Ever catch yourself checking, refreshing, or worrying just to feel a little more in control? Jennifer Shannon returns to the podcast to explain why those habits may be feeding your "monkey mind" and share practical tools to help manage uncertainty.

If you’re interested in learning more, Jennifer’s book “Don’t Feed the Monkey Mind” is an excellent resource, and is available at Amazon.

I'm John.

And I'm Julie.

We're the hosts of the Hartford Fund's human-centric investing podcast.

Every other week we're talking with inspiring thought leaders to hear their best ideas for how you can transform your relationships with your clients.

Let's go!

Jennifer, welcome to the Human Centric Investing podcast. We're so excited to be here with you today.

It's great to be here. Thank you.

Jennifer, when you and I had spoken previously, I asked you what a cognitive behavioral therapist does, and I loved your explanation. You talked about thoughts and emotions and behaviors, and what a great topic, because that's what we'd like to discuss on today's podcast. It's really about when we ourselves, as financial professionals, are feeling stress or anxiety, or we are dealing with a client who's experienced a period of really excessive worry or stress. What are some things that we might observe in our behavior or their behavior? And then we'll kind of wrap up the podcast today with talking about some of the things we can do to maybe push back on that a little bit. But can you lead us off by talking about sharing with our listeners a little bit about what cognitive behavioral therapy is and. And what you tell people when they ask you, so Jennifer, what do you do?

Right. Yeah. So cognitive behavioral therapy, I think of it if you think of a triangle and you're connecting three dots of a triangle. And those three dots are one is what we're thinking. So that's the cognitive part. What are we thinking? And then another is what are we feeling? And then the third one is, what do we do, which is behavior. So we're connecting those dots. So if we give an example, if we take a financial example. And there's a market volatility, and the thought is, oh my gosh, I could lose everything. So there's the thought. And then that, what kind of feeling does a person have if they have that thought? Anxiety. Well, anxiety is a call to action. We talked about the monkey mind in the last episode. And so this idea of that, oh, oh, something's wrong, do something. Anxieties, like it can be interpreted as a signal. And then we'd wanted that it connects to the behavior, which is What does the person do at that moment? And sometimes when we're in an activated state, we don't make good decisions, so the behavior might be to pull out of the market, then that would be a behavior related to the thought, I could lose everything and I'm feeling anxious.

It's interesting when we're having these thoughts and behaviors and they're all connected and they are all happening so quickly. How do we start to train ourselves or educate ourselves on maybe making different decisions? What does that process look like? How have you successfully worked with individuals to ultimately probably break habits because I'm sure a lot of this is rooted in habit. When all of those things are happening so quickly in our mind, and then all of a sudden, we come forward with a decision that we think in that moment of anxiety is the right decision.

Right, so I can use an actual example of somebody that I've worked with who did have a lot of anxiety around money. And this was interfering with their quality of life. So in terms of feeling relaxed or secure, it was worrying about money. And they were getting older and they wanted to retire, but this decision about, well, when should I retire? And if I make more money, more money is good, right? So I have to keep making it. So they were in an activated state. And the fear, the thought was, I won't have enough. And so the behavior was working beyond when this person really wanted to be working because she was entering her 70s, she wanted to retire. And also another thing that she did frequently was she was checking her portfolio multiple times a day. And this, so we can see the thought is, oh my gosh, you know, will I have enough? And the fear that created a fear. And then there was checking behavior and working longer than she wanted to work. So part of it is just to understand what is happening. What is this person wanting? Because when they come to me, they are saying, hey, I'm anxious, it's not serving me help. They don't know what to do. And so the first step is to really, in fact, I actually start with connect the dots with people. I say, okay, let's look at what's happening. What are you thinking? What are your feeling? And then what are you doing? So it's really helpful to pull back what's going on here. Then from there, once you understand that, it's creating different interventions, and I can talk more about that.

So, Jennifer, we talked about, in the past, this concept of a monkey mind. And I know the name of your book is Don't Feed the Monkey Mind, but what happens, how do we behave? But you mentioned safety, what is a safety strategy and how does it interact with that monkey mind, if you will?

