When your mind works against you | Ted Powell | TEDxJacksonville

Our minds are programmed to make the unknown "known" as part of our basic survival mechanism. But in a seemingly chaotic world, Ted Powell argues that our brains are too often hijacked by what he calls the "Drunken Monkey," which compulsively seeks absolute and certain truths in order to maintain a false sense of security in our rapidly changing world. Rather than learning to be comfortable with unanswered questions, our minds work against us when we prematurely reject a new or different idea out of the fear of the unknown. In this talk, Powell explains how to recognize when your brain is working for you and when it might be working against you.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx

It is November 2nd, 2004.

I'm on the road; life is good.

I get a phone call from my wife Nancy
and the mother of our three children.

And as I listen to her,
she says, "Bad news."

I figure the car must
have broken down again.

We have another expensive car repair bill.

But then the words
that follow after that are:

"It's cancer."

I go, "It's cancer."

Immediately in a numb state,

I start to ask her
all of these different questions,

like "Well, is it treatable?
What's the prognosis?

What's the plan?
Where do we go from here?"

and the only thing
that she can respond by saying is,

"I don't know."

I figure, I better shut up for now.

Surely the answers I need will come
next week when we go to the doctors.

That evening, I go out to Barnes & Noble,

and I buy every single breast cancer book
that I can get my hands on.

I become hell-bent on becoming
a breast cancer expert.

I spend every waking
and non-working moment

reading, reading, reading.

The next week arrives;
we go to the oncologist office.

We're looking at the biopsy results,
and they are not good.

Tumor cancers are labeled according
to a number of different characteristics

that are either labeled
as being favorable or unfavorable.

HER2/neu Positive,
estrogen receptor negative,

premenopausal under the age of 50 -
those are all unfavorable characteristics,

and Nancy's tumor possesses them all.

I remember at one point when we
were sitting in the oncologist office,

she just looks at the results,
and she just says,

"Bad, bad, bad, bad." I hate that.

My research and analysis intensifies.

I'm doing more reading;
I'm doing research on the Internet.

I develop this strange sense of pride
that I'm becoming a breast cancer expert.

When people ask me, "Ted, how you doing?"

I start to rattle off everything
that I know about the tumor,

everything that I know about the disease,

telling them that it is a nasty tumor;
it is aggressive; it's likely to spread,

but we really won't know anything

until we get the lymph node biopsy
in a couple of weeks.

Meanwhile week later, we're sitting
in Dr. Carlos Castillo office,

that's Nancy's primary oncologist.

And I came to that
armed with my list of questions,

surely figuring that he is going
to give me the answers that I need.

So I start to rattle off the questions.

Tell me about this new drug Herceptin?

I understand it's breakthrough.

You know, I know that it's not good
that she's under the age of 50,

but does it matter if she's close to 50?

(Laughter)

Are these five-year survival rates,
that's confusing me, what does that mean?

Is that with treatment
or without treatment?

And if it's with treatment,
what does that mean,

and what treatment are we talking about?

He listens to me patiently,
and in that moment, he puts his hands up,

and he says, "Ted,
I'm going to stop you here."

And I said, "What?"

He goes, let me ask you a question:

"How many times have you
asked these questions

or sought the answers to them?"

A lot.

"Are you getting any new and different
information in your quest?"

Not really.

He says, "Then I have
one-word of advice for you,

and that is for you to focus
your attention on getting closer to God.

And if you do that,
then everything will be OK."

In that moment, I realized that he was not
delivering a faith-healer's promise.

He was in no way, assuring me
that Nancy was going to live.

What he was doing was he was telling me
to get out of my head

and to venture into the scary
place of not knowing.

He was telling me to live in my strength,

whether I call that God, spirit,
courage, or something else.

So I started to reflect on that.

And I started to reflect
on the absentee father and husband

that I had been the weeks

leading up to that meeting
with Dr. Carlos Castillo,

how I had been going
through the motions of caring for Nancy

and thinking that caring

came in the form of doing everything
that I could to research,

so that I could fix
this particular situation.

