Summary
Joe Hudson explores how the root cause of stress is not life circumstances but the act of holding back emotions. He introduces three interconnected ideas: the iterative mindset, enjoyment as true efficiency, and the practice of toggling between feeling and not feeling emotions.
He explains how the habenula — a brain structure that discourages repeated failure — makes rigid goal-setting counterproductive. When we set a fixed standard and fail, the habenula triggers avoidance, creating a cycle of shame and giving up. An iterative mindset, where failure is expected and experimentation is the method, removes this stress entirely.
Joe then redefines efficiency as enjoyment rather than speed, arguing that if you feel better at the end of the day than at the beginning, you used less energy and were therefore more efficient. The video culminates in a powerful experiential exercise: alternating between shutting down all feeling and opening to all feeling, demonstrating that stress is simply emotions held in constriction.
Key Concepts
- Iterative mindset dissolves procrastination
- Enjoyment is the true measure of efficiency
- Unfelt emotions create physical stress
- The habenula and learned helplessness
Key Quotes
“The root cause of your stress isn’t coming from where you think it actually is. It’s not about life circumstances or how busy you are. It’s about the fact that you are holding back your emotions.”
“The thing that creates so much stress and accomplishment is failing and feeling like, ‘Oh, now I have to push over a hump to do it again.’ You take all that stress out of the system by just having an iterative mindset.”
“If I walk out at the end of the day and I feel better than I walked into the day, I enjoyed it. And that means I wasn’t using as much energy to get the thing done, which means I was efficient.”
“What people call anger isn’t anger. It’s repressed anger. It’s kinked anger. What people call fear isn’t fear. It’s a strangled, repressed fear.”
“Often times what we see as stress and overwhelm is just emotions that are stuck and we’re just holding that musculature so tightly.”
Transcript
The root cause of your stress isn’t coming from where you think it actually is. It’s not about life circumstances or how busy you are. It’s about the fact that you are holding back your emotions. In this video, I talked to a woman about how to reduce stress by reframing her experience of emotions, failure, and enjoyment. And along the way, you’ll be invited to do some experiments. I just had authority issues. So, I did not like being told what to do. And I was interested in self-development. And so I would find all these teachers and the teachers would tell great things, say what to do, but I’d be like, “Yeah, you’re full of it because you’re an authority.” Go. So I would test it out myself. I would iterate. I would say, “Oh, I’m going to run an experiment and see what works for me.” And as I did that, what I noticed is when I was in that iterative mindset, a lot of stuff worked. And when I got into a management mindset, then it stopped working. So for instance, let’s say I wanted to work out. If I was iterative, oh, I hear this might work or this might work or this might work and I tried those different things, I would be working out. But if I went to I know what I should do, I should work out six times a week, then it wouldn’t work. And later I found out what caused that. And it’s this structure in your head called the habenula. And it’s in all vertebrates. And it basically is a part of the brain that tells us, hey, you shouldn’t fail too much or you shouldn’t fail twice. So let’s say for instance, I was going to fight for dominance in a tribe and I lost, I probably shouldn’t do that right away again or I’d be dead. Or if I eat that mushroom and I got sick, I probably shouldn’t do that again. And there’s a structure in the brain that prevents us from making a mistake over and over again. And but basically what that does is it makes us not feel good about failure. So the way this works in our system is we’re hanging out and we say, “Hey, we’re going to have a diet.” And we try that diet and then we fail one day and we go, “Ah, screw it. I’m not going to even try anymore.” And boom, we’re eating chocolate cake. Whereas if you have a diet and you say, “Oh, on Thursdays I get a cheat day.” And you fail on that Thursday because it’s a cheat day, but it’s an okay thing to do, then Friday you’re back to your diet. And so it’s this thing whereas if you set the idea that you can fail up, then it’s incredibly stressful because you will fail at some point. But if you’re constantly iterating, if it’s an iterative mindset, I’m not trying to get perfect. I’m not trying to get great. I know I’m going to mess up. The job is the way I don’t mess up is to try things and try new things and then try new things and then try new things. Boom. Then it makes for very easy ways to accomplish things. The thing that creates so much stress and accomplishment is failing and feeling like, “Oh, now I have to push over a hump to do it again.” Or, “Oh, I’m scared to fail.” You take all that stress out of the system by just having an iterative mindset. Here is a great experiment that you can do on the iterative mindset. I want you to think about something that you feel deeply stuck on. Something that you’ve been trying to do for a long time and you haven’t been able to do it. Whether it’s lose weight or stop smoking or be nicer to your friends or listen better, whatever it is, I want you to think about it. And then in a minute I’m going to ask you to pause the video. And what I want you to do is I want you to write 15 distinct iterations that you can make that you can do to achieve this goal. So it’s not one thing in 15 different ways. So for instance, if you’re trying to lose weight, one of the things might be play pickleball, one of the things might be walk with a friend. One of the things might be play dodgeball. One of them things might be try an ayurvedic cleanse. One of them things might be do a juice fast. But I want you to come up with 15 of them. And