Rowan Mangan:
Hi, Cahoot.

Martha Beck:
Hi, Cahootniks.

Rowan Mangan:
We’ve got a fun Bewildered episode coming up for you today, I must say.

Martha Beck:
Yep. It’s all about this part of your brain or this state of being that we call “control mode.”

Rowan Mangan:
Control mode. We’re going to talk about how it works and how it’s ruining the world.

Martha Beck:
Seriously. This actually, this episode was kind of a turning point for me in my life. I hope it is for you, too. Hi, I’m Martha Beck.

Rowan Mangan:
And I’m Rowan Mangan. And this is another episode of Bewildered. It’s the podcast for people who are trying to figure it out. Isn’t it?

Martha Beck:
Like the two of us, yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
Very much like us.

Martha Beck:
So Rowan Mangan, Gracious Badger herself. What are you trying to figure out at this particular time?

Rowan Mangan:
Well, I don’t think it’s right to air our dirty laundry in public, but I will. Listen, Marty, you put out this vibe into the world that claims to be all kind of creative and entrepreneurial, but what I’ve noticed is, and I’m sorry to just be raising this now, but as soon as I get out there and find a new way of supporting our family, you are so against it. Like vocally that I honestly believe it’s threatening our marriage.

Martha Beck:
What? Have I woken up in a crazy nightmare? What are you talking about?

Rowan Mangan:
Well, farming.

Martha Beck:
Oh, farming.

Rowan Mangan:
So I have begun farming as a side hustle, and some might say, “Oh, it’s not real farming because it’s just a computer game where you farm.” Well, let me tell you, it’s important, okay? And I plant. Guys, I till soil, I plant crops, I milk cows. You want to tell me that’s not farming?

Martha Beck:
As she lies on the couch with her head completely motionless, gazing into the little machine.

Rowan Mangan:
It is so offensive how utterly bored Marty is by my farming game. I’m like living out this off-the-grid fantasy, and she doesn’t even pretend to be interested. I tell her things about my day, about how I should do more fishing and how it’s nearly time to harvest the parsnips, and she doesn’t even, usually when I have an enthusiasm, she makes an effort to be interested. But you won’t even try.

Martha Beck:
I can’t see it. It’s tiny and invisible. But here’s the other thing is I can never tell in a conversation when farming will come up because you’re always farming, right?

Rowan Mangan:
That’s not true.

Martha Beck:
You are very diligent in your farming. I’m sure you’re farming right now. You have the little thingy, right? The PS9 or whatever they call it. Anyway, we’ll be talking and I’ll say something like, “You know in The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith had a really good point,” and you’ll say, “Yes, I know all about that. Oh my God, the chickens are dead!” And I’m like, okay, number one, is that a metaphor for what we’re meant to be talking about here? Because I have forgotten that you are farming because it’s a single important fact. Are you listening?

Rowan Mangan:
Okay.

Martha Beck:
You’re not farming.

Rowan Mangan:
How dare you?

Martha Beck:
You are not actually farming.

Rowan Mangan:
But actually, okay, so two things. No, I have three. I have three. What’s the word when you come back at someone?

Martha Beck:
Ripostes?

Rowan Mangan:
Ripostes, defenses. First of all, you are never freaking talking about Adam Smith, and that’s just, I don’t want to give the readers that. You’ll be much more likely to be like, oh my God, look at that beautiful Japanese swimmer on the television.

Martha Beck:
That’s true.

Rowan Mangan:
You’ll say pecs or something that I don’t understand.

Martha Beck:
Because everyone can see it. It’s on the television. There are pecs. It’s like the elephant in the room, pecs on the television, with enormous pecs, which they probably do because they have boobs like humans, two between their front legs. Breasts.

Rowan Mangan:
Please, please stay on topic.

Martha Beck:
Sorry. Sorry.

Rowan Mangan:
All right. Second point. I would never kill my chickens. And so I have never said the chickens are dead because I would never do that. Third point.

Martha Beck:
A weasel did it. I never said you did it. That’s a weasel, did it.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s a lie. There are no weasels in this game.

Martha Beck:
Well, if there are no weasels inside your little P310 or whatever, then it’s just, I mean, they’ve got to take that farming game back because there are weasels in real farming. I happen to know this.

Rowan Mangan:
So—

Martha Beck:
That’s literally true.

