, he was very interested in awakening in people of African descent a spiritual power that he said had been dormant. They had been in a state of amnesia, you could say. When I listen to him and read his speeches, I hear him as kind of a combination of Moses and

11:43Napoleon and Dale Carnegie, the kind of pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, you know, aspect of that message. So the effect that he had on his followers was magnified following a very dramatic incident in October 1919. He was in his office in New York when a man burst through the front doors. Tell me the story of what happened next, Molly. This man is clearly in a fury. He's searching for Garvey and is armed. He gets off a couple of rounds and fires at Garvey. Garvey falls to the ground. It appears to be mortally wounded. The man takes off and is later captured by police. And it is widely reported that Garvey is killed and his followers are grief stricken in mourning. And then a few days later, Garvey appears limping with a cane to greet his followers at a rally. And many of his followers, especially since they've read these newspaper reports,

12:49suggesting that their leader had died, view this as a miraculous, clearly a divinely ordained survival. And so that assassination attempt, if anything, it solidifies Garvey's power over his followers. Their faith that God has selected him for a specific mission and that he has a kind of invincibility that ordinary mortals do not have. So we've looked at a spiritual leader in the 18th century and a political leader who was born in the 19th century. Let's jump forward to a completely different world, the world of sports in the 20th century. In the 1960s, Tim Garvey was a nationally ranked tennis player. He was

13:53captain of the Harvard tennis team. After graduating, he began teaching tennis in California, but he became famous for his unusual coaching style. What was his approach, Molly? He really burst onto national consciousness in 1974 with a book he published called the Inner Game of Tennis. And his message was quite counterintuitive, I think. Essentially he said, you've got all these coaches advising you to pay close deliberate attention to every detail of your forehand and backhand and your serve and to drill down until you're absolutely mindful of every detail. I'm telling you that's the wrong approach and that successful tennis is an exercise in self forgetting, in silencing the ego mind. This is a phrase he used. He brought to bear on first tennis and then later sports and subsequent books, kind of vague mix of Buddhist and Hindu

14:57ideas, notions from mid 20th century pop psychology regarding self actualization. So Tim Garvey suggested that high performance comes from quieting the mind and trusting your natural intuitive self. I want to play you a clip that ABC News film featuring one middle-aged woman who said that she had not done anything athletic in 20 years when she took part in a group lesson with Tim Garvey. She surprised herself when she started to hit the ball beautifully. So there's something wonderfully seductive about that idea Molly. If we can only get out of our own way you know skills come to us effortlessly. That's right and this idea of your leader or your

16:02coach as someone who is helping you unlock your potential that there is inside you this authentic flame of who you really are and your true capabilities and it's already there and all you have to do is nurture it and release it. It's a very late 20th century way of thinking about personal identity and the relationship between leaders and followers. When we think about powerful figures in history it's easy to explain their influence by pointing to their unique personality traits. Barack Obama was confident and optimistic. Steve Jobs was intense and visionary. Martin Luther King Jr. was a brilliant speaker with strong convictions. But it's an important part of the story we don't explore. That is the story of how charismatic people awake something in us.

17:02You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. We often conflate charisma with likeability. When we think about charismatic people, we think of people with beautiful smiles, great social skills and relatable backgrounds. People like John F. Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, or Oprah. At the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, historian Molly Werden offers a different view. She says that charismatic people in history aren't always charming or beautiful or even inspirational. Rather she argues, we are drawn to them not because of their traits but because they reveal something to us about ourselves. Molly, I think it might help to first understand what you mean

18:09when you use the term charisma. What is the history of this word? If we go back to the way that ancient Greeks used the word and bequeathed it to the authors of the Bible, it's best to think of charisma or carus as a kind of grace, a gift from God or the gods that in the ancient Greek context brought with it power that could redound for good or for ill. It was power that the recipient could not completely control, a gift that the human recipient didn't necessarily ask for. And the word remained in that Christian theological context for really 1900 years. It was a fairly obscure term. You would only have occasion to use it or know it if you were very active in church or you were a professional church historian or theologian. How did the tongue come to be secularized, Molly?

19:10Around the turn of the 20th century, the German sociologist Max Weber was casting about looking for ways to describe all the complicated changes. He was seeing unfold in Western modernity. He was really interested in leadership and in the way particular individuals could turn into disruptive forces. So he borrowed the term charisma. He heard it in a lecture when he was a student, a lecture in church history. And he borrowed it to describe a particular kind of authority that he saw manifest in both religion but also importantly in politics. A type of authority that he said was different from authority based on institutions, the institutional role of a president or prime minister, different from authority, premised on a society's tradition, and separate two from authority that comes with military power. Charisma instead is the quality of an individual

20:16seen by his followers that this leader has superhuman qualities. And therefore can promise for them a new path forward that is totally impossible except for his leadership. By the late 1950s and the 1960s, American journalists start picking it up and kind of playing with the word charisma as a way to describe contemporary politics here. When I think of the word charisma, Molly, I often associated with people who are magnetic. Has that been a part of the meaning of the word for a long time? I think one reason the word charisma is so interesting is because it's a term we punt to when we are observing a dynamic between a leader and followers that we can't quite make

21:24sense of. We know something's going on but we can't account for it by pointing to a policy proposal that this person is making or some other kind of common sense quid pro quo arrangement. And I think as Americans have played with the word charisma, it's gotten a bit muddled together with the ideas of charm and celebrity. And it surprised me to observe how few of the figures I ended up studying across four centuries of American history were particularly charming. I found myself again and again writing about individuals who were not that good-looking, who were not reported to be amazing public speakers, whose presence was maybe better described as polarizing rather than kind of universally magnetic. If we think about people who are really good at working the room at a cocktail party, they have the ability to invite you into a conversation that quickly