Yes. So a safety strategy, and in this example I just gave you, there were two obvious safety strategies. One was checking her portfolio, and the other was working beyond where she wanted to work, so this continuing to work even though she wanted to retire. So those were safety strategies. Now, obviously. You know, one of the things I talked about with her is like, meet with your financial advisor, project out what does it look like if you live to, you know, 95 years old and you know of course you want financial security and she had it and that was the thing there was a misalignment between so that I talked about overestimating the threat and underestimating ability to cope, which is anxiety makes that mistake or monkey mind makes that mistake. So she was absolutely overestimating the threat. It was interfering with the quality of her life. And these behaviors that she was engaging in while checking and working, continue to work in the short run helped to decrease her anxiety. I call this feeding the monkey mind. It's actually feeding this fear that she had that I'm not secure and I could lose everything. And that fear I could lose everything was not based on reality. It was an overestimation of threat. So if she's acting as if, you know, this is real, it reinforces this is real. So you're literally feeding this part of your brain, which is going to create a reactivity cycle. And you have to do something different in order to get out of it. You can't keep doing what you've been doing. That's just going to keep going the direction you're going in.

Julie: How do we stop feeding the monkey mind then?

Jennifer: Yeah. So what I do with clients is first of all really get idea of like what is happening so seeing because if you don't recognize these behaviors they're often habitual you just do it um and So recognizing that that's what's going on and that it's actually in the short run, it may make you feel better, but in the long run it's causing more anxiety. So helping people understand that cycle and how it works. Because the next step is to start, I like to actually change, well, let's start with values. In this case, this client that I'm talking about, she really wasn't in alignment with her values, which was to travel, have adventures. Feel more relaxed and spend time with her husband. These were all things that she really valued and wanted to do. However, her anxiety was getting in the way of that. So I like to use values as a way of helping people recognize that they wanna move in a different direction and that can be motivating. And then the second part is helping them identify, okay, these are your values. Let's look at what. Your thinking patterns are that are getting in the way, which is I'll lose everything overestimation of threat. And then what are your safety behaviors, checking portfolio, working harder. So then saying, okay, then we need to change the way that you're thinking about this and your behavior. So the thinking could be more, I wanna live life more fully in the present instead of worrying excessively about the future. That's kind of changing her cognition, her thinking. And then we started with her is to check her portfolio at scheduled times, not based on anxiety. So we started once a day, which actually, and it was once a day not when she felt like it, it was at five o'clock in the evening. That's when you check your portfolio. And the idea there is, first of all, it was scary for her because she was used to checking it and that made her feel better. And so even though it seems reasonable to check once a day and actually that's excessive. That's where we started. And then from there, and of course it causes anxiety if you're breaking what your pattern is, but it's a good thing, not a bad thing. So that would be an example of then changing the thoughts and the behaviors.

So Jennifer, since you are a practicing therapist, I'm gonna come into your office for a second with a scenario that Julie and I see quite often, which is I'm an aging financial professional. I'm the head of my team. I'm now getting maybe towards my early 70s and I've been giving clients financial advice for the last 40 years. And... Now I'm thinking about that next phase of my life, retirement, if you will, or doing something different. So I tell my team, we're going to transition over five years and we get everything set up. We get the legal things in place. And then a year or two out, I start to have misgivings because maybe I'm not quite ready to go yet. Because maybe my safety strategy is I've come to the office every day for the past 40 years to serve my clients. In that case I could see where that would be a safety strategy for me. What might you say to me in terms of what an expansive strategy might be or where because I saw in me or in advisors that I talked to some of what you talked about that example we just used. I wanted to spend more time with a spouse. I want to travel. I wanna be a better grandparent. I have this passion for xyz, fly fishing, you name it, whatever. How would that work in that scenario?