Rowan Mangan:
So I’m not going to say the name of the game unless they contact me on the DL and try to get us, like they want to be official sponsors. So I’m not going to say the name of this game. I will say it has no weasels. But I do just want to say one thing real quick about a concern that I’m having inside my farming life. So I was worried that I accidentally kind of inadvertently sexualized my goat because I tried to—

Martha Beck:
Wait, wait, wait. This is just one of those sentences that I want to take back to Jane Austen’s time and just lay it on ’em, “I’m worried that I inadvertently sexualized my goat.” This is what we will talk about in the future, Jane Austen, inadvertently sexualizing goats.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh yeah, like they weren’t sexualizing goats back then. They were just doing it.

Martha Beck:
Not inadvertently. They meant to.

Rowan Mangan:
They were doing it advertently. So I was really horrified because I didn’t realize it was the baby, and I accidentally brushed up against it and it thought I was trying to milk it, and I was like, “I’m not milking you, you’re just a baby.” So I was really hoping I hadn’t traumatized it. And so then when, the next day when I went back, one of the things you have to do if you’re a farmer—you wouldn’t understand, but I explain to the listener— is that you have to pet all your farm animals every day or else they stop producing milk or eggs or whatever. So you have to give them a little.

Martha Beck:
This is well known in Big Agro.

Rowan Mangan:
And anyway, so I went over to the baby goat the next day, very careful not to hit the button that might milk it, but to hit the button that would just, and this big love heart came up over the baby goat to me when I did that. And I thought, “Oh my God, now I’ve confused it and I’ve confused it about what our relationship is.” And anyway, I just wanted to get that out of my system. I’m trying to figure it out.

Martha Beck:
I’m so proud of you. I was just going to say that you’ve been very vulnerable and very real just now. That is so real. Even though none of it is freaking real now. I love you.

Rowan Mangan:
I still love you too. What are you trying to figure out?

Martha Beck:
Speaking of inadvertently doing things to kids.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh boy.

Martha Beck:
Because a baby goat is a kid, yeah? I have been worried because I let our daughter, Lila, who is three, watch part of a YouTube program that is supposed to be, I mean, it’s nice, it’s sweet. It’s cartoons and it’s songs. It’s all songs set to common childhood tunes like “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” But they do danger education in these songs. It’s very strange because for some reason they always get these wonderful singers who have very, very thick accents that I can’t identify. Anyway, I can’t imitate the accents because they are otherworldly, I think it might be AI.

Rowan Mangan:
I think it’s Australians.

Martha Beck:
Could be, but they lay some heavy shit on kids. So the other day it was like, “Look, look, everything is shaking, things are falling down. Oh, it’s an earthquake. I am very, very, very scared.” They also don’t do great lyrics. And then it’s like, “Run, run, run to the park, always protect your head, crouch in any place you like. And remember a crevice could open underneath you anywhere.” And I was like, am I glad she knows this?

Rowan Mangan:
Marty, is this one of those things where you think you’re on YouTube Kids, but actually she’s watching these crazy snuff films using the SpongeBob characters that someone’s made and thinking that it’s Kids TV? Because this sounds like it might be one of your little boo-boos.

Martha Beck:
I think they were genuine. I mean, it went right from potty training to that. And then it’s like, “Always do what mommy says.” And the next one is, “Now we’ll be covering landslides.” It’s like they mix it all up and they’re trying to make it seem gentle, but they are laying some heavy truths on these kids. But there are earthquakes, there are mudslides. Probably it’s great that she knows to run to the park, which is 20 miles away while protecting her head and not letting and jumping crevices as they open beneath her.

Rowan Mangan:
But do you think this is part of why the other day she spontaneously started singing, “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star? How I wonder what you do for money?”

Martha Beck:
I don’t know.

Rowan Mangan:
I think we’re here doing a podcast and our daughter’s being brainwashed by the culture.

Martha Beck:
Oh for sure.

Rowan Mangan:
In the same instant.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, I don’t know. Here’s the thing, Ro, whether I don’t show it to her, whether I do show it to her, I’m trying to control her.

Rowan Mangan:
Hey, I sense a segue!

Martha Beck:
Segue to topic! That doesn’t happen every day.

