Britt Frank | The Science of Stuck: Breaking Through Inertia to Find Your Path Forward

Okay? Now we've taken this very large amorphous, I'm anxious about work. We've distilled it into a fear. We've distilled the fear down into a worry. Now the worry is I'm worried I won't have enough content. I can intervene on that. That we can do something about. And once you distill that worry down into solvable problems, may not solve the whole thing, but it's gonna dial down that quote, anxiety from a 10 to a four.

SRini: IBrit, welcome to the Unmistakable Creative. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us. Thanks for having me on. It is my pleasure to have you here. So I actually stumbled on your book on Amazon and Amazon must think I have some serious issues because all the books that are recommended to me are about, being single and unhappy, getting unstuck.

So based either on my purchasing history or, my mental health, Amazon probably thinks I'm insane. But you have a book called The Science of Stuck, which one of our former guests, Sasha Hines, wrote the for. And I remember picking it up, I think I read the preview on Kindle and I ordered it right away and I couldn't put it down.

I thought, this is amazing. So I am absolutely thrilled to have you here, but before we get into your work and the book, I wanna do start by asking you what social group were you a part of in high school and what impact did that end up having on what you've ended up doing with your life? Let's

Britt Frank: start with the trauma question.

For me, that's a trauma question. . Hey, me too. So I was part of the floater group in high school. I was, not so outcast that I was outcast, but I wasn't cool enough to be considered in. So I was too much, not enough. I floated around and I did not have a group. I was a. Lone wolf flyer, and it was very difficult and very lonely and frustrating.

So I smoked a lot of cigarettes, uhhuh, and watched a lot of infomercials.

SRini: All right. To parents listening to this who have kids who are either floaters or loners, given your work , what would you tell them to tell their kids other than to smoke a lot of cigarettes and

Britt Frank: watch a lot of infomercials? I loved the ones about cat litter boxes, and I didn't own a cat, so that tells you a little bit about my own pathology, but I think it's really different now with social media.

I think, ha, I getting a TV in my room at 16 was the biggest deal in the world. I think having social media and having access to a world outside my Long Island mid nineties bubble would have been incredibly useful. So I would tell parents listening, do not use the removal of devices as a long-term punishment because you are removing the social supports that are necessary in order to curb whatever the behavior is that you're trying to stop.

SRini: Okay. It's funny you say that because I just finished reading Gloria Marks in a book attention Span. And this feels like a double-edged sword to me. , because on the one hand, particularly in adolescence, when you're dealing with a developing brain and you're so prone to social comparison, excessive use of this stuff can be really detrimental, I think, to your self image.

On the flip side, she actually wrote about the fact that we don't live in a world where technology is separate from our social structures in society. And so how do you find the balance between those two things? I As a teenager, I'd imagine it would be very hard to not just be drawn into it constantly.

Cause I see these kids at the Starbucks. Where I go to get my coffee in the morning and there's a high school right by there and they're literally texting each other from in the same room.

Britt Frank: Oh, . It is absolutely wild. I grew, I don't, I grew up in the last analog era and so I grew up without technology and the internet came about when I entered high school.

Yeah. Early in my career I studied child development and I was a play therapist and so it was very strange for me to witness, a two year old knowing how to work an iPad that was like, what is this world we're living in? And it needs to be number one. I think the balance is careful and conscious curation while still parenting young people.

Because if you are mindful and conscious at the types of media, the types of groups, the types of social networking, if you're a parent these days, you need to be tech informed because you need to be able to know how to curate and how to monitor and how to tell the difference between, wow.

Social media is an on-ramp to feeling connected versus, wow, social media is an on-ramp to all of the shenanigans that I see in my private practice. .

SRini: Okay. Since you mentioned you started by studying child development earlier in your career, I have to ask you this first because my sister just had a baby.

He's turned four months old. What is happening in the brain in those first four months? ?

Britt Frank: So I have no idea because my child development expertise begins around the age of five. I started working with children four to five who could speak and who had mobility and who were able to interact on at least the basic level.

So the world of the infant and the baby is a total mystery. So if you can answer that question, give me a call back and let me know, cuz I do not

SRini: know. Fair enough. I I feel like no matter how many books I've tried to find on this, it seems like this just black box that. Very few people seem to know about.

Britt Frank: One thing I do know though, is that our nervous systems can encode everything, every last piece of information coming at us from in utero till whenever. So it, it's not a true statement that, oh, they're infants, so it's not like they're going to remember, what we know now about trauma. And this was helpful for my own personal journey, journey.

Trying to understand why did I turn out the way I did was that infants encode intrinsically, all of the things happening around them. So it is important to monitor language and to monitor media and to not assume, because someone doesn't have the brain structure to develop narrative explicit memory that what's happening around them isn't going to severely impact them later in.

SRini: So as of right now, then my nephew will basically be a nineties hip hop junkie is what you're telling me.

Britt Frank: Which is awesome. And the flip side of that, and I tell parent, I don't have children. I'm a child-free by choice person, which is why I had the time to sit and study children and how they interact with themselves in each other in the world is you don't have to do it perfectly.

It's not, oh my gosh, I hope I don't mess up my child. It's okay. So to what degree are you going to, because you're guaranteed to ? Because all humans are imperfect, which means all parents are imperfect, which means everyone will mess up their child. But the research shows by and large, you don't have to get it perfect.

You need to be good enough. It's really amazing how much good enough parenting can stave off a whole lot of problems later in life. So you don't need to be perfect. It needs to be good enough. And then it's not about whether you will mess up. It's about how do you attune to your child after a mess up?

And are you able to repair a relational breach without getting defensive, without flipping out, without making it about, oh my God, I'm such a terrible parent. A parent spinning around in, oh my God, I suck, is not trying to be narcissistic. But that is in fact a narcissistic orientation because oh my God, I'm a bad parent, is still about the parent versus, oh, let me see, let me witness how this choice is impacting my child.

SRini: It's funny because I remember asking Sarah Peck about parenting and she said, parenting's a giant shit show. Basically , it's, you get this kid and you say, we're gonna screw you up and your job is to go to therapy and fix all the things we screwed up. And I remember for the longest time I thought there was this idea of some sort of parent that is, infallible.