Yeah, so the way that it works is it's a great example. And a metaphor that I use oftentimes with my clients is to, again, go to your values of fly fishing, adventure, fun, connection with family members. All of those things are important. So what we tend often to do, which gets us trapped, is we overvalue safety and security. So I use this, I call it the boat metaphor. So let's say the harbor is you're used to working with your team, you've been doing it for all this time, that's kind of the safety of the harbor. But you're thinking about leaving that and going out and doing some other things, you're kind of going out to the open ocean of the unknown of things that you're not used to. But out in the open Ocean, there's, if we look at South, the sort of security of the Harbor and North is towards your values of adventure, connection, things like that, That's it. You're going to go out in the open ocean for those things. That's what you're going for, North. It's natural when you do that, leave the safety of what's familiar to you, is to feel when you move out, wind and waves and uncertainties and loss and sadness, but that's all part of change and transition. So I call that, and also, the more we move out in the open ocean doing the things that we wanna be doing and are able to deal with things like that don't work and that work or unfamiliar the better we're able to cope. Again, kind of going to that idea we tend to underestimate our ability to cope and so you become a better captain of your boat when you take your boat out and do things that you're not necessarily familiar with. So that's something kind of the metaphor That I think can be helpful. And the other piece that's very important is to look at what we would consider negative emotion, like anxiety or grief or sadness, as a sign that you're doing something wrong. And it's not, I call it a growing pain that when you make a change in your life and move in a desired direction, you're going to feel some negative emotions and to reinterpret those as growing pains. This is something that I need to learn to be able to handle as opposed to retreat and go back into the safety of what's known.

Thanks for that, very helpful.

It's interesting, Jennifer, as you just described that. So it sounds like at the end of the day, anxiety will be part of us to just varying degrees, of course, person by person or situation by situation. But as opposed to the mindset of saying, I need to control this anxiety or try to get it out of my life, it almost sounds more like it's figuring out how can I live with it? How can I tolerate it? How can I create a healthier relationship with it? Am I interpreting that accurately?

Absolutely, that's exactly right. Anxiety is a part of life as well as other emotions like sadness and frustration and all of these things. So if we take that as like, okay, you move towards and in fact can interpret it as I'm trying new things which is gonna make me feel anxious. How about the, yay. I always talk to my clients, I say, when you do something difficult and it doesn't work out the way you want it to. Pat yourself on the back instead of kick yourself in the pants. You know, you're trying something different. This is fantastic. You're feeling anxiety. Or when you're thinking about doing something that's scary, I use a metaphor of lean into it. You know? As opposed to, oh no, clench against it and fight. You know trying to protect yourself. It's like lean into, this is anxiety. It's part of life. Or another metaphor is, you know, ride the waves. Learn to ride the ways. Don't use the waves as retreating back to the shore. So, our relationship, a huge thing I do with my clients is change their stance towards anxiety. So instead of seeing it as a signal that something's wrong, you know, retreat or do something, it can be noise and it can an opportunity of actually growth. So moving towards it and reinterpreting it.

Jennifer, two of the things that you kind of put a name to that made a lot of sense with me is, one, you talk about welcoming the monkey mind or greeting it. And the second thing is you talk about like a welcoming breath, breathing. Can you kind just talk about those two things for a second, what they are and why they're helpful?

Yes. Again, this is changing our stance towards emotion. So I call it the welcoming breath. And the welcoming breath is basically noticing discomfort and allowing it to be here. So for example, when people are anxious, there is a lot of physiological response. So there can be tension in your shoulders or tightness in your chest or clenching in your belly. These are all normal natural reactions to have when you're feeling anxious So this idea of like, okay, let this be here. Allow this, you know, make room for the feelings that are happening in your body. And that's different than say, traditional relaxation techniques, which are good. Relaxation, nothing against relaxation techniques. But sometimes what people do is use them to fight anxiety. And then again, it's feeding the monkey man like, oh, this is dangerous, I need to get rid of it. Hey, this is an emotion that is part of being human. And if you just allow it, you ride over it, it will dissipate. Everything goes up, will come down. So it's more of this idea of I can handle this versus I need to get rid of this. So it’s a little bit different. So it is welcoming anxiety. I call it actually welcoming anxiety as opposed to relax and try to feel better.

