B (3:24)

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think most of what we're doing at the end of the day comes down to how are we thinking about things and what is our actual behavior. And those are core concepts of psychology. I think people get stuck in thinking these are unchangeable and we're kind of just in the path and have no control over that, but we actually do, and we can slow down and start to better understand what are our thoughts, what are our behaviors, and how do we want to change those.

A (3:54)

Yeah, I like that. And actually, real quick, Jess, before we get into this, I know at the outset in the intro I talked about multiple of your day jobs and you wanted to take a second just to give a little disclaimer, which I think is really, really critical.

B (4:08)

Yeah, absolutely. I think like a lot of people in the PHI community, I don't do just one thing. So I am a licensed clinical psychologist and I developed a deep interest in FI over the last couple of years. I am also an assistant professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School and a staff psychologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, as well as an NIH funded researcher. But my interest in PHI doesn't have to do with my day to day job. It actually has to do with my own journey to fi. And I'm speaking to you today just as a regular person as part of the FI community with an expertise in psychology. But like many people in this community, my interest in FI has nothing to do with my 9 to 5.

A (4:48)

And obviously, it goes without saying you're not here under any official capacity with any of those organizations that you listed, no matter how impressive they may be. So, yeah, we're just chatting just like always. As I always say, none of this is financial advice. You're not giving professional advice. So we just two friends chatting. But hopefully it's two intelligent friends who have some level of knowledge and expertise in their own lives. So let's talk about your own FI journey. Cause I think that's actually, that's pretty interesting where again, I say that the psychology is 90% of the FI journey. But you're coming to the FI journey with a deep background and knowledge in psychology, obviously. So I'm curious, like, while you can never prove what it would have been like had you not had the knowledge, of course I'm curious your thoughts on arriving to the FI community, which I think is a fairly recent development in your life in the grand scheme of things, with this deep background in psychology.

B (5:40)

Yeah, absolutely. I think I have sort of a backwards approach, which is I'm really good at managing my own thoughts and behaviors. But I didn't know much about finance or personal finance until recently. In graduate school, I made like $25,000 a year for six years. I didn't think I could ever contribute to a 401k or in my case a 403 until relatively recently when my salary did increase. But I also started to learn about these principles and concepts. And I listened to just about every episode that's come out of Choose FI in the past two years to learn. And I used to think that financial information was this gated thing like psychology. You had to go to school for a really long time to learn about these concepts. And I didn't understand even what an ETF was four years ago. Now I do, but I learned. I read books. I figured out you could actually learn this stuff and make changes towards something you want to achieve. And I'm good at the goal part. I'm good at getting my behaviors to be goal oriented, which is one of the goals in psychology. But I didn't know I could get even have this goal until relatively recently.

A (6:54)

Interesting. Okay, so the goal. It's fascinating because you hear people like James Clear from the author of Atomic Habits, talk about systems versus goals. And he's actually talking generally about. About systems and that being the starting point. But interestingly, you just said that goals are a significant part of psychology. Talk me through that because I'm curious how. How you personally look at goals when it comes to both your personal life and your phi life.

B (7:23)

Yeah, I think about overarching goals. What do I want to accomplish? What do I want to achieve? The systems are sort of how we get there. They're day to day things we can actually do. But I think about long term goals and I think about wanting my behavior to be goal directed and not mood directed and not doing things because I feel like it and especially not doing things because I don't feel like it at that moment. What do I want to achieve? What do I need to do to get there? How do I make that happen day to day?

A (7:56)

Okay, and now with these goals, of course you, you just mentioned long term, but I'm curious, do you break them up into distinct parts? Do you have sub goals? Do you? Or is it just simply my goal is fi 12 to 17 years from now or whatever it is. Like, talk me through how you personally set up these goals.

B (8:14)

No, absolutely you have sub goals. I like to think about chunking things into small approachable parts. There's a framework called smart goals. S M A R T, specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, time oriented. And so I think about setting goals in that way. Not I'm going to achieve five, but like what do I need to do this year? What savings rates, what kinds of income do I need to have those kinds of things? How do I make that happen? And, and that's sort of how I set goals in a long term way, but are more achievable in time oriented space.

A (8:49)

Okay, I gotcha. If you don't mind me asking, what are the more short term or medium term goals that you're working towards? I think it would really help people because I think clearly the long term goal, the I'm going to reach FI is pretty evident for most people, but we sometimes talk about the boring middle or maybe the messy middle. Like in terms of like, okay, the first year or two when you're on the path to FI is super exciting. You're making changes, you are investing, you're setting up accounts, you have a savings rate you're optimizing. And then you get to these years where maybe it seems a little boring. And we've talked about this on the podcast. I'm sure you've, you've heard Jess from the finance talk about this where, okay, maybe this is the time to experiment and iterate on what your FI life is going to look like. But I, I certainly don't want to lead you there, obviously, so I would counsel most people too. These can be the really fun years. You're not just sitting around, sitting on your hands, waiting. These can be very, very productive years. For what does my life look like post 5 for the next 50 or 60 years. But anyway, like I said, Jasper, I'm not leading you here. Talk to me about how you set these goals because I think that might really help people.

B (9:54)

Yeah, I think the boring middle, so to speak, is an opportunity to practice and to sort of emulate what you would like fi to be like for yourself and then practice doing those things. You've talked about mini retirements a lot on the show and those kinds of concepts. I like those. I think that sometimes we can get too stuck in like, what does a mini retirement really mean? But just practice. If you could fi tomorrow and you all of a sudden had all of this time to do what you want to do, what would you do? Like figure that out and start to practice doing that. Spending more time with family for me is one. So I have made specific changes in my life recently to be able to do that more. And if all of a sudden I didn't have a job tomorrow because I didn't have to have one or I could retire, how would I want to actually spend my day and start practicing setting up days of the week or parts of your time throughout the year that way?

