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Follow along with the transcript below for episode: Celebrating The Purest Bond With Jen Golbeck [INTRO] [00:00:08] PF: Welcome to Happiness Unleashed with your host, Brittany Derrenbacher, presented by Live Happy. We know that the bonds we have with our pets are special, but today's guest may have you thinking about that connection on a deeper level. Jen Golbeck is the creator of social media's popular channel, The Golden Ratio, dedicated to sharing photos and videos of her rescued golden retrievers. With her new book, The Purest Bond: Understanding the Human-Canine Connection, she provides the science behind those incredible bonds and offers new insight into how we can use that information to improve our relationships with our own animals. Listen in as Jen and Brittany talk about how our pets can improve our well-being, as well as our community. [INTERVIEW] [00:00:53] BD: Hi, Jen. [00:00:54] JG: Hey, Brittany. How are you? [00:00:55] BD: Good. It was so interesting because when we were looking for guests for the show, I was just looking on Amazon for books that were coming out. I saw your book and was just immediately drawn in because of the cover and the topic. But when I started reading your book, I realized that I had already followed you on Instagram. Yes. So tell us a little bit about The Golden Ratio. [00:01:23] JG: Yes. So we rescue special needs Goldens, so a lot of seniors, medical cases, hospice cases, usually. Occasionally, somebody else sneaks in there. We've been doing that since – I guess 2016 is really when we grew from having a couple dogs in an occasional foster to four and five and six and sometimes seven. But, yes, it was after the 2016 presidential election, and like everybody was angry online, regardless of who they voted for. It was also the same time as Brexit, so everyone there was angry. I was like I just need a corner of the Internet to take a break from all of this. I couldn't really find it, and I was, “Well, poor Golden Retrievers,” at the time. Like that's happy. So I started posting them, and it really resonated with people, both for kind of a wholesome little piece of online life and then also following the stories as we would take in senior dogs or dogs that came from really traumatic backgrounds and rehab them. I think everybody likes to see that really hopeful story unfold over time, see them get better, see them live their great life. Even if it’s a hospice case, where we know that we don't have a lot of time with them, to see them like get their first swim in the ocean or their first KONG and have a good couple months, even if that's all they have left. I think it feels a need for people. [00:02:44] BD: I love this. So I have the same background as you in the same year that my husband and I started our special needs rescue. It’s breed-specific with Boston Terriers. How long until you really started brainstorming writing this book? [00:02:58] JG: So I had off and on thought about it because now across all the platforms, we have close to a million followers. It's like a 100,000 on Instagram. I was finding that we were getting a lot of people coming to us for questions often around end-of-life issues or treating medical things. But also like as a scientist, my area of expertise isn't animal science, but I have always followed these stories about the benefits that we get in our life from having dogs and read those articles. But it was really the pandemic, early in lockdown, when everybody started rescuing dogs and bringing them in that I started talking with my agent, my book agent, to be like, “You know, there's a book here about this idea where we can really share that science but also the really uplifting stories of how dogs have helped people in their lives and put that together in a happy book, which I feel like we don't have a ton of happy books coming out lately.” So it was a great opportunity, and the pandemic kind of gave a little extra time to work on that and get this coming out now. [00:04:05] BD: The title of your book is The Purest Bond: Understanding the Human-Canine Connection. I love this because the purpose of this podcast is to illuminate the gifts and the lessons and the magic that animals bring into our lives every day often in very unassuming ways. Every chapter of your book hit that on such beautiful notes. I actually wrote down a quote from the beginning of the book because I just felt like it was so spot-on with our message. You say that this book, the goal of it is to explore and illuminate the profound impact the human-canine connection can have on our physical, emotional, cognitive, and social health and well-being often without realizing it. I love that. It's so spot-on to the message that we want for this podcast. That brings joy into people's lives too. Like you said, it's a happy topic, and we need that right now. [00:05:01] JG: Yes. I think on one hand, when we were thinking about writing this book, it's like who's the audience for this. Is it people who are thinking about adopting a dog? You can hear mine maybe barking in the background. Is it for people who have dogs? I really think people who have dogs are going to come to this. On one hand, I'm not going to tell them anything they don't know in terms of this being a really important connection. But I hope what I'm going to do is give language and kind of expand the understanding that they have about the role that dogs can play in their life. [00:05:34] BD: I love that. Tell us more about what readers can expect from your book, The Purest Bond? [00:05:42] JG: Yes. It's both science and story. So you're not going to get hit over the head with like really deep statistics or anything. We try to give like the good overview, so you get the gist of what the science was trying to achieve. But we want to ground all these insights in actual rigorous peer-reviewed scientific studies. So that will be everything from how do dogs help kids when they're learning? How do dogs detect cancer in their owners or tell you when you're having a heart attack. What role do service dogs play in the community? How are communities impacted by people having dogs and look at the research of that? But we mix it with stories from a lot of people that we recruited on social media of the really profound personal impact that their dogs have had. So we can say, “Look, here's a bunch science about how dogs’ noses work and how they can smell diseases or if we're going to have a seizure.” Then we're going to share some stories with you that people have given to us about how their dogs saved their life or saved their baby who was dying in a room, and they didn't know, how they detected their cancer. You really get to see that on a science level and then in a really intimate personal level. I mean, I'm so grateful that so many people trusted us with these really intimate stories. I think you've read them and you agree that you get these glimpses into sometimes dark and difficult points in people's lives and how their dogs were really there for them. So I think it gives this well-rounded picture of how dogs help us and how we see it play out. [00:07:13] BD: Yes. I felt as a reader that I was getting that dopamine hit as I was reading those personal stories from people. So I really appreciated that because when you get statistics and facts in a book but also paired with these really beautiful human stories and, I mean, very heart-centered stories, I just felt like it was the perfect balance. [00:07:33] JG: I mean, that's exactly what we wanted, right? That this isn't – like I love all the dog science books that are out there. I have all of them. Even before I was writing this, I have them all. But I wanted to make sure like that this was a very heartfelt book, right? That there was soul in this book because that's the critical thing about this relationship that it's not just a bunch of statistics. It really is something that speaks to like the real depths of what makes us human. [00:08:00] BD: What was the most surprising fact that you learned and you found out while you were researching for this book? [00:08:06] JG: The one that I like the best which I wasn't expecting was on one hand, we know if you have a dog, and you go out and walk them, that you learn who other people are in your neighborhood from their dogs. You often don't know their names. I'm terrible at human names anyway, but like, “Oh, that's Rufus's dad, and that's Phyto’s dad.” So, of course, like you get that connection if you're out walking dog. Of course, science says like that makes us meet more people, and that's great. But a result that I was really surprised by is that scientists have found that in communities where there are more dogs, like if your neighborhood has more dogs, the community has a stronger sense of cohesiveness. Often, we'll have like lower crime levels and better community participation, even if you don't have a dog. It tends to because you see a lot of people in your neighborhood more, and you have a chance for positive interaction. Even if you don't have a dog, you get to meet them. You get to see their dog. So the presence of dogs in a neighborhood brings a greater sense of civic responsibility, a greater sense of community, connection, even to the people who don't have dogs there. That really surprised me, but I think it's beautiful. On reflection, it makes sense. It kind of carries over that benefit that we dog owners feel into the whole neighborhood. [00:09:21] BD: I love the civic responsibility of that. We were talking about this on our last episode, just the benefits you can get just from petting. Like if you don't have an animal, you don't have a dog, and you're out walking, and you get to pet your neighbor's dog. You also get all of those feel-good hormones, and you get this very reciprocal exchange that can be healing in unassuming ways. So I love that. [00:09:43] JG: Yes. I mean, it's amazing that it's only like a few minutes of petting a dog. Even if it's a dog you don't know, that you get all these like biological indicators of your stress levels going down, which is pretty amazing. So absolutely like ask to pet every dog that you go past if you get the chance. [00:10:00] BD: Yes. In your opinion, what lessons do you think that we can learn from our dogs? [00:10:06] JG: This is such a great question because it's one that we're looking into more in-depth for the book that we're writing now, which is going to come out a couple years, November 2025. But really looking into like how our dogs think about things. So there's an area of psychology. If you think about going to a therapist, right? Psychology is normally looking at stuff that's going wrong with us and helping us fix it. But there's a complementary area of psychology called positive psychology which is about like joy and happiness and gratitude and civic responsibility, loyalty, all these kind of good things because we want to make sure we've got a lot of those too. What we found in this book, and we're going to explore more in-depth over the next couple years, is that dogs have a lot of those positive psychology traits. They're able to feel and show and express gratitude. We can kind of measure that scientifically. Obviously, they feel love. We talk about that in the book, how you can see the parts of their brain light up that you see in babies light up when they see their mother. Our dogs have that same activation when they see us. You can see it in the hormones that you measure in their blood, for example, that they really do love us back. I think being able to be mindful and in the moment and forgiving, right? To be able to allow for people to change, it's hard to do that as a human with other humans. But I think we can look to dogs. If you do rescue, you know this too, right? You can bring dogs in from really traumatic backgrounds, where they have no reason to trust or have joy or have anything good in their life based on what they've gone through. In like two months of being in a loving household, they’ll bond with you. It’s not like they're completely over what was there, but they're really able to embrace a new life and trust again. I certainly aspire to have more of that kind of trait in my own life. It’s a thing that really inspires me watching my own dogs. I think in this book, we really see that they're good at that. It'd be great if we all could be a little more like that. [00:12:08] BD: Absolutely. When I think of all of the dogs that we've brought into our home and the conditions that they've come from and the neglect or maybe even just physical abuse, emotional abuse, just the amount of forgiveness and trust is so profoundly beautiful. I mean, you're so right. That is a message that we can all take away from our relationships with our dogs and other animals as well. [00:12:35] JG: For sure. I mean, if we could all be like that, especially like in our close personal relationships, right? Stop holding those grudges because the person you love did that one wrong thing that one time. That'd be better. [00:12:48] BD: Can you talk a little bit more about the profound love connection that we share with our dogs? [00:12:55] JG: This is really amazing. So we kind of came in with a little bit of research on oxytocin, which is this neurotransmitter. It's a chemical that you can measure in your blood, and it's kind of this feel-good hormone. So if you get an oxytocin hit, like that's great. That's what you want. Parents will often describe feeling it when they like cuddle with their newborns. It's important for bonding, the release of this hormone. We know that if you stare into the eyes of your dog, you will get a release of this oxytocin. But your dog will, too. I think this is so interesting, right? That it's not just us feeling good because we're with our dogs. For a long time, we tried to like dismiss and be like, “Dogs don't really have the same kinds of emotions as people. They don't really love you. They're just operating on instinct.” That's clearly not true. We know how these chemicals operate in people. We get them when we interact with our dogs, but the dogs get them too. Then I had mentioned earlier, in people we look at a kind of relationship called an attachment bond. So in psychology, these are the bonds that infants form with their mothers primarily. If mothers and infants are looking into each other's faces, this helps create the attachment bond. They do have this oxytocin, but it's also like a psychological bond. Psychologists have done studies where they will use functional MRIs, FMRI machines. That’s the thing you've seen pictures of where like different parts of the brain light up. When they show infants pictures or play them the voice of their mothers, certain parts of their brain will light up. That really shows that there's an attachment bond forming there. They don't get it when it's a stranger talking. When dogs are put in an FMRI and they're given the smell or shown a picture of their owner, the same part of their brain lights up. So we've been able to measure because we can talk to people that we feel like we have these really close attachment bonds to our dogs. They're like the bonds we form with our closest family members. But it's so interesting that our dogs form them back to us. So it's a real like deep biological and psychological connection that we form with each other. It's not just one way. It's not us kind of anthropomorphizing onto an object. They love us back, and they do it all the way down to like the deepest parts of their brain in biology, which I think is so beautiful and a really lovely way to like see the science play out in something that we all go like, “Yes, I totally felt that.” But, man, can we measure it in a lot of ways. [00:15:22] BD: You're speaking my love language. So I'm a therapist, and there were so many parts of this book where I was like, “Yes.” The attachment styles was one of them because I talk about this a lot. I specialize in pet loss grief. So when I'm working with my clients, I actually try to help them understand that about themselves in their relationship with their pet. Because oftentimes, I have clients that come in, and they're so shocked by their grief. They're like, “Oh, well. It was just my pet.” I'm like, “It's not just your pet, and this is why.” So we talk a lot about attachment styles. When I read that in the book, I was like, “Yes.” [00:16:00] JG: I got to say like I started – I was on sabbatical from my professor job for a lot of the writing of this book, and I started getting a master's degree in psychology while we were writing the book. So literally, like every week, I'd come back to Stacey, my co-author, and I'd be like, “Stacey, I just did this thing in class this week, and we have to go back and put that in chapter five.” So the attachment bonds were one of those things. We had written that chapter already. When I finished my class on close relationships, and we did a lot on attachment bonds, I was like, “This totally recontextualizes for me the kind of stuff we had in there.” So I'm very happy as a therapist that you found that relevant because, yes, for me, it really added this layer of, okay, it's not just that we're measuring. This is a really important relationship, and we know how to talk about that. That became one of the major themes of the book. It tied together so much different science to think about the relationship that way. [00:16:51] BD: You and I, we share a love of seniors. We share a love of hospice cases and dogs with special medical needs. Can you share with the listeners what being an advocate for these animals has taught you about yourself? [00:17:05] JG: I think I've always had this feeling that I want to find the ones that weren't wanted the way that they should be, and like show them that they've got value and that they deserve better than that. I'm sure I've got some like deep-rooted trauma that informs that. But that's always what I'm really drawn towards is like who are these dogs that like everybody's forgetting, that no one has treated right? Let me come along, and like I will take care of it. That feels really rewarding and like I'm fulfilling some need and probably trying to like heal myself by doing that. But taking them in has really shown me how easy it is to do so much work, and you don't even really know that you're doing it. So there was one point where we had two hospice dogs and another senior who was close to the end of his life. We had seven total at that point, including three very high-maintenance dogs. We had to hand-feed them, and it was no problem. I wasn't like, “Oh, my God. I can't believe I've got to like hand-feed spaghetti and get covered in this.” It's just like, “Of course, this is the thing we do.” I suspect parents often have this feeling. I don't have any kids of my own, and so I suspect parents who like really love parenting are like, “Yes. Of course, I got up at like three in the morning. It's like not like the most fun thing, but like it's fine. It didn't bother me at all.” I think about doing that with a kid, and I'm like, “Man, that's the reason I didn't have any.” But with a dog, I'm like, “Of course.” I'm hand-feeding them in different rooms and doing this. When you lose them then, you go, “I had no idea how much our life had started revolving around taking care of this.” But it's not a problem at the time, and that's a thing that I was like very happy to kind of realize about myself that it can get to be a huge amount of work. But it's just you're taking care of a soul that you love, and it doesn't really feel like work then. [00:19:02] BD: Yes. I resonate with that so much. I tell people a lot that this work has taught me just how much love I had to give. [00:19:09] JG: For sure. [00:19:10] BD: I loved that you in your appendix included the quality of life. Will you talk about that for a minute? [00:19:17] JG: Yes. A question that we often get from people on social media when their dog either has gotten a pretty catastrophic diagnosis or is just clearly at the end of their life is like how do I know when it's time to make this decision. It’s decision that I've made more times that I can count about when to say goodbye to your dog. I have guilt over every one of those decisions, even though I know I have made it correctly every time. But it's hard to talk through with people if you don't know their specific dog. Frankly, you don't want to tell them, yes, it's time or, no, it isn't. What I wanted to be able to do was tell people like here's how we make this decision. So that quality of life survey that's in the appendix is not a – it's a bunch of questions, and they have scores. But it's not like, “And if it's above this level, you're fine.” Or below that you say goodbye. It's more for you to get a sense of the different parts of your dog's life. Because like we were saying, when you're in it and you're taking care of a dog who's declining, you may not realize that like, oh, the fact that they're not eating actually has gotten to a pretty extreme level, the fact that they don't want anybody to really be around them. Or if you try to move them, they snap at you, which is something they didn't do before. To really see where do they fall in a bunch of different aspects of the quality of their life and be able to track it over time and see like, “Oh, it's going down,” or like, “Man, I didn't even think about this part.” I have sent that to so many people like since we wrote it. We pulled together from a bunch of different surveys to make that one. That is really helpful for us. That's basically the kinds of things that we think about. I also tell people, we kind of set a threshold, depending on the dog. So sometimes, we have Golden Retrievers. A lot of them have hemangiosarcomas, which are these very fast-growing cancers. A dog can be fine on Monday and be dead on Friday. They just show up really fast. If we're able to catch them, you can't really treat them, and we go, “Okay. If they are up all night panting because they're uncomfortable, like that's kind of going to be the marker for us.” We give ourselves the freedom to reassess. But I think having some objective things to help guide you can be really helpful. Of course, you can make whatever decision you think is right at the time. [00:21:28] BD: Yes. It's a really great resource, and I'm glad you included it. [00:21:31] JG: Thank you. [00:21:32] BD: What do you hope readers will take away from your book? [00:21:36] JG: I hope they come away, if you're a dog owner, with a really deeper appreciation of the complexity of the mind of your dog and the depth of the relationship that you have with them. I don't think anybody's going to love their dog more. Hopefully, you love them the maximum amount already. But, hopefully, you come away from it really understanding that they are complex creatures that have the capability for so much emotion and connection. They give that all to us freely and willingly and to the fullest of their abilities, which is pretty amazing. It's hard to get that from humans, right? It's a relationship that we can feel safe in. Maybe it'll get more people like telling their secrets to their dogs or wanting to take him out for a walk and like deepen that connection. I always think it's great if you're like, “Is there a thing I could