And then I remember at the end of the TV show Parenthood Craig t Nelson turns to his daughter and he says, you know what? Parents screwed their kids up. That's just what we do. And , it made me have a lot more empathy for the things that I thought were mistakes that my parents did.

Britt Frank: And it's a spectrum, right?

I was watching this random movie, man of the House where Tommy Lee Jones has to shack up with a bunch of cheerleaders who witnessed a crime. It's hilarious. And in that, in watching that, I'm like, wow. Two hours where Tommy Lee Jones is with these very hot half naked cheerleaders and he does not sexualize or objectify them in the slightest.

I'm like, wow, look at that. It's a grown man who can hold space for. Really unbounded young ladies without making it really creepy or gross. Yeah. So there's a degree to which you can be a good enough parent to which you could be a terrible parent, but the whole, I hope I don't screw up my child is not the question because you will, it's how much to what degree and will you be attuned enough to notice when it happens so you can repair it and not have to retrofit an attachment system 20 years later.

Yeah. Walk

SRini: me through the trajectory from, being a floater in high school to studying the science of being stuck. What in the world led you down this path, .

Britt Frank: So when I was little, this was way before I was a floater in high school when I was really little, I didn't have friends. I was bullied a lot.

I was the weird kid who just liked to have their nose in a book. And I always was fascinated by humans, human ing, because I felt like I was sent out of the factory, missing a few pieces of software and hardware. And so it wasn't a, I wanna help people. It was not that altruistic from very young.

It was, wow. That's what those people like an anthropologist of humanity. What is going on? How are these people doing? They have groups and they sit at lunch together and it's very strange to me. And so the studying of stuckness really came out of my own personal, I don't know how to be, forget about adulting.

I didn't know how to human period. I didn't know how to adolescent, I didn't know how to teenage, I didn't know how to college. I did it. I made it through it. And because school was not difficult, I was able to skate by unnoticed. And I didn't have these huge behavioral issues that needed prompted. I was an addict, but I was a functional drug addict that could be a drug addict without it costing me legal or medical ramifications.

But I really wanted to understand why we do the way, why we do things the way we do. And surely it can't just be that I'm crazy. I really did believe, and I have a long history of mental illness on both sides of my family, stretching as far as the eye can see, but it can't surely it can't just be that I am crazy.

There has to be something going on that makes us tick, that makes us do these things. And so I graduated college and entered the media production world and then later on, after I got some of my, I was able to walk a little bit without falling every two seconds and I got better from being in therapy, that's when I made a midlife switch and became full-time doing what I do now.

What I do now. Yeah. Wow. 600,000 work hours and 4 million saved in one year,

SRini: 15 times roi,

Britt Frank: 60%

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SRini: Of all the books that you could write what made you choose this subject in particular? Like this whole idea of being stuck? Because I think part of why this book resonated with me so much was I just of felt myself, nodding along, saying, Hey, that's me. That's me. I was like, wait, you just wrote my life story.

In this book, ,

Britt Frank: it's really amazing how universal the phenomenon of stuckness actually is. And I have worked in a very large variety of settings. I now, I work in private practice with really high functioning, high achieving people. I've worked in the foster care system, I've worked in patient psychiatric, I've worked with kids, I've worked with teens, every single category across demographics, across every, measurable category.

Everyone uses the word stuck and everyone experiences a degree of stuckness to some. We're not all the same. I'm not equ. But it's amazing how this, I am stuck be between this intention action gap is what the social scientists like to call it. I know I'm supposed to do the thing. Nevertheless, I'm not doing the thing.

And even though there's no logical reason why I can't do what I say I for some people that's oppression or systemic issues or poverty or medical issues. I'm not talking about that. But for me, the stuck factor of there's no logical reason why I can't get from A to B, nevertheless, I'm stuck.

It was amazing to me that impacts everybody to a degree. Not everyone identifies as having a severe mental illness or a severe addiction, but everyone knows what it's like to get stuck. Relationships, career, money, sex, body, name it. We all feel it to some degree in some area. Yeah, I

SRini: mean I I'm just, thinking about this idea, I was like, do you ever not feel unstuck at a point in your life, like when all your problems were solved?

Because I had a mentor used to say, is, your problems will never go away. All that changes is your capacity to deal with them.

Britt Frank: Yes. And I think that's true. And largely I think recovery and people are always like, what does it mean to heal trauma? It's that is such a metacognition question, like whatever it means to you.

But for me it's not that we'll always have problems, it's for me, the goal is can we change the nature of the problems? , I accept that part of the human experience is to always have something that you need to surf on top of, or you're gonna get tossed. But it would be nice, it's nice now at 42 not to have the same problems that completely be fuddled me at 20.

Yeah. At 30.

SRini: Yeah. I trust me I know the feeling. It, we're migrating a website and it we're having some issues with the transfer. And I think if this would've been three or four years ago, I would've just

,

been losing my shit . And I just remembered this thing that Tim Ferris said to me in an interview about Matt Mullenweg, the founder of.

Atomic, which creates, created WordPress. And the guy is like as stoic as it gets, and he is one of your data centers is down. Isn't that a big deal? He no, there's nothing I can do. There's nothing. Don't point worrying about it. And he had this acronym, what would Matt Mullenweg do? And I remember just, I was like, wow, I'm actually saying that to myself now.

And even five years ago, that would've freaked me out, but oh my God, the things that were problems when I was 20 or basically a speeding ticket now,

Britt Frank: which, you know, in the 12 step world, and this is why I wish that the whole mental healthy world wasn't so isolated from the quote, mentally healthy, which I don't see them as separate.

But there's a saying in the 12 steps of AA that, we will in, if you do the work long enough and you stick to it, eventually we will. The quote is, we will intuitively know how to handle problems that used to baffle. And I find that is really true. The more about humoring that I know, it's like same thing when, I learned to drive a car, every little noise would freak me out and I've got my hands at 10 and at two and I'm focused.

And then it was like, okay, I could be driving a car on the phone listening to the radio while eating a sandwich. And you develop muscle memory. And then if I hear that little noise, I now know the difference between a whatever noise and uhoh pullover noise. Yeah. And it's really true that we don't wanna solve all the problems living in this BLI out Zen state.