22:30starts to feel like an exploration of your own best thoughts and experiences. I think that's really the secret of charm and it's important but it is not enough to launch a new religion or build a political movement. The leaders who do that I think have to have to offer something much more powerful and disorienting and compelling. Can you talk a moment about the very interesting idea that likeability can actually be an impediment if you're trying to break through social norms and customs? Humans are storytelling and story-making creatures. We're constantly looking for ways to organize our chaos and the most successful politicians and religious leaders are brilliant storytellers who not only offer a set of slogans,

23:35a critique of the other side, but a plot arc, a story of where we have come and where we're going who the villains are, who the heroes are, and they invite certain people in, but a narrative only has tension. It's only worth being a part of it. If there are also people who don't belong, who are or who are cast in rather undesirable roles. So I think if a leader is too preoccupied with being all things to all people, that can result in a message that is not activating, that doesn't grab and elevate a certain subset of the people hearing or reading him to the point of really building a movement, really breaking through and building a movement is going to involve eliciting quite a lot of disdain and anger from people who are not part of the story you're telling.

24:39You see that there is a paradox of charisma and it has to do with the dual urges we have to feel like we are in control of our lives but also to fear the responsibility that comes from having that control. Can you unpack that idea for me Molly? Most of us want some feeling of agency, some sense that we know what the point of all of this struggling and suffering is that it hasn't been for no reason at all, but we don't quite want the responsibility of being wholly in charge of it all ourselves. And those two impulses, wanting that sense of freedom and control but also wanting that security, they exist in tension, but I think that they're always there and the most successful, at least briefly, not always over the long term, but those religious and political movements that have really made a mark on American history have been led by individuals who master

25:44the art of that balance. You see that the religious leader Joseph Smith exemplifies this paradox. How so Molly? Joseph Smith was a child of kind of poor New England, homesteader, farmer, family members who couldn't really make a comfortable life in the context of the turn of the 19th century America, they were constantly scrapping and struggling to make a living materially, and also his parents were seekers who were frustrated with existing church options really interested in the supernatural side of life prone to having dreams and visions, but unable to really find an institutional home. And that's awfully confusing and disorienting. Joseph Smith had this genius. I mean, Mormons would say he received revelation that helped him to

26:51diagnose the gaps, the ways in which the existing religious story, the way of understanding the Bible and the relationship between humans and God, was just leaving, I guess, a critical mass of early Americans feeling frustrated and lost. And so he offers, as he's reporting his revelations and interpreting these golden plates that he says he's been led to find in a hill on upstate New York by the Angel Moroni, and then he spends the next two years kind of spinning out what this new religious community built around this new scripture will look like. In many ways, he offers a deeply American form of Christianity that is very much in line, I think, with the desires and anxieties of Americans at this time. They want, they want to have their free will

27:56celebrated and recognized, and the Mormon faith is kind of the ultimate free will faith. I mean, it's very clear in offering a roadmap for earning your exaltation and your access essentially to different stages of heaven. So it is this story of both tremendous empowerment but also an invitation to subsume your individual struggles and your efforts to scratch out an existence on your little homestead in upstate New York or Ohio into this broader story that God has ordained in some meaningful way. And so that, I think, is a great example of that paradox of offering both empowering agency and security. As you're talking, though, Molly, it feels so clear to me that when charismatic people have these followings, it's clear they have these followings because they're unlocking something in

28:58the people who they are leading. The people are hearing something about themselves in this message. So even if the charismatic leader is not charming and is not good looking and is not likeable, the point is the message makes me think differently about myself. That's right. And Joseph Smith is a great example of this. I mean, some people who met him in person found him really physically compelling. He was tall for the era. He had these electric blue eyes. One follower said just by shaking his hand, she felt the Holy Spirit electrify her whole body. But then you can also find skeptics who encounter him and say, this guy is a clown. He has this dishonest face, his hands are kind of fat. I wouldn't follow him to the grocery store, you know, let alone to found a new Zion on the banks of the Mississippi, as his followers did in Navu, Illinois. And Joseph Smith story also was an early case that helped me understand in my research that the power of charisma

30:05resides much more in the story and the message than in the individual. One of the elements of charisma that you explore is that charismatic people often promise to pull back the veil on a secret truth. I mean, that's that was true of Jemima Wilkinson, that was true of Marcus Garvey, even true of Tim Galway. Talk about this idea that in some ways charismatic people offer to show us a vision of reality that is in some ways behind the reality that we are seeing every day. I think charismatic leaders in many different contexts are positioning themselves alongside the message that people are getting from established sources. From tradition, from institutions, and the charismatic leader says, you think you've

31:06been told how the world works. You think you have a full picture of reality, but you don't. You've been denied some crucial facts about your existence and your relationship to the powers both material and supernatural. And that can take the form of a very legitimate revelation of true access to the full picture of what it is to be human. So I think this is one way we could understand Martin Luther King Jr.'s message that he is someone who destabilized complacency and a willingness to just suffer Jim Crow by reorienting the way that Americans, Black and White, saw what was possible, saw the reality of who each person is as an individual and the vast chasm between the lived experience of Black Americans in the mid-20th century and what

32:11justice really consists of. So there is a case of a pulling back the veil that was absolutely rooted in a true revelation, if you will. But I think this can take darker forms also, and this is where I think the word charisma can trigger perhaps in our mind a kind of negative connotation, because it can sometimes go along with a false story about reality. An effort to undermine the news people receive from the mainstream media or what they're told by experts, and sometimes that can cross over into the realm of kind of pseudo facts. So really crucial, I think, in how we use this information in our everyday lives, how we evaluate leaders is to be constantly holding up the story that leaders tell us against other sources of

33:16information, and doing our best, although it's never possible to be perfect at this, to discern, you know, is this leader really showing me something that is true and that changes everything, and that I have to take seriously, or perhaps do I have reason to be skeptical? Charisma is a powerful force. It has the ability to inspire, unite, and give people a profound sense of meaning and purpose. When a charismatic person speaks, their followers aren't just hearing a speech, they are seeing a new way to understand their own lives. When we come back, the different forms that charisma has taken over the years, and how and when we should question it. You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta.