do now that would make my dog happier? Let's go do that thing.” That's what I want people to do. Put this book down and be like, “You know what? Let's go get some French fries, and you can have a few.” [00:22:37] BD: I'm so glad that you came on this podcast because your message is exactly what we want our listeners to leave every episode thinking is like, “Man, I have so much gratitude for the animals that are around me.” Kind of switching that way of thinking where we've always thought, well, what can animals bring into our lives and reversing that? Well, what can we bring into animals’ lives? How can we kind of return the favor to them for all of the profound gifts that they bring into our life every day? I love to close out the episode sharing a story of an animal in your life that has really brought magic or done healing or taught a lesson in an unassuming way. I know you've had so many animals in and out of your home. But is there any one particular animal that stands out to you? [00:23:26] JG: For sure. So Voodoo was our epileptic dog. We only had him for like a year and a half. He was, obviously, a very complicated dog. But that dog did not care about anything you wanted him to do. He was just like the most mischievous dog. We had to actually move the toilet paper roll holders up the wall in our house because he would eat the toilet paper. Not just grab it and drag it around the house. He'd, like an apple, just take bites out of it. He would eat anything, the recycling. Anything below like shoulder height of a human, he would eat it. You couldn't make him upset. Like if you were to yell at him, he'd be like, “Whatever. I'm going to go eat it again.” He just didn't care at all. He’s just absolutely his own dog, doing whatever he wanted but loved us and was like so happy to spend time with us. He thought he'd want to go for walks, and he'd get all excited. He'd walk halfway down the block and throw himself to the ground. I'd have to call my husband to like bring the car and put him in the car, and he'd be fine. He just didn't want to walk anymore. He was very independent and did whatever he wanted. It was the like most joyful amazing thing ever. He was really a magical dog, and I miss him so much. [00:24:40] BD: Voodoo. [00:24:41] JG: Voodoo. [00:24:42] BD: Jen, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. This was such a beautiful conversation, and I'm so excited for people to read your book. Yes, The Purest Bond: Understanding the Human-Canine Connection, it’s amazing. [00:24:56] JG: It's been a joy to talk to you. Thank you so much. [END OF INTERVIEW] [00:24:58] PF: That was Brittany talking with Jen Golbeck, author of The Purest Bond. Brittany, that was a fantastic interview. I know that as a therapist and as a grief specialist, you really enjoyed it and as a rescuer. So it's so easy for us to think like, “I got this out of the interview.” What did you get out of the interview as you were doing it? [00:25:17] BD: I felt like Jen did a really good job of bringing that happiness message. Listeners that go out and get her book and read it will see that there really is this kind of like dopamine hit that you get from reading her book because there's so much happiness in it, the stories. I read this on an airplane, and I remember at one point like putting my hand on my heart like, “Oh, my God. I wish I could go home and kiss my babies right now.” I just felt so much gratitude towards them reading through the stories and just like the research and the way that Jen's able to put that together. That's the purpose of Happiness Unleashed is to share the these little moments of happiness and the happy lessons and all the joy that animals bring into our lives. So I love that she led with that immediately. [00:26:08] PF: I love it. I love it. That was a great interview. Lots that we can learn from her. We're going to tell the listeners how they can find her book. Of course, how they can find out more about you and the work that you're doing. We'll have them meet us back here again next month for another fantastic episode of Happiness Unleashed. [00:26:24] BD: Thanks, Paula. [OUTRO] [00:26:26] PF: That was Brittany Derrenbacher talking with Jen Golbeck. If you'd like to learn more about Jen, check out her book, The Purest Bond, or follow her on social media, visit our website at livehappy.com and click on the podcast tab. While you're there, you can also learn more about Brittany and the work she's doing with animals. Of course, Brittany will be back here again next month to talk more about how pets bring us joy, help us heal, and can be some of our best teachers. Until then, for everyone at Live Happy and Happiness Unleashed, this is Paula Felps, reminding you to make every day a happy one. [END]

Follow along with the transcript below for episode: Unwinding Anxiety With Dr. Jud Brewer [INTRODUCTION]   [00:00:02] PF: Thank you for joining us for episode 436 of Live Happy Now. Anxiety is so pervasive today that more than 40 million adults in the US are living with it. But this week's guest is trying to change that. I'm your host, Paula Felps. This week, I am talking with Dr. Jud Brewer, a New York Times best-selling author and Director of Research and Innovation at Brown University's Mindfulness Center. In his 2021 book, Unwinding Anxiety, Dr. Jud shared his scientific insights into how to break the cycle of worry. Now, those steps are also available through an app, and he's here today to tell us how we all can learn to break free from anxiety. Let's have a listen. [INTERVIEW] [00:00:45] PF: Dr. Jud, thank you so much for joining me today. [00:00:48] JB: Thanks for having me. [00:00:50] PF: You have written, researched, done so much work in the area of anxiety. This is such a huge, huge problem for people. To start it off, this has been problematic for generations. I wondered why we're not getting better at managing it, given the amount of time we've had to learn about it. [00:01:07] JB: This is way before neuroscience was even a field . Neuroscience is a very young field of study. It wasn't even coined until like the 1970s. But if you think about this approach to changing human behavior and working with ourselves, it's about I think, therefore, I am. I think, therefore, I could think. I can think my way out of anxiety. So that's been a dominant paradigm for a long time. Even I love – one of my favorite comedy skits is from the 1970s. This guy, I don't know if you remember Bob Newhart. [00:01:41] PF: Oh, I loved him. I loved Bob Newhart. [00:01:44] JB: So he had a skit called Stop It, basically, where this person, this woman comes into his – he's playing a psychologist or a psychiatrist. Woman comes into his office and says, “I have this fear,” talks about this fear. I won't give away the skit. Then he basically just says, “Stop it.” But he's highlighting what has been this dominant paradigm back in the sixties, seventies with cognitive behavioral therapy. Still present to today as the dominant thing is just control yourself, to stop it. If only that worked, if we could find that switch in our brain that we could just flip off that anxiety switch or that worry switch or that overeating switch or that whatever switch. It just doesn't work that way. [00:02:28] PF: Right. It's like growing up, my mom would be like, “Well, just calm down.” It's like that is what I'm trying to do. Literally, I'm trying to calm down and I can't. [00:02:37] JB: Yes. The more somebody tells us to calm down, the more anxious we get. [00:02:41] PF: Yes, exactly, exactly. Then we feel like we're doing something wrong. Like, “Why can't I get this under control?” Is that part of it too? We felt like we have to do it ourselves. [00:02:50] JB: I think that's a lot of it, where it's just like, well, what's wrong with you if you can't control your anxiety. So we also get into loops of self-judgment and unworthiness and guilt and shame and all that stuff. [00:03:04] PF: So is it more prevalent? Or are we just hearing more about it? Are we more willing to talk about it? Because it seems it's everywhere I turn, I hear conversations about it. I see reading materials about it. So I don't know if we're just more comfortable with talking about it or it really is a bigger problem. [00:03:22] JB: It's hard to know whether something's increasing, decreasing, or staying the same if you haven't measured it. So I don't think it's been measured historically as much as it's been measured today. So what I can say is we do know some of the factors that contribute to anxiety more, and we can certainly say those factors are pretty prevalent. So for example, our brains don't like uncertainty, and that's actually a built-in mechanism to help us survive. If we hear some rustling in the bushes, think of our ancient ancestors. You can't just ignore that and be like, “Yes, whatever. I'm going back to sleep.” [00:03:55] PF: It’s probably just a tiger. I’m fine. [00:03:57] JB: Yes, yes. It – pet tiger, pet tiger, not the dangerous non-pet tiger, right? So, yes, just a tiger. No big deal. So our brains are set up for survival in that way. In modern day, we've never had so much access to information, right? So it's like our brains are like, “Oh, more information, good.” But you can't drink from the fire hose. On top of that, there's a lot of unintentional misinformation and then intentional disinformation. So back in the day of our ancient ancestors, there was no such thing as the deep fake tiger or the whatever, the intentionally misleading tiger. It was like tiger or no tiger. So now, we have to become the expert on everything. When we hear something, we're like, “Well, is that true or not,” and then – so our brains start to go into overload because not only is there a ton of information, but we don't know what to trust, what not to trust, and we're not the experts. So I would say that certainly wasn't available back, before the Internet, for example. The Internet's really made information much more available and also mis and disinformation as well. So that's one piece in modern day that historically hasn't been there that is certainly contributing. [00:05:14] PF: And we don't get that time away from it. We used to have like you walked away from your life a little bit. Your work life, whatever it was. You had your evening. You could kind of decompress. That doesn't happen now. So what's that doing to give us this heightened always-on circuit in our brain? [00:05:31] JB: Yes. Well, there's a – it's now coined the FOMO, fear of missing out. That fear of missing out is not just social. So that can start in someone's teenage years or even probably earlier. But also in adulthood, it’s not only the social FOMO but also the work FOMO. So it's like, well, I could be checking my email to see if I'm missing an email. I could be doing this or that. Or somebody can always get a hold of us via text and say, “Hey, call me immediately,” when there used to be work-life boundaries. [00:06:02] PF: Yes. I read an article in the New York Times this past week, and it said that texting from work is starting to invade our personal space. I'm like, “That's just starting.” Like – [00:06:12] JB: Starting. I was going to say what. [00:06:14] PF: That’s been going on for a little while there, NYT. So it is. It's absolutely overloading. What is it doing to the brains of kids who are growing up in this kind of always-on environment? [00:06:28] JB: Yes. That's a good question. We now have a generation of digital natives, which means children that were born and don't know what it's like not to have smartphones, not to have social media, not to have the Internet. It is an uncontrolled experiment. [00:06:46] PF: On your children. [00:06:48] JB: Yes. That you didn't sign a consent form for. [00:06:53] PF: And you’re probably not going to like the outcome. But, yes, it is. It's going to be – it will be interesting to see. Will the way that anxiety is addressed with that generation be different than, say, someone like myself, who actually saw the screens go off like at 2am when they're babysitting, and there's no more TV for hours? [00:07:13] JB: It's a good question. Happy to be wrong here, but my hypothesis is that, regardless of whether we're a digital native or not, you treat it the same way. Part of that is that our brains are so adaptable that we can certainly remember what it was like to not have a cell phone or not have email or not have the Internet. But it just feels like ancient history because that's not what's happening right now. So whether we were born before or after, it doesn't really matter because what we're dealing with is the present moment, like what's happening right now. [00:07:52] PF: That makes perfect sense. You have done so much research in a lot of areas, but we want to talk about specifically what you've done with anxiety. I'm interested in learning what made you start researching anxiety. [00:08:04] JB: Basically, I was really anxious at the end of college, and I didn't know it to the point where my body had to give me some very clear signals through I developed irritable bowel syndrome. One of the big drivers for some people of irritable bowel syndrome is anxiety and stress. So my guts were letting me know, “Hey, pay attention. This is not good.” Also, fast-forward eight years later, when after I had finished my MD-PhD program, I started getting panic attacks during residency. So those were kind of precursors for my personal experience with this. Then interestingly, I – my lab – so I had started studying mindfulness training when I started my career as an assistant professor because I was really interested in how people can change addictive behaviors and habits. As a psychiatrist, I was really seeing the limitations in current treatments for addictions. So I really wanted to put – contribute there. I felt like people with addictions were my people, and so I really wanted to help there. So I started developing these programs. I developed a program for smoking. We actually got five times the quit rates of gold standard treatment, so that's – [00:09:16] PF: Oh, that’s amazing. [00:09:17] JB: Yes. I was thinking, wow, this works pretty well. Then we even developed an app for eating called Eat Right Now. A study led by Ashley Mason at UCSF found a 40% reduction in craving-related eating. That’s even gone, so we're like, “Wow, that's pretty good.” That program is now actually CDC-recognized as a diabetes prevention program, the first one that's based solely on mindfulness as a way to change it. I would say mindfulness. We can talk about this in a bit, but mindfulness really targets some of these neural mechanisms which other programs don't. But somebody in our eating program said to me, “Hey, anxiety is actually triggering me to stress-eat. Can you create a program for anxiety?” I was thinking, well, I'm a psychiatrist. I prescribe medications. But I was realizing, if you look at the data, there's this scientific term called the number needed to treat, which basically gives you a rough and dirty of how many people actually benefit from a treatment. That number is 5.2, which means one in five people benefit from the best medications we have out there. So I was basically playing the medication lottery when treating my patients with anxiety. One in five, I didn't know which one of the next five was going to benefit, and I didn't know what to do with the other four. So I was getting anxious about how to treat my patients with anxiety .So that question that somebody had asked me from our Eat Right Now program, can you create a program for anxiety, was kind of burning a hole in my ear, and I started – so I went back as a scientist and looked at the literature. Somebody back in the 1980s, ironically back when Prozac was introduced as the first SSR that's supposed to help anxiety, they had largely ignored the psychological research, where this guy Thomas Borkovec, had suggested that anxiety could be driven like a habit. When I read that, I was like, “Anxiety, habit. I research habits. I never thought of anxiety as a habit.” I was like mind-blown. So I developed this Unwinding Anxiety program and as a researcher wanted to study to see how well it worked. Get this. We started as like who's – what's the hardest population for us to work with? Oh, yes, physicians. Like we’re a pain in the ass. We don't take care of ourselves. We learn to armor up. We learn to be martyrs because if we're focusing on ourselves – we could be saving patients’ lives, and so don't waste our time on ourselves. Of course, that's why we get burnt out. So we did our first study with anxious physicians, and we got this whopping 57% reduction in anxiety. We also got burnout. But I was like, “Wow. Okay, this might have some legs to it.” So we got some funding from the NIH and did a randomized controlled trial in people with generalized anxiety disorder, like the worst of the worst. They wake up anxious. They feel anxious all day. Then they have trouble sleeping because they're anxious. Rinse and repeat. Really, really challenging condition. Here, we got a, ready for this, 67% reduction in anxiety, yes. The number needed to treat there, remember with medications, it's 5.2. The number needed to treat here is 1.6, the smaller number. [00:12:15] PF: Oh, my gosh. [00:12:16] JB: Yes. So we're like, “Wow, this is pretty good.” We went on to work out the mechanism. We did more studies showing that you could even improve sleep by treating anxiety, all this stuff. So all of that is to say work effects conjecture his hypothesis that you could treat anxiety as a habit was just so important. Here we are able to test that hypothesis in a way that's accessible for anybody with a smartphone. Here we're getting gangbuster results. It's really exciting to see that the theory lines up with the practice and also that the practice can be very pragmatic. We set these programs up to be 10 minutes a day for people to incorporate them into their busy lives. Importantly, what we're seeing from the data is that it's really helpful for people to reduce their anxiety. [00:13:02] PF: There's so many aspects to anxiety, and one thing is being able to access that help when you need it. So what are some of the tools that you teach people? We'll get to your app in just a moment. But what are some of the tools that you teach people to use so that when anxiety hits, they can start managing it then? [00:13:22] JB: Yes. I go into all the details in the Unwinding Anxiety book, but people don't need to read my book to get this. I think of it as a three-step process, where the first step is to map out our anxiety habit loops. Now, I didn't even know. As I mentioned, I didn't know that meant anxiety could be triggered like a habit. So the first thing for anybody to know is that anxiety can be a habit. The way that works is you need three elements to form a habit. You needed a trigger or a cue. Behavior is the second step. Then a result or a reward from a neuroscience standpoint is the third. The way that works is that the feeling of anxiety can trigger the mental behavior of worrying. Yes. Mental behaviors count just as much as physical behaviors, right? Then that mental behavior of worrying makes us feel like we're in control or at least doing something, right? Because it's better to worry than not to worry. [00:14:12] PF: Oh, interesting. I think most of us don't even think of worrying as a form of control. Again, it's just a habit. It's just – it's what I do. [00:14:21] JB: Yes. Well, I think that's accurate because worrying doesn't actually give us control. But the research has shown that for enough people, it makes them feel like they're in control, or it distracts them from the feeling of anxiety that it's rewarding enough, at least initially, for it to feed back so that the next time somebody feels anxious, they worry. Then like you point out, it quickly becomes a habit. [00:14:43] PF: Interesting. So you've got these three steps. Then how do they – how does that equate into being able to handle them? [00:14:51] JB: Yes, yes. So that first step. We've talked about the first step is just mapping out these habit loops. So being able to identify what's the trigger, what's the behavior, what's the result. We can actually even simplify that to just puts the behavior, and it tends to be worrying, like you're highlighting. But sometimes, it can be distracting ourselves with social media, stress-eating, emotional eating, drinking alcohol, things like that. Second step is where we really lean into the neuroscience. The way that works is our brains are going to keep doing a behavior if it's rewarding, and they're going to stop doing that behavior if it's not rewarding. If we're not paying attention, and we don't see how rewarding or unrewarding a behavior is, we're going to just keep doing it. We actually did a study with our Eat Right Now program to have people where we had people specifically pay attention to what it feels like when they overeat. It only takes 10 or 15 times for somebody to overeat and pay attention to see that that reward value is not rewarding. That reward value drops below zero in their brain, and they start to shift that behavior. So it doesn't take a lot of time. It doesn't take any effort. Notice how none of this requires willpower. This is really all about awareness, paying attention in the present moment. So feeling of anxiety triggers the mental behavior of worrying. If we don't pay attention to how rewarding or unrewarding worrying is, we're going to keep doing it because we're going to think, “Oh, this is just what I do,” like you pointed out. If we start to ask the question, what am I getting from worrying, and we really feel into our direct experience, we start to see something pretty clearly. Worrying makes me more anxious, right? It doesn't solve my problems. It doesn't help me predict the future. All it does is make me feel more anxious. That gives us a negative prediction error, where our brain says, “Hey, is this worrying thing really working for you?” No, no. It's not. It's not. Pay attention. Then we start to become disenchanted with the worrying. That's step two. That step applies to any habit. When my patients come in and want to quit smoking, what do I have them do? Pay attention as they smoke. They come back. I had a guy. He’d been smoking 40 years, right? We calculated the number of times he had reinforced this process. Ready for this? It was like 293,000 times. [00:17:04] PF: Oh, my gosh. [00:17:06] JB: And he hadn't been paying attention. So I said just set up a follow-up appointment and told him to go home and smoke and pay attention. He comes back and he's like how, "How did I not notice that before,” right? Cigarettes taste like crap. So it's much easier to quit smoking when you really see, feel, taste, smell what cigarettes are like. [00:17:25] PF: That's amazing. Yes, because you can’t – I can see how that works with any habit. That's absolutely amazing. [00:17:30] JB: Yes. Smoking, overeating, anxiety, all these things. Self-judgment, big one in western society. We're really good at beating ourselves up. We can start to ask, “What do I get from this,” right? So that's the second step. Third step is actually leveraging that same process. So if our brain is going to only do things that are rewarding, and they start to become disenchanted with