Sounds terrible to me. All of the good things that we want in life are not in the center of this perfect balance. They're on the edges, but it's nice to have new problems and not the same ones.

SRini: Yeah. Let's get into the book. You actually say the mental health, pharmaceutical wellness, beauty and fitness industries are largely built on the idea that anxiety is your fault, and improving yourself is your solution.

Every time you hear an ad promising freedom, joy, bliss, or peace up on a purchase of a product or service, you've just fallen prey to the cultural mythology that directs you to look outside of yourself for answers. The solutions to many of your problems can be discovered only by journeying within your mind.

I think that all of us intuitively know that, but our actions don't reflect that. But I let's just think about it. People are listening to this podcast as a way of looking for answers outside of their mind. I read books, I read your book, looking for answers out of my own mind. So why is that? And how do we find a balance?

Because I think there's value to external influence, but I realize there's also a diminishing return.

Britt Frank: Sure and I'm certainly not saying you shouldn't read books and everything you need is within you and you don't need people and you don't need resources. No, I am saying there is, like you just said, there is a limit to which information there, there comes a point where lack of knowledge is not the problem.

There comes a point where you don't need another book telling you the same thing on another, just from another framework, but it ama and it no shame. Here I was, I smoked meth, I did coke, I did pills. I understands the very, very high temptation to flee from who we are, what we know, and what's true about us.

Now I have a very peaceful relationship with my mind, but again, you don't need to have a mental illness to be terrified of your own thoughts. Every single person sitting on Sunday night with the quote Sunday scar. Knows the world is about to smack me in the face when I get out of bed on Monday morning and off we go.

But this attempt to escape who we are and what we know, specifically the icky things about ourselves that we wish were not true. Young calls that shadow, lot of people call it shadow work, but young sort of popularized it as you need to face the shadow because if you don't, it will bite you.

That's pretty true. And thoughts can't hurt us. And that sounds so reductive and simple. But I remember one of my therapists was like, it's your mind if you go in it. There's nothing in it that can hurt you. But we, people die every day in their efforts to avoid what's inside their minds. That's the tragedy.

And but it is, it's scary when you go inside your head and you start to look at under the carpets and I know where all my bodies are buried now because I had a lot of help making it safe to look. But self-knowledge sounds so wonderful, but it is a messy, scary, very scary prospect.

SRini: Yeah.

And talked about the drug addiction phase because I have done my fair share of experimentation. My joke is often I'm doing this as research for my listeners, . When it comes to things like psychedelics, although I haven't really done an episode on it even though I should, but that somebody joked me is you're doing this for science.

I was like, yeah, absolutely. Even though I'm, probably doing it to your point, to escape from something.

Britt Frank: Sure. The impulse to use and I tried lots of things. Drugs were not available to me when I was young, so I was addicted to porn when I was young through the, the rabbit ears on the tv with all the scr, you can look, you look hard enough, you can see, I see a person through the static, and then it was drugs and then when that didn't work as it, as it tends not to, I joined a fundamentalist religious cult and that was a wonderful resting place for a while because fundamentalism is, by its nature, a different type of addiction.

It's not chemical, but it's a process addiction. And anytime we have these dysregulated bodies that don't know how to feel, what we feel, we're not taught how to, know what we know. If I ask someone, what does anger feel like in your body? I usually get blank stares. I know I wanted to smack my therapist when she was like, so tell me, Brad, where do you feel that in your body?

I'm like, I don't know. We were talking about, I live in a floating head because we're not taught that feelings are physiological and here's how to drive your physiology and all of that. So addiction provides a very loud distraction from the icky things about ourselves. Whether there are things we did to ourselves, whether there are things that happened to us, whether it's bad choices that we made in reaction to the bad things that happened to us, it doesn't matter.

Addiction is a very compelling distraction from the pain of our reality. Now, again, the pain of our reality is temporal. If you face it, it tends to get better, and the pain of addiction, gets amplified until it destroys everything about you. From the religious cult thing to smoking meth, I understand the appeal.

Yeah.

SRini: One thing that you say early on in the book is that the human brain is powerful, beautiful, and mysterious. Current research indicates that we're wired for survival, not happiness. We're wired to seek safety, not serenity. This means your brain is constantly scanning your environment in search of threats and opportunities.

So with that in mind, how does a human being navigate the world without losing their fucking mind? ?

Britt Frank: Have you looked around lately? Yeah. I think by and large it's not working. We're taught, use your mind. Mindset is everything. Mind over mood. Just think positive. And I'm not anti mind work.

Obviously there's a large degree to which how we talk to ourselves, how we think about thought, how we speak to ourselves and other people. That stuff largely matters. But if you don't know that your brain's first objective is to find a way to go on autopilot to conserve energy. It's not to get you out of bed, to launch the business, to start the fitness routine or whatever.

Insert thing. You're gonna feel crazy. There's, this whole, I'm so lazy. What's wrong with me? And these narratives that we attach to these physiological states, and people get so mad at me when I talk about this. They're like, are you saying it's okay to lay on the couch, binge watching, whatever?

No, I'm not saying that. I am saying that the explanation for inertia is not laziness or some sort of character defect. The explanation for a lot of our inertia is physiological because our brains are not desire designed to get up and be productive and go and do, like human ing is hard.

Thinking is hard. Doing is hard. So our brains, if they think that not doing will keep us safer and conserve more energy, it's not going to wanna do it. Now that said, you can train yourself out of basic survival physiology, but you can't train yourself out of a physiological state if you don't know that's what's happening.

So I get very . I get really Amped up about, no, your brain has a gas pedal and a brake pedal. It's like driving a car. If I put a five-year-old in a car, they're gonna drive off the road cause they don't know how to drive. But that is not a problem with the car, nor is it a problem with them. It's that five-year-olds don't have the tools, the knowledge, and the skillset to drive.

And that's why the car is crashing. It's not that dissimilar with our lives.

SRini: Let's get into the concepts of, getting unstuck. And you start out by talking about anxiety, fear, and worry. You make these distinctions. You say that anxiety is a series of uncomfortable physical sensations in your body without an identifiable source.

