Guy Winch, Ph.D.: Emotional first aid and how to treat psychological injuries

**Peter Attia, MD** (0:11)
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Now, without further delay, here's today's episode. My guest this week is Guy Winch. Guy is a psychologist, an author, a speaker, and now recently a podcast host.
Guy received his PhD in clinical psychology from NYU, where he also did his postdoctoral work at the Medical Center. He's been in private practice in New York for nearly 30 years. And as we learned on this podcast, he shares office space with my therapist, and that probably speaks to the state of mind I'm in when I walk in for therapy, and that I haven't noticed the names of anybody else on the wall there. Guy has authored three books, The Squeaky Wheel, How to Fix a Broken Heart, and Emotional First Aid. We get into a pretty good discussion on two of these three.
He's also the co-host of one of my favorite podcasts, Dear Therapists, which he hosts with Lori Gottlieb, a previous guest on this podcast.
He's given three fantastic TED Talks and a number of great Google Talks, all of which I recommend highly. I wanted to talk with Guy after I had a chance to get to know Lori a little bit. And obviously since their podcast came out, which was late July, I've been pretty obsessed with it. And I think getting to familiarize myself with the style with which Guy and Lori worked together, I realized he'd be just a fantastic guest. In this episode, we talk a lot about his journey to the path he's on now through psychology and what he learned along the way, both about himself and perhaps more interestingly to the listener, what he's learned about the human conditions. We get into a lot of things that he later acknowledged he doesn't get asked a lot of during his frequent interviews. And so I'm grateful that we were able to have kind of that nuanced discussion. I could have spoken with Guy for many hours, but before I knew it, we were nearly two hours into a discussion and he was already in Israel and it was getting late at night. So where we did end though was I think a really interesting discussion around emotional health, specifically vis-a-vis the challenges that many people have experienced through the pandemic. And Guy would actually say during our interview that he thinks it is the biggest sort of seismic shift that's probably impacted our ability to recognize the importance of psychological and emotional health. And so if you've found yourself interested in other episodes we've done that have covered mental health, emotional health, I think you're gonna find this one very interesting. And without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Guy Winch.

**Guy Winch** (3:05)
Hey!

**Peter Attia, MD** (3:11)
Guy, it's fantastic to be speaking with you here today. I almost feel like I know you because I have been listening to your podcast, yours and Lori's podcast, pretty religiously since it came out, which I think was in about August, is that right?

**Guy Winch** (3:27)
Correct, July 30th, actually.

**Peter Attia, MD** (3:28)
Okay. And I don't know, well, you can probably imagine the fondness I have for Lori that probably came across in the interview I did with her. And so now by extension, I see you two as left and right hand, and I've really just enjoyed listening to you guys. I do have to ask you a quick question about this.
When you read the letter at the beginning of each episode, actually before I do that, explain to people the format of the podcast, and then I'll ask my question. How do you guys set it up? Because you have a pretty specific format.

**Guy Winch** (3:59)
Right, well, Lori is the advice columnist for The Atlantic, and I write an advice column for Ted. So our initial concept was, hey, advice. But we wanted to do something different, because number one, we're both therapists, which is not always the case when it comes to advice. And number two, the thing that's always frustrated me about advice is that you can give the most brilliant advice, but you never find out what happened. Sometimes people will write and tell you, but even then it's very curated. So our format is such that we bring a letter each week, we start by reading the letter to one another, and we do a very brief case consultation like we would in a therapy office. And that gives you a little bit of a fly on the wall in a therapy office perspective. And then we immediately bring in the guest and we do a session with them.