Hello, and welcome back to practicing human, the podcast where every day we're getting a little better at life.

I'm your host, Cory Muscara.

In today's episode, we're going to talk about the relationship between agency and surrender.

More to come on that in a moment.

First, let settle in together with the sound of the bells.

Okay, so it is very important to feel a sense of agency and influence over our life.

This can sometimes get poo-pooed in the meditation spiritual world, which tends to emphasize that we're not in control of anything.

And then it's all about full surrender, which I talk about quite a bit on this podcast and in support of up until a point.

But the reality is that we do, if we take the perspective of free will, and even if you don't take the perspective of free will, that free will is a myth, you still have some form of that there's a felt sense of having a choice in each moment.

And part of being human and having a brain is having a brain that is programmed to feel more settled when it does feel like it has some influence over its environment.

Even if that influence is actively being okay with letting go of not having control, that could be viewed as a form of agency.

But feeling like we can impact the world around us, we can make decisions, we can put up boundaries, we can step out of a situation, we can pursue a dream, a goal.

All of this is incredibly important to our well-being.

Just on a fundamental level, it is a buffer against depression.

And we see this through the neuroscience as well, that learned helplessness is actually not something that is learned.

It's our default response to a difficult situation.

So chances are you're probably familiar with the idea of learned helplessness, this idea that an animal, including a human, after prolonged exposure to a difficult experience will eventually feel helpless if they don't feel like they can control the experience.

And it was viewed for a long time that that is something that is learned.

And now that is updated research by the same researchers who founded learned helplessness, Steve Mayer and Marty Seligman, they're seeing actually, no, this isn't learned.

The default is to give up in the face of something difficult. So it's actually a default, it's not learned.

But what we have is something that overrides that, which is the part of the brain connected to the Dorsal Rafa nucleus, that gives us a sense of hope and a sense of control, essentially agency, feeling like we can influence a situation.

And when we see that we don't have influence over a situation or feel that we don't have influence over a situation, that part of the brain stops firing for lack of a better way to say it.

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