34:16This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. Do you have personal stories about being drawn in by a charismatic leader, a question about charisma, and how we can be swept up in the spell of a mesmerizing person? If you'd be willing to share your question or story with a Hidden Brain audience, please record a voice memo on your phone. Then email the file to us at feedbackathiddenbrain.org. Use the subject line, charisma. Again, that's feedbackathiddenbrain.org. Charismatic people draw followers in, shape movements, and alter the course of nations. At the University of North Carolina, historian Molly Wurden is the author of Spellbound, how charisma shaped American history from the Puritans to Donald Trump.

35:18Molly, I'm wondering whether you can talk about the idea that charismatic people sometimes fuse their personal story with their message. So long before Donald Trump became president, for example, he was crafting a narrative that fused personal mythology with his worldview that America was being taken advantage of by the rest of the world. Can you talk about this idea that charismatic people are very good at placing themselves in the flow of the stories and the narratives that they're crafting? I think that's exactly right, and a crucial step for a charismatic leader who's offering a story that is supposed to draw followers into a special relationship with him or her as an individual. Looking back over Donald Trump's career long before he formally entered politics, I think he showed a real instinct for doing this. And if you go back and read his conversations with tabloid reporters in the 1980s, or you can find old footage of him on the

36:19Oprah Winfrey show in the late 1980s. And you can you find him talking about his experience with all kinds of evil actors who have tried to take advantage of him and rip him off. That's a phrase he uses a lot from early in his career. I think people are tired of seeing the United States ripped off, and I can't promise you everything, but I can tell you one thing, this country would make one hell of a lot of money from those people that for 25 years have taken advantage. It wouldn't be the way it's been, believe me. His account is one of, you know, himself as a self-made man, you know, really glossing over the degree to which he inherited his business empire from his father. And instead he describes it as this brilliant exercise in entrepreneurial creativity, one that has required him to evade at every turn people who would try to take him down. And it's required him to develop a facility in working the system because the system is fundamentally corrupt.

37:26And why do laws that have no legitimacy deserve consistent, you know, good faith respect? That's a line he's always walked very carefully, I think, never suggesting in his own narrative of his career that he broke any laws, but at the same time suggesting that someone who doesn't take advantage of, you know, loopholes in the tax code, if you don't do all of those things, then you're kind of a fool. So, you know, he has crafted the story of himself as this master of this kind of working the system and taking revenge on people who are bad actors. And so it was really not a far leap at all to cast himself as he trained his eye on national politics as the hero of the forgotten man of the hero who would really rectify injustices and go after all of the people

38:33and the powers and the institutions that are rigged against the average American that have screwed people over, you know, to use another phrase that he's used frequently. And so he set himself up, I think quite brilliantly, to fuse his personal story of triumph in the business world with the revenge and justice and ultimate triumph that he promised to offer his supporters if they elected him president. Do you think his story in some ways mirrors the stories of other people that you have looked at, other charismatic people and that, you know, there are followers of his who, you know, almost quite literally are willing to die for him and believe so deeply in what he stands for. And simultaneously, there are other people who look at him and don't know whether to roll their eyes or just to throw their hands up and disgust. You know, he seems to have worked extremely strong

39:36passions in completely different directions. Absolutely. And it was observing those very polarized reactions back in 2015 that helped send me down the path of trying to understand the phenomenon of charisma across the centuries. And I absolutely did find that that polarizing effect on people is echoed, you know, all the way back into colonial times up and to the present. I'm wondering, Molly, when you think about someone like Donald Trump, you know, his views have actually been fairly consistent about some of these issues for a long period of time. And well before he became president, his sense, of course, that he's being ripped off, that the country's being ripped off, that you have to, you know, take on these institutions and these elite forces that are, you know, arrayed against the common man. These are all views that he's held for a long time. Do you think that charismatic people carefully select their views to figure out what will be

40:38effective in driving their followers? Or are they really accidents of history, which is that they happen to have a set of views and beliefs and perhaps even personal stories. And these happen to fit almost like a key into a lock into the needs of the people who are around them at the time. That's a great question. And I think the charismatic leaders have to have a kind of genius and instinct for reading their time and identifying the driving anxieties and desires of their cultural moment, especially among people who are not being served by the narratives currently on offer in the culture. But I have never run across a charismatic leader who struck me as 100% pragmatic and just adopting, you know, some, some mix of views and, and making up some story willy-nilly purely because it seems like it will play well. Instead, I think you're right

41:44that there, there has to be this kind of magic, this, this synergy between the leader's natural self-understanding and aspects of his or her own story and the way he connects specific parts of that story to this, this grander picture. As a reminder, if you have questions or comments from Molly Werden that you'd be willing to share with the Hidden Brain audience, please find a very quiet room and record a voice memo on your phone. Two or three minutes is plenty. Email the file to us at feedback at hiddenbrain.org. Use the subject line, Curisma. Again, that's feedback at hiddenbrain.org. Molly says that we live today in the age of the guru. I asked her what defines this type of charismatic leader. I think it's interesting to play with the term guru in a in a broad sense

42:48and and to remember too that charismatic leadership very rarely exists in in a pure form. It's often combined with other kinds of authority. So so the frame of the guru as a radically anti-institutional figure who is positioning himself as the gateway to truth and knowledge. That that's a useful frame I think for understanding Donald Trump while of course also recognizing that he has conventional institutional authority as as the president of the United States. But I think it's a it's a broader cultural phenomenon that we can see manifest across the political spectrum. I became fascinated by the story of Oprah Winfrey and the kind of personal

