Is mental health genetic, habit, or personality, and how can you improve or master it? Yeah, well, it’s all of those things. You know, you might say, well, it’s unfair that it’s genetic. Well, look, we all have different temperaments. Okay? There’s five dimensions of temperament: extroversion, that’s sensitivity and threshold for positive emotion; neuroticism, that’s sensitivity and threshold for negative emotion; agreeableness, that’s kind of maternal compassion and empathy versus a kind of tough, more individualized, what would you call it, decisiveness, yeah; good conscientiousness, that’s dutifulness, industriousness, and orderliness; openness, that’s creativity and interest in ideas.

Conscientiousness and creativity traits

If you’re conscientious, well, you’re orderly and industrious, but you can get excessive. And if you’re creative, well then you end up with purple hair and nose rings. And I did a study at Harvard in like 1994 when piercing and tattooing started to first emerge on the cultural landscape because we were trying to find out if it was a marker for psychopathology, which wasn’t obvious at that point, well, because it was a subcultural practice before that.

Tattooing, piercing, and creativity study

It was circus people and prisoners and so forth that were tattooed and who were pierced, and then it spilled into the mainstream, and we were curious—as I was in the psychopathology and personality sub-department in the Harvard Department of Psychology—and I worked with a colleague of mine, Jill Hully, and we never published this study. Many studies end up not published, but it was very interesting.

Creativity as predictor for tattooing and piercing

The best predictor of tattooing and piercing was just creativity. There’s no sign of assorted psychopathology except the psychopathology associated with creativity. And you might say, well, what’s that? 

Creativity and business

Well, try starting a business. The probability that you’re going to fail is extremely high. Most people who end up with a successful business have failed multiple times because it’s very hard to figure out what the market needs at this moment. It’s really hard, and so you’ll flail around trying to hit that target.

Book publishing statistics

It’s probably more like one in a thousand, and then 99.9% of books sell less than 200 copies. So you got a one in a million chance at best of writing a book that is going to be successful, you know. 

Creative achievements and rarity

And most of you probably haven’t written a symphony or even a song or a play, and you probably haven’t, you probably don’t dance, but some of you do, but I doubt if you’ve ever generated a truly original dance except by accident, and then generally people will just laugh about that.

Measuring creative achievement

So we studied creative achievement across a wide range of people. We had developed a 13-domain scale with eight levels of competence in each domain. So on the musical front, it would be, you know, I have no training or interest in this area to, you know, I’ve written original compositions that have been played internationally by major musicians.

Genetic and environmental factors in mental illness

So now that might visit you if you’re particularly unlucky, or you might fall into that if you’re incautious, but you generally don’t get an advantage without an attendant disadvantage. So that’s on the genetic front, and then there’s environmental variability for sure.

Early childhood behavior and neuroticism

You can take a neurotic child—the studies have already been done in this—so some children by let’s say two, although you can actually measure this by six months. So imagine you have a child in a room lab, and his or her mother is there, and the mother is sitting, and the child’s here, and then a little wheel robot is remote controlled by the experimenter.

Children’s reactions to new stimuli

Well, some kids will just run right over and engage with the robot, and other kids will hide behind their mother and then sort of peek out, and the ones who hide are higher in negative emotion, and then if it’s a baby-eating robot, they’re not dead, so that’s their strategy.

Variability in children’s behavior and safety

Whereas, you know, hey, your kids are going to go play with a strange dog at the playground, you know, or not, and sometimes that’s real fun, and sometimes it’s no fun at all, and sometimes it’s the, you know, kid who’s hiding behind his mother’s legs that doesn’t have his face torn off by the Pitbull. So there’s variability for a reason, you know.

Neurosis and later mental health risks

And then the more neurosis prone, the more kids more prone to negative emotion, they’re going to suffer from a higher proclivity for depression and anxiety later in their life, and that’s the price they pay for their threat sensitivity.

Encouraging exploration to reduce neuroticism

But if you take those kids and you really encourage them to explore voluntarily instead of facilitating their proclivity to hide themselves, you can tilt them up into the normal range for negative emotion, and those studies have already been done.

Limits and shifts in neuroticism traits

And so you’re never going to take a kid who’s really high in trait neuroticism and make them as low in trait neuroticism as someone, you know, at the 99.9th percentile genetically—you just can’t. Maybe you could do it if you did nothing else than train that child like 12 hours a day for 10 years, but you can shift people a fair bit.

Learning new skills despite temperament

And if you’re introverted, you can learn extroverted skills, and if you’re agreeable, you can learn to stand up for yourself, and if you’re unconscientious, you can learn to discipline yourself, although that’s a tricky one, because you usually don’t have the discipline to discipline yourself if you’re unconscientious.

Habit and psychotherapy for managing neuroticism

So, and then in terms of habit, well, you become what you practice, and so if you’re high in neuroticism, it’s going to take a lot of practice to get you all calmed down, but that’s what you do in psychotherapy with people all the time, because a large number of people who are in therapy have higher than average levels of negative emotion.

