Martha Beck:
So Rowie?

Rowan Mangan:
Yes?

Martha Beck:
What are you trying to figure out?

Rowan Mangan:
Well, Marty, I had a pretty strong story, like locked and loaded, ready to go for today’s podcast of something I was trying to figure out about your son, my stepson, Adam Beck, a favorite of the listeners. Who doesn’t love an Adam Beck story? But I’m going to have to shelve that due to some pretty pressing business that you and I have at this moment. Something happened shortly before we began recording this podcast, and I wish to address it.

Martha Beck:
It’s best to do these things in public.

Rowan Mangan:
So I won’t say it was actual violence that you did to me, but it was adjacent to something like that.

Martha Beck:
I’m too weak.

Rowan Mangan:
Well, you found a way. Life finds a way.

Martha Beck:
Okay. How did I find a way?

Rowan Mangan:
I left my bag in the car. Important context for the listener. So I came into the studio in a really, really fraught position that never happens. I never let this happen. I had no lip balm on me.

Martha Beck:
But I had lip balm.

Rowan Mangan:
Or so I thought. You’re like, “Fear not. I have something that does that.” And let’s just be very clear. What is lip balm supposed to do? It’s supposed to slightly moisten your lips.

Martha Beck:
Balm your lips.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, it’s a balm.

Martha Beck:
Balm. Not a bomb. A balm.

Rowan Mangan:
A bomb. A bomb.

Martha Beck:
Lip “bomb” must be painful.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s a baaaalm. But a balm implies—

Martha Beck:
Soothing.

Rowan Mangan:
Yes, that’s right. And what you gave me was—the first red flag was what you handed me literally had the words on it “medical grade.” Now, Marty.

Martha Beck:
We live in a cold climate now. We need medical grade lip balm.

Rowan Mangan:
But what does it even mean? It means that there’s something wrong with my lips that you think needs curing by medical. First of all, that’s a big judgment for you to be making. Second of all, I put this shit on my face and it hurts. It has made my lips go a different color. And I don’t know if I’m having a severe allergic reaction or if this is what it was going for. And either way, medical grade lip balm should not exist.

Martha Beck:
I think that it’s happening on your lips the way it was meant to, but it doesn’t affect me that way. I think I’m the one with the abnormal genotype here because they told me that if you just put this on, you won’t need lipstick and it will plump up your lips. And I was like, okay. And it doesn’t at all for me. So it’s just lip balm for me.

Rowan Mangan:
Plump up? But yet they’re swollen.

Martha Beck:
Oh gosh.

Rowan Mangan:
Because I’m having a medical episode from the medical grade gunk that you just so freely gave me to smear on my face.

Martha Beck:
It doesn’t do a thing to me. And I have allergic reactions to my hair. I am allergic to my own skin cells and nothing, nothing happened in here. But you have these delightfully plump, naturally shaded lips.

Rowan Mangan:
Don’t say plump.

Martha Beck:
They’re not fat. And even if they were, that would be awesome.

Rowan Mangan:
I don’t mind if they’re fat. I don’t want them to be plump. I don’t like that word.

Martha Beck:
You don’t like the word plump.

Rowan Mangan:
I feel like it’s a verb.

Martha Beck:
It’s better than tumescent.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s something like you plump a pillow.

Martha Beck:
Okay. They’re tumescent. And turgid. Let’s go on a… Let’s go on…

Rowan Mangan:
All I’m saying is if Burt’s Bees wants to become a Bewildered sponsor, I will very joyfully be part of that and I will never trust you ever again.

Martha Beck:
Can I wipe it off?

Rowan Mangan:
No. What are you trying to figure out?

Martha Beck:
Oh, goodness. I know that AI is going to take over the world and become our overlord and kill us all or whatever. I’ve read the headlines. But I really enjoy watching it flap around trying to be an obsequious, like sycophantic servant to the humans. And mine, I don’t know why this happens, but like when I search for something in Google, it doesn’t say “search.” It says “buscar” which means search in Espanol. Not that I speak Espanol beyond if really religious listeners will remember that like one of our very first podcasts, I talked about how I had just started doing Spanish Duolingo and I was worried about Luiz because all he would say was, “Por favor, no.” Which really, to me, signals some grave distress.

Rowan Mangan:
He’d probably tried medical grade lip balm.

Martha Beck:
Por favor, no!

Rowan Mangan:
Por favor, Madre de Dios.

Martha Beck:
Anyway, for some reason, because I look at Spanish Duolingo for two minutes a day, my phone believes that I fully want to speak Spanish. I probably should be doing Spanish. But since today I asked, I don’t use AI very often, but today I wanted to ask what I should do with these little saplings that I’m growing. I don’t know. And I said, “I have two very small saplings.” And it says “ay” A- Y. “Ay have two sapiens in American por semana trece…” It just goes on, gibberish of Spanish. And that’s what I seem to put in. And wait, wait for it. This is what—

Rowan Mangan:
Hang on, hang on. I just literally don’t know what you’re talking about right now.

Martha Beck:
I was talking into my phone. I was saying, “I have these two very small trees. They’re in a dark space.”

Rowan Mangan:
In English.

Martha Beck:
“They’ve been over wintering. They’ve been dormant. Now they’re getting leaf buds. I need to know what to do for them.” And it created an absolute hodgepodge of heavily drugged Spanish or something. Anyway, that didn’t make me laugh. That just annoyed me.

Rowan Mangan:
Good.

Martha Beck:
What made me laugh was ChatGPT’s desperate attempt to be polite about it and what it thought that I may be talking about. It said, “I’m not quite able to understand what you’re asking here. Could you please rephrase for me? For example, are you asking about a cell phone plan or offer, inventing or writing something, dark winter, dark winter, water in a room or salon, or something happening this week?” It’s just groping around all the things that I think about or talk about. And I thought, okay, this is my Rorschach blot test of what my AI thinks I’m thinking and I can’t figure out what to do about it.

Rowan Mangan:
So it’s like your keyboard or something is set to Spanish. So when it listens to you, it tries to Spanishify your—

Martha Beck:
And I keep sending it back to English, but no, it goes to Spanish every time. And by the way, when Siri talks to me, she’s Australian.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh let’s not get started on Siri.

Martha Beck:
And I can’t stop her from being Australian. I’m like, I’m trying to get… I would love a Jamaican Siri or somebody. But no, it’s always, “I can’t do that.”

Rowan Mangan:
“I can’t do that.”

Martha Beck:
“I can’t do that.” And not only-

Rowan Mangan:
“What the fuck are you talking about, Martha Beck?”

Martha Beck:
That’s the thing is it has some attitude along with it because you really can’t speak Australian without being a little sassy, if not downright belligerent. There’s some—

Rowan Mangan:
Certainly salty.

Martha Beck:
It’s so weird because there’s the very proper Australian thing where you can’t have any, like your mom, where you don’t… No profanity, no nothing.

Rowan Mangan:
Like your mom.

Martha Beck:
Like your mom. And then you get the rest of Australia, which is basically, sorry, which basically, yeah, even Siri sounds rude when she talks to me, but funny and delightful.

Rowan Mangan:
Just give me another lip balm, Martha Beck. Right through the heart this time.

Martha Beck:
Medical grade. I just love this, though. There is a woman, she’s speaking randomly. Is she talking about a cell phone offer or plan? Inventing or writing something? Dark winter? Water in a salon? Or something happening this week?

Rowan Mangan:
Water in a salon or dark winter. You know what I’d like to imagine is happening is that you have so deeply confused it that it’s just like, I’m just going to grab from things people talk to me about. Dark winter. Yeah, that’s where the emo crowd are talking to me this week. A cell phone plan. That’s what the tech bros are like.

