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The Peter Attia Drive
Qualy #116 - Dealing with anger in spots where you know it’s coming
Qualy #116 - Dealing with anger in spots where you know it’s coming

Qualy #116 - Dealing with anger in spots where you know it’s coming

The Peter Attia DriveGo to Podcast Page

Peter Attia, Sam Harris
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8 Clips
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Feb 21, 2020
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Episode Transcript
0:11
Welcome to a special bonus episode of the Peter Atia qualys a member-exclusive podcast. The qualities is just a shorthand slang for qualification round, which is something you do prior to the race just much quicker. The quality is highlight the best of the questions topics and tactics that are discussed in previous episodes of the drive. So if you enjoy the quality
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You can access dozens more of them through our membership program without further delay. I hope you enjoy today's
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quality
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think it was in one of your lessons, but it might have been in a podcast where you talked about.
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Imagine you're playing a video game and it's the same video game every time and you always get killed by the same monster at the same part of the maze or whatever it is. And I think about that a lot every time I falter at predictably, you know, known understood things that get under my skin and it's very discouraging right? It's sort of like there are like a dozen things that I just know if they happen so I mean one of them is
1:14
There's certain types of questions that if I'm asked really irk me, you know, when people ask questions that are to which the answer is very complicated, but they asked through the lens of just give me the one word answer. That just irks me like I don't know why it just bugs the shit out of me and I know that and yet over and over again, I find myself getting upset when that happens and I feel like the guy that you're describing a video gear losing the boss fight at the same place every time every single
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All time I know where the boogeyman is. I know what weapon he's going to use to kill me and I just walk over there and out comes the machete and I'm dead nothing and then I'm back to the starting block again. And I'm one fewer lives in the game. Right what what but you can recover faster each time. You lose getting angry is not the measure of having lost right now. You you obviously you can aspire to a time where you never get angry again or you never get angry in certain circumstances again.
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But the real practice is to notice as early as possible what's happening and to let go of it the difference between being angry for 10 minutes and 10 seconds and one second those factors of 10 are enormous, right? And
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I have the same thing going on where it's a anger is something that I very frequently feel and I also noticed that it totally contaminates the experience of people around me. So I have my wife and my daughters and my anger for them is clearly toxic and I have this commitment to letting go of it the moment I can let go of it and it's again it's not that anger is never warranted. The energy of anger can be useful. Someone's attacking you on the sidewalk.
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When you're in a self-defense situation, that's not the moment where I would say get rid of all your anger as quickly as possible. Right and maybe there's our situations where you want to use that energy. But for the most part you want to let go of it very very quickly and then be in a position to decide what's what and whether or not it's appropriate to take some kind of confrontational path, whatever it is.
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By email or say the thing that would convey your displeasure or whatever. But now I have my my wife and my daughters as a kind of feedback mechanism for me because they know my commitment. They know I can let go of anger on demand and they know I want to and they don't like my anger right and they detected in the subtlest way. So like I'm it's not it's not even anger. Where a normal
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Person would classically think he was angry don't have to wait till you raise your voice. They can see the mannerisms in the way. You might move or the way your answers become shorter or yeah. Yeah, or it may just so but like, you know even mild frustration get scored as you know, kind of crazy level of anger, right? So like if I you know, if I say, wait a minute, I thought the plumber was coming today. That's like, you know that you know, that's a four-alarm fire, right? So
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One of my daughters will say oh daddy's getting angry, right and they'll say that so early now and it's fantastic because it's I just let go of it way earlier than I used to but if you can't be mindful you actually have no choice you just you will be angry as long as you're angry and the people around you who don't like it. Just have to figure out somehow to put up with you.
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It's not that there's no other hacks and there are many other hacks and sometimes sometimes there. It's important to have a hack that is more Global than being simply being relentlessly mindful of everything that's coming up for you like a different understanding of a situation can offer some kind of firmware update to the whole operating system. And then you just simply don't go there anymore. So for instance, I mean, so you're driving.
5:24
And traffic there are many hacks for that. But one hack is just you discover that you've got 400 hours of podcasts. You want to listen to and you're listening to a great one and you you're just you're just happy to be listening and the fact that you're delayed an extra half hour or whatever is fine, you know, and that's a totally useful hack. Right? It modulates your state. You're just you're just discovering the silver line into something. That's that would otherwise be negative. I'll share with you another one because I agree with that completely. That's a great one. The other one that I've taken on in the
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Year that has had surprising efficacy is any customer service experience you have that is profoundly negative. And if you fly as much as I do you're pretty much guaranteed one of those a week, my friend Jay Walker who knows a lot about the aviation industry said
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one out of six experiences with u.s. Aviation as a customer service failure, right? So anyone who flies would agree with that but so the next time like the flight attendants rude to you or the TSA person is sweating you or being obnoxious or whatever if you instead take a view of empathy, which is God. This is a really hard job. You know, I mean, yeah, I have the privilege of getting to be, you know, intellectually engaged and doing all of these things and boom but this is a really hard.
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Job, I mean most of the people that they're encountering are on some level dissatisfied he's showing up to to their world happy and so like simply taking that posture completely changes the way you interact with that system. Yeah, and it's interesting because it doesn't even really require a huge mindfulness in sight. It's just sort of a but it's a condition you want to walk in the situation with right you want to be able to walk in with that in your mind. Yeah. It's a framing effect. Yeah. Yeah, and it doesn't
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L mindfulness at all. You could get the benefit of that new framing without ever having heard of mindfulness so you and if you do get angry you'll be as angry as you ever were but right so that you have a different way of thinking about it. The combination of these is powerful. Yeah. Hope you enjoyed today's special bonus episode of the quali new episodes of the qualities are released Tuesday through Friday each week and are published exclusively on our private member only podcast fee if you're interested in hearing more as well as receiving.
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Of the other member exclusive benefits. You can visit Peter at TM d.com forward slash subscribe. This podcast is for General informational purposes only and does not constitute the practice of medicine nursing or other professional health care services, including the giving of medical advice. No doctor-patient relationship is formed the use of this information and the materials link to this podcast is at the users own risk the content on this podcast is not intended to be a substitute for Professional Medical.
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Medical advice diagnosis or treatment users should not disregard or delay in obtaining medical advice from any medical condition they have and they should seek the assistance of their Healthcare Professionals for any such conditions. Finally. I take conflicts of interest very seriously for all of my disclosures and the companies I invest in or advise, please visit Peter Atia MD.com forward slash about where I keep an up-to-date and active list of
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