43:48do-it-yourself spirituality that she developed alongside her media career. And I think much of her effectiveness and popularity and really rocketing to fame in the in the mid 1980s when she was in her 30s lay in her ability to convince many Americans that what you were seeing on her show was was her authentic self. It was it was just you know straight shooting asking the difficult questions pulling back the veil on reality that you know more polite talk show hosts would ignore. I say this on my show all the time. Can you really forgive if you haven't gotten angry? If you haven't dealt with how you really feel. I don't know if you can go from having been abused to forgiveness. But it becomes folded into this broader story of how you should be in the world that draws on various new age religious influences you know Deepak Chopra and really a kind of

44:57she's a sort of omnivorous consumer of of all kinds of religious and spiritual tools you know every everything from her own Christian heritage you know what you grew up with to more kind of Eastern religious techniques to just a way of talking about shopping and acquisition as self empowerment in a way of actualizing your potential. These are all a way of recasting religion not as joining a traditional community you know deciding to obey an institution but rather think of it as a toolbox or a smorgasbord if you will of of options that are just all about suiting yourself. Because only you have the power to take responsibility to move your life forward. And so it's a whole picture of reality that I think she offered her most devoted fans and

46:05it's part of why you encounter in Oprah's fans a sense that this woman is is laying out a path a way of being you know she's not just a talk show host. So I think that frame of the guru helps us make sense of this whole cultural picture and people as disparate as Donald Trump and Oprah. I think what I'm struggling with Molly is um you know I'm trying to imagine what if I was you know somebody living in Nazi Germany in 1936 and this messianic leader comes along and basically tells me a story about you know lost glory and the glory that is achievable if Germany were to achieve its full potential and I'm inspired by this story and I want to follow this person. What should I be doing when I feel like I'm gripped by somebody who has the story that

47:07feels like it's unlocking something within me and I feel like I need to follow this person. What are the questions I should ask myself that you know I don't have the luxury of hindsight waiting 30 years to see how something has turned out but in the moment what kind of question should I ask myself to determine if I'm on the right path. Boy that that is in some ways the question right and I think part of what your question has to compel and all of us is a recognition that even in these cases that hindsight seem kind of black and white morally if you're in it it can be very hard to tell up from down and get your moral bearings. I guess I have two main thoughts. One is that there's a real power to being embedded enough in a long-standing ancient philosophical or religious tradition that you can avail yourself of all of its resources and perspectives on a range of different

48:12challenges in human experience. So when I think about the the small number of German Christians who resisted the Nazis and remained deeply critical of Hitler even you know in the case of Dietrich Bonhoffer attempting to assassinate him I see that clarity of moral vision as a reflection of staying grounded in the in the whole of the tradition not whatever kind of attenuated useful version of this old tradition the the leader happens to be endorsing. The second needful thing is to ask who is this charismatic leader casting as my enemy who is he telling me is the villain and what do I actually know about those people what are my sources of information in most cases right I mean that that set of questions was not at top of mind for for Germans

49:15you know who were looking the other way or directly complicit in the Holocaust but for for the minority that that helped save Jews and worked in the resistance that personal knowledge of these victims as as individuals as you know multi-dimensional humans was absolutely crucial in inoculating them against Hitler's anti-Semitic propaganda. So you know in our in our current moment and you know I don't I certainly don't want to accidentally draw analogies I think we always have to be very careful in drawing historical analogies but certainly we live in a time when very few Americans know in a personal way people who are on the other side of this of this political divide and those relationships are hard to come by for all kinds of reasons but at the very least even if we don't have access to those relationships we can remind ourselves of of that dearth of

50:20information the fact that human beings are complicated and any kind of monolithic story of the other side has to obscure far more than it clarifies in the best of times charismatic people can make a chaotic world feel more orderly they can imbue our daily lives with purpose and meaning they make us feel good and we want to be close to them I was in New Orleans some months ago and word got out that Taylor Swift and Travis Kelsey were eating at a private room in a restaurant word-linked out and soon the crowds started gathering the intersection was soon swamped with hundreds of people all they wanted a glimpse of their heroes it made me think about the connection

51:22between charisma and romantic love when we fall deeply in love the person we adore seems to walk on water every gesture they make is beautiful every word is a pearl when you think about it we relate to our lovers as if they were imbued with charisma their quirks their habits their sense of humor we find every aspect of them to be fascinating and charming so what happens when one of these relationships comes to an end breakups are devastating because they demand that we wrench ourselves from the orbit of someone we found irresistible it becomes something like oh you're not entirely the person I thought you were I thought that you would honor the relationship the way I hope to honor the relationship when we come back we dig deep into the psychology of breakups as we respond to listener questions about the end of relationships stay with us you're listening to

52:26Hidden Brain I'm Shankar Vedanta this is Hidden Brain I'm Shankar Vedanta there are certain painful experiences almost all of us will have to go through we'll have uncomfortable first days at a new school or a new job we'll fight with your friends we'll grapple with the grief of losing a parent and unless we're very lucky we'll break up with someone or have our heart broken by someone we love in movies and on TV break up scenes often make us laugh it seems so obvious to us the audience that this relationship is doomed but in real life there often isn't much to laugh about when you're in the middle of a break up when you're the one sitting across the table from the person you love