Martha Beck:
That’s what everybody’s thinking about. Inventing or writing something. It cast a pretty wide net. But it has nothing about the saplings and whatnot.

Rowan Mangan:
No. So yeah. Oh, we’re going to get so much mail about this.

Martha Beck:
About the saplings or about…?

Rowan Mangan:
About using ChatGPT, about naming ChatGPT about—

Martha Beck:
Oh, should I be blipping this out?

Rowan Mangan:
You should… No. No. I mean, you’ve outed yourself saying—

Martha Beck:
Scott can go booop.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. No, Scott, don’t go boop.

Martha Beck:
Go ahead, go boop.

Rowan Mangan:
The people deserve to know. They deserve to know.

Martha Beck:
I just read a novel that is very condemnatory of American fast food things and the guy uses real brand names all the way through and I think that was very brave of him.

Rowan Mangan:
Okay. Should we do a podcast?

Martha Beck:
Oh, maybe. Or… Dark winter.

Rowan Mangan:
Cell phone plan?

Martha Beck:
Something happening this week. Oh, I had a bear.

Rowan Mangan:
Well, you’ll have to save the bear.You’ve wasted it all on ChatGPT. Look, what’s happened to your humanity and to nature.

Martha Beck:
I know.

Rowan Mangan:
Gone. Gone. Into AI vortex of doom.

Martha Beck:
Can I just say?

Rowan Mangan:
Yes.

Martha Beck:
Your lips look amazing.

Rowan Mangan:
They feel really weird.

Hi there. I’m Ro and I’ll be your podcaster for today. Do you know how to tip your podcaster? It’s actually pretty easy. You can rate our pod with lots of stars, all your stars. You can review it with your best superlatives. You can even subscribe or follow Bewildered so you’ll never miss an episode. Then of course, if you’re ready to go all in, our paid online community is called Wilder: A Sanctuary for the Bewildered. And I can honestly say it’s one of the few true sanctuaries online. You can go to wildercommunity.com to check it out. Rate. Review. Subscribe. Join. And you all have a great day now.

So back in the very early days of Bewildered, we used to have a thing we did.

Martha Beck:
Yes. What was it?

Rowan Mangan:
Well, it’s actually fallen by the wayside quite dramatically in recent times, but maybe we should bring it back. And I refer to a convention called The BeWild Files.

Martha Beck:
Oh, yes.

Rowan Mangan:
Remember those?

Martha Beck:
Yes. Yeah. Wonderful questions people would send in.

Rowan Mangan:
People would send in questions about what they were trying to figure out. And we, in the role of kind of dotty, old lesbian advice columnists or something, would try to say something about it. And guess what? We got one.

Martha Beck:
Oh, we fielded a question?

Rowan Mangan:
We fielded a question for Jaison.

Martha Beck:
So exciting.

Rowan Mangan:
And Jaison has a wonderful question and he has put it in writing, which is a little bit of a departure from the BeWild Files convention. But hey, I don’t want to be culture. Okay. I want to be nature. So I’m going to roll with it. And to show you how nature I am, I’ll read it off my cell phone. All right. So Jaison says, “Your work…” And I’m going to be really generous and assume he means your work. “Your work has been shaping how I think about integrity and the nervous system, especially around why people struggle to stay open when something challenges their identity. I’ve been noticing a pattern in my own conversations. It’s not that people resist truth itself. They seem to resist the internal threat response that comes with it. When that response is lowered, something shifts. People don’t just agree, they start thinking for themselves in a more open way.” And he says, “My question is, do you think discernment is less about what we’re thinking and more about whether our nervous system feels safe enough to think at all? And if so, how do we practically create that sense of safety, both in ourselves and in conversations with others? It feels like this could change how we approach everything from conflict to growth, but I’m still trying to understand it more clearly.” Jaison, freaking great question.

Martha Beck:
That is a beautiful question.

Rowan Mangan:
Very well written.

Martha Beck:
Yes, indeed. It comes from a place of wisdom and compassion. I think we’re done here.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. I mean, the answer’s in the question, mate.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. No, it’s really true. I mean, there is the question … I mean, there are a number of wonderful, juicy tidbits in there, but the central question is, does discernment come from… Say it again for me.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. So his question was, “Do you think discernment is less about what we’re thinking and more about whether our nervous system feels safe enough to think at all? And if so, how do we practically create that sense of safety, both in ourselves and in conversations with others?” So I feel like the context of the question is as important as the question itself. So you’re imagining two people in conversation with each other, for instance, and something that one person says produces some sort of challenge to the other person’s sense of identity in some way, whether it’s actually about their personal identity or maybe just something that kind of acts as a bit of a sacred cow in their worldview, that we then feel like it is our identity and “you’re attacking me because I think this.”

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
And that, I mean, this is just me freestyling off how I’m understanding the question. If we took a sec in those moments and actually worked on regulating the nervous system of the animal that we’re living inside at the time, that we would be a long way towards a genuine opportunity for relationship, for mutual understanding, for saving the world, world peace.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, because once something has been seen as a threat to identity, nothing is going to happen except conflict because if somebody feels like they’re being attacked as an ego state or whatever, they immediately come back in a very defensive posture, which leads to the other person like aggression, not defense. So then that person becomes defensive, which reads as aggression, and you’ve got two people in violent aggression who actually may never have disagreed at all. It’s just all perception.

So Jaison is saying, is it what we’re thinking and saying that is the problem or is it whether our nervous systems feel safe enough to think at all? And so discernment, it’s like there are two levels. So that before you can discern something at the level I think he’s talking about, like figure out what someone’s saying, there’s already a choice that’s been made in the brain, and that is something unfamiliar has come up or something that may be related to other categories of things that are seen as threat. Like if you use a word that someone’s grandfather uses, like I remember I knew someone whose word was “disappointed.” If you said the word disappointed, prepare for a full-on like World War III. And it was just an innocuous little word. Anyway, so there’s this little part of the brain called the amygdala that’s ancient, ancient, ancient, and its whole job is to decide whether something is a threat or not, friend or foe. And the thing is, it’s very, very, very, very ancient. It’s in every vertebrate, right? And it’s reacting thousands of times faster than any kind of cognitive process. And if something is one, if it’s connected with something scary to the person, even if it’s not just tangentially connected, the amygdala at a very deep level is going to go, “Fight, fight! Run, run!” It goes immediately into a defense cascade. You’d think I’d prepared for this question, but no, I just wrote a book about things, so I knew this defense cascade worked.

Rowan Mangan:
That was very impressive. Most things you have written a book about. Can I interrupt with a question?

Martha Beck:
Please, because I could go on forever.

Rowan Mangan:
Well, and I hope you will. So you say the brain has made a choice to interpret that, but of course what I’m imagining you mean is not that our conscious mind goes, “Should I totally overreact and assume this person means me harm or should I give them the benefit of the doubt?” No, right? It happens too fast.

Martha Beck:
It’s way before cognitive thought.

Rowan Mangan:
And what’s more, it’s probably happening on the internet where any… I mean, not necessarily, but it just strikes me that if it’s also happening on the internet where there’s no other signals that like a little smile or a “hahaha” to calm you down to know that it’s not a threat, so that can raise it up. But what interests me is that what it could be, like you mentioned the grandfather and the disappointed, but I feel like something that I see around in the culture is a tendency to make taboo many things that for other people are built into the way that their brain processes language. So there are certain words that become trigger words because it has been decided that that’s how you have to talk about these things. And I feel like, and I only mention that because I feel like in a lot of the echo chamber forms that our conversation or media where our conversations take place, everything has the capacity to be exaggerated and we have the capacity to fly so far off the handle. Is that the word? Is that the… That it’s all way more complex than it would be if it was all just us and I could just sit there and say, “She probably means well.”