these other behaviors, our brains are going to look for something better. Spoiler alert, it's not social media. [00:18:00] PF: Yes. Dang it, I got my answer wrong. [00:18:05] JB: Yes. Just scrolling on our social media feeds or checking our email, it might scratch that itch, but it just makes it itchier. It's like poison ivy. So we need to find things that are intrinsically rewarding that help us step out of these old habit loops. The good news is they're already there. We already have them. We just need to dust them off and use them a little bit more. Two main flavors here. One is curiosity. The other is kindness. Let's see how we can apply both of them. So if we have anxiety and we start worrying, we can worry, which tends to come into the mental flavor of, “Oh, no. This is happening,” or, “Will this happen,” or, “What's going to happen?” We can flip that to, “Oh.” That oh awakens our curiosity, and we go, “Oh, what does this anxiety feel like in my body?” We can even ask questions like is it more on the right side or the left side, front or back? It doesn't really matter what the answer is, but that awakens our curiosity like, “Huh, where is this? What does it feel like?” When we go looking for the anxiety, it starts running away because what we start to notice is that these physical sensations are constantly changing. If we're not feeding them by worrying, they tend to go away on their own. They might not go away instantly, but we can start to see, “Oh, these are physical sensations. They might be unpleasant, but I can tolerate this.” That curiosity helps us work with them. There's this saying attributed to Marcus Aurelius who is a Roman emperor and a stoic. He says, “What stands in the way becomes the way.” I love that because we can think of anxiety as a problem, or we can think of it as an opportunity to learn. Oh, this is what unpleasant sensations feel like. That curiosity helps us develop that distress tolerance. Instead of running to our phone to distract ourselves, we can turn toward this experience. By turning toward it, it's like the rats that scatter when you turn on the lights, right? It’s not as powerful as we thought it was. So that's how curiosity can help. I think if it has flipping that, “Oh, no,” whether it's a craving or worrying or whatever to, “Oh,” awakening that curiosity. The other flavor that I talked about was kindness, and that can be very helpful when we're judging ourselves. So we can compare judging ourselves, what do we get from this, to kindness. What do we get from this? No-brainer, right? Which one feels better in the body, being kind to ourselves. Yes, right? So here, this third step helps us step out of the old habit loop of judging ourselves by stepping into the new behavior of being kind to ourselves. Then because that is more rewarding, it becomes the new habit. Same for curiosity, it helps a step out of the old worrying habit loop and into the new habit of being curious. [00:20:56] PF: Those are such incredible techniques. Obviously, they take practice. It takes one remembering to do them when it strikes, which might be the hardest part of it. Once anxiety kicks in, it kind of feels like just grab your hat and hold the hell on. You don't really have the chance to do anything. But if you have a plan and you know, “Next time I feel anxious, this is what I'm going to do,” then you can start changing it. [00:21:20] JB: Yes. It's kind of like if you're flying in an airplane, lots of people have fear of flying in an airplane. Talk about lack of control. So the pilot comes on, and she says, “Attention, there's going to be some turbulence. Buckle up.” We can go, “Oh, no. Turbulence.” Or we can go, “Woo-hoo. Oh, no. Here we go.” [00:21:38] PF: Am I going to be YouTube famous? Hey. [00:21:42] JB: Yes. We have no control over that turbulence, but we certainly have control over how we respond to it. [00:21:47] PF: That's terrific. With your book, Unwinding Anxiety, it was widely acclaimed. It has helped so many people get through it, and that led to creating an app of the same name, which we're going to let our listeners try out for a month for free. But talk about how the app allows them to implement these principles and kind of how that works for them. [00:22:10] JB: So the app is set up as a – we have these core trainings where it's 10 minutes a day for 30 days to help people get the core understanding of how their mind works and how to work with their minds. So it's about 10 minutes a day, videos, animations that kind of teach a concept and then importantly have people start to put it into practice that day. Okay. So that's the psychoeducational component. The other components are we've got in-the-moment exercises. So when somebody feels anxious, they can buckle up, and we've got some great practices to help people ground, help people get back into the moment. So we can get their brains back online and working. The other piece is through those 30 core modules, it walks them through this three-step process. We use the analogy of gears, like driving a car. You shift into first gear, second gear, third gear. On top of that, there are a bunch of theme weeks that help solidify the core concepts. Then also, and this is actually one of the favorite parts of my week, every week, I run a live group through Zoom at noon Eastern Time on Wednesdays for anybody to join and ask a question. So we can actually go through what they might be struggling with live. So there, we can reiterate the concepts of three gears. Then we can see where somebody might be struggling to shift into one of the gears. Then, usually, in 5 to 10 minutes, kind of identify that and have them through an exploration process together. Have them see where they might already have it, and they just don't think they do or give them a couple of things to play with, and then let us know how it goes. So those are the key elements. We also have a very active online community where we now, over the years, have developed this very large crowdsourced knowledge base, where people ask questions. I answer the questions. Then over the years, people – there's basically a very rich library of answered questions because 80 or 90 percent of the questions that people have are the same, and they've already been answered. [00:24:06] PF: That's terrific too because just knowing you're not alone in your anxiety journey can be absolutely huge. Having someone else say, “I felt the exact same way, and here's what I did,” instead of going like, “Dude, that sucks. I'm really sorry.” [00:24:21] JB: “It sucks to be you.” [00:24:23] PF: Exactly. “Ah, so glad I didn't get that.” But, yes, I think that's so helpful. That community approach is really incredible. [00:24:31] JB: It is. Community is everything. [00:24:33] PF: So all the work that you've done in this space, and you're continuing to do more. What is it that you really want everyone to know about anxiety and, two, like really hope this accomplishes in the long run? [00:24:44] JB: Well, I would say the most important thing is for people to know it's not their fault, right? They think there's something wrong with them. They're broken. They can't be fixed. Well, there's nothing wrong with them. This is just their survival brains that have gone a little off track, and they can actually get them back on track in a relatively simple way, right? It's not magic. It's not to say one and done. But it's also not to say, well, you've been anxious for 30 years. It's going to take another 30 years to help you become unanxious. That's the good news. I've had plenty of patients, et cetera, success stories, where people come in 30 years of generalized anxiety disorder, full-blown panic attacks. Within six months, they're like, “Wow, I don't know what to do with all this extra time now that I'm not worrying.” [00:25:34] PF: I love that. How freeing is that? [00:25:36] JB: I'm like, okay, great opportunity to go help the world. [00:25:40] PF: Yes. There you go. This is such an important conversation to have. The work that you're doing is so incredible. I really appreciate you taking the time to sit down with me today and talk about it. I'm really eager to share your work with our listeners because I don't want to say I think they will. I know that people will get so much out of this. So I appreciate you coming on today. [00:26:01] JB: Well, I really appreciate you having me. This has been a great conversation. [END OF INTERVIEW] [00:26:06] PF: That was Dr. Jud Brewer, talking about Unwinding Anxiety. If you'd like to learn more about Dr. Jud or follow him on social media, just visit us at livehappy.com and click on the podcast tab. While you're on this episode's landing page, be sure to check our anxiety links and resources, including a one-month free trial of the Unwinding Anxiety app. That is all we have time for today. We'll meet you back here again next week for an all-new episode. Until then, this is Paula Felps, reminding you to make every day happy one. [END]

Follow along with the transcript below for episode: Happy Activist Becca Finley: Taking the Arts to Rural Communities [INTRODUCTION]   [00:00:02] PF: Thank you for joining us for episode 435 of Live Happy Now. Creative arts such as painting, dancing, acting, and singing can play a powerful role in self-care and mental health. But they're often overlooked, particularly in rural communities. This week's guest is determined to change that. I'm your host, Paula Felps. This week, I'm talking with our Happy Activist, Becca Finley, founder of the non-profit This Is Noteworthy. This Is Noteworthy supports the creative community and now is working to develop new spaces in underserved areas. Becca is here today to talk about why she feels it's so important to emphasize the arts, how it can improve our mental health, and why she is focusing on rural areas. Let's have a listen. [INTERVIEW] [00:00:48] PF: Becca, welcome to Live Happy Now. [00:00:50] BF: Thank you, Paula. I'm so happy to be here. [00:00:53] PF: You have a lot going on. I think before we get into the how and why of what you're doing, I want to hear about the what. Can you explain to our listeners what This Is Noteworthy is all about? [00:01:05] BF: This Is Noteworthy is an organization that was founded in late 2010. The purpose of the organization was to give creatives a space to grow and to experiment. So whether that be as a graphic designer or as a writer or as an artist, a visual artist, we sat through the process of people don't have access to try and fail. So really, what This Is Noteworthy started as is a place where creatives could come together to build something as a unit, and then try and have this space and ability to fail but still put it out and utilize the creative process. [00:01:48] PF: You say that it started in late 2010. You started it, correct? [00:01:52] BF: I did. [00:01:52] PF: It’s something you started. Can you talk about what was going on that made you realize this needed to start? Then how did you go about saying this is the steps that we take to create that? [00:02:04] BF: So, I mean, I am a creative and have been my whole life. I never had enough resources to be able to try and do all the different things I wanted to do. So I took on lots of jobs and internships and led what is deemed as a starving artist lifestyle and fully embraced it, dug into addiction and all the things that come along with that. In 2010, I was in Texas, and I had a really burnout phase in my life. I was traveling fast and hard, and I needed to reset. So I moved, packed up all my belongings, shut everything down, and moved to the beach in South Carolina, and took three years to get really quiet and tap into the divine. I thought what I wanted in my own journey was I wanted to create, and I wanted support, and I wanted all these things. But I was mad at everyone for not opening doors freely and easily for people to grow. I was also mad that our creative community was always in competition with each other versus being collaborative with each other. I watched industry, meaning the business part of the restaurant industry and the entertainment industry and the arts industry, start just take, take, take, take, take, take, take from the creatives, and creatives had nothing left. You have nothing left. You have no resources. Your work half the time doesn't belong to you anymore. I wanted to change that. So after sitting on the beach for a few years, I decided that I wanted to dedicate my life to something that was of a noble service. I couldn't think of anything that was a more noble service than taking care and providing space and all the different ways you provide space for the people who create and inspire everyone else. [00:04:10] PF: So that's a huge mission, though. How do you go from sitting on a beach and saying, “This is what I want to do,” to making that happen? Like it's a big machine. [00:04:21] BF: Well, I think it seems like it is. It is and it's not. I think that's the thing that all of us who want to do big things we struggle with is like how do I. How do I go about? Then we're like, “I got to form a business. I got to do this. I got to do that.” The truth is you don't. What you have to do is go, “Oh, yes. I want to do this.” You go and you talk to one other person. You find one person who says, “Yes, let's –” In this case, I had two interns that were working at the film production company that I was working with. They have been talking about wanting to have a music magazine, and they asked me. They were like, “Can we have a music magazine?” I was like, “Can the music magazine have a ripple effect that impacts a bunch of different communities?” They were like, “I don't know what that means.” I said, “Great. Let's do it.” So it literally started as that, and we put an ad on Craigslist. All these different people who were graphic designers, writers, videographers, musicians, artists, everyone came together and said, “I want to be a part of this. I want community. I want to grow.” So that's how we started. [00:05:30] PF: So basically, when you provide a space for creative people, they'll find it. Kind of like if you build it, they will come. That's how it's all come together for you. [00:05:39] BF: Yes, 100%. It’s that but then also recognizing where opportunity is and where there are holes that beauty and empathy and curiosity are needed. So it's an awareness too of what is around you. Just like people take from creative, creatives have to give back. But everybody has to work together on what does it look like that it's beneficial to both. So it's having the awareness yourself of recognizing where there are holes that you actually can help and elevate society. [00:06:15] PF: So you've done a lot of different things to provide that space for creative people. You've just developed a lot of programs, things like that. Can you tell us some of your favorite projects that you've done through This Is Noteworthy to give artists a voice? [00:06:27] BF: There are probably three that I love the most. The first is there was a documentary project. We did this high school program in Charleston that connected four different high schools, the different socioeconomic groups and different areas of the city. Kids who had artistic interests came together to build a television show. So in the process of building this television show with all these different creatives who came in, so they could do interviews and all the thing, it was right around the time of the 2016 election and the Emanuel shooting at the church. Then our kids had a program outside, and one of them got held up at gunpoint. [00:07:09] PF: Oh, wow. [00:07:11] BF: It was a very, very scary thing. We had to shift like quickly because they're no longer prepared to just make a television show about art. What they did was they chose to use the mediums they were learning, film and writing and design and art and television, to instead make a documentary called See Me that was all about what it means to have gun violence or people not seeing each other and having empathy for each other in schools. We had a songwriter come in, and they all wrote a song together. It was the most beautiful collaboration that organically came out of what happens with life. But for me, that shows ultimately the creative process and the life process of how in every day, every moment, you have to be aware, and you have to pivot, and you have to be willing to pivot to accommodate what society is handing us. [00:08:08] PF: Let me ask you this. How did it change the people who are participating to have that voice instead of trying to deal with it in their own heads or just saying like, “That was an awful thing, and I've got to move on,” to actually have the space to sit down and work through it and create a song, create something about it that really expressed how they felt? What outcome do you think that had as opposed to not having that outlet? [00:08:32] BF: For one of our professional songwriters who came in and worked on it, he took six weeks out of his very busy schedule in life to come in and work on this. He begrudgingly kind of did it at first. I mean, he's happy to, but it was like, “Man, this is a beast of a project.” It was scary, and it was something he hadn't done before and all the things. Then at the end, the inspiration and the cause and the ability to give back, it just fueled him on to do more and more within society in that area. [00:09:06] PF: That's terrific and that's the whole purpose, and what you're looking at is how the launching pad that you give and the space that you create will then help them explore their talents, and they keep moving that forward. They're going to pay it forward. They're going to do other things, and that's going to affect other people. I believe that's what was behind you, taking it to a whole next level in 2021, and you created a cultural arts center in Water Valley Mississippi. That's had just this amazing effect on the community. Can you talk about how you changed that in 2021, and what you're doing, and how that's changed the program going forward? [00:09:43] BF: So in 2021, we as a group decided that, hey, it was time to have a brick and mortar because all the things we were doing, we were bouncing from place to place to place to place to place. But I think what we realized was there's a modeling of behavior, I think, of creatives or entrepreneurs for that matter of this gig economy of like, “I’m in. I’m out. I’m in. I’m out. I’m in. I’m out.” There's no real holding on to what you create because you're always putting it in the hands of another venue, another place, another something else that doesn't belong to you. We as an organization, we're doing that as well. So we had nothing to hold on to at the end of the day. [00:10:26] PF: Had no home. You had no home. [00:10:28] BF: We had no home and no way to protect our people that they then always had a safe space to come to. So when we decided to plant in Water Valley, Mississippi, we decided we wanted to start impacting underserved and rural communities, and utilizing our cityness that we have as well, and putting it back into rural communities because those communities, the school systems are in the arts, and entrepreneur-type activities are lacking. So we were like, “If we can create a hub that is primarily free for people to be able to utilize, we can cultivate many entrepreneurs, creative entrepreneurs. We can give that. We can give that back and have access and resources.” Which rural and underserved communities do not have access and resources that are not just only that they're free to them, but they are free to them to learn how to make money for themselves, and they use this space to make money for themselves. [00:11:41] PF: So talk about some of the things that has gone on with the center because you've done a lot in a very short amount of time. Tell us some of the things you've done, and then we're going to talk about what kind of effect it's had on the community. [00:11:55] BF: So we've been in the space for almost a year now, and we've produced about 150 different events. We've given over 200 micro-grants to students and provided 80-plus opportunities for creatives to build working gigs for themselves. So that in a just a nutshell. But then in the space, there's a listening room. There's an art gallery. There's a commercial kitchen. There's a ceramic studio. We do healing arts work with yoga, and we're starting breath work. There have been exhibits that have ranged from the first art exhibit that came from Parchman Prison and the inmates was in our space. So we do music events with Wu Fei, this beautiful classical music in a tiny listening room in Water Valley, Mississippi with an internationally acclaimed virtuoso. [00:12:55] PF: Talk about Water Valley. That's less than 4,000 population. [00:12:59] BF: The Water Valley, the total population is, I think, right around 3,600 people. [00:13:05] PF: Yes. What you're doing is like unheard of in a community that small. First of all, when you first started saying, “Here, we're going to do this,” was the community like, “You're insane. That doesn't happen here.”