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Follow along with the transcript below for episode: Standing Together in Divided Times With Rob Volpe [INTRODUCTION]   [00:00:02] PF: Thank you for joining us for episode 480 of Live Happy Now. As we head toward the end of summer, many of us are talking about this contentious election environment. But this week's guest is teaching us how to change the conversation using empathy. I'm your host, Paula Felps. This week, I'm joined by Rob Volpe, an empathy activist, consultant, and author of Tell Me More About That: Solving the Empathy Crisis One Conversation at a Time. Rob's here to talk about how we can avoid some of the hazards that come with discussing differing opinions, particularly when it comes to politics, and how that can change the way we interact with one another for the long run. Let's have a listen. [INTERVIEW] [00:00:45] PF: Rob, welcome back to Live Happy Now. [00:00:48] RV: Paula, thank you. It's so great to be here. What an exciting time. [00:00:53] PF: I know and I always love talking with you because you have such wonderful insight. [00:00:57] RV: Oh, thank you. I love talking to you, too. [00:01:01] PF: It’s a love vest. As you know and as our listeners have probably figured out just from our little intro that I just did, there's been a lot of turmoil the last few weeks around politics. That’s why you and I need to talk. I wanted to start by you framing the situation and talking about how all this turmoil is affecting people and the conversations that they're having. [00:01:24] RV: Chaos probably defines the last four years, maybe eight years even, but in particular since the pandemic and all the things. Now, we're just in this constant churn of like what unexpected news event is going to happen next, whether you're thinking of politics or you're looking at geopolitical, Hamas attack in Israel, war in Gaza now and Ukraine, and all the things. It's really got people overloaded. There's too much that's going on. Nerves are frayed. I think there's pain and trauma from the pandemic, from the lockdown, from the murder of George Floyd, from January 6th, that election four years ago that we haven't fully processed either as a society or as individuals. All of these things just keep adding up, and it just becomes like, “Okay, what fresh hell is this?” When you're waking up and if you think about in the last couple months the number of never before seen events in presidential politics from a conviction of a former president to clearly something happening with a sitting president with cognitive ability and full presence at one of the most critical junctures, to assassination attempts, to Supreme Court rulings, to suddenly now, oh, one with the cognitive abilities got a moment of clarity and said, “Okay, I'm out. I'm not going to run this race.” Then you've got somebody new coming in, and there's only so much people can handle. You start to get this sense of overload and confusion, and it causes more stress. All of that stress actually then impacts how we talk to each other and how we interact. One of the things I keep hearing from people in a longitudinal study we do is how mean everybody's gotten. [00:03:22] PF: That's something I really wanted to talk about because I've not ever remembered a time when there was so much just animosity toward people that you know. Why are we treating each other like this, and how is it worth sacrificing these relationships? [00:03:40] RV: Yes. There's something about that anonymity or that distance that you get on social media. People just feel like they can say whatever without any sort of repercussion or responsibility to the other person. I think it's too easy to fire off quick thoughts, and then feelings end up getting hurt. But in short sentences, feeling tone never comes across very well. A lot of these issues are really huge, and you need to take the time to actually talk to somebody and listen and have a dialogue. Not just post things up on a wall basically. That's like the wall behind you. If people just wrote thoughts and put them up on Post-it notes and stuck them on the wall, that's what social media is in a digital format. [00:04:32] PF: How is it kind of reinforcing this mentality of, “I'm right. You're wrong. You need to listen to me.”? [00:04:39] RV: We've been living in a society for the last, God, how many years of decades really where it's winner takes all and zero sum game. People have been taught through reality television and all the other things around us, even in politics, that it's, “I'm right. You're wrong.” That’s not how the world works. You're never going to get there, reach compromise, figure out how to collaborate if you just dig your heels in and stay on one side versus the other. It's really detrimental to having productive conversations with people. [00:05:21] PF: You wrote a blog post called Divided, We Stand, and that is part of what sparked me wanting to have this conversation with you. We're going to share it on the Live Happy website. We're also going to put it in our newsletter because you brought up such wonderful points. One thing that you shared was that there was a survey that shows 62% of adults in the US consider our inability to overcome our differences opinion as one of their biggest concerns. If we are so concerned about it, why are we still taking these approaches? Why aren't we working to bridge that gap, but we're just seeming to dig a divide that's deeper? [00:05:59] RV: Well, because they haven't listened to this podcast or read that blog post yet, Paula. [00:06:03] PF: Here we go. Well, we're going to change that, aren't we? [00:06:06] RV: Honestly, it's because we don't know what to do, and that's part of what with Divided, We Stand and some of the other posts I've been doing, I'm really trying to help people understand and give them the tools so that they can have more productive conversations with other people and realize that, hey, at the root of it all, we want to be happy. We want to have the freedom to live our lives. We don't want a lot of interference one way or the other. We want to just exist. How do we work together to make that happen? It takes communication. We've got to turn that paradigm around where it isn't winner takes all. It's united we all win, and how do we actually do that? [00:06:52] PF: Oftentimes, we can start a conversation with every intention of, okay, I'm going to listen, and I'm going to be calm. I'm going to be cool and collected. Then I'm going to logically present why I feel the way I do. Shocker, that's not how the conversation goes. [00:07:09] RV: Yes. It's really hard. Every conversation that you go into with somebody, you're carrying all the triggers from your past experiences with them. A lot of these situations are coming up with a friend from high school that you've known for 20, 30 years, a family member. There's a lot of emotional baggage, if you would, that goes along with that, and so it can be very easy to get triggered by that. Then, yes, that's when the conversation goes off the rails. What I wrote about in Divided, We Stand is the idea to keep in mind where – remember the human element. Remember that this is a person that you in theory care about on some level, and treat them with that sort of respect. Remember as well that all these issues that we're talking about out today in politics are highly personal. Someone is really affected by this, whether it's immigration-related issues, whether it's about access to puberty-blocking medications for trans-identifying kids, whether it's access to reproductive health and abortion rights. This really affects people's lives and very deeply. Some people it doesn't and they may be having more of a theoretical argument about it. A man arguing with a woman about abortion access, who's most affected by that? The woman. So you have to keep that in mind. These are really personal issues. Of course, when they're that personal, they're going to get really heated very easily. How do you keep things at a more intellectual but no less passionate level, if that makes sense? [00:08:57] PF: It does and I know you use empathy. You are now, Rob, going to give us the million-dollar answer of how we do that. How do we keep it from getting heated and raw and vicious? [00:09:11] RV: Well, Paula, are you ready to take a curious breath? [00:09:14] PF: I love your curious breath. Tell us about the curious breath. This is the thing. When I do trainings around empathy, hands down – I have the five steps to empathy is kind of the framework. But before you even take a step, you've got actually take a curious breath to get yourself into that mind space. I include that in all of my trainings, and that's the thing people come away with like, “What was the most useful thing?” They're like, “Oh, it's the curious breath. I'm going to just do that over and over again.” Then I hear back like, “Oh, yes. I was taking a curious breath, and it helped me see that sales negotiation differently. It helped me interact with my child differently. It's useful everywhere.” The idea behind the curious breath is that, cognitively, there is a space. There's a gap between stimulus. Somebody's saying something to you, and then your reaction to it. Neurologically, those two things do not actually touch. There's a little tiny gap that's very, very small, but it's there. The goal is to try to get into that space and widen it so that you can actually decide how to respond rather than react to someone. Clap back to somebody that said something to you. That's a reaction where if you take a curious breath, it gives you the space to actually respond. The beautiful thing is the breath is actually a big inhale and exhale. If you can imagine, as you take that big inhale, you're going to feel your lungs press against your rib cage. When you're taking one of those big deep breaths and you're feeling everything kind of push out, imagine that that's what's also happening in your head. When you do that big inhale and then that exhale, it actually makes space. Just like it's made space in your lungs, it's making space in your head. Shall we try one together? [00:11:10] PF: Let's do this. [00:11:11] RV: Okay, okay. We're going to take a nice – and everybody please, everyone listening, please join us. You're just going to take a nice big inhale on three. One, two, three. Maybe hold it there at the top for a second. Feel the ribs pressing and then exhale. Let's do one more just to make sure we got it. I want to pull people's attention to what's happening with your lungs and your rib cage and just make sure the breath is deep enough that you're feeling that expansion happening. Here we go. One, two, three. Inhaling, hold it for one, and exhale. This does have the ability to calm our nervous system as well a bit. That's why in yoga and other practices, breathing is so important. That calming actually helps also, I think, create space in the mind. That's the benefit of a curious breath. If you're in a conversation and somebody says something and it's just got you, “Oh, my God. I want to rip their –” Pause because you're reacting in that scenario. Pause. Just take a breath, and that's going to give you the space to decide how you're going to respond. You can even then use some filler words to give yourself even more time. Say, “That's an interesting point you brought up. Huh, let me think about this.” You’re breathing all the way through all of that moments. It’s, again, giving you a chance to figure out how to respond instead of just merely reacting. [00:12:50] PF: Now, do you have any tips for practicing that beforehand? Because just like you're not going to go play a game, you're not going to go play pickleball without practicing first. [00:13:02] RV: Absolutely. [00:13:02] PF: This kind of the same thing. It’s very unlikely that if you're putting that in your back pocket and waiting until that conversation takes place that you're going to be like, “Oh, wait. I'm supposed to take a curious breath, and then I'm going to do all these things.” How do you start incorporating that into activities that aren't potentially heated? [00:13:20] RV: Paula, that's a great question that you're asking. [00:13:23] PF: Why thank you, Rob. [00:13:24] RV: You're welcome. I just filled a little couple of seconds of time. I knew what I was going to say, but I'm filling that time as an example for people to like, “Hey, that gives me a sec to gather my thoughts and figure out what I'm going to say.” I think it's really important to that idea of practicing. If you're going into a conversation and it could be a family gathering or something and you know that person, Uncle Bill or whoever, no offense to the Bills in the world. But let's say Uncle Bill is coming, and he has a very different point of view. Ask yourself ahead of time like, “What if –” Well, first, if the conversation even comes up because you don't know that it will. But you can think, okay, if the conversation comes up, what am I hoping to get out of this? Is it even realistic that you're going to change their minds? Or is it really that you want acknowledgement that they see you as a person and they understand where you're coming from and, hopefully, that you're understanding where they're coming from. Identifying what that out is that you're looking for is really helpful. That helps you prepare. Then you can think about, okay, he's going to say – Uncle Bill's going to say this. Then how do you respond to that in a way that is going to help him see your perspective? An easy thing to do is to work into that conversation as you're responding. Uncle Bill said the thing. You're like, “Whoa.” You take in a curious breath. [00:15:04] PF: Or 16. [00:15:05] RV: Or 16 while you're saying, “Huh, thanks for sharing that, Uncle Bill. You know, I have to tell you that.” I just filled so that I can figure out what I'm going to say. Then you can say it like, “I have to say that I hope you can see where I'm coming from. By using that phrase I hope you can see where I'm coming from or I hope you can see how I'm feeling about this or my point of view. It's actually asking them to have empathy with you. You're setting it up to take this into a different place. You're not pundits on Fox or MSNBC or CNN debating or really yelling at each other. You're not doing that. You're actually asking to have more of a conversation and see me as the person that I am and how this is affecting me. [BREAK] [00:15:54] PF: This episode of Live Happy Now is brought to you by BetterHelp. We’ll be right back to talk more with Rob Volpe. But right now, I'd like to take a moment to talk about self-care. Self-care is so important, especially during stressful times. But even when we know that, it's often hard to make time for it. It seems like there are so many other things that take over our calendars, and we end up making time for everyone but ourselves. One way to practice self-care is through therapy, and that's where BetterHelp comes in. Therapy is a great way to discover new coping skills if you're feeling stressed and overwhelmed. It can also teach you how to give yourself more of what you need to become the best version of yourself. If you're thinking of starting therapy, I encourage you to check out BetterHelp. Because it's online, it's completely flexible and works with your schedule. All you have to do is fill out a brief form to be matched with a licensed therapist. You never have to skip your therapy day with BetterHelp, so visit betterhelp.com/livehappy today to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P, .com/livehappy. Now, let's get back to the show. [INTERVIEW RESUMED] [00:17:09] PF: How important is it for us to determine now to make up our mind, “These are people that I'm not going to have that conversation with because I know we disagree, and I don't want the turmoil.”? We have two situations on each side of my family. One is two family members to decided like we are just not going to agree on politics, so we won't talk about it. Then I have two family members who decided they would try to hash it out, and now they're not speaking to each other. It's been about three years. How do we make that decision of, yes, I have an opinion, and it's very important to me? It's not just an opinion. It's a belief, and it's very important to me, but it's not worth losing this relationship over. [00:17:57] RV: That's an individual decision for every person listening and then every person that they are thinking about. They may prioritize those relationships differently, depending on all the different situation, how close they are, if it's blood versus friend, and how tight the connection is, how old are they. If we're in hospice, it doesn't really matter. I don't need to have this discussion. Let’s focus on the ultimately much more important things which is appreciating your life in general. Anyway, you have to have that individual decision. I can't just tell people, “Oh, do it this way.” But you have to think about it. If you're like, “You know what? This relationship is valuable to me, but I don't want to get into it with them,” I think that's a fair conversation to have. Let them know how you feel and that, “We're on different sides of the political spectrum, but I love you dearly. You're very important to me. I don't want to get into a situation where this is going to tear our relationship apart because you're more important to me than these political issues,” or whatever the debate is. How do we move forward? Is there a code word we can come up with when we're veering into the that — [00:19:20] PF: We need a safe word. [00:19:22] RV: We need a safe word. We need a safety deposit box that we can just put all that crap into and come back to it. You can have that conversation so that both people know where the other person stands without getting into all the things. You can also have the conversations. Again, this is where the emotion comes into play and can you kind of pull yourself up out of. Take those curious breaths to pull yourself up out of that reaction. There's a woman I wrote about in one of the most recent blog posts. I wrote about a conversation I had with a woman in South Carolina. She’s part of this longitudinal study Navigating to a New Normal. We've been talking for four years. I talked to her on January 8th, 2021. She had a very different – I was traumatized by January 6th. That's one of the things that I have still not healed from, and I'm trying to figure out how to do that. She had a very different perspective and take on the whole thing when that was really hard. As we were moving into the conversation, this guy around was like, “All right. We were planning to talk about all the things.” But we ended up having a really good conversation that we didn't change each other's minds, but we shared – I asked questions on how her perspective. Because I've been talking to her for four years, I share a little bit more about myself and clarify. We had the conversation about JD Vance and the childless cat ladies. She's a mom of three kids. Her perspective, she's like, “Yes, I get that.” She's like, “I'm constantly thinking about my kids in the world that they're going to move into and all of that.” I said, “I hear you. I get that.” I as a childless cat dad of three cats, I still have nieces and nephews, and I do think about the world that I'm leaving maybe in relation to them but just the world in general and that my understanding of that. I was able to talk about that situation. I helped her see where I was coming from and say I acknowledged. Yes, I can see where parents would feel that way, and that was Illuminating for her. She was like, “Oh, okay.” She said, “I get it. I see your point.” That doesn't mean she's going to change her vote or anything, but we at least developed some empathy with each other. We understood each other's points of view. We agreed to disagree, but we kept it very kind of civil, if you would. We didn't get into a knockdown drag out. So, yes, you can do it, but you've got to choose how you're going to approach the conversation and if you're going to even have it. [00:22:02] PF: Once you do that, does that change how you then approach other conversations? Say you've had this successful conversation with somebody, and you are a little bit like, “Okay, I don't agree with you. But now, I do understand why you have that belief.” Does that then change how you approach others? [00:22:19] RV: Absolutely. Because then if you've got that understandings, let's say – let's go back. Let's bring Uncle Bill back into the conversation. [00:22:27] PF: Come on, Bill. Come on back. [00:22:28] RV: Bill's sitting down here, and we've had this good conversation, and he's – I've gotten some empathy. I understand where he's coming from now. If I go have a conversation with Aunt Sally on the other side of the family, who also seems to have that same belief, I can share. I may not want to name names, but I can share like, “You know, I've heard from other people that have that same belief that this is what's behind it, why they're feeling that way. How does that sit with you? Is that how – do you feel that way? How does that sit with you? What do you think of that?” Then you let them kind of respond. You're starting to go, “Oh, okay. This really is this sort of underlying belief system.” Then if you really want to do something about it, you can start to take that information and figure out what might persuade them, what might