53:26hearing them say I'm leaving you can be an agonizing experience the period that follows the initial shock of a breakup can often bring its own distinct heartache you start to question everything did they really love you what did you do wrong could you win them back was there someone else how long will it take you for you to stop thinking about them at the University of Windsor in Canada Antonio Pasquale Leone studies how we process breakups and how we can make this particular type of loss less painful Antonio joined us as part of our recent love 2.0 series if you missed that episode it's the one in this podcast fee titled how to move on today we welcome Antonio back to respond to listener's thoughts and questions in our popular segment your questions answered Antonio Pasquale Leone welcome back to Hidden Brain thank you shanker Antonio after we released our episode with you we heard from listeners who shared

54:31how they had struggled or were continuing to struggle with really deep sorrow in the aftermath of a breakup I'd like to start with this message we received from a listener named Molly she went through a breakup about 13 years ago and it took her a long time to get over the loss of the relationship why is it that if I were dating this person and he died I would be allowed and in fact even expected to continue loving him for the rest of my life but because he is not dead I am expected to get over it to stop loving him to move on what I don't understand is sort of what is the difference I mean isn't a breakup essentially a death that relationship is dead the person that we knew is dead to us now why are we supposed to approach breakups differently than an even more permanent kind of loss so Antonio I think Molly is looking for permission to

55:36continue to grieve are well beyond the point that others think she should stop grieving is she right I mean I think it's an interesting question I can hear that the pain in Molly's voice and how she sort of has been sitting with this for 13 years over a decade right and part of the problem you know let me just answer her question which I think is the first part is our breakups the same or similar to somebody just dying and I mean they're both going to be very hard but you break up because someone doesn't want to be in the relationship someone is unhappy and and someone wants it to end so there's a difference in vision and that has to be dealt with that has to be accepted by the person who's being broken up with right in death it's possible that that both people are really happy and then somebody dies and so it just has to be accepted you know you might feel like

56:44the universe is unfair but but it's not a struggle between two people's visions of what we could do together right so when someone dies we may grieve them but we don't necessarily feel rejected by them but in a breakup the person who splits up with you is still walking around still doing that thing perhaps now with someone else you know I can see in some ways how that can be more painful yeah I mean you have a disagreement a difference in how you see things right there's the relationship has um expired or turned sour or run its course you know the other piece that Molly kind of points at or that comes to my mind is this been a long time right and of course one's resources emotional cognitive and otherwise are trapped kind of stuck on this and there might be more life to live right it's important to end something so that one feels freed

57:47up to explore new possibilities Antonio a listener wrote in with a hypothesis about why things often get worse before they get better after a breakup Carlos Alberto saw something online that said that after a relationship ends people may experience a withdrawal of sorts from their ex partner essentially the post suggested that the struggle we feel after a breakup might be similar to the cravings of someone experiencing an addiction here's Carlos Alberto and I feel that this view is very reductive of the relationship and it doesn't really encompass all the complexities that are going around but on the other hand I do feel that it makes sense in a certain way so my question is specifically if there is value in this understanding of breakups as recovering from

58:48addiction or if this is a rabbit hole that is not really worth exploring what do you think Antonio is the comparison between breakup grief and addiction withdrawal on the money you know when you first introduced it I thought I don't know and then the first thing Carlos said I realized Carlos and I were on the same page I it is a bit reductionistic right you know there are some things that are just very sort of functional in terms of getting over an addiction that might be similar behaviorally in terms of getting over a relationship you're going to have to change your lifestyle you're going to have to change who you hang out with so there's some similarity there but I think the issue of relationships and grief become also more complicated it is reductionists just think of it as just that because as Carlos was kind of hinting there are other issues of personal meaning of attachment of of identity and you know there's no correlate there with respect to

59:52to drug addiction Antonio a listener named Cliff reached out with a question about how to know when we might be stalled out versus taking time to recover from a breakup Cliff and his wife got together when they were teenagers and they were married for 25 years but eight years ago Cliff's wife asked for a divorce it threw him for a loop and he says he's still struggling to move on here he is I'm healthy active and have a good career yet I feel unable to move forward emotionally the idea of dating again in my 50s even after eight years still feels impossible being alone feels safer than risking being hurt or blindsided again at the same time I recognize that this belief may be rational my question for Antonio is how can I tell the difference between thoughts that are irrational and those that may simply reflect caution or self-protection is choosing to remain alone indefinitely in a rational response to my experience

1:00:54or could it be a reasonable choice for where I am now and how might someone in my position even if I tried dating begin to trust the emotional role or coaster that can come from it so Cliff raises a really interesting point Antonio it isn't always easy to tell where the line is between healthy self-protection and irrational fear do you have any advice for him my heart goes out to him when when sort of speculates that it may be irrational that suggests that it's something that's crossed his mind you know but there's also no obligation to date other people you don't have to there's nothing wrong with deciding well I'm fine on my own that's okay too so really the question sort of becomes what hurts more what's missing in your life is something missing in your life I mean life is risky business so you know you date somebody and they

1:01:55might not be interested in you or you might be not so interested in them and then there's that hole I mean it's a lot of work finding the right person but you know we don't look for people because it's convenient we look for people because we want to connect and so I think Cliff it might be useful to sort of consider to what extent am I depriving myself of possibilities right I knew somebody who once said I broke up with someone so so that I would have the possibility of falling in love again you know so so what do you need I guess and what hurts the most because it it costs you something to be so safe as well many of the most common questions we ask after a breakup are why questions we want to understand why this rupture happened we find ourselves pouring

1:03:00over our relationship looking for clues when we come back we dig deeper into this process and we'll talk with Antonio about how to know when it's time to start letting go you're listening to Hidden Brain I'm Shankar Vedanta This is Hidden Brain I'm Shankar Vedanta Throughout our lives we all will experience various kinds of rejections maybe we'll be turned down for a part in the school play our dream university will say no to us we'll toil over a job application only to receive a generic response saying thanks but no thanks but one of the worst forms of rejection is the end of a relationship to have someone say I know you I loved you but I