But in the meantime,

I was really overwhelmed
with my own fear and my own distress.

I know that Nancy and the kids missed me.

So I go home,

I throw away all the books,

I pray when I need to pray,
I cry when I need to cry,

and I let go of the need to know.

Dr. Castillo tells me,
and he told me later on

that the number one challenge that he has,

as an oncologist, is getting people
to let go of the need to know;

getting people to let go
of control over something

which they have very little
or no control over.

Now fortunately, the weeks ahead
bring better news

and we find that while Nancy's
tumor was nasty,

it was small, and it was contained.

And she sits here with us today.

(Applause)

And reflecting back on that situation,

I also realized that when he
was delivering the faith-healer's promise

or not delivering
the faith-healer's promise,

he was also in no way again, assuring me
that Nancy was going to survive,

and there were no guarantees
that I wouldn't lose my soulmate

and the mother of our three children here.

And here's a picture
of her and Dr. Castillo,

who we owe a great deal of gratitude to.

So what happened to me
in that particular situation?

What does that tell us
about knowing versus unknowing?

And what I learned
from that particular experience is

that we as human beings
have a strong desire

to make the unknown known
as part of our survival mechanism.

Why is that?

Because the unknown is a scary place.

The unknown brings pain;
it brings discomfort,

and pain and discomfort
is associated with death.

So in a sense what we will do is we will
tend to stay stuck in the "I know,"

and do whatever it is
that we can to venture out

and accept whatever it is
that we don't know,

and that's what I was doing
in that particular situation -

was clinging on to an answer that I knew
would be absolutely positively certain

that I would be okay
in that particular situation.

And this is a big challenge.

This is a challenge for us today,

when our mind goes into that fearful place
of wanting to cling on

to what it is that we know.

I have a metaphor for that.

We call the mind going
into a fearful place -

the Drunken Monkey.

The Drunken Monkey is that fearful mind,
that fearful way of thinking,

that when it gets activated,
when it gets going,

it starts spewing out
all sorts of self-talk.

I need to fix this now;
you better do this;

what happens if this happens?

Why did you do that, or why did I do that?

How can I possibly handle this
particular situation?

So what it essentially happened to me

was I had gotten hijacked
by the Drunken Monkey.

Now there are a couple of things
to be aware of as you start to think about

that negative self-talk part of our mind,
the Drunken Monkey.

One of the things
that the Drunken Monkey likes:

simplicity, clarity, and certainty.

Simplicity, clarity, and certainty.

There's that part of our program

that likes to have everything boiled down
to something that we can grab on to

and phase absolutely and positively true.

A number of years ago, I was talking
to a theologian here in Jacksonville.

And I was asking him

about the rise of fundamentalism
and extremism in religion.

And he shared something with me
that was very insightful.

And he said, "Ted,
it has to do with the fact

that there's so much change going on
in the world right now,

and that change
is bringing out so much fear;

it's bringing out so many Drunken Monkeys

that people want something
that they can hold on to;

that's absolutely,
positively, undeniably true -

an ideology, a particular belief,

and if the fear is strong enough,

they will kill people
over that particular idea."

So that's the Drunken Monkey working

at its most challenging for what goes on
around us in our society.

So what I want to do is I want to share
three things that I've learned

from this particular experience,

and how I have applied them,
in terms of how it is

that I relate to the world
day in and day out.

One of those is I call it
rejecting the label,

and you see this a lot
in the media out there.

The label is basically
I slip into accepting labels

when I become intellectually lazy,

and I want to label people

based on their perspective
or their point of view.

Right winger, limo liberal,
tea-bagger, America hater.

You know, why do we do that?
Why do we label?

That's the Drunken Monkey at work,

because instead of diving in
to a complicated issue

and trying to figure out the nuances,

we want some easy way we can grab on to,

and say I get it,
I understand that person.