Martha Beck:
No, you’re absolutely right. There is a huge… There is this massive boiling pot of, I’ll say overreaction at the risk of people who are overreacting getting extremely reactive against being called overreactive because this is what happens. Once the amygdala gets triggered, and it will be triggered, there’s something called a negativity bias, which just means that if there’s anything threatening to you or even potentially threatening, that you can see, hear, smell, taste, touch, understand, associate with anything, your brain will immediately say, “That’s dangerous.” Because you don’t want to… It could be just an electrical cord, not a snake, but if it is a snake, you’re better off checking to see if it’s a snake than just assuming everything’s fine. So the brain is very, very much more likely to go into fight-or-flight than anything else.

Rowan Mangan:
Because also the… If you haven’t… I’m just thinking about training dogs, obviously, and how when you’re training your dog and you have it as quite a young puppy, it’s really important that that dog has walked between parked cars or seen a woman in a long skirt or someone holding an umbrella because otherwise… And so it’s like this absolutely bizarre set of expectations that obviously have triggered other dogs in the past. So they’re like, “Oh, the old two-parked-cars thing.”

Martha Beck:
Oh my goodness. We had a dog named Bjorn who you came and, when he was old and very lumpy. I remember you house sat for us before we all got together, Karen and I left and you were house sitting, and you said you were caring for Bjorn by caressing his lumps.

Rowan Mangan:
Just caressed his lumps from time to time. He seemed to appreciate it.

Martha Beck:
And I remember thinking when Karen read that email, “I like that Rowan Mangan.”

Rowan Mangan:
She’s a lump caresser.

Martha Beck:
Caresses lumps. That’s the kind of woman I’m looking for.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s a skillset I admire.

Martha Beck:
See, if my amygdala had gone off in the wrong direction, that could have been very frightening to me.

Rowan Mangan:
You cannot caress any of my lumps.

Martha Beck:
Anyway, Bjorn, as a puppy, we were trying to house train him by taking him out when he started circling and acting like… Do you know why they snirkle? Oh my God. They sniff and circle. Do you know why they’re circling? Because most of the time, they only want a poop facing north.

Rowan Mangan:
Same here.

Martha Beck:
And foxes are successful in their hunting in the winter when they’re hunting things that are under the snow. They’re successful more than 80% of the time if they’re jumping due north, but not otherwise.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. I love the thing that I love most is just how good we are at staying on point.

Martha Beck:
ADD, ADD, me and my ADD.

Rowan Mangan:
Confused little person.

Martha Beck:
In my ADD. Okay, back to it. Bjorn was a puppy. I was taking him out at night when he snirkled. He was snirkling one day. I took him out and it was in Phoenix and we were sitting there in our little desert lot and we had these gargantuan summer storms, the monsoon, and it was dramatic. And Bjorn snirkeled and snirkeled and snirkeled. Finally found north, I assume, because he was settling in for the act itself and lightning struck: bam!

Rowan Mangan:
Sorry, Scott. Sorry about her noises.

Martha Beck:
It was louder than that. It was louder than that. It was deafening. Bjorn did not poop outside for a year and a half. We tried to get him to do it and he just looked at us like we were completely insane: “Do you know what happens when I do that?”

Rowan Mangan:
“I have a power beyond your human understanding.”

Martha Beck:
So we just sat there and grew lumps, all of which is just to say, yes, I see your training-a-puppy thing and go back to the point where if the puppy sees anything unusual, it’s likely to freak out.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Assume it’s a snake.

Martha Beck:
Assume it’s a snake.

Rowan Mangan:
Don’t assume it’s cord.

Martha Beck:
Here we are back at the human amygdala. See how we did that? Just down the street and then back.

Rowan Mangan:
Right back.

Martha Beck:
Just like it’s nothing.

Rowan Mangan:
Just a quick little detour.

Martha Beck:
This is how I keep my life interesting inside my own head. Do-dee-doo…and penguins. Woo! Yes.

Rowan Mangan:
We watched a TV show where a brilliant lawyer took advantage of another brilliant lawyer’s intense ADHD by at the crucial moment when an objection was called for, dropping a brochure about penguins on the desk of the defense attorney and then launching into their attack. And the attorney’s like, “Penguins!”

Martha Beck:
It was brilliant. I so identified with that.

Rowan Mangan:
Yes.

Martha Beck:
Anyhoo, here’s the thing. Yeah. Once the amygdala is activated and it’s looking for snakes, it can interpret an entire environment as being dangerous. So if you’re in a jungle at night, as we’ve been in the jungle at night in Costa Rica, and we’ve been told you don’t want to know what’s crawling around the trees there, not at night. In the daytime, it’s fine. But—

Rowan Mangan:
Please come to our Pure.Wild.Self retreats in Costa Rica. They’re great. Not dangerous.

Martha Beck:
They’re fantastic. Super not dangerous. No, I’ve never actually seen anything scary there. But when I’m walking in the dark from one of the cabins to another or whatever, I’m hyper aware that there are creepy crawlies and potential jaguars, I don’t know, just in case. No, there are no jaguars. Come to our Pure.Wild.Self retreat. It’s amazing. You’ll love it. I’m sorry. I just thought of a whole lot of inappropriate things I’ve said about things that I’m trying to promote. Anyway, the environment matters. And what happens to people on the internet, not even the internet, but it’s like the apex because our entire culture, if you look at modern, westernized colonial, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah culture, it’s very, very sort of devoted to or based upon the perceptions of the left hemisphere of the brain. And like all these straight lines and right angles, they don’t really appear in nature. They appear in the left hemisphere of the human brain, which loves them. And once you’re in your left hemisphere, that’s where you’re going to have this little reaction where the amygdala sends out this little: “There are scary things around. I’m not sure what, but something.”

Rowan Mangan:
Talk about this loop because it’s so interesting.

Martha Beck:
I call this an anxiety spiral. So you go online, you see something, somebody has a recipe for flan. Okay? So you’re like, “Oh, a nice recipe for flan.” And then they go in and they say something like, “All you girls will love to make flan.” And you’re like a feminist, so you’re like, “All us girls?” Like, what? Or you’re a man and you’re like, “Oh, you’re only talking to women.” So if your amygdala is set up to feel attacked, just that will make you go, “Ah!” And once you’re in a state of even slight anxiety, what happens is the amygdala, which is completely nonverbal, it goes all the way back to flatworms or whatever. The amygdala sends a signal that says, “Afraid, afraid,” to the neocortex, which knows how to talk. And it immediately, the neocortex tells a story explaining why you’re afraid.

Rowan Mangan:
Because that’s what it has to do, because it’s like, “I’m getting a danger signal. It must be because of the thing.”

Martha Beck:
Yeah, “this is the reason.” So yeah, the left side of the brain wants to defend the sense of being afraid. And so it explains, “Well, that person wrote that thing about flan and all the girls because that person just hates women and thinks they’re all infantilized into children,” or “That person is just a man-hating lesbian” or whatever phrase comes to mind from their particular—

Rowan Mangan:
Set of worldview biases of their experience.

Martha Beck:
Exactly. And so what happens then, and this is the tricky part with humans, the amygdala does not just get a message from the neocortex and say, “Let me read this. Hm. That’s one opinion.” It actually treats the story coming back from the neocortex as if that is reality. And so it looks at the story and goes, “Holy shit. Oh my God, this is worse than I thought.” And it sends out an even bigger distress signal, which is then interpreted by the—

Rowan Mangan:
Infantalized women? Ahhh!

