The first part of this episode is available to all listeners. To hear the whole thing, become a paid subscriber here.
Writer and linguist Amanda Montell joins us to discuss “magical overthinking” and the cognitive biases that make us vulnerable to misinformation, celebrity culture and its intersections with wellness culture, how to deal with panic headlines, cultish language to watch out for in wellness spaces, and more.
Amanda Montell is a writer and linguist from Baltimore. She is the author of the acclaimed books Wordslut, Cultish, and The Age of Magical Overthinking. Along with hosting the podcast Sounds Like a Cult, her writing has also appeared in The New York Times, Marie Claire, Harper's Bazaar, and more. She holds a degree in linguistics from NYU and lives in Los Angeles with her partner, plants, and pets. Find her on Instagram @Amanda_Montell.
Resources and References
Amanda’s new book, The Age of Magical Overthinking
Christy’s second book, The Wellness Trap: Break Free from Diet Culture, Disinformation, and Dubious Diagnoses and Find Your True Well-Being
Subscribe on Substack for extended interviews and more
Christy’s online course, Intuitive Eating Fundamentals
Transcript
Disclaimer: The below transcription is primarily rendered by AI, so errors may have occurred. The original audio file is available above.
Christy Harrison: Welcome to Rethinking Wellness, a podcast that offers critical thinking and compassionate skepticism about wellness and diet culture, and reflections on how to find true well-being. I'm your host, Christy Harrison, and I'm a registered dietitian, certified intuitive eating counselor, journalist, and author of three books, including Anti-Diet, which was published in 2019, The Emotional Eating, Chronic Dieting, Binge Eating & Body Image Workbook, which came out on February 20th, and The Wellness Trap, which was published in 2023 and is the inspiration for this podcast. You can learn more and get them all at christyharrison.com/books.
Welcome back to Rethinking Wellness. I'm Christy and my guest today is writer and linguist Amanda Montell, who joins me to discuss her new book, The Age of Magical Overthinking. We get into the cognitive biases that make us vulnerable to misinformation, celebrity culture and its intersections with wellness culture, how to deal with panic headlines like you see so much in nutrition and food and wellness reporting, cultish language to watch out for in wellness spaces, and lots more.
Paid subscribers get to hear the full episode, which includes another 30-ish minutes of this great conversation with Amanda. I love what we get into, especially at the end of the episode, I will say. So if you want to upgrade to paid, you can go to rethinkingwellness.substack.com. If you do, you'll not only get to hear extended interviews like this one and all the ones we've done in the past, but you'll also get subscriber only Q and A's and essays, commenting privileges and subscriber threads where you can connect with other listeners and lots more. Plus, I will be so grateful to you for supporting the show and helping keep this an ad and sponsor free space. Just go to rethinkingwellness.substack.com to sign up or click the link in the show notes. And thanks so much to everyone who's already become a paid subscriber. I really appreciate your support.
I also want to make sure you know about my second book, which is called The Wellness Trap. It was the inspiration behind this podcast, as I've said many times before, and I launched it to continue the conversations I was having in my reporting. I really just wanted to like release all of my interviews as a podcast, but I decided to do this instead. And if you like the interviews here, I think you'll love the book. It explores the connections between wellness and diet culture, how the wellness space became so overrun with misinformation, including some of the cognitive biases and fallacies that I talk about in this episode with Amanda, why the alternative, integrative, and functional medicine world can lead to so much harm, including disordered eating and lots of other things, and how we can both protect ourselves as individuals and reimagine well being as a society. If any of that sounds interesting, you can learn more and buy the book at christyharrison.com/thewellnesstrap, or pick it up at your favorite local bookstore.
With that, here is my conversation with Amanda Montell. So, Amanda, welcome to Rethinking Wellness. I'm so psyched to talk with you today. Can you just briefly share a bit about what led you to do the work that you do today?
Amanda Montell: Yeah, absolutely. So my background is in linguistics. I studied the relationship between language, gender, and power in college, and that was the subject of my first book, Word Slut. And then as I was writing that book, I continued to develop my fascination in the role of language and culture. And my second book, Cultish, was birthed from that fascination. Also because my dad grew up in a cult. And I was always so interested by the ways that cultishness shows up in everyday life, particularly in the ways that we talk, how certain cultish leaders, from Soulcycle instructors to Gwyneth Paltrow with her Goop empire, really catering this to this wellness podcast, can weaponize cultish language techniques to influence their followings, for better and for worse.