Rowan Mangan:
We’ll be right back with more Bewildered. We don’t say this enough. We are so glad you’re a Bewildered listener and we’re hoping you might want to go to the next level with us. By which I mean if you rate and review the podcast, it helps new people find us so we can keep Bewildering new souls and you know how much we love that. Ratings are very much appreciated. Obviously, the more stars you give us, the more appreciation is forthcoming. Reviews are quite simply heaven, and we read everyone and exclaim over them, and we just love you all.

Rowan Mangan:
So Marty, today’s topic we’re talking about why staying in control will, let’s just say it, ruin everything. Right?

Martha Beck:
Everything. Yes. And that’s a strange thought because being in control is kind of considered a good thing culturally in our particular culture. And I think it’s true of individuals inherently probably, but it’s also magnified culturally in incredibly intense ways. We all want to control all sorts of things. We want to control our health. We want to control our children. Yeah, will they grow up happy? We can control that, so we say. Yeah, we want to control the government, we want to control the weather, we want to control it all.

Rowan Mangan:
Right, and so— sorry.

Martha Beck:
No, I was just going to say staying in control of all those things would be beyond anyone. And the fact is you really can’t anyway, but we all try. We all try.

Rowan Mangan:
Because the culture is all about control. And because it is constantly infiltrating us like some sort of dodgy metaphor that I shouldn’t go into. Because we are the culture, and so we go into this control mode and it suits our psychology. So we wanted to talk about what is this “control mode” in our brains, and why is it going to ruin everything?

Martha Beck:
Yeah, it’s going to ruin everything. So the first point that’s pretty obvious is that trying to be in control—no, I guess it’s not obvious because we really are given the impression from media, from school, from everything—

Rowan Mangan:
YouTube Kids.

Martha Beck:
YouTube Kids. Yes, you can control your child’s safety in an earthquake by telling them to run to the park and crouch. I remember when they used to have us go under our desks in the event of a nuclear bomb strike. I am old enough that I really was asked in first grade to get under my tiny little child desk in case there was an atom bomb falling. Can I just say, you can’t control the effects of an atom bomb by getting under your desk. I’m glad it’s, sorry, this is going off in a very dark direction, but what I’m trying to say is almost nothing that we try to control is actually under our control. And even if we do manage to take control of it sometime, two noble truths of Buddhism—death and impermanence—everything is going to change anyway. And reality is fundamentally beyond our ability to control. So trying to go into control mode or going into control mode is simply a recipe for stress. We’re trying to do the impossible and we’re trying it in a very clenched sort of way.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, yeah, totally. I mean, I just think about waking up and trying to control a day.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. No kidding.

Rowan Mangan:
I don’t know if you’ve seen that meme, but it’s like a screenshot from an email and it just says it’s easily the most relatable email I’ve received, and the subject line is “Need to postpone. Hi Rachel. I have lost control of the day.” And I just feel like I should put that on my email as an auto-reply because it’s always the case. Take today, the only time we have to do this podcast at the moment is a Sunday afternoon because our weeks are so jammed that it doesn’t happen. Last night I got no sleep because an aforementioned and frequently oft-sighted small person lives with us, also not a great sleeper. Then the babysitter that I have hired forgets to come so that we can do the podcast. All these things. I was controlling our ability to do this podcast by hiring a babysitter. “It’s under control.” Then inevitably, we log on and the tech issues, which I complained about before, I’m not going to go into it, don’t worry. I know it’s not interesting content. And then the ultimate not controllable is my mood when all these things come together, and that’s what I’m stressed out about is myself and my self-presentation is perhaps the least controllable thing that I have in my life. So anyway, I can’t control a day.
But I really love, you were talking about, I mean, I think you might’ve even mentioned it before, but it’s such a great example, is that you’re watercolor painting and how control is like a recipe for disaster with watercolor, right?

Martha Beck:
Watercolor is such a brutal taskmaster. Taskmistress. Yes. We have a deep love/hate relationship. I love it and it hates me. And the thing is, it triggers all your need to go into control mode because I’m a very perfectionistic painter and I can be quite literal, and I’m trying to be less literal, dammit and looser and more fun. That’s why I am doing watercolor. So you’re just supposed to sort of splash color onto a page and just let it do what it does. It’s a wash, man. You just put water and then pigment and it goes where it wants to go.

Rowan Mangan:
But it also goes exactly where you want it to go.