Martha Beck:
Exactly. And then the social part of this is that people run for defense to other social primates, us being social primates, and they’re like, “Can you believe this person? He put this thing about girls in his flan recipe.” And the other people are like, “Oh my God, let me get you some tea. Can you believe this?” And they sit down and say, “This is war. And I can’t believe this is happening.” We’re the only species where you can get a group of people in a room or even just two people and have them contemplate a subject and come out of that room more terrified and appalled and angry than—a thousand times more terrified and appalled and angry than they were when they went into the room. Nothing has happened at all.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, but someone’s getting canceled.

Martha Beck:
Someone’s getting canceled and the rage is inflamed. And it’s crazy because there is real harm being done. There are horrifying things online. And then there are things like somebody’s flan recipe and they’re getting the same kind of reaction.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, because the amygdala is… And the amygdala is expecting to have to encounter like three things in a day, right? Not a scrolling, endless parade of outrage, which is what the culture is feeding us. And if you ever want to read a really good book, check out Beyond Anxiety by Martha Beck. It’s a hell of a read. And one of the things that you talk about in the book is the fact that once this spiral is underway, like amygdala, neocortex, amygdala, neocortex, there’s other bits. I don’t pay attention to those. And there’s no reverse on that.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. It’s like a feedback screech in a microphone, which is if you’re at a concert and it goes [screeching sound]. Because the amplified sound from the microphone is going into the speaker, but then the speaker’s feeding back into the microphone, which amplifies it, and then it sends it to the speaker, which amplifies the amplified sound, goes back into the microphone. And within a few seconds, you get this unbearably loud shrieking noise.

Rowan Mangan:
And so what we’re living in is in these brains that, God love them, they’re trying their hardest, but they are not really equipped for the attention economy that’s like, if you haven’t watched 15… you know, this video will not be seen if they haven’t watched it for 15 seconds. So you’d better, in those first 15 seconds, tell them that if they don’t watch, then something really bad’s going to happen to the people they love. And that’s what we’re fed. And so the culture is feeding us exactly what ramps up to the fever pitch of the anxiety spiral. And I really think that it’s worth underlining that in that environment, no wonder we can’t tell the difference between a flan recipe and a boa constrictor.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. It’s as if we’re in the most terrifying environment in the world and there are people all around us running around screaming, “We’re in danger! We’re in danger! There are enemies everywhere we must attack, we must run away, we must hide in a bunker.” And people are literally saying these things. I’m not even exaggerating.

Rowan Mangan:
No.

Martha Beck:
But I think Jaison’s question is very well put. Is that even thinking? I don’t think it is.

Rowan Mangan:
And I love the fact that implied in the question is, so given this, given this environment, given this situation where how can we communicate with each other in such a way that we can experience each other’s perspectives truly if we’re so fucking triggered at every moment, thanks to our inner architecture and outer situation of our society, given that, what can we do? And to me, the lovely opportunity in that is to say, “Okay, so whenever I’m greeted by a situation where I don’t think I can make a choice, but there’s some lizard brain back here that is making that choice for me.” Just to kind of step into taking responsibility for wait a second, maybe there is a choice, maybe I can use some other part of my brain that’s somewhere else to be the grownup in the moment and take a breath and take a beat and get regulated however, whatever that looks like for us.

Martha Beck:
Well, it’s interesting because basically we live, the culture/nature breakdown of this is that we’re actually encouraged to be very hypersensitive and terrified. If you show that kind of calm and sort of settling back into peace, a lot of people who are highly activated will increase their own anxiety: “You’re not paying attention, you don’t care about me.” There’s a lot of pressure to go into that inflamed state because everybody else is already in it.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, and then you’ve got the hoard of masked crusaders who are running after people on the internet.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. However, even… Yeah. Okay. So I think there is the opportunity to take a breath and settle into the part of the brain that can make a decision, but I think it’s almost impossible to do it once we’re in that conversation. I think we have to start it way before we even go into the arena because once the amygdala gets triggered, it’s very, very difficult. If you haven’t practiced bringing it down at… It’s like learning to ski on a black diamond off-piste run. You’re going to ski along a cliff if you’ve never been on the bunny hill. We’ve got to take it back to the bunny hill and practice not getting activated before we even have to face someone.

Rowan Mangan:
Right. But the reality is, if you ever turn on the radio or listen to a podcast or whatever, we’re probably triggering the shit out of a bunch of people right now.

Martha Beck:
Undoubtedly.

Rowan Mangan:
So this is great. If you’re really mad at us right now, it’s a great opportunity to practice because it’s definitely more activating when you’re face to face with someone. So in terms of this being a skill to build, which I think is a really brilliant growth edge for me based on Jaison’s question. I’m super excited about it to be like, okay, I’m going to remind myself to take a beat at those times when I’m… And I agree with you, not in the moment when someone’s screaming in my face.

Martha Beck:
Right. Or not even… So let me put something out there and you can decide whether I’m attacking you or not. Okay. So there’s the whole culture is coming to consensus. The consensus is “Everything’s on fire, run screaming or everybody will think you’re apathetic.”

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. And by the way, people are espousing versions of that point of view in every country, in every part of the political spectrum. The story is greater than the words being used in it.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And then the other side of that that we always want to think about is nature. So culture is coming to consensus. Nature is coming to our senses. And it’s so funny because I’m talking about “In the jungle, you’re afraid. And so your whole system’s activated.” But the truth of it is, the reason we go to the jungle, the reason we go to Londolozi in South Africa out there in the Bushveld, where there are animals running around that could, in Africa, that could easily just munch you. In Costa Rica, creepy crawlies, no big deal, but still—eek! a little scary. People are afraid to go to those environments, but when you’re there, if you’re in nature and you come to your senses, there is this deep calming of the nervous system that comes from getting out of the brouhaha of human interaction and just into the land, into the creatures.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, that’s like the accelerated course is if you want to accelerate getting this skillset, go outside, go somewhere quiet.

Martha Beck:
I actually think it’s not even accelerating. I think it’s a foundation. I don’t think you can even build a foundation. We did not evolve to lack the foundation of connection to the natural world, to water and wind and stone and creatures. We evolved to be calmed by those things almost all the time. When we’re in Africa, when we’re in Costa Rica, we almost never go inside. We’re in comfortable places under roofs, but there are no walls. We are with nature and everybody… There are people who are like, “Oh, I’m really afraid of lions and leopards” or whatever. Or, “Oh, I’m really afraid of, I don’t know, sloths in Costa Rica.”

Rowan Mangan:
And then there was famously the woman on the star whose greatest fear while she was out in the Bushveld was that someone would break into her house in L.A. So that was her fight-or-flight, checking her security cameras room after room, after room, after room.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And there were elephants around us and she’s like, “Ah!” So I don’t think it’s, oh, you can accelerate your skills by going to nature. I think it’s like you—and I could show you huge mountains of evidence. If you even want to get calmed down in the first place, you have to access some level of connection to nature that we evolved to experience, even if that’s just a painting or a photograph of something in nature.

Rowan Mangan:
Even if it’s just as simple as a five-day luxury retreat in the beautiful Imiloa Institute in Costa Rica, even if it’s just that.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. That’s a good way to start. So anyone who’s on the internet, that’s what you need.

Rowan Mangan:
No, I think that’s really good to point out though because it’s like the photo or the house plant. The house plant is the ultimate thing. You can do a deep mindfulness meditation with a house plant, and I do.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. Especially if the house plant is something you smoke.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, well, yeah, I mean…

Martha Beck:
Yes. I think there’s a study where people who are recovering from an illness got either a teddy bear or a plant. And the teddy bear recipient—I mean, teddy bears are awesome, right? And they’re bears.

Rowan Mangan:
Well, I wasn’t going to—

Martha Beck:
Hello. I’ll tell my bear story on another episode.