And then as I was researching that book, Cultish, I kept coming across all this really fascinating psychology and behavioral economics research referencing cognitive biases because I was interested in why people end up in cults and why they stay. And these cognitive biases that some listeners may have heard of in the past, like confirmation bias and sunk-cost fallacy, had something to do with the answer. But not only that, these cognitive biases seem to really explain so many of the irrational choices that I had made and was continuing to make in my own life. Like, you know, my decision to stay in a truly toxic cult-like one-on-one romantic relationship in my early twenties, long after that relationship stopped serving me, or the ways that I would enter fight or flight, engaging in some bout of social media conflict that was actually not threatening and not even real.
So I was noticing the ways that these cognitive biases could explain some of my behaviors and then some of the broader irrational behaviors plaguing the zeitgeist at large. And that's kind of what inspired this new book, The Age of Magical Overthinking, which is generally about cognitive biases and the information age.
Christy Harrison: I think it's such an important book, and especially for people who've been caught up in wellness culture and fallen into sort of cult like thinking around that. I think all of your books are important. I'm curious to talk a little bit about your family background because you describe your mom as sort of a niche celebrity. She is an award winning cancer cell biologist. She actually cured her own cancer and very science minded, it sounds like. And then your dad is also a science professor, I think I saw, with his history and his background, having grown up in a cult. So I'm curious how their influence shaped you and might have made you more skeptical to woo-woo wellness stuff or maybe insulated you or maybe not, if there was any way in which you rebelled against that sort of thinking too.
Amanda Montell: I love this question. I actually love being able to write my parents as characters in my work because they are such personas. My dad is, yeah, he's a goof. He spent his teenage years against his will in this pretty notorious cult compound called Synanon. And ironically, that's where he developed his love of science. He's a neuroscientist. Both my parents are research professors, and my dad, at the age of 15, was tasked with running the medical lab at Synanon. They had their own little microbiology lab because they obviously wanted to avoid the outside world and outside hospitals as much as possible. So while other teenagers on the outside were like studying for the SATS or going to the prom, he was culturing culturally followers fingertips for tuberculosis microbes and it was, you know, kind of a sanctuary for him, this lab on the cult compound, the one place in the cult where things seemed to make sense and there was a procedure and you could question ideology, or there actually wasn't any ideology at all.
And so, yeah, he went on to become a research professor. And working in labs is where he met my mom, and she's a cancer cell biologist. Both my parents, I mean, I forget that they do like this really important work because they're just like my parents and I'm constantly making fun of them. Yeah, my mom studies border cell migration, which is important in understanding how cancer cells move. Lol. I've never had to describe my mom's research in public, but my parents always had this halo surrounding them, particularly my mom, who is such a poised individual.
And the first chapter in my book, in this new book is called Are You My Mother, Taylor Swift?: A note on the Halo Effect, which is the cognitive bias underlying how we find role models, including, and these days, especially parasocial role models. And it describes our penchant to think that because we like one single trait in a person, that they must be perfect overall. And this informs these extreme cycles of celebrity worship and dethronement that we see in the culture nowadays. But it sometimes also describes our relationships to our own parents.
And when it comes to the halo effect and, you know, pitfalls, women are often the ones who suffer the worst consequences because we build them up into these one dimensional, god or goddess like figures. And then when they disappoint us in some way, whether these figures are our mothers or our celebrity hashtag mothers like Taylor Swift, we feel the need to punish them, dethrone them in these really grave ways. And those same standards don't necessarily apply to men.
But to answer your question, growing up with these scientists, his parents, yeah, they were deeply left brained, rational minded, had an incredible disdain for mysticism or, you know, really all things spiritual. And so, yeah, I grew up in this atheist household where the good book, the great text that was displayed in our living room, was not the Torah or the Bible, but the dictionary and texts by Darwin and Stephen Hawking. Actually, my parents, they still have, like, a shrine to Stephen Hawking in their house to this day, which is so funny and, like, so on brand for them.
Growing up, you know, I developed this, like, real respect for the scientific method and for not, you know, engaging in beliefs for which there was no evidence. And then, yeah, speaking of the rebelliousness, you know, growing up, I was kind of the melodramatic theater kid of the family, so I was, like, quite a mystery to my parents. And, you know, certainly indulged in a lot of mysticisms that I think perplexed them. I, living in Los Angeles, have no qualms dabbling in a bit of witchcraft or tarot. And I actually, having studied cultish belief and now irrationality and reporting on these subjects have really come to re embrace mysticism, not as a rebellion against my parents, but as a sort of embrace of our inherent delusion as a human species.