Martha Beck:
It does not go where I want it to go. And there are all these things you do that I know, I know from the toes of my feet to my head as opposed to my fingers, which are the toes of the hands.
I know from the toes of my hands and the toes of my feet. You can’t freaking control a wash. You have to let it do what it wants to do. But no, these are the things I, oh, I’ll just drop a little pigment in there. Oops. It’s already dried a little bit. So now I get weird shapes. No, that looks bad. Let me try to, I’ll dip a paper towel in water and smudge it a little. No, it’s even worse now. Okay, well then get it to the point where it’s going to look good. Now, dry it, dry it, dry it with a hair dryer. Oops, you just killed all the pigment and blew the color off to one side. And the thing is, I’ve been doing it for so long and I still want to control it, and I know it always ruins it, and I get tighter and tighter and I start making little tiny washes because they’re easier to control. But that’s not what watercolor is for. Sorry. Those of you who do not do watercolor or have any interest in it, you can see just how tempestuous my relationship with my creative work really is.

Rowan Mangan:
But it’s such a great example to me because it shows this weird kind of paradoxical thing where this idea of us having a control mode in our brains. When we’re in it, we can’t make shit good. And yet the whole point of control mode is “This is the only way I can make shit good.”

Martha Beck:
Exactly.

Rowan Mangan:
And so it’s such a funny thing, and I think it’s one of these, I mean, everything, I guess, that we talk about is about trying to find where the culture has infiltrated us and change it in ourselves so that we can then fractal that back out to the culture. So where are we with the culture and control mode? What does the culture say?

Martha Beck:
What you just said was perfect. It says, “If you can control stuff, then all of the shit will come out right.” That is the conventional wisdom. “Oh, you’ve got to get control of your people. Oh, you’ve got to get control of your children. You’ve got to get control of your impulses. You’ve got to get control of your whatever. You’ve got to get control.” Why? Because control ensures a good outcome.

Rowan Mangan:
Right, but not a beautiful one. Thinking about your watercolor, you get these tiny little washes and suddenly your painting doesn’t look alive.

Martha Beck:
Think about a relationship that is based on total control of the other person. It might look flawless, but if you’ve ever been in such a relationship, the more someone tries to control you—and it’s not just romance, it’s work, it’s parenting, it’s everything—the more someone tries to control you in order to make things work right, the more you want to do very bad things to them. To escape them, is what I’m saying, to escape them. And it does not lead to a good relationship.

Rowan Mangan:
It doesn’t have life. It takes the life. It takes the joy, the joy, the life, the creativity, the beauty.

Martha Beck:
But our culture, as I often say, is coming from this very left-hemisphere-dominated perspective where the left hemisphere wants to only count things it can measure and make progress that’s visible and be able to exert force. Like, I’m sorry, I have to say it, Max Weber, father of sociology, and he said we’re all after power, and power is— he measured it by being able to make people do things against their will. And people want that power, even though it breaks everything. So every time—

Rowan Mangan:
Case in point, before we started this recording, I said to you, in an attempt to control you, “Please, for the love of goddess, could we not mention Max Weber on today’s podcast?”

Martha Beck:
See? It did not work.

Rowan Mangan:
I know it didn’t work. And you know what, Marty? Our podcast is more beautiful because you brought him in again.

Martha Beck:
Thank you. I’m not in control of the times that I mention Max Weber. It comes through me. I’m basically channeling Weber.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s kind of like how you’re always talking about Adam Smith at the dinner table.

Martha Beck:
I do have a son named Adam. Who do you think I named him after? No, I did not. No. My point is that anytime I notice I’m in control mode, like trying to control the direction of this conversation, it’s a red flag that I’m stuck in this mindset that I’ve been fed by the culture and that I feed back out into it. By the way, I tried to influence other people my whole life, and that is a massive red flag, people.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Okay, so here’s the thing. Control kills joy. And it takes courage, like I don’t want to underestimate how much courage it takes for us to let go of control or defy control because that’s a massive step, but it’s an interesting thing to note that there’s a kind of algorithm there which says, therefore it takes courage to get back to joy. And the courage is to take the leap of faith that says, “What if I don’t try to control this moment?” Maybe then the joy, the life, the beauty. And so I defy our own tendency towards control for this exact reason. But it’s also because— I was kind of hinting at this before—we want things to work well in our lives, and this leads to problems that come up that we need to solve.

