- Major funding for the series, "I Am More Than", was provided by Caring for Denver Foundation.

Additional support for this program was provided by the Colorado Health Foundation and DemiFund.

[Music] - Hi, I'm Tom Pyszcynski.

I'm a psychology professor at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs.

And I'm a father, and a husband, and a grandfather, and a citizen of the world.

- Everyone's good?

All right, this is Tom.

- I was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1954.

I lived in a pretty typical middle class neighborhood.

You know, it was a time when parents were less afraid of horrible things happening to their children.

You know, we just wandered around.

We, you know, had friends of very-- You know, in three or four different directions, you know, within several blocks of our house.

I think the late 50s and early to mid 60s were a really interesting time.

You know, one of the flashball memory sorts of things for a lot of people from that era was when John F Kennedy was assassinated.

I remember walking home from school for lunch.

That was back then.

You used to go to school and go home and have lunch, then go back in the afternoon.

And I remember getting home, and my mother was crying, and telling me what happened, and hearing that all the schools were closed.

And just seeing the films of it was shocking that something like this could happen.

Around the same time, something a little more positive happened, at least a big influence on my life, is The Beatles came to America.

And what was interesting about them is they sort of were growing up as we were growing up.

And it seemed every time they put out a new album, they were moving on to more serious issues they were writing about, more complex music.

Very controversial for a while.

Kind of got into the late 60s, which was a psychedelic era, kind of the anti-war movement.

I really identified with the anti-war movement, the civil rights movement.

I mean, it wasn't just The Beatles.

There were a lot of other voices in the culture speaking out about these things, sending kids to war to fight thousands and thousands of miles away in a country that people weren't really-- Not everybody on the side that we were trying to help really wanted our help.

That just didn't seem worthwhile.

And it was also a time where there was a lot of increasing awareness of racial problems in the United States.

And I remember when I was a little younger going down south for the first time and seeing drinking fountains that said, "coloreds not allowed,” or "colored only” and just thinking, what?

That's crazy.

And being told watch what you say down here because people are different.

Of course, again, my parents stereotyping the Southerners, right?

All those changes in the mid to late 1960s were just mind opening for me.

And that was around the time I was kind of moving into early adolescence.

But the idea of the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, the ascendancy of people who were saying something was seriously wrong with American culture and that young people could change it.

And that by not participating in it, we could maybe make things better.

I remember that when I turned 18 was the year that they eliminated the draft.

So, going to Vietnam was something that hung over a lot of people's heads.

And I knew older kids that went and some that didn't come back.

And I knew I didn't want to do that.

And then, when they stopped the draft, they put in a lottery system.

They stopped the draft because what was happening was wealthy kids weren't going and poor kids were.

You get out of going to war by being in college, which is a big motivator for a lot of people to get educated, I think.

But anyway, they had this lottery system, and my number was 13, which I thought that's not good.

And also because it's an incredibly low number, meaning, you know, if they needed soldiers, I was going.

And then, the war ended and it was great.

I was happy.

Thinking about how the experience of the 60s and early 70s relates to what's happening in the world now.

There was a lot of social change happening back then.

A movement towards trying to make the world more fair and just to reduce discrimination against people who weren't white.

I think a lot of progress has been made, but there's a lot more progress that needs to be made.

Then as now, maybe more so now, there is a counter reaction to progress or social change aimed at increasing equity and equality.

And a lot of people are disturbed by it.

Another place you really see this is when it comes to sex, and gender, and the roles that men and women play, sexuality.

That's disturbing to a lot of people.

And when things change really fast, it sort of discombobulates them, and upsets them, and undermines their emotional security, kind of fuel conflict.

Any change in society is going to be disturbing to some people because it upsets their understanding of the way things are.

And that makes it harder to know-- to understand the world.

- Brilliant.

Chair management theory deals with the role that our beliefs, and values, and our self-esteem, the way they give us emotional security.

And chair management theory suggests that death plays a much bigger role in life than we could ever imagine.

A lot of what we do is aimed at helping us manage the anxiety that's lying underneath the surface because we know we're going to die someday.

That awareness of death affects a lot of things that we would never imagine have anything to do with death.