One of the things that think I've heard you talk about is the scheduling you're worrying or how do we contain it? And I think this is something that I personally am very curious to learn more about because I feel like that can just weave its way into every situation, right? I don't have my checklist or what if this isn't good enough or all of those thoughts that can creep into us. Will you talk to us a little bit about this worry time and then this concept and how maybe for those that tend to find that sneaks into their thoughts throughout the day. How do you sort of begin to contain that and help yourself focus on other positive activities versus the worrying?

Right I mean, one place worry shows up that's usually never helpful is in the middle of the night. And so this is not the time to problem solve. So worry time, it goes along with the idea of what we just talked about, the welcoming breath. It's basically saying, okay, I'm gonna go ahead and allow myself to worry. I'll just set the timer for 10 minutes. I can write down my worries. I can think about them. I can try to feel as anxious as possible about them And There's a sense of like, I'm going to just feel it. I'm gonna lean into it. Okay. I'm just going to give myself that time. And if you're worrying in the middle of the night or, or during the day when it's not useful, say, okay, I will, I can jot that worry down. I will put it in my worry time. So you're saying basically, like we talked about scheduling, checking portfolios, it's like schedule your worry time instead of letting it disrupt and your sleep or your day. Schedule it and go ahead and worry. Now, what often happens with when we do worry time? It's an exposure based technique. It's like, okay, go ahead, worry, worry worry, worry as hard as you can, feel as anxious as possible that you're again, leaning into it. And often after 10 minutes or after five minutes or after three minutes, people start getting a little bored. It's, like, oh gosh, and I have eight more minutes to go on this one. So it actually can help people just kind of burn out their worry by just going into it, but at a scheduled time.

Versus having it be a minute and a half, 10 times throughout the day, which obviously is so much more time if you added it up.

That's right.

It's so interesting.

Before I let you go today, my last question for you is look, we're always talking about technology and young people, right? But how much, when you think about your interactions with the people that you help, how much do we have to be mindful about technology's role in causing anxiety, maybe making it worse? Have you seen an impact in your practice over time? Based on technological advancement, we're on the dawn of the AI era, which is somewhere between the greatest thing in the world and the elimination of mankind, but we've all come through internet cycles, email, text, you name it, and it just seems like the world comes at us so much faster. Are there things that you tell your clients in terms of their relationship with technology?

Yeah, you know, I talked about like who's in the driver's seat. We talked about the monkey mind and putting the monkey mind in the drivers seat versus in the back seat. And I feel like technology deserves being in the back seat as opposed to the front seat of our lives. So when people who I see anxious people and there's different ways that might be triggering anxiety. So news cycles, for example, on when you have a cell phone or your computer and you're constantly Being exposed to new cycles, which are now 24-7, or there's things when there's something that you're following a story that actually keeps us in an overly alerted, anxious state. So it's actually speaking directly to when we talked about the monkey mind, which is that primitive, instinctual survival. When we're getting these kind of constant dings about things that are happening in the world. And of course, the things that we're gonna get reports on are the scary things, because that's what draws people into news and gets more hits. So to realize, hey, that's probably what's happening. So I often have people take news off their primary, you know, front screen, or take off the notifications so that they're not getting dings. Dings are very agitating. That's an example. And I think social media as well, to put it in its perspective of social media is, you know, people kind of reacting or showing things that aren't necessarily real, also for perfectionism, it looks better than it is. So just kind of putting things in perspective, like this is what's really happening with social media. I don't need to be looking at news cycles. We talked about checking. You can check your portfolio. It's right there on your phone, you know, at any time. So again, putting apps in the backseat so they're not leading our, they're the ones that are capturing our mind. We can put controls on it.

I think that's such good advice. Also, when you think about all of the constant updates, or the notifications that are constantly on the screen, it's almost like if you were to turn those off, I think that would probably be helpful as well, because even if you're not going and seeking out the information, it's coming to you even if you're just opening your phone to make a phone call. All of the different alerts are right there.