solve the problem in a way that we're all happy with it. Obviously, we're individuals in a much larger political situation. But if you think about other familial disputes or conflict with family or friends, you can use the same approach and apply the same principles. [00:23:43] PF: I love it. Now, I know I have to let you go, but I have one more thing you talk about that I really want to bring up. That is you brought up recently the point to stop othering people. Oh, I love this. How does it help when we stop referring to someone as being on the other side and instead we just accept them as having a different opinion? What change does that make? [00:24:07] RV: I hope people do take a moment to read Divided, We Stand because I do write about on the other side. An industry, a research industry colleague, Susan Fader, I want to give her credit. She reached out to me afterward, and I love hearing from people. Anyway, Susan reached out. She was like, “You know, word choice is important.” She really focuses on that in her work, and she's like, “When you say other, it immediately others them, and it creates that difference and distance, rather than they're just people with different viewpoints.” That was such a huge, “Oh, yes. Dang, I did it myself, and I'm an empathy activist.” They're not other. They're not aliens from another planet. They are human beings. They have a pulse. They have thoughts and feelings. You're going to find that you have things in common with them. It's just that you have some different viewpoints. It’s staying open to that and realizing that with people. Related to that and what else we were talking about, there's a chapter in my book called Fear, which was when I got to go to the NRA gun show and was there on behalf of a client to talk to people about why they have carry conceal permits. What I found is I really started to just be open. Not think of, “Oh, they're other. They're weird. They're gun [word: toting — inaudible 00:25:32] and everything.” Just be curious about their viewpoint and where they were coming from. The title of the chapter is Fear. As we kept talking, that's what was revealed was that they were afraid of the world that they live in, and they want to keep themselves safe. Similarly then, my Liberal Leftie friends here in San Francisco, as I was talking to them about the project and what I was hearing, it was the exact same issue for them. It's a scary world they happen to be afraid of people with guns because they don't know if they're trained or what they're going to do with it. It's like, “Oh, okay. We're all afraid. So how can we use that then? If we understand that we're all afraid, what's going to make us feel safe and secure in the situation? How do we collaborate and compromise?” That's how empathy can work in all of this. [00:26:17] PF: Tell me what kind of differences will we see in the next few months if we can learn to approach our conversations with calm and empathy. [00:26:27] RV: I think – so we were talking at the top of the show about that stress and the chaos and the frazzled nerves and the meanness. You're going to see a lot of that for yourself diffuse. That's going to dissipate a bit. You're going to have, hopefully, a calmer sort of presence and understanding of where people are coming from. It's giving you knowledge. Once you have knowledge, then you can actually do something about it. Hopefully, people will be able to also recognize what are the things that they can influence and what are the things they just need to let go and say, “That's how this person is, but at least I understand how they appear.” Or we have had a nice conversation with a code word where we're just not going to talk about these things, and we're going to talk about some other stuff. [00:27:16] PF: I love it. Rob, you always have such wonderful insight. I appreciate you taking time to sit down with me, and we'll be talking with you again I'm sure. In the meantime, we're going to run your Divided, We Stand blog post. Tell people how they can sign up for your newsletter. Thank you again. I appreciate you. [00:27:32] RV: Paula, thank you. It's always awesome. Just keep taking those curious breaths, and it will get us through this election madness. [00:27:40] PF: I love it. Talk to you soon. [00:27:42] RV: Okay. Thank you. [END OF INTERVIEW] [00:27:47] PF: That was Rob Volpe, talking about how we can learn to listen and use empathy to better understand one another. If you'd like to learn more about Rob, follow him on social media, read his article, Divided, We stand, or check out his book, Tell Me More About That, just visit us at livehappy.com and click on this podcast episode. While you’re there, be sure to sign up for our weekly Love Happy newsletter. Every week, we'll drop a little bit of joy in your inbox with the latest stories, podcast info, and even a happy song of the week. That's 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 Coming Up in Season 10 With Paula Felps and Deborah K. Heisz [EPISODE] [0:00:02] DH: Welcome to another episode of the Live Happy Now podcast. I'm Deborah Heisz, co-founder and CEO of Live Happy. I couldn't be more excited to be here with you today. In fact, today, as we wrap up Season 9 of Live Happy Now, we want to talk a little bit about what's coming up in Season 10. For those of you who are used to our regular podcast host, Paula Felps, she is on here as a guest today. We thought we'd flip things on its head a little bit, and let me interview her for a change because we got a lot of exciting things coming up. She works so hard to make Live Happy Now, the success that it has been, with our regular listeners, we've had more than six and a half million downloads, we've had nine years of tremendous success. We've got a massive library of great interviews, great information out there for you to tap into. If you're new to Live Happy Now, and we're excited that you're listening, and we just got a lot to talk about. We're coming up on our 10th season. So, you know, there's new podcasts launched every day, but we've been going at it for 10 years. Paula, tell us a little bit about what's coming up for Season 10? [0:01:04] PF: Well, first of all, thank you for the introduction. It feels so odd to be doing it this way, because you know, I like asking the questions, not answering them. But yes, so Season 10, we're really going to build on what we did in Season 9. As you know, we did some things differently, and you're a big part of that, because we introduced a couple of email courses that we had tried. We'd started that back in Season 8, we did one on pet loss, and that has done well. So, in Season 9, we did our shot at love email course for Valentine's Day. Then, of course, we're just wrapping up our – we're actually still in it, our summer of fun email course. So, because of the response we've had, we're going to be doing more of that. One of the things I'm really excited about is, we're working with a psychologist, Dr. Lauren Cook, and we're going to be presenting a four-part email series on election stress. I think that's something everyone's familiar with, everyone's failing in some way or another. So, that's one of the things I'm most excited about. We have a lot of great guests lined up, but I'm really excited about being able to do more with our email courses. [0:02:08] DH: So, we're a podcast first and foremost, Live Happy Now. We're about bringing you all of the information you need to craft the life you want to live a happier life. But as listening to Paula, you should picked up by now, we also have other avenues where you can connect with us, our email courses, our website, livehappy.com. If people don't know about our email courses, which I know we've talked about on the podcast before, where can they access the old ones or can they access the old ones? Where can they make sure that they are registered so that they can find out about the new ones and get access to those. [0:02:41] PF: We have our weekly newsletter. I appreciate everyone who subscribes to our newsletter, because we have an incredible following. I so appreciate the support that we've gained. So, you can just go to livehappy.com. In their drop-down box, there's a newsletter tab, you can click on that, subscribe for free, you'll get happiness in your inbox every week. We get our song of the week, which I always love picking that out for everyone every week and it always goes with the theme. So, you can start with our newsletter, and then our newsletter will also keep you informed when we have special courses. And on that same webpage where you can sign up for the newsletter, you'll see a list of our courses. So, you can just kind of scroll down, find one that works for you, and sign up for free. [0:03:23] DH: Well, enough of the commercial because I know a lot of people out there know, never enough of the commercial. But I know a lot of people out there are just podcast listeners, maybe they're listening to this podcast as they take their morning walk, or maybe they're listening to it as they're working around the house, maybe they're listening to it as they drive into work, which is actually how I listened to it. Don't feel like you have to do all the other stuff to get a lot of stuff out of the podcast. We have a lot of great topics and a lot of great guests on here. Paula, you mentioned something, and I'm so glad that there's a course coming with it, which is upcoming, which is just a dialogue on how to deal with the political election stress that really is hitting so many people right now. I'm really excited about that. I need to make sure that all of our listeners understand, Live Happy does not have a political point of view. That is not what we are about. You are entitled to whatever your political beliefs are, we are happy to have you as a listener, we're happy to have you engage with us because we're really all about allowing you to craft the life that you want, so that you can be happier. We aren't here interjecting our own thoughts or beliefs, which are myriad across the Live Happy organization. We have people of all political persuasions working on this particular product. But election stress is real. So, tell me a little bit about how live happy is going to be helping our listeners and people connect with us deal with that stress. [0:04:46] PF: So, the first part of any problem, as you know is recognizing it, and this all started because of Dr. Lauren Cook, who is the psychologist who is creating the course with us. Because of course, we always want to make sure that we are rooted in the science and the psychology of it. She specializes in working with Gen Z, which is another topic we're going to talk about. But she had noticed in her client base that particularly among Gen Z, there was so much trauma and tension already early in the year about what to do with the elections. So, she and I had a conversation about it, and that just kind of snowballed. I started talking with some other experts, who are also looking at it from different perspectives. I work with a man named Rob Volpe, he's out in San Francisco area. He works in the empathy space. He brought up something that is simple but genius. He said, "Even by saying the other side, we're creating a divide." He said, "We need to quit othering one another and stop looking at it. It's not another side, it's a different viewpoint." So, there's so many things I've learned already just from talking with the guests that we're going to have and getting this all lined up. So, I'm really excited, and I know that they're going to add so much to the conversation. The thing, just as with every episode we ever do, you may not agree with every guest, but there will be something. I look at Live Happy Now as a buffet table. Because when you go to the buffet table, you don't load up everything. Well, I hope not. You don't take everything from the table, but there's always something for you, that you can find that you can learn, you can nourish yourself with. [0:06:26] DH: Yes. I think this is a very, very important topic. Like I said, we don't have a political viewpoint for Live Happy at all. In fact, our viewpoint is that we would hope that people would come together. No matter what happens in this election cycle, at the end of it, we've all got to get on with our lives and do what we can to improve our communities around us, regardless of the outcome. I think it's very important for people to learn how to deal with that stress and deal with radically different viewpoints than the ones they personally held, and how they can continue to live their life and make a difference in the way they want to make a difference. Despite the fact that they may not always feel congruent with the people they're talking to. Then, really, when we're talking about political differences, that's what we're talking about. It's no different than religious differences. It's no different than any other fundamental belief that you hold that someone else a different fundamental belief that might appear or occasionally be in conflict to the ones you hold. We all need to get better at dealing with people who think differently than we do. It'll be a much happier world when we can have civil dialogue and civil discourse, and not other people. I love that, don't other people. Welcome people, listen, understand, have constructive dialogue, but move forward. I'm really excited for that discussion. I'm really excited to listen to everything that's been brought to the table, that we're going to be going over in the next couple of months. Because let's face it, we live in the United States, the next few months are going to be dominated. When you turn on your television, when you turn on your radio, when you turn on your computer, and you open up that browser, they're going to be dominated by election news. It's impossible to escape, and they're going to be dominated by people who share and people who directly oppose your opinion. I think it's really important to keep yourself mentally healthful through all of that. I find it really interesting that you brought up Generation Z, because the happiness report that came out in March, we've talked about this on this podcast before, what it showed us is Generation Z is fundamentally less happy than any other generation we have. Well, we haven't really looked at Generation Alpha yet for that, but they're fundamentally less happy than Generation X, than the millennials, than baby boomers. It really, I think, was shocking and surprising to everybody to have that outcome. So, I know we're doing some content on Generation Z. Tell us what you have planned, Paula? [0:08:54] PF: Well, that's going to be an ongoing conversation that we have. We're going to do something about once a month, where we deal with a topic that's relevant to Gen Z. Don't mistake this for a bit, to get Gen Z listeners, because this isn't – just like with any other rights movement, they aren't the ones that are going to make the change. It's the other people around them. It's the millennials, and the baby boomers, and Gen X are the ones that are going to make a difference for Gen Z, because we have to help change the way that they move through this world. So, those are some of the things that we look at, like what can we do, what is it that Gen Z is suffering from, and why is this. I see so many headlines where they're just like, "Well, it's because they're lazy. It's because they're on their phone." We as the adults in the room are not taking the time to really dive into what's driving their behavior. And until we do that, we can't help them. The fact is, they are our future, and how they move through the world is going to affect us later in life. So, again, we're all on the same ship, just as with the political beliefs. We're all in this together, and you can't wish that their side goes down because we're on the same ship. So, it's like, we rise or we sink together. So, we have to learn what it is that they need, why it is they see things differently, why they're so stressed out, and what we can do about it. If we don't change that, what does that mean for Generation Alpha? If each generation subsequently becomes less happy, we're not looking at very good outcomes for our grandchildren and their children. So, it's trite, but we need to be the change. [0:10:32] DH: We do, which isn't to say, we don't want Generation Z listeners. We do.   [0:10:37] PF: Exactly.   [0:10:38] DH: It's not just about us, but it's not just about our Gen X's, but it is everybody else. [SPONSOR MESSAGE] [0:10:44] PF: This episode of Live Happy Now is brought to you by BetterHelp. We'll be right back with the show. But I wanted to take a moment to talk about self-care. Self-care is so important, but even when we know that, it's often hard to make time for it. It seems like there are so many other things that take over our calendars, and we end up making time for everyone, but ourselves. One way to practice self-care is through therapy, and that's where BetterHelp comes in. Therapy is a great way to discover new coping skills if you're feeling stressed and overwhelmed, and it can also teach you how to give yourself more of what you need to become the best version of yourself. If you're thinking of starting therapy, I encourage you to check out BetterHelp. Because it's online, it's completely flexible and works with your schedule. All you have to do is fill out a brief form to be matched with a licensed therapist. You never have to skip a therapy day with BetterHelp, so visit betterhelp.com/livehappy today to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp.com/livehappy. As we enter the hottest month of the year, it's a great time to cool down, and Cozy Earth sheets can help make that happen. Thanks to their cutting-edge temperature regulating technology, Cozy Earth's bedding lets me stay cool and comfortable, even on the hottest of days. That means, I can wake up refreshed and ready for the day. Here's the best part, our exclusive offer for listeners like you gets you a 30% discount and a free item when you use a code, COZY HAPPY at cozyearth.com/livehappynow. I'll bet you'll love the unbeatable combination of softness and durability as much as I do. So, invest in your sleep health this summer and stay cool backed by Cozy Earth's 100-night sleep trial and a 10-year warranty. Visit cozyearth.com/livehappynow today to unlock this special offer and optimize your sleep for better health. After you place your order, be sure to select podcast in the survey, and then select Live Happy Now in the drop-down menu that follows. Now, let's get back to the show. [EPISODE CONTINUES] [0:12:59] DH: I think this is a really important topic because I have Generation Z children, those are my children. I was surprised by the outcome of the World Happiness Report, because I don't find them to be less happy, but I do find them to be more fearful and more stressed about things. We weren't fearful or stressed about it all that I remember, at least my peer group wasn't in the 'eighties, dating myself. But in the eighties, we just seemed a little more risk taking, a little less fearful of going outside the lines, a little more, I guess, empowered to have control of our own lives than I see in Generation Z right now. I think part of the issue we have is they don't feel empowered to take control of their lives and to live. I think there's a little bit of helicopter parenting, I think it's a little bit of coddling, I think it's a little bit of sheltering. They were all impacted by the pandemic, and it's easy for us as adults to say while the world is getting back to normal. For them, that was normal. So now, there's a new normal. If you're only 18 years old, and you spent a year and a half year life, not leaving your house or your neighborhood, that's a very different life experience than I had. [0:14:10] PF: I cannot imagine having to spend any of my high school years holed up in my house. I can't. I mean, a curfew was hard enough to deal with. So, I can't even imagine. [0:14:21] DH: I have to be home by 11? What? But I can't imagine how different they're set up. I mean, it's so different. The world is so different. So, I think it's going to be a really interesting topic. [0:14:34] PF: Can I bring up too that this is a generation that consumes their news from social media feeds. The algorithms know something that is fearful is going to get the clicks. So, they are being fed in addition to everything that they've experienced, the trauma of the pandemic, and everything else. They're being fed such negative news. I know we've talked about this with you, and your son, and you talking differently with him about that. Just because it's presented that way doesn't mean you'll never have a house. It doesn't mean you'll never be able to afford things. But that is where so many in Gen Z are coming from. Well, what's more concerning to me than that, is that Generation Alpha, which is also being called Generation Glass, because they are the first generation that's raised completely on screens, they're going to have that same messaging as well. So, they're going to be even more entrenched in getting that news that is undermining their wellbeing. [0:15:35] DH: They are also the generation that, particularly the upper end of that generation that truly missed some relationship development time with the pandemic. I have a 12-year-old, and she's very comfortable never leaving the house, she's happy. For me, that's just bizarre. I mean, she goes in the backyard, in the front yard, and we have friends over, and she does get out of the house. I don't want you to think my child's a recluse, but she's perfectly happy if she doesn't. Which is very different than, even my older two. She's at the very upper end of that Generation Alpha. So, they're just now becoming able to voice who they are. It's going to be different, because it's always different. It's always surprising. [0:16:12] PF: Right. I think it's going to be quite an adventure for us, and really eye-opening to be so aware of what's going on, and what needs to be presented differently. I think we'll learn as much as they do. [0:16:26] DH: I do too. I think it's going to be a really good season. I mean, I love that we cover these topics, because we don't have the answers yet. It's always interesting to talk about the stuff that there's no answers to, because there's so much work to be done. And I know there's a lot of studying that's going to be done, there's going a lot of stuff that we don't even know that's going to be available to us next year that's going to be coming out. It's going to be a great year. Great Season 10, Paula. Ten years. Isn't that crazy? [0:16:53] PF: How did we do it. Here's what's funny, because as I was prepping for this, and I'm like, "Wow, 10." I couldn't even remember our first podcast. So, I went back and listened to it. It was you, and you're introducing the podcast, and it was really nostalgic, it was really touching for me, because there was such enthusiasm, and optimism, and trepidation too of like, what are we getting ourselves into, and what's going to happen. To listen to that, and your hope, and your expectations. Everyone should go back and listen to it if they haven't. It's like a 10-minute podcast introducing it. It made me so joyful to listen to that. Then, to be able to look back, 477 episodes later, and say, "Wow, we did all that and more." That was really touching. [0:17:45] DH: We have definitely evolved. I haven't listened to the first one probably in eight years.   [0:17:51] PF: You should.   [0:17:51] DH: Maybe longer. I should go back and listen to that. But I know we started as a lot of companies, we've been through the digital revolution, we started as a magazine company, printing and mailing magazines to your house. Then, we added our digital website, livehappy.com, which has also evolved over time. Then, we added the podcast, and the first episode in the podcast were all about, what was in the magazine, when you go back. Not the very first episode, but what was in the magazine. Then, over time, I get to be jealous now, because Paula gets to do all of the interviewing, she gets to be the one who gets to meet with all these fascinating people and discuss their ideas. But over time, it really has evolved into the center of our business. This podcast is now our primary function. Yes, our companion newsletter is amazing. If you don't subscribe, you should subscribe. I'm going to share a little bit, and this doesn't mean anything to anybody out there in the world who doesn't follow media, but it's not just that we have a lot of subscribers to our podcast, is that our open rate is triple an open rate. Meaning, the average open rate. Meaning, people get it and they want to read it. You can unsubscribe any time, it's completely free. But we have the newsletter, we have the podcast, we post new stuff on the website. It really has evolved into being something that I'm very proud of. I'm excited about what we do, and to know that it's still all about making your world a happier place, and giving you the tools that you need. And it's all still grounded in science, we're not making stuff up. I mean, sometimes –   [0:19:21] PF: Not often, anyway, no.   [0:19:23] DH: Not often. Usually we'll say, this is our opinion, and we have really no idea, but we think this may be what's going on. But we're not making stuff up. But it's still grounded in science, and I'm really proud of it, and I'm excited to be entering our 10th year. I'm going to be on as often as I can. I want to close by asking you, Paula, two questions. The first one is, what is your favorite recollection about being the podcast host? What is your favorite thing that you've been able to do from the seat and the role you play at Live Happy? [0:19:52] PF: Oh my gosh. That is probably the toughest question you could ask me. I cannot even put into words the way that it feels when I have a dynamic interview. I feel like it's how a musician must feel when they walk off the stage, and they've just had the crowd roar. There's a feeling that you get when you're interviewing people, and there's a flow, and insight that they're giving to you is so meaningful. You're like, if it means this to me, I know it's got to resonate with somebody else. That has been the most gratifying experience that anyone can imagine. [0:20:27] DH: I'm chuckling because for our related podcast and other podcast that I'm in, which is called, Built to Win. We just did an entire episode on flow, and getting into flow, and how that feels. It's fascinating you find your flow through dynamic dialogue, that's great. For those of you who don't know what flow is, we've got tons of stuff on it, we've done tons of stuff on it on Live Happy. It's kind of essential to achievement, it's essential to an overall sense of positive wellbeing. There's a great book on it. It's a little technical, but there's a lot of articles summarizing that book. It's by Mihaly Csikszentmihaly, and it's called Flow. You should check it out if you haven't already. It's one of the foundational books of really Live Happy and Live Happy Movement. So, you should check that out if you haven't. So, that was question number one. Question number two is, what are you most looking forward to in our future? What do you think is on the horizon that you're just super excited about? [0:21:23] PF: Oh, our newsletter. We have so much growth plan, and so many exciting things that we're going to be unveiling through our newsletter. People don't know this, but I also work with an International News Media Association, and have learned so much about how we can engage with people, and how we can really reach people through newsletters. It has kind of changed our whole platform of how we approach this. I'm super, super excited. I love our listeners, I love our audience, and I'm really eager to share all these great new things with them through the newsletter. [0:21:56] DH: Well, thank you, Paula. Thank you for letting me sit in the interviewer chair.   [0:22:00] PF: Any time.   [0:22:00] DH: Although I probably pontificated more than I used to, more than I needed to, I mean. But I'm super excited about this upcoming season. I'm honored that you still let me take credit for a lot of this, because Paula – for those of you don't know, Paula is the heart of what we do at Live Happy. She is the center of the wheel that keeps all the other folks moving, and I could not appreciate her more. It is a joy working with her, and it's also a joy being able to be a guest on the podcast when I'm a guest, and letting me host this time brings back old memories. I miss hosting, I missed that flow that you get from that dynamic conversation. But I love listening to them, so thank you so much for everything you do. [0:22:34] PF: Well, thank you, and we'll have you back to host again. [0:22:38] DH: All right. Take care, Paula. [END OF EPISODE] [0:22:44] PF: That one was Deborah Heisz, talking with me about what's in store for Season 10. If you'd like to learn more about what we're up to, or sign up for our weekly newsletter, or any of the email courses we talked about, just visit us at livehappy.com and click on this podcast episode. If you aren't already receiving us ever week, we invite you to subscribe wherever you get your podcast. While you're there, feel free to drop us a review and let us know what you think. That is all we have time for today. We will 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: Prioritizing Play With Jeff Harry [INTRODUCTION] [0:00:02] PF: Thank you for joining us for Episode 478 of Live Happy Now. Summer is sort of a reset for all of us, but this week's guest is here to teach us how to prioritize play all year long. I'm your host, Paula Felps. This week, I'm joined by Jeff Harry, who combines positive psychology with play, to foster healing, and help individuals overcome their biggest challenges. He's sitting down with me to talk about why we all need to embrace the power of play, and how doing that can improve our wellbeing at work and at home. Let's have a listen. [INTERVIEW]   [0:00:36] PF: Jeff, thank you so much for joining me on Live Happy Now. [0:00:39] JH: Thanks so much for having me. I'm so excited for this conversation. [0:00:41] PF: Oh, it's such a great topic. It's something we have to talk about, because we don't talk about it enough. Tell me, I think I want to start by finding out and letting our audience know how you discovered the power of play. [0:00:53] JH: Ooh. So, I'll tell you my Batman origin story. I'll tell you the brief version. But do you ever see the movie Big with Tom Hanks?   [0:01:01] PF: Yes.   [0:01:02] JH: Oh, I saw that when I was in third grade. He got to play with toys for a living, and I was like, "That's a job?" So, I started writing toy companies in third grade, and I did not stop until I got into the toy industry, like I think 15, 20 years later. Have you ever gotten exactly what you've always wanted, and then been so disappointed when you got it?   [0:01:28] PF: Really?   [0:01:30] JH: Yes. It was a toy industry. There was no fun, there was no joy, no high fives, no kids, no play. They might as well have been selling like pillows or socks. So, I was somewhat like disenchanted. So, I left New York, that's where I was at the time, and I came to the San Francisco Bay Area, and I found a job on Craigslist, for anyone that knows Craigslist.   [0:01:51] PF: Nothing risky there.   [0:01:53] JH: Nothing risky there. That's where you get furniture down a dark alleyway. I found this job teaching kids engineering with Lego. It was basically playing for a living, playing, and teaching for a living. We grew it from seven people to 400 people.   [0:02:10] PF: Oh my gosh.   [0:02:11] JH: Yes, it became the largest Lego inspired STEM organization in the US. While we were doing all this, we started working with companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, all these top companies in the world. I realized they were not playing at work at all. Even at the best companies, they weren't finding a way. So, I created Rediscover Your Play as a way of exploring how can we infuse more play into our work to solve problems, because I feel like play is probably one of the best ways in which we learned as a kid. And I feel like it still is one of the best ways now. [0:02:48] PF: It something that comes naturally to us as kids. So, if it's something that we're born with, and it's inherent in us, why and when do we lose that ability to play? [0:03:01] JH: There was a professor, [Name inaudible 0:03:02] – I'm going to ruin her last name, but like Pam Settler that talked about how, by the time we reach the age of 18, I think it's 149,000 noes.   [0:03:14] PF: Oh my gosh.   [0:03:14] JH: That's the average amount of noes. Probably, we received in the range of 7,000 9,000 yeses a piece. Then, obviously, it depends on how you grew up. Probably in some places, you got even more noes than that, and barely any yeses. So, we're constantly told at such an early age, "Raise your hand, do this, do that." So much pressure coming from parents, and guardians, and teachers all being like, "What are you going to do when you grow up?" Constantly giving you all like this information, "Maybe you should be a doctor, maybe you should be a lawyer." You're like, "I'm six years old, like I don't even understand what is happening, and you're putting all." NASA did this study that found that, the creativity levels of a human being at three or four is massive, it's around like 96%, 98%. By the time we reach the age of 18, it's below 20%. Then, by the time we reach the age of 25%, it could even be below 12%, maybe sometimes below 10%. Creativity, your ability to look. We are told we have to be a certain way, so we forget how to play. So, the whole point of organization, rediscover your play is like, who are you, who are you as a kid, because that really actually dictates what you would love to do as an adult. [0:04:44] PF: Why is it important to be able to identify that? What change is it going to evoke in us if we can start rediscovering our play? [0:04:53] JH: Then, you're not trying so hard. You're not playing a role; you're not pretending to be somebody that you're not. We're naturally a certain way, and then we lose that. We lose who we are, but that inner child constantly is knocking on the door, and being like, "Remember me. We still love to do this." When you're able to connect back to your inner child, you're reminded of like, "Oh my gosh, this is what makes me come alive. These are the actions that bring so much joy to my life. I haven't done those in a really long time." So, it's really amazing when someone connects back to their inner child, because you see them change. And more so, not even so much change, but you see them get reinvigorated, because then you see who they really are. [0:05:43] PF: Do you ever have people –I'm sure this happens, where people are just not comfortable being playful? How hard is it when you find someone who has stepped into a very serious role or very serious mindset to get them to get in touch with their playful side? [0:05:59] JH: I define play as a new joyful act where you forget about time. It's where you're fully in the moment, is where you're fully immersed in your flow. Then, I also define plays the opposite of perfection. Perfection is rooted in like ego, shame, constantly trying to be right. While play is rooted in like curiosity, a sense of wonder, like a sense of awe. So, if I was approached someone about that, that is like is now so serious, I'm like, "How's that working out for you? Does that feel right? Do you want to be this perfectionist? How does it feel to carry this level of burden? Because it doesn't seem like you're having a lot of fun. It doesn't seem like this is an enjoyable way of being for you." I start small. I remember talking to someone that was just like, "I don't play at all." Then, I was like, "Well, what do you do? What do you do?" She goes, "Well, I'm a lawyer." I was like, "Okay. What do you do in the law?" She's like, "Well, I get people that disagree with each other to agree on one thing. Like people that hate each other, but I'll find one thing that they can agree on." That could be, that's her play. So, everyone has a play that they're probably doing right now, but they don't realize it is, because everyone's plays different. So, it's not like, "Oh, are you playing pickleball? Are you hula hooping?" It's just like, no. What is a joyful act that brings you fully in the moment, that taps into your zone of genius? That is your play. [0:07:25] PF: I'm so glad you brought that up, because adult play looks very different from kids play. So, when you're telling an adult, "We're going to go play." They're like, "I don't do hopscotch. I don't." So, how do you really help someone dive in deeper and explore, okay, this is my form of play. You gave a great example with the attorney. [0:07:44] JH: So, I try to help people figure out their play values. It was something I came up with my colleague, Lauren Yee, where we asked people, "What do you love to do as a kid?" So, I love to combine all my board games together and make an epic board game. So, I would combine Mouse Trap, Monopoly, Clue, all of them, Candy Land, Chutes & Ladders. And I make this epic board game, and I have my sisters play with me. They hated it, but I loved it. But what I found is my values in that is creativity, collaboration, and connection. Those are my three play values. The way I do my talks when I speak, or the way I run my workshops, or the way I brainstorm the next activity, or the next video, silly video I'm going to make combined my creativity, connection, and collaboration. So, identifying your play values based off of what you love to do way back when can I help you. [0:08:38] PF: That is so interesting, because I think when you break it down for someone like that, boy, it's not just, "I need to find a way to play." Because that can be hard as an adult to make that leap back to it. But yes, now, you're really looking at – I love the values part, and how I can integrate that into what I'm doing. [0:08:55] JH: Another tangible one that I do, and I do this with a lot of my coaching clients, or executives that I'm working with is, I ask them these two questions, to rediscover their play. Is I asked them to identify three to five people that they're going to talk to, three to find people that they're close to. It could be friends, it could be family, it could be colleagues, but three to five people that they consider close to them, and ask them these two questions. What value do I bring to your life? Like, what do I do for you? Why are we friends? Because a lot of times, we don't even know what value we're providing for someone. Then, the second question, which is really interesting is, when have you seen me most alive? Another way of asking that is, when have you seen me most creative, most at play? So, the two questions are. what value do I bring to your life and when have you seen me most alive? Then, to get answers back from those three to five people, you start to see patterns of like, "Oh, I didn't even know I give in that way. Oh, I didn't even know that I play in this way." Then, when you connect it all together, then you're like, "Oh." New ideas will come up of like, "I want to play in this way." Then, you reach back out to those same three to five people, and you're like, "Can you help me play more this way?" [0:10:12] PF: I love that. So much of your work centers around companies, and is with companies. I was trying to figure out, how does that translate to individuals, but you just gave us that entire recipe of how it doesn't have to be among your workplace, it can be among your circle of friends. [0:10:26] JH: And there's this other one that I'm actually really excited about, because I'm about to go to England on Tuesday. So, I'm going to experiment with this. I learned this from my friend Desiree, who travels all the time. So, usually, people when they have a bad day, I challenged them about whether they had a bad day. Usually, what happens is you had a bad experience, and that's only momentarily. So, you can decide to let go after 50 seconds, you could let go of that experience. But if you're in a loop, you start to think that the next bad experience is coming on the next one. So, you start thinking like, "Oh, bad things happen in threes. Guess what? It happens in threes." Because your brain is constantly looking for patterns for safety. So, an interesting question that she would ask herself, is she would ask, regardless of however her day is going, whether it's good or bad. She would ask, "How can it get any better than this?"   [0:11:19] PF: I love that.   [0:11:21] JH: So, if you're traveling and you just had some really fascinating conversation, you could be like, "How can it get any better than this?" Then, someone comes in like, "Want to hop on a moped?" And you're like, "Sure, I'll hop on this moped." Then you're like, "How can it get any better than this?" Then, all of a sudden, you find yourself on an island somewhere, watching the sunset. You're like, "How can it get any better than this?" You do that, and it builds a certain level of momentum. Then, your brain starts to positively prime. It's the same thing with gratitude journals, which a lot of people think are corny. But what you're doing is you're just doing pattern recognition, where you're like, "I'm going to look for good things to start my day." Now, if you pull out your phone, which I do as well, to begin your day, and you just start doom scrolling, and the first thing you see is negative, it actually dramatically affects your productivity, I think by 20% to 30%. So, just being aware of like, what is going into your head is crucial. I think a lot of times, we're not aware of that. [0:12:24] PF: Yes. One thing we do in our house, and this is relatively new, I mean, we've kind of done it, but we weren't conscious of it. But then, we sort of made it a thing, and it's, how fast can we make this funny?   [0:12:35] JH: Ooh, I love that.   [0:12:36] PF: If something happens – we bought an older home and a lot goes wrong. We've been fixing it up for four years now. So, it's like, things go wrong a lot out here. It's like, "Okay. How fast can we make this funny?"   [0:12:50] JH: I love that.   [0:12:50] PF: It's like, we could take the show on the road at some point, I'm thinking, because there's been so many things that have happened. Again, just like you said, what happens now when something goes wrong, instead of just being like, "Ah, you got to be kidding me." You're like, "Okay. I want to be the one to come up with a punch line on this." Right?   [0:13:08] JH: Yes.   [0:13:07] PF: So, it's like, you start going through your head like that. So, that makes it fun.   [0:13:10] JH: It's such a mind shift, because now, you have redefined any failure, or any mistake as this like, "Oh, this is an opportunity for us to play." That's so cool. I love that.   [0:13:23] PF: It makes it fun. [SPONSOR MESSAGE] [0:13:25] PF: This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Most of us are feeling a lot of stress these days, and one thing that can add to that stress is comparing ourselves to others on social media. It's so easy to start feeling like your life doesn't measure up. But with help from therapy, you can learn to focus on what you want, instead of what others are doing. Therapy can improve your coping skills and change the way you look at your world. BetterHelp is a great place to start. All you have to do is fill out a brief questionnaire and you'll get matched with a licensed therapist. You can always change therapists at any time at no extra charge to make sure you get a therapist who's right for you. It's completely online, so it's flexible, convenient, and works with your schedule. Stop comparing and start focusing with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com/livehappy today to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp.com/livehappy. We'll be right back with the show, but now, Casey Johnson, Live Happy marketing manager and cat owner extraordinaire is back to talk more about her adventures with PrettyLitter.   [0:14:36] TB: Paula, as you know, I'm a proud cat mom of three adorable cats. But, let's be honest, no matter how cuddly they are, those litter box odors are not so cute. Before PrettyLitter, it felt like no matter how much I scooped, our place always smelled like a litter box. With PrettyLitter, I found a product that is the perfect blend of beauty and functionality. That pretty crystal masks the smell at the litter boxes, and now, you don't even know I have three cats until they sit on your lap. So, to all the other dedicated cat parents out there, I highly recommend trying PrettyLitter. [0:15:06] PF: We're going to make it easier for them to try. They can go to prettylitter.com/livehappy and use the code LIVE HAPPY to save 20% on their first order and get a free cat toy. That's prettylitter.com/livehappy, code LIVE HAPPY to save 20% and get a free cat toy. Again, prettylitter.com/livehappy, code LIVE HAPPY. [INTERVIEW CONTINUES] [0:15:28] PF: Talk about what you see when people really start giving into their playfulness and really embracing that playful side. [0:15:35] JH: They become lighter, there's not as much burden upon people. You can feel it. You can feel it when you're around someone that's playful, and when you're around someone that's like a perfectionist. If you ever hung out with a perfectionist, like it's not fun. Like, restaurant with them, and they're eating lobster, and you're like, "This is really good lobster." Like, "Well, it's not as good as the one I had in Paris." You're like, "Dude, just enjoy being present." When I see people that have tapped more into their play, and are tapped more into their inner child, they can be present with people, they can be more playful, they're much more adaptive, they've embraced a much more growth-oriented mindset. So, if something bad happens, they're dramatically more resilient. Like what you just did with your example, where you're just like, "Okay. We're just going to figure out how we can make this more funny, more playful." They're willing to adapt more, and then that actually has a ripple effect on everybody else. Because then, people aren't so stressed out anymore. They're not driven by fear. They're not driven by scarcity. When you're in a playful place, you're much more abundant, you're much more tapped into your intuition, and you're much more tapped into your own emotional intelligence. So, this like really helps in so many ways, especially from a stress standpoint, because you're dramatically dropping your stress. [0:16:56] PF: So then. what's that doing to like our productivity at work? [0:17:00] JH: Well, when you're in flow, studies have found that you're 500% more productive. So, you're five times more productive. People are like, "Well, what do you mean by flow?" Well, there's this professor, the Doctor of Flow, Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. He made the only flow chart that I love, where it basically is like skill and experience. When you join a job, you have no idea what you're doing, you have no skill, and you're probably lacking experience as well. So, you have a lot of anxiety at the beginning, you have a lot of imposter syndrome. When you have so much skill, and you've been at a job for a really long period of time, you become bored. So, between anxiety and boredom, though, there's a flow channel where if the skill meets your ability directly, you go into this flow state. You know you're in a flow state because you forget about time. That's why I ask people all the time, "What is your zone of genius?" You have your zone of incompetence, things you suck at. Zone of competence, things your average at. Zone of excellent things that you're like good at, that you get a lot of praise for, but you don't really care to do them. But your zone of genius is the work where you forget about time, it's the work that you do, even if you're not getting paid to do that work. What happens is, when you're in flow, and follow me for just a moment, I'm going to get old nerdy. You go through something called transient hypofrontality. Transient means, refers to temporary, hypo is under activity, and frontality is talking about the prefrontal cortex. When you go through transient hypofrontality, a part of your brain shuts down, and your inner critic gets quiet. So, when that inner critic gets quiet, all of a sudden, you get a shot of dopamine, you become highly creative. It's almost like that movie Limitless, where you just start pulling ideas from your childhood, college, this thing, that thing, and that's where innovation comes from. That's where genius comes from. That's where like ideas that change the world come from when you're in flow. Then, studies show that then you're five times more productive doing that work. Then, it affects all the rest of your work, because then, you feel seen, you feel heard, you feel appreciated. And then, you're just in the momentum, and you get more focused doing all the other work that you typically don't like to do. [0:19:22] PF: Then, it affects how you present in the world because you're feeling good, you're happier with it, you're more fulfilled. You go home a happier spouse, mother, father, whatever that is. It just has such a domino effect. Just like a job that you hate has a domino effect. Being able to do that and find your place and find your flow is really going to change the way that the rest of your life feels. [0:19:45] JH: Exactly. And what's also interesting, and you can tell, probably, people that are typically most happy and most fulfilled are usually most present. When we're not present, that's when we're on our phones though, that's when we're looking somewhere else, that's when you can barely focus on what's going on right now. But when you're fully present, and fully at play, you feel all the feelings. It's very much like the Pixar movie Inside Out, where people are like, where they talk about how you want to feel all the feelings. You want to feel joy and sadness at the same time. That's what living is. When my dad passed away back in 2015, his brother showed up for the first time since their mom died. It was like 20 or 30 years since they had seen each other. So, I was surrounded by all my family members. I felt such an immense amount of joy. Then, I was like, "Oh my gosh, wait a minute. I'm at a funeral. I'm at my dad's funeral. I should feel guilty about this." But no, it's just like, no, you can have joy and sadness at the same time. You can be nervous and excited at the same time, and to be able to hold both truths and hold all those feelings. That's what living is. I think a lot of times, we're in such a mess state. Like, "Let me binge watch Netflix and doom scroll at the same time." Then, you're not feeling anything. Then, you're bored a majority of the time. When you're playing, you're opening yourself up to be open to all the experiences, all the emotions that come with it. [0:21:15] PF: Yes, it's so important. But of course, people right now are very time poor. This is something I can hear people like listening saying, "Yes, that sounds great, but I have this to do and this to do." So, for people that struggle with time, how do we make the time to prioritize play in our lives? How do we do that? [0:21:34] JH: Something mentioned to me by another play, friend of mine, play advocate, Gary Ware. He's like, "Who's your play partner?" So, we got to get some play partners, you got to get someone that's going to help. That is fun. It's what I did earlier when I asked you the two questions, the three to five people. Who is someone that can help you and be like, "I want to play more, but I don't have time." Well, then, we're going to work together to figure that out. Also, how important is it to you? How important is joy in your life? Look at all the things that fill up your day. We talked about how we're like, we don't have any time. The average amount of time that I think humans are on their phone is about five hours a day. So, you have time, you're grabbing your phone 200 to 300 times a day. So, I think we tell the story that we don't have time for the things that bring us joy. But I read something recently that was like, joy is vulnerable, joy is scary, play can be a little scary. Because I think a lot of times, we're so scared about feeling the fear things, but joy sometimes is even scarier. But that's where also so much living is. So, I would challenge people to look at their time, and see where there's opportunity. Even for example, with kids, you're like, "Oh, I have so many kids, I'm so busy." Play with them, join their play. Play some video games with them, even though you have no idea what they're playing, or play a game with your three-year-old even though you have no idea what game they're playing. Then, here's the flip side, show them your play. How do you use to play, they would love to see that. We talk about how – you only have 18 summers with your kids. Then, we forget later on about that. One of the greatest gifts that I think I've seen parents give to their kids, not only showing them their play, but also doing things where they fail, where their kids can see them, like make mistakes and try things out, and take risks. Like my friend Marina, who's in her late 40s just picked up roller skating. I think she injured her ankle the first time, and all the perfections, people are like, "Well, I told you, you will get injured." She's still doing it. She's still playing. What does that communicate to her kids, is that if this brings me joy, I'm going to do it. If I make mistakes, that's okay, and it's okay for me to fail, even in front of my kids rather than constantly trying to be the perfect parent, which no one can be. [0:24:15] PF: I think that's amazing. Summer time is a great time for play. This is a great time to be looking at it, get it started. But we go into fall, things get more serious. We have some serious stuff coming up this fall. So, how can we start now, building a daily practice of play so that it becomes part of our habits that carries us through? [0:24:35] JH: This is what I do for myself, so I'm just sharing this with others, is try one of the play activities that I suggested. Whether it's figuring out your play values, or asking the two questions. What value do I bring to your life? When have you seen me come most alive? Or, how can it get any better than this? Try one of those things. Then, don't put pressure on yourself that, "Oh, I got to play an hour a day." Just ask yourself throughout the day, "Is there something that can bring me a small amount of joy? What is that? Let me just do that." If you can't think of it, that's when you reach out to your friends and family, you're like, "Help me to find this." Rather than like making it so burdensome that it's just like, "It's just another thing to put on my to-do list, that now I got a play too." Just find things that you're already doing and figure out how to make them more playful. You just did that with your house. You're not doing something new. You're just shifting your mindset on how you show up. You might be able to practice this while people are traveling for the summer, where you're like, "Okay. I know I'm going to go to Disney, and I know my kids are going to have fun, but I'm just going to see it as just exhausting. Me just walking around all day long, just spending way too much money." Here's a shift. Try to see it through the lens of when you were a kid going to Disney your first time. Any experience like that, how do I see like my inner child all over again. Then, give yourself freedom to fail, and keep trying, and playing, and allowing yourself to be more of you. The perfectionist, thing that we are striving for, it's not realistic. It's driven by a lot of like consumerism and capitalism, so people buy more stuff. But when you're at play, you don't feel as if you need to fill the void. So, allow yourself the permission to play. [0:26:32] PF: I cannot think of a better way to end this. Jeff, we are going to tell people how to find you so they can learn more about play. I appreciate what you're bringing out into the world, and I super appreciate you sitting down and talking with me today. [0:26:44] JH: Yay. Thank you so much for having me. This was super fun. [END OF INTERVIEW] [0:26:52] PF: That was Jeff Harry talking about learning how to prioritize play. If you'd like to learn more about Jeff, follow him on social media or check out his website. Just visit us at livehappy.com and click on this podcast episode. While you're there, be sure to sign up for our weekly Live Happy newsletter. Every week, we drop a little bit of joy in your inbox with the latest stories, podcast info, and even a happy song of the week. That is all we have time for today. We will 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: Mindful Flower Arranging With Talia Boone [INTRODUCTION] [0:00:02] PF: Thank you for joining us for Episode 477 of Live Happy Now. We've all heard the advice to stop and smell the roses, but this week's guest also wants us to take a moment to arrange them. I'm your host, Paula Felps. This week, I'm joined by Talia Boone, a social entrepreneur whose work has centered around human and civil rights issues. As you're about to learn, she discovered flower arranging as a form of meditation and self-care. In the height of the pandemic, she launched Postal Petals to help others relieve the anxiety they were feeling. Today, her company's mindful approach to flower arranging is being used by companies, individuals, and community groups who are discovering just how life changing her workshops can be. Let's have a listen. [INTERVIEW]   [0:00:48] PF: Talia, thank you for joining me on Live Happy Now. [0:00:51] TB: Yes, absolutely. Paula, thank you so much for having me. [0:00:54] PF: You are doing something that is truly different. As soon as I read about it, I was just like, oh my gosh, I can't believe, it had never crossed my mind before. We talked so much about the benefits of nature here at Live Happy Now, and you are using floral arranging as a form of healing. So, I wanted to know, you've got a very interesting story. Can you tell us when you first realized that that could affect your mental health? [0:01:21] TB: Yes. So, the interesting story came to me very unexpected way. So, I have a really good friend, and she and I, whenever we get together, we're really intentional about doing things that we've not done before, always trying some new activity, never like, "Oh, let's go to lunch, or let's go to dinner." That's boring. Always, let's do something different. For one of our friend hangs, she actually suggested that we try flower arranging. I was like, "Cool, I haven't done that before. Let's do it." I liked it, not just because I was really proud of what I've made, but just something about the experience I just enjoyed in a different way that I had other activities. I ended up doing it again, I thought – because I live here in LA, we had the second biggest flower market in the world. I just was like, I'm just going to go down to the flower market, and grab some flowers, and come home, and arrange them, and just kind of see what happens. I went home, and I arranged them, love the flowers again, did it again, did it again. I just liked the way it felt. What I started realizing is that, I would go down to the flower market, just pick whatever feel good to me. I never knew the names of anything, except for the basic like roses, and calla lilies, and things like that. But I just would go down and just pick whatever felt good, whatever colors felt good, whatever shapes really spoke to me. Then, I would go home, and pour a cup of tea, and I would just arrange, and I would just feel like all of the worries of the day, the week, the anxiety, the stress would just dissipate while I arranged flowers. Even the process of just like prepping them, and pulling the stems off, and the thorns, all of those things, I just found it really, really therapeutic. Without really having the language for to call it that then, it became my go-to form of self-care. So that, you know, fast forward a couple of years later, whenever I feel stressed, that's what I would do. I would instinctively go to the flowers. So, fast forward to the very early days of the pandemic, I was starting to get very stressed out as they kind of – as two weeks went to four weeks, went to six weeks, and then it just looked like an endless amount of time that was going to kind of consume us in the home. I started to get really nervous, as I'm sure most of us did, with the uncertainty of what it meant for ourselves, our livelihoods, our families, all of those things. My therapist, we've kind of we're trying all these different things to see how I could kind of calm myself down. I'm very much a person that's into what I call lifestyle medicine. I believe diet and exercise, the right kind of food, the right kind of serving your body in the way that it actually needs it natively is what I kind of will always gear towards. I'm very, very cautious about medications and things like that. So, those kinds of things weren't options for me, and she didn't really recommend them, but that's not a route that I wanted to go. I know that prescriptions for medicines that calm your nerves were at an all-time high during the pandemic. [0:04:11] PF: Pharmacists are banking, right?   [0:04:12] TB: Absolutely. She actually said to me, she's like, "You know, Talia, I haven't heard you talk about arranging flowers in a few months. Why don't you try that and see if that helps you feel better." That ultimately started the journey for what is now Postal Petals. So, that's how I got the love of flowers, how I understood the kind of healing benefits. But then, once she suggested that I arranged them as a way for me to deal with what I was going through in the pandemic, that ultimately ended up being the one suggestion that led to starting Postal Petals. Because when I started looking for a company that could ship me fresh cut flowers to the house for me to arrange, I just couldn't find it. There were so many options to ship me ready-to-use arrangements, but there was nothing that allowed me to arrange them myself. That journey is ultimately what led me to recognize that there was a hole in the market, being that, what I was looking for did not exist. I just felt like, if I was looking for this, there's got to be other people who are as well. Then, I just saw an opportunity to enter into the flower industry. It was a time when events weren't happening, weddings weren't happening, people were hoarding toilet paper. They were definitely not buying flowers at the grocery store. Nobody was really thinking about flowers in that way. So, I took a chance, and decided I'm going to start this company, and we're almost four years later and Postal Petals is the best thing that could have happened to me professionally. I'm in love with this company, I'm so honored, privileged to have been chosen to build and run this company. [0:05:44] PF: That's amazing. For novices, what are we talking about when we talk about flower arranging? Because I'll be honest, the only flower engine I do is take it from the paper around it and put it in a vase. That's about as fancy as I get. So, what does flower arranging really entail? [0:06:03] TB: You know what it entails? It entails patience, it entails you allowing for the time to do it, it entails you allowing yourself to express yourself creatively. So, we are quite conditioned as a culture, particularly here in America. I think in other cultures, I know that they do a lot of flower arranging, and in Japanese, historically in Japanese culture, they arrange flowers specifically as a form of self-care, and meditation, and mindfulness. So, we're just kind of catching up to where flowers had been for many for quite some time. But, the actual act of flower arranging is, realizing that flowers don't always come as perfect as they come in these ready-to-use arrangements. You have to realize when those flowers show up to your florist, they've got leaves all over them, they've probably got bugs crawling in, and there's probably petals that are wilting and dying. So, it entails you being willing to work with those flowers in the same way your florist would, to kind of strip through all of the muck, or all of the waste to really hone in on the beauty. Then, once you hone in on the beauty, really put attention into thinking about where you want to place each stem. So, it's this idea of slowing down to get through that process. So many of us, it's so easy to your point, Paula, around just grabbing a bouquet from the grocery store, running some water in a vase, and plopping it into a vase. But when you stop, and you spread that bouquet out, and you decide that you're going to rearrange it. Now, you see, "Oh, there's leaves in here, let me pull those leaves off the water, off the stamp so that they don't poison the water. Let me adjust the height a little bit, because I want it to look a little bit more full. I think this petal, this bloom would look better over here next to this bloom." So, it's just that process of prepping the flowers, which is trimming them, removing leaves, removing thorns, removing what we call guard petals. But then also, kind of thinking through stem by stem where do those flowers best show up in the arrangement that would bring you the most joy. Then, really take your time to go through that process. I think once you kind of lose yourself in that experience, when you come out of it on the other side, experiencing a piece that I just can't even explain it. I think it's very similar to the way that people talk about gardening, and how they find it just so therapeutic. Most people who haven't done it would say like, "Why do I want to get my hands in the dirt, and do this, and do that? I don't want to do that. I could just buy my vegetables at the store. I could just have a florist deliver my flowers." But there's something about engaging with nature, whether it's in the dirt of a garden, or flower stems, as you're arranging. There's something about that process that is just so incredibly calming and therapeutic. [0:08:45] PF: This seems like such a mindful activity. You can't really be looking at each one, and deciding what you're going to do with it, and be thinking about, I've got to go pick up the kids from school, and I need to stop at the grocery store, and all these other things, you really have to focus. Is that a big part of the therapy side of it? [0:09:03] TB: Yes, it is, because it really forces you to just be present on what you're doing. It's interesting, because we offer our boxes as, you can get them on demand, but we encourage people to, as we say, kind of schedule and regulate self-care as a part of your routine. So, we do subscriptions, where you can get them every week, every other week, or once a month. The reason I say, kind of center your wellness, kind of schedule your wellness is because, when those flowers show up, you have to get them out of the box right away. So, whatever other things you're stressing about, whatever other things are pulling on your time or your attention, you're going to have to make time to pull those flowers out of the box, get them in some water, get them hydrated, and then go through that experience of arranging them. So often, we're in this hustle and grind culture, where we all are wanting to multitask, and do so many different things at the same time. Whereas, it really does in this way force you to pay attention, to be present, to not allow your attention to be diverted. Because if you're looking at work emails, and trying to arrange flowers at the same time, chances are, it's not going to turn out as beautiful as you want to. You're going to cut something too short; you're going to – there's something's going to happen. So, it's just an opportunity for you to design. It's also one of those things, I find that even people who are reluctant to try it, once they start their focus, they're dialed in. One of the things I love most about workshops is that, people come in all excited, and with all this energy, and they think it's going to be like a party. Once they start arranging, the noise dies down so much, because people just – they zone out, they just really, really get into it. It's a similar feeling to me. Result is different, and the experience and the textile is a little bit different. But kind of like when you're fixing puzzles, which is relaxing. You can be doing other things while you're fixing a puzzle, but it's going to take you a lot longer, because you're not going to be paying attention to what goes where and what makes sense. Flower arrangements really are a puzzle, they're your puzzle. It's for you to decide how you want them to turn out, but you have to give them the attention they deserve in order to know exactly where you want them to go. So that when you're done, and you twirl it around, you're going to be like, "Wow, I've made that, that's amazing." You definitely want to be present for that. Otherwise, the other side of that experience, if you're not present, is you're going to be, the whole week that you have them up, you're going to be noticing all the things that you would have changed if you would have been paying attention. [0:11:29] PF: So, I think you brought up to really great points without maybe even realizing it. So, when someone knows they're going to get these flowers. So now, you have this anticipatory savoring where it's like, they're really looking forward to this experience. Then, you have the experience itself, which we've talked about. Then, you have that, as you said, that week afterwards, where you're looking at these flowers. I think that probably brings back a lot of wonderful feelings, calming emotions, just by looking at that. [0:11:58] TB: You're absolutely right. I thank you for noting that point, Paula, because that's exactly it. We talked about or starting to talk more and more about self-care, we're offering them something that's really, at the end of it, they have this really beautiful reminder of that experience. You want to repeat that, because it just feels so good. There's nothing about flower arranging that you come out of, and you're like, "That was terrible. I'll never do that again." [0:12:23] PF: That flower bit me. [0:12:24] TB: Yes, they're so beautiful, like you absolutely love them. Then, also too, throughout the week, you have an opportunity to continue to engage with them. You want to keep trimming them and changing the water to extend their vase life. If one flower starting to fail, you pull that guy out. Sometimes, I even will, midweek, I'll take the whole arrangement out, lay it out, and design it again. Because sometimes, you just need a little bit of a, "Oh, I did a little bit of a huzzah. Let me give me myself a quick 15 minutes and I'll redesign this." It starts to really change the way that you think about flowers. Instinctively, even now, people when they see flowers, it brings a smile to their face that makes them happy. But when you're also able to add to it, that you were able to release anxiety or release stress, that kind of really changes even the way that you feel when you even see flowers. Because now, you've attached this really calming experience to it. Now, you've attached this kind of this mindful, and therapeutic experience to it. It really goes to elevate the relationship that we have with flowers. I think it's a missed opportunity when we allow florists to have all the fun, but we don't take on that experience ourselves. [SPONSOR MESSAGE] [0:13:37] PF: This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Most of us are feeling a lot of stress these days, and one thing that can add to that stress is comparing ourselves to others on social media. It's so easy to start feeling like your life doesn't measure up. But with help from therapy, you can learn to focus on what you want, instead of what others are doing. Therapy can improve your coping skills and change the way you look at your world. BetterHelp is a great place to start. All you have to do is fill out a brief questionnaire and you'll get matched with a licensed therapist. You can always change therapists at any time at no extra charge to make sure you get a therapist who's right for you. It's completely online, so it's flexible, convenient, and works with your schedule. Stop comparing and start focusing with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com/livehappy today to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp.com/livehappy. We'll be right back with the show, but now, Casey Johnson, Live Happy marketing manager and cat owner extraordinaire is back to talk more about her adventures with PrettyLitter.   [0:14:46] TB: Paula, as you know, I'm a proud cat mom of three adorable cats. But, let's be honest, no matter how cuddly they are, those litter box odors are not so cute. Before PrettyLitter, it felt like no matter how much I scooped, our place always smelled like a litter box. With PrettyLitter, I found a product that is the perfect blend of beauty and functionality. That pretty crystal masks the smell at the litter boxes, and now, you don't even know I have three cats until they sit on your lap. So, to all the other dedicated cat parents out there, I highly recommend trying PrettyLitter. [0:15:17] PF: We're going to make it easier for them to try. They can go to prettylitter.com/livehappy and use the code LIVE HAPPY to save 20% on their first order and get a free cat toy. That's prettylitter.com/livehappy, code LIVE HAPPY to save 20% and get a free cat toy. Again, prettylitter.com/livehappy, code LIVE HAPPY. [INTERVIEW CONTINUES]   [0:15:39] PF: You have turned Postal Petals into an entire movement. So, if someone's listening to this, they might think, "Oh, she sells flowers." It's like, "No, that's not what's going on here." You are doing community workshops; you even do online workshops. Talk about the workshops that you offer, and kind of what you see happen through the course of these workshops. [0:15:59] TB: Yes. So, thank you for asking that. We absolutely are not just flowers. I always say flowers are their tool. We are here to help introduce people to an attainable form of self-care, and mindfulness, and mental wellness. So, we do a series of free community wellness events where we incorporate movement, meditation, and then mindfulness with the flower arranging. So typically, it'll be maybe it's hiking, maybe it's walking, or like a restorative yoga session, followed by a breathwork session, or a guided, or sound bath meditation. Then, we take that really, once the body's already in a calm state, your mind has already kind of started to settle, we bring that energy right into a truly peaceful floral design workshop. We kind of guide people through, here's the flowers, and they walk into the space with the flowers, and it's just flowers everywhere. They can pick whichever flowers they want, and they go back to their stations, and we guide them, in a really kind way through the design process. We're really careful around not telling people where to put each stem. But instead, giving them tricks and tips like, "Cut the stems at a 45-degree angle, make sure you don't allow any leaves to fall below the waterline, because it'll poison your flowers. Be conscious of where you cut based on where you want the blooms to fall on the arrangement," things like that. The most rewarding thing after we do the free community wellness events, and then some of the corporate stuff that we do as well, is really the way that people without fail will comment about how unexpectedly good they feel after having gone through the experience. Because most people will say, I never thought about flowers in this way. I loved flowers. I've always loved flowers, but I've never, I've never experienced flowers in a way that I'm leaving feeling so relaxed, and feeling so centered, and feeling so calm, and feeling like I've addressed, I paid attention to my mindfulness today. That's really what we appreciate most. Then, even when we do our corporate workshops, or our workshops with – we do that private, we call them Petal Riot for design workshops. But we'll bring them in, and they'll say like, "Oh, there's going to be men in there, are men going to want to do this? We have come to find out that the men love it. They absolutely love it.   [0:18:11] PF: That's amazing.   [0:18:13] TB: Yes, the men love it. Many times, they are far better designers than they ever thought they were. I have been wowed so many times by the arrangements that some of our male workshop attendees have put together. They sometimes are dragged, kicking, and screaming to that workshop. But by the end of it, they're among the best, and typically, at the top of the class, it's really interesting. It's funny, because, I'll tell you, Paula, a trend that I was starting to notice when men would be in the workshops, whether they were the virtual workshops or the in-person workshops, is that they would naturally become very competitive. They would always want to make their arrangement better than everyone else. I would see this over, and over, and over again. I was thinking like, geez, I don't understand what that is. I really want this to be relaxing. I don't want it to feel like a competition. I was talking to a male friend of mine, and he was saying, he's like, "Talia, I think what you're not realizing is that for most men, competition is self-care."   [0:19:08] PF: That's a great way to look at it.   [0:19:09] TB: Yes, exactly. That's why they love watching games. That's why they love going to sporting events. Because for man, a lot of that is self-care. I never thought about it like that. But it also really helped me to kind of also even understand how to reach men, and how to, really, instead of discouraging the competition, encouraging it for those who need it, because everybody's journey is their own. While competition for me is not self-care, being able to be sensitive to, and to pivot, and adjust on the ways in which we're addressing each person in the class to make sure that we're meeting them where they are. So long as they leave with an experience of feeling exactly the peaceful and mindful experience that we want them to have. That's what we want. So, I say all that to say, it's a different experience for everyone that comes in, but collectively, regardless of the way that they get there through their flower arranging experience. Whether it's through the joy and peace of it all, or the competition of it all, they all leave saying that they never thought in a million years that they would have that kind of experience, or that they would leave feeling as good as they felt after arranging flowers. It really, it's a beautiful thing, and it's my favorite thing of doing workshops. At the end, I'll say, "How was it?" And they're just like, "This was amazing." [0:20:25] PF: How rewarding that must feel. [0:20:27] TB: Really. It really is, because it's, to your point as we were talking around this really being something that hasn't really been done before in the way in which we're doing it. It really is a unique offering, and it's validating every time I get that response. Because sometimes, people who have not had the experience find a hard time understanding why they would want to have the experience. Because we've been so traditionally conditioned to experience flowers as this ready to use product from florists. They just deliver them to your door, maybe you take some pictures, throw them on the ground. Then, you don't really engage with them again, until you're tossing them out into the trash because they died. The whole time you've had them, you've missed all that opportunity to really engage with them, those flowers, and those stems in a really, really meaningful way. So, I get it, why people don't understand it. But it's so rewarding when they do get it because they don't – once they get it, they don't do it just once, they keep coming back for it, and I love that. They're hooked on it like I am, and I love it. [0:21:26] PF: There you go. You did something really interesting and profound with Amazon. I want to hear about this. I was reading about this on your website, and I thought, oh my gosh. I'm not going to say anything more, because I want your words to describe this. [0:21:42] TB: Yes. Oh, God. Paula, thank you for bringing that up. That was actually one of my favorite events, very special to me for a number of reasons. But that event, Amazon had Amazon Studios, put out a film back in 2022, called the TILL movie, which was the Mamie Till-Mobley story about the lynching of her 14-year-old son, Emmett Till in the south, while he was there visiting family. It's a story that growing up in the African-American community, you've always been very much aware of, as well as stories just like it that happened, that have been happening for generations to our ancestors, men and women in our family who have come before us. When that film came up, and they were releasing it, they reached out, and they said, "Hey, we're doing a series of screenings and talks about, we want to have you there." This particular screening that we did was a screening for black mothers. It was a screening of the project, and they never meant to have like a panel discussion about that film, and what it brought up for them being mothers, and the way that they protect their children in general, but their sons, their black sons growing up in this country, in particular. When they came to me, I just said to them, the themes in this film, in other films like it, incredibly traumatic for us in our community. These bring up very negative feelings, very real vulnerabilities, and threats to our livelihoods, even today. So, I said to them, "I would love to work with you all, but I want to be really careful about the way that we engage in this type of space. Since we know that these things can be incredibly traumatic to our community, I want to make sure that we don't send them out into the world with that trauma from the screening and from the conversation that we can instead make sure that we're really intentional about the ways in which we can start to relieve some of that pressure before we leave." So, the idea that we came up with was to do one of our make and take bloom bars, after the screening and after the panel discussion. So, what happened was, the ladies went in, they did the screening, they had their panel discussion, and we were in a separate room in the back. You could kind of see, yes, they were coming out of that room, the weight of the film on them. But then, when they saw the flowers, and they got closer, and start to realize that the flowers were for them, you could visibly see the weight of the film starting to break away. As they were gathering up, and starting to pick the flowers that they wanted in their arrangements, and we started kind of fixing them up and wrapping them. Then, they started to converse with each other about the flowers that they were creating, and the flowers they were choosing, the arrangements that they were creating, it completely changed the spirit and the energy in the room, where the ladies were able to use the flowers as a way to decompress, and to kind of level set kind of their energies, and the spirit of kind of how they were feeling coming out of it. It just completely changed it, where they were talking about the flowers, and they were talking about the beauty of the flowers. As they were able to continue to have some of the conversation about the film, their perspective was very much shifted based on the fact that they were able to look at it from a different way, because their energy had been shifted. Then, they took those flowers, and we had a whole portrait studio set up for them. So, we were able to kind of memorialize the moment with those flowers, and with those women in the portrait studio, and to think that they were able to go from watching that screening, and really taking in those really heavy, heavy messages at the film. To ending with being given flowers, and smiling in a portrait studio was just really beautiful to see. Also, just a true example of the absolute healing powers of flowers. In real time, we were able to see how these women went from carrying the weight of this movie and their lived experience relating to the movie. And seeing the flowers being able to decompress that, and allow them to leave feeling less heavy than the film. [0:25:45] PF: As I read about that, I was thinking how it's really helping heal a traumatic experience for them. So then, I wonder, I know you have so much research on your website. I love the fact that you just have research that says, "Hey, it's not just me." There's science behind this that shows how good this is for us. But what do you see being able to do in terms of helping people work through trauma? [0:26:09] TB: Again, thank you for asking that. That's another thing that we're actively doing now, is beginning to partner with licensed mental health practitioners to start to develop floral healing curriculums that speak really specifically to various ailments. Mental and emotional health ailments that people may be going through. So, we're now really thinking about in addition to what – as our curriculum start to be formalized, really very intentionally beginning to partner with the social institutions that sit at the centerpieces of our communities. Thinking about schools, and community organizations, even rehab facilities, correctional facilities, aging, and caregiving facilities. Seeing how we can begin to take our flowers into those spaces and help with things like self-esteem, emotional intelligence, mindfulness. When you're thinking through rehab, and things like that. But even, people who are in facilities where they're having to find more healthy ways to express themselves, as opposed to coming angry or, or taking on substances, or anything that's not healthy and saying, "Well, let's put that energy into the flowers, and really being able to have curriculum that's very intentionally crafted to help people use the flowers in that way. The way that I love to describe this is, we are really giving people an attainable way to achieve, to reach for their mental, and emotional wellness. For some, they require that to be done in concert with professionals, in concert with medications, just kind of depending on what their unique condition is. But for many people, just the act of tending to your emotional and mental wellness, tending to acknowledging the anxiety that you're feeling, acknowledging the stress that you're feeling, and giving yourself 30 minutes to an hour each week or every other week. Just to kind of put that energy into the process of arranging flowers works wonders for your total emotional health. [0:28:04] PF: That's incredible. I'm so excited to see where this goes, because I know you've been at it for a while. But I also realized this is just really the beginning of what it can accomplish, and like I said, I hope you'll stay in touch. I hope we can watch and see it grow because you're doing a lot of amazing things. [0:28:20] TB: Thank you so much, Paula. I really, really appreciate that. Thank you. [END OF INTERVIEW] [0:28:28] PF: That was Talia Boone, talking about how mindful flower arranging can relieve anxiety and improve our wellbeing. If you'd like to learn more about Talia, follow her on social media or check out her Postal Petals workshops. Just visit us at livehappy.com and click on the podcast tab. While you're there, be sure to sign up for our weekly Live Happy newsletter. Every week, we'll drop a little bit of joy into your inbox with the latest stories, podcast info, and even a happy song of the week. 