Anxiety is a trail that leads to unaddressed emotional injuries. Injuries, and then fear shows up in the sa in the body with the same physical sensations as anxiety, shallow breathing, rapid heart rates, sweaty palms, dry mouth intention. So talk to me about the distinction between anxiety, fear, and worry.

Because I think they all feel the same.

Britt Frank: They feel the same. And our culture uses them interchangeably. But again, I'm really militant about the semantics, not because I want to be so smart, but because the words that we use largely matter if we're trying to make changes to our physiology. So if someone says to me I'm really anxious about work, okay, that is so broad.

That tells me nothing about the nature of the problem. That tells me nothing about are we talking perceived threat? Are we talking actual threat? Are we talking a boss who's sexually harassing you or are we talking six kids at home that if you do something wrong, you're gonna get fired? I'm anxious about work is just, I know this person is feeling uncomfortable body sensations, but there's no definable origin.

So anxiety is physiology. With no known origin, you can't intervene on something that doesn't have an origin point. And so when people say, I struggle with anxiety, that will actually amplify the problem because we're not. Defining a problem. You can't solve a problem if you're not defining it. So I have this like funneling filter system.

So it's okay, you're anxious about work. What does that mean? If I mess up this presentation, I'm going to get fired. Okay, cool. So that's not anxiety. That's a fear. I feel fear that I'm going to mess up this presentation that feels a lot different in your body than I'm just anxious about work.

Now we've created a fear. So then how do we distill the fear down into a worry? So you're fearful that you're, you'll mess up the presentation. I'm worried that I won't have enough slides and that I'm just making stuff up. Yeah. I'm worried that I won't have enough slides and I'm gonna run out of content, and this 30 minute presentation will be five minutes.

Okay. Now we've taken this very large amorphous, I'm anxious about work. We've distilled it into a fear. We've distilled the fear down into a worry. Now the worry is I'm worried I won't have enough content. I can intervene on that. That we can do something about, and once you distill that worry down into solvable problems may not solve the whole thing, but it's gonna dial down that quote anxiety from a 10 to a four.

Let's

SRini: get into, the concept of rewards and behavior for being stuck. You say, here's the truth. , if you dig under most unhealthy behaviors, you'll find hidden rewards. In order to get unstuck, you must take an honest inventory of your behaviors. Even the ones that I know you genuinely wish to change.

Shaming yourself and be moaning, your choices won't work. Now let's just take an example of something like making more money or, wanting to be in a relationship. Like sometimes I, when I looked at that I was like, okay, I was trying to think about this. It's like, where's the hidden reward to being in this situation where, my mom is basically constantly stressed that, I'm her 40 plus unmarried Indian son.

I'm like, I have to deal with my mom. That's not a reward.

Britt Frank: We'll file that cost column of the cost benefit analysis. That's a cost.

SRini: But, as, just as an absurd example. So talk to me about that. Like how do you actually find the hidden word? Because I remember I had Terry Cole here as well to talk about boundaries and she said the same thing.

She said, there's some hidden sort of second order benefit that you're getting from , this thing you say you don't want. How do you figure out what that is? Cause I was thinking about that. I was like, I can't

Britt Frank: find it. So you've come up with nothing. Oh, this will be fun. I'm not your gonna theise you, but is your benefit column legit blank?

Nothing's on there.

SRini: No, not nothing is on there. Look, what's the upside of, being single? I can just do whatever I want. I don't have to report to anybody. I don't have any, I'm not accountable to anybody. I guess is, that's

Britt Frank: a big one way to big deal. That's a big deal.

That is something no one wants to say, but everyone has this association that once you pair up, that you lose your freedom, you lose your autonomy. I'm married, I've been married now for two years, and I go on solo vacations. I go on vacations with my friends. My husband takes solo trips. We both really value our autonomy and are independent from each other lives, but we also got married later in life.

Most people asso like really associate partnership with loss of freedom. If your system thinks that once you pick a person, then it's over for you. It's going to be highly incented to either not find someone or to pick a series of unavailable people. Because if that's the story, that's a big story.

So how do you change the story? You can't change unless you first name it. So no, the first order of business is no one wants to admit that there are benefits cuz all behavior, even suboptimal behavior is functional. Otherwise the behavior wouldn't be there. Whether it's not making money, not getting fit, doing drugs, it doesn't I'm not saying it's good. I'm saying there are benefits. So again, let's start by assuming there are benefits. Step one, step two. Okay, let's start listing them. You just named a very clear one, Angie said again, not to get personal , but if your mom is super super concerned with the fact that her unmarried son is this age and blah, blah, blah, then there's gonna be a lot of pressure on whoever you bring home.

That is not going to be a small thing. There is going to be eyes on you, eyes on your partner. There's going to be pressure, you're gonna be grilled, your partner's gonna be. And to your brain, will, your brain's immediately gonna go, no, don't wanna do that. They can train your brain out of that. Cause we can take that anxiety and distill it to fear and to worry and all of, using my secret formula.

But you have to start by admitting there is a lot of pressure on you now because all eyes are on you. You don't have the freedom to just explore and see what's happening. It's this is my potential mate, and then that's going to be a problem. And that's where what you said, your conversation about boundaries is gonna be really helpful because if you put enough boundaries in place, then you can boundary moms.

So her opinion is less impactful.

SRini: Trust me, I was on a reality TV dating show that hit the top 10 Netflix people descended on my parents like vultures. And to the point where I had to basically call them and say, look, this is ridiculous. You guys are basically giving me, like prospects that I would get more information from a sperm bank about a potential donor.

Than the information you guys are giving me. And I put my cousin in the way. I was like, I want you to run anything through her. I'm only gonna deal with her. But yeah, it's exactly what you're talking about. That was, scrutiny at a level that I'd never experienced before.

Britt Frank: , which on a neurological level, is going to register as very threatening because not only are you faced with the prospect of scrutiny and pressure, but you're also faced if you're close with your family, at the prospect of loss, of connection with people who are important to you. If you make the wrong choice, if you don't make a choice, if you do it improperly or however your family deems it to be, you could lose these connections.

