How to Let Go of Your Shame, Solved

SOLVED with Mark Manson

Mark Manson

Education, Self-improvement

4.9 • 4.1K Ratings

🗓️ 1 September 2025

⏱️ 223 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Chances are, there’s something in your life you feel deeply ashamed about—something you’ve never told anyone, something you can’t even admit to yourself. In this episode, we go deep into the emotion we all experience but almost no one wants to talk about: shame. Where it comes from, why it’s so powerful, how it screws up our lives—and more importantly, how to deal with it. We cover the biology of shame, the psychology, the evolutionary roots, and how modern life (especially the internet) completely messes with our shame systems. We talk about healthy vs. toxic shame, how it shows up in addiction, relationships, perfectionism, and self-sabotage, and why most of us either try to hide from it or end up being controlled by it. You’ll also hear from members of my team about how shame shaped their lives in surprising ways. As always, this episode is brutally honest, deeply researched, and sprinkled with a few bad jokes. But more than anything, I hope it gives you the awareness—and the tools—to start facing whatever it is you’ve been avoiding. Because you can’t outrun your shame. But you can learn to live with it. We also put together a free companion guide for this episode with all the takeaways, references, and tools to help you get your sh*t together once and for all. Download it here: ⁠⁠https://solvedpodcast.com/shame Sign up for my newsletter, Your Next Breakthrough. It will help make you a less awful person: ⁠⁠https://markmanson.net/breakthrough⁠⁠ Get clarity on what actually matters. Try Purpose, Mark's AI mentor app that learns your patterns, challenges your blind spots, and helps you take action. Get 7 days free at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠purpose.app⁠⁠⁠/solved⁠⁠ Chapters 00:04:35 CHAPTER 1: Shame's Hidden Architecture 00:14:38 CHAPTER 2: Key Definitions 00:25:14 CHAPTER 3: The Neurobiology of Shame 00:44:12 CHAPTER 4: The Shame Compass 01:01:15 CHAPTER 5: Individual, Familial, & Cultural Sources of Shame 01:26:12 CHAPTER 6: Digital Technology & Shame 2.0 01:39:21 CHAPTER 7: Developmental Stages of Shame 01:56:49 CHAPTER 8: How Therapy Transformed Our Understanding of Shame 02:27:59 CHAPTER 9: Tools to Address Your Shame 02:58:26 CHAPTER 10: Tuning Your Shame System 03:31:39 CHAPTER 11: Takeaways from the Discussion on Shame Follow Mark Mark’s IG: https://www.instagram.com/markmanson Solved IG: https://www.instagram.com/solvedpodcast/ Twitter: https://x.com/markmanson LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markmanson/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@IAmMarkManson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Chances are, if you're listening to this or watching this, there's an area of your life that you feel so terrible about that you just try to pretend that it's not there.
0:09.2	That you hide it from others.
0:11.4	That you just, you avoid it at all costs.
0:14.8	And that avoidance and that hiding leads to more problems in your life.
0:19.2	It causes you to isolate yourself. It causes you to isolate yourself. It causes you to withdraw yourself.
0:22.7	It causes you to numb and distract yourself.
0:25.9	It probably causes problems in your relationships.
0:28.9	Yet, you're probably not addressing it.
0:31.4	Shame is, it is the, in many ways,
0:34.4	the ultimate topic that we all need to address, but by definition, it is the last topic we ever want to address.
0:42.6	And so this episode is going to probably have a weird tension throughout for most people.
0:48.5	I actually imagine that we will lose some people in this episode, just for the simple reason that it will become
0:54.6	too uncomfortable and they don't want to ask these questions of themselves as we go through
0:59.7	all the topics. But fundamentally, as we will see, alleviating shame or healing shame or coming
1:07.5	to terms of your shame, whatever language you want to use around shame,
1:17.3	it is one of the most important and core aspects of developing yourself or improving yourself.
1:22.4	A lot of what people go to therapy for is to heal or overcome their shame.
1:32.0	A lot of what people go to seminars and meditation retreats and self-help conferences is to help heal and alleviate their shame.
1:37.1	The reason people go to AA meetings, that they go to check themselves in the mental hospitals,
1:40.8	a lot of it is around alleviating their shame.
1:46.8	And so it is such a fundamental aspect of our relationship with ourselves,
1:52.8	our relationship with the world, our relationship with our loved ones. And it is the topic that we hate touching more than any other. So, all irony aside, we are about to spend the next four to
	...

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