A (10:58)

Yeah, I love that. And right. It's trying to find these overarching things that really do light you up. Like you said, you've had multiple changes in your life recently. I know you have a young child and you recently moved to live closer to family. I mean, those are pretty seismic changes in a life and it's not easy when you have day jobs and different things that you're working towards. Obviously on the path to fight. But, but I think for me there's some level of like, if not order of operations, then like what takes precedence? I know personally on my path to fi, moving to a lower cost of living area was, was a significant thing. And interestingly opposite of you. I moved away from family and friends. So it was purely a FI decision. It was, it was also a long term decision for future children at that point. Interestingly enough, it was, hey, I always know that I could have made a life here on Long island, which is a very high cost of living area, but it would be just dramatically easier in Richmond, Virginia because the cost of living was a third to a half. And that was, that was kind of a no brainer. But nevertheless it was moving away from family and friends. So like, I'm not sure frankly where I am now if that order of priorities would still be the same. Interestingly so, I suspect in this season of my life, relationships are much more important. So it is kind of fascinating to think back on decisions that were so self evident at the time and now they really might not be. So anyway, that's a tangent that I didn't expect to go on, but I'm curious for you, where are you on your FI journey? I know you said it's, you know, it's been about four years, but are there things you still. And again, coming in with a level of expertise in psychology, which I think puts you 10 steps ahead of the game, but not personal finance. Do you feel like you're on solid ground financially and you're just kind of in that experimental phase waiting towards FI or waiting until money compounds and savings rate continues to do its thing? So I guess just give me a sense of where you are on your own FI journey.

B (12:58)

I have, as you mentioned, a young kid, so being able to fully retire seems pretty far down the road. I'm still saving for college and things like that now, so I definitely think of myself as working towards fi. But one of the things that I like to think about is not being stuck in all or nothing thinking. And either you're Phi or you're not Phi, but how do I, on a day to day or week to week or month to month basis build more of what I would like to see when I do get to FI into my current life? So can I take a morning on a weekday and schedule that differently for myself so I can have more family time or, or can I change my schedule on a weekend so that I can do things with my family or with my friends that I wouldn't have otherwise been able to do if I was working all of the time and trying to just hit my number? And so I think about it as how do we change these small variables throughout our life to increase our enjoyment in life while still getting us closer to phi? Like I don't think it has to be you're at Phi or you're on the journey to Phi and there's no in between.

A (14:17)

Yeah, totally agreed. And I think for me, I've noticed that changing these small variables, going back to what you said before under a different context, you said some people think we're unchangeable. And I think some people think that what I like and don't like is also unchangeable, that these things don't vary, that there aren't seasons of life, that there aren't additional, like you said, small variables that might really impact what you do on a day to day basis. And I think this is really important. Like in my current life My mornings are essentially sacrosanct. So I do not want to give up my mornings at all. This, which is why we're recording this at 11:00am Eastern as opposed to 9:00am Eastern, which is when I used to record. So that's just. That's become really important time for me. And while that's a small thing, I think also, frankly, when you're in control of your time, which is such a critical aspect of fi, you can make decisions based on, like you said, those small variables, but that really add a measurable increase in the enjoyment. I'm using your words here, of course, but I think you have to look for these things and also understanding that things change in life. Right. Like we are not these monolithic beings, Jasper. Right. That like, are set in stone from the time we're 22 until we're 90. Like, it simply doesn't work that way. And I'm curious, how would you counsel people or advise them to look at their lives in this spirit of experimentation? Because I think some people, they know they should do this. But you're talking about these small variables and testing things. You gave a sense of that. But is there anything that you very concretely would advise, like, hey, here are a couple steps you could take in the next week to make this happen?

B (15:56)

Yeah, absolutely. I love the word experiment. Actually. One of the things we talk about in psychology a lot is behavioral experiments. So doing things without knowing what the outcome of those things is going to be and then evaluating what that was like. By definition, some of these things are not going to be helpful to you, but some of them are, and you can retain those in your life. I also like to tell people or encourage people to do something I call an activity audit. So what are you doing in your week chunk each day, morning, afternoon, evening, what is the main activity in that time and what did you get out of it? We're going to talk in a little bit about specific ways to think about your activities and what you get out of them. But just look at your week each day. Write down what you did in the morning, afternoon and evening and then what you got out of it. And if there are parts of your week that you're not getting a lot out of, you're really not enjoying them, they kind of detract from your day. We can do behavioral experiments to find new activities to put in there.

A (17:06)

Okay, I like that. So I definitely want to talk more about these behavioral experiments, but with the activity audit, this is a very specific question, but in your opinion, how do you think about structure of a day or a week or a month or a year. Do you find for people that you work with or yourself that more structure is better within a framework? Is it better to have a blank canvas in terms of your calendar? I know, like I said, this is very specific, but I'm curious your thoughts.

B (17:35)

I like a middle ground. I think we do well as human beings with some level of structure. I think about it like scaffold on a building. Like, it's not every inch of the building, but there are tiers throughout going up. And I think people tend to fall into this. Like, I need to schedule out, hour by hour exactly what I'm doing today. And that can get stressful and overwhelming and then you miss something or something runs long. So I like big chunks of time. Generally what am I doing in this two or three hour chunk of time and what did I get out of that?

A (18:11)

Okay, I like that. Yeah. This reminds me of There's a podcaster and author named Jocko Willink, and he talks about discipline equals freedom. And it's tangentially related here. I use this when we were raising our daughters, actually, in thinking about, we set up a significant framework boundary of like, what clearly was allowed and what wasn't. But within that framework, they had tons of autonomy and freedom to experiment. And that's where I think of, like, the discipline in the sense of like, I'm drawing a boundary with my finger here that nobody else can see, of course, but when you have an idea of those concrete boundaries, but then you have immense freedom inside, it seemed to work extraordinarily well for us and our families. So not parenting advice, obviously, but I like this concept of loose structure, but then this ability to have tons of time within to do these small experiments. So thank you very much for that. And I guess let's change gears and really talk about financial wellness and psychological wellness, because this is clearly what you're doing as part of your private practice. And earlier you mentioned what are our thoughts, what are our behaviors? And you've talked a little bit around this, but let's talk about this general approach to psychological wellness.