Right, exactly. I'm a huge fan of focus on my phone so that it actually will stop all notifications and not using it just when I'm at work or in a meeting, but using it because I want to have more relaxation. And just for my own me time, I will put it on so I'm not getting constant notifications. And some of the notifications are good. It might be my child calling me or my adult child who's, and I want those connections. So I do love technology and all the things it brings. At the same time, we used to go out and we didn't have our phones. And to be able to go and spend time away from being connected to things and realizing again, we're safe in this world, even when we don't have a phone. So it helps us learn we can cope.

Well, Jennifer, if we think about our listeners today, and you could say, if it comes to our behaviors and our anxiety, if you could sum up our episode today in just one thing you would share with our listeners, one key lesson from what we've talked about today that you would like to see them walk away with, what would that be concerning our anxiety and our behavior?

The main thing I would say is, that's why I called my book, Don't Feed the Monkey Mind, is the idea that we can tame this part of our brain and live in a happier, healthier, more fulfilling way. And there's two things that we do need to change in order to live the way we wanna live, and that's how we're thinking. Are we overestimating the threat? So how are we thinking? And then we need to change our behavior, is what we're doing trying to get rid of short-term anxiety, but not helping us in the long run. So those would be the main things. You can tame your monkey mind. You need to be aware of how you're thinking, change that, and definitely change behaviors. And that's something that's often overlooked when we think about change. We just think, oh, if we have insight, that's enough. No, not enough.

Well, speaking of insight. Since this is the Human Centric Investing Podcast, we would love to take you next into our lightning round where we learn a little bit more about you, Jennifer, if you're game for it, and hopefully it doesn't feed your monkey mind.

Sounds like fun.

Okay, perfect. I'm glad this won't cause any anxiety because we've covered that topic up. What's your go-to karaoke song? Oh my gosh. Maybe I am creating anxiety. Sorry.

Outside just the word karaoke creates anxiety. I hear you. That is something I have actually never done. So I do not have a go to song for karaoke. Um, yeah, seriously, my mind went blank on that one. Let's try another one.

Okay.

Alright, let's go with this one. What's your favorite board game or card game to play?

Well, I like Rummy. I like something, Gin Rummy, I like something that you don't have to think too hard. It's sort of like it's it's playful, it's fun, you're doing something. And there's still that competitive edge to it. So there's some thought but not like chess is not my thing. I'm you know, that's a great thing, but it's just too much thinking. I like it where little little later on the thought.

What's your favorite app on your phone?

Oh my gosh. Okay, I do have a favorite app. It's a weather app and I just and this is part of this is kind of funny story so I love my weather app I like to look I love to go to the beach which in where I live is about 40 minutes away but it can be very windy at the beach and so the weather app can tell you exactly what the wind velocity is gonna be so I'm a planner and I love the plan. However I one time was going to challenge myself. I said, okay, for the next 48 hours, I'm not going to look at the weather map at weather app. I'm just going to go with it. And we were going to, we were gonna go to the beach. I was like, whatever happens, happens. And it was just a way of like playing with flexibility and resilience and taming that part of my brain. But I love the weather app

Jennifer on a scale of 1 to 10, how good of a driver are you?

I would say I'm, uh, eight. Um, yeah, I've, I'd never been in a car accident. So I guess I'm taking that as information. Uh, I, I would, I'm a safe driver. I'm very aware and cautious as I drive, but not overly so. So I would give myself an eight pretty confident driver.

Well, for our listeners, if you're interested in learning more about Jennifer's concepts, she goes into much more detail in her book. It's called Don't Feed the Monkey Mind, as she mentioned a few minutes ago, and it's a great resource, an excellent read, and it's available at Amazon. Jennifer, we can't thank you enough for joining us here today to educate us. Thank you again.

It's been a real pleasure. Thank you.

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Talk to you soon. The views and opinions expressed herein are those of the guest who is not affiliated with Hartford Funds.