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: How to Stress Wisely with Dr. Robyne Hanley-Dafoe [INTRODUCTION] [0:00:03] PF: Thank you for joining us for episode 476 of Live Happy Now. If you're feeling more stressed than usual these days, you aren't alone. Today, we're going to find out why that is and what you can do about it. I'm your host, Paula Felps. This week, I'm joined by Dr. Robyne Hanley-Dafoe, an author, psychology instructor, and expert on resiliency. Her latest book, Stress Wisely: How to Be Well in an Unwell World, breaks down why the stress of today's fast-paced world is having such a devastating effect on us, both physically and mentally. She's here today to explain how we can manage that stress to become more resilient and even how we can proactively prepare for stress before it happens. Let's have a listen. [INTERVIEW] [0:00:49] PF: Robyne, thank you so much for joining me on Live Happy Now. [0:00:52] RHD: I am thrilled to spend time with you here, so thank you for the invitation. [0:00:56] PF: I'm excited to have you. I received your book, Stress Wisely, and it is one of the most profound books on stress I have ever read. The time I've spent with this is really more than I would normally spend with a single book, because you approach it in so many different ways. Before we dig into that, tell the listeners what led you to write this book. [0:01:19] RHD: Oh, well, first, thank you for that very generous feedback. My area of research is around human resiliency. I've been really curious. I've been teaching and doing research almost 20 years now on that area. One of the through-line, Paula, that just kept coming to the surface was that persons who were able to work with their stress systems, like people who had strategies to work with their stress system, they were so better positioned to be able to manage life when things went off the rails, or when stressors became really apparent. As I was doing this work on resiliency, I just really felt that calling to be able to say, hey, we got to shine some light and spend some good intention about understanding our nervous system, because that's really going to unlock how we can really, truly be well. [0:02:06] PF: Mm-hmm. One of the things that I love about your approach is it's very knowledgeable and scientific, but it's like talking to a friend. It is really like you, take us by hand, it's like, “Hey, we're going to go on this little journey through this thing called stress.” It's very friendly in the tone. Was that just a natural thing for you to write it that way? [0:02:28] RHD: I feel very fortunate and, again, being in a position where as someone who really struggled with school, so I was not a really super strong student, I really navigated with a lot of challenges academically, until I learned that with my ADHD and learning disabilities that I just process information in a different way. Despite being able to go on and being able to complete multiple degrees and have this really great academic success, something that's always been true to me is I love to share information in a way that resonates with how information lands with me. I'm really not interested in that notion of expertise. I'm interested in allyship, where walk with me and help me understand, because that's the learning that really resonates with me. Again, to be true, to be able to do this work, I felt I wanted to represent it in that similar way. That's why I'm just really appreciative when I hear folks say that, hey, this was a pretty kind approach to be talking about a very complex topic, which is what I really strive to do with how I prepared that material. [0:03:29] PF: A lot of books, or articles that we read about stress, it's like, how to overcome it. It's like, this is something we should beat, which just stresses us out more, because it's like, “I can't. Stress is bigger than I am.” You really take a different approach in that you talk about making stress an ally. [0:03:48] RHD: Absolutely. [0:03:50] PF: Talk about what that looks like when you make stress an ally and how you even begin doing that. [0:03:56] RHD: Yeah. You're absolutely right. Right now, it seems like, everything is going to kill us, right? Stress is one of those things, where they say, 90% of all diseases are associated with high levels of stress. It seems like, it's just permeating every aspect of our well-being and our culture. Then we hear that the remedy is to try and get rid of stress. Where I ran into a bit of just this disconnect was stress is actually our first line of defense. Our stress system is designed to keep us alive. It's not meant to do us this harm. What I really fell into was this notion that the way that we're living our lives very much is going against our biology. When we start to re-imagine that relationship with stress as in like, hey, this is my internal system that's letting me know what's okay and what's not okay, letting me know when do I need to rest? When do I need to focus? When do I need to regroup? Again, when do I need to just find a different way through it? What I really started to get curious about is how do we change that narrative that, again, stress isn't the enemy. It's the doses of cortisol that we're getting on a daily basis that we're now using as our default setting. Our default setting is this sense of urgency that everything's a crisis, and that hustle and that just never enough feeling is really this idea that that's just not sustainable. Instead, learning how do we re-regulate these nervous systems, so we can work in partnership with all of our parts, versus working against ourselves is what we started to think about in this work. [0:05:33] PF: I love that you acknowledge the fact that our bodies were not built for today's world. [0:05:38] RHD: Not even close. [0:05:39] PF: Talk about that. Why do you say that we are not equipped to live in the society we've created? [0:05:45] RHD: Well, I think the biggest one, even just if we come at it from a physiological perspective, our bodies and our brains are not designed to be in this place of omnipresence. What I mean by that is we're not meant to have these 18, 20-hour days where we don't have opportunities for rest and recovery. What's happened right now is we're creating this artificial ecosystem where we're calling this high performance, or we're just calling this the way that the world is now. But the reality is our nature is very much designed to have ebbs and flows, to have seasons of high productivity, absolutely. But then, we need time to rest and to recharge and just really enjoy that. Right now, again, I think we're doing a big disservice by suggesting that everything needs to be this complicated, and this full, versus being able to priority management, the things that matter most and make those things matter most, so we can enjoy the process. [0:06:43] PF: What's so difficult is we keep adding more things that need to be done. Even some of those things are, “I need to relax. I need to build in time to meditate, or whatever my form of relaxation is.” Then it becomes just one more thing on this list. You get stressed out looking at it, because you can't get to all those things. [0:07:03] RHD: Absolutely. It would be a full-time job in itself just to do all the things that they say we ought to be doing and we should be doing, or we could be doing for our well-being. One of the things that when we're doing this research that really was striking for me was, for example, we learned that loneliness will kill you faster than a bad diet. Yet, we're not talking about social connection. As we are talking about what's the nice next hype cycle of what nutrition program we should be following. Again, it's reimagining that, okay, well, what is it that we actually need? Really, much going back to some of those fundamentals of ensuring that we're meeting all of the parts of our well-being. So often, again, when we talk about well-being, I think people are really talking about health and you know what? Yeah, health is associated with the physical self. Well-being is the emotional self, it's the spiritual self, it's all of the parts of us that make up our identity. I think coming at this from a different perspective of radically simplifying the things that matter most, where we'll get the best return on our investment. I can give you an example of that. Okay, just recently I was at a huge event and they were all asking me what supplements should I be taking, or how cold should the cold plunge be? They're just really talking about a lot of those pieces of information in the media that are making some really big promises to radically transform our lives. They're like, “Which one should I do, Robyne?” I said, well, I can ask you this. Do you sleep? They said, “Well, no.” Then I said, well, you're really stepping over a $100 bill to try and pick up a penny if you're looking at supplements, because if you're not having a good night's sleep, or using naps to help recover, none of the supplementation is going to work. You're trying to find a way to replace something that's so fundamental to our sense of well-being, which you just can't do with supplementation and things like that. [0:08:58] PF: Yeah, we do try to find this answer without looking at the actual cure for what's going on. As you brought up, sleep is such a huge factor in how we're doing well overall and stress completely robs us of that. Can you talk about some of the other ways we are affected when we are living in this world of constant stimulation? [0:09:18] RHD: Yeah. Well, I think one interesting area that we're seeing right now in the research is that as we see, for example, emotional health starting to get quite bumpy and there's a lot of turbulence right now about emotional health and mental health, one of the things that I'm really seeing is we're not really giving ourselves the spaciousness to be able to process our emotions. I'll give you this example. Imagine when you're a little kid and you're walking home from school after you've had a bad day, right? You're holding your backpack and you're walking down the street, chances are in the background, your brain is processing all of the day's events, right? Maybe you're not even giving it a lot of conscious thought, but in the background, your brain is organizing the learning, it's making space to process all of it However, now, when that little one is walking home from school, chances are they're scrolling on a phone. They're just adding more content constantly in. It's the steady stream of over-information, and what happens is our brain never gets to really do its job around putting things into place. Even just that notion that we're robbing ourselves the time to process thoughts and feelings and learnings, and we're just always on this treadmill of consumption, versus having time to be a curator and organize some of those thoughts and feelings. Then usually, what we see happens, Paula, is at the end of the day, you might just pass out, because you're exhausted. You're not falling asleep. You're just passing out. Then, because we haven't processed the day, we'll usually get a cortisol spike, I think usually between 1 a.m. and 3 a.m., and we wake up and we feel the sense of worry. We feel the sense of dread, because our body has just got this huge hit of cortisol. Again, we're in this cycle where our default setting isn't really manageable to the reality of how we want to be in our day and really how we want to feel most of the time. [0:11:10] PF: Yeah. It's like, our day is we just grab it and try to hold on. It's given a whole different meaning to seize the day. It's like, now I grab your hat and hold the hell on, kind of thing is how you feel. I think of that from an adult perspective. Then as you mentioned, the child, kids that are growing up in this always on environment, how is that rewiring them for the world? Because we know the studies are showing, each generation is subsequently less happy and more anxious and that is alarming. What does this have? What role does this play in it? [0:11:46] RHD: Oh, absolutely. You're absolutely right. It is very concerning, because the world is unwell and our children very much are unwell in this world in some cases. Again, what I really think is happening is that we've created that baseline, or our emotional home of that place of anxiety, of that place of, again, I don't think we're ever meant, or designed to have access to all of the information that we have. We know historically, there's always been unrest in the world, yet we were sheltered from it in some cases, because we didn't have this 24-hour news cycle, or this news feed always showing us the worst and all that noise and negativity. Our brains weren't designed to be activated in that state of threat, like they are all the time. I can share with you, when I'm working with young ones and especially adolescents is there's not a lot of hope right now in some places. They're not really excited about growing up, because they're not really seeing examples of grownups who are happy and grounded and really thriving. Right now, they're seeing very exhausted people who, again, are just, as you said, they're just barely holding on. I think it's really important that we find ways to model that, yes, we want to be productive and have these good livelihoods and this solid lifestyle. But there's also room for play and joy and this all being meaningful and worthwhile in the process. [0:13:13] PF: Yeah. As adults model that, we're not giving them anything to look forward to. [0:13:19] RHD: Yeah. I can tell you from a very – with radical candor, I recall several years ago, sitting at the kitchen table and my oldest at the time, he was there, and we were chatting and I had a very difficult, no good rotten day at work and this was becoming a theme. He said to me. He goes, “Mama, you told me that if I work really hard and that I set my intentions in the right way,” he said, “I could be anything that I wanted to be when I grow up. Is that true?” I was like, “Yes, Hunter. You can be anything, as long as you set your course in that right way and you work hard.” He paused, Paula, and he looked at me and he said, “Why can't you? Why can't you be anything when you grow up?” Because he goes, “Right now, mama,” he goes, “I just can't imagine, this is what you want to be. This is what you want to do.” [0:14:03] PF: Well, first of all, what an insightful son you have. [0:14:07] RHD: Absolutely. It was this emotional two by four to the face. It was just this moment of just stark clarity, where I realized, I was modeling behavior to my children of like, you know what? Other people can be happy. Other people can have this. But I was just in these trenches and repeating what I wasn't repairing. It was a really big wake-up call for me to say, “You know what? I do want to take this chance. I do want to write these books. I do want to explore my career, so I can model for my kids that there's another way to go about building a livelihood and a lifestyle.” [0:14:42] PF: We'll be right back. Now, it's time for Casey Johnson, Live Happy Marketing Manager and cat owner, to talk to us about PrettyLitter. [CASEY JOHNSON] [0:14:49] PF: Casey, welcome back. [0:14:50] CJ: Thanks. With three cats, PrettyLitter has become an essential part of our cat care routine. I must say, I understand why it's called PrettyLitter, because the packaging and the crystals are gorgeous. They live up to the name. Plus, they're super lightweight and lasts up to a month. That means, changing out the litter boxes less often, which is always a plus when you have a cat. Even better, they're delivered right to my doorstep and come in a small lightweight bag. Now, I don't have huge containers taking up space in our small condo. [0:15:18] PF: That's awesome. We're going to give that same opportunity to our listeners. They can go to prettylitter.com/livehappy and use the code LIVEHAPPY to save 20% on their first order and get a free cat toy. It's prettylitter.com/livehappy, code LIVEHAPPY to save 20% and get that free cat toy. Again, prettylitter.com/livehappy, code LIVEHAPPY. Now, let's get back to the show. [SPONSOR MESSAGE] [0:15:44] PF: This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. As we're discussing today, most of us are feeling a lot of stress these days. One thing that can add to that stress is comparing ourselves to others on social media. It's so easy to start feeling like your life doesn't measure up. But with help from therapy, you can learn to focus on what you want, instead of what others are doing. Therapy can improve your coping skills and change the way you look at your world. BetterHelp is a great place to start. All you have to do is fill out a brief questionnaire and you'll get matched with a licensed therapist. You can always change therapists at any time at no extra charge to make sure you get the therapist who's right for you. It's completely online, so it's flexible, convenient, and works with your schedule. Stop comparing and start focusing with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com/livehappy today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P.com/livehappy. [INTERVIEW CONTINUED] [0:16:46] PF: One of the things I want to talk about is you talk about proactively planning for stress. [0:16:51] RHD: Yes. [0:16:52] PF: it's so simple, but genius. It's like, yes. Because we know it's coming. Let's talk about that. Talk about what you mean to plan for stress and then how that's going to change the way it affects us. [0:17:04] RHD: Yeah. The strategy we talk about is cope ahead of time. In our culture, many of us have been conditioned, or raised that we need to just go amongst our day and then stress will happen and then we have to recover from it. It's this idea that the stressor comes first and then we do recovery. The reality is, our evenings and our weekends, they're not long enough to repair all the things that we need to fix. Instead, the conversation switches to, okay, if this is what my day looks like, or this season, or this week, how do I make sure I'm coping ahead of time? That means, for example, even things like, planning out your meals, because the last thing anyone wants to do at 6.00 is to try and figure out what they want for dinner, right? We're not doing this because we're really adopting the hype cycle about meal prep and all the delivery things. It's nothing about that. It’s simply, you can decide that you're going to have pancakes for dinner, but just make that decision in the morning when you have good energy, versus waiting till you have that 6.00 energy that doesn't want to be able to make another decision, or a choice. We jokingly talk about how that's a swear word in our house like, “Mom, what's for dinner?” Don't you dare talk like that in this house. [0:18:15] PF: Watch your mouth, son. [0:18:17] RHD: Watch your mouth, exactly. That notion of cope ahead of time, where if you're going to have a stressful day, a stressful season, or even, let's say, a difficult conversation, or a difficult interaction, instead of booking an appointment, or a meeting right afterwards, give yourself the gift of blocking an hour in your calendar, so you can go for a walk, or you can call a trusted friend, or maybe even just do some online shopping to find some digital