And from an attachment level that's very threatening to your central nervous system and will very much incense

,

your unconscious to not find available people. .

SRini: Let's talk about feelings versus emotions. You say that feelings are a series of body sensations and emotions are body sensations with stories attached to them.

. So basically feelings plus stories, minus emotions. It's the stories we attach to our body. Sensations that create emotions. So let's say you're feeling terrible just as an example, maybe you're depressed, maybe you're sad, whatever it is. Where do you change this in this equation and how?

Britt Frank: , and again, it seems like I'm just being a word nerd for the sake of being a word nerd and I'm not in all of the time that I have sat across from people in my office, being able to specifically ide you know, speaking in metaphor is really great as part of the human experience. And I really love that consciousness allows us to speak in meta.

But when you're feeling like shit, metaphors are not your friend. You want to really be able to say things in as specific language as possible so you can intervene on them. So if someone comes in and we'll just use a couple who's fighting and one of the partners is I just really feel like you're not listening to me.

There's so much embedded in that because I feel like you're not listening to me. That's not a feeling, that's a thought. And I've done workshops like this and people get so mad, they're like, Bri, this is stupid. This is not how people talk. I'm like, great, but that your way is not working. So okay, go do it your way.

But I feel like you're not listening to me has mixed up and mushed together all of the factors. So the person who's mad, sweaty palms, clench jaw, their stomach is cramping and blood is flowing to their extremities and they feel like they're ready to just come apart at the. Those are the feelings.

Those are the physiological cues. Those are the somatic markers. Okay, so those are the feelings. The emotion is anger, right? The same body sensations could just as easily be, you're having really good sex or you're on a roller coaster, but because they're having a fight, the feelings are physiological. The emotion is anger.

And so if you can separate that hi, let's say the same person, instead of saying, I feel like you're not listening to me. Let's say that person could stop themselves long enough to tune in to their body sensations, which will inherently slow them down. Okay. I'm noticing this. I'm noticing that. Okay. I am feeling the emotion of anger.

When you do that, which is essentially a mindfulness practice, you're slowing yourself down enough that you can maintain the neocortical activity necessary to not say or do something stupid in order to fight skillfully and fairly and effectively. You can't be just spouting off. From the physiology that you're in, you have to tease it out from this is physiology, these are the emotions, these are the thoughts.

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I've probably done that with friends, but yeah. One other thing you say about this, that the myth is there is an easy way. This truth says that there are only two ways. The hard way that goes around and around in circles and the hard way that has a beginning, middle, and end, the pain of facing feelings is often easier to navigate that the pain than the pain of avoiding them.

And yet I think people, in a lot of cases, avoid them. And suppress them.

Britt Frank: Sure. Cuz they believe there's an easier way it would be, and this is right out of the 12 step handbook. Also the myth is that there's an easier, softer way. There's not, there are two hard paths. Dealing with your stuff is hard.

Not dealing with your stuff is hard. Getting fit is hard. Not being fit is hard. And there's this whole Choose your heart. I didn't come up with the whole Choose your hard philosophy, but it's gotten fairly trendy. It'll, the limits of the choose your hard come again to the degree that you have safety and choice is the degree to which you can implement changes.

If you are in an abusive environment or if you're a child, or if you are in a wartorn country, none of this information applies. But to the degree that you have choices, you can make changes. Wow.

SRini: Speaking of war corn countries, let's talk about trauma. You make this distinction between trauma and traumatic events, trauma inducing events, and trauma responses.

Can you explain those and break those down for people?

Britt Frank: Oh my God. Yes. Because I'm glad that trauma has gotten trendy because I'd rather we all be talking too much about it than not talking about it at all. Most people don't realize that you can become a fully licensed therapist and never once take a class about trauma or the brain, which is just bananas.

That's me. Absurd. But that is absurd and that is fact. You do not have to ever sit in a class about the brain or the body. You never hear the word trauma in graduate school unless you specialize in it, which is like absurd. And nevertheless, it is what it is. The D S M has just recently begun to identify, non-combat P T S D as trauma.

But I can rant about that. That's another thread. So trauma has now in the zeitgeist becomes synonymous with something is uncomfortable. Oh, that traumatized me. I sat in traffic. Oh, that traumatized me. I got into a fight with my boyfriend or whatever. Okay we need to differentiate between a trauma, a traumatic event, a trauma inducing event.

So trauma, the definition that I use comes from Dr. Peter Levine, and he created somatic experiencing, which is a modality that I'm trained in. And he defines trauma as anything that's too much, too fast or too soon. It's an internal process. It's not defined by the events. It's defined by how your body processes it and the, I can distill all that clinical legal, jargon down to it's brain.

Indigestion. Trauma is an internal process where for whatever reason, your brain didn't metabolize an experience. It couldn't process it for whatever reason. It could be genetics, it could be family, it doesn't matter. So that experience has now gotten stuck in your nervous system and now you're experiencing symptoms, emotional symptoms, sometimes physical symptoms, that's trauma, a traumatic event, are the things we can all universally agree are bad Assault is bad, and sexual trauma is bad, and natural disasters are bad.

But traumatic events don't always create trauma, which is really important to note. You can survive a really horrific traumatic event and not sustain any long-term symptoms. Why? Because bodies are weird. Because brains are weird. Maybe you have a really resource nervous system and you had an amazing set of caregivers, and life has been so good to you that after you survived a bad event, you had enough people in your community to surround you and take care of you.

I don't know what, I don't know why, but a traumatic event doesn't necessarily cause trauma. Now, a trauma inducing events, those are things that people get mad at me about because they shouldn't be trauma, like getting stuck in traffic shouldn't cause trauma. Going to the dentist shouldn't cause trauma, nevertheless.

If you have sexual trauma, going to the dentist is a very big deal. And there are reasons why those two things are linked. But people will come into my office all the time I don't understand. I was at the dentist and all of a sudden I'm shaking and sweating and crying, and I couldn't get through a cleaning.

This shouldn't be so traumatic. It's not that deep. What's the problem? Okay, so going to the dentist isn't a traumatic inherently events, but that for you was a trauma inducing events. Does that make sense? , it's so important to use the right language. So non bad events can cause trauma. Bad events don't necessarily cause trauma, and trauma is brain indigestion.

