June 16, 2024

Living the dream with clinical psychologist and academic researcher Dr. Shannon Sauer-zavala

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'Living the Dream' podcast welcomes Shannon Sauer-Zavala, a visionary in mental health research, to discuss the transformative power of personality change in treating mental health issues. From her role at the University of Kentucky to her hands-on clinical work, Shannon unveils the future of mental health care and offers proven strategies to overcome mental health difficulties. This episode is an enlightening journey through the science of self-improvement and mental well-being. Please be sure to follow, rate, review, and share this episode to as many people as possible

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Welcome, um, to the living the Dream podcast with curveball. If you believe you can achieve cheat, cheat.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Welcome to the Living the Dream with Curveball podcast, a show where I and a few guests that teach, motivate and inspire. Today we're going to be talking mental health and mental health research, as I am joined by clinical psychologist and academic researcher Shannon Sour Zavala. Shannon has focused her, uh, career on psychological methods that can help people get over mental health difficulties. And she has focused her career on proven strategies that will shift the personality traits in people that struggle from anxiety, depression and substance abuse and things like that. So we're going to be talking to her about everything that she's up to and anything that she's got upcoming. So, Shannon, thank you so much for joining me today.

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> Shannon Sour Zavala>My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Why don't you start off by telling everybody a little bit about yourself?

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> Shannon Sour Zavala>Sure. Absolutely. So, um, I am a clinical psychologist. I have been doing that for about 15 years. And so I have a small, um, private practice, and then kind of my main gig is as an academic researcher and associate professor at the University of Kentucky.

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> Shannon Sour Zavala>And in that role, I conduct clinical trials that are really aimed at, um, increasing the accessibility of mental health treatment. So if you've ever tried to find a therapist, you know, it is hard out there.

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> Shannon Sour Zavala>And, um, that most places have long wait lists. And so my thinking is that could we make more efficient, more potent treatments that are easier for therapists to deliver, um, so that folks can get better faster and then people on the waitlist can kind of move into slots faster. So that's kind of, um, the overarching goal of my research.

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> Shannon Sour Zavala>And more recently, I've been working on, um, an intervention that's focused on shifting the personality traits that put people at risk for some common mental health conditions. And I've really been reflecting on the fact that personality change is something for everybody, not just people that are struggling. Um, and that we could all kind of intentionally develop traits that would help us kind of achieve the goals that we have.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Okay, so explain to the listeners exactly what personality is. And, uh, also, um, this personality is static or does it change over time?

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> Shannon Sour Zavala>Yeah, so that's a great question. So personality is your characteristic way of thinking, feeling and behaving, right. And so a lot of times when people hear personality, we can be really precious about that.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Right.

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> Shannon Sour Zavala>Like, oh, my gosh, it's at my core, it's who I am.

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> Shannon Sour Zavala>Right. But your personality isn't necessarily your tastes. It's not the music you like, it's not your dry sense of humor. It's your characteristic way of thinking, feeling and behaving.

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> Shannon Sour Zavala>And while it may seem hard to think about changing your personality, we change how we think. We change our perspective about things. We change our behavior. We shape different habits all the time.

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> Shannon Sour Zavala>And so when you think about it like that, if you're changing your perspective and you're changing, um, your behavior and you maintain that over time, you, um, are going to fill out those personality questionnaires differently, right? Essentially, you are going to develop or cultivate different traits. And so research really supports that notion, too. So across the lifetime, people tend to experience fewer negative emotions. They tend to experience more positive ones.

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> Shannon Sour Zavala>They tend to be more oriented towards close relationships. They tend to be more open to new ideas, and, um, they tend to be more reliable or conscientious. Um, and some people change a lot change really drastically. And some people hold steady, right. So there's a lot of variability. Um, but what we found is that with these intentional interventions that we've been testing in my research, that we can take kind of 20 years on average of personality change and kind of speed it up. So we're seeing kind of the same effects across 20 weeks.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Okay. Well, I know in your bio you talk about nudging your personality.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>So I know you just said that your personality is not your music taste or anything like that, but if someone nudges their personality, would they still be themselves?

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>And explain what nudge your personality means?

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> Shannon Sour Zavala>Yeah, absolutely.

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> Shannon Sour Zavala>Personality, um, is, like I said, your characteristic way of thinking, feeling and behaving. And we can reduce all the differences between people, like how people describe themselves into five overarching traits, right?

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> Shannon Sour Zavala>So your tendency to experience negative emotions, your tendency to be excitable and have a lot of energy, your tendency to be reliable, to be, um, empathetic, kind and tender hearted.

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> Shannon Sour Zavala>M and your capacity or interest in new ideas. So it's kind of five traits. Um, and so when I think about shifting personality, I'm thinking about those particular characteristics. Um, and so an example of this could be like, let's say you take a career personality test and it tells you you're introverted. So maybe you should shy away from leadership roles, right? And so what I don't want to happen is for people to feel like they're limited or they're kind of typecast based on, um, their personality test, right? Particularly like kind of the non scientific, commercially available ones, when really we have a lot of power to develop traits, right? Like to be more outgoing, to be more assertive if that's something that's going to be important for the life that we want.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Okay, can you describe the, uh, future of mental health and where you see it going in the future?