B (19:23)

Yeah, absolutely. And what I'm hoping to discuss really today is a primer for applying some core psychological skills to FI goals. And a lot of the concerns we're going to talk about are shared by many people. And these aren't designed to be groundbreaking or like the first time you've ever heard of this. But really, how do you take concrete steps towards making the changes that you want to make? I don't think of this as an exhaustive list of all psychological skills that could be helpful, but really two or three things and if the listeners take away one thing that they want to work on, I think that would be awesome.

A (20:04)

Agreed. Yep. You know, we're all about action here at choose of High. And yeah, if you leave here as a listener with. With one thing that you can take action on, that's a massive success. And I think Jasper is underselling it a little bit here. I suspect there are going to be a couple of things. So. All right, let's dive into it. Where would we start?

B (20:19)

So I think what's helpful is to first understand sort of where relationships to money come from. What did you learn in your childhood about money? What have you learned subsequently? And experiences about how you relate to money? So you just had a recent episode with Paula Pant that I really liked, and you, you started to discuss attachment styles as a way to think of relationship to money. There are other ways to think about relationships to money that aren't also attachment styles, and I think sometimes it can be helpful to just have different frameworks for this. We can also measure our relationships to money. There are different measures that have been used in research out there. There's one I like called the Klontz K L O N T Z Money Script Inventory. The Revised version is 32 questions about your attitudes and beliefs relating to money that break out into four scripts or narratives about money that we learn in childhood and subsequently. Just to say, this is not my measure. It's Brad Clonz's measure. He's an associate professor at Creighton, also a clinical psychologist and cfp. And you can find it online. It's relatively easy to find, but you could answer these 32 questions and then come away with actually, like, where do you fall on these different money scripts? The first one is money avoidance, belief that money is bad, or rich people are greedy or I don't deserve money. And some patterns that come with that are kind of avoiding finance or having guilt about wealth. The second script is money worship, this idea that money will fix everything. It's the key to happiness. All problems get better when you throw money at them, and that can lead to really unhelpful behaviors about spending and earning and taking on debt. Another one is money status, which is my worth is my net worth. And success means showing off our wealth, which I think probably most of the people listening to this episode are less inclined to be falling into. If you're in the FI community and the last One is money vigilance. You have to save and work hard. Money is something you shouldn't talk about and that can really lead to over frugality and anxiety about future financial security. And it makes it hard to enjoy spending money or enjoy the money you've earned. Probably many folks in the FI community might score a little bit higher on the money vigilance. There's nothing necessarily wrong with it, but we want to know where we're coming to our relationships with money, where are we coming from? So that we can sort of be aware of our tendencies and use those as signals for things we might want to change.

A (23:06)

Okay, so this really is, it's simply an awareness. So it's a starting point for the entire journey that we're going to undertake. Okay. And like you said, this is really easy to find. I'll try to put a link in the show notes, but you just simply Google klontz K L O N T Z money script inventory and it literally is the first result in Google. So incredibly, incredibly easy to find. All right, Jasper, so we have a sense of one of these four categories now. And I'm not sure if there are shades of gray where you might fit into multiple of them. I suspect there are. Where do we go from there? So clearly people have strong emotions about money, but what do we do with this awareness? What's the next step?

B (23:46)

Yeah, that's a great question. The next step is once we know kind of what are our tendencies, what are our biases that can signal us into things we need to be aware of, signals to look out for in the future. And it can also suggest some of the changes we might want to make. So if you are a person that is high on money avoidance, you want to sort of change your thinking about money and actually engage in approach oriented behaviors and start to scaffold how to approach money in a healthy way and not just avoid it. Avoidance is a great short term coping strategy. If we don't think about our problems, they don't exist. But it's a terrible long term coping strategy because they will always come back around to get you. And we want to be able to approach those things that we're concerned about. And so then there are behavioral ways to figure out, okay, how do I approach this? I know this makes me stressed when I think about it, how do I engage with it in a healthy way?

A (24:45)

Okay, and then presumably right for each of these four and then some of the combinations thereof, we can set up this scaffolding for next steps. So of course we Talk about Brad Klontz and you have a website. But I'm always cautious of people listening to a podcast. And again, all we care about is people taking action. Right. And people saying, okay, look, I'm going to take this quiz. I want to have a sense of where I fit in. And then Jasper just talked about these tendencies and knowing them and suggesting some of the change we want to make. But concretely, where do they go from there if they don't have you as, as their, you know, on call or you as their, their psychologist? Like, yeah, what did they do next? Are there books, are there resources? Like, where would you advise people to, to start? Because I suspect some people are going to get caught right there.

B (25:31)

That's a great question. So where do we go from here? There isn't like a clear. This is the right answer that you should do. What we're going to talk about today are two main skills in psychology that can help. And I think what people want to do is start to think about their thoughts and behaviors and work on changing them. And if you have difficulty doing that, that might be a good indicator that reach out to someone who specializes this and have an hour, two consultations and see what you can learn and how you can change.

A (26:04)

Okay, I love that. So, right. We're going to walk away with two main skills. And you have repeated multiple times already in the first 25 minutes here, thoughts and behaviors. So that's another thing that hopefully everybody leaves here today with a clear understanding of what that means in this true psychological sense. Because while these are common words, of course we understand them in the literal definition. But I really hope that people walk away with that as well. So before we get into those two main skills, though, I know there were some other, other major items that you wanted to talk about in terms of evolution and relationship to resources and retirement being a brand new development. So let's take two minutes because I think this is an important background as well.