1:04:03no longer want to be with you Antonio Pasqualeone is a psychologist who studies the impact of relationships on our well-being and how we can navigate the emotions that engulf us after a breakup Antonio when you tell people about your research there's sometimes skeptical about whether the emotions we experience after a breakup are generalizable they assume that each person's response is unique isn't well each person is unique you know in the details in the way you experience and what it means to you obviously that's it's like a thumbprint that's your unique experience and at the same time you know is it unique isn't actually going to be an opinion question this is an empirical question there are some common patterns that predict wellness outcomes and you know that's probably because we're humans and humans have a similar parameters for

1:05:09their functioning you know you attend to certain there's a lot of overlapping human needs um it's a funny puzzle though because if I were an astrophysicist I would say well it's like this and people would sort of nod and go okay I guess so I can't I can't see that far so I'll take your word for it but relationships and emotion everybody everybody has direct experience and um which is kind of wonderful but it also means that people hold up what we find against their personal beliefs system the personal kind of experiences now after a breakup many people find themselves turning things over and over in their minds a process that it's known as rumination talk a moment about why we do this and why it can sometimes be a problem well rumination is almost always a problem right I mean it's tricky to know am I

1:06:18ruminating or am I getting stuff done um rumination is a busy work right you it's emotional there are emotions there right um you can think of three kinds of rumination the anxious rumination is always worrying about the future and creating scenarios what if this and what if that when we talk about about things like unfinished business or losses relationship losses you'll get more depressive rumination depressive rumination tends to be about the past it's not about problem solving but it's about if only I should if only I had you know it's regrets kind of replaying events of the past and if they had been a little bit different of course there's an overlap between depressive and anxious rumination the third kind I'll just mention to be complete here I'm sure we could make up others but um when we're talking about relationship is angry rumination

1:07:22so you know but and these also are scenarios they tend to be vengeful at at the end right in certain kind of ways if only I had said that clever thing and and I hope so and so gets their come up ends but notice these are all scenario based they tend to be a replaying of a scenario it's the plot and characters uh being reworked and um it tends to be a very cognitive verbal loop keeps you really busy so especially when it's anxious you feel productive in some sort of way and yet that that verbal cognitive loop insulates you from sinking a bit deeper into what's really going on which is the present right and issues of loss issues of shame um that can be very painful you don't get caught up in those much more maladaptive emotions because you stay on these secondary hopeless helpless rageful sort of things we received a lot of listener questions about

1:08:29rumination um I'd like to share a couple of them with you the first is from a listener named Sophie Sophie told us that she and her boyfriend broke up earlier this year because of something that she did here she is I'm trying to piece together this version of me that loved him so much and then this version of me that did what I did and hurt him and the two are just aren't connecting and it really scares me and freaks me out and makes me question whether or not I am a good person a person who should be in romantic relationships is it possible to truly move on and heal from a breakup that was essentially your fault so Sophie stuck on the idea that perhaps she is in the kind of partner or maybe even the kind of person that she thought she was um what can people do when they find themselves in this sort of ruminative cycle Antonio one thing Sophie is doing is uh or at

1:09:31least in this uh excerpt right is thinking of herself in a relatively static way right it's like I hurt somebody I ended the relationship so in life and in relationships you get to you get to reinvent yourself you have choices now you you you get to decide to do things differently if you have regrets about the way you treated somebody you can commit to not treating other people in that way um and I don't think you should sit around and wait until you're perfect before you're in a relationship because that's not really how it works nobody's nobody's got it all sorted out perfectly and the truth is you grow the most on on the contact points on the boundary line between you and someone else you grow the fastest it's hard to compromise it's hard to negotiate it's hard to to have a sense of we but that changes you

1:10:34and so you'll become a different person by being in a different relationship I would imagine that the rumination process is particularly common when a breakup is satan and you don't know why the other person cut things off Elissa named Frida wrote in about her recent breakup her boyfriend ended things with her out of the blue she writes I really don't know exactly why he broke it off I've asked to talk with him several times and he always makes excuses not to talk previous relationships have ended gradually or with a clear reason I'm having a hard time moving on and still want to talk with him about what happened any advice on how to move on I'm wondering Antonio how can we find closure when a relationship ends and the person who has ended it won't give us any answers yeah I think a lot of people get stuck there um sometimes there's even ghosting or other sorts of very abrupt endings and the person's out there somewhere but they're unresponsive and the episode we did

1:11:39something that we talked about was the idea that although the relationship was a shared project me letting go and moving on after the relationship is not a shared project we will not be doing that together just like we we don't break up together meaning in synchrony right and hence forth it's like this is this is my own project obviously reaching out there's nothing wrong with that trying to have a conversation trying to get closure maybe there are things that you want to tell the person maybe the things you want to ask um but you know that you will make use of that in the way that's useful to you and if they're unavailable or unwilling and then that is actually information it it becomes something like oh you're not entirely the person I thought you were I thought that you would you would honor the relationship the way I hope to honor the relationship um so

1:12:47that's that's another loss in some ways but um the relationship is yours to move on from is what I'm trying to say a listener named Jennifer wrote in about a situation where a relationship ends amicably but the two people actually want to stay in contact with one another and try to remain friends here's Jennifer i'm really struggling with how to do that because i'm just still working through my emotional baggage and um the hurt that i feel and at some point i want to do it can it be done as my question what do we need to do to make that happen each of us individually or is it a giant mistake i'm wondering Antonio have you seen any success stories of exes finding their way to becoming friends yeah um that's gonna be a long road though it's not gonna happen overnight um and i

