Andrew Huberman· PhD
but then as we start to talk about it more it becomes apparent that there's a lot I'm angry about right but I'm not aware of it then then reflection or therapy right or a good friend we're talking to can help us see right that hey this is going on inside of me right and that can really help us same with use of humor like if I'm using humor and I'm I'm kind of decompressing uncomfortable situations or things that make me feel uncomfortable maybe that greases the wheels of social progress but maybe over time I come to use humor in a way that's self-denigrating right well that's not so good anymore but I may not be aware of the shift just because I can maybe be funny in certain situations that I'm now not using that for myself anymore I'm using it against myself and by talking to people by reflection like we can be aware of the defensive structure that's going on inside of us and then there's not an automaticity to it if you point out that I'm using projection a lot I can start to be aware of that just like if someone let's say you were with me at the grocery store right and someone says something nice and I shy away and you say Hey you know you didn't weren't even aware someone said hello to you and then I said say I want to be more aware of that like I want I don't want that thing to happen unconsciously so maybe now I think okay anytime someone I don't know says something to me I'm going to just stop and think like what's going on here right is that person being friendly to me is it is are they just you know it's just person exchanging money at the cash register like what's going on so we take what's unconscious and we make it conscious so that we can change it sounds to me like exploring and thinking about our reflexes is what's really key here um the example of displacement that you gave you know kicking the dog I couldn't help but um smile not because I think it's a good thing to do I never once kicked my dog by the way folks terrible thing to do also he was the size of a boulder it would have injured me more than it would have injured him but I never would do such a thing however in Academia there's this um phenomenon that's very common that that I refer to as trickle down anxiety where the person running the laboratory is inevitably under a tremendous amount of stress grants and papers Etc and graduate students and postdocs will immediately be familar with what I'm describing but for those of you that haven't gone to graduate school um this will be a little bit foreign but you'll think of other examples where when the lab head is under stress it's incredibly common for labhe heads to walk through the laboratory and start asking about experiments and telling people to do additional experiments and basically just assigning busy work to people or pressuring what simply cannot be moved along any faster and when I was a graduate student I worked for somebody who was the exact opposite of this phenotype when I was a postdoc frankly I worked with someone who was a little bit of that phenotype although I still liked working for him very much but I used to have a response that at least for me was adaptive which was I would always say I'm working as fast as I carefully can because no scientist ever wants to uh somebody to cut Corners no good scientist anyway um but trickle down anxiety is common in every occupation I think we see this sort of displacement all the time where someone's anxious and so they go start creating anxiety for other people I mean you can just as you're describing I was just seeing how pathologic that is for everybody involved so the the academic the trickle down anxiety that you were just talking about is it's a related but but it's a different defense mechanism and it's projective identification right which is which is causing others to feel the way that you feel in order to get your needs met right is