You know, there are simply questions that if they can't be fully answered with science, it's only because there are these existential questions of why are we here and how do we make life meaningful? And, of course, there are evidence based therapies for how to feel better in the face of depression and anxiety and such. But I am a firm believer that there is a point, emotionally or existentially, when empirical facts and information stop helping the world make more sense. Actually, it can make it feel more overwhelming and certainly doesn't help you feel better. So I sort of live in this tension of logos and pathos, of head and heart. I have my whole life.
Christy Harrison: I feel you on that. I'm also similarly minded. I have a lot of skepticism. My parents aren't scientists, but my mom's a therapist and just very sort of rational minded. And actually, as a kid, was always cautioning me against magical thinking and talking about possibility versus probability and sort of trying to instill a more mature way of looking at the world than kind of the kids way of like, "Oh, my God, this could happen. An asteroid could hit the earth. I'm gonna die." That jumping to conclusions.
And then also, I am someone who was raised, I think, to be very over intellectual and sort of lived in my head, and that had a lot of negative consequences on me personally in terms of, like, being in touch with my body, being in touch with my emotions and signs that maybe a relationship wasn't gonna be good for me. I also was in some toxic relationships that I stayed in much longer than I should have and had eating disorders and disconnected from my body in all these different ways and tried to rationalize my eating in order to change the size and shape of my body and ended up in a world of hurt from that. And so, yeah, for me, too, I think learning to sort of bridge that tension, I think has been really important.
Amanda Montell: Yeah, I can certainly relate to that. I've never sort of thought about the correlation between my sciency upbringing and my perfectionistic tendencies. But, yeah, there's probably a cause and effect there. But, yeah, it is something that I've come to embrace as I've gotten older and started doing more of the work that I've been doing on irrationality in the information age is just coming to embrace uncertainty, coming to stomach the cognitive dissonance of not having certain answers all the time, and being open to having conversations with other people who don't have certain answers either about anything.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, I think we're pushed and incentivized to have answers and to have hot takes and to be strident, and that's what does well on social media. That's what gets people celebrity status oftentimes. And so I think pushing back on that and sort of having more nuance and living in that gray space can be a really important antithesis.
Amanda Montell: Yeah, absolutely. You know, nuance doesn't go viral. So under sort of, like, digital age capitalism, it can be really hard to sort of cut through the noise. But it's a challenge I feel like I still have the energy to pursue.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, that's good and important. I want to talk about celebrity culture, which you mentioned, and its intersections with wellness culture. You talk about the loss of trust in institutions and how it paved the way for celebrity worship. Celebs sort of being elevated into these trusted figures that institutions no longer are. And I see that same loss of trust as being part of what led to the rise of wellness culture. Right. It's like people wanting to take their well being into their own hands and find alternatives to the conventional healthcare system that was suspect in the minds of many. That still is suspect in the minds of many.
And personally, I have multiple chronic conditions that took a long time to get diagnosed, and I went through really bad experiences in the conventional healthcare system that also pushed me to find alternatives into the realm of alternative and integrative and functional medicine. So I get it. And then now we have celebrity worship and wellness culture that I think have kind of come together in this phenomenon of the wellness influencer. Right? Like you mentioned, Gwyneth Paltrow, obviously, it's kind of the most glaring example, but there are countless others, and I'm curious how that relates to what you mentioned, the halo effect, where celebrities get this halo on them because of one or a few good traits. How do you see the halo effect playing out in wellness culture?
Amanda Montell: I detail this a little bit in one of the chapters of my book, but my day job for five years before I started focusing on my books full time was working as a beauty editor at a sort of like, beauty and wellness publication. And I actually explicitly remember the editorial meeting in, I want to say, 2017, when one of these very poised, beautiful LA higher ups working at this digital beauty and wellness publication came in to our editorial meeting and was like, "We need to capitalize on this new thing called the influencer halo effect. And we need to find these individuals who have this glow surrounding them because, say, they make the most beautiful latte art, or they have the most beautiful skin, or there's just like, one quality that people are really coming to embrace or even worship in them. And we need to align ourselves with those people to go viral in headlines or to align with them for certain brand affiliations or to do a photo shoot with them or something like that."
So I really see the halo effect manifesting in a strategic way in the wellness industry, where we're finding people who maybe look like some standard of wellness, even though they are not experts or might actually have nothing to do with wellness, and we're putting them up on this pedestal as a figure to be worshipped, to emulate, to listen to when they're hawking sponcon. And that can be insidious, because, again, the halo effect describes this irrational penchant to jump to a conclusion about someone for survival. It's based on this age old mental magic trick that our long ago ancestors would play on themselves for survival and adaptive purposes, where you would clock someone in your tribe of neighbors who had intact teeth and big muscles. And so you would jump to the conclusion that that person had avoided disfigurement in battle and, you know, had was probably a skilled hunter, and thus that would be a wise person to align ourselves with.