SRini: Let's get into. This idea of shadows and self-talk and therapy, because I think there are a couple things that struck me. You said, even though sadness is essential to our royal being, as the character proved the plot of inside out, many of us continue to suppress painful thoughts and feelings.

But it's only when you're willing to explore the caves of discomfort that you can access your shadows, healing properties. Explain that to me, because I don't think anybody wants to intentionally feel sad.

Britt Frank: No. And there's a point to which it can become emotional self-harm to just constantly ruminate on the sad things and look at the sad photos and watch the sad videos and listen to the sad music.

So again, I trust that when people read my work and listen to me speak, that they know how to nuance that. I'm not saying go dive around in pain and be sad all of the. I am saying to the degree that you have actual sadness that you're not dealing with, there are going to be problems so you don't have to live there.

But our efforts to escape uncomfortable feelings usually result in some sort of addictive or compulsive or problematic behavior. And again, doesn't always have to be, code red types of things. Sometimes it's insomnia. Sometimes it's, I date the same person over and over again and I don't know what's wrong with me.

Sometimes it's, I just can't seem to power down and relax. But this idea that you should only feel the positive feelings, I don't even like the words positive and negative. I have a real beef with that because one implies good and one implies bad. I much prefer there are comfortable feelings and somatic states and there are uncomfortable feelings, but neither is good or this binary of only have good thoughts and feelings sets us up for a lot of really bad things.

So if you have uncomfortable, like legitimately uncomfortable stories, sensations, memories, experiences promise you, you can't just move on because past is a construct. It's not like you can leave your history and not take it with you. I just wanna leave the past. In the past. Look, that's a great metaphor, but physiologically that is not the reality of how bodies work.

Your body takes all of your experiences with you wherever you go. So it doesn't mean you have to dumpster dive in every bad thing that's happened, but if you're noticing that you have some problems in an area, I would venture to guess there's probably some uncomfortable stuff we should probably examine.

Yeah.

SRini: Speaking of which Dan Pink had something really interesting to say about negative emotions when we had him here. And I wanted to bring back a clip. Tick, listen, we are over-indexed on positive

Britt Frank: emotions, and we've been taught somehow that you should always

SRini: be positive. You should always think positive that you should vanish, that you should banish the negative, that you should always look forward and never look backward.

And here's the thing, that's a really bad idea, but it comes from a decent place because what we know is that positive emotions are enormously important. You wanna have positive emotions. There are benefits to optimism. There are, you want to have more positive emotions than negative emotions. But the thing is, we've gone too far in saying that you should only have positive emotions.

And that negative emotions, particularly our most common negative emotion regret is somehow dangerous. That it weakens you. I wanted to hear your take on that, given what you just said. If

Britt Frank: I didn't have a mic in front of me, I'd be screaming like, yeah, this works so much. And it's true. It's. Getting rid of the positive and the negative altogether.

Let's just look at what's true. Because if you're rah rah positive at the expense of your pain, then you're lying to yourself. If you're, oh, I'm an EOR, and I'm spinning in the negative, then you're ignoring the reality of your resources, which is also bad. So rather than even trying to focus on positive or on negative, I like to just look at it as what's true, like what is true.

And if you look at the context of your life, the container, if you look at it from a bird's eye view, it is really unlikely for most people. Especially people who are listening to this podcast that you're only going to find good things and it is equally unlikely that you are only going to find bad things and confirmation bias.

We know we're gonna seek out what we believe and then attach our stories to that. But if you can look at what is true, you're gonna find things like sadness and pain and regret, and you're gonna find things like feeling connected and feeling awe and inspired and feeling passionate and creative and joyful is really unlikely if you take an honest inventory of your life that you're gonna come up with just one thing.

So I love his work so much. So I fully Two thumbs up to that. Yeah,

SRini: you, the other thing you said in this section was that the goal of therapy or any inner work is not to change yourself. It's to know yourself and then to conduct your inner orchestra with skilling compassion. We often think of self-compassion as the practice sing.

Nice. It's funny because I feel like so many of us go to therapy with this idea that we need to fix something. And I think that was one of the reasons. That I liked Sasha so much and now it makes complete sense as to why you had her write the forward to your book. Because I remember something that she said that, that really stood out to me.

She said, my job is not to fix you. She's you're already good. My job is to make you great.

Britt Frank: I love that. And yeah, we both come from a similar framework. We approach our work differently, but I love her work because she also sees humans as inherently capable and inherently not good.

It's not a good, bad thing. It's if you know how to know yourself, that means you're not going to be driven by your unconscious, young said, until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. So you will be co, you can go from good to great when you're not tripped up by all these unconscious forces.

You can go from great to super great when you know how to contain uncomfortable feelings without running away from them. And so I really, and I think therapists largely get seduced by this idea that their job is to fix people. People ask me all the time, how do you listen to, all this pain and all this stuff without, going crazy?

And it's my job isn't to fix people because I don't see them as broken. My job is to help them organize these pieces, give them information and then they can do or not do with the information, whatever they choose. And so people don't need to be fixed. They need to be assisted and helped and encouraged.

But I don't fundamentally believe people are broken. And I say this as someone who is diagnosed with severe mental I illness and I still take meds. None of this is a call to stop meds. Meds are great. I take meds the same reason I wear shoes cuz life is easier to walk around in when I'm wearing shoes or when my brain is medicated.

So fine. But that does not mean that I'm broken. It just means, this particular pathway is going left when I want it to go. That's, obviously metaphorical. But people aren't broken and I need to be fixed. If someone is coming into my office and that's their orientation, the entire therapy is screwed from the jump because they've already lost track and completely lost connection with their inherent capacity.

Like not all people do good things and not all people might. They the whole nature of goodness and evil, like I don't even touch that. . But generally for the most part, with the outliers taken outta the equation, people are capable of a lot more than they give themselves credit for and are capable of a lot more than we give themselves credit for.