1:13:56think it's wonderful when people do you know depends how long ago the breakup has been and if that has been put to rest right but you know sometimes that's just a way of letting the other person down more more easily you know one of the puzzles here and one of the reasons why there there's gonna have to be some some time off let's say um you know are are we wanting to be friends just because it follows on the heels of a very intimate and tight romantic relationship or are we wanting to be friends because if i didn't know you and i bumped into you at the library we might become friends one of the puzzles i just want to be really clear about it is the goal of the relationship that that would be the new relationship because you've kind of maxed out in terms of intimacy in the relationship with the person as you know them you have been together shared life had dreams made love uh that's probably more intimate than most friendships so now you're looking

1:15:01for friendship so it's kind of to roll back the relationship it's not gonna be the same relationship if you're able to become friends it'll be getting to know the person in a whole different context my parents is a funny example my parents split up when i was 10 um my father remarried and in some ways i guess they kept in touch well for many rather want to speak for them right but it's like well they had kids that becomes a shared project right so when i say redefine the relationship it's the relationship becomes then about co-parenting and that's important right we have different goals and there's a different end not now my parents are are quite elderly and i remember you know we get together for holidays or birthdays my father my mother my stepmother my brothers everybody is at the same table i mean it's great right and it you can tell these are now

1:16:03these are friends right in the sense of community um so there's gonna be a reinvention of the relationship uh for Jennifer if that's what she wants and it's it's it's not gonna happen overnight right you're really gonna have to give some time you still have to end the relationship when we go through a breakup it can feel like we are saying more than just goodbye to our partner we're also saying goodbye to the future we imagine together the trips we would take the life we would build it's hard to imagine how to move forward how to fill in all the gaps left behind up next Antonio will answer your questions about how to find peace after a breakup and offer guidance on how to avoid a split in the first place you're listening to Hidden Brain this is Hidden Brain i'm Shankar Vedanta

1:17:12this is Hidden Brain i'm Shankar Vedanta Antonio Pasquale Lione is a psychologist at the University of Windsor in Canada he's the author of Principles of Emotion Change what works and when in psychotherapy and everyday life he joins us today for the latest installment in our series your questions answered Antonio breakups are not always a surprise sometimes we know that a relationship isn't meant to be and we pursue it anyway this happened to one of our listeners named Celine her partner recently broke things off and Celine is coming to realize that her own emotional issues might be playing a role in undermining her relationships here she is basically long story short in my scenario i know why it didn't work out there was a lot of communication issues and emotional disconnection and lack of effort because of it what didn't help and a punch in the gut was the fact that i was

1:18:12dumped through a voice note um so what i'm currently struggling with is a lot of self blame that i couldn't get myself to end it and i guess my other issue is that i fall into loneliness and crave companionships before i get any work done on myself and basically start seeing other people before i know i'm ready uh and i know myself enough that this is another struggle that is for sure to be expected so it sounds like Celine is aware of what she needs to work on Antonio but finds it really difficult to follow through before loneliness compels her to start a new relationship what do you make of her dilemma i think what Celine is saying is i hope she feels like it's okay if it's like she's saying i'm a work in progress right um but we all are i'd say to Celine i am too you know so so there's work to be done and um you know that doesn't mean one has to

1:19:18change relationships to improve oneself one is often reinventing relationships as when changes who one is but when she says about her own emotional issues whatever they might be she made reference to sort of a lack of effort and that that peaked me a little bit because i you know sometimes people say things like well you know we'll see where it goes um when when i hear somebody say talk about lack of effort or or we'll see where it goes i cringe a little bit i kind of go well i can make a good guess where it's gonna go because the reality is that the rate of successive relationships is relatively poor right if we go by divorce rates are maybe you know they're close to 50% depending on where you are i'm just talking statistics 50% that those are bad odds um if you

1:20:19aren't sure that you want it to work well now you've given up your only leverage right relationships work because you lean into them and for that reason one needs to sort of um think about in what kinds of ways am i not leaning in what gets in the way of me loving someone or allowing them to love me so i think that's really key so lean's question really highlighted how difficult it is to find a sense of ease when we've gone through a breakup um you've explored strategies that can help in these moments um one idea is to focus on identifying what you call unmet needs um say more about the centonia that's right yeah all emotion is about needs and negative emotions are about unmet needs and you know when you get to deeper feelings i'll call them primary emotions they're about

1:21:23not just highlighting something's wrong to you but organizing and orienting you to what you need right um so emotion becomes procedural i need to have a sense of camaraderie i need to feel like understood by someone i need i need a sense of playfulness i need fun i need fun with somebody where toss it back and forth um those are existential and and attachment oriented needs right um often moving on is about figuring out what's missing now and once you're identifying it you can kind of put it to rest the relationship i mean and you organize to start looking for that specific thing that you're missing

1:22:23we received a number of messages from listeners who wanted to share their strategies for getting over a breakup this one comes from a listener named Deb at the age of 41 Deb went through a divorce she struggled and felt like she'd never move on until about a year later she decided to try something new here she is i took out a yellow line writing pad and pen and on every single line i wrote thank you and then i would fill in the blank for some way shaper form that my former husband had made my life better five pages later i had let out from my head and hard all those aspects of my former life with him that made a difference for my stories of the past my impacts on the present and possibilities for my future that's what that letter meant to me outside of my new bedroom window i made a sundial on the ground and after crumbling up those heartfelt statements

1:23:26of gratitude i burned them and imagined the resulting smoke moving through the air and two it's intended recipient my former husband from that moment on i could tell my story without pain or tears or anguish it was fabulous so there's abundant research that finds that gratitude is a powerful tool for many realms of our lives Antonio is it possible that it can also help us with breakups absolutely i think it's wonderful it's very creative and it's very agentic and she runs with it right so part of his very action or to do something nobody ruminates with a piece of paper the way umdeb was talking about i mean at least not usually so notice that one of the things here is she's committing to paper or to conversation with someone or to write it's it's not just in your head going around turning it around in circles