We're now applying that to wellness influencers and celebrities. We're looking to these singular role models not only to tell us what to wear or what, you know, supplements to buy, but we're looking to them to save us during this time of incredible mistrust in institutions that were supposed to provide that support. So, yeah, I think it's being capitalized upon it in a very strategic way. Our mental magic tricks are working against us in a very specific way in this time in history.
Christy Harrison: That's so interesting, too, that media companies are specifically seeking out influencers who have that halo effect. And when you think about the information environment we're in and what's being served to us, it is so strategic. It's not just like, this person's interesting and they have something to say, and let's cover them. And this is, like, editorially sound or something. It's like, no, this is a person that we need to hitch our wagon to, to sponge off of their star power or something like that to grow our brand as well.
Amanda Montell: Oh, absolutely. Because, you know, you're talking about the blurred lines between wellness authority, celebrity political figures, business leaders. The Venn diagram has just become a circle. I mean, Gwyneth Paltrow is an example, but in another corner of culture, so is Elon Musk. Starting really with Beatlemania and then fortified with the Reagan era, we really are starting to see celebrities as people who are not just there to entertain us, they're there to guide us, to lead us, to be our spiritual authorities, our parasocial lover. It's why you see Harry Styles on prayer candles or Dolly Parton. That's another great example. And there are positives to this. Of course, it's lovely to have a role model, but celebrity wars, and that includes worship of wellness influencers, is becoming more extreme empirically in our culture today. And that comes with some pretty deleterious consequences to our mental health.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, let's talk about that, because you talk in the book about how celebrity worship is harmful to well being, and I'm really curious to dig into that a little bit. I think that even people who don't think of themselves as necessarily worshipping celebrities, but are simply following them for recommendations or inspiration or something like that can, unfortunately, fall prey to this.
Amanda Montell: I came across some really fascinating research while researching that halo effect chapter, talking about how celebrity worship can fall on a continuum that has been divided into these four categories. And those categories are the entertainment social level, which is defined by attitudes like, my friends and I like to discuss what my favorite celebrity has done. You know, it's like, pretty healthy, pretty normal. But then there was this intense personal feelings category, which could be classified by statements more like, I have frequent thoughts about my favorite celebrity, even when I don't want to.
Third was this borderline pathological level, characterized by delusional thoughts such as, my favorite celebrity and I have our own code so that we can communicate with each other secretly, which sounds absurd, and, you know, fans might not phrase it exactly that way all the time, but I have noticed that behavior in swifties and also implausible expectations were a part of that. Characterized by phrases like, if I walked through the door of my favorite celebrities home without an invitation, she or he would be happy to see me, as well as self sacrifice. So, you know, I would gladly die in order to save the life of my favorite celebrity.
And a fourth category, labeled deleterious imitation, described these super fans willing to engage in criminal behaviors on behalf of their favorite celebrity. So something like, if I were lucky enough to meet my favorite celebrity and she or he asked me to do something illegal as a favor, I would probably do it. So there are these different categories that have been described over the past decade or so, and the more extreme end comes with these serious consequences.
You know, on the positive end, fandoms can be vehicles to talk about larger issues like feminism and social justice. But on the more dramatic side, there was this 2014 clinical examination of celebrity worship concluding that high levels of standom, as it's called, are associated with body image issues, greater proneness to cosmetic surgery, sensation seeking, cognitive rigidity, identity diffusion, poor interpersonal boundaries, depression, anxiety, dissociation, narcissistic personality tendencies. I mean, compulsive shopping and gambling, stalking behavior. A 2005 study found that addiction and criminal activity were more strongly correlated with celebrity worship than calcium intake with bone mass. So there's just, like, so much evidence to support that we are submitting ourselves to these larger than life figures more than we have in the past, and that it's coming with serious side effects.
Christy Harrison: That is so upsetting. And also, to think about the feedback loop there, too, right? Of, like, I wonder to what extent, because these are associations. So I wonder if there's some sort of driver as well, of people who already have these tendencies. Difficulty with social skills or narcissistic traits that are maybe being amplified by celebrity culture and social media and the environment we live in, and then also making them more likely to seek out celebrities to emulate or if there's some sort of feedback loop going on there.