dopamine. Whatever it is, it's totally cool. It's the idea that you plan ahead of time. You forecast where there likely might be a few little bumps and you already have a strategy outlined. The other part, too, when we think about cope ahead of time, right now, our calendars are so full. There's no time for anything to go off the rails. That way, when a little irritant happens in our day, it almost feels catastrophic, because we're so scheduled. Even this notion of operating at a solid 80% of the capacity of most of the time, 80% of the time, and then you have 20% for wiggle room, if things pop up, or the unexpected happens. [0:19:26] PF: We can't change the amount of things we have to do. Overall, we cannot change our must-do list. We can't change the hours we have in a day. How do we change our mindset to embrace this better? As you say, stress wisely. [0:19:43] RHD: Again, this is the idea, I think, that’s so important is that we're operating a place within our values. What I mean by that is ensuring we're doing the things that matter most and make the matter most for the right reasons. I can give you a quick example, where when people show me their calendar and we say, okay, what are those must do's? What's not even, that's non-negotiable? Often, things that we might feel are non-negotiables, or must dos, actually might not be the way that they are. But we've just told ourselves that they are. I could give you another quick example. I remember one time, my son, he's off at university, he called, he's like, “Hey, I'm on my way home with some friends.” I said, “Okay, but not yet. I just need a few more hours, because I need to make our house look like nobody lives there.” That’s the goal, right? Anyway, so I'm frantically running around, trying to get the house looking like nobody lives there. What was so amazing, in the meantime, he had contacted his siblings who were home. Hunter said like, “What is she doing? What's mom doing that’s so big that we can't come home yet?” The little brother goes downstairs and he sees me wiping the baseboards, right? I'm wiping the baseboards and Jack says to his brother, “She's wiping the white stuff along the bottom of the room.” Hunter is like, “Okay.” Anyway, so a couple hours later, Hunter and his classmates come back to the house and they walk in and Hunter takes his friends, his new friends from university right into the dining room. He's showing them the baseboards. He's like, “Boys, I want you to see how clean my mother's baseboards are.” I was mortified. I was so mortified. I'm like, “Dude, I can't believe you did that. You just outed me like that.” He's just like, “Hey.” He's like, “Mom, if you're going to put it in the effort, I just want it acknowledged.” It was this awesome moment, again, where I was just like, I felt I had to do that before he came home. Paula, he lives in dorms. I can't even tell you the state of – [0:21:37] PF: Right. If there's not food on the floor, it's clean. [0:21:40] RHD: Exactly. In the moment it felt that I had to do this. This was so important. As soon as we take that moment to zoom out and look at the big picture, a lot of this stuff really doesn't feel as must do anymore. I tell you, kids need a present parent. They don't need a perfect parent. They just need us to be present. [0:22:03] PF: Yeah. I love that. Prioritizing, you talked about it a little bit. How do we start that process? Because we've got so many things. Like, list the most important thing. Well, I have three of those. [0:22:15] RHD: Yes. [0:22:16] PF: Where do we get this prioritization going for us? [0:22:21] RHD: Again, one of the things that we talk about is making the invisible visible, right? So many of us, especially when we're the predominant person in the household, we hold so much knowledge that literally it's like, we're these oracles, right? We have all of this knowledge in our head, but none of it's visible. As soon as we start to make it visible, so if we even just grab a piece of paper, or a whiteboard and just start mapping out all the things that we feel we need to do, and then again, just looking at it, taking that step back and being like, is this a must do? Or is this, it would be nice to do? Is this really an alignment with how I want to feel? How I want to be, especially when we think about all that invisible labor in with our family systems. Again, once we start looking at it and getting it out of our heads, putting it on paper, we're going to realize that there's some places where we can get some clarity, and especially around simplification. Things do not need to be as complex, I think, as we're making them out to be right now. [0:23:23] PF: But it's almost become our way to just complicate things. Why are we doing that? [0:23:28] RHD: Well, I think it's very much because we're trying to fit in. We're trying to fit in with the people around us, versus finding our sense of belonging. Our sense of belonging, when we're with the right community, we don't feel the need to try and compete. If you're with your people, with the right friends and the right community, this isn't a competition, because I want you to win as well. It's those people who, yeah, they can show up and have a barbecue and we're not feeling the need to run around the house to make it look that no one lives there. We're not feeling that need, that everything has to be perfect. Because for the right people, that's not what they're interested in. They're interested in the people in the space, not what some of these spaces look like. I think just that competition sometimes and that social comparison, just trying to fit in and be included. I also think as well, there's this notion that we've lost sight that we have way more control in this whole situation than we really acknowledge, because it doesn't have to be this way. We can step out of this race at any time and we can run our own race. We can do it our own way. Again, I think so often, we give up so much of our ability to choose and identify what matters most to my family, or to my community. We just get pulled along in this current. But we can say, we're done. We can say, “This isn't how I want to feel most of the time.” That's what I really encourage people, when we think about these practices that are going to foster self-care, or self-stewardship, it's not like, what do you want to do, or how do you want to look, or what do you want to achieve? The question is, how do you want to feel? I know personally, I want to feel present. I want to feel grounded. I want to have space for joy. I want to have space for spontaneity. I want to have space for us to be able to enjoy our days. They're very, very special to be able to have these opportunities. [0:25:16] PF: As you say that, you can almost hear people saying, “Yes, but.” Because we think, “Oh, yeah. That sounds great. That sounds great for you, but you don't understand how busy my life is, or how much I have going on.” You have all people understand that. [0:25:32] RHD: I do. [0:25:33] PF: When someone is sitting in your office and says that to you, what is your response? [0:25:39] RHD: First of all, my response would be to sit beside the person ear-to-ear, not eye-to-eye and acknowledge that that reality for them is real. That right now, it doesn't seem like there's another way, other than this fullness that we've created. Because we've created these lives, right? Again, I do recognize that there's an abundance of privilege to be able to say, take a break, step back, because some persons are navigating some big complicated situations. Even with that, there is a way to do it in a gentler, more compassionate way. I would want to sit beside that person and say, yeah, what you're feeling is absolutely real and you're not alone. I would love to show you a different way. Even just one of the questions I really love to ask people to move them out in that place of scarcity, where it's like, I don't have enough of time, I'm always chasing, hustling. I love to ask the person this question is, what does it feel like when you are connected with your favorite self, your favorite part of you? Now, this isn't your best self, or your wisest self, or your most integrated self. It's like, what are you feeling when you're your favorite version of you? I love how this question just dismantles a lot of the roles and obligations and the shoulds and I have tos, and it just allows people to reconnect with the parts of them that are like, “Hey.” I hear things follow like, “When I'm my favorite self, I'm not worrying as much. When I'm my favorite self, I roll with things a little better. I don't hold things so tightly. Maybe I'm a little bit more child-like, and I'm up to new adventures, or maybe there's a curiosity, or a silliness.” Again, I think we can reactivate and reconnect with the parts of us that are really, really looking to shine and come out, because they've worked very hard, but I think they need to play as hard as well. [0:27:34] PF: Is a lot of it just recognizing what you want that self to look like? [0:27:39] RHD: I believe so. Again, self-awareness right now is the most critical social-emotional skill that we can have, the self-awareness, when we actually just take a step back and we look at that pig picture and say, “Okay is this working for me? Is this actually how I want to feel? Is this actually how I want my days to be?” As somebody who, I myself, and I write about this in my first book, I experienced a very significant, a catastrophic car accident when I was 16-years-old. That event was very much this turning point for me personally. What happens when you've had these very difficult experiences and this traumatic event is that you get this clarity and this perspective that comes, where I often ask myself at the end of the day, it's like, “If this is my last day today, is this what I want to be doing? Is this what I want to be feeling? Is this where I want to be spending my time and my energy?” Again, the reality, not to sound doom and gloom about forecasting the end of our days, but there's something pretty powerful when you pause and be like, “Okay, if this is my last day, am I going to look back on and said, it was a good day, or I made the best of it?” I think, again, just that awareness and those radical shifts, they're not these – it's interesting. It's the little things done well and those little things aren't that little after all. [0:29:02] PF: Yeah. One thing that I've started doing, a lot of it is due to the recent death of some aunts. That has given me an appreciation for things that I have to do that I don't want to do. But the fact that I can do them, the fact that I'm healthy and I'm strong and I can go do these things, it's really interesting how that reframes the things that you don't care for in life. [0:29:29] RHD: Absolutely. I could share with you just recently, I was working with, again, at a large event, and somebody was saying that, “Oh, gosh. I would do anything for my kids. I would do absolutely anything for them.” I'm like, “That's great.” A woman actually said, “I would die for them. There's nothing I would not do for my family.” I said, “Interesting.” I said, “But would you live for them? Would you take care of yourself for them? Would you prioritize your own well-being and mental health, so you can be here for as long as possible in the most healthy way?” It was just this really interesting moment. One woman actually asked me like, “Okay. Well, what do you do each day to look after yourself, Robyne?” I shared some very simple practices that I like to do. Another woman said, “Well, don't you feel guilty? Don't you feel guilty for doing that?” I said, “No, I feel guilty if I yell at my kids. I feel guilty if I yell at my husband,” or I'm sure with my husband when I know there's things that I can do to be the best version of myself and I don't do them. I don't feel guilty for taking care of myself. I feel guilty when I don't do those things. Then my family's caught up in the blast radius. [0:30:34] PF: I love that. I love thinking that way, and I love being able to remind ourselves that self-care is taking care of everyone around you, because they're all going to benefit from that. [0:30:44] RHD: Absolutely. [0:30:46] PF: We have possibly a difficult fall coming up. No matter where you stand on anything, let's say. There's a lot of stress, and it's already starting to bubble up. Using what you teach in your book, how can we approach this and plan for the stress and make it an easier time? [0:31:07] RHD: You're asking such a great question. There's so many different ways that we can approach it. I think what's really important, when things feel out of control, or there's uncertainty or division, one of the things that we can really lean into are habits, routines, or rituals, where we can make sure that we are okay. We know, for example, that morning routine, taking a few minutes each morning to whether it's go for a walk, or just write in your journal, or have that cup of coffee and just be present, and not start our day opening ourselves up to the world. We want to make sure that we just take a few minutes to ground ourselves. Then when we are able to take that time, make sure our head and our heart are okay. Then we open up to the big world that's out there, we’ll be in a better position to cope and manage with what's going on. The other thing is I think that there's also a place for avoiding certain conversations, if you just know that the outcome isn't going to be positive for either person. What I mean by that is there's some conversations just be willing to walk away from. I think it was actually the actor, Keanu Reeves, who said, he got to the point in his life where if somebody told him that one plus one equals five, he would say, “Cool, you're right,” and walk away. Stop engaging in battles with people who just live to be upset. Some people just live to be upset, and recognizing that that's not how you want to feel. There's just some conversations. That doesn't mean we turn to blind eye to big, significant social justice issues that are unfolding. I'm not suggesting that we come passive. I just want to make sure that we are as well-resourced as possible to make sure that we are okay and our family systems are okay, because that's our best chance to weather a difficult season. [0:32:54] PF: I love that. There's a lot to unpack when we're talking about stress. But right now, what is the one thing that listeners can take away with them, about how they can live their lives with a little bit less stress and learn to manage what stress they do have? [0:33:11] RHD: Yeah, again, a great question. I think where we would start is if we think about the power of our relationships. What I mean by that is we're not meant to do all of this alone. So often, when we're under high levels of stress and have lots of cortisol in our bloodstreams, what happens is we feel this tendency to lone wolf it. That we have to just be more stoic and just hustle through, push through. The reality is when we show up for one another and we nurture those relationships and connect with that collective humanity, it's going to serve us a lot better. Pushing away from that driver, that tendency to shut down, and instead of giving ourselves a timeout, give ourselves a time in, where we are able to connect with the people that matter most to us and be able to see those communities, because that sense of belonging will help us weather whatever stressors come our way. [0:34:01] PF: Robyne, you have a lot to teach us. I thank you for sharing some of it today. I do. I appreciate you coming on the show, and love this book and would love to talk to you some more. [0:34:10] RHD: I would love that. Take good care and thank you for this chance to chat today. [END OF INTERVIEW] [0:34:18] PF: That was Dr. Robyne Hanley-Dafoe, talking about resilience and how we can better respond to stress. If you'd like to learn more about Robyne, follow her on social media, check out her book, Stress Wisely, or discover her online classes to learn about resilience, just visit us at livehappy.com and click on this podcast episode. While you're there, be sure to sign up for our weekly Live Happy Newsletter. Every week, we'll drop a little bit of joy in your inbox with the latest stories, podcast info, and even a happy song of the week. That's 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: Happy Activists: Wilson County Kind Makes Kindness Cool [INTRODUCTION] [0:00:01] PF: Thank you for joining us for episode 474 of Live Happy Now. We know that kindness is crucial and sometimes these days it seems to be in short supply. But today, we're talking to a couple of happy activists who are creating kindness in a place you might not expect. I'm your host, Paula Felps, and this week I'm joined by Mayor Randall Hutto and Project Administrator Susan Shaw, who are the driving forces behind an initiative in Tennessee called Wilson County Kind. As the name implies, Wilson County Kind promotes kindness, starting with local government. Randall and Susan are here to share how this initiative started, why it's important for governments to embrace kindness, and what effect this has had on their community. Let's have a listen. [INTERVIEW] [0:00:49] PF: Mayor Hutto, welcome to Live Happy Now. [0:00:52] RH: Thank you for having me. [0:00:53] PF: This is a wonderful thing that we're going to talk about today. It's something, I love the fact that it comes from a government agency. I love the good that you're putting out in the world. So, before I ask you any more questions about it, why don't you tell us, tell our listeners what Wilson County Kind is all about. [0:01:09] RH: Well, thank you for having me on the show. For us, we get lots of conversations, and lots of traffic that comes through our office. Normally, it's an opportunity for us to help people. They have an issue, many people don't walk to the door saying, “Hey, you're doing a great job.” Again, it becomes an opportunity for us to really do a setback and take a chance on how can we help that person that comes in. Normally, we're able to do that. Sometimes we're not able to, but most of the time we are. But we realize that as we began to see people come in and how happy they were leaving, the focus though was always on what's not done right, what's missing, what's not there. It reminds me of a story that I heard about a professor given a test to his college class. He handed a piece of paper out. He told him to leave them all face down. Then he was going to give them a little bit of time to write on that project and write on the test. Then took it back up and began to read what they wrote. Anyway, the test was really a white sheet of paper with a black dot in the middle of it. When they all flipped it over, he said, “Now, write what you see.” Everybody spent time writing. They talked about the dot. It was black and it was in the middle of paper, but nobody focused on the white area that was outside it. That was the point that he was making there that a lot of times when we go through life, what we focus on determines our attitude, maybe how we live. So, that was the piece that we noticed here. Once we solved that problem, those people were happy that were mad when they walked in, and we realized that there were a lot of good going on in the county, but people were just focusing on the bad things. Many times, we saw that, for sure, on Facebook, where they talked maybe about the government. We were trying to figure out how can we get the message out here that this is not really what's happening and tell the story, but many times when we did that, it would just balloon into something that would get out of control, because they would start fussing about something else. We said, what can we do to bring positivity to the people in the county for them to realize all the good things. There are definitely some things we need to get better at, things we need to correct. That's where we started the initiative in Wilson County Kind, and we said, focus on something that's good. When you see a good act, post that on social media. Send a story to the paper on that. Let somebody else know that something good has happened. So, that got the story started. Then I had an episode with a young lady that I met at the Wilson County Fair. She came up to me and we normally made it to fair and ride some rides, but she came up and said, you know what? Her goal was, was that she wanted to do something nice for Wilson County, so she made some bracelets that said Wilson County Kind on it. She gave me a couple at the fair. I wore those for a while. Then I asked her a little bit more about this. I said, “Tell me what you're doing here.” She said, “Well, I'm going to sell these bracelets for whatever anybody wants to give me. Then once they give me the money, I'm going to do something good with that money. I'm not going to pocket it for myself. I'm not doing it for me. I'm doing it for other people.” So, as time went on, what she did with that money was they actually made up some packets. Actually, they've given me several packets so far of things to give out to the homeless people, homeless population. Inside that back during the wintertime, I had a couple of hot hand warmers in there, a gift card, maybe a couple of other things, a bracelet. So, I went out and I just saw somebody on the side of the street that I knew who was homeless. I would hand that out. So, that became hit, but that was just one example