? Or were they just standing there with their mouths open or what? How did they receive this? [00:13:20] BF: It’s a hard question because I think it's both, and it is – some people were like, “This is amazing.” Other people were like, “What do you want?” Other people were like, “We already do this.” So there was a wide gamut of just I think when you are in a small community, and there are different people that are working on different things to whatever their capacity is, it’s tricky that no one comes in and dishonors or dismantles what is happening. So we have to walk in and walk through really a lot of landmines. I mean honestly. I think over time, it's like you have to walk the walk and talk the talk. I think that's what we've done. We have been over the top, like we just have been doing the things. Hopefully, people come. Hopefully, we will continue to be out there and grow. But it's just – it is that ripple effect. There's no greater gift for us than for the people we are serving within that building, that space that they go out, and they're like, “I had this comeback with me,” or, “I can't go. You should try this over there.” Then they show up, and we're like, “We’re thrilled to have you,” or, “We're thrilled to explore this idea with you of something you want to make or produce that you haven't been able to do yet and let us think about who our resources are that we can help you.” [00:15:00] PF: So what you've done is give them a space to express themselves. You've also brought people together that might not have been together otherwise. You've brought people from outside of the community who have come into your events. I think that's what's stunning too is Water Valley is not a place where a lot of people are going to say, “Hey, let's go there for the Friday night show.” So what has that been like for you and for the community to have that kind of an impact? [00:15:29] BF: I think for the community, it's beautiful. It's resources. Again, it's an opportunity to experience beauty, to experience questioning, to experience community without having to drive too far, without having to worry about anything that it's there, that you two are deserving of beauty. [00:15:48] PF: That's the pride too. It gives pride to a community to have these things that people are coming to see. [00:15:53] BF: Yes. I think so. Well, and it's that, and it shows. Or at least for me, it shows that any of us can advocate for anything we want anywhere at any time. We just have to be willing to do the work. We have to be accountable. We have to keep pushing forward when it's hard. [00:16:18] PF: Yes. Well, and now because this is done well, and thanks to a lot of hard work from you and some other people, now you're looking at replicating that model. Can you talk about this vision that you have going forward to help other communities? Because I think that's what's so amazing is you've touched so many lives in this one little community. Now, you're saying, “Hey, let's do that same thing for –” I think it's a dozen other places. [00:16:44] BF: Yes. What we want to do is we want to impact the southeast. You know I'm from Louisiana, so the southeast is my hub. Because we don't have a ton of major cities in the south, again, there's a lot of rural communities. So what we want to do is have one of these in each state, whether it ranges from a brick and mortar. Or it's a land, and it's artist housing an amphitheater. But we want them to connect. So you have different communities who have different flavors, but they all are filtering together in artists or creatives or chefs or whatever. Have the ability to create a routing system as well between – from community, community, community. So they can earn a living and earn it in a way that is really supportive and that they get to try new things without worrying like, “Hey, if I open this half-a-million-dollar restaurant, and these 12 recipes don't work, I've drained everything – [00:17:47] PF: Yeah, you’re done. [00:17:48] BF: Right. None of them have to do that and because they don't have to. Other than when they finish, they donate back to us, there's not a payment and [inaudible 00:17:58]. So the access for all creatives and people to get in the door, it's there. [00:18:07] PF: That's amazing. [00:18:08] BF: So why wouldn't we want to create this real curiosity and empathy across the entire south, which is filled with literature and storytelling and food and community and music and history and reconciliation and all these things? Why would we not provide the space to be able to do that in a way that is good for the people that are making? [00:18:35] PF: As you amplify the creatives in a certain community and that, of course, attracts more creative people into that spot because creative people want to be where the creativity is. So as you do that, how is that going to change the flavor and the feeling of these small communities? [00:18:55] BF: Our intention is never to change the flavor of a community. It's to enhance it. It's enhance it. It's use the resources that are there, and then bring an extra to think about, to be like, “Huh, let me noodle on that.” I don't want to change anything. What I want to do is allow the community to see what its own natural resources are in the term of creative capital. Because if you don't know what your creative capital is, you can't utilize it to beautify your city. You can't utilize it for someone who maybe has a great business brain who you need on your city council, who is really creative with numbers. But you didn't know that because now this person's volunteered over at This Is Noteworthy. We know and we're like, “Oh, wow. You're really good with budgets, and they need help.” So it's this connectivity in these really gentle ways of small batch events. [00:20:03] PF: I love that. I love that. So we're going to tell people how they can learn more about you and more about This Is Noteworthy. But as you look down the road, like look at this five years from now, what do you want to be able to say all this work has accomplished? [00:20:17] BF: I want more people to be more open to the possibility and the probability of goodness, that people are actually good. People actually do care. People actually can make something and provide something, and they don't have to take all the money from it. It still works. There's not one way to do things. I think that's the biggest thing is have people learn there are many ways to do stuff, and you cannot do anything if you don't take that step. [00:20:58] PF: I like it. I like it. You're doing wonderful work. You're putting so much good out in the world. I appreciate what you're working on, and I appreciate you coming on the show and talking to us about it. [00:21:08] BF: I loved it so much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, and I appreciate what you're putting out into the world. This is a beautiful podcast. [00:21:15] PF: Thank you. [00:21:16] BF: You're welcome. [END OF INTERVIEW] [00:21:22] PF: That was Happy Activist Becca Finley, talking about the power of taking arts into rural communities. If you'd like to learn more about Becca and This Is Noteworthy or follow her on social media, just visit us at livehappy.com and click on the podcast tab. If you know someone who is putting good out into the world, we want to hear about it. Each month, we celebrate a different Happy Activist who is changing the world one happy act at a time. Just email us at editor@livehappy.com and tell us all about them. That is all we have time for today. We'll meet you back here again next week for an all-new episode. Until then, this is Paula Felps, reminding you to make every day happy one. [END]

Follow along with the transcript below for episode: Introducing Happiness Unleashed With Brittany Derrenbacher   [INTRO] [00:00:08] PF: Welcome to the very first episode of Happiness Unleashed with Brittany Derrenbacher, presented by Live Happy. Each episode, we're going to look at how our pets bring us joy, help us heal, and just make us better humans. To kick things off, Brittany is talking with me, Live Happy Now host, Paula Felps, about what to expect from this new podcast, why we're doing it, and why it's so important for us to get in touch with our animals. Then we'll talk about why petting other people's pets is scientifically proven to be good for you and why you should stop phubbing your pets. [00:00:41] BD: Hi, Paula. Thank you so much for coming on the very first episode of Happiness Unleashed. [00:00:46] PF: I am so excited. First of all, I'm honored that I get to be your very first guest, and I am just so excited to see this finally coming to fruition. Congratulations on making this happen. I'm really happy for you. [00:00:58] BD: Thank you so much. I can't think of a better person to kick off the show with. [00:01:02] PF: I know I live happy wanting to do this. Why don't you tell us like how this all came about, and why it's so important for us to do this podcast that's devoted to pets and happiness? [00:01:13] BD: Well, first, what I love is that, really, animals brought us together. So just in us having conversations on Live Happy, I think everyone was kind of able to see just how much people wanted to hear about our relationships with animals, how much people really tuned in for that. So it kind of validated just how much we wanted to talk about animals and bring that to public knowledge. I really think that we are doing ourselves a disservice and future generations a disservice if we don't include the human-animal bond in our research. Research on animals’ interactions with us is still relatively new. As that research really evolves, so does the role that animals play in our lives. So I think it's incredibly important that we continue to support this and understand just how happy animals can make us and what we can learn from that. [00:02:06] PF: You're very right because I even think about how I grew up and the role the animals had then and how different it is now. We couldn't do the things for our pets that we're able to do now. Last weekend, I was doing some spay-neuter volunteer work. The woman was helping me get these cats into my truck. I opened the back, and she saw I have dog beds with – they're very nice little dog beds in the back seat. She said, “Animals at your house have it really rough, don't they?” It’s true. We are able to make them true members of our family. I'm able to take my dogs with me on trips and on little errand runs and things like that. We get so much out of it. They get so much out of it. I love that we have changed how we view animals. I love that the research is giving us more validation and showing us more ways to do that. [00:02:57] BD: Yes. I love how much it's evolved from this understanding that animals or outdoor animals, they were kind of in the background. Now, they are people's children. They have more rights in the home than sometimes the humans do. [00:03:13] PF: Especially when it comes to that bed space. It's like – [00:03:15] BD: Right. [00:03:17] PF: “I'll be taking that. Thanks.” I know that you are so well-researched on this, which, obviously, that's why you're hosting this podcast. You want to share some of the things that they do for us emotionally and physically as well. [00:03:31] BD: Our relationships and understanding of animals can be a powerful tool to increase a lot of things in our life, so joy and happiness, first of all, health, longevity, emotional and social skills. Then also, interacting with animals has been shown to decrease levels of cortisol. That's the stress-related hormone in our bodies. Then it also lowers blood pressure. So I find that so fascinating that animals have this ability to uniquely shift that in us in our bodies, in our mental health. So this mental, physical, emotional support that they give us. Other studies have also found that animals can reduce loneliness and increase feelings of social support and boost our mood. That's just to name a few. That is so profound to me and almost magical that these animals can do that for us, and we don't talk about it enough. [00:04:24] PF: Right. Do we know the why of it? We're seeing the action and the what. But why is that? Like why is it that the act of petting my dog can absolutely lower my blood pressure, can decrease my anxiety? What is it that's happening that makes that? [00:04:40] BD: Yes. This is stuff that we're really going to be diving into in this season is exploring from a very unique lens and heart-centered lens how we can understand animals benefiting us from those perspectives in our life, so that mind-body-spirit approach. [00:04:57] PF: So those are some of the things. Like you said, those are some of the things that you're going to talk about. I know that you've already been lining guests up. You've got some great things in store. Do you want to talk about some of the things that we can learn and what we can expect from the next several episodes? [00:05:12] BD: I think listeners are really going to be in for a treat, the topics and the guests that we’re kind of brainstorming for the season. Uniquely, I think that animals, not only are they a part of our house and our families and our hearts, but they are out in communities healing people. They're out doing a lot of really unseen work and behind-the-scenes work that is bringing a lot of joy and healing to people. I think that needs to be illuminated. So that's really the goal of this podcast is to have those conversations and really take a dive into how animals can bring so much to our lives. [00:05:52] PF: Yes. Because once we realize that, I think we give them a lot more space, and we give them a lot more credit maybe than we have in the past because I think we all know like, “My dog makes me feel good. My cat makes me feel good.” But we don't realize just how far-reaching that is. [00:06:07] BD: Right, and understanding that animals are our teachers. Animals prompt us to experience the world more like they do. They bring us happiness. They bring us comfort. They bring us love, wonder, and awe, living in the moment, purpose, and like I said before, healing, which is huge. I think that animals heal us on a mind-body-soul level. When that happens, I think they begin to heal us on a cellular level. What I mean by that is studies show that interacting with animals reduces cortisol, like I mentioned before. But also, it's increasing dopamine and serotonin. So that's on the chemical level, which improves our mood. [00:06:48] PF: Yes. Explain to us what dopamine and serotonin do for us. [00:06:52] BD: That's the happy feel good. That’s the opposite of the stress hormones. That's what puts a smile on our face and an ease in our bodies. So understanding that we can get that support on a chemical level, but also realizing that animals and playing with animals and interacting with animals can be an intellectual and an inner child experience for us all. [00:07:14] PF: You bring up such a good point because as adults, we forget to play. We've done episodes on play before, and I'm guilty of that myself. It's like I love to play probably more than the next person. But I get caught up in work, and I forget to play. Newsweek just had a huge cover story on this about how dangerous it is for us not to play. What I love about animals is they kind of force you to do that. Whether you want to or not, they are ready to play. That is so healthy for us. That is doing so much more for us than we even realize. [00:07:47] BD: Yes. Play is healing. Play is used a lot in trauma work, reconnecting with that joy center and those hope receptors. Animals can be that safe and supportive space to then navigate that trauma, even using play. This can physically help us but also mentally help us. [00:08:06] PF: Because you have a healing center in Louisville. Do you use animals in that center? [00:08:11] BD: Yes, yes. Several of the therapists have a support animal, and I also bring in animals. I also encourage my clients if they have emotional support animals and therapy dogs to bring them in with them because they will always aid and speed up the process if they're involved. [00:08:28] PF: Oh, that's amazing. That's amazing. I'm so excited to see how this season unfolds. What do you want to talk about today because we can't tell them everything that you're going to do? We'll ruin all the surprises. I think you said you had something you wanted to talk about today. [00:08:42] BD: Yes. There's actually a new study that came out, and I think it fits perfectly into our conversation today. Last month, we celebrated International Dog Day, and it just so happens that this study was published around this time. What the study shows is that petting other people's dog is good for your health, even – [00:09:01] PF: I saw that. That was a great story, actually. Actually, just reading it made me smile. But, yes, I love that. Tell us about what they found out. [00:09:09] BD: I feel like it's so powerful. Who else does that? Who else does that? Just briefly any interaction with someone. [00:09:17] PF: In positive psychology, we talk about micro moments. Barbara Frederickson, that was a big area of study for her and how even just short exchanges with people can lift our mood and help us feel happier. But we had never applied that to pets, to animals. So to think about the fact that when I'm reaching down and I'm petting somebody's pooch as they're walking. If we’re walking in the neighborhood, there I am. I say hello to the dog and pet it. It's like it has done something for me that we don't even think about how much good that can do. [00:09:48] BD: I think the reason that this study seemed like something that really would fit into what we were talking about is because we're talking about how animals can do all this behind-the-scenes work that we're not even aware of. This is a perfect example that just a quick exchange on a walk, getting the okay to pet someone else's dog because PSA, everyone. We should ask. [00:10:11] PF: Always ask first. [00:10:12] BD: Always ask consent to pet someone's dog because not everybody likes to be pet. Not every dog likes to have that engagement. But stopping someone and asking if you can pet their dog and having that interaction. Maybe stopping by a friend or family member's house and getting greeted by the dog or even being at an event or a gathering where dogs are allowed. This is the interaction that the study's talking about is that 5 to 20-minute period that can make you more relaxed and happier in that space. [00:10:39] PF: They said that it aids in releasing oxytocin, which is that love hormone, which think about that. If you go out, and you're in a grumpy mood, and you get to run into a pet, and it releases that love hormone, I mean, it might change the way that you're dealing with the next person you encounter. [00:10:54] BD: Yes. It's that cellular chemical change that I was talking about. That evidence shows that it will lower cortisol, the stress hormone, and it will increase all the feel good stuff. So we see that increase in oxytocin, which is the feel-good bonding hormone, really. So you have that bonding moment happening. What's awesome is that the dog we're petting also gets that exchange, so it's reciprocal. [00:11:18] PF: Yes. Everybody benefits from it. You've done so much work with people and with animals. I think that you've had experience of seeing how animals have done exactly what we're talking about, which is sharing joy by just letting people be with them. [00:11:35] BD: Yes. I love sharing stories of animals doing incredible work in very unassuming ways. I think through thousands of years of domestication, dogs have really developed a wondrous ability to read us as humans. They can connect to human beings from the heart without words, which I think is so beautiful. A friend of mine, [inaudible 00:11:57], she does really beautiful community work here. She creates a space called [inaudible 00:12:02], where people can gather and heal through music, poetry, food, group connection. She also does a lot of work with small groups. But really, and this is no shade to [inaudible 00:12:12], I share the story with you because of her dog. She has an emotional support dog named Arlo, who wanders around greeting and spending time with everyone. He is this beautiful, gentle, scruffy, majestic, golden healer. I love that. [00:12:30] PF: I love the fact that he's a healer. [00:12:32] BD: He's a golden healer. He’s so loved and cherished by everyone. He means so much, and he seems to know exactly who needs a kiss, who needs a quick touch, or who might need a good cuddle session, even acting as a weighted blanket for some people who need some extra soothing and processing time. So it's really amazing to watch him just live his best life while enriching and healing the lives of others as he does it. I think every person in the room who interacts with him are experiencing all the benefits that we just talked about. I think Arlo is really a perfect example of a dog who can just heal others by being himself. I think this is a gift that dogs possess that we can all learn a lot from. [00:13:18] PF: That is so amazing. There was also something in the story where it talked about how it aids children. Like children that were able to interact with animals had better cognitive function after that. That kind of blew me away because, yes, the well-being make you happy. That's very clear, and that's easy to understand. But my gosh, the fact that it can also change the way that your brain is functioning, do you have any insight into why that is because they didn't really talk – they just said it did that. They didn't say why. [00:13:47] BD: What I think they were getting at in the study is that dogs induce a very calming effect. So it's like a chill pill for kids and not just kids but for adults, giving our nervous systems permission to relax and really come back online, which can then bring you cognitively back online. So I kind of just look at that moment as like this chill pill moment for kids, right? [00:14:07] PF: I love that. So what we're saying here is that every parent whose child is running crazy should go get a pet. Is that what? [00:14:16] BD: Parents are going to love us for saying that. [00:14:18] PF: Yes. I had a situation, as I mentioned. I mentioned the kitties, the little spay-neuter thing I had going on. We'd get got some strays. We were trying to adopt them out. I had a single mom come out and meet one of the kitties and was like, “I really think this will be good for my little girl.” Oh, my gosh. It was like instant love, these two. The look on this little girl's face, I'm still in love with just that look that they had. She and this little stray cat bonded almost immediately. The mom has for this past week been sending me photos of the two of them together, and it's just so touching. She said like she has never seen her daughter that enamored and that happy. It’s like I just think about what that's doing, this relationship that it's creating, and this joy that it's bringing to her life and how that's got to be affecting her in other areas of her daily being. [00:15:09] BD: Yes. It’s also teaching that child the kind of simple pause, the taking a moment and really just being in that moment. Animals always uniquely teach us that if we're open to it. [00:15:21] PF: Yes. Animals are really good for mindfulness. You know what? That is another thing that you and I had talked about at one point because there was a study about phubbing your pets. Then if anyone doesn't know, phubbing is phone snubbing. Our animals can tell. They actually get hurt when we are ignoring them and looking at our phones. So if we can use our walks or our play time with those animals and to really be in the moment, to really be noticing what's going on around us and really put the phone away, it makes a big difference for both of us. [00:15:58] BD: Right. I think we can apply this phrase that the Gottman Institute uses about relationships. It's called bid for affection. I think we can use that in regards to animals too because that is their bid for affection. That's their bid for, “Hey, Mom. Hey, Dad. Love me. See me. Spend this time with me.” When we actively avoid that snub, whatever you want to call it, phub, that is received in the same way in animals as it is with humans, which is, “Oh, I'm not being paid attention to. That doesn't feel good.” [00:16:32] PF: Yes. When I was still in Nashville, I'd see this a lot where someone's walking their dog. They're looking at their phone. The dog wants to stop and sniff and enjoy the moment. They just are kind of pulling him along like, “Got to go.” They’re not even looking up. I was always like, “Man, that's such a lost moment because you don't know when you're going to have your last walk with that animal.” Nothing's guaranteed, and that's such a precious time that you can spend with your animal. It’s so good for you to put your phone down and not be looking at that. Even if it wasn't good for the animal for you to be giving him that undivided attention, it's good for you to get away from that. [00:17:07] BD: Yes. Again, animals are our teachers. If we are open to receiving those messages and being present for them, we can learn so much. [00:17:14] PF: I love that. This is going to be a fun journey. I'm really excited to see where this goes, what some of the things are that we learn and the guests that you bring on because I know you have a lot to teach us. The animals have a lot to teach us, and you have a lot of great people that you're tapping into who can tell us how we can access that. [00:17:31] BD: I can't wait. This season's going to be incredible, and I can't wait for everyone to just learn right along with me. [OUTRO] [00:17:40] PF: That was our very first episode of Happiness Unleashed with Brittany Derrenbacher. Brittany will be back here next month to talk about how pets bring us joy, help us heal, and can be some of our best teachers. Until then, for everyone at Live Happy, this is Paula Felps, reminding you to make every day a happy one. [END]