Amanda Montell: Yeah, it's interesting you bring that up. I mean, the sort of nature vs. nurture or chicken or the egg conversation is one I think I'll be having for the rest of my life. But the title of that chapter is called Are You My Mother, Taylor Swift? because I can't help but notice this really pronounced trend in celebrity stan communities, where we refer to our favorite female celebrities as mother, as mommy. I've seen fans of the pop star Charli XCX say in the very same sentence, her new singles are doing nothing for me whatsoever, but she's still on my mother list. And in a way, that's cheeky.
But also, there is this really fascinating research reflecting that our worship of celebrities is actually connected to mothering, or more specifically, insecure parent child attachment. So there was this pair of studies from just the past few years, 2020 and 2022, that confirmed that young people who are lacking in so called positive stressors from their family members or real life activities, those people were poised to fixate on these media surrogates, on these sort of illusory mothers, and that if you are lacking in those connections or those positive stressors in your real life, you might be more likely to focus on what was called trauma in the virtual world. The celebrity worship, whether it's the start of it or the effect of it, is really creating this hallucinatory environment for young people.
Christy Harrison: Oh, my God, it's so scary. As the mother of a young daughter, I'm trying to do everything I can to inoculate her against that and do my best to create a secure attachment, but it's tough. And I'm sure that there are many parents out there who are scared for this environment, this information environment their kids are living in, and sort of the ease of getting sucked into celebrity stan cult like, cultish sorts of behaviors.
Amanda Montell: I don't ever want to be alarmist with my work, which is so funny, because my last book was about how cults are everywhere. But there is evidence that is at once frightening, that celebrity worship is becoming so extreme. But there's also evidence that the inoculation, as you said, is actually, it's pretty simple. It's human connection. It's strong and fortified genuine relationships in the real world. What's troubling about now is that we are living in a time of seeming hyper connectedness because of how many identities you can perceive on social media within the course of a single hour. And yet at the same time, that sort of social glue that is only found in real life interactions is becoming less sticky or harder to find.
Which is why I think one of the reasons why the Era's tour was so explosively, monoculturally successful, because at long last, after all of these pandemic years, these really intense stans could gather in person and see one another's humanity. And I mean, I'm speculating, but I think that must have been a soothing sort of splash of cool water on the faces of so many stans who'd been engaging in these really heated, intense dynamics with no human interaction to kind of mollify that or humanize that. Yeah, stan interactions can be really, really intense and intimidating and scary looking online. And I think as soon as you bring it offline, that helps a lot.
Christy Harrison: Yeah. Seeing each other's humanity, looking other people in the eyes, has such a huge effect on people's empathy and ability to treat each other with kindness and respect.
Amanda Montell: It's so simple. But I think one of the issues of now is that we are, especially in the wellness space, is that we are sort of overcomplicating and catastrophizing a lot of issues, not to then me sound like a sort of wellness grifter, but there's a reason why "touch grass" has become this really popular slang phrase. And it's a bit, and it's cheeky, but there is some truth and optimism to be found in the truth that a lot of the answers to our sort of existential malaise lie in the sort of human medicine that we've always had access to. It's each other. It's nature. For many of us, obviously, not every problem can be solved by going outside and perceiving a deciduous tree, but you know what I'm saying.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, sure. A lot of it. Yeah, totally. Well, so you mentioned catastrophizing. I definitely want to get into that because I feel like that's got a real connection with manifestation, which you talk about in the book. But before we do, can you just do a quick definition of how you define magical thinking and magical overthinking? Because I think that's important for this context.
Amanda Montell: Magical thinking is this age old human cognitive quirk, and it essentially describes our penchant to believe that our internal thoughts and feelings can affect external events. It's what underlies any kind of idea of manifestation or spiritual belief or irrational behaviors that we might engage in in the face of grief. One of my first exposures to the phrase magical thinking was in the title of Joan Didion's memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, where she talks about how after the unexpected death of her husband John, she would engage in behaviors like refusing to remove his loafers from the closet, because she felt like if she did that, then there would be no hope of him coming back, you know?
And so magical thinking can be a protective mechanism. It's something that we've always done. But I feel that magical overthinking is a product of the modern age. And I'm sort of describing it as this clash between our innate mysticisms, these mental magic tricks that we've always played on ourselves to cope, to get through life, these cognitive biases and the excess of information, this information age, when there is this capitalistic pressure to know everything under the sun. We're exposed to more data, true and false, in a day, than our ancestors ever would be in the course of their entire life.