Martha Beck:
As they say in Asia, the obstacles do not block the path. The obstacles are the path.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s so weird because I could have sworn what they said in Asia was, “Look at my enormous pecs.”

Martha Beck:
They say that right after they say what I just said. And look at my enormous pecs. You’re getting me distracted.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s so weird how they become Russian.

Martha Beck:
Isn’t there a chicken you should be petting right now?

Rowan Mangan:
I already petted it.

Martha Beck:
Oh, now it’s getting all sexual and weird. There are a bunch of problems in the path, whether you are farming in a tiny machine or whether you’re in a relationship or whether you’re trying to do a freaking watercolor painting. And when you encounter a problem, you get tense. You get afraid. And the instinct that comes up—and this is not just cultural, it’s part of our instinctive patterns—is that when we see something that makes us afraid or tense, we go into control mode.

Rowan Mangan:
Right, yes.

Martha Beck:
And sometimes that works. You see a massive spider coming at you, you squish it, and the spider is—sorry.

Rowan Mangan:
You get a glass, you get an envelope, you take it outside and release it peacefully, Martha Beck.

Martha Beck:
You take it, you put it on a plane, you send it back to Australia, where it came from.

Rowan Mangan:
Okay, I hope that spider’s not a metaphor for me.

Martha Beck:
Anyway. Oh, honey. Anyway, sometimes, actually, controlling works. You wake up at the wheel of the car and you take control of the car again, that’s great. But sometimes some problems require us to do things we’ve never done before. The problem of climate change right now, or the problem, any problem you’ve never had before. The problem of aging, everybody ages, but the major emotion people feel when they age? Surprise. We didn’t know that was going to happen. So how do I control these bat flaps that are growing on my upper arms? We get controlling about things that we’ve never encountered before, and we have reached a point where everything we know how to do does not work. And I’m going to quote my beloved friend Sonya Alar again. She says, it’s like when you’re—”In making love, here is some advice. If what you’re doing isn’t working, don’t do it harder.” So when we get to a problem and we’re scared and control isn’t working, we try to control more. What we need in order to address these unprecedented problems is creativity. It’s the only place where we can find solutions we’ve never tried before is creatively.

Rowan Mangan:
Right.

Martha Beck:
But control mode kills creative mode, flat dead.

Rowan Mangan:
So if it’s climate change or it’s making a watercolor, all the triggers inside us and in the culture around us, which is kind of the same thing, say stay in control. That literally cannot coexist with creativity at the same moment. You cannot both be creative, which means able to solve unprecedented problems or able to create unprecedented beauty, which is kind of the same thing.

Martha Beck:
I love that.

Rowan Mangan:
From control mode we cannot do it. So again, there’s that leap, that courageous leap we need to take to be able to get to the place of creativity.

Martha Beck:
We have to jump somehow from control mode into creativity mode. So what can we do, Roey Ro, to come to our senses?

Rowan Mangan:
Let’s get to that in just a minute.

Martha Beck:
So we’re talking about making a leap from culture, which is control mode, or at least where culture very strongly encourages control mode, all the way to nature, which is creative mode. Nature is continuously creating. And those two things are so discrete we can’t ooze from one thing to the other. We can’t tiptoe over there. It is by nature, in the brain, a leap to a different way of operating.

Rowan Mangan:
That is so true. And not to be too repetitive, but it is that caveat of you have to be brave to do this. It won’t happen without an active leap because this one, especially this control one, it’s got its claws in us deep, deep, and the culture outside us and the tendencies of our own psychology reinforce each other. So it’s strong as shit. But as we get brave, we can also get ready to be much happier, right?

Martha Beck:
Yeah, and it sounds great in theory, but I’ve had people say to me, “What do you mean get brave? I’m not brave.” But what they mean is “I’m not without fear. I don’t feel fearless.” And so we wait to feel safe. We try to force things to make us feel safe. And this is where we start to control everything. Now I have to control everyone in the world so that I can feel safe, and I have to control my own mind so I can feel safe. Guess what? You can never control anything enough to feel safe. But even when you don’t feel safe, you can act with courage. Even if you do it like shaking, sweating, vomiting on your shoes. Everything I’ve ever done in my life that is even moderately interesting—

Rowan Mangan:
Has been done with vomit on your shoes.