Follow along with the transcript below for episode: IPPA Recap with Andrea Goeglein [INTRODUCTION]   [00:00:02] PF: Thank you for joining us for episode 430 of Live Happy Now. Every two years, the International Positive Psychology Association holds its World Congress. This week, we're finding out what they were talking about. I'm your host, Paula Felps. Over the next few weeks, we're going to have some conversations about some of the takeaways from this year's event which was held in July. First, I'm sitting down with Andrea Goeglein, who addresses some of the growing concerns about loneliness and the lack of social connections, as well as giving us a fresh perspective on the World Happiness Report. Let's have a listen. [INTERVIEW] [00:00:38] PF: Andrea, thank you for coming back and talking to me today. [00:00:42] AG: You know that it's always my pleasure. So this is like my happy place, and thank you for having me again. [00:00:48] PF: You just came back from the IPPA World Congress, which is an International Positive Psychology Association World Congress. It has been a minute since it was able to –was this the first one that was able to take place person to person? [00:01:00] AG: Well, they actually had one in ’21, but it was virtual. This is the first in-person for four years. [00:01:08] PF: Because it doesn't happen every year. It's every two years. First of all, going into it, did you have any certain sessions or certain ideas that you really wanted to explore? Or did you go there and say let’s follow what's going on? [00:01:21] AG: Historically, I never really even looked at anything other than knowing, okay, I am going, and I'm going to absorb because I always view myself as an interloper. I think I am exactly like all of our listeners. I'm the person who did not commit their life to doing the research, but I did commit my life to getting the message out. From day one, when I went to the conferences, it was like, “I'll take whatever they've got.” This time, because there had been a lull, and so much seems to have happened, ‘09 was the first conference. There's been 14 years just there of how it's evolved. So here's what I want to give you the difference of where the science has been and where the conference has been. I did actually for the first time, unlike my extroverted personality, when I got the links to what the session programs were, I mapped out who I wanted to see and why, who I wanted to hear. [00:02:32] PF: Who, that's nice. [00:02:33] AG: So to your question, yes, I didn't wing at this time. I felt it was too precious. It had been a while. Think about how many times we're all doing that now. I think we're being a bit more thoughtful when we do come together. [00:02:48] PF: That's interesting. That's something I haven't really thought about, but I do believe you're correct. We are more maybe judicious with how we use our time and how we spend that time together. [00:03:00] AG: So you have just mentioned what the overarching theme of the conference and how the science itself is clearly moving. So the theme of the conference was connect to heart. From the time I was in positive psychology and went to the authentic happiness coaching pre-map, what it was about was the individual learning their strengths and how the individual applies these strengths. Like everything was very individually. Even with one of the founders, Chris Peterson, bringing out the other people matter message. I know in my work, it was always that one-on-one. What are your strengths? How do you apply them? How do you get it better? Now, what the science has done is look at the overarching problems. Let's just start with loneliness. [00:04:03] PF: Interesting because the episode just before this that we ran last week is loneliness because it's such an epidemic, so great. Yes, yes, jumping on that place. [00:04:11] AG: Yes. I want you to know, Live Happy Now was very present in my spirit and in actual. I’ll talk a little bit about that, at it. But loneliness, what – they open the conference by basically saying loneliness is at epidemic proportions. I will paraphrase and say and we know what cures it. Okay. [00:04:38] PF: Yes. [00:04:38] AG: So, yes, the science is showing us is that epidemic proportion, and the same science is showing us how to – like I took away the word up-level. The science from me of positive psychology has been up-leveled from the strengths. It is how do I use my strengths and you use your strength so that together everything is stronger. I don't care if it's your community, the workplace, your family. It is that connect to the heart. Well, it's connecting to the heart. Loneliness is resolved. When I connect to the heart of you at a different level than me just having an agenda that, boy, I'm lonely. I want to be with you, you know, the thing. [00:05:34] PF: Right. So what did they kind of recommend as the approach for that? [00:05:39] AG: Oh, well. So, first, let me say there were 130 sessions. I probably went to 15, and I'm like every other carpenter, I pick my nails. [inaudible 00:05:51]. [00:05:52] PF: Right. [00:05:55] AG: So above all, active participation. You must self-initiate to get back out, whether it's at the virtual level, the family level, the community level, the work level. You must know that loneliness is solved and well-being enhanced when you take an action to come together and then the techniques that we were taught a zillion years ago about empathetic listening. I'll use you and I as an example. You and I met years ago at a taping for a show on happiness. We all had our own little bucket. But then you and I spent some time at the airport. [00:06:42] PF: That's right. [00:06:43] AG: Okay. We connected through the person who – Mary Agnes made us both know about that show. What they are finding is that your ability to engage empathetically and listen for the commonality is going to help with all of the various rifts and all of the various communities. So active and active in a slightly up-leveled way where I am listening, first and foremost, for the commonality. But I'm not sharing it. Put, no one needs this more than me, masking tape on your mouth and truly just listen. Don't listen to jump in, that type of thing. Doing those small steps actually helps increase what the relationship is, even if it's in a shorter time period because we're going to be meeting for shorter time periods face to face. There are certain changes that 2020 gave us that we are going to be using techniques better because we have to use them faster. [00:08:11] PF: Oh, that's interesting. Let me ask you one more thing related to that, though. In a world where most of us are on social media, people have gotten so used to sharing their message, promoting their brand. People consider themselves a brand now, not just a person, and they're so busy sharing their message that we're forgetting how to listen. So how does someone reacquire those listening skills? How do we start doing that empathetic listening and learn to step back and not interject? [00:08:44] AG: The one thing about science knowing the answer is we still have to do the activity. It’s so interesting. We actually have everything we need to have better levels of life satisfaction. What we miss or what we don't commit to as strongly is applying it, doing the steps such as coming together. One of the suggestions, this came up a lot in work, texting, emailing, not the best way to build the relationships. Go back to more phone calls. This medium works. Whatever time you're taking, so many times what you put in an email doesn't need to be an email. It's not fact points or a report. But we're using email or texting. Pick up that call. Do re-initiate. Just because social media has become more brand-oriented, we are giving up or sacrificing and forgetting we control everything. We have the choice. This science gives you the strength, no pun intended, to engage at that level. So it's an action. [00:10:20] PF: Yes, yes. I love the idea of picking up that phone once in a while and getting more accustomed to that. Because I was joking with a friend within the past week because she had texted me to say, “Can I call you?” It's like remember when we actually like had to take a chance. You picked up the phone and hope it's somebody you wanted to talk to. I think we've lost a lot by not having that ability to just pick up the phone and call someone. The fact that we do feel we're intruding if we call them out of the blue. So I do love that of making it a practice to pick up a phone and call somebody. It's amazing how much more enrichment, how much more information you get out of that. [00:11:01] AG: Yes. Well, and I'll give you two points on that. One, it's actually a sign of what I call evolved respect. Do you have the time? Because I do that with my friends because we know how crazy we allow our schedules to become and we – what you're really asking is do you have time to pay attention to me if I call. [00:11:22] PF: Oh, I love that. I love that framing. [00:11:23] AG: Okay. So as a habit to actively engage more, I use that technique because then I can say no this time or schedule. But I'll tell you a funny thing that just happened to me yesterday. I have a very diverse background. I've lived in all sorts of parts of the country and done all sorts of things. I have a media platform, yada, yada, so a lot of people in my life. One person from 40 years ago kept coming to mind, and I'm in contact with them maybe twice a year. We had a 12-year period where we were really together. I originally was going to text them but decided – when I knew I had some time, I picked up the phone. Funny thing, I couldn't leave a message because his voicemail was full, which is something that happens a lot. So I text him instead and just said, “Hey, I'm just thinking about you,” this, this, and this. Next thing I know, he calls. Well, I ragged on him about the voice message. He said, “What is it? You want to make sure that like please don't call me?” So I would urge your listeners to check that habit because I know that I encounter that a lot, full voice messages. I will also tell you, I've done a very funny thing on my own voicemail, which I like to use to make people smile. So my voicemail currently says some version of please leave your number. Then, “I'm making a lot of changes in my life. If I don't get back to you within 24 hours, you happen to be one of them.” Now, I got that from Joe Dispenza, but I love it. Then I say, “I hope I made you laugh,” because that's always been a goal for me that my ability to respond is going to increase. This goes across the board for all of us. So this is actually we will respond to people who made us feel lighter, who made us feel like more vulnerable, more receptive. So I make that statement in a way to say, okay, lighten up because don't think I won't get a text about like, “Did you not return my call because I no longer matter,” kind of thing. It's great. [00:13:39] PF: Exactly. I love that. I love that. So you talked a lot it seems like about loneliness and connection. What would you say was another thing that really made a big impression on you at that IPPA? [00:13:51] AG: Okay. So know that we started with the World Happiness Report, and one of them – [00:13:55] PF: Oh, yes, yes, which we talked about here a while back. [00:13:59] AG: Right. Okay. So one of the great things, now, if you take the theme of up-leveling the science, going from strengths of the individual to strengths of the group. Then one of the respectful things we were asked as the audience. For those like that are listening to us that are practitioners and disseminators of the information in your audience, what they said is one of the greatest problems, the theme was how do we get this message out to the mass audience in an accurate way. Because as you probably know, when the World Happiness Report comes out, what's the thing the world knows about? What's the – [00:14:39] PF: All they know is the happiest countries in the world. Some of them will know that US isn't doing that great. We cannot crack the top 10 to save our lives. They know that the Scandinavian countries are crushing it. That's what we know. [00:14:52] AG: Bingo. I know that I don't even look at the list because Norway, Finland, Sweden can be the happiest places in the world. [00:15:00] PF: Denmark. Yes. [00:15:01] AG: But they're also the coldest ones in the world. I'm not going there. That’s all there is to it. I’ll visit. But, no, no, I'm not to stay. So we – taking in information, it's an example of how the media uses us and how we have to take back control. I'd love to read the part of the World Happiness Report. True to my statement, if you don't do the free stuff, my fee is not the problem. The World Happiness Report is free. Type in World Happiness Report. Download the sucker. Although the media talks to us about country rankings, and then we get unhappy because we aren't able to crack the code, here is an interesting finding that they have, under happiness, the very first agenda item. Once happiness is accepted as the goal of the government, this has other profound effects on institutional practices. Health, especially mental health, assumes even more priority, as does the quality of work, family, life, and community. Now, you talk in our language. Well, we have problems in those areas. So if our government would make it a focus, not make the focus mental health only. But how do we up-level the components of not happiness the emotion, which is different from me and you, but that overarching well-being, life satisfaction, all of the components that are truly governmental and community issues? What the conference did was take a report that a lot of us know the top line of but say, “Wait a minute. What action can I take?” The action is start working towards your community, looking at mental health not as a social dilemma and a social disease but as a component that needs to be solved in a connection way so that overarching our community and our policies work better. [00:17:20] PF: That's interesting because how then does an individual that's such a huge problem to solve, and that shift is not going to turn around quickly. So how does the individual who's listening say, okay, I can be a small part of this, and how do they do that? What action was it determined that they can take? [00:17:39] AG: I'm going to use an analogy that my dad used to use with me, and it had to do with I may not be able to clean up the junkyard. But I've got a broom, and I can clean my stoop. [00:17:52] PF: I like it. [00:17:52] AG: The problem media does to us and we've done to ourselves by accepting it. Don't try to solve the world happiness problem. I don't even give a flip about the world happiness scale. I do care about my square block. I do care about the policies that impact how safely I can cross the bleeping street. I do care that if I get safe crosswalks that other neighborhoods that may not be as affluent have equally safe crosswalks. That's how you do it. You look at what does my square block need and how can I do that. Then build on it from there. Don't fall into the trap of globalizing because catastrophizing and globalizing are two of the things that take away our optimism. It works at every level. [00:18:48] PF: So it really comes down to looking at your immediate tribe and saying, “All right, what are my strengths? What are theirs? How do we do make this small difference together?” I love that. [00:18:58] AG: Okay, and I'll give you another one. So meaning and mattering. The up-level station was, historically, we talked about meaning meaning. Again, that's a very individualized how do I find meaning. Well, what we found the mattering part, the new up-level is the mattering part because I find meaning when what I do at every level of work, life, family, when actually I can sense the impact on you. That went across the board. That became the nuance. That's just one of those aspects that it seems like we're talking about the same thing, meaning and mattering. But it's the difference between individual and then realizing that the satisfaction you get is from how others are impacted. [00:20:02] PF: Interesting. Boy, we could do a whole episode on that. That is really, really – [00:20:05] AG: Oh, and do I have books for you. [00:20:07] PF: Yes. [00:20:10] AG: Do I have books for you. [00:20:11] PF: Yes, you do. [00:20:13] AG: Yes, yes. I walked away – having this conversation, as I said, 130 different things about schools and well-being and the isolation, the use of psychedelic drugs. I mean, the topics were deep. If I was to leave anyone with anything, the things that I cared about the most was the shift from the meaning to the mattering and strengths, the importance of strengths at a different level. One of the many researchers that I love a lot is Ryan Niemiec. [00:20:47] PF: I love Ryan since [inaudible 00:20:48]. [00:20:48] AG: Okay. How can you not love Ryan? A man who has devoted his life to values in action, and he lives it. From his Positive Psychology Goes to the Movies books, what Ryan and his teams have been finding out is that when you add the strengths, the difference between adding strength to the mindfulness. Your particular strengths apply to the mindfulness in all the various things that you do in life is what then increases the life satisfaction aspects. Again, seems like we're saying the same exact things, but we're not. They've up-leveled it. They have found the deeper way for the things such as mindfulness and enhancing your spiritual connection because spirituality is that attribute where there is a oneness mindset. That oneness mindset builds on the same theme. That whole we're in this together. They took that theme, the wearing this together theme of 2020, and have looked deeply at what does that really mean when it's in action. [00:22:09] PF: That's what really needed to come out of the pandemic because there were a lot of lessons learned about ourselves and our relationships and both good and bad. To have that new application, I think, is really important for us to be able to take away. It's like we have to have learned something from that. We have to have changed something because of that. [00:22:33] AG: For me, that is the greatest. I think it opened up some of the greatest potential for the future, starting with the most obvious of how we valued certain jobs in our society and what it will mean for us going forward to keep valuing. The US is a service economy. We know that those jobs and satisfaction in those jobs helps build the economy because I know I'm to the point. You do too with the tipping. There's lots of articles right now on tipping and the backlash. I'm going to say I'm a very generous tipper, and I'm getting cranky. [00:23:16] PF: Yes, I know. I don't want to start at 18%. [00:23:19] AG: In ’20 and ’21, I was wanting to make sure you could pay your rent. Now, it's like, “Could you at least be accurate on the stuff when we’re interacting?” [00:23:28] PF: I know. [00:23:29] AG: It is there but they're in lies, what we are learning. We go through. There was a great line by the man who heads the Center for Good Science in Berkeley. His last name is Hanson. I think it's Rick Hanson. [00:23:46] PF: Oh, yes. [00:23:48] AG: Yes. One of the greatest challenges that we have is our brains on bad things is like Velcro. On good things, it's like Teflon. [00:23:57] PF: Exactly. [00:23:58] AG: Okay. [00:24:00] PF: I would say relative to the lessons that 2020 gave us the opportunities is we have the choice of holding on to the good stuff and continuing to up-level the stuff that was a problem because we'll be refining our economy and our ability to interact in it in a more positive way than when we were making widgets. [00:24:27] PF: I love it. Andrea, that is so insightful. I do want to ask you before I let you go. [00:24:33] AG: Okay. [00:24:34] PF: Positive psychologists, we've talked about it's a relatively new discipline, and it's maturing, and it's changing. How have you – since you've been in it a long time, you've been there. [00:24:45] AG: Long time. [00:24:46] PF: How have you seen it mature, and where do you see it being different right now? Not just the conference but positive psychology as a discipline. [00:24:55] AG: Yes. So this is really interesting. The scientific model forces an artificial. We've got to have a sample that has a known outcome that we can say this about this group. What I heard, particularly from the president of IPPA, because her background is in genetics, our ability to individualize the findings, whether it be on life satisfaction, what causes happiness, how to overcome the loneliness, our ability, what well-being is to me, I mean, they have a zillion definitions. That's a problem for science, except it's not. They're working towards not making that the hurdle. That you can continue to create work that, in fact, helps impact people and also do good science. They're now staying in what I see is a more both lane. They're not going to give up the good model of what how you study science, but they are also looking to and respecting the individualized differences along the sphere. That matters a lot. [00:26:16] PF: Yes, it does. It does. That's terrific. Andrea, you know we'll come back and talk about more of this later. [00:26:22] AG: We will. [00:26:23] PF: Later. But I appreciate this. I did. I wanted to do a follow-up. I knew you'd be a great person to talk to about it, so I appreciate you spending this time with me and telling us about it. [00:26:33] AG: Thank you. [END OF INTERVIEW] [00:26:38] PF: That was Andrea Geoglein, talking about her takeaways from the International Positive Psychology Association's World Congress. If you'd like to learn more, just visit us at livehappy.com and click on the podcast tab. That is all we have time for today. We'll meet you back here again next week for an all-new episode. Until then, this is Paula Felps, reminding you to make every day a happy one. [END]