And of course, the democratization of information is a great thing. It's better than information only being kept for a high up elite. However, we are sort of not built to be able to process this excess of information. And it's led us to this era that I've been calling the age of magical overthinking. And the book is kind of breaking down how this shows up in these eleven different contexts.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, I think that's so helpful. And magical thinking is something I see so much of in wellness culture. I think probably the most glaring example is manifestation, which is, like you said, the idea that you can literally create reality just by thinking certain thoughts. I also covered that in my book and found it really fascinating, as someone with a history of anxiety, which I can share more about that connection, but you describe manifestation as a conspiracy theory, which I think is really spot on. And yet I know there are probably people listening who swear by manifestation and might be shocked to hear that. So can you explain what you mean by calling it a conspiracy theory?
Amanda Montell: Yeah. Well, in my defense, I have this chapter in the book called I Swear I Manifested This: A Note on Proportionality Bias, which is this fascinating bias that underlies conspiratorial belief. It's this idea that a big event or even a big feeling must have had a big cause. And as a species, we are really inclined to make those sort of false cause and effect conclusions. And that can work in a negative capacity, like by assuming, "Oh, my God. You know, COVID, it's this big, insurmountable tragedy. Like, the only way that the existence of this thing makes sense is if someone high up engineered it on purpose." Actually, like, a shocking percentage of Americans across the political spectrum believe that COVID was manufactured by the government, at least partially on purpose, which was stunning to me, but it really reflects how strong our proportionality biases.
But on a more positive side, proportionality bias also underlies ideas of manifestation, which. Which, yeah, I argue is a form of a conspiracy theory, because it is this false misattribution of cause and effect in the way that an anti-vaxxer might think that vaccines cause autism as a conspiracy theory, this sort of misattribution of cause and effect in a negative way. A hardcore manifestor might think that the reason why you were once struggling financially or didn't have nice skin, and now you do, was because you practiced the law of attraction. Your thoughts informed your reality, you vision boarded for your life. And I don't think this always has to be a destructive thing. Obviously, I love a vision board as a craft. You know, who doesn't love a good collage?
And there is truth. Absolutely. There is truth to the fact that your thoughts and your attitudes can affect outcomes and things like that. But in that chapter, I tell the story of this cult followed Instagram manifestation guru and how she sort of weaponized and commodified ideas of manifestation in a way that created some victim blaming. Obviously, if you believe that you and your thoughts are individually and solely in the driver's seat of your reality, then if your reality isn't a positive thing or isn't changing, then you're the only person to blame. Not dumb luck or systemic issues or anything like that. It's you.
And so that can be very easy to manipulate and exploit, because if you're like, "Oh, I'm an expert manifestor, I have a proprietary manifestation technique, and if you pay $600 a year, you can access it. And if it doesn't work for you, well, then, sorry, that's your fault." That is a precarious belief system to align with. And the story that I tell in that chapter is how some manifestation gurus on social media right now can actually serve as a gateway to much more insidious, conspiratorial belief.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, I mean, that pipeline is so real. I think there's so much in wellness culture and sort of new age culture in general that can serve as that pipeline to conspiracy theories. And it's scary. I talked in my book about the mental health impacts of manifestation and how manifestation is antithetical to so much of cognitive behavior therapy and other good therapies for anxiety disorders and depression and things like that, where with CBT, there is truth and evidence behind the idea that your thoughts can affect how you feel and how you show up in the world and perhaps can affect outcomes in your life. That having distorted thoughts can cause you to act a certain way that changes your relationships or changes your outcomes in the workplace or things like that. And so there is truth to that.
And as you said, there's a grain of truth to this idea of manifestation, but the idea that your thoughts literally create reality where it's like you can manifest a parking spot or you can manifest a bad haircut or a person to show up in your life or whatever it is, I think that is the real problematic thing, because that's such magical thinking, right? And it's antithetical to the CBT notion of reducing cognitive distortions and helping people see reality more clearly with more nuance and less catastrophizing and less black and white thinking.
And yet it is so tempting to catastrophize in a world like ours, where things feel so big and so bad. And I think that is sort of along the lines of what you were discussing with proportionality bias, right? That there's so much bad going on in the world today that it feels sort of right in a way, to be like, "Oh, the sky is falling, everything is terrible. There's a climate crisis. We're all going to die." I think you might have mentioned this in the book, this idea that it's sort of become a shorthand to just be, like, "We're living in a capitalist hellscape. The world is burning." People just toss off this idea, right?