So, for example, hundreds of studies have shown if you remind people of death, they become more hostile towards people with ideas that are different from their own and more in need of support and validation from people who are similar to themselves and who share their beliefs and values.

Of course, that's at the root of a lot of conflicts in the world.

Now, you look at political divide in the United States.

I'm a liberal, you know?

I lean left.

And there's a lot of beliefs and values that go with it.

And it's more comforting being around people that share those beliefs and values because they're basically implicitly telling me that I'm right.

That's the way the world really is.

When you encounter people who see things differently, raise the possibility you might be wrong.

So, we react negatively towards them.

[Music] One of the main insights you get from social psychology is that people think in terms of concepts and categories, what we call schemas.

A schema is like a category or concept we use for thinking.

It is a mental structure that we use to organize our thinking about things that are out there in the world that simplifies things, and then influences the way we interpret what we see, the way we remember what we see, and how we go beyond what we actually see, and make assumptions about things that fit the category that may not actually be there.

Everybody belongs to a variety of categories.

You might be a father, you might be a police officer, you might be a cook, you might be a liberal, you might be a MAGA enthusiast, you might be, you know, a Catholic, or a Muslim, or a Jew.

And all of those things are part of the way we think about people.

And once we put a person into that category, that category fills in the blanks about all the other things that we would like to know about the person.

Another term for what we're talking about is stereotypes.

And we have political stereotypes about liberals and conservatives.

If you learn that a person is a liberal, you're probably going to infer that they prefer, I don't know, a latte or cappuccino over a drip coffee.

And statistically speaking, you're right there.

You're going to probably make some assumptions about how they feel about guns.

And statistically speaking, you're right about that probably.

But there are a lot of liberals who like guns and like to hunt and a lot of conservatives that don't.

And then, the other thing is that when we're dealing with a group that, for whatever reason, we're not fond of, that we dislike or even hate, those categories, the stereotypes, the content of the categories, gets increasingly negative and further and further from reality.

[Music] Being a professor is the most fun in the classroom when you're talking about something and you see sort of eyes light up and you see-- You don't really see.

You imagine light bulbs popping in the person's head.

When a person kind of gets a concept that allows them to see the world in a new way, that allows them to think about things in a new way, it's really nice when they'll come up afterwards and tell you that that makes sense to them, it fit their lives, and so on.

My impression is that students are struggling with mental health issues more than they have in the past, and there's some research that backs it up.

I want to just say, I want to check myself on that because pretty much every generation thinks the generations that come after them are having problems that are different.

What's wrong with these kids?

That kind of thing.

And I think the current generation of college students is dealing with something that most of us didn't have to deal with.

They're living in a world where throughout their education, they were constantly hearing of mass murders in schools.

Here in Colorado, Columbine was a game changer.

Over the years, I've had students who were in that school, in that classroom when that happened.

Occasionally in class, we'd be talking about trauma.

They'd talk about the trauma that led to, and pretty much everyone could relate because they realized that even if they weren't at Columbine, this happens on a very regular basis in schools around the country.

So, realizing that simply going to school could be a lethally dangerous experience and something I never had to deal with.

It never occurred to, I think, anyone in my generation.

And that stretches beyond the schools.

Mass shootings happen everywhere.

Over the last several years, we had to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic.

And not only was it extremely lethal, it killed well over a million Americans.

For a while, it was killing 5,000 people a week.

A couple of things went with that.

One is the kind of lockdown, the social isolation.

People were no longer having that person-to-person interaction in the classroom and the playground as they were growing up.

They were doing it over Zooms.

And then, on top of that, there was this massive dispute, disagreement, argument, constant, what?

Debate about how to handle this.

What's the best way?

Is what we're doing good for people or bad for people?

No one really knows the answers to those questions.

My take is that public health officials did the best they could with a really complicated situation that was very frightening because a lot of people were getting very sick and quite a few were dying.

But because of the policies put in place to try to deal with that big danger, there was a lot of dispute, and anger, and second and third guessing.

There was this air of uncertainty about what's happening.