I want you to write them down in order. And then right next to that, I want you to write down what you would have to do to make each one of those things fun. And if you can’t think of a way to make it fun, enjoyable, something that you want to do, then you have to come up with a different one. So you have 15 things, 15 iterations that you would find enjoyable to change this thing about yourself that you’ve been trying to change for years. And then once you’ve finished watching the video, when you’re ready, you can just do them in order. You’ll do one until it fails, and then you’ll do the next until it fails. Maybe one of them doesn’t fail. Maybe they all fail. Doesn’t matter. You’re just doing them in order and see what happens. The second one is enjoyment. And so this one was weird for me to understand. And it’s because in business what happens is there’s speed and we call speed efficiency. So, oh they did that really quick. They were really efficient. But if you have a really fast car, you don’t go, “Oh, that’s an efficient car.” The efficient car is the car that does things with the least amount of energy. So, if I’m in my business, how do I measure what the least amount of energy is to do something? And it’s how much I enjoy it. So, if I walk out at the end of the day and I feel better than I walked into the day, I enjoyed it. If I walk out of a meeting and I’m invigorated, then I enjoyed it. And that means I wasn’t using as much energy to get the thing done, which means I was efficient. And so, when I realized that, oh, prioritizing enjoyment in my work, how do I enjoy the things? And that doesn’t mean only that I do different things that I enjoy. It’s how do I enjoy the things that I’m doing? If I’m writing emails, what’s the way to do that that’s enjoyable? What’s the way to do that that’s painful? If I am having a conversation with a client and I’m selling something, how do I do that in a way that’s connecting and enjoying and isn’t making me feel like I’m trying to control somebody because that’s not enjoyable. Everything goes through the lens of how do I enjoy this process? So this is going to be an experiment on what it is to feel and to not feel. So it’s a really simple experiment. We are going to do everything to not feel our experience in the moment right now. Whatever you have to do to shut down every single emotion to not feel at all. If you’re feeling numb, you’re still feeling numb. So, you’re not even allowed to feel numb. You can’t feel anything. Whatever you have to do, whatever you have to tighten, whatever you have to do to feel absolutely nothing. Okay? So, just let that go and let yourself feel everything fully open to feeling all of it. You don’t have to try to feel anything. You’re just experiencing whatever is happening in this moment without any resistance. You don’t have to try. You’re just allowing all of what’s here. And now let’s stop feeling. Cut it all off. Shut it down. All the way. No emotions at all. And take a deep breath. Relax. And allow yourself to feel all of it. The whole thing. No resistance. Just be with all of those sensations, all of those feelings. Big welcoming arms. So, which do you want? A life where you’re feeling or a life where you’re not feeling? What most people think about getting to joy is, oh, I’m going to try to be happy and that’s going to create joy. Or I’m going to try not to be angry or sad and that’s going to create joy. But there’s a huge difference between joy and joy, you know, like, oh, I’m supposed to be happy and nice. That rigid thing and that loose thing of joy. And so the trick instead is to actually feel everything. And the Tibetans have this great thought structure on it. And the traditional Chinese medicine has this great thought structure about all of these emotional channels and how they are when they’re unkinked. And you’ll start to see things like, oh, fear is really excitement without the breath. That if you actually fully feel your fear, there’s often a lot of excitement there. And there’s a lot of energizing that happens with it. And so these emotional structures, if we start to welcome them, they change. What people call anger isn’t anger. It’s repressed anger. It’s kinked anger. What people call fear isn’t fear. It’s a kinked fear. It’s a strangled, repressed fear. And if you allow all of these emotions to move through you fluidly, what happens is you feel a lot more joy. And there’s a lot more joy in each of the emotions. Often times what we see as stress and overwhelm is just emotions that are stuck and we’re just holding that musculature so tightly. So it’s a really cool way to move from stress to joy. So I want to leave you with this last experiment you can take with you and you can use it anytime. I highly suggest doing it at least once a day for a week. And what you’re going to do is you’re going to do the same thing that you did in the last exercise where you go back and forth between not feeling and feeling. Not feeling and feeling. But this time you are going to allow the feeling state to last longer and longer and the not feeling state to be shorter and shorter. So, you’re going to just get longer and longer moments of feeling and shorter and shorter feelings of not feeling. If you notice that when you’re feeling, you start resisting, that’s not a problem. That’s just a sign to super resist. To resist every emotion. That’s your moment to go, “Oh, I’m resisting an emotion. I’m going to go all the way there.” And once you’ve gone all the way there, then you come back and you feel everything. The unresisted feeling state. If you get distracted, no problem. You’ll notice that in the distraction that the feelings will often try to constrict. And if they do, then you just go to super constriction. Once you’ve noticed the distraction and then once those are super constricted for a while then you go back to the feeling state. And so just do that for like 15-20 minutes a day for 7 days and see how much your life changes, how much consciousness you have on your day-to-day about how much you’re holding back your emotional experience.