Amanda Montell: I do. I have a chapter in the book. Sorry. It's so funny to reference all of these cognitive biases because it really is. It's been such a helpful lens for me, because now whenever I see someone engaging in a behavior that makes no sense, that would almost, in a proportionality biased way, cause me to believe, "Oh, my God, they must be making this irrational conclusion because they're evil or deranged" or I don't know, actually what's motivating it is one of these biases. and the one that you're mentioning is called declinism, which is our penchant to think that society or our individual lives are just getting irreversibly worse and worse and worse and worse, despite evidence to the contrary.
And actually, I have an opinion piece coming out soon in Esquire about doomslaying, particularly how this attitude shows up in the ways that we speak colloquially. So you can't notice that phrase is like, you know, bedrotting and doom scrolling and like, you know, "How are you? Other than the world burning and all?" Or like, "How was your weekend surviving through our neoliberal, late stage capitalist hellscape?" You know, like these phrases were really interesting to me, and I was curious about what they were doing to us or what they were saying about us. And my intuition, whenever I, like, embark on one of these projects is to think like, "Oh, my God." You know, it's almost a decline of statitude. It's like, "Oh, my God, you know, speaking this way is causing us to catastrophize, or it's making us desensitize to actual disaster just to make light of the apocalypse in this way."
But then I spoke to all these scholars, and whenever I talk to academics, they always make me feel so much better actually, there's a lot of optimism in having access to these facts or in studying them. And they were saying, well, it's actually a coping mechanism. First responders, when they show up to a really grisly scene, and one of the first things they do, not in front of people who are struggling through that scene, but later on, one of the first things that they do to cope is to make a gallows joke about it. So in a broader way, some of that doomslaying is helping us cope with humor, and it's in a way, helping us acknowledge the reality that, yeah, there are a lot of doomy horrors that the news is tasking us to confront or that life is tasking us to confront. The climate crisis can't be ignored. So that's definitely going on.
And the oversimplification of cause and effect is something that now I completely understand, knowing what proportionality bias is like, we naturally, as a species, want to create a narrative that makes sense for our lives. We do this for our personal lives, too. It's like everything happens for a reason, we tell ourselves, because we want there to be this sequence of plot points that quote, unquote, make sense. And that goes for catastrophes as well. It's too chaotic to think that a tragedy happened for no reason or a series of minuscule events. It's much more satisfying to think that the royal family killed Princess Diana, rather than that it just happened by a horrible accident. And it feels much better to think that we're doing well now and we're doing poorly before because we manifested it. And if we're still not doing well, well, that's our fault.
It's so much more manageable to think that something is your fault. The way that kids will blame themselves for their parents divorce, because it's way too chaotic to think that just shit happens and chaos, chaos, chaos. I'm fortunate to be friends with several therapists, both for my work and for my own brain. And I was talking to one of my best friends, who is a school psychologist recently about CBT, but also ACT, acceptance and commitment therapy. And I really liked that as a solution to some of this digital age anxiety which might manifest in over fixation on manifestation, or even something like imposter syndrome, where we just blame ourselves, blame ourselves, blame ourselves.
And I like the idea of using this acceptance and commitment therapy strategy as a method to soothe that. Because rather than attempting to replace your rational thoughts, it's more about maybe visualizing your thoughts as waves that peak and crest and break. And this happens in cycles and it's fluid and normal, and that we are not our thoughts. That they come in and out like a tide, and everybody has irrational thoughts. I mean, show me someone who doesn't.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, I love that. I think that's been so helpful for me, too. That idea that we are not our thoughts. And I think that's sort of antithetical to manifesting, right? Like the idea that your thoughts literally create reality. It's like, you know, we're sort of doing our best to detach from that notion and recognize that, like, we are not our thoughts. Our thoughts don't manifest in the real world. They don't necessarily have to have any sort of consequence. They can come and go and just be relics of our brain firing off at random and not have to make meaning out of them actually.
Amanda Montell: I do argue a little bit in that proportionality bias chapter that it doesn't mean that life is meaningless, that your thoughts can't influence reality, or that manifestation isn't quote unquote real, or, you know, that there wasn't some big on purpose reason for XYZ tragedy. It's just that meaning is our job. It's not like the universe has your back, but it's also not depressing to think that the universe doesn't have your back. It's simply that, like, the universe is there and it doesn't care. But that doesn't mean that our lives aren't meaningful. I hope that this makes sense. It's like meaning is our job to create in our lives with the people that we love. And if the universe doesn't have our back, that's okay, because someone in our real life does.