I know what they do,
and why they're doing it.

So I've worked hard to reject the label,

to work to understand the situation,
to accept the facts

regardless of whether or not
they line up with my personal beliefs.

Limit mental junk food.

How many of you would agree
that there is a lot of mental junk food

in the form of news these days?

As a matter of fact, I had
a lot of trouble with this speech,

because I like to tend
to change things at the last minute,

and there was so much stuff going on.

(Laughter)

I said I want to use
that particular example,

so there's some things to be aware of,
in terms of the media,

and how we digest it.

One thing to be aware of
is on a daily basis

we digest infinitely more information

than any previous
generation of humankind.

In fact,

there was a book that came out recently
that said even compared to 1986 and 2011,

we took in five times
more information in a day

than we did back in 1986;
that's equivalent to 175 newspapers.

Drunken Monkey doesn't like that, right?

No, because Drunken Monkey
gets all overwhelmed

"OK. I need to label this,
label that, whatever."

Drunken Monkey wants you
to take shortcuts.

You know, get to the easy answer.

So there are a couple of other things
about what's going on in the media

that contribute and feed
to the Drunken Monkey.

One of them has to do with the fact

that a lot of the new sources are actually
starting to program the content

that they serve to you based on
what your Drunken Monkey wants to hear.

Anybody use Zite?

(Laughter)

So Zite is a news App
that I kind of fell in love with,

because a friend of mine told me,

"Hey, if you really want to know,
take advantage of this."

And so I looked at it,
and I started reading it,

I started getting more and more
drawn to it and into its application,

and the next thing you know,

I read that Zite basically
has been programming the information

to serve me exactly all I want to hear
based on what I read previously.

Of course, I loved it,

(Laughter)

but it was sparing me

from having to confront
a different point of view.

And then the last thing to be aware of
is the negative versus the positive news

that you pick up.

For every 17 negative messages,
there's one positive message.

Because the Drunken Monkey
likes negative news.

Now the reason for that is

because our human mind
is basically programmed

to stay on the alert for anything
that will threaten us in our survival.

So we like that.

OK, it gives us a false sense of security.

So that's one of the reasons
why when you turn the television on,

that's all you see is negative news.

I was having lunch the other day

and the banner related
to the Parliament shootings was

this could have been a huge massacre;

that was on for two hours
while I had lunch.

Well guess what, it wasn't.

But that's what they were doing
was feeding the Drunken Monkey.

So it's very very important
to be aware of that and to limit.

Your digestion of that news

and to look for a combination
of positive and negative sources.

And then finally
beware of fearful rhetoric,

which is related to
what I just talked about here.

Now here would be an example
of some fearful rhetoric.

This was something that was said
in the media a while back.

"The President needs to rise
to the occasion

before we all get killed back
here at home."

OK, I'll let you guess who said that,
perhaps some of you all know.

Now, by his own admission,

President Obama was a little bit slow
to recognize the ISIS threat.

OK, so this was in response to that.

OK, he needs to be challenged
and held accountable for that.

I'm not sure that this fearful rhetoric
is the way he should be held accountable.

What do we know about the Drunken Monkey

getting involved in policy decisions
about going off and creating new wars?

OK, we've got a long history of that,

so it's very very important
to be aware of that.

So before I close,
just a couple of quick points,

because I've talked about it
from a macro perspective

in terms of what goes on
that can feed the Drunken Monkey.

The Drunken Monkey can get us every day.

Pay attention to when the Drunken Monkey
has hijacked your thinking.

Keep that rascal out of your head.

Ask trusted friends to give you insight

when they see you going
into that fearful place

because many times
people recognize the angst in us

before we can recognize it in ourselves.

Realizing that we have the ability
to control our way of thinking

in a seemingly chaotic world

is the most transformative and empowering
human experience that we possess.

Use it on a daily basis

and you will change your life
and the world around you

in many wonderful ways.

Thank you.

(Applause)