Rowan Mangan:
But it is interesting to think about the fact that we give one of the few predators we have left on earth, representations of them to baby.

Martha Beck:
“This will help you feel better. Be with an omnivorous predator.” Yeah. Because you know the ironic fact of it? It works. It works to clutch a little animal, even if it is a carnivorous predator or an omnivorous predator. Anyway, the people who got the house plants recovered faster, had fewer doctor visits afterward, less pain, all these different indices of their wellbeing, they were significantly better than the people who’d received a teddy bear. So you’re right, even just one plant, which that’s so sad to think that we are so devoid of nature.

Rowan Mangan:
So divorced. Yeah.

Martha Beck:
That some people don’t even have a plant.

Rowan Mangan:
Marty, Marty, Marty. Yes. Now we need to do a whole episode on this, but I really, I need to just put in at this point that all the studies that are coming out about how your plants, if you water your plants, they know when you’re just coming home when you’re in within two miles, they change. They change the song that they sing because they know you’re coming home.

Martha Beck:
We’ve got to get one of those little synthesizers that you put on a plant. They’re pricey, but you could be an influencer and go out and flog them and then we’d earn one. Flog as in sell, not whip.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. Because yes, they interact with us.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Even us. And trees feed their babies differently from how they feed the other trees when they send sugar, sugar like treats. They give their own saplings something that’s a little bit better than other people.

Martha Beck:
Around the mother tree, the saplings will grow. And then the mother tree is older, so the mother tree dies first. But the saplings will feed sugar even to the stump of the mother tree.

Rowan Mangan:
The stump of the mother tree, also a good band name.

Martha Beck:
Stump of the mother tree. I had an album I bought in mainland China in 1983 that was called Our Motherly Rubber Estate.

Rowan Mangan:
You broke Drew. When we break Drew, we know it’s going to be a good day.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. One of the main songs was “Folk Songs Are Lovely to Sing but Are Forbidden.” Anyway, they were trying to up their production of rubber in China at the time. All of which is to say, we need plants.

Rowan Mangan:
We do. We need them. They need us. We have got to make that connection with nature.

Martha Beck:
And even, and I’m telling you, because I wrote a book about anxiety and because I was very much observing my own state as I read all these studies and everything, I’m very sensitive to where my amygdala, where I feel like I’m living a dangerous, difficult life and where I feel like life is taking care of me. You or Karen bought me a fantastic humidifier.

Rowan Mangan:
The one thing about having two partners is you can never remember which you told one thing to or which one you gave me.

Martha Beck:
Y’all got me a humidifier.

Rowan Mangan:
This guy. You’re welcome.

Martha Beck:
It’s a good one. And man, it ran out of water the night before last.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, and man, it ran right out of water.

Martha Beck:
It did. I need to be afraid. But I woke up in the morning and I was like, “Why is the world so sad today?” And it’s because the humidifier trickles. It’s just this little trickling sound of running water, which is one of the most regulating things for a human nervous system because obviously we need water every few hours. So the sound of trickling water says, “Oh, fresh water nearby.” And it had an incredible difference in the way I felt waking up in the morning. These are the—

Rowan Mangan:
That’s why I love it when the first thing I hear in the morning is you peeing.

Martha Beck:
I know. And I try to pee very near you every morning.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s lovely.

Martha Beck:
Audibly. And I hum. I gently hum while I do it.

Rowan Mangan:
You know, I bet there’s a market for ASMR based on this.

Martha Beck:
Yes. I’m not altogether sure. I’m not AMSR—AMSR autonomic medial sensory reality?

Rowan Mangan:
I think I’ve talked about this before, but Marty sometimes with clients has to sign non-disclosure agreements and she calls them a DNR: Do not resuscitate. “Yeah. I can’t tell you anything because I’ve got a DNR.”

Martha Beck:
Anyway, yes, I hum and I pee and I do everything I can to help you.

Rowan Mangan:
I garden and it’s the same thing. It really is. There’s something that our nervous systems need to attune to the natural environment.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. Obviously pets, but small things that you really wouldn’t think would have a vast impact on your ability to self-regulate. So it’s by setting that up around yourself. It’s a kind of self-mothering. And I do use the word mother advisedly. I know fathers are wonderful parents too, but sometimes “mother” is a verb. It’s not just a noun. And so I’m using it in the sense of bringing something into life, which is a very specific thing, the nurturing of life. You need living things around you and interacting with you long before you go on the internet in the morning, like from the very first moment. And when we go off with people for five days into Africa or Costa Rica, it’s because culture is three days deep, the famous Terence McKenna quote. After three days without the clash and bustle and the scream of internet and everything, everyone just feels completely different. And people leave those retreats looking sometimes almost unrecognizable: younger, joyful, their tension is gone, their postures are better. And I’d love to say we’re doing it all, and I think we help, but really if it weren’t mostly the environment, we wouldn’t be going all that way.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s the environment. And another kind of key piece of this, it’s also the experience of being with other people outside of culture who are a self-selected group of people who we have a kind of unspoken contract with of, “I mean you well. I come in good faith to give you the benefit of the doubt and I believe that you’re going to give me the benefit of the doubt.”

Martha Beck:
Yes.

Rowan Mangan:
Because we’re doing wellness.

Martha Beck:
Yes. So starting out with the actual elements, stone, water.

Rowan Mangan:
Sloth.

Martha Beck:
Sloth. The occasional leopard, yes. And then going to village, right? Because humans in a state of nature, actually, it’s very hard to survive by yourself. So being connected is another thing that we desperately need, but being connected by going to an internet where people are already screaming at you is not going to do you very many favors.

Rowan Mangan:
Well, and it’s something, too, worth noting that there are skills in the village that like as a culture we’re atrophying in individuals.

Martha Beck:
Say more.

Rowan Mangan:
I’m planning to.

Martha Beck:
Please do.

Rowan Mangan:
Say you live in a village with 65 people or half a dozen families or something, and it’s just a little hamlet, it’s a little pod. There are going to be people that you don’t really enjoy in that group, but you live in the village with them so you figure it out. And maybe that’s some humoring them, maybe that’s some avoiding them, maybe that’s some speaking truth to power moments, but you’re still having to do life around them. And I feel like some of our masked crusaders and keyboard warriors and everything are… It’s a sad thing if you think about how we’re losing our tolerance for people who are a little bit different from us.

Martha Beck:
Oh yeah. Horrendously.

Rowan Mangan:
And everyone has to use the same terminology and feel the same way about all these things. And that if they don’t, if someone doesn’t, then that does become, in Jaison’s word, like an attack on your identity. Not an interesting conversational topic up here to discuss.

Martha Beck:
No, you’re after me. You are an existential threat to my very being.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. And so I’m really trying to focus on, just for apocalypse reasons, not for this podcast reason, just trying to focus on getting to know our neighbors and spending time and all that. And it does make me reflect on the fact that… I mean, our neighbors are lovely.

Martha Beck:
The only reason I even talk to them is the apocalypse. I don’t want them coming for the food in the basement.

Rowan Mangan:
But I notice that in myself, the unwillingness to… and intolerance like you have an intolerance to a certain type of food. It’s an intolerance that is just like, “This is hard.” Oh, like everyone texts so it’s hard to make a phone call all of a sudden. Whereas in the past, we just fucking did it. It’s like that. I feel like there’s lots of ways that we’re becoming so sensitized that we’re giving our amygdalas so much opportunity to freak out.