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> Shannon Sour Zavala>Yeah, um, one kind of, I think, sort of sad reality is that there will never be enough face to face therapists to meet the rising demand, right. And that could be because people are experiencing more mental health challenges. But I optimistically think it's because people are more comfortable talking about mental health and sort of saying, yeah, my therapist, um, and so that's kind of really driven up the demand. And so I think we, as a field, really need to be thinking about innovative ways to deliver services, right. To think about how we can personalize care, because not everyone needs a full course of treatment with a therapist. Some people can benefit from self help, from guided tools on the Internet, whereas some people need much more intensive care.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Right.

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> Shannon Sour Zavala>So I think as a field, we really need to get better at identifying what level of service people need at the outset. And then I also think that this is like a little bit of an aside, but basically, um, in my field, there are different sort of treatment protocols for every different disorder in the DSM, which is like our book of diagnoses, and that is incredibly cumbersome for clinicians. And so if you are in community mental health and you're seeing patients, um, five days a week, 8 hours a day, you don't really have time to do all the prep that you need to do to be up to speed on all these different treatments and how they differ from each other. And so a lot of times therapists will rely on kind of what I call how is your week therapy, right. And try to kind of infuse skills or techniques, but it's really tough to provide treatment in the way that it's been tested in our clinical trials.

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> Shannon Sour Zavala>And so, circling back to your question, I think we need a more simplified treatment system. And, um, that's where I keep coming back to personality, because there's great research that says that most of our different mental health symptoms can be kind of explained by these vulnerabilities in personality. People that are high in the tendency to experience negative emotions tend to struggle with anxiety disorders, depression, eating disorders, people that are sort of lower in that conscientiousness, or higher in disinhibition, or more impulsive, they tend to, um, be more likely to experience problems with substance use. Um, and so when I think about personality and those kind of five different traits that are sort of overarching, I think a simplified system could look like a different treatment for each personality domain, right? So instead of playing whack a mole with the different symptoms, we're kind of focusing on what are the vulnerabilities, and that's fewer treatments that are just easier for clinicians to deliver.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Can you lay out some proven strategies that you know of that can improve mental health?

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> Shannon Sour Zavala>Yeah, absolutely. So I'm a cognitive behavioral therapist. I'll just speak from my experience. Certainly there are other orientations to therapy that are also evidence based, but I'll talk about cognitive behavioral therapy.

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> Shannon Sour Zavala>So basically we can break that down into its two pieces.

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> Shannon Sour Zavala>There's the cognitive part, and that's really changing your thinking. So a lot of times when people are struggling, they have really habitual ways of thinking about things, right? So, um, take a person with social anxiety, they might enter a work situation or a party situation and think to themselves, uh, everyone thinks that they're wondering why I'm here. They're like, what is she doing here? Um, and that thought is going to probably lead to greater anxiety. And so in cognitive behavioral therapy, we work with people to really question their first impression. A lot of times we don't do that. We just are like, yeah, well, my brain is telling me this, so naturally, uh, it's true. Whereas instead we could say, well, that's kind of a mental habit. This is the thought I tell myself when I go into social situations, but do I actually have any evidence that people are like, why is she here? What is that evidence? So we teach people strategies to really systematically question those automatic thoughts while at the same time acknowledging, right? Like maybe you've had experience in your past that make those thoughts pop up. Um, in the personality change world, kind of moving away from mental health and into just kind of personality change, we have thoughts about ourselves, right? So the example I always give is, um, people that say, I need the adrenaline of the last minute to start this project, right? That's a thought, that's a perception about the way that you are.

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> Shannon Sour Zavala>And it's not like literally true.

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> Shannon Sour Zavala>You don't literally need adrenaline to open a word document on your computer and start working on the task, right? That's something you're telling yourself that then leads you to procrastinate until the last minute, right?

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> Shannon Sour Zavala>So could we challenge that thought about you and your identity as a conscientious person and might that change your behavior? And that's the other piece of cognitive behavioral therapy is behavior change, right? So we engage in strategies that, uh, people that are struggling with mental health often engage in strategies that make them feel better right now, but kind of set them up for more problems in the long term. So take that person with social anxiety. They go into the party and they say to themselves, oh, my gosh, no one wants me here. I have nothing interesting to say. And so maybe they leave, right? And as soon as they leave the party, their anxiety goes down. Right. Uh, relief. Um, but that backfires in the long term because they never get to correct the record. They don't stay at the party and see that people talk to them, that actually the host comes out and is like, oh, so glad you're here.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Right.

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> Shannon Sour Zavala>They don't get that corrective information. So those negative thoughts about being in social situations and that people are evaluating them, that sticks around. Um, and so we really challenge people to avoid avoiding, basically.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Right.