Martha Beck:
Yes. So scared. Always vomiting in the shoes. So I mean, I’m not tooting my own kazoo. It is just, I’m afraid of everything. So I go down to breakfast, it takes courage. Every single day I have to force myself to act with, not force, that’s the control word. I have to encourage myself to act with courage, but I don’t feel safe. That’s a perfect time to act with courage, honey.

Rowan Mangan:
Right, and so even deciding to experiment with letting go of control mode takes courage. So our first step is to give ourselves credit if we’re willing to try, right?

Martha Beck:
Absolutely. Tons of credit.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Yeah. Lots of back pats. All right. So practical steps. How do we get there, Marty?

Martha Beck:
All right. This is where I just get all self-helpy. Okay. First of all, I talked about when I catch myself in control mode, it’s a big red flag. I don’t notice it when it first comes on, but after a while I realize, for example, and it helps to be doing an activity because it makes you notice what you’re doing. I noticed that, for example, my brush strokes, if I’m painting, are tight and jerky, my jaw is clenched, my head aches. I’m all hunched up. And I remember when I was skiing or doing martial arts where it’s very active, same thing: rigidity, tension, not breathing. So the body starts to be like crick-crick-crick. Eventually that’s going to get your attention. And then it’s time to check your thoughts to see if the tension you’re in is actually control mode. Because it could be that you’re grieving or something, or you need to switch your activities, it’s not necessarily control mode when you start to get all tight. You have to check your thoughts to see if it is.

Rowan Mangan:
So we want to learn to recognize what control mode might sound like in our own inner monologues. So for me, if I think about this, then this is just to start to recognize that’s what might be going on. So for me, if I notice myself thinking things like, “There’s no margin for error here.” Oh God, you always sound like you’re one of those voiceovers: “This summer, the tsunami to end all tsunamis. There’s no margin for error here. Rowan Mangan cannot afford to fuck this up this summer.” So if I am hearing myself say, “I can’t afford to fuck this up, there’s no margin for error here,” those are the kinds of things that for me, are my signals that, oh, hello, control mode.

Martha Beck:
I can barely breathe when you just say those things. So yeah, I think for me it was like, “This has to be perfect. This can’t go wrong, this can’t go wrong.” And oh, here’s the big kahuna: “I’m the only person who can make things okay. Yes, I, in my house in Pennsylvania, will make your life perfection, and nobody else can do it.”

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, that’s hilarious. Or can I give a little, just as a side note, I have a little hack for these. It’s not totally on topic, but I love, so you hear that voice, you get used to being able to separate yourself from the monologue voice, and then your voice says, “I can’t afford to fuck this up,” there’s this thing you can do where you go, “Really?” Like, “Or what?” Like, what would actually happen if you fucked it up? “There’s no margin for error.” “Are you sure there’s no margin for error on formatting this Word document? Are we sure? Are we totally sure?” And you can kind of bring that tone to it as well. Anyway, my hack is to just be like, “Hmm, really? Really?”

Martha Beck:
That’s so funny. I just sent in a manuscript after copy editing it. I mean, I was so tense by the end of the copy editing and everybody in line, the various editors and stuff, I could feel them all trying desperately to make things right. And I was like, there’s no margin for error. And now as you’re talking, it reminds me of a time that I sent off a manuscript just to get feedback from my editor. And the next thing I got back was a bound and published book, and it had actual notes to the editor inside the text. It was the ultimate in humiliation and failure. And nobody’s ever mentioned it. I don’t know what they think when they read that shit, but nobody’s said anything to me about it.

Rowan Mangan:
They probably think it’s super postmodern, where you’re like, “I don’t know if this is the best example. Do you think I should try something else?” And the reader’s like, “No, that works for me.”

Martha Beck:
“I feel so respected she’s actually asking.” So most things, in most cases, we exaggerate the amount of control we need to have and the dire things that will happen if we don’t do something perfectly. But for me, one of the real dichotomies that can help me say, “Oh, this is control mode” or “This isn’t” is: Is it coming from fear? Is it coming from love? Is the bottom breakdown. And you wrote a poem. A poem, yes.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, a Ro-em.

Martha Beck:
A Roem. Roem wrote a poem, and it didn’t always rhyme that well, but I’m a-rhyming. I know. No, you did this cool sort of half-rhyme thing that I can never do, but it was the assignment. It was for Liz Gilbert’s wonderful Substack called Letters From Love, where Liz writes letters to love, where am I? What do I do? And then sort of switches modes and becomes love and writes back to herself. And now she’s been inviting other people to do that. It’s amazing. You should check it out and definitely go to Rowan Mangan’s poem, which actually I think this is why I married you because you changed my life by saying things I don’t expect. So in Ro’s poem, love is trying to counsel a human who is trying to human, which is the hardest of the things. And so love is speaking very gently to the human.