B (26:44)

Yeah. The purpose of this is just to normalize why this is so hard. As humans, we don't really have a good script or understanding of retirement. Retirement is a relatively new concept in the history of humanity. Going as far back as hunter gatherers, right. There was no concept of retirement. Nobody sat back and said, you know what, I picked enough berries in my time, I'm going to retire and let the kids do it. You had to work until basically you could not work anymore in order to be part of society. And the ability to retire is relatively new. There was a little bit like just looking at the history in ancient Rome, in the Middle Ages, there were some sort of concepts of pensions, but for certain professions, soldiers, religious institutions, some crafts or guilds. But they weren't really retiring. It wasn't until 1889, when in Germany they introduced the first, what they called old age social insurance for people 70 and older, that we could even really start to think as retirement as a concept broadly for society. And in the U.S. social Security was only started in 1935. It's 90 years old. There are people living today in America who are born into the United States, where the concept of retirement wasn't guaranteed. So up until this time, recently, last hundred years or so, the idea of not working until death was really only for like the elites, royalty, landowners, people with generational wealth. What FI is really about to me is that financial independence is attainable for everyone and you don't have to work forever if you don't want to. And what you and this podcast are so great at doing is outlining steps real people can actually take and strategies we can actually use to help us get there. But psychologically, we are fighting an uphill battle because this is not how our brains evolved. We don't have evolution to help us have a concept of having enough resources. That has never been a concept in human history. Almost all of human history, we have been barely getting by. And the people who pushed a little bit harder had more stockpile for winter or for drought, had a better chance of survival and. And we inherited those genes and that way of thinking. So we come to this with a scarcity mindset that there is never enough. And really, in the last hundred years, we've started to try to change that scarcity mindset. But that's the underlying core line of thinking that we tend to fall into, because that's what every human who came before us have fell into.

A (29:28)

Right? And evolution doesn't happen too quickly, not to mention in the last decade or two. Right. So scarcity mindset that ties into money vigilance that you talked about before, I think that is something you kind of loosely reference that a lot of us in the fight community, I suspect very strongly factor into that of the four money scripts, for sure. But it's hard. It's hard, Jasper. Right? Like, this is not something, I mean, we're fighting uphill battles psychologically on multiple fronts because that scarcity mindset is built into us. Like you said, in most, most humans, you literally, if you don't have resources, if you don't have food, you are going to perish. There's going to be significant consequences. Right. And then you have modern day issues as well of these. These battles to fight is like just the baggage with the term retirement. I mean that's something we grapple with so often. Like when you tell people like it, it's hard to tell people I'm retired early. Like that's something I, I even recoil from because it sounds so preposterous. And that's why I think the financial independence aspect is really what clearly what we focus on here at Choose a vi. But I think what most people are actually looking for, they're not looking for necessarily retirement in this old baggage sense of like you're going to sit on the beach sipping umbrella drinks. Right. Like that's not something anyone aspires to. But nevertheless, we are fighting this war on multiple fronts with ourselves psychologically. How do you think a modern day person aspiring to be fi should get started on those couple of items? Because I think, and I know we're going to go into concrete ways. So I don't want to get ahead of ourselves here, but talk me through that. So this scarcity mindset, like how on earth do we overcome something that is hardwired into us over hundreds of thousands of years of evolution?

B (31:13)

Yeah, absolutely. Change is really hard. That is why I have a job. This isn't. I say that in a joking way, but it's true that this isn't something we can just easily do differently. It takes a lot of consistent effort towards working on changing whatever it is. We're talking specifically about the journey to five. But there are other things in life. Humans are multidimensional. There are other things in life we may want to change. We have to every day work towards that. It is difficult. Where I come to change from is finding that balance. So it's easy to fall into the scarcity mindset and think, oh, there's never going to be enough. But that's only one side of the coin. And what I want people to do is take a step back from that initial reaction and turn the coin over. What is the other side of that coin? How do you balance that? A lot of times we just go with that. First thing that comes into our mind. We call that an automatic thought. It's happening so quickly we're really not even aware of it. It's kind of automatic. And then that we're off on the whole tangent down that path that that automatic thought led us down. But that automatic thought may not be accurate and we need to get better at taking a step Back and sort of putting thoughts in the context of they're just thoughts, they're not facts, they're not always true. And what is on the other side of that coin? How do I come up with something a little bit more balanced?

A (32:50)

Okay, so then how do we come up with that? Right, so this I suspect is going to lead right into the main skills. And you talked about thoughts and behaviors. I know emotions I have to imagine ties into this as well. Where do we start? As far as I know, you talk about cognitive behavioral therapy. Cognitive behavioral triangle, which I think are thoughts, behaviors and emotions. Where do we go from here?

B (33:12)

Yeah, absolutely. So I like to talk about the cognitive behavioral triangle. There are many different types of therapy. I am a CBT therapist, so that's how I think about things. Other people might think about things differently, but in the cognitive behavioral triangle, if you imagine a triangle, there's emotions, thoughts and behaviors. And we think about them as being all interrelated, kind of double sided arrows going from each corner of the triangle. And you can have a thought that leads to an emotion, that emotion can then lead to a behavior and the behaviors can lead to more thoughts. Or you can go around that triangle different ways. So for example, there's so much worry that is absolutely natural in the five journey worries, a normal human emotion we just talked about that we evolved to worry about. But we also know that too much worry isn't actually helpful. And there's a curvilinear relationship between worry and performance. It's called Yerkes Dodson law. Anyway, you can start with a thought. Oh, I'm not going to have enough. That's a thought. It may or may not be true, but that's a thought. And that can lead to an emotion like worry. And that worry can lead to behaviors like over frugality or not enjoying life or one more year syndrome. Right. And then those behaviors can lead us to more thoughts or more emotions. Feeling like you're missing out on life, not really enjoying things, and then that leads to more negative thoughts. And we kind of go around this spiral of negativity, but we came into that from one specific area, in this case a thought. We don't have a magic wand that can make negative emotions go away, but we do have skills where we can change our thoughts and we can change our behaviors.

A (35:00)

Okay, I definitely get the sense of the triangle now, but you're saying you can really start. Is it, is it generally thoughts where this starts? Like obviously the interrelated. I'm getting that sense. But in terms of someone who is saying, like, okay, I really do want to get started on this, but how do I think about it? Like, how are they trying to find. I don't want to say issues because that has negative connotations. But how do they try to find these items in their life where they can even, even start as literally a starting point for this? Like, is it always thoughts? Are you looking for behaviors, emotions? Like, does it matter? Is there one easier way? Like, do you suggest people write these down? Like, what are they looking for? Yes.