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> Shannon Sour Zavala>Like, go in and test those hypotheses that people are judging you, that you need the adrenaline of the last minute, that you can't trust people, that you can't handle feeling strong emotions. Go and test those hypotheses by putting yourself in situations where those thoughts come up and see what happens. Um, and pay attention to the outcome. So those are kind of like, that's like the cliff notes version of cognitive behavioral therapy for both kind of mental health treatment and then also for nudging your personality.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Okay, well, I know you're also a researcher and you always working on some research, so if you could talk about maybe some research that you're working on that you might have upcoming that can help people.

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> Shannon Sour Zavala>Yeah, absolutely. Right now, um, or really over the past, um, couple of years, I have been testing a new treatment for borderline personality disorder, and I'm really proud of that because BPD is pretty stigmatized and most people think that to treat BPD, you need specialist care. That is intense.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Right.

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> Shannon Sour Zavala>So meeting with your clinician maybe twice a week, potentially also going to group therapy, definitely needing access to sort of after hours, um, phone so that you can get in touch with your therapist. Right. So pretty intensive. And like I said, there just aren't enough therapists to meet the demand for mental health care generally. And so that becomes even more sort of like, crunched for personnel when, um, some people are needing, like, twice weekly sessions.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Right.

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> Shannon Sour Zavala>That takes away a thought from somebody else. And so my work has been thinking a lot about, like, well, not all people with BPD need that level of care. So could an 18 week, sort of traditional 50 minutes session outpatient therapy, could that be effective for some people with BPD and so the personality change work kind of fits in here, too, because we've developed these modules for negative emotions, for interpersonal kind of trust issues, and for, um, impulsivity.

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> Shannon Sour Zavala>And, um, depending on the problems that a particular patient has, we can personalize it such that if I come into therapy and I am struggling with emotions and impulsivity, I would just give those two modules, and I wouldn't get the trust issues one right. So, trying to just make treatment more efficient, and hopefully, um, we've had some foundation funding to support this from the American Psychological foundation, and we're hopefully, um, getting a big grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to support this work. So we're really excited about it.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Okay. Are there any other upcoming projects that you or your team are working on that the listeners need to be aware of?

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> Shannon Sour Zavala>Yeah. So another study that we're working on and that will continue into the future is, um, trying to identify what skills work best for which individuals. So, um, like I mentioned, cognitive behavioral therapy is changing your perspective. It's changing your behavior. Um, and so how do we know at the outset, for me, changing my thinking would probably be the best way to feel better more quickly, but maybe for you, changing your behavior would be the place to start.

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> Shannon Sour Zavala>Um, right now, usually we just give people treatment packages and we give them everything, and we hope something sticks, um, rather than being more targeted based on information that we know about a person, ah, at the outset of care. And so we've been, um, doing this study where we bring people into the lab and give them just like a ton of, um, tasks. For instance, we show them an ambiguous picture of a hospital scene, and we say, come up with as many interpretations as what's happening, um, in this picture. And the idea is that maybe somebody, their ability to flexibly or creatively think about explanations for this picture, maybe that translates to being better at, ah, changing their perspective. Maybe they'd be better at the cognitive part of cognitive behavioral therapy. So we're basically giving people a ton of tasks and questionnaires and then seeing if we can predict who responds better to cognitive therapy. And then the end goal would be to then personalize what skills people get, um, based on their performance on some tasks at the beginning of therapy. And I should say, um, for any of these studies, like, if any of your listeners are in the state of Kentucky, um, this is something I'm also really proud of.

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> Shannon Sour Zavala>We give away this cutting edge, um, gold standard cognitive behavioral therapy to people that participate in our trials. So in return for filling out some questionnaires you get free treatment, and I think that's pretty special. Um, so I just want to throw that out there as a resource.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Okay. So everybody can keep up with everything that you're up to. Do you have any contact information?

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> Shannon Sour Zavala>Yeah, absolutely. So probably the best way or the most central place to see all the things that I'm up to would, um, be my website. And that is ww, personality compass.com.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>All right. Personality compass.com.

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> Shannon Sour Zavala>That's right. And I'm also on Instagram and Twitter and LinkedIn. All the places where people might want to connect.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Absolutely. So close us out with some final thoughts.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Maybe if that was something I forgot to talk about that you would like to touch on or just any final thoughts you have for the.

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> Shannon Sour Zavala>Yeah, yeah. I think that the biggest takeaway that I would want listeners to kind of put under their cap is that we shouldn't let our notions of who we are right now dictate who we can become. Don't let a personality test put you into a box or a type and think, I can't do a particular activity or job or be in a certain kind of relationship because I'm not insert characteristic enough personality changes. We have great science to back that up and that you do have the power to cultivate the traits that you need to be successful in the life that you want.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>All right, ladies and gentlemen, there you have it.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Check out everything that Shannon's up to. Follow her on socials personality compass.com. Please follow rate review share this episode to as many people as possible. If you have any guests or suggestion topics, Cjackson one and is the place to send them. As always, thank you for listening. And Shannon, thank you for joining us and sharing your research and expertise.

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> Shannon Sour Zavala>Yeah, my absolute pleasure. Thank you again for having me.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>For more information on the living the Dream podcast, visit www.djcurveball.com.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Until next time, stay focused on living the dream dream.