Follow along with the transcript below for episode: Overcoming Loneliness With Dr. Randall Hansen [INTRODUCTION] [0:00:01] PF: Thank you for joining us for episode 429 of Live Happy Now. We know that loneliness is a huge problem in today's world, and this week we're learning what we can do about it. I'm your host, Paula Felps, and this week I'm sitting down with Dr. Randall Hansen, an author, educator, and advocate for deep healing. His mission is to help others understand and heal from the trauma in their lives. In the wake of the pandemic, he is one of many thought leaders who are concerned about what loneliness and isolation are doing to us. He's here to talk about the dangers of loneliness, what's causing it, and most importantly, what we can do about it. Let's have a listen. [EPISODE] [0:00:41] PF: Randall, thank you so much for joining me on Live Happy Now. [0:00:45] RH: Paula, I'm very excited to join you on a – to discuss a very important topic today. [0:00:50] PF: Yeah. You and I are having this conversation, because of something that you wrote about loneliness. I follow you on LinkedIn, and you wrote a post that really spoke to me, because there's so much information coming out right now about how deadly isolation and loneliness are. It's just continuing to grow. It's like, even though we know what a problem it is, it's getting worse. I guess to start, tell me why it was so important for you to write that post, because you really took a deep dive into what it's doing to us. [0:01:18] RH: I've just seen too many people affected by it. I have a good friend who's a caretaker for a disabled brother and pre-COVID. He was already self-isolating as often caregivers do, because they have to spend their whole time with the person they're taking care of, but then with the pandemic, he just became further isolated, and I could actually see, I mean, not be, but I could see his brain changing in the sense of he was just becoming more pessimistic. He's a single guy, he wants to have a family. So, he just becoming more and more isolated and his attitude is just become more and more pessimistic, because we've actually seen, and this is part of my deep dive, but we've actually seen scientific studies and show that loneliness changes the format of our brain. It actually is almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy if we don't make changes, that the loneliness will actually, almost keep feeding itself and making it a downward spiral that will make it even harder for us to get out of. [0:02:29] PF: Is it similar to depression, where once you have depression, you can't just like snap yourself out of it and it keeps getting worse? As you said, a downward spiral, does loneliness make you continue to self-isolate? [0:02:42] RH: Bizarrely, it does. I mean, that's the crazy part of this thing. We have mechanisms that we think are designed to increase or decrease the loneliness, increase our connectivity like social media, but we're finding out now that social media is actually more isolating, because we have this comparison syndrome where we're looking, “Oh, look at all our friends who are doing these exciting lives who are leading and I'm stuck at home with by myself.” So that becomes this thing. Then also, or, “Oh, look at my friend has 10,000 likes and I have one like. I'm not loved. I'm not appreciated.” So social media which is supposed to bring us together is actually more isolating. So, yeah, it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy that way. [0:03:30] PF: I want to ask you about social media, because you can create some guidelines at some point to make it a healthy experience for you by like, limiting your time and maybe monitoring who you're following and what you're doing. What are some of the ways that you recommend that we can use social media to cure our loneliness and not make it worse? Because I'll say, I've got a relative who's, she's in her 80s, she's in a nursing home. I don't know what she would do without social media. She uses it in that right way. She stays in touch with all her nieces and nephews. Tell us how to do this the right way. [0:04:05] RH: Yeah. I think especially for, I mean, again, that's what social media is all about for the isolated people, for rural people that are disconnected from friends and family that this is a chance just like FaceTime, or Zooms, or something like that. The same thing. We can connect face to face, but – so that is definitely a positive thing, but it hit me last year. I was just having this quiet meditation and it really hit me the strong, especially about Facebook, which a friend of mine calls fake book. [0:04:37] PF: Yeah. [0:04:38] RH: I'll come back to that in a second, but it just came back to me that so much of this doesn't matter. My rule would be, as long as you're not putting all your focus, emphasis on social media, that's number one. Definitely, limit the amount of time you spend and look at what your goal is. If your goal is something like, this grandmother that's trying to just want to connect with friends and family, maybe share the memories. I have some older relatives that are now going through their photo albums and posting old black and whites and it's awesome. Yeah, that's the part that's a good part of social media, but as soon as we start comparing ourselves to others. If we're looking at social media just to look at others and keep in contact, that's great, but if we're posting, hoping to get 100 likes, or 1000 likes, or 10,000 likes and we're going to be probably setting ourselves up for disappointment. I think the key is just expectations, what's our intention with social media. I think each social media is different, like Facebook, I think is perfect for family and friends. LinkedIn's you and I have talked about is wonderful for professional connections. I love that aspect. You and I wouldn't be talking otherwise. [0:05:52] PF: Exactly, yeah. [0:05:54] RH: Then Instagram, I use Instagram just for photos. I just love photos. So, that's a different vibe in all of them. [0:06:00] PF: How important could it be then to set an intention each time you're going to use social media? Would that be a good way to start building a healthier practice with it? [0:06:10] RH: Yes. I think that's an extremely good idea. You can, you can also be honest for yourself and just try to monitor it, but of course, you can also get an app if you're doing it on your phone and watch your screen time that way. The honor system says, “Oh, I'll only be on social media for an hour.” But then you have 10 minutes here, 10 minutes there. [0:06:32] PF: Right. [0:06:32] RH: All of a sudden, five hours, not one hour. So, having some device that maybe tracks you at least in the beginning might be another way to keep yourself a little more honest with it, too, if your intention is just to keep to maybe an hour a day or something like that. [0:06:46] PF: Right. Right. We know that beyond social media, there's other things attributing to our loneliness. But first, I do want to – you brought up a great point. That is the difference between loneliness and solitude. [0:06:59] RH: Yeah. [0:06:59] PF: Can you tell us about that distinction? Because I think this is a really important thing to think about. [0:07:04] RH: Yeah. I think solitude can be so life enhancing, so soul searching. So, that's not – if we seek out solitude and I'll give you an example. I've gone on a healing journey and my best modality for healing is nature. I instill the day it is. But I live, you can see behind me, I live on this, very gratefully, on a little hilltop above a lake. I walk this property almost daily. Anyway, but my healing journey in nature, I was alone for about five years in nature. Just rediscovering myself and trying to get rid of my ego and then deal with my traumas. I was alone in that process, but I was also in a community of other forest owners. We talked about how to manage our forest and best techniques and things like that. I was still in a – I was in solitude for my healing journey, but I had a community around me that supported me. The difference in loneliness is a sense of isolation, that social pain, that people don't care about you, and you're not connected, and you're alone. Where solitude is seeking that solitude for some kind of purpose, typically self-enhancing, educational learning process. That's a big difference. They can seem similar, but quite different purposes involved. [0:08:46] PF: Right. You can be lonely even when you're in a sea of people. [0:08:50] RH: Yes. [0:08:51] PF: It doesn't – [0:08:53] RH: Yeah. My other perfect example is when I was in freshman in college. I picked the wrong college. I was completely, lonely, isolated in a sea of thousands of other people around me. All these students were around me, but I wasn't connected to any of them. Yeah, that's the perfect example. We could live in a city with a million people and still be lonely. Yeah. [0:09:21] PF: Yeah. It's really important then to have community and you talk about that. Explain to us why community is so important. Especially now, it's even more so in this post pandemic world. Can you address that for me, please? [0:09:34] RH: Yeah. Well, I think let me just address the pandemic for a second too, because I think my wife and I, my partner and I, we talk about how we are the 1% in the middle. It seemed like everyone else is on the extremes. I think the pandemic – before the pandemic, we had some of that, but I think since the pandemic, we've had this splintering so much so that almost any issue seems to be political if you want to make it so. To me, it's so important to find community that aligns with your values. I think in today's world, it's a lot harder, because a subject like dogs, well, there's no political aspect of dogs, but someone's going to find something like, the dog food, you give your dog. Whatever. I mean, it's just – [0:10:24] PF: Right. There's always going to be a way to find that fault. [0:10:28] RH: Yeah. Yeah. I think it's community, because it's so blindered these days. It's so important to find people that support you, support your values. You don't have to support all your values or be 100% aligned with you. It's pretty rare to find someone like that. As long as there are maybe 75%, because you want these people to be able to agree with you, uplift you and you'd be able to uplift them at the same time, because again, communities is a back and forth street. [0:10:57] PF: It's also important to be able to realize that they can have different views. [0:11:02] RH: Yeah. [0:11:03] PF: I don't need to jettison them from my lives. I've seen people really cut off some longstanding friendships, because of political, or social beliefs. It’s to me very sad, because you're throwing out, talk about throwing out the baby with a bathwater. There's so much more than what your, say your political beliefs are. [0:11:23] RH: Yeah. Yeah, I have a friend who is completely opposite me about the pandemic and all things are about it. I could have easily written him off. He could have written me off, but there are so many other aspects of that relationship of that friendship that don't deal with that one little subject. I know the pandemic is a massive one, but it doesn't have to be. Yeah, I work around – you find to work around for those things, because we're all multifaceted. We're not – I can't imagine one person that's all about just one topic and that's it. Yeah. So, save some of those friendships. That's one of my things is if you're lonely and you're feeling like you're isolated and you want to move ahead, maybe go back and look at some of those friendships that maybe got dissolved in the last three or four years and see if there's a way to resolve them. I think we have a fear of rejection. I can tell you when I've reached out to a few people that I rationally did something wrong and I apologized or I just, depending if I did it wrong, or if I just reached out to them and said, “Hey, can we – I really miss you. Can we reconnect and see what's going on?” All those were positive. I didn't have one bad experience with that. One didn't take off back to the friendship, but that was fine. He didn't say – he didn't yell at me or anything like that, but just, “Yeah, I moved on.” But yeah. I mean, I think many people have gone through their contact list and said, “Oh, no they voted for that person. Nope.” Or, “They did that there in the pandemic. Nope. Gone.” But now where we have so many other qualities to us. [0:13:07] PF: That's it. Yeah. If you can really start looking for what you have in common with people. I moved out to an area where I will have less in common with the people than I did when I lived in downtown Nashville. That's been very key for me, is not focusing on the differences is looking at where do we find this common ground? Now, frankly, we have a swimming pool. For them, that's our common ground. They're like, “You have a pool? I like to swim.” I know, but you do need to look for things that, places where you can connect instead of being so quick to say like, “No, they're not right for me.” [0:13:41] RH: Yeah. Yeah. I just think it's so many opportunities. It's a good way to actually grow, because if you lean into some of that, just comfort like, “Oh, I don't know if I like that, their beliefs or their whatever.” But if you lean into a little bit you might even learn something. “Oh, I didn't know about that.” So, it can be a positive. Even if you don't become a friend with those people, you can still become a positive learning experience to grow your own knowledge about other things. [0:14:07] PF: Yeah. It's a good opportunity to find out why someone thinks that way. [0:14:11] RH: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. [0:14:13] PF: That will blow your mind sometimes. [0:14:15] RH: Yeah. Many times, it will. Again, The Four Agreements, great book, real short, it’s a tiny book, but one of them is don't make assumptions, but we do it all the time. [0:14:25] PF: Right. [0:14:26] RH: That person [inaudible 00:14:26]. Oh, they must be Irish or whatever. Whatever, but who knows, they just like green. Yeah, we need to get beyond our assumptions sometime. [0:14:36] PF: We do have this loneliness epidemic. What is really like the cause of the loneliness epidemic? Is it just so many different things or what's going on? [0:14:44] RH: That's really a good question. I've seen so many studies on impact of loneliness. We even have the search in general, released a report about a month or two ago about how dangerous loneliness is and more dangerous than almost a pack a day cigarette smoking issue. We know how dangerous cigarette smoking is. It leads to stress eating, further isolation, depression, self-medicating, all these things. I think it's just a tipping point. I was just having a discussion with a psychologist this morning in Ireland, of all places. She was saying that we have just gotten to this point where we are so, it's almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy that technology is supposed to make things easier. It's isolated us. The pandemic, illness and health, sometimes brings it together, but because, again, for whatever reasons, the reaction to the pandemic and all that became so political. Then from the pandemic, we also had the self-isolate. I have a brother who is still self-isolating, because he has just gotten into that. Again, it's almost like a – again, I don't want to label this like a, in terms of a medical diagnosis, but it's almost a little bit like OCD, where OCD is this loop that you can't get out of. So, it's a spot loop until your brain fixes it. I think lonely, we're seeing loneliness is almost something similar to that. So, for my brother, who, yes, he can travel now, he wanted to travel to Europe and he couldn't, because of the pandemic and the travel restrictions. Yet, he still hasn't left his house. I think there is a self-fulfilling aspect of it. Then the work from home is the other component to this. Maybe we all didn't have the greatest co-workers, but there's a certain human connection we have when we go into work and meet people. “Hey, how are you? How was your weekend? Catch the big game.” Whatever. There's some connection going on there. Now, I mean, we still have that with zooms and things like that, but it's just not the same or you don't have that – [0:17:10] PF: There’s nothing like face-to-face. Yeah. [0:17:11] RH: Person sitting next to you. Yeah. Yeah. It changes you. [0:17:16] PF: What can we do if we're out and we're in the world and we're feeling good about things, what can we do to help people who are suffering from loneliness? Because it's, as you said, it becomes this vicious circle for them. It's not something it seems they can pull themselves out of. How do we help people who are going through this? [0:17:35] RH: I love it. Two aspects. Number one, of course, first, I love that those who are doing better should always be trying to help others. I love that. Thank you for that, Paula. It's a beautiful message. I think the key is awareness. Look around to the people in your circle. Who haven't you talked to, who haven't you seen in a while, and who has suddenly dropped off and just reaching out is that I think a major, major first step and just saying, “Hey, I noticed – I haven't seen you in a while, I have been texting you or haven't seen you on social media.” Whatever your connection with that person is. Then maybe the next step is there are so many ways to meet new people. The next step after that would be maybe invite them along to something you're going to, a book club, or a social event, a conference, a club that you belong to. There are so many non-profits you can volunteer with. I mean, there are so many ways to get involved, but I think inviting them along rather than telling them. I mean, it's easy to say, “Hey, there's a book club over at the library.” [0:18:49] PF: Go check it out. [0:18:49] RH: Yeah. Go check it out versus, “Hey, I'm going to this book club next week. The book is fantastic. You don't have to read it all. You don't have to read any of it.” It's just a chance to talk about the book and meet other people. Then forced that we bring them along. I think those are two things. One, checking in. Then two, just recommending, “Oh, hey. Why don't you go to the gym? Why don't you just.” Say, “Hey, I'm doing this. Can you come along?” Or invite them along with you. [0:19:18] PF: I think for that, it's important to keep asking, because the chances are the first time, first three times, they're going to say no, but there's also something that happens within that person when they are being invited. Someone's extending a hand, someone wants to spend time with you. It's like that's, I think where you can really start helping them and not just giving up, not being like, “Well, they always say no.” Just continue to let them know that you're interested in their companionship. [0:19:48] RH: Yes, a 100%, because almost, especially depending on how long they've been in this loneliness cycle, their reaction is almost always going to be no, because, “Oh, I don't want to be a burden.” “No, no, you, you're an extrovert. I know you're going to have more fun than I am. I'm going to be a drag, blah, blah, blah.” But you're right. Every single time you ask them, it's a little change going on up in there. It might be the fifth time or the 10th time, but yes. I love that. Thank you. Keep asking, because it will flip that switch. It might take a little while, but it will. [0:20:23] PF: You just got to be patient and persistent. There's so many pieces to this. I appreciate you sitting down and talking about this. We can do an entire series on loneliness and, and still just be scratching the surface. I am going to tell our listeners on the landing page, they'll be able to find the column that you wrote about this. That also gives incredible tips for stepping out of loneliness. I really hope that people do listen and whether they're dealing with loneliness themselves and need some tips on how to take these baby steps. Things like adopt a pet. That was a great one. I mean, you gave just so many wonderful tips that are pretty easy to do and getting out in nature and. Then also, what we can do as people who are watching someone go through that. There's a lot of ways that we can reach out and help. I truly appreciate you sitting down with me today and talking about it. [0:21:12] RH: Well, thank you, Paula. I just so appreciate you reaching out to me and giving me this platform to talk about it, because it is a very important subject. Thank you. [OUTRO] [0:21:24] PF: That was Dr. Randall Hansen talking about loneliness. If you'd like to learn more about what he has to say about loneliness, check out his books or follow him on social media. Just visit us at livehappy.com and click on the podcast tab. That is all we have time for today. We'll meet you back here again next week for an all-new episode. Until then, this is Paula Felps reminding you to make every day a happy one. [END]