Christy Harrison: And I think, too, this idea that we can take on the task of making meaning and that can help sort of organize our reality and help us cope and feel better doesn't mean that we have to seize on every little thing as having some kind of existential meaning, right? It's like we can sort of learn to filter out what is going to go into our sort of constructed self meaning, what is going to go into our meaning making machine, and what is going to maybe get left to the side as just sort of like, "Oh, this doesn't really belong here."
Amanda Montell: I struggle with this so much because whenever anything negative happens or whenever there's a curveball in the narrative of your life, I'm always just like, oh, my God, what does this say about me? What did I do to deserve this? And it's like, maybe life isn't actually a story. Like, maybe this curveball or this tragic plot point doesn't actually say anything about what genre the story of your life is. You know, I really struggle with that myself.
Christy Harrison: I think about this story I heard a long time ago when I was studying mindfulness meditation. I think it was a Buddha story. I could be totally wrong about the origin, but it was something like, guy got a horse. Someone's like, hey, good for you. You got this horse. And he's like, like, we'll see. We'll see. And then the country goes to war, and someone comes and takes the horse, and someone's like, "Oh, man, bummer. You lost your horse." And he's like, "We'll see." And then everybody gets drafted, and every man with a horse has to go to war, but he doesn't have a horse. So this person's like, "Oh, hey, cool. You don't have to go to war." And he's like, "We'll see." And then, just like, everything that happens is sort of like, we'll see, right? We actually don't know how it's going to end up or what twists and turns our life is going to take.
Amanda Montell: Oh, my gosh. That reminds me of this children's book that I actually think had a great effect on me, even if I didn't notice at the time. But it comes up, it lives proverbially rent free in my head I'll say. It's just called Fortunately and it's by Remy Charlip. Go on a wonderfully wild adventure with Ned as he takes on a journey full of mishaps in this book from celebrated dancer, choreographer and beloved author and illustrator Remy Charlip. But it was like the whole book went, "Fortunately, Ned was invited to a surprise party. Unfortunately, the party was a thousand miles away. Fortunately, a friend loaned Ned an airplane. Unfortunately, the motor exploded. Fortunately, there was a parachute."
I think it's important for me to like, revisit that children's book because it wasn't like Freytag's Pyramid, you know, where there's like a beginning and then a challenge and then a climax and then a happy resolution. You know, it's like we like for life to feel that way, but instead it's more like Ned's day, you know? And so, yeah, I think that that book is, lol, me in my thirties, like, re-parenting myself with Ned's day. But it is helpful to kind of go back and be like, what relics from my childhood can inform the way I want to live now?
Christy Harrison: Totally. I know I'm reading my daughter all these kids books and there was a time when I couldn't get through any of them without crying because it just has so much meaning in them and these life lessons and beauty. And also when I was postpartum, up until a year or so after I gave birth, I was just ultra, ultra sensitive and still I haven't gone back to my, I was already highly sensitive before having my daughter, but it's gotten to the next level. Just things will affect me but never used to, you know, so there's that piece of it, too.
Amanda Montell: Oh, my gosh. I can only imagine. My reproductive system is like, let's say it's out of office, but one day it'll go back to work and I'm sure I will have the same reaction.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, it's fascinating. I feel like not enough people talk about that, the sort of emotional, long lasting repercussions of having kids or going through those hormonal changes. I want to talk about another cognitive bias you cover, which is the sunk-cost fallacy. I think this is one that, that shows up so much in wellness culture. You write about it in the context of staying in a toxic relationship, which I have too, but I see it so much in the wellness world and have done this myself, where people will devote themselves to particular alternative protocols or practitioners and spend all this time and money and energy on them, and they don't really see results, or they're still having symptoms, or they're like, maybe it's better. Maybe there's some sort of placebo effect going on, but then it wears off and they just don't really know, but they aren't able to admit it to themselves or to other people for a long time.
I did this myself when I was cutting out gluten 15 plus years ago because I was so invested in doing it. I had written multiple pieces about it for the magazines I was working for at the time. I was telling everybody I knew about it and getting people on board, both to make me gluten free foods when I went over to their house, and also to do it for themselves, like, talking about all the benefits they were supposedly going to get, and convinced some people in my life to go gluten free for a time. And so I made it my whole personality, kind of. And that resulted in hanging onto it much longer than I should.
Because at my heart of hearts, I was like, "I don't actually know if this is helping." I still had to go to the ER for stomach pain while I was gluten free. It wasn't necessarily helping the things I thought it was going to help. I would love to talk about the sunk cost-fallacy and how you see that showing up in wellness culture, and also the idea that it's not necessarily a fallacy, that it actually can be a form of self protection.