B (35:42)

So great question. So I think of emotions as signals. Something has just happened. If all of a sudden you're feeling worried, what made you feel that way? Was it a behavior? Did you just log on to your Fidelity, Schwab or Vanguard and check what the market did? And now it's down, There's a lot of volatility. Now you're worried. Okay, if checking is what's making you worried, we can do a different behavior. We can get rid of that. If it's thoughts, if you have a specific thought that led you into this negative emotion spiral, then we can challenge those thoughts and get out of negative ones, overly negative thoughts. I think thoughts are often easier for people to become aware of in the moment and that can be an easier place to change on a moment to moment basis. But behaviors are important in a long term way. Day to day, month to month.

A (36:38)

Okay, that makes sense. So it's funny because this actually, on some level it ties back to the activity audit that you mentioned earlier. Totally unrelated of course, but to me there is great satisfaction in writing things down. I don't know if I'm old school or whatever it may be, but it somehow makes things more concrete for me. Which is why even when I track my net worth, I don't do it in an automated way. I literally log into each one of my accounts and I write down the balance. When I do my quarterly net worth in an Excel sheet, it just, there's something about the granularity of it that like, it just is concrete. So yeah, I think this is a really good way of just how I'm thinking about it. I don't want to put words in your mouth, of course, Jasper, but like the way that I would walk away from this is just for the next couple of weeks I'm going to be looking for these, these things. And again, I don't want to imprecisely use words, but like trigger is the word that comes to my mind. And again, I don't want to use a word that Might carry different significance. But what are these things that cause that we're thoughts, behaviors, and emotions that are maybe outside the norm in terms of level of significance are arising for me and then jot them down. I think that would be my starting point. Does that sound plausible?

B (37:52)

Yeah, I absolutely ask people to write things down. I think tracking is extremely helpful. Tracking behaviors is certainly one way. And also tracking thoughts. What was that automatic thought you had that entered your mind that led to an emotion? And sometimes just writing it down on paper is enough, or in today's day and age on a document or your phone is enough to get it out of your head and let you get some space from it so that you can start to evaluate these thoughts.

A (38:18)

Okay, great. So now that we've started this, what's the next step? Where do we go from here?

B (38:22)

Yeah. So the first step in managing thoughts and behaviors is to determine what aspects of this stressor are within our control. I think about problems as having two distinct parts. Parts that are controllable and parts that are uncontrollable. And this is a key distinction because the degree to which a stressor is controllable or uncontrollable will influence what coping strategies we decide to use. For controllable problems. We use problem solving. And there are a whole host of five strategies that can be applied for problem solving. And you do this thing where you say, what number episode I'm talking about? When I talk about an episode, see episode one to almost 800. Pretty much every episode of choose fi has something concrete you can use for problem solving. Controllable stressors. There are account strategies, there are saving strategies. We can control and use problem solving to do that. The problem is not all stressors are fully controllable. When things are not controllable, we cannot use problem solving. And when we do, we start to feel burnt out because we're just spinning our wheels and not actually improving our situation. If you are stressed because the market had a downturn, opening a new account or using a roth conversion or whatever it is won't help with that. So we need to figure out a way to cope with the stress, and that is outside of our control. And that's where these two main strategies come from. And the two main areas are cognitive and behavioral. We can change our thoughts, we can change our behaviors to be more helpful to us in coping.

A (40:10)

Okay, so controllable issues, like you said, problem solving, these are almost like tasks or things that you. There's some way to complete it. As I'm understanding, like there's something to do, there's some problem to solve, some activity to take, some step to take. But. Right. Whereas uncontrollable, like you said, hey, I'm worried about the stock market. Opening up another account is not going to help you. Right. Like that's not a, a valid response or a way to solve this issue. Okay, so two main categories, cognitive and behavioral. Again, these are words that we think we understand, but let's really go into each of them. How would you interact with. Do we think a definition is the best way to start?

B (40:50)

Yeah. So thoughts, I mean, you're right. We know these words. Thoughts are things that happen in our mind. We think about things all of the time. Our brain is really good at filtering out erroneous information, but we have millions of thoughts a day. Some of them are helpful to us, and some of them are really not helpful to us. And what we want to do with understanding our thoughts, our cognitions, is identify those unhelpful thoughts, the thoughts that needlessly take us down negative spirals. And once we have identified them, we increase our awareness of our own thinking. We identify unhelpful thoughts, then we want to challenge our thinking. So if we find thoughts that keep leading us towards negative emotion, I want to know, are those thoughts really true or 100% true? Because if they're not, why do we keep having those negative emotions? Why do we keep letting ourselves feel bad if the only reason we're feeling bad is this thought that's not actually accurate?

A (42:01)

Okay, now what if the font is accurate? What if there's some truth to it, but you're still ruminating on it all the time?

B (42:09)

Yes. Okay, so there's two sets of skills within this. One is dealing with unhelpful, inaccurate thoughts. We want to challenge those and get away from them. And I think that can also be true when thoughts have some degree of being accurate. Because oftentimes we feel like, oh, it's 100% accurate, but maybe it's not. Maybe it's only 75 or 50% true, maybe it's not true all of the time. But we apply it to our whole life like it is, and we want to get some space from that and give ourselves an opportunity not to be stuck in that thought. There are other skills for dealing with rumination or dealing with thoughts that are true, and maybe that can come at a later time. Acceptance based strategies and other things for dealing with ruminating about problems. But we often over apply that to our whole life.

A (43:05)

Right. So it becomes like a monolithic Thing, it's either true or untrue or in this case true 100% of the time. In 100% of the cases is how you're, you're catastrophizing.

B (43:16)

Yeah, catastrophizing is one of the main, I call them thinking traps or that's the term used in cbt thinking traps. Catastrophizing is a main one. All or nothing is another one. These are things that we get stuck in this kind of thinking, but it's not actually true all of the time.

