Richard Lazarus

Secondary appraisal is crucial.

And this whole process, by the way, is known as Lazarus's transactional model of stress.

And this filter can drastically change the direction of your stress, and it can drastically change whether you are able to feel motivated by this moment or I guess, despondent over it.

So this is when we really get into the nitty-gritty of what this whole episode is about.

This going from I used to think and now I think can be an incredibly powerful reframe.

And the work that started this off originally was some work by a social scientist named Richard Lazarus, who did this really interesting study in the 1960s where he played people a distressing film And the researchers varied the narration that accompanied the film and how people felt about it.

And their measured skin conductance was different based on the narration.

So this is very much an example of how I think about something radically shifts how I react to it.

Their bodies were in the exact same state of generic high arousal, but their conscious minds looked out at the social context to figure out what label to slap onto that physical feeling.

Here's where it gets really interesting, because you see the mechanics of this cognitive labeling even more clearly in Richard Lazarus's film study.

Oh, the circumcision film.

Yeah.