Martha Beck:
Yes. And here’s the thing, in a village, you wouldn’t just have to deal with someone because you’d walk past them several times because there were only 65 people in the village. It’s a phenomenon like The Office, the sitcom, The Office, or anybody who’s worked in an office. It’s this thing of a bunch of strangers thrown together and they’re in each other’s physical space and they have to interact in meetings and they pass each other and they sit in the break room and they’re both there. All of them are there together. And there are these different personalities and they all have to cope with each other. And it’s jolly because it’s ridiculous and it’s difficult. Here’s the thing, though, if you’re in a village that is in nature, everyone literally has to do some work together or you won’t survive.

Rowan Mangan:
Ah, the old death problem.

Martha Beck:
Yes. So in our culture, one of the things that I’ve heard, like I read this thing online about a woman who lives in a very politically divided neighborhood. There’s like one side of the street is liberal, the other is conservative or whatever. And there was a fire in a bodega, a little shop, and it was threatening to spread to the other buildings around there. And everyone from both sides of the street came running with buckets and ladders and anything they could to help with the fire. And they were completely united in putting out the fire. No political differences whatsoever. I remember when I was 13—13, Ro—I was sitting in US history class and I wrote in my notebook, “Intimacy increases as a function of shared endeavor.” This is why I got beaten up almost every day.

Rowan Mangan:
Yes, I see that.

Martha Beck:
But I noticed how the people who were beating me up got much closer to each other.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s nice.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, no, the point is, if you have to work together for the good of the whole group and everyone knows “We’ve got to get this well dug” or “We’ve got to deal with the elephants” or whatever it is, there’s not nearly as much room for, “Wait, you have a different shaped fingernail than I do. You’re threatening my identity.”

Rowan Mangan:
Right. And it’s also that identity becomes a much more meaningful category because identity politics is kind of off the table because the bodega’s on fire and for as long as that lasts, the things that feel so deeply rooted become hypothetical, not hypothetical, but a little bit abstracted because really not burning to death and not starving to death and not drowning and all these things are—now don’t at me, don’t at me for this—more important.

Martha Beck:
Oh boy, they’re going to at us.

Rowan Mangan:
They’re going to at us. Yeah.

Martha Beck:
They’re going to at us to death. We’re under threat right now. They’re threatening our very existence.

Rowan Mangan:
Jaison, your question is so brilliant. It’s so brilliant. And I feel like, yes, we totally agree that we can’t think in those moments, which you’re sort of proposing and you’re spot on. I also think that we’re kind of getting to the how, then, is that you’ve got to build the muscle.

Martha Beck:
I’m so tempted.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, go on then. Be a fucking life coach.

Martha Beck:
All right. Should we do a break? Like, we’ll be right back after this break.

Rowan Mangan:
With Martha being a life coach.

We are at the, how do we come to our senses portion of the episode. And I would love to say that, to return to Jaison’s amazing question, how do we practically create the sense of safety, both in ourselves and in conversation with others?

Martha Beck:
And I, as previously mentioned, gave a lot of thought to this and wrote a book about it, and I came to a very unexpected conclusion.

Rowan Mangan:
Is that right?

Martha Beck:
At least I didn’t expect it. It’s really fun when you’re doing research and you find something you didn’t expect because I talked earlier about the anxiety spiral that’s on the left hemisphere of the brain. Yeah?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
If you look at the right hemisphere of the brain…

Rowan Mangan:
And I do.

Martha Beck:
That is where a lot of creativity takes place. And it actually has the same kind of spiral form where you have an amygdala reaction. And at first it’s like, oh, just like on the left side, but the left side takes it into, “Oh no, I should be afraid.” The right side takes it into, “Oh, I should be curious.” And one of the ways everybody feels this is rubbernecking at an accident. You slow down and there is an almost ineluctable desire to see what happened. And you could be horrified… If you see that something went wrong, you’re genuinely horrified and people feel bad like they’re being prurient or something looking at it. But don’t be too hard on yourself because you evolved that because if something bad does happen, you can learn from that experience, but only if you observe it very carefully, which is why we’re so freaking obsessed with murder mysteries. There are no robbery mystery movies being made.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, well, Ocean’s 11.

Martha Beck:
That’s true, but it’s a different kind of—

Rowan Mangan:
That’s a heist movie.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, a how do they get away with it?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. It’s solving a puzzle of sorts in a different way. But the murder mystery thing is so obsessive because if a person being killed by another person is the maximum situation where we can learn something that could help us be safe in the future. Because the greatest threat from any mammal, to any human, is another human.

Rowan Mangan:
Right.

Martha Beck:
I wanted to say humans are the animal that is most dangerous, but it turns out to be the mosquito.

Rowan Mangan:
Fuck those guys.

Martha Beck:
I know, right? Anyway.

Rowan Mangan:
The worst.

Martha Beck:
They are not going back to nature to make you happy. Anyway, so you get curious and if you’re curious about something and you go toward it and you find out, “Oh, it’s not a snake, it’s an electrical cord, but what does it do?” And you start to—the natural result of that impulse in a child or in a baby monkey is to play with it and try to figure something out. And as you play with something and learn what it can do, you start to make things with it. And I called this the creativity spiral and I was expecting to write a whole book about calming ourselves down. And I did write a third of a book about calming ourselves down. I wrote a third of a book about why we get so anxious and why it’s just gone absolutely wildfire, ape shit in this day and age.

And then I wrote a third of a book about calming down because you do have to regulate your nervous system and almost everyone is dysregulated almost all the time in this culture. Even if you think you’re not terrified, if you imagine… Okay, can I do a little—for the peeps?

Rowan Mangan:
I wish you would.

Martha Beck:
Okay. For the next two minutes, wherever you are listening to this.

Rowan Mangan:
I’m just across the table.

Martha Beck:
For the next two minutes… You are? Okay, good. I feel safer now. Wherever you are, listener, for the next two minutes, you do not have to have any identity at all. You don’t have to identify as anyone’s mother, daughter, sister, friend, father, brother, nothing. You don’t have to identify with an occupation. You just get to be for the next two minutes. Okay? And you get to take deep breaths and you get to stretch your arms or whatever. Ro’s gone into…

Rowan Mangan:
I identify as a lump.

Martha Beck:
A rest coma. Oh, “I identify as a lump caresser.” Look out, watch yourself.

Rowan Mangan:
I love your face when you decided to make that joke. You were like, “He-he-hey.” Back to the visualization?

Martha Beck:
Back to the visualization. So all you have to do is just sit like a lump, maybe stretch out. If you’re tired, you’re tired. If you’re angry, you’re angry. Let it happen. Let it all be as exactly as it is. Don’t try. Okay? So I did not actually mean to take a deep breath, but it happened naturally, just because when your nervous system is reregulating back to peace and relaxation, that’s one of the things that signals it the most. You can do it deliberately, but even if you aren’t doing it deliberately, if you relax in other ways, if you mentally let yourself off the hook for something, if you plug into something that is true for you, there’s this natural [exhales]. And it’s so interesting because I watch my breath so much that now I notice that even if I’m breathing in when the thought comes to let go, there’s a deeper level of breathing and it takes over and I feel like something else is breathing me and it’s delicious. It’s just like, oh, everything feels better. So there are all those ways and a zillion wonderful books and people and yoga and all the things. Great. The whole wellness industry is like soothe. Enya.

Rowan Mangan:
Enya lives alone in a castle with her cats and she’s my hero.

Martha Beck:
See? She doesn’t have to do anything except sing those songs that make us all feel so much better inside the spa. If you’ve never been to a spa, just get some Enya and listen to her. She’s fabulous because she lives alone with her cats. If you can get your nervous system out of the usual of the culture.

Rowan Mangan:
Technical term.

Martha Beck:
Technical term. The next step is really simple and it’s really hard, but it’s really, really effective. Make something. Make something. Make anything. The more complicated, the better, actually. Make something you like making. Make something you wish you had.