A (43:35)

Okay. And yes, I can certainly see how. I know I have done that personally in the past and we've talked about or you've heard me many times talk on the podcast about just different psychological issues that I have grappled with over my life. And I think that's very, very normal. I think most of us deal with, with different issues. And for me it was always like, okay, this is keeping me up at 3am and I can think very concretely back to poor real estate investment that I made. And I mean, that used to keep me up almost every night or certainly many, many nights. If I woke up at three in the morning, that was the first thing I thought about. And it seemed like it was an insurmountable issue. But I wasn't really applying a holistic look at my life and saying, hey, Brad, yeah, okay, you did this one stupid thing, but you still have a 50 plus percent savings rate. And it was hard to see the forest for the trees. I was so myopically focused on this one really frankly stupid mistake. And there's no two ways about it that it overwhelmed all of my senses and it just became the centerpiece of my financial life. And yeah, so I mean, I, I'm assuming that's a pretty. Well, that exact specific instance might not be common for everybody. I suspect this catastrophizing and worrying is something that plagues a lot of us.

B (44:52)

Oh, absolutely. And I think that's such a great example too of how this actually works. Is, yes, okay, you made this mistake that happened. It's now not changeable. You can't problem solve out of it. So how do we get space for, from these thoughts that are keeping you up at three in the morning, how do we take a step back and say, okay? And to make this concrete, there are a couple different approaches. One is to think about the evidence, for the evidence against and to come up with a balanced thought. So if the thought is about, oh, I made this terrible real estate mistake and probably what's Underlying that is I'll never financially recover or some other kind of catastrophic, I'm now doomed financially. I won't be able to achieve Phi or something kind of catastrophic like that. We can actually evaluate that thought and say, okay, I made this mistake. What is the evidence that I won't be able to achieve Phi now? Okay, lost some money. I think you were talking about this in a recent episode where you said if you thought about the compound interest of that money you lost, it's like well over a million dollars. You don't like thinking about that, okay, fine, that's evidence for that. You could have had more money that you missed out on. You don't now have that. Okay, but we need to turn this coin over and look at the other side. What is the evidence against what else is going on for you in your financial life? Okay, you made one bad decision that cost you some money. And on the other side of the coin, oh, look, the market's been up year over year since the beginning of time, right? Like there's, there's so much going on for you elsewhere that you're not thinking about at three in the morning. You're not pushing back and saying, yes, I made that mistake, but here are the things that are going really well for me. And if I look at my net worth chart from since I started tracking to now, it's gone up, I'm doing fine, everything is going to work out. We don't push back on that. And that's what the skill is. It's generating the evidence against this negative thought and then coming up with a balanced thought, which might sound like, even though X, Y is also true, even though you lost out on some money from this bad real estate deal, it's also true that your financial stability is okay and you are on the journey to fi, you are making progress and your net worth is going up.

A (47:24)

I love that. Jasper. Even though X, Y is also true, right? And we're not, we're not engaging in BS, fanciful thinking or trying to mitigate that, like, hey, this, this happened like you said, like I made this investment, it happened. But that doesn't mean that this is a catastrophe, right? Like, it can also be true that I'm on the path to FI and that I have a 50 to 70% savings rate and I reach FI and also frankly, like another benefit in this particular instance, right, is I learned the hard way what real estate, and not just real estate, frankly, but general speculation, is versus true investing. And my future, though minor success in real estate investing Came about because of this scar that I had, in essence, from this negative experience. And I frankly don't know that I would have looked into it with the level of detail and scrutiny that I probably should have without that issue. So it actually, in a. In a funny way, it turned into something very positive. So, yeah, I love that it's. Even though X, Y is also true. Okay, Definitely got this. So I. I think you call it cognitive restructuring. Right. So, like, we're just looking for evidence for and against. We're not trying to BS ourselves and say this didn't happen or it. There's no shred of truth to it. But you're trying to come up with a balanced thought to leave. So it's not this, like, I know well, like this. These doom loops, these doom spirals of, like, you start thinking and you just can't stop. You start beating yourself up. I can't believe it. Like, to me it's. I can't believe I was so stupid to do that. How could I not think? Like, you know, all of these things just come through my head and it just. It goes on and on, and it's exacerbated at 3:00am Also, when you're exhausted.

B (49:00)

Yeah, absolutely. But you're not doing that other side of the coin thing at 3:00am, right. And if you did, maybe you would be able to get back under the covers and sort of, you know, count your sheep again. But we need to push our thinking a little bit further to get more balanced and not just let that initial thought take us on a journey.

A (49:21)

Yes. Okay. This is deeply sinking in with me. So that's some of the cognitive strategies. Are there additional cognitive strategies or is it. Is that the main one we should focus on? Anything else we can tangentially talk about?

B (49:33)

Yeah. There's another way to also approach cognitive restructuring. So evidence for evidence against balanced thought is one. Another way is to look at the worst case scenario, the best case scenario, and then realistically determine the most likely scenario. And it's very important. What you've highlighted here is we are not trying to skip through a field of flowers all day and say everything is great all of the time. When things are not great, we want to know that so we can adjust appropriately. Bad things happen in life. That's normal. And it's okay to feel sad down. It's okay to beat yourself up a little bit. And like you said, you learned from that and you were able to do something constructive with that information. We just don't want to do that all of the Time. We want to be able to see what's going on in the rest of life and not just only focus on the negative, but we also don't want to avoid completely the negative and bury our head in the sand, because that's not helpful either.

A (50:34)

Yeah, it's interesting. I feel like many of us have this propensity towards negativity. And I wonder, does this tie into. We talked about evolution and resources. Are these essentially the same thing?

B (50:46)

Yes, exactly. That's why I thought it was important to talk about that. We have often bias towards negative thinking because it helped us survive. We wanted to know what problems might be around the corner and the people who could do that better survived better. And the people who were just like, oh, yeah, no problem. Oh, there might be a saber tooth tiger around there. No worries, I'll be fine. Got eaten. And we don't want to do that.

A (51:13)

Right.

B (51:13)

So we have. And especially when negative emotions are stronger, when feeling down or worried is much higher, we know from research we have a bias to be more negative in our thinking. And so we want to take a step back and realistically evaluate that thinking.