And love says, and this is a quote, “You feel like the whole world’s about to tip over, but my hot take is these stakes literally could not be lower.” I didn’t know you’d written that. You recorded it, you read it out loud. And I was like, “Oh my God, my partner just became my guru here.” Because I was not expecting that. I was thinking, “You feel like the whole world’s about to tip over, but I will help you and save you and things will be all right.” In other words, control. Love is going to come take control, and then I’ll be okay. The mommy will come to my bedside and fix everything. But instead, love just turns it around and says, “There’s nothing serious going on here.” It’s from the perspective of love, whatever you’re worried about so much, it’s not that big a deal.

Rowan Mangan:
And that’s super zoomed out. It’s hard to access that “There are no stakes.” It’s not because that— so somewhere between the, “Are you absolutely sure there’s no margin for error?” and “The stakes couldn’t be lower” there are stakes that just have—

Martha Beck:
Things have stakes.

Rowan Mangan:
Where your vantage point is in the moment. And so what I was trying to do there was be from a really distant vantage point where our lives are just cute.

Martha Beck:
So if you can, sorry, if you can zoom out that far to the part of you that is just pure love. I mean, this is what I’ve been doing since I heard your poem. Even if I’m terrified about things that are really genuinely high-stakes for me, like loved ones dying, that kind of thing, if I can find the part of me that is just pure love and say, you know what? The stakes are still low compared to the totality of what is happening to you. You don’t really understand what’s happening to you. And I have no evidence, no material evidence that that is true. But boy, oh boy, when I give myself that message, all those symptoms of tension in my body disappear, and the frenzy and the panic, they just, they’re gone.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s so cool. Actually, it’s talking about that manuscript that you sent off. Somewhere in that manuscript, not the one that got published with the notes, the recent one that is being—

Martha Beck:
The more recent one.

Rowan Mangan:
—beautifully, beautifully edited. You talk about, there’s this section called “Calming the Creature,” which is about our own anxiety. And so maybe we need to be able to see this controlling part of us as just like a little creature, and then we can zoom out a little bit in order to be the person or the part to reassure that creature. Does that make sense?

Martha Beck:
Oh, I love that. Yeah. It’s like we think that control mode is this huge, “Oh, I will control everything. I am the hook. I am a monster.” And when you, I’m going to conflate some metaphors, but when someone pulls back the curtain, what you see is the little person sitting there with the levers or even something tinier, a little animal that is so desperate to control the world and has no, it’s too dimwitted. This little, the amygdala, this little part of your brain that’s very primitive, it tells you to control everything, and it’s kind of dumb, and it just doesn’t realize that not everything can be controlled. And so it’s in a panic. Nothing’s working for it. And maybe you just stop what you’re trying to do, your damn watercolor or whatever, the argument in your relationship, whatever, go get some time by yourself, your farming, farming, and find the anxiety creature inside of you, the little frightened animal, and just spend some time. I have people imagine that they have built a little pouch for their anxiety creature where it will feel safe. And every time it’s scared you, say, “Okay, honey, we’ll deal with the things, but you need to get in your pouch now. Get in your pouch.”

Rowan Mangan:
I want a pouch. Can I have a pouch? Actually, I have a weighted blanket. That’s my pouch.

Martha Beck:
But again, the reference to Australia, because don’t all Australians have pouches? Marsupials, right? You’re all marsupials.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. I just thought for a second you were referencing my C-section scar, but that’s my paunch, not my pouch. Yeah, yeah. Okay, sorry. Back on topic.

Martha Beck:
What’s your little creature?

Rowan Mangan:
My little creature is like a little mole.

Martha Beck:
Aww.

Rowan Mangan:
A little mole with its little wall. This is only for the YouTube watchers, the mole, which isn’t a marsupial, but in our imaginary world of mixed metaphors, my mole has a really nice soft pouch to climb into. And then we can all make our, it’s such a fun reframe to make this voice that sounds so scary and authoritarian and realize that it’s scary because it’s scared, and that you can bring kindness to the scare and then put it in a pouch, which is all any of us ever really wanted in the first place.