Helping people confront fears in therapy

And you make them, you help them become stronger, and the way you do that is by strategizing with them and encouraging them to confront the things that they’re afraid of and avoid, and avoiding, and they become more able and more courageous as a consequence of doing so, and you can shift people quite a lot doing that.

Universal mechanism of adaptation

And that’s what you do when you learn, and that’s how you teach kids, and it’s the universal mechanism of adaptation, and you try to speed that up in psychotherapy, and you can do that for yourself.

Overcoming obstacles in career challenges

You know, so maybe I’m, I have a client, and they’re being tyrannized at work, and they need to get another job, and to do that, they have to put the CV in order, and they’re embarrassed about their CV, and they don’t even want to open the file on their computer that contains their CV, which they haven’t looked at for 10 years, and which contains nothing but a record of their dismal failures in the past, as far as they’re concerned, and that’s a box that’s locked, that’s Pandora’s box with a dragon in it, and they don’t want to go anywhere near it, and no wonder, you know.

Taking small steps towards progress

But if they’re going to get another job, well, unless they get the resume together, they’re stuck under the thumb of their local tyrant, and that’s not a good deal.

And so often what you do with someone like that is you say, just print your resume, don’t even look at the bloody thing, just print it, turn it upside down, put it in an envelope, and bring it to the session the next week.

Gradual exposure and visualization exercises

And then the person will come back and say, you know, that task that we agreed on, because you have to agree on these things, I didn’t do it, I couldn’t even, I couldn’t even sit at the computer. So now, why, you tell me what happens. So imagine your office, okay, now you’re walking in. Now tell me what happens. You’re going to walk towards your computer. Just describe it. I first sat down. 

So what’s happening with your breathing? Shallow? Okay, so, so, so try to pay attention to your feet for a minute. Okay, they’re twitching. They’re twitching? Yes. Okay, so just try to let them kind of sit heavily on the floor. Okay, now pay attention to your calves and let them relax, and then you walk the person through their body, and you say, now pay attention to your breathing, just relax. Now, you don’t have to do this with people, but it’s a good thing for them to learn. Okay, now, so how are you feeling, by the way? Anyway, you’re feeling slightly better. I am feeling slightly better. Do you get more nervous? I, a shallow breath. Yeah, yeah, okay, okay, so now you, you get the point. Then you walk the person through turning on their computer and then opening up the dread folder and then reading the title of the horrible dragon resume, and then maybe opening it, and then you say that’s good enough for this week. And then maybe the person can go home and just open their damn resume, and then maybe they can print it out and bring it to you, and then maybe you can go through the subreptiles one by one, you know, and clean out the snakes.

Addressing gaps and shame in biography

So there’s a lacuna, there’s a hole in the account, in the autobiographical account, and chaos itself is looking through that with all that disorder and shame and malevolence lurking in the background, and no one wants to look at that. You think, well, you didn’t do a very good job between 2012 and 2013, and you’ve got a hole in your record, and, and, uh, we, right, right, and we need to do something about that now. And so, you know, how do we address that so that you have a coherent account of yourself? And look, this could take a good while, right, to put that all back together, that’s your whole path, to put that together in a manner that you could, that you could confidently bring forward to a new potential employer, but it’s worth it if you escape from tyranny and you now have a coherent account of yourself, and you’ve atoned for your past inadequacies, let’s say, and you’re ready to move forward.

Therapy, self-awareness, and life order

And partly what you do in therapy, and partly what you should do with yourself, is not hide all that in the fog, you know, so you know where you are, so you can figure out where you’re going, and then practice doing that, and then as you practice doing that, then that’s what you become, and that will lower your proclivity to negative emotion definitely as you put your life together. That’s why it’s useful to order your room. A chaotic room makes you anxious. Why? Like, you’d rather be anywhere else, and no wonder, because everything in the room is broadcasting chaos and disorder at you.

Organizing surroundings to reduce anxiety

So that’s another thing I used to do with my clients, a typical behavioral maneuver, which is if you’re anxious, organize your surroundings a bit, you know, simplify, declutter, organize bit by bit, order habitable, order the habitable order. That is good, all of that. It’s a recreation of the original Ed, metaphysically speaking, and you can do that very practically, and then you practice that, and that’ll sort you out, you know, assuming you’re not physically ill. And even then sometimes, you know, to the degree you can get yourself, yeah, right, together, yeah, you know, bit by bit you’ll even push physical illness into a bounce, not least because you decrease your stress response, and that’s fight or flight, and fight or flight stress response is in IIT your immune system, and so if you’re always in the state of chaos, your immune system is suppressed, and you’re far more likely to get to become ill.

Putting order in place of chaos

So you put order in place of accidental chaos, and everything snaps into place, and, uh, and is there anything better you can do than that? It’s, it’s, and there’s no limit to how much of that you can do, you know. You start locally, start with the things that are right in front of you, plenty of problems that are right within your grasp, you know, they might seem trivial to you, but they’re not because the things you do aren’t trivial, and that’s just where you have to start. And then, you know, once you got yourself kind of ordered locally, well then start making your relationships harmonious, and once you’re good at that, then you got a whole group of people around you that are behind you, and then you can expand outward from there, and there’s no end to that.