Follow along with the transcript below for episode: What’s New in Season 9 With Deborah K. Heisz [INTRODUCTION]   [00:00:02] PF: Thank you for joining us for episode 428 of Live Happy Now. It's a new month. And for Live Happy Now, it's the start of a brand new season. I'm your host, Paula Felps. This week, as we launch season nine, I'm talking with Live Happy CEO and Co-Founder, Deborah Heisz, about some of the great new things that you can expect. We're rolling out some new ways to help you discover happiness, and we're excited to share these with you. So let's get to it. [EPISODE] [00:00:30] PF: Deb, always a pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you so much for sitting down with me today. [00:00:35] DH: Well, I wasn't going to miss it today. It's the first episode of our ninth season, which either means that we're really old or we're having too much fun, one or the other. [00:00:43] PF: I think it's a little of both. [00:00:44] DH: Yes. [00:00:46] PF: Yes. I mean, it's amazing when I sit down and say, “Oh, my gosh. Yes, we're starting our ninth season.” Because when we started this, we didn't know if anyone was going to tune in. Lucky for us, they did. [00:00:55] DH: Yes. You know, podcasts were just getting started. I think we had the serial podcast, which really took off. It was like right after we started this one. So that was really interesting. We got into podcasting originally as a way to expand on the magazine and do some interviews because we always got to interview these great people. We’ve been getting to do those interviews on tape, so to speak. That really shows my age. We’ve been getting to do interviews live and then share those. That's really why we started the podcast. Then, of course, the whole podcast thing took off. It's still the most fun and my favorite thing that we do. [00:01:27] PF: Yes. If we can just figure out how to combine true crime and happiness, we're going to have the biggest hit podcast of all time, so. [00:01:34] DH: Yes. Speaking of serial, true crime and happiness. Yes, it's interesting. The true crime genre is certainly the one that I think most people think of when they think of podcasts. Or if they don't, they at least are aware. Either that or business help podcasts, self-help personal podcasts. A lot of those are really successful. I guess we kind of fit into that. Happiness will certainly help business. We don't fit into true crime, but I kind of look at it as us as the antithesis to true crime. [00:02:01] PF: Yes. That's true. [00:02:02] DH: Yes. We talk a lot about paying attention to what you put in your head. You and I were talking before the podcast about how people who listen to true crime to decompress may not be processing their stress well. [00:02:17] PF: Not judging. We're not judging. [00:02:18] DH: Not judging at all. [00:02:19] PF: That was an actual study that was done. [00:02:21] DH: Yes, true. But it is hard to be bombarded with everything we've got going on in the world. We've talked about this before, all the political stuff, all the war in Europe right now, and all the negativity. Then you add true crime on top of that. You add your news feed on top of that. It's very easy to look at the world as a dangerous and unwelcoming and not fun place. We are the antithesis of that. Listen to Live Happy Now. Listen to it. Go online and look at our website, livehappy.com. Subscribe to our newsletter. Fill up your inbox with the opportunity at least to get something positive out of your day. I love that because for me, sometimes just putting that in my head makes me think about the world a little differently. A lot of the stuff that we share that research is being done just changes your perspective and kind of puts you back on course because I'm still a little more than a glass half full. I'm kind of a glass overflowing person in regard. I think the world’s a wonderful place with tremendous opportunities and beautiful things and a lot of joy out there. I like to be exposed to that, and it's so much fun to share with everybody else. [00:03:26] PF: Yes. Filling your brain with good stuff since 2013. [00:03:30] DH: New tagline. [00:03:31] PF: Exactly. There we go. And which is crazy to think. Now, that means we're going to – in October, we turn 10 years old. Like Live Happy has been around for 10 years and been active. I think that's really exciting just to see that people have embraced it and are hanging with us. [00:03:45] DH: As you know, we've had millions and millions and millions of downloads of the podcast. A hundred thousand of people hit our website. It is humbling to realize that something that we really started working on about 11 years ago has morphed into this positive force in the world, and it's great. But 10 years, wow. My youngest child is 11. So it’s her entire life. [00:04:11] PF: All she knows. [00:04:12] DH: Yes, all she knows. [00:04:14] PF: That’s cool. We're doing some new things. We were talking about this. So we have Live Happy Now podcast. That's done obviously very well. Last year, I added On a Positive Note, which looks at music and how it affects our happiness. We look at it through the health and well-being, a lot of different aspects of music. So now, this year, we're going to add the Happiness Unleashed, the new pet podcast. Now, you know as well as I do that pets are such a huge thing not just for Live Happy but in the world. So let's kind of talk about why we believe so much in pets and what they can do for us. [00:04:48] DH: We've always been a family-oriented podcast or a family-oriented property. Not all of our content is suitable for children. That's not what I mean. I mean that we're always about building families, building relationships in the community. Pets are a part of our family. They're a part of our lives. They are something that we integrate, that we care about. There's so much research out there on how they improve your overall well-being, everything from lowering your blood pressure to being a companion in stressful times. They are part of our families, and we know that there's a lot of people that can't imagine not having their pets in their lives. I think it's a really good thing. It's an important part of our lives, and I just don't think there's that much out there about it. I think people are really interested in it, so I'm super excited to be adding that, kind of our repertoire. [00:05:37] PF: Yes. What's great too is they don't have to listen to me. It's going to be Brittany Derrenbacher, who has been on here frequently. She's been our pet expert. She is so well-versed. She is a therapist. She does deal with things like pet loss, grief, compassion, fatigue, things like that. She's in the rescue space. So I think she's going to bring some incredible insights into how pets help us heal and what good they can do for us. So I'm excited to see how that one unfolds. [00:05:59] DH: I am too. It’s great to add another voice to Live Happy. Yes, she's done a fantastic job on the podcast in the past. You and I have talked about how they’re some of the most downloaded and most listened-to podcasts we have. [00:06:10] PF: They are. It's like maybe we should pay attention to that. [00:06:13] DH: I would call that a clue. I'm taking the clue, and we're super excited to have Brittany on. She's just got some fantastic insights. I just think this is something that people are going to be really interested in. [00:06:24] PF: I do too. I'm excited to see that play out. Another thing that we just added, we did our first episode with Dawn McMullan as a Happy Activist. You originated the Happy Activist idea back with our Happy Acts. We would spotlight people on the website who were doing amazing things. Somehow, as the magazine went away, we kind of got away from that. With this Happy Activist segment, we're bringing that back once a month to be able to spotlight someone who's doing amazing things in their community. So tell us a little bit about what you perceive a Happy Activist to be. [00:06:57] DH: When we started Live Happy in general, we really wanted to focus on the science and the fact that there are things you can do that you can actually do proactively to make your world a happier place for yourself, your family, your community, all of that. But there are people out there in the world who are doing it as their way of life. There are people who are doing things that truly make a difference in the lives of others. They truly do things to improve the well-being of themselves, their community and families in a very public way and sometimes not so public. They aren't as sung. It’s not that they’re unsung heroes. It's more like I don't think they even realize, as many of these people don't even realize, the impact they're having and to be able to celebrate that and to be able to share the stories of people who are truly, truly putting their heart into the well-being of others. It brings me joy that we can tell those stories because I don't think we see enough of those stories. There are so many people in the world that that's their mission and their purpose, and they found it, and it's just really important to share that. So a Happy Activist, to me, is someone who's out there improving the well-being of their community as a personal mission. [00:08:08] PF: What I love about it is it gives our listeners more participation in the content of the podcast. It's our listeners who are going to be bringing their Happy Activist to us and recommending people. We're going to be doing some things on social media, on the website, in the newsletter to promote that, so they know how to reach it. But they can just send us an email to editor@livehappy.com and tell us about their Happy Activists. We'll look into them and see about getting them on a future episode. [00:08:33] DH: Yes. We really want our listeners and our readers and the people passionate about happiness the way we are to share the people in their lives that are making a difference. We don't know who they are, but we know they're out there, and we know that you know who they are. A little bit of recognition goes a long way. But I think that we need to spotlight the people that are doing good in the world. The people who are not, have true crime podcasts about them. [inaudible 00:08:56]. [00:08:59] PF: Go back to the anti-true crime podcast. We’re the true good podcast. That's what we are. [00:09:05] DH: There you go. [00:09:08] PF: Yes. What's wonderful too is someone else hears that and discovers new ways to give back. So like with Dawn and the work that she's doing in Congo to help women give them a future was just amazing. She just gave so many ideas for how you can get involved in ways that you can give back, stuff that I had not even thought about. [00:09:28] DH: Well, and I think that's important because I think so many people hear those stories, and they think, “Wow, that's huge. I could never do that. That's great. I'm really glad they're doing it, but I could never do that.” That's not what it is. There are little things you can do in little pockets of time. Don't take dedication of going to the Congo to just – [00:09:48] PF: We don't all have to go to East Africa. Okay. [00:09:49] DH: We don’t have to go to East Africa to make a difference in the world. That is one of the great things about her perspective is she knows that. But something the other Happy Activists are doing things that you can do in your backyard that don't take heroic full-time effort to do. Share their stories. We want to hear about them. They make a difference. [00:10:07] PF: Yes, they do. I'm excited to meet these people. One more thing I think that we should talk about today is a newsletter because we've had this for a while, and we're doing a lot of great things with it. I think we know it's there. Like I know it's there. You know it's there. We kind of take it for granted. It's like that middle child. Like we just, “Yes, they're doing good. We love them. It's great.” But we don't really talk about all the things that the newsletter has to offer, and I'm really excited about some of the ways that we're pumping it up and making it even bigger and better, a weekly free in your inbox. Get that great news delivered. [00:10:39] DH: Well, one of the ways of making it better you just hit on, weekly. In the past, we've done it monthly, which is great. We've got a couple hundred thousand subscribers. We want more. Really, it is that little burst of joy, happiness in your inbox once a week. It will give you information on the next podcast episode. It'll have some of that news in the happiness space. Yes, there is news in the happiness space. There's happiness. There's other news in the happiness phase. It'll give you a little taste of the type of content we have on the website without you having to go like intentionally seek that out, although we want you to go intentionally to seek that out. When we talk about filling up your mind with positive stuff, fill up your inbox with positive stuff, and give yourself the best opportunity to brighten your day, and find out a little more about how you can make yourself and the community around you a happier place. [00:11:27] PF: Yes. One thing we've added to the newsletter, and it's my personal favorite passion project, and that's, of course, music. We've had the Live Happy Now playlist for a long time. Sometimes, we'll talk about – we'll do special playlists for Mother's Day, Valentine's, things like that. Haven't been talking about the playlist lately, so each issue of the newsletter is going to have a song that fits the theme of that newsletter. Then we'll direct you back to the Live Happy Now playlist, so you can just put on some tunes, change your state, make your brain happy, and maybe do a little bit of dancing in the kitchen. [00:11:58] DH: Well, we really are looking at things that are in our everyday lives that make us happier. You start talking about pets. You start talking about music. I mean, all these are things that most people listening to the podcast, the families. Most people understand that this is where the key to happiness is. I love the music piece because you’re music. I’m film. I'm passionate about movies. There's not as many movies that make me happy as there are songs. But dancing in the kitchen is one of my favorite pastimes. [00:12:29] PF: It's a universal skill because you don't have to be good at it. [00:12:32] DH: So we just want to expose people to things that really enhance their lives. Music is absolutely one of them. I'm super excited we're doing that. [00:12:40] PF: Yes. So those are some of the new things that we have coming up for this season. Gosh, 10 years. So what are you excited to see? As this new season, this New Year unfolds for us, who are you most excited about or looking forward to? [00:12:52] DH: Well, I'm going to divert the conversation a little bit here because one of the things I'm most excited to see is a picture of you with a chicken on your shoulder, getting ready for this particular issue we were talking about. Paula lives in a rural area. [00:13:07] PF: Let's tell. During the pandemic, I moved from a top floor apartment in downtown Nashville to six acres on a lake about an hour away from Nashville. To say it was a culture change is kind of an understatement. [00:13:20] DH: I am certain it was a culture change. I think what you were telling me earlier was like you went from music to chickens. [00:13:27] PF: Yes, pretty much. Concerts to chickens. There we go. [00:13:31] DH: Tell us about your chicken project, just because I think that they gave us a nice chuckle earlier. But it's also really interesting to me what you're doing with chickens. [00:13:38] PF: First of all, I have to tell you, we were going to get 15 little baby chicks. Then my partner was in charge of buying them. They're very cute on the website, and so somehow we ended up with an order of 25. Shortly after that order had been placed, a friend came and had three grown chickens that needed re-homed. So we took those in. Now, we have like – basically, with the little chicks getting here, we've raised them. They’re like 12 weeks or whatever. So we now have a chicken farm. But, yes, one of the things behind us, one of the driving ideas behind it is our ability to give back and that with chickens comes eggs. There are many people who are not able to access the food that they need. Being able to have that many eggs produced gives us the opportunity to help people who maybe wouldn't have access to that. We also have a very huge garden, and that's what we – our intention behind it is to be able to help other people who aren't having the food that they need, the nutrition. There's no reason in the world in America today that people are going to bed hungry at night. Food scarcity is a huge concern of mine. So that's what we want to be able to do is help eliminate that in our own area. If it's only with three families, if it's only with three people, then that makes a difference to those three people. That's kind of where it all started. [00:14:53] DH: Well, now, you have shared what a Happy Activist is. Paula, my favorite things about doing this podcast is the team we have working on. We were on earlier with Laura and Casey and where we're going. It is a joy in my life to see the people who are at Live Happy. They're genuinely Happy Activists in their own life. I'm really glad you shared that because I think that's something that people need to realize. I mean, you have a job. You work. You do everything else. But you've also – something you're very passionate about. You're taking time out of your day and your life and your lives to really support that, in addition to your dogs and cat and rabbit and – [00:15:33] PF: The whole freaking zoo that I got out here. [00:15:36] DH: I'm so glad I asked you about that. I wanted to share it. But what I'm excited about for the podcast this year really is the expansion and the integration. By the expansion, I mean, I love that we're adding pets. I love that we're going back to put more of the happy playlist in. But I like the integration. The newsletter is kind of going to tie it all together and just continue to expand the number of people we're reaching, continuing to share that. One of the things I'm most proud of Live Happy is that everything that we do is free to you in terms of content. It's just a joy to be able to give back to the world in that way. So I'm super excited about that. I know we've got some podcasts coming out about what happened at IPPA, the International Positive Psychology Association event. I know we've got more podcasts about pets and people and Happy Activists and the science behind happiness. I just hope everybody turns in and fills their mind with good stuff 20 minutes a week. Let's make a difference in the world. I hope they become Happy Activists like you. 00:16:36] PF: Oh. Well, thank you. To be honest, Live Happy has changed me by making me so aware how I can help, how I can be of service. It's literally impossible to interview someone every week, a different person every week who is putting good into the world, who is telling us how to be better humans, how to be happier humans. You have to change your life. There's no way that you can just say, “Okay, on to the next thing.” You can't do it. It affects you. It has made a profound difference in my life and, therefore, is making the difference for other people because it's changing the way that I walk in this world. [00:17:10] DH: I think if you listen to it, it's the same way. If you listen to it every week, it's just that reminder that you don't have to accept things the way they are. You can make a difference. You can make a change. Change starts with you. You can be happier. We always say happiness is a choice, and we don't really mean that entirely. I mean, obviously, there are things in the world that impede that for people that are very real. But you can choose to do things to make yourselves incrementally happier. You can choose to do things that give back to the world incrementally. It's a privilege to be sharing that information. [00:17:43] PF: Deb, I cannot think of a better way to end this that you've summed it up beautifully. This is a pleasure. It's an honor to get to do this. I love sitting down and talking about what we're going to do because it gets me so excited for this coming season. Thank you and for the opportunity to do this. Thank you for creating this for us all to be able to come play in the happiness space. [00:18:02] DH: Thank you for everything that you do to keep me on track. I appreciate it. Have a great season. [END OF EPISODE] [00:18:12] PF: That was Live Happy CEO and Co-Founder, Deborah Heisz, talking about what you can expect from season nine. If you'd like to sign up for our newsletter, tell us about a Happy Activist, or follow us on social media, just visit us at livehappy.com and click on the podcast tab. You'll find that information on the landing page for this episode. That is all we have time for today. We'll meet you back here again next week for an all-new episode. Until then, this is Paula Felps, reminding you to make every day a happy one. [END]

Follow along with the transcript below for episode: Easing Back-to-School Anxiety With Dr. Laura Phillips [INTRODUCTION] [0:00:02] PF: Thank you for joining us for episode 427 of Live Happy Now. It's time to go back to school, and for some kids, that means a whole lot of stress. I'm your host, Paula Felps, and this week, I'm talking with Dr. Laura Phillips, the Senior Director in the Learning and Development Center at the Child Mind Institute. Laura specializes in working with children who have learning disorders, mood disorders, and anxiety, among other things, and she's committed to improving the social, emotional well-being of children and adolescents, so she's sitting down with me today to talk about how going back to school can create anxiety for kids of all ages and how it can also affect their parents. Then, she's going to tell us what we can do about it. Let's have a listen. [INTERVIEW] [0:00:47] PF: Well, Laura, thank you so much for coming on the show today. [0:00:50] LP: Thank you so much for having me. [0:00:52] PF: I wanted to talk to you, because back to school is on the minds of everybody, kids, parents, shopkeepers. We tend to, at this time of year, focus on the excitement of the new school year and all the great things, but there is a lot of research that shows that children are more anxious than ever about going back to school. I wanted to talk, first of all, and find out what you're seeing. [0:01:14] LP: I think, children are more anxious than ever, unfortunately, about everything. I think back to school is a transition which tends to be anxiety-provoking for children, particularly those who experience anxiety. The last three years, each transition back to school was anxiety-provoking, because kids didn't know what the year would look like in the fall of 2020. We had kids who were doing full-time remote instruction, hybrid instruction. Some kids were back in classrooms for the first time since the previous March, so that was really anxiety-provoking. Then the following fall, there was increased return to the classroom, but still some – I mean, really significant changes from what normal school looks like. Then there were really young kids who never really knew what normal school looked like, because they hadn't had a normal school year, because of where they were when COVID hit. The past couple of years, the back-to-school transition, I think, was anxiety-provoking, because kids didn't really know what that would look like. This year, we seem to be out of that pandemic phase, so it's a more normal return to school this year than I think the past couple of years had been. But that's with an atypically anxious population of kids and teenagers. As you said, general rates of anxiety are higher than ever before among our teenagers and children, and that's true for mood disorders as well. We have a group of kids and teenagers who are coming up, who are just really struggling from an emotional perspective. [0:02:42] PF: What is the biggest cause of that anxiety? Because I do hear a lot more about anxiety, and I don't think it's just because we're more aware of it. I think there's a greater amount of it. [0:02:54] LP: I think that's right. It's really not just COVID. This isn't a COVID relic, although I don't think that the pandemic helped, but we really did see these trends, rising rates of anxiety and mood disorders preceding the pandemic, and really dating back really to the mid-2000s. I think that there are a lot of things. I think that a really big contributor is social media. We have kids who are constantly connected to one another and to the world. That can take a hit on their self-esteem, because there's just this constant comparison game that's taking place and FOMO and the unkind behavior that used to end at 3:00 tends to follow kids now home at the end of the day, because there's just constant connection. There's also just constant information. The world is a scary place. I think that kids are really acutely aware of it, because there's a 24-hour news cycle and because of their constant access to information through social media and being on screens. They're hearing about school shootings. They're hearing about racialized violence. They're hearing about global warming. There's a lot of reasons for kids to feel nervous about the state of the world. There's also a lot of pressure on kids, which I think comes from very well-intended parents who also have a lot of concerns about the state of the world. They want to feel like they have some control over their children and their children's future. There's a lot of pressure put on kids to have academic success. From very early on in kids' school years, they're hearing that how important it is to do well in school and to get into a good college and to get a good job. Free time is pretty limited now, because kids are really involved in a ton of programming. Some of which is really good, but I think that downtime is really important, both from a mental health perspective, but also from a cognitive development perspective. I think that there are a lot of factors contributing to the rising rates of anxiety. [0:04:51] PF: For parents, how do they press pause on some of that? Because you want to keep up, and your child wants to keep