Martha Beck:
“There is no margin of error!” And then you’d pull back the curtain, it’s a tiny mole. “There is no margin of error.”

Rowan Mangan:
And you go, you want to get in this pouch?

Martha Beck:
Go in the pouch. Come on, get in the pouch.

Rowan Mangan:
You wanna get into the pouch? And then the mole goes, “Oh, okay, that sounds nice.”

Martha Beck:
“My name is Control Mode, and I will get in the pouch.”

Rowan Mangan:
“I get in the pouch now. Thank you. It’s a very soft pouch.”

Martha Beck:
I do this stuff. For reals. And then, okay, once I’ve sort of calmed down my brain by cuddling the creature, then somehow I have to activate the right hemisphere of my brain where the creativity lives, and I have to go all the way from tiny frightened mole in a pouch to a creative human being. And one thing always works for me, and that is to think of making something amazing, making it happen somehow. And not as in, I have a list of tasks that I must do, but just the beauty. I just call it “Picture beauty.” So all I have to do to help loosen myself up when I’m painting is go look at the works of great watercolor painters and imagine myself painting like that.

Rowan Mangan:
And you said make something amazing. And so I think the keyword “make” because that’s the toggling out of control mode and into creativity mode, which cannot coexist if the focus is on make.

Martha Beck:
So think of something wonderful that could happen, not necessarily a picture, but a conversation, a great meal, a walk in the woods, something that is pure beauty to you, or pure joy or pure communion. And then if you can, if you have a strong sense of imagination, picture it as much as possible. Yes, you’re just focusing on a cheerful fantasy. But isn’t that better than focusing on a disastrous fantasy? It’s still just fantasy. If you’re not a big imaginer, talk about it to people who get you. Find people who— do not talk about it to people who don’t get you. Oh God, do not talk about this to people who don’t get you. But when you find your folks, talk about it a lot. And just remember, this is not about totally giving up all will and agency and ability. It’s about balancing the creative part of the brain with the part that tries to control things.

Rowan Mangan:
Because that part’s never going away. Let’s be honest. It’s not, you’re not just going to be in some sort of dionysian like naked romp forever. I mean, sorry, I’ll speak for myself, Marty, but it’ll come back in and it does. It’s how we know to put milk on our cereal or whatever. It’s not. Yeah.

Martha Beck:
And I always go to my friend Jill Bolte Taylor’s wonderful book Whole Brain Living. I love that book, but I also love the way she lives. She’s a scientist who makes sculptures and stained glass windows and paintings and paddleboards around all the time. She’s not your typical scientist from a cultural perspective because she lives to keep her brain whole and balanced. And that’s what we’re going for, I think.

Rowan Mangan:
Totally. And I don’t want to bang on about this too much, but the reason that this is important is not just to make our lives kind of cuter or better or optimal or more functional or whatever. It’s because there was an episode we did where we talked about— it was called Change the Shape of Culture, I think—and it was about when we make these transformations in our individual selves, it feeds out and it changes the culture. In the same way that we inhale the culture, we exhale into the culture. And so it’s a two-way feedback system. And I want us to always remember that if we have that very cultural tendency to think of this as selfish stuff.

Martha Beck:
Mm-hm. You’re reminding me of Pema Chödrön.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, people say that to me all the time.

Martha Beck:
It’s because she’s a farmer at heart. She doesn’t actually farm, but I know that in her heart, she’s probably a farmer like you. No, she teaches this Tonglen practice, which is breathing in the pain and panic intention of the world, and if we give into that, we magnify it with our own personal panic, and then we breathe it back out, and we exaggerate the tension and the control mode in the culture as a whole. But in Tonglen, you breathe in tight, controlled, gnarly energy from all around you, and then within you, it transmutes, and you breathe out joy, creativity, compassion. And then you breathe in more of the control mode around you, and you transmute it, and you breathe it out to the world as joy, compassion, creativity.

Rowan Mangan:
Holy shit.

Martha Beck:
And you’ve changed the world just a little bit.

Rowan Mangan:
Wow. And honestly, I cannot, first of all, I want to do that as a meditation every day. That’s amazing. And what a great model for us all on our quest to…

Martha Beck:
Stay…

Rowan Mangan:
Wild!

Rowan Mangan:
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