A (51:32)

Okay, so. Right. I think it's easy to beat yourself up, but. Right. You have to basically say, like, hey, my ancestors weren't tiger mead, and that's why I'm here, frankly. But they've also passed down this propensity towards negativity. And that's where your strategies really can help is. All right, we need to look at these things. We need to come up with a balanced way of looking at it and come up with realistic scenarios as opposed to the worst case scenario all the time. So, okay, so that is the cognitive side. Now, clearly the behavioral side comes next. So talk us through where we start with that.

B (52:06)

Yeah. So the main skill on the behavioral side is behavioral activation. And that's kind of like the fancy psychology term. It doesn't necessarily mean being active like outdoors or walking around all the time, but activities, what are you doing with your time? And I think this can help us develop better financial habits on the path to fi. And then identify the kinds of activities that enrich our lives based on our values, which will help us enjoy life leading up to and during phi. Okay, so the kinds of activities that that fit for people within behavioral activation are deeply personal and different for everybody, but they are generally activities that fall into one of four main categories. They can fall into more than one, but generally these four main categories. So accomplishment, that feeling of that you get pat on the back feeling when you've Done something. Pleasure, social activities, and physical activities. And not necessarily every day do we have to be achieving all four of these categories, but generally week to week, month to month, we want to make sure we're doing these kinds of activities. Research has shown these help us feel better and help us be more productive in our lives, whatever our goals are when we're doing these kinds of activities.

A (53:35)

Okay, so four main. And like you said, accomplishment, pleasure, social, and physical. I definitely want to. Want to talk more about this, but just to tie us back into what we were talking about. So we're talking about controllable, right, the different strategies. Controllable versus uncontrollable. Now, clearly we talked about controllable and problem solving. Then uncontrollable. There are cognitive strategies and then these behavioral strategies. Right. We're still. Still on board with that. So these are for uncontrollable. So let's take that step back with behavioral and talk about, like, that framework of the uncontrollable and how this would lead into behavioral activation and how someone would. Would think through this. Because for me, and maybe this, this speaks more to. To who I am. Like, the cognitive strategies, that makes perfect sense for uncontrollable, because my issues, I feel like, you know, they're rattling around in my head. So, like, it would be logical for me. And now I'm not saying this is accurate clinically, obviously, but logical for me to come up with cognitive strategies to overcome them. But how do we do this with uncontrollable issues, with behavioral strategies?

B (54:38)

So I think that this is an opportunity to get out of our head. And often the line between problem solving and cognitive restructuring can get a little blurred when we're very cognitive people. And so what behavioral activation is, is a framework to think about your behaviors so that you can go out and get enjoyment from life without worrying about the problems. So if the market took a big downturn and you lost 1% of your portfolio in a day, you can sit there and think all day, but sometimes it's helpful, like just to go out and go for a walk or go hang out with your buddies and watch a game or something. Do something else totally unrelated to the problem that gets your mind away from it. And the activities that are best at getting our mind away from our problems are those that are high in accomplishment, pleasure, social and. Or physical.

A (55:40)

Gotcha. Okay. That is a beautiful explanation that makes perfect sense. So essentially, right, like you said, this is a framework to get enjoyment out of life without worrying about the problem. So this is okay, you have to. You have to enjoy your life. And these are the. There are lots of ways to enjoy life, but these are four deeply impactful ways to go about it, these categories. So, okay. And it's funny, Jasper, doesn't that speak so much to where my mindset is that, like, well, I believe in building a wonderful life. And certainly in these four categories, it genuinely wouldn't have crossed my mind that this was a way to potentially overcome some of these uncontrollable issues. That's. That's quite interesting, I think.

B (56:20)

Yeah, we often tend to fall into sets of skills that work best for us, but that's a really good indicator of what we need to actually practice going forward. If you're really good at cognitive, that comes to you easily. Then round it out by getting better at behavioral. Round it out by figuring out what are these activities that I want to have in my life that help me get away from my problems, not in an unhelpful way, but actually in a helpful way that help us kind of not be so negative.

A (56:52)

Gotcha. Now, do these two strategies, cognitive and behavioral, work in isolation or is it always together?

B (57:02)

No, you can absolutely do one without doing the other. You can set out to practice just behavioral activation for the next month and not think about challenging your thoughts at all. Ideally, you would get good at both of them, but. And so you have these skills ready to go depending on what comes your way. But certainly. And in my work, we focus on one skill and then the other. We don't forget about that skill once we moved on from it. I still check in with people, but we spend dedicated time working on one skill before moving on to the other.

A (57:38)

Okay, that makes perfect sense. All right, so we've got, like I said, pleasure, social, physical, and then mastery and accomplishment. So I suspect that's one where many people. And frankly, and this might be an exaggeration because I know I've said this before and gotten some pushback, but I think for many people, and this might not be the fi community, certainly, but for many people, we stagnate. Adults. Many adults stagnate. And I don't know if you asked a broad swath of a thousand people off the street, how many of them are pursuing mastery as 30, 40, 50 year olds in any capacity in their life? So this might be something that people need, like that, aha. Awakening moment for, like, how do you advise people who really maybe haven't thought about learning something new since college or grad school or whatever, high school, frankly, like, think about. All right. Look, I'm an adult, but this is a really important part of behavioral activation, and it's not something that I should have let fall by the wayside decades ago.

B (58:37)

Yeah, I think that's a great point. We get very stuck in our routines, and it's really easy to fall into routine, and sometimes they don't serve us very well. And that's why I was talking about the activity audit before, because I want to know how you spend your time and what do you get out of that? I think those are two main questions. Why am I doing what I'm doing? What am I getting out of it? And you can actually rate your accomplishment and your pleasure on a scale from 0 to 10 for any activity that you're doing. And ideally, we'll find activities that are high on both, but you will have in your life activities that are high on one and low on the other or low on both. And if you notice that there's a huge imbalance in your day to day or your week to week, you're not having a lot of accomplishment. That's a really good signal that you should go out and find activities that are associated with a higher sense of accomplishment. What those are for you, I don't know. You'd have to figure that out. That's where the behavioral experiments come in. But maybe you want to pick up a new hobby and see how that goes. I got into ax throwing. That was, like, something I did at the end of COVID I got really into axe throwing, and I took that. That was, like, a big hobby of mine. I got a lot of accomplishment and pleasure out of doing that. It was fun, and I got good at it. And so I got that pat on the back feeling. And so it could be totally out there. Could be woodworking. It could be crocheting. I have no idea. Whatever that activity is for you. But start to develop something that you feel a pat on the back for having accomplished something.