up. They want to know what's going on with social media. Even though it's challenging and anxiety-provoking, they don't want to miss out on it. How do you take them away from that a little bit and find some mental health breaks? [0:05:15] LP: It's really, really hard. I don't envy parents of children who are old enough to have screens. I have very young children. I have a four-year-old and a one-year-old, and I am not looking forward to the day when my child asks me for a cellphone, or a Facebook account. Because to your point, you don't want kids to miss out, and that is the way that kids are connecting with their friends. That is the way that kids are staying in contact when they're outside of school. That's the way that they're making plans, and so you don't want your child to be isolated, or pulled out of that. But parents need to be monitoring. They need to be aware of who their kids are talking to, what they're talking about. There is a role for restrictions on certain types of programming, or access to people through programming, so you can certainly, you can restrict who kids talk to, and they can only talk to people if you're approved. I mean, there are ways to put in place restrictions on kids' access to screens and social media. But you said mental health break. I think that a break is also really, really important. Not just for kids and teenagers, but for adults too, and I wish that I practiced what I preached. But I talk to parents all the time about, really, we talk about screen contracts, or social media contracts, so coming up with a plan for when and how and for what purposes these devices will be used before giving children the privilege of having a phone, which having a cellphone really is a privilege, which I really try to reinforce with parents a lot. It's a privilege that they have the right to remove if these devices are being abused, or if kids are not following the rules that are set out for them in order to safeguard them and also, to protect their mental health. But within those contracts, should also be designated break times. There should be times throughout the day that kids are not on phones. I think that dinner time and I mean, families have obviously different schedules and different opportunities to be together for dinner. Meal time should be a time ideally where everybody, not just children are putting away their phones and really using that time to come back and connect with one another. The bedroom, designated so to screen-free times of day, also screen-free zones within the house, or the apartment. Maybe the bedroom is a place that we at least after a certain hour of the day, because certainly during the day, kids are going to insist that they need access to their phones and their screens. But maybe after 8:30 p.m., everyone turns in their phones and then there's just designated blackout time for screen media. I think that kids and adults really do need a break, and there's a lot of really compelling research showing mental health benefit of having designated time away from screens. [0:07:55] PF: Then how can you use that time at dinner to connect and find out what's going on at school, what's going on with them, and this is a two-parter, because a child isn't necessarily going to tell you in words, “I'm being picked on. I'm being bullied. I'm not happy. I don't feel comfortable.” How do you use that time at dinner and how do you get into what is really going on? [0:08:16] LP: Well, I mean, anytime you're talking about uncomfortable things, you want to ask open-ended questions. You don't want to ask leading questions and you don't want to plant affect, or emotional experiences into kids' minds. You don't want to say, “Are you nervous about your first day of school tomorrow?” You might want to ask them, “How are you feeling about starting school tomorrow and really see what they bring to you?” Yeah. I mean, kids may not come out and tell you how they're feeling. They might not tell you that they're feeling nervous, or scared, or if they had an unpleasant experience in school. You want to watch carefully for some red flags that we know kids tend to show when they are experiencing something that makes them feel uncomfortable. Changes in affect, changes in behaviors, if you're seeing increased irritability, reduced frustration tolerance, kids are having meltdowns more frequently than, or more easily than they tend to have. If you're seeing changes in sleep patterns. You're noticing that kids are having a hard time falling asleep, they're waking up in the middle of the night, they're waking up earlier in the morning, if they're more clingy than usual, somatic symptoms, so physical complaints like headaches, stomach aches, fatigues, etc., are all really good signs that something might be going on that's making your child feel uncomfortable, which can then be a reason to prompt that conversation either during dinner, or a really good time to have conversations about things that are difficult are when you're doing other things, but also have to be – you're forced together time, like a car ride to school. You're trapped inside a car, but you're also not looking directly at one another, which can make it a little bit easier sometimes for kids to open up about what's feeling uncomfortable for them. Car rides to school. Walks to school. If you have a younger child, bath time. I get a ton of information when I'm giving my younger child a bath. [0:10:00] PF: It's better than an interrogation, right? [0:10:02] LP: Right. I mean, you're together. It's again, it's like this forced together time, but it doesn't feel like an interrogation, because you're in the middle doing something else and you just happen to bring up. My daughter. I'm sorry, I keep bringing up my child, but she's about to – [0:10:15] PF: All good. [0:10:17] LP: - her deep-water test. Rather than saying, “Are you nervous with your deep-water test?” We might say something like, “What's happened? What are you thinking about swimming tomorrow?” Something very benign, something open-ended, and just see what happens to come up. In those moments where kids might be a little bit more willing to share information, rather than if you go into their room and say, “I want to have a conversation with you right now about going back to school tomorrow.” [0:10:42] PF: That's intimidating. [0:10:43] LP: Right. Exactly. Yeah. [0:10:46] PF: If a child does show signs of anxiety about going back to school, how do you differentiate between, this is just jitters of starting a new school year and something unfamiliar? Or there's actually an underlying anxiety situation? [0:10:59] LP: Yeah. That's a really good question, because back to school jitters, I mean, there's a term for it, because it's very common thing. A lot of kids really do feel – it's very normal to feel a little anxious, nervous, jittery at the start of a new school year. Some of that is really excited anticipation also. But you would expect those nerves, if it's just back-to-school jitters to dissipate within a couple of days of that new school year beginning. When we talk about, how do I know if this is something more, I like to talk about frequency intensity, duration, and impairment. The duration piece can be really important in this particular example. Again, if those signs of nervousness, or jitteriness persist beyond those first couple of days of school, and you're seeing more frequent occurrence of either worry thoughts, or stomach aches, or difficulty sleeping than normal, more intense occurrence of those symptoms than normal, and that they're starting to have some functional impairment, like my child is expressing that he doesn't want to go to school, then that suggests that this is more than just typical back-to-school jitters. [0:12:03] PF: Then the question, of course, is what do you do about it? Because when I was growing up, they're like, “Oh, just wait it out.” They're like, “Work through it.” There are better ways, I am sure to do it than just toughen it out. What does a parent do if they realize that their child is very anxious and that it's more than just a couple of days type of thing? [0:12:28] LP: Yeah. You seek support. I mean, I would – teachers are a wealth of information about how your kids are doing during the day they're on the ground. I might reach out to it. I might start by reaching out to a teacher, or if there's the dean, the head of the middle school who might have broader view of your child, because they may have known them over the course of a couple of years. I might reach out to them and say, “Are you noticing anything different? Johnny has been complaining of stomach aches really frequently and that's not very typical for him. I'm wondering if you're seeing anything in school.” I would I would look to teachers for as a really important source of information about how kids are doing during the day. They're usually your mental health professionals on site in school. Whether that's a school counselor, or a school psychologist can be another really second point of contact, either to help check in with your child during the day, or guide you towards whether it might be time to seek support outside of the school system with a mental health professional in the community. [0:13:27] PF: In our conversation, we're talking more about younger children, because, well, teenagers are a whole different ballgame. Once we get to that, they're not talking to us anyway. How do parents start monitoring that tween and teen situation and differentiate between what's just the moodiness of a teenager and an actual problem that's going on? [0:13:51] LP: I think parents have a long view of who their children are, if they're seeing really acute changes that that's suggested it's more than typical moodiness associated with hormone change and development in teenagers. But the same things. It is normal for kids to be a little bit grouchy and hard to wake up in the morning. But if they're refusing to get out of bed, if they're showing sleepiness during the day, if they're insisting that they need to take naps during the day, or if they're indicating that they don't want to go to school, I mean, the more intense communication of these impairment, I think parents would notice. [0:14:33] PF: Okay, that's really good. I guess, the same rules apply. It's like, understand when you need to seek outside help. [0:14:40] LP: I don't think that kids want to feel uncomfortable. I think that they might not know that there's a way for them to feel differently and they might be concerned that there's something wrong with them. Admitting that they need help can be scary. But normalizing it can be a really good way to get a teen to seek out professional help. [0:15:01] PF: Okay. What about children who are either ignored, or bullied in the school environment? That's as a parent, I can't imagine watching my child go through either of those situations. There's only so much that you can do. How can a parent help a child who's dealing with either of those? Then, how do you set them up for success and start changing things for them? [0:15:26] LP: It's really hard, because you also want to, as you said, you can't imagine it. I think that that's something that's really hard for all parents to watch their children go through feelings that their child is being mistreated, or feels uncomfortable, or unsafe in school triggers a lot of anxiety in parents themselves. You want to be really mindful of putting your own anxiety and discomfort onto your children, because then they have the double whammy of not only is school hard for me, but mom is also really upset about this, too. You want to be really careful in how you broach these conversations. You again want to ask open-ended questions about how they're feeling in school, rather than putting the affect into their minds. Like, “Are you nervous about going back to school tomorrow?” Were you going to sit with all your own racing thoughts that you might have? Leave those out of this. When they do communicate to you what they're feeling, you want to validate those feelings without reinforcing those feelings, without reinforcing the fear. You can say, “I understand you're feeling really nervous about the first day of school. I bet a lot of other kids are feeling that same way.” You don't want to say, “Of course, you're feeling nervous. Who are you going to sit with?” Listens to their own concerns. At the same time, if you know that there's something challenging for them, don't start the conversation with that. If you know that they feel nervous about finding someone to sit with at lunch, when they come home from school that first day, don't say, “Who did you sit with at lunch?” You want to start with something that's going to make them feel more positive about how those first days back at school have gone. The big thing is, I think there's this real desire, there's this urge for parents to take away their children's anxiety, either by dismissing it, or telling them these social struggles don't matter. “When you get out of school, you're going to look back at these days and you won't even remember them and you're going to have so many friends.” That's not helpful. Keeping them home from school. If they express that they don't want to go to school, because they're worried about who they're going to sit with at lunch, or they're worried that they're going to be made fun of, keeping them home from school is not helpful, because that's also just reinforcing their own fear. The goal really should be helping them learn how to cope with and tolerate the discomfort, or cope with the anxiety, manage those big feelings and learn skills to manage those anxiety provoking situations, rather than removing those anxiety provoking situations. Practicing with them, or problem solving. Let's think of some people that you can try to sit with at lunch tomorrow. Let's think of some conversation starters. Practicing, coming up with a script for how they might approach a new person in their class, some questions that they can ask and then you can practice asking those questions. Really, the anticipation of the anxiety provoking situation is the hardest part. You want to prepare kids for what those situations look like, previewing, actually visualizing what it looks like to walk into a big cafeteria with a lot of kids around, some of whom you know, some of whom are unkind to you. Another group who hopefully, you can feel comfortable approaching and then actually walking them through what it looks like to go up to a friend and ask if you can sit with them and practicing using their brave words to try to break into a social group. Previewing, practicing and also expressing really positive but realistic expectations about those fear situations. You can't promise your child that first day of school is going to be great. They're going to make a ton of friends. Because that may not be the case, it might be and you should anticipate that for kids who have social anxiety, or who have historically been bullied, first days back to school can be really stressful and challenging and they might have a couple of bumps in the road. You don't want to promise them anything that you can't deliver. You don't want to promise them that those first days of school are going to be easy. You don't want to promise them that they'll have a ton of people to sit with and talk to at lunch. But you do want to imbue in them the confidence that you have that they'll be able to get through it. You can validate, “Yes, this is going to be a – this can be a scary experience and I have faith that you can get through it. This is how we're going to do it.” You're communicating your faith and your confidence in them, validating their feelings and also giving them some tools and practicing using those tools. [0:19:46] PF: Then as they're going through those first few days, if it's not going well, if they are having a very tough time, how do you give them a soft landing when they get home? What are some things that you can do? You can't take away what has happened, or hasn't happened at school, but how can you balance out the day for them and make it less miserable, less uncomfortable for them? [0:20:08] LP: I mean, exactly what you said. You want to give them a soft landing. You want to be very positive. You want to ask questions about things that you know that they enjoy and really try to shine a light on things that were positive about those first days back at school. School is highly structured and highly scheduled. I think that especially in those first couple of weeks, trying to make sure that weekends at least have a lot of unstructured, or unscheduled time, so that kids can feel like they have some control over how they're spending their time. I mean, school is very, very heavily dictated for them during the school day. Giving them some sense of control, some sense of rest and decompression and sensory relief on weekends can be really, really helpful for kids to recuperate after having highly stimulating and stressful days back at school. [0:20:59] PF: There's another sector that we haven't talked about and that's college students going back to school. Only they're going off to school maybe for the first time. I have a gentleman who I know and he had twin sons and they went to separate colleges. One of them is very outgoing and went there and thrived, and the other one is very introverted and ended up coming home during the school year, because he couldn't handle it. How do parents prepare their children for going off to college? [0:21:28] LP: It's the same thing. You want to really help them preview. You can't take away the experience, but you want to help them preview, problem solve, practice how they're going to engage in those situations. I mean, ideally, there might be a person or two that a teenager knows at the school that they're going to, that they can try to connect with and a step, just that they have one safe person. If you have one safe person to go around with and start to meet new people, that can be really, really helpful. If you can find a way to arrange for a meet up with someone, just that there's a familiar face, that can be really, really helpful. Then just talking through, really helping them understand what those first couple of weeks at school might look like, and helping them problem solve can be really, really helpful. Again, validating that this is a new experience, that this is something that could trigger a lot of discomfort in you, and this is how we're going to deal with it, and I believe that you can get through it. [0:22:24] PF: Let them know, it's okay not to be okay, I guess. [0:22:26] LP: It's okay to not be okay. [0:22:29] PF: Then parents, they're also starting to get a little stressed, back to school, because and it's not just the shopping. I know it changes parents’ routines. They've been able to take it a little bit easier without having to carpool and commute with the children and drop them off. What can parents do? As now we get more demands back on our time, what are some great ways for them to approach back to school and breathe and make it a joyous time for everybody? [0:22:56] LP: Yeah. I change in routine is usually a positive one, because there's so much structure and routine that's associated with school. Well, I mean, it might take a minute to get back into that routine, but once you're in the groove and actually, there's something very safe that the school year provides to kids and families in really, the structure and the predictability that the school schedule provides. Yeah. I mean, if you're going from not having to manage carpool and early wakeups and making lunches, etc., there's definitely a lot that parents have to remember how to do. I would say, start early. The whole family, you really want to get people back into that school routine, at least the school schedule, at least before the first day. Start thinking about getting kids to go to bed earlier, waking kids up earlier in the morning and really getting back into the routine of mom and dad are making breakfast, or caregivers, or someone's making – we want to make sure that we're setting up that structure of the school day of where we're getting dressed, we're having breakfast and we're practicing, or thinking at least about what it means to get out the door on time. You want to make sure that you're pulling together school supplies earlier. You don't want to be racing the night before to find the right size binder that your teacher wants for your math class. Just to the extent that you can really do as much in advance those couple of days right before school starts don't feel as hectic. Just to the extent that that parents can really try to prepare earlier, rather than later, or getting back into school routines, starting to, I said, pull together materials, managing parents own anxiety. Thinking about what it is that they're feeling nervous about, whether it's the social piece, the academic piece, the time management piece and managing that outside away from children. I mean, children are so unbelievably perceptive. They really pick up on parent energy. It can be hard to do. But to really try to be mindful of your own emotions and your own level of stress when you're talking to kids about going back to school, because you don't want to put your own anxiety and stress onto children. [0:25:06] PF: Right. When is it a good idea, maybe even for a parent to get some outside help, talk to somebody about it, if they're having trouble managing at all? [0:25:17] LP: This is a Herald confluence quote. “That self-care is child care.” Parents cannot be the parents that they want to be if they themselves are struggling with anxiety, or feeling overwhelmed, or depression. When parents are noticing that they're having a hard time being fully present, it's important for them to take a step back and figure out what it is that they need. Whether they need to seek professional help, or it's just about carving out more time for themselves to exercise, to get sufficient sleep, to connect with friends. That's not selfish. It actually helps make parents better parents, if they're to the extent that they're managing their own anxiety and stress, they can be more available to support their kids through stressful situations. [0:26:01] PF: That's excellent. Laura, you've given us a lot to think about, a lot to learn, and I'm going to tell our listeners how they can find you, find your work, find the Child Mind Institute, and learn more about what you all are about. Thank you for coming on today. This is enlightening, very important topic. I know it's on top of mind for a lot of people right now, so thanks for taking time to sit with us. [0:26:21] LP: Thanks so much for having me. [OUTRO] [0:26:27] PF: That was Dr. Laura Phillips, talking about alleviating back-to-school anxiety. If you'd like to learn more about her work and the Child Mind Institute, just visit us at livehappy.com and click on the podcast tab. Of course, if you're looking for some uplifting cool t-shirts for your child to wear back to school this fall, be sure and check out our selection at store.livehappy.com. That is all we have time for today. We'll meet you back here again next week for an all-new episode. Until then, this is Paula Felps, reminding you to make every day a happy one. [END]