Rowan Mangan:
Daisy chain, Lego Death Star, map of…

Martha Beck:
Your own intestines.

Rowan Mangan:
Wow. That would be hard.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. Make a paper airplane, make a joke, make a song. Literally the minute you start thinking… And it’s hard right at the beginning. There’s this self-regulating thing: “You don’t have to do or be anything.” And then I say, “Make something,” and people are like, “You’re such an angry bitch. Why don’t you like me anymore?” But if you can get yourself past the make something threshold, I literally just like folding things, paper mainly, just fold something for a while. The moment I actually get into the physical construction of a thing with my hands, because for some reason, most people, your hands are really well connected to the ability to self-regulate when you’re moving something around. Some people it’s more verbal, like you write poetry, you write songs.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, but I use my hand. I still still stim with my hands.

Martha Beck:
And make bracelets and okay. And let me just finish and then I’ll stop pontificating.

Rowan Mangan:
I love this. Keep going.

Martha Beck:
As you start to make something, they’ve known for a long time that if you’re given a creative task to do and they create any kind of stress, immediately your creativity goes absolutely flat line. And there’s so much research on this. And then I went and looked for research that said, “When you start to create, does your anxiety flat line?” And there was really no research done on it because the whole left-hemisphere brain, which dominates academia says, “Ah, go find the thing that puts you into a panic and we’re done.”

Rowan Mangan:
It’s academia rubbernecking at its own car accident.

Martha Beck:
But yeah, “It doesn’t matter if creativity can shut down anxiety. We like the anxiety. We don’t want to shut that shit down.”

Rowan Mangan:
“Focus on the anxiety.”

Martha Beck:
So I started forcing myself to do creative things, and this was during the pandemic. And it was like, oh my God, within five minutes, I’d been working on this painting and saying, “Oh, this is so frustrating. It’s not working” and everything. The second I’m actually putting paint on the canvas, I’m in another, I’m in what you call my art coma, a state of such wellbeing.

Rowan Mangan:
I have a thing which is that, and this is a new thought, so it may not make any sense yet, but I feel like when we’re being keyboard warriors and we’re out there kind of our amygdalas just doing fireworks over everything that we see, the identity piece is when we are identifying as a noun: “I am a thing and any adjacent thing either affirms me or confronts me.” And I feel like when we begin to make something, we start identifying as a verb and that that is an entirely different way of being human. And it is so separate from all the judgment postures of social interaction. And what a delight to actually have those art comas where we just get a relief. I mean, it’s kind of like what you’re trying to create with the visualization of “don’t identify as anything” is like almost an artificial way to try and create the state that you create when you’re making something.

Martha Beck:
I love that. I love using language to trick its own left hemisphere thinking. Because in poetry, jokes and songs, the right hemisphere comes in to use language. And you’re a poet and a songster, so you’re more likely to turn language against itself. And by saying, “Make a noun a verb.” I said this earlier, that I’m talking about mother not as a noun, but as a verb. And that thought came to me when someone… I heard years ago someone say, “Many people mother all their lives without ever giving birth, and others give birth and raise children but never mother them.” So the moment you say, do this, you are a garden, to garden, it’s a garden, but when you’re out there, you’re gardening.

Rowan Mangan:
Yes. That’s it. Yeah.

Martha Beck:
As soon as you can—

Rowan Mangan:
And then I’m one with the activity and so it matters a lot less.

Martha Beck:
You’re going out to garden. You’re going to the object and you’re going to the verb. Maybe any place you go. I’ve never thought of this. Now I need to go back and rewrite part of my book.

Rowan Mangan:
Steal my material.

Martha Beck:
Where else can we… So I immediately want to make something out of that. Where can we find a list of nouns that we could turn into verbs and then we’d be happy all the time? That’s my question.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. And I hate that.

Martha Beck:
I love that.

Rowan Mangan:
Because I want the identifying as a verb to be the end, to be the… I identify as a verb in the sense of I stop being a lump and I become a wisp of smoke.

Martha Beck:
Can I still caress you?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, but it’s going to be kind of wafty. It’s going to be a little unsatisfying. But it’s like, to me, I feel like a list of nouns that can be verbs to just jump into a book that we’re reading at the moment called The Alphabet versus the Goddess.

Martha Beck:
Oh, yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
You are trying to bring this sort of slightly right-hemisphere, linguistic whim of mine and fully left-hemispherize it with a “list one word after the other that you can…” I know it’s a kind of, but it is—

Martha Beck:
Because for me, it’s a fun game to find nouns that can be verbs. And you know what one is? What? Caress. It’s a caress or it is… I could caress. I can. You may not think I can, but I can. So what else?

Rowan Mangan:
No.

Martha Beck:
I like.

Rowan Mangan:
No.

Martha Beck:
I want.

Rowan Mangan:
No.

Martha Beck:
I want.

Rowan Mangan:
Stop it. Oh, she’s so annoying. You should see her when she plays on the New York Times games and she starts the spelling bee and she’s like, “I’m doing really well on this today. There’s really good letters.” And then she’ll just quietly be like, I don’t know, if I came up with something like “mystify.”

Martha Beck:
Let’s face it. We all do that. “I solved the—”

Rowan Mangan:
“I solved the Wordle in three.”

Martha Beck:
I solved the Wordle in two once. I actually have solved it in two more than once.

Rowan Mangan:
We need those people to come. Actually, you know what? The connections is a little bit of a right hemisphere.

Martha Beck:
It is. It also though makes me very angry sometimes.

Rowan Mangan:
Ditto.

Martha Beck:
Anyway, back to Jaison and Jaison’s question. Are we answering it at all? How do we get ourselves in a state where we actually can be calm in the wildness and the craziness of culture as we must encounter it these days? So I like, okay, so soothe yourself and then make shit.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. And then what he said was then bring it into conversation with others. So how do we take that new skillset and be ready to deploy it in conversation? Because you were saying we can’t do it initially because that’s the black diamond.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, right in the heat of the battle.

Rowan Mangan:
But let’s say we went to nature, we became a wisp of smoke, we did the connections and whatever. We made shit and we made shit and we took a deep breath and we stopped identifying as ourselves and then… So we’ve practiced and then we’re back in conversation. What do you do at the moment that your amygdala flares?

Martha Beck:
You know what I really, really genuinely do?

Rowan Mangan:
No.

Martha Beck:
I am always working on a painting. I literally am always working on a painting. And I am in situations fairly frequently where people get exercised and they’ll go right at me and everything because I’m coaching them. And that means that everything, every time I glance at them, they feel like it’s a thunderbolt, right? Because they put me on some plinth, which I don’t deserve at all. A plinth is like a…

Rowan Mangan:
I know what a plinth is, but I just got a really… Every time you glance at them, it’s a thunderbolt and it was a callback to Bjorn trying to shit in the desert with the lightning. And I was just like, this is so complicated.

Martha Beck:
I know. It weirds me out, anyway, that people see me as being in any way influential, but they’ve read a book by me. And that means that somehow words have more impact coming from me, even though they shouldn’t. So people will get quite anxious and they’ll identify me with authority figures in their lives, and then I’ll say the word “disappoint” and somebody just goes off like I pulled a gun on them. And I know it’s because they’ve parentified me and whatnot. So what I do, when that happens, to stay completely regulated is I go to whatever I’m drawing or painting and I just keep working on it, but in my head. Alternatively, you could write a poem or…

Rowan Mangan:
There was a young woman from Quebec, who fatally injured her neck.

Martha Beck:
Yes?

Rowan Mangan:
She went on all fours and was kicked out the door and then changed her name to Martha Beck.