A (60:16)

All right. That makes perfect sense. So this behavioral activation aspect is certainly not, in my estimation, not limited to uncontrollable problems either. Right? Like, this is. This is literally the path to find. This is like building a life that you want to live into.

B (60:30)

As I see it, it does two things. One is, how do we want to live our life? And that is finding your values and finding activities that are congruent with those values and doing them. The other side of that coin is having activities you can use for coping. Oh, I really know I feel better when I do X.

A (60:51)

So.

B (60:51)

So I. I had a Rough day or I'm really stressed about whatever's going on. I'm gonna go do that thing because I know that helps me, that I love.

A (61:00)

Okay. You could see me nodding along and smiling at that. That deeply impacts me. So, okay. Not only, of course, we're trying to build this wonderful framework of a life. I think that is the path to fi. But these are also. We're talking about tools for specific issues and knowing maybe what makes you feel better in a given moment when such and such happens. Right. So, like, for many of us, some type of physical. I think that's the thing that comes to mind for me is I'm going to go to the gym and lift weights and just kind of like. I don't want to say, like, burn my anger off or whatever, because that's slightly imprecise, but it's like, man, I just want to go to the gym and crush it. And I just feel great. And that is a way to get out of my head. So I think clearly, by any definition, that would fit this behavioral activation.

B (61:47)

So what does the gym. Of course. What does the gym have in it that is serving you so well? It's physical activity, for sure. You said you're going to crush it, so there's accomplishment, it makes you feel good, so there's pleasure, and there are other people there. So it's also social. So it's got all four. So that's a perfect example of an activity, you know, you can use as needed to feel better. It's also something that's important for your life and consistent with your values. So it's something you're going to do in general, consistently throughout your time or your week, your month. But you could go to the gym after a specifically hard day and know you'll feel better afterwards. Yes.

A (62:24)

I love this. So, right. These two main skills. We talked about this. Behavioral activation, obviously, looking at these four main categories. And then clearly cognitive restructuring, I think is huge. So it's really like, it's not catastrophizing. It's arriving at this more balanced thought, I think, clearly, by any definition, Jess, where we. We nailed it on. On the goal here of. Of getting those two main skills across. I. I just wanted to take a second because I suspect there are going to be people who really undertake this and go after both of these, but frankly, like, maybe they don't have the skills on their own, even with. With the great explanation that you just gave to overcome this necessarily. And. And again, you know, I'm using words that make sense. For me, but I don't know how, how you think about it as, as a actual psychologist, but where would someone go next? So like, the last thing I would want is someone to, to walk away from this and say like, oh man, I've been dealing with these uncontrollable thoughts. I've been dealing with these issues. I'm going to really undertake this. And then they don't feel like it solves. I, I'm assuming there are different levels. You mentioned something like acceptance and commitment therapy. CBT is another one that I know. Where would someone go next as far as, like, would you recommend they look for a professional in their area? Someone online? Are there books that somebody could read? Like, what would be the very next step from this?

B (63:39)

So that's a really good question, Brad. And there are many different steps you could take. You could find a licensed mental health professional, clinical psychologist in your area, someone who specializes in cognitive behavioral therapy or acceptance and commitment therapy.

A (63:55)

Act.

B (63:56)

There are some books out there. There are a lot of different CBT and ACT self help books. There's an ACT book I've read that I like, Happiness Trap by Russ Harris. And there are many different CBT books to help you think through this. And if you feel like you're struggling with this, you can find someone. They don't have to have a specialty in personal finance or phi. These are just thoughts. These are just behaviors that you are the expert in. You and you know what's bothering you, but you can reach out to somebody and they can help you work through whatever your thoughts and behaviors are. It's just important to find somebody you click with.

A (64:40)

Okay, that's absolutely wonderful. So the Happiness Trap is the book you recommended, but of course there are many, many, many resources, so. Okay, that is great. I really appreciate that. All right, Jasper, well listen, I really appreciate you coming on and sharing your expertise. This was wonderful. It exceeded my lofty expectations and ambitions for it. And I think, frankly, hopefully if you'll come back. I suspect this is the first of many appearances because like we talk about all the time. Yeah, I'm just a bozo off the street talking about a bunch of this stuff. On the psychology side, I, I hope, I hope I'm directionally accurate and, and nail more things than I get wrong. But having someone with your expertise is really wonderful. So I appreciate your time. I thank you for coming on. Where can people reach out to you or find more about you?

B (65:24)

Yeah, Brad, thank you so much for having me. It's really been a pleasure to talk to you and I love talking about this stuff. Like this is what really gets me going and so it's really exciting. People can find me. I have a website, it's jasperleep h d.com and Lee is spelled L E E. And people can just submit a form and reach out to me. There's. I'm always happy to chat and have meetings with folks.

A (65:48)

Absolutely wonderful. I really appreciate this. This is really helpful. And to everyone out there, like always, when you listen to choose of I, this is about taking action. We don't want you just sitting there on the couch, just passively listening and then moving on with your day. I think a lot of these issues that we talked about today are really important and impactful for the vast majority of us. I would say everyone. But we'll, we'll round down to the vast majority and I think the tools that Jasper gave you today are really going to help. I know they're going to help me. I already literally, while we're recording this, put the Happiness Trap book in my Amazon cart. So it's going to click and check out here in the next minute or so. And I think we're never finished products. I think that's one of the beautiful aspects of being human is we can always work on things, we can always iterate, we can always test and we can get better and we can live better lives. And I think that is the path to fine is just part of understanding this is a finite life. I'm not a finished product. I never will be. And that's the fun part. That's what makes this enjoyable. It makes it a little maddening every so often, but that is the fun part. So thanks for being here, thanks for listening and thanks for being part of the choose a community.