The political arguments, the political divide, it was becoming so wide and deep that a lot of people felt weren't able to talk with their own family members about how they felt about things because it would lead to arguments.

So, I think socially, the world's become a little bit more fragmented.

One other factor is the replacement of face-to-face interaction with social media interactions.

People are spending less time face-to-face with each other, not really learning how to interact, how to deal with people.

So, there's a sense of isolation.

So, I guess what I'm kind of saying is that there's a series of things converging on all of us, but especially younger generations who are just sort of coming up and learning to live life in the social world that makes that harder.

And I'm seeing more students in the last couple of years.

I've seen more students than I ever had in my life come to me to talk about needing-- wanting referrals for mental health issues, talking about suicide attempts.

It's extremely rare in the past for students to reveal that they were having that kind of problem.

And it's not at all unusual right now in my life as a teacher, a university professor.

It's not like everyone, right?

It's still a small minority, but it's still more than it used to be.

And people who collect data on these things seem to be finding that these problems, there's scientific evidence that this is increasing as well.

In addition to what I think is a real change in the psychological well-being of people, it's also more socially acceptable to acknowledge this.

Having psychological problems, even admitting that you're stressed used to be something that was taboo.

It was seen as a horrible sign of weakness, especially among men.

But that has changed.

It's become much more acceptable to acknowledge that we have problems.

I think that's a good thing.

It's hard to know how much of what we're seeing is people being more willing to talk about it, or actual changes.

My sense is a little bit of both.

Actually, my sense is a lot of both.

[Music] Yeah, so, in dealing with stress and pressure, finding ways to decompress, and relax, find your center is really important.

And everybody does that in different ways.

For a lot of years, I played music in kind of an amateur way to have a different form of expression that was relaxing, and we used to call it our therapy session.

For about 20 years, I played in a reggae band.

I think it was the creative bouncing off of each other that was most therapeutic.

You've probably heard of the concept of flow.

That's a flow experience.

A flow experience is when you sort of lose consciousness of yourself and become one with the experience, when you become one with the music.

Of course, there's other ways, too.

I like to get together with friends, and have a beer or a glass of wine, and just talk with people, and be with people, and commune.

- I cannot create with structure.

[Laughter] I don't want to be bound by it.

- Can I ask-- I'd like you to place it where you want it.

And then, what do you think would be easiest for you to put it down?

Or is it okay up here?

- Will it stick?

- It'll stick.

Everything's pretty wet.

- Okay.

- So, I'll leave you to it.

- I think the best advice I give people about practicing self-care would be to try to treat yourself like you treat a good friend.

When your friends screw up, you give them the benefit of the doubt.

You try to help them get over the rough part, the pain that they may experience from when things didn't go the way they'd like.

Sometimes you might even stretch the truth a little to help them feel better about what happened to them and what they did.

And that compassion for other people that we all extend to some would be something we could all do a little better at extending to ourselves.

- Might be done.

- Might be done?

- One of the most important things for keeping ourselves in an even keel and maintaining our own well-being is seeking and having close bonds with other people, a sense of community.

- I should have probably taken the acid before doing this.

[Laughter] [Music] Okay.

It's ready.

It's ready for auction.

I don't know.

I was trying to put something in the sky.

As I started playing with the colors, looking for sort of a swirling kind of feeling.

But the basic theme was, it was music.

And of course, the treble clef is symbolizing that.

Blue seems like a backdrop of the sky.

Gold, sort of autumnal.

Red, yeah.

Just for vibrance, and brightness, and counterpoint.

I mean, I tried to approach it like I'd approach anything for fun, you know?

And just do what feels right.

I was really apprehensive coming in.

I thought it was going to be terrible.

And it was fun.

Looking back on the painting, I really was not looking forward to doing it.

I thought it wasn't going to be enjoyable.

I thought it would be a pretty bad experience.

But I really enjoyed it.

I was really surprised.

I thought it was fun.

And I guess a big part of the process of doing it was to try to just not think about it very much and just to kind of, I don't know, look at the canvas, and just start making lines, and see where that took me, where it would go, and what would come out of it.

And I was really surprised how much fun it was.

I never thought I'd want to get into painting, but maybe I would.

I don't know.