Martha Beck:
That was phenomenal. You are on a plinth in my mind. Pedestal is too common.

Rowan Mangan:
You are on a plinth to me.

Martha Beck:
Okay. And apparently I was fatally wounded in the neck. I believe you because my neck hurts a lot. But honest to God, if I don’t have a project I’m working on, I can’t regulate myself like that. But if I do, I’m almost bulletproof.

Rowan Mangan:
I spent a lot of time staring out the window and like picturing stuff in the garden. So I think I understand that for the first time.

Martha Beck:
You’re always thinking. I see that same look in your eyes.You’re like looking at me and we’re talking and you’re thinking, “That’s south-facing, but it slopes a bit.”

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
And I know, I can see it written in your eyeballs. And it doesn’t bother me because I know you’re super regulated in there.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, that’s true.

Martha Beck:
And it’s a bit of a juggling act to be really aware of what somebody’s saying while you’re thinking about, “Let’s see if I did…would India ink work on that? No, it seeps through.” Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. I mean, I think that… I get what you’re saying and I think it could be a good touch point to return to, but if I want to be genuinely in conversation and have the internal fortitude to be able to have a conversation with someone that has some level of disagreement built into it without it being the end of the world, I don’t actually want to be thinking too intently about my garden. I want to be present with the person. And so, to me, everything you’re saying is right. And as so often is the case with these kind of questions, I circle back around to the question of how do you make yourself remember in the moment? Because it’s actually, so much of it is about, “Okay, step back. I need to get regulated. I need to take a deep breath and I need to remember that we’re all just fucking star dust flipping through on a little wind eddy for a second in an endless universe, so maybe it’s not that big a deal.” And so it’s almost like for me always, and I know for sure I’ve talked about this before, and it’s such a frustrating thing in my mind is, how do you trigger that? The little reminder, the little haptic on your watch that goes, “It looks like you should be standing up, you lazy person.”

Martha Beck:
You don’t know me, Australian Siri!

Rowan Mangan:
That’s what I need. I need a haptic on my watch to go off and just do a little like “Take a deep breath and go into parasympathetic nervous system.” And if I could reliably have that, just that reminder so that I don’t lose myself in the amygdala’s panic.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. Well, I do not like the feeling of my heart starting to accelerate and my back getting stiffer and like this kind of [gasp] that comes when I feel somebody’s attacking me and that’s my trigger. As soon as that happens, actually there is one thing I do is I start breathing very, very slowly and deeply. And I just sit there and I’ll just watch my breath while they yell for a while. And you can always… It’s actually, you’re more likely to pick up what they’re saying if you’re watching your breath than if you’re trying to track what they’re saying, because you will not be tracking what they’re saying. You’ll be feeling a threat and composing an attack in response.

Rowan Mangan:
So I think remembering that we’re in a body can just be the most incredible sort of medicine against freaking out and losing the ability to hear what’s being said to us is just, “Remember I’m in a body that would prefer to be loose than tight, that would prefer to have oxygen than not. And am I comfortable? Can I comfy myself up a bit in this?”

Martha Beck:
Yeah. It’s actually, given the choice in that moment when the amygdala is feeling attacked, I would go with fear response 100% of the time. I can’t actually say I prefer to be relaxed in that moment. I have to say, “Just breathe first.” Okay. I want to defend or attack or run away or I’m having a defense cascade because it’s more than fight or flight. There are all these other responses like getting floppy or fawning on someone. So—

Rowan Mangan:
Mine is a really good combination of flop and flight and so I kind of like lurch off. I run away flopping all over like a fish.

Martha Beck:
And fall down and just wriggle. Yeah. So when that happens, I would choose the defense cascade because it is very, very convincing saying you need me to be safe. All I know is that it feels awful. And if I take and then blow out a very slow, deep breath, not like [breathes fast], not that kind of breath, like really it can be a deep in, but it has to be a long, slow exhale and it’s better if you purse your lips a little so your diaphragm has to push to get the breath out. That will reregulate your brain stem, which is like the only thing more primitive and anxious than the anxious, ancient than the amygdala. So [exhales] is actually the single first best step.

Rowan Mangan:
So what’s the context where we usually hear “Breathe”? It’s like when you’re having a panic attack or something.

Martha Beck:
When you’re having a baby.

Rowan Mangan:
And so it’s like take that and just widen the usage of the, “okay, take a breath” to when you suddenly feel like someone has an in for you in this and they’re coming at you and let that be one of the situations where you go, “Take a breath.” And I feel like there’s such power in stopping making it about them and just taking responsibility for yourself in that moment because there is nothing you can do about the other person, even if they are coming at you.

Martha Beck:
Even if they’re dead wrong and you have them dead to rights, can’t do anything about it.

Rowan Mangan:
No, but you can get regulated and that will, like that does ripple out.

Martha Beck:
You know what? This is one reason I’m glad I’ve done … I haven’t done a ton of meditation, but I’ve done more than a lot of people get a chance to. And I just watch my breath. Literally, my mantra is “breathing in, breathing out” most of the time. And I’ve sat there and watched myself have skirmishes with people online while I’m sitting absolutely still not moving and then regulating my breathing. I’ve had to practice. My anxiety is so strong and so hair-trigger that it has taken 10,000 hours of just looking at what happens inside me when I think about someone who’s been threatening or—wait for it—may potentially at some point be upsetting to me and watching that and going, “Okay, now I’ve been in hysterics for half an hour.” It is very uncomfortable to be in hysterics, sitting alone in a room, not moving, not writing anything into your phone, not just sitting there with the hysterics. And how do I get out? Breathing in, breathing out, breathing in, breathing out. Nothing is happening here.

Rowan Mangan:
Nothing is happening here, which makes me realize to sort of wrap it up that that’s the beauty of nature and is that not much is happening. And that’s what we crave because in the culture, in the scrolling, in the keyboard warriors, in the attack, attack, it’s all the left hemisphere making everything so fucking complicated and “this is a conspiracy” and “this is happening” and “these people want me to be whatever.”

Martha Beck:
“And I’m not sure of this, but this is how it could go, don’t you think?”

Rowan Mangan:
“And actually I’m very convinced by that. And now I’m pretty sure that is what—” Yeah. But nothing much is happening. Just breathe in, breathe out, watch the trees.

Martha Beck:
Sit in the forest, sit with a house plant and just…

Rowan Mangan:
Face north. Get ready to poop. Look out for lightning.

Martha Beck:
That’s right. Wait for the lightning. And when you’ve survived the lightning and you’ve learned to regulate yourself and you’ve learned that you don’t, it does not strike every time you poop, then you’ll be ready when someone comes to just caress your lumps.

Rowan Mangan:
And that’s how we-

Martha Beck:
Stay wild.

Rowan Mangan:
We hope you’re enjoying Bewildered. If you’re in the USA and want to be notified when a new episode comes out, text the word WILD to 570-873-0144. We’re also on Instagram. Our handle is @bewilderedpodcast. You can follow us to get updates, hear funny snippets and outtakes, and chat with other fans of the show. Bewildered is produced by Scott Forster with support from the brilliant team at MBI. And remember, if you’re having fun, please rate and review and stay wild.

We’re also on Instagram. Our handle is @bewilderedpodcast. You can follow us to get updates, hear funny snippets and outtakes, and chat with other fans of the show.

For more of us, Martha’s on Instagram, themarthabeck. She’s on Facebook, The Martha Beck, and she’s on Twitter, marthabeck. Her website is, MarthaBeck.com. And me, I too am on Instagram. Rowan_Mangan. I’m on Facebook as Rowan Mangan. And I’m on Twitter as RowanMangan. Bewildered is produced by Scott Forster with support from the brilliant team at MBI.