I've had parents come to me with their adult children and they're like, I don't

,

understand, those failure to launch syndrome and whatever. And I'm like, because you treat them like they're broken when you pay all their bills and you take them on your vacations and you have a 30 year old who can't hold a job and can't do this or that, it's because you ch continue to see into them as broken versus looking into them as whole.

People who may need a little help or information or encouragement or assistance. But we don't need fixed people. I am not in the fixing people business.

SRini: Let's talk about boundaries. Speaking of parents, , I really love the way that you broke down the idea of boundaries, conflict language and conflict contracts.

And then I thought to myself, yeah, I have no idea how this would ever work with my mom in her world. It's either her way or no way. Yeah, so that, that's our conflict contract with my mom is to avoid it, is what my dad and I have decided.

Britt Frank: I come from a very long Island Jewishy family, and when I learned about boundaries, this is so funny.

I was so excited. I was like, oh my gosh. I have discovered the secret sauce to relationships. And I was so excited. At that point, I was still very enmeshed with them. Yeah. And I said, I learned about this boundary thing, and my father says to me, Boundary is the most disgusting word a child can ever say to a parent.

I was like, okay. And scene this. These aren't . Nope. Okay, got it Noted. Yeah, you need to have a willing partner for conflict contracts and conflict language. Those are a relational strategy. Assuming two people are consenting. If you don't have a consenting partner for a conversation, then it'll be on you to figure out where your lines are and how to set and enforce them.

SRini: Yeah. I had a friend I was talking to India once about this. We were having dinner, we were talking about boundaries, and I, we were talking about previous relationships and I said, if I found one common pattern between all my relationships, it was a lack of boundaries.

, and we both had this sort of moment of yet, but the first time you ever express a boundary, it's like the most terrifying thing because especially if it blows up in your face, where the other person gets pissed off. So how do you do this in a way that you hold your ground.

I like I remember I finally got to the point where I was like, okay, this is a boundary. Like I, I had this girl I was dating who was just really mean to me on the phone. And I didn't talk to her the next day. And then, when she called on Sunday, I was like, you know what, we need a boundary here.

None of what you said the other night is acceptable and it's not, that's not okay. Ultimately it didn't work out, but whatever that's for whole host of other reasons. But, with that in mind how do you do this in a way that doesn't just feel, like it's gonna, I think we're all afraid because particularly in relationships, I think there's always this feeling that if I set this boundary, express this boundary, the relationship will end

Britt Frank: and real talk.

Sometimes that happens, and this goes back to what we were saying about contending with the unpleasant and uncomfortable realities of our lives. There are many times where once you set a boundary, a relationship, Is going to end. And that is unfathomable for some people, particularly when we're talking about things like parents or spouses or siblings.

It's really tragic. And that's where I'm really big on grief work being a very necessary part of whatever change you're trying to make, whether it's relationally or whatever else. But the reality is for sometimes in, with some people setting a boundary, no matter how gentle, no matter how appropriate, no matter how skillfully you execute, it is going to create a state where the relationship is no longer available in any form.

And that's sad and that's reality. So the answer to your question is, how can you do this and preserve the relat? The hit the answer is you can't. You just need to hope that the person that you're, people who are safe, who genuinely want the relationship to work, might be hurt by your boundaries, but they'll understand them, particularly if you're setting a boundary from a, boundary.

I say this in the book, boundaries are not about dominating a person. They're about preserving the relationship. And so your intent with it isn't to shame them or control them or force them to do something. A boundary is a way of saying, I care about you enough that I really want this relationship, but here's my line where I'm no longer willing to cross it because I can't betray myself and abandon my myself and hope this relationship continues to work.

But the loss of relationship is one of the reasons that it's one of the hidden benefits. Keep people stuck because if you set boundaries, you are guaranteed to lose relationships. Now that said, once you learn how to set boundaries with healthy people, they're beautiful for preserving relationships cuz that's boundaries stave off resentments.

They stave off a lot of things because when you know who you are and what you're about and what hurts you and what you're okay with, then you can stand your ground. And boundaries also don't have to be a hammer. I was a little zealous with my boundaries when I learned them. I'm like, this is my boundary.

And sometimes you can use like a match to light a candle. You don't need to use a blow torch to light a candle. But you can ask yourself when you're setting them, what, how strong of a boundary is needed here and be ready to contend with the reality that yeah, it could end the relationship and that is unfortunate.

SRini: Speaking of relationships, let's talk about love and friendships and then finish this up by talking about family. I think the thing that I really appreciated was you said that, projection bonding is the thing that happens when you're attracted to the qualities other people have, but you think you lack.

And you go into these three Ds of fr friend finding where, you say differentiating between movie relationships and real relationships. defining the roles we want our partners to play in deconstructing toxic fairy tales that keep us stuck. And that fairytale thing is something that I have probably come across in damn near every book that mentions anything about relationships.

And I remember, I think it was in Emily Fletcher's book how to Stress Us An Accomplish More. She said The three most toxic words to ever come out of Hollywood are you complete me

Britt Frank: so bad. So bad. And it's so true. And again, I'm not a downer. I love a good love story. I love a good fantasy. But the problem is that these relational things that we see portrayed in fiction are in no way reflective of reality.

I call it relational porn. I'm like, yeah, that looks great, doesn't it? That looks awesome, but that's not actually how it works in real life. One of the things being you complete me like that one just speaks my blood boil or Romeo and Juliet were 13 and Beauty and the Beast is a Stockholm syndrome situation.

And you can diagnose almost every fairytale romance with a real pathological problem. But the reality of intimacy in our current human state is it doesn't look anything like that. And that's. And that does I'll, a very simple example is my husband and I don't sleep in the same room. It's not cuz we don't like each other, it's because both of us being half unconscious together, being pissy because I steal the covers and he snores and duh.

That means we both wake up unrested and resentful. And so we sleep in separate rooms. And that horrifies people when they learn that , like it is truly disruptive. Like I have ca I can't even tell you how many people clutch at their pearls and they're like, oh you don't flavor the same roof. It's no.

And our relationship works really well with that particular product. I'm not saying everyone needs to do that, but I don't share well with others at night. Why should we shouldn't have to. But pop cultures tells us that it's even called sleep divorce, which is a terrible way to describe it.