1:24:28there's a there's a sense of undertaking a task and the other piece that dead mentions is is ceremony right i mean there's a ritual the idea of right and i think i'm often saying to people after you've done all the work not before you can't do it at the beginning but after you've done the work you still have to decide that it's over there's a decision point where you say and i'm going to put this to rest and that serves several functions one it creates a sense of closure notice the other person doesn't have to be here for this ceremony um it can be private you do your own thing it has to be done after you do the emotional work of course but it also becomes a reminder a memento there was that time in that moment in time and space where i let it go and walked into the rest of my life um which is what she describes right um then there's the piece about gratitude

1:25:35and the original episode we talked about a goodbye exercise where you might write down what are the good things you're saying goodbye to what are the bad things you're saying goodbye to you know goodbye good rhythms and what are the hopes and dreams right because the reality is we had something together and it was a value this next question is from a listener who is on the outside of a breakup looking in her name is Christine i'm wondering how to help a friend who's been through a difficult breakup and seems to be stuck in a never ending loop of rumination after a year or more and they just can't seem to move on how can i be of help what do you think cantonia yeah that was a good question right um if you care about people um and you see them suffering you want to help them depends how long they've been stuck this sort of way it depends how long the relationship is right i think in some sense if somebody were in a with with a life partner and

1:26:40then the marriage ends or the relationship ends a year after the breakup they're they're still stuck with it and working through it i wouldn't say that's outside of healthy right i mean it takes time and the longer the relationship the more it's going to take time right um you know so so it kind of depends on the context of what we're considering but let's imagine it is kind of getting a little it's taken a bit of a while maybe the relationship wasn't as significant in this person's life story but obviously important enough for them to be feel broken over it maybe the relationship was a year long and they're grieving for a year this is starting to be a bit well yeah it's that's long time then right and if you're a friend or family member or somebody who's still grieving or it seems stuck um i would say give them company to fill the void i would say help them figure out what's important to them you know what i mean often at the end of a relationship people

1:27:43don't really know what they're looking for so maybe give them some space to actually do that the third thing would be if people are really stuck in a hole that's almost always from a first person perspective right yeah i feel sad when i think of myself and first person in this situation but you can move the person to a third person perspective kind of like somebody else looking in right and that that would be you of course so then when starts talking about a life story a life narrative and and you might have a story that's a sad story but dot dot dot where to from here and the story's not yet finished there's still life to live so what do you want to do with that right and i think that is also important to help on shake people up and lift it lift their chin a bit to

1:28:43stare at the horizon we focus most of this conversation on how to cope with feelings that come after a relationship ruptures but i'd like to end with a listener question about how to support relationships that are not yet at the point of no return a listener named Lou sent us a question along those lines Lou says i'd love to ask advice on how to break through the distance and silence that occurs when our romantic relationship feels like it's drifting apart when both parties are feeling vulnerable and unsure of where they stand what are some key questions we can ask our significant other to bring us back to honest communication what do you think Antonia i think this is a lovely question from Lou i have already said if you're just waiting to see what happens that's a coin toss heads or tails right and is that what you want um because if that's what you

1:29:50want then you'll you'll get that right um and yet you know you move through the the the procedures of life the comings and goings and we're busy with work and we're busy with stuff maybe you're busy with kids you have projects relationship maintenance takes time you got to put time into it where there's a sense of we that's a very strong predictor of good outcomes so how do you do that you look at your partner and you say how are things right you make time for the relationship you check in how they're doing um and and sometimes the years roll by and you actually have to reinvent the relationship if you think of projects you've done uh uh i don't know i wrote a book but people do other sorts of things right they you renovate a house or you start a career or or or have children these things are a big project in life takes six to eight years you know from beginning to end

1:30:56and i mean if you're having kids it keeps going but of course the first six to eight years are really special and very hard so you know if that's true for everything else it's probably true for relationships too um and if you don't reinvent the relationship every six to eight years well then it will probably expire right um which is okay too but if you wanted that relationship you got to lean in as i've been saying and uh take the time to find a date night again you don't have time for that you have a date breakfast often one is kind of rediscovering i find myself with my wife we have kids our kids are like nine and ten now and it's sort of like oh oh that's oh that's who you are that's interesting that's exciting be curious that would be my advice be curious don't take it for granted

1:32:05you know i remember hearing someone say if you don't make time for health you are going to make time for illness and i love that line because it suggests that uh being healthy is is a proactive exercise and as you're talking now Antonio i'm realizing the parallels here if you don't make time for your relationship you will make time for your breakup it's very true and it's very time intensive if you have a breakup Antonio Pascoa Leoni is a psychologist at the University of Windsor in Canada he's the author of principles of emotion change what works and when in psychotherapy and everyday life we also heard today from Monty Worthin she's a historian at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and the author of Spellbound how charisma shaped American history from the Puritans to Donald Trump hidden brain is produced by hidden brain media our audio production team includes

1:33:13Annie Murphy Paul Kristen Wong Laura Quarelle Ryan Katz Autumn Barnes Andrew Chadwick and Nick Woodbury Tara Boyle is our executive producer i'm hidden brain executive editor our unsung hero today is Kelly Rudin Kelly has worked for me for many years as my lecture agent she's fielded incoming calls and emails and set up many speaking engagements she's retiring and i want to express my heartfelt gratitude for her many years of friendship and service Kelly is a master gardener and i expect she's going to get to spend many more hours in her beloved garden thank you again Kelly if you love hidden brain please be an ambassador for us tell one or two friends about the show your word of mouth recommendations are one of the most powerful ways to connect more people with the ideas and research we explore on hidden brain i'm Shankar Vedantam see you soon