It's not that deep. It's, we sleep in separate rooms cuz good night's sleep is important for relationships and we don't get a good night's sleep in the same bed. Okay. But all the fairytale romances don't actually portray that. Or if we wanna be cheeky, sex on the beach is always portrayed in movies as this romantic thing.

But if you've ever done it, it's like really unpleasant , no. You can separate and differentiate the fantasy from the reality by not feeling bad when the reality doesn't mirror the fantasy. Because not only will it not, it shouldn't.

SRini: Yeah. think that was like such an issue for me for a long time.

I thought things would play out the way they do in the movies. And then I was like, you know what? If you stand outside of some girl's window with a boombox playing Peter Gabriel, you're gonna get arrested. She's not gonna fall in love with you. Yeah. Yeah. For anybody listening who doesn't get the reference Yeah.

You're too young. .

Britt Frank: It's such a good movie though. Yeah, but it's true. And this idea of infatuation Twilight, forget You Complete Me. The whole Twilight series, like that one just makes me claw my face a little bit because that's in infatuation and boundaries cannot coexist. You cannot have infatuation and also maintain healthy boundaries.

And so this, I want these marathon dates that people go on, and I did it too, and I get it because the marathon dates feel really good and they're fun, but like cocaine feels really good and it's really fun too, until it's not. Yeah. So your brain can only handle an hour and a half on a first date and we're not taught that it should be, se we talked on the phone all night and we watched the sunrise. I'm like, that's infatuation. And that's like turning your brain and your brain into spring break cocktail party mode. And that's not good.

SRini: Yeah. No I, you. I completely relate because I remember we had Daniel Lieberman who wrote the molecule of More, and he was talking about dopamine, and he made this distinction between compassionate love and companion love.

And he's you know that butterfly feeling that you had at the beginning of relationship, that's inevitably gonna go away. And a lot of people don't realize that.

Britt Frank: And the butterfly feeling is like your body diverting blood to your extremities to prepare it, to get away from a lion. Like sometimes the butterfly thing is a sign from your nervous system that this person is not good for you.

But when we mistake intensity for attraction and intimacy, then we wonder why we wake up the next morning in bed with a lion. It's no, just because you feel attraction and butterflies, that could mean that your nervous system is in a state of disarray, not in a state of, I have now found my person.

It's tricky. . It's very

SRini: tricky. Let's finish up by talking about two final things. You say that we all come from dysfunctional families. Dysfunctional family is not a category, it's a continuum. I appreciated that so much. I thought to myself, yeah, I, I realized it was like every family is dysfunctional to varying degrees.

Britt Frank: , it's not a sh it's not, I'm not shaming people and I'm not equating people, but there's just no way that there's such a thing as a normal or healthy or fully functional family system. Every family has their stuff. Every single one. That's why I love the Adams family, because they are weird, but their dynamics are spot on.

Like they nailed it on every single level. Yeah.

SRini: This final line, I think was one of the things that was probably, I would say my favorite line of the book. You said you don't need readiness. You only need willingness as you shift out of stuff, expect to encounter discomfort. And the reason I think this struck me so much is I see this with people who say they wanna do some sort of creative project, they wanna write a book, they wanna do this other thing, and they have this sort of Mythical date in the future when they think they're going to be ready to do this thing why is that?

And how do they stop believing in that mythical date when they'll

Britt Frank: supposedly be ready? So the, I'm going to start when is a very tempting fantasy because we know that when you're fantasizing about a future outcome, you get a little bit of a dopamine rush from doing it. It's I'm thinking about it and I'm talking about it.

So my brain thinks it's happening and that gets me just high enough that I can continue putting off the thing. Cuz again, there are the benefits to not doing the thing and there are the stories and the narratives, but this, I must take a big step and I will do this project when. That's a narrative that keeps everybody stuck.

It's, you don't need to be ready, you don't need to feel like it, you don't need to be motivated. You just need to start doing it. And I'm a big fan of the mi I call it the micro. Yes. It's like in the same zone as the Atomic Habits ideology. . It's if you're going to start writing your novel next Tuesday, what's a micro yes you can do today?

It might be you get out a notebook and put it on your nightside table. If you want to launch a business, next month, what's a micro yes, you can say yes to today. Because as long as you keep giant outcomes and goals in your mind, you're not going to start saying yes to things and saying yes is what gets the momentum for these things to get completed.

Thinking about it, feeling like it, being ready to do it is not only is that not necessary, but that idea is completely counterproductive. So instead of what do I wanna do when it's, what can I say yes to today, no matter how small, like the teeniest, tiniest yes, is still a yes and those compounds.

SRini: It's funny, Ryan Holiday told me that he never talks about a book until he's finished with it.

, uh, and if you look at his Instagram feed, you'll notice when it comes to his books, the only thing you ever see about his books are the finished manuscripts. , when he submits them. . Now you've given me the scientific explanation for why .

Britt Frank: It's very smart, because when you're talking about the thing and you're fantasizing about the thing, you are gonna use up all your brain bandwidth that you need to actually do the thing.

So yes, set goals, but then, put the goal on the shelf, forget about it, and find where are your yeses, because those little, and then don't talk about your yeses. Keep it close to your chest, because again, when people have well-meaning feedback, they could be discouraging accidentally. It's like you don't want to share these little brain seeds until they can stand on their own, so to speak.

SRini: This has been awesome. You've packed this with so many valuable nuggets and insights. So I have one final question for you, which is how we finish all of our interviews at the unmistakable creative. What do you think it is that makes somebody or something unmistakable?

Britt Frank: What do I think? That's a good question.

What do I think it is that makes someone unmistakable? Self knowledge without shame?

SRini: Beautiful. Amazing. I can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us and share your story, your wisdom and your insights with our listeners. Where can people find out more about you, your work, the book, and everything else they're up to?

Thank

Britt Frank: you so much. So my website is science of stuck.com. I am unbounded on Instagram, so come say hi to me there. It's just at Brit, Frank and Brit has two t's and you can buy the book, the Science of Stuck Wherever books are Sold.

SRini: Amazing. And for everybody listening, we will wrap the show with that.

Britt Frank: 600,000 work hours and $4 million saved in one year, 15 times

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