of things that happened as we started talking about Wilson County Kind. Susan Shaw have her with me here. She's really the overseer of all this. I'll let her talk in just a minute about that, but there's been many other things, but that was the initial goal was to say, focus on the positive things that are happening here and let's put that out in social media or tell people about any time you catch a kind act. There's more good out there than they are bad, but we don't focus on it, so let's get that out there. So, that's the origination of Wilson County Kind. [0:05:15] PF: Well, when you started thinking about this, like how did it go from you thinking this would be a great thing for us to do for the county to spread this good news to actually becoming a program, because that's a big stretch of highway between those two points? [0:05:31] RH: It definitely was a concept that we had to spend a lot of time on. I'm going to let Susan Shaw speak for just a second, because she really orchestrated all this and made all the mechanics fall together. I'm going to turn it over to her. Susan Shaw. [0:05:44] PF: Okay. [0:05:44] SS: Thank you for asking that. Really, it originated once the mayor, we talked about this and decided that this was something to focus on and emphasize. We decided to have a campaign launch and not just a press release or something to notify people, but a real campaign launch. There was a lot of focus put on that to have activities in that launch. So, we invited everybody that wanted to come to see this and hear about this. We introduced them to Lexi Potter, who does the Kindness Clays by Lexi. Her little bracelets. We had five stations set up that were activity stations that demonstrated kindness. One of our local artists, Kim Greg, she had some blank postcards made up and with images on there that people could color. She brought some coloring materials and people could come up to her table and color it in and write a encouraging message on the back of it. We partnered with our side, Senior Living here, and we've collected all these after they were done and we mailed them to residents at her side. We purposely did several activities that people could engage in and would demonstrate kindness and really get them motivated on it. The neat thing about this with kindness is that once you start putting a spotlight on it and a focus on it, people start to notice it more. Not only does it help the recipient of the kind act, but the person that did it feels better. Then the person that received it tells three other people, and then they might go out and do something or observe something or tell more people about it. It's kind of this leveraging effect that once you start it and it can really continue to spread. [0:07:22] PF: When did it actually launch? [0:07:24] SS: It was September of last year. People asked, “Well, when does it start and when does it end?” [0:07:29] PF: When are you going to stop being kind, Susan? [0:07:33] SS: That was the answer. You don't. We have a start date, but we don't need to have an end date and we, so we keep publicizing when we observe, or see, or people tell us about something that was a kind act, we continue to publicize that. On social media, we encourage people to use #WilsonCountyKind, because that way we can pull it up and we can see what happens. I wanted to tell you one other neat story, because you heard about Lexi and another young man, a sophomore at Mount Juliet High School that reached out when he saw the campaign launch and he said, “I want to do something and I want to help in this kindness campaign.” He had an idea that he noticed that with the athletics in the high school, that they would retire old equipment and sometime he didn't know what happened. It might be thrown out or something. He said, “I would like to collect that and where could it be given?” In the county, there's an initiative to try to start a boys and girls club. He said, “How about if I collect the equipment and if there's a place to store it, I'll collect it. I'll deliver it. Then it can be used for that purpose later.” So, he did that. [0:08:38] PF: That's amazing. I love it, because what this initiative is making people do is like what can I do? They're thinking about it. They're pausing for a moment and saying, “How can I be part of that?” That's really what it takes. Like you said, it causes this chain reaction. We'll be right back with the show, but right now I want to bring in Casey Johnson, Live Happy Marketing Manager and cat owner, who's here to tell us about her favorite new discovery called PrettyLitter. [MESSAGE] [0:09:03] CJ: I love PrettyLitter. It has changed my life truly, but three cats, I feel like I'm constantly trying to mask the smell. I feel like PrettyLitter does just that. It changes the color to help monitor early signs of things like kidney issues and urinary tract infections. Not so fun fact, a few years ago, one of my cats had to have emergency surgery. I truly feel that if I had PrettyLitter at the time, we could have detected the problem sooner and taken proper action. So, I cannot recommend PrettyLitter enough if you were a cat parent. [0:09:35] PF: All right. I know you're going to be telling us more about that in the weeks to come, but our listeners can go to prettylitter.com/livehappy and use the code LiveHappy to save 20% on their first order and get a free cat toy. That's prettylitter.com/livehappy, code LiveHappy to save 20% and get a free cat toy. Again, prettylitter.com/livehappy. code LiveHappy. Now, back to our show. [INTERVIEW CONTINUED] [0:10:01] PF: I wonder were there any challenges to implementing it? Did you hit any skepticism or people stonewalling against, because a lot of times when you try to do good, people say that's nice, but and then they tell you why it's not going to work. [0:10:14] SS: They Mayor may have a different answer, but I'll tell you what I encountered. It wasn't exactly stonewalling. It was more, well, what does this mean? Because it's very conceptual. It's not a super concrete, but we did give examples, but it was more, well, what does that mean? What is this really? What's the end game? I guess that might be the skepticism is – [0:10:34] PF: Yeah. [0:10:35] SS: Who’s going to produce? We couldn't exactly answer that at the beginning, because how can you say Lexi Potter is going to want to give back and give these care packets. Brady Patterson is going to want to collect sports equipment and give that to a boys or girls club. It's hard to know what people are going to do, but it was pleasantly surprising that so many people stepped up and had ideas. I want to tell you about one other one. We have an SRO. A School Resource Officer. This is something that Wilson County is really proud of, because we've had school resource officers in all of our schools for long before there was so much attention put on it and money put into it from the legislature. One of the school resource officers, they have a program to give out certificates for good deeds. So, they're participating in the Wilson County Kind that when they see a student that does something that is just kind to another person, reaching out a hand, helping somebody doing something, they get a certificate with their name on it and they present it to them. They take a picture. They posted on social media. So, they've been posting it with #WilsonCountyKind, but I didn't even know that they did that. So, that affected me too. It was nice to see that, and learn that. [0:11:55] PF: I love that. So, what are some of the other things that you've done? What are the actions that you've taken as part of Wilson County Kind? [0:12:04] SS: Talking about it is a big thing and that's really the putting a spotlight on it, like I said, you don't know what the end result is going to be, but we talk about it when we go to chamber meetings or meet the mayor. Inevitably, every time we talk about it, we learn about another kind action or deed or something that has happened. I talked about it at the Ambassador meeting of the Lebanon Wilson County Chamber. When I finished talking about it, the chair of that committee said, “Susan, that is so interesting.” He said, “If I think about it, as you're talking, I'm thinking about over the last week and what acts of kindness that I observe.” He said, “I hate to tell you, but I really can't tell you any.” He said, “But I can guarantee you that right now I am hyper alert and I will be looking for it. I am sure I'm going to observe this when I go out.” I thought, that's right there, that's part of the impact and what you see happen. [0:12:59] PF: What I love about that, one thing we talk about a lot at Live Happy Now is gratitude and how having a gratitude practice really changes the way that you look at the world, because if you're going to write down three things every day, you're grateful for, you're training your mind to look for things you're grateful for. That's exactly what you're doing by spreading this message. You're teaching people to start looking for acts of kindness. So, I love that. Now, instead of looking for the bad in the world, they're out there looking for the kindness around them. That's such a powerful gift to the community. [0:13:30] RH: I think it is. I don't think it's taken attraction yet enough to where it's where we want it. We've talked about it. We've got the two citizens that she just talked about, the SRO, but we know there's a lot out there. We've got to find a way to make it a everyday train of thought, not just once in a while or one or two people, because we know just like – network came out of this after the tornadoes where volunteers came together to help all across the county. There's many good things have come together to prove that Wilson County is a kind and generous place to live. There's a lot of that going on, but nobody's telling that story. We are just getting started in my opinion with Wilson County Kind, like I have a sign in my front yard, and I wonder how many people drive by and look at it and say, “I wonder what that means.” That's the goal. We're in the early stages in my mind of people that sinking in, kind of like Wilson County, the place to be. Wilson County Kind will continue to grow. We hope, and take more and more attraction. I think it takes three or four big events to happen that we can talk about that will start spreading a little bit, hopefully, like fire throughout the county, but it has not really in my mind gotten a lot of attraction, like we hope it does here soon. [0:14:45] PF: Part of what's so interesting to me is that, okay, so we know that kindness is very important, but it's not something that you would think of tackling through a government agency. How does that work with your duties as Mayor of Wilson County to behind this movement? How do you work it into part of your duties? [0:15:03] PF: I think it comes under the duties of quality of life. One of the goals here that we have, no question, we have to educate people. We have to incarcerate people. We have to make it safe, but quality of life is one of our major points that we want people to be happy while they're here and enjoy the life that they have here. We don't have to leave the county lines for anything to be honest with you. So, I think that's where it comes in as far as quality of life goes. It's important for our people at least where I sent from to know that there is a lot of, we'll take tourism, for example. There's a lot of great things to do in Wilson County that people don't know about, so we try to spread that word through tourism, but there's a lot of good activities happening. A lot of people doing good for others that we've got to get that word out there. I think it's really going to have to happen, as Susan said, when you ask a while ago the question, but what's the problem? The but is, so how do I really help? What if I'm not good at social media? I don't know how to do a hashtag. I don't know what that means. How can I still take advantage of this? I think that's the piece that is our next step is really getting a word. Here's how you can do it. [0:16:10] PF: I love that. What do you think would happen if other communities started taking this on as a governmental initiative or it's just little pockets of some citizens trying to do this, which is a wonderful thing to do, but what if governments actually got behind that and said, yeah, that's part of, as you said, that's part of our quality of life and we're going to make this about being a kind city and kind community? How would that change things? [0:16:34] RH: I think it definitely does change things. We're working to initiative here becoming an age friendly community, which allows for different things to happen for our older families here, grants to qualify for better services for those people. I think as a government as long as and what we've really tried to do smart here is that we don't use any taxpayer dollars to do this, this is just a way of thinking of life. This is a new culture. I think it'd be great for government, because right now government sometimes has a bad tone to it in our world today, but at the local level, it's not really that. I mean, we're here to provide the services that we just talked to you about, so we want to distance ourselves from any negative tone when you say government that you may feel inside of you. I think it would allow for people to say, “I like my government. I trust my government. I'm glad they're doing this. It's not cost me any money. I get benefits from it, because people are kinder as I walk across and see them walking down the street.” We know that we live in the best part of the country, probably. I think right now is when you wave at people, you don't know, you speak to people, you talk to people, you don't find a stranger. That is in our culture here, not for sure if it exists everywhere else in the country or not, but I know it exists here and we want to continue to expound on it. [0:17:52] PF: If people are hearing this and they're saying, “This is what we need to do, like we need to do something similar.” How do they get started? This might be a Susan question. I'm not sure, because it sounds like she was driving that vehicle quite a bit. How do they go from an idea to implementation? [0:18:07] SS: Well, first of all, you get the support of people like Mayor Hutto. You get the support of somebody in government like that. Also, a support from the school systems, which we had huge support. Annie Barger, she's with the Family Resource Center for Wilson County Schools and Beth Petty in the same role for Lebanon Special School Districts. They got with us and helped plan it. Then we also, because it's not paid for with taxpayer money, we needed a small amount of money to do some promotional things, like yard signs, and stickers for water bottles, and we gave out t-shirts and all those things we gave out free at the campaign lunch. What you do is we found a great partner. We have something called Ten Community here in Wilson County. It's nine or ten banks that group together to be very supportive within the county. They sponsored Wilson County Kind and basically put up some funding this small amount, but for us to be able to buy some things that help with the PR. So, you brand it, you get the support locally of whoever it happens to be, government, school systems, chambers, our Chamber of Commerce were very supportive and the banks are helpful, because ours are very community-oriented banks in the first place. We brand it. You come up with a good name. The logo was created for us by a local visionary design group who is a local marketing firm in Watertown and they did that pro bono. Then you just have to create some spark around it. Now, there's a lot more PR that we can do and we need to do and we'll constantly be thinking and building on that, but that's how we got started. We brainstormed with people to say what our kind acts, what are some activities that people do? Sometimes it's being in the line at Chick-fil-A and saying you're going to pay it for the person behind it. That it starts a lot. That happens a lot of times and people recognize that. Then talk about it, when you see something or hear something, then talk about it. Make it known. [0:20:04] PF: I love it. I love it. What's your dream? You've got it kicked off, you're going, you're picking up momentum. What's your vision? What does success look like for this program? [0:20:14] SS: I think success looks like recognition. It looks like seeing acts of kindness everywhere you go, whether it's in a store, or a school, or at a playground, or something. It's hearing about people reaching out and doing something kind for somebody else. It's hearing more, thank you. It's receiving more thank you notes in the mail. That to me is what it looks like if you're trying to create a vision. It can continue forever, and I hope it does, and I hope it just continues to grow. [0:20:43] PF: I love it. Thank you so much for sitting down and talking with me today. I appreciate both of you. Giving your time and letting us share this with our listeners. We're going to give them all the information they need to know about how to find Wilson County Kind. They can check it out. Maybe get some ideas for doing it themselves, but thank you so much for the good that you're putting out into the world. [0:21:02] SS: Thank you for asking, Paula. We enjoy talking with you about this. [OUTRO] [0:21:10] PF: That was Randall Hutto and Susan Shaw talking about Wilson County Kind. If you'd like to learn more about this initiative or follow them on social media, just visit us at livehappy.com and click on this podcast episode. While you're there, you can also sign up for our weekly Live Happy newsletter. Every week we'll drop a little bit of joy in your inbox with the latest stories, podcast info and even a happy song of the week. That's 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. Jeremy Nobel [INTRODUCTION] [0:00:02] PF: Thank you for joining us for Episode 472 of Live Happy Now. Loneliness is one of the major challenges facing our society today. Since this is Loneliness Awareness Week, it's a great time to look at what's behind this loneliness epidemic. I'm your host, Paula Felps, and this week, I'm sitting down with physician, teacher, innovator, and author, Dr. Jeremy Nobel. founder of The Foundation for Art & Healing, and the Project UnLonely initiative. Jeremy, who is also on the faculty of the Harvard Medical School and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, has published the book, Project UnLonely: Healing Our Crisis of Disconnection. He's here to talk about what loneliness is doing to us and what we should be doing about it. Let's have a listen. [NTERVIEW]   [0:00:50] PF: Dr Nobel, thank you so much for joining us on Live Happy Now. [0:00:54] JN: My pleasure to be with you. [0:00:56] PF: It's so important to talk to you any time of the year, but right now, we really are excited to talk to you, because we have Loneliness Awareness Week. Boy, loneliness is such a huge, huge issue for so many people today. I was curious, first of all, where did your interest in not just studying loneliness, but resolving the crisis begin? [0:01:16] JN: Well, actually, it really began in an interesting way after 9/11, but I didn't know that I was really focused on loneliness. I was actually very interested in the trauma of 9/11, as an experience for many people, particularly children. That's what got me started, and I started The Foundation for Art & Healing, 501(c)3 nonprofit. The idea was to promote creative expression as a path to health and wellbeing. Really focusing on the power of the arts to really help us make sense of the world in positive, healthy, stress-reducing, trauma recovery-oriented ways. As we started doing this work with the arts, we quickly found that many people with trauma and dealing with that stress were also quite lonely. They told us that the work we were doing with the arts to engage, and activate, and have kind of exciting conversations, storytelling, and so on, made them feel less lonely and more connected. That really got our attention, and that's what launched Project UnLonely. [0:02:19] PF: What is the connection between trauma and loneliness? [0:02:22] JN: When you're traumatized, so what is trauma? It's a painful, hurtful injury or experience. As you can imagine, when you have something painful, and even if it's something just like touching a hot stove, if you remember all those stories. You learn not to touch hot stoves, you back away from the threat of a hot stove. Many times, trauma is associated with engagement with other people. So, this could be everything from military trauma, to domestic violence, to the repeated marginalization of racism. This is all painful, and so, we withdraw. Almost anything that leads to trauma, in a way, does set you up for a kind of isolation, a kind of loneliness. That relationship is pretty clear. The real challenge, we'll talk more about it, is how do you move from that loneliness towards a sense of connection. [0:03:15] PF: Now, your organization started in 2016 and there was no clue at that point that the loneliness crisis was going to get so bad. In fact, as you mentioned in your book, 2020 was going to be a bang-up year for your organization. You had so much research that you were going to present, and so many speaking engagements, and then that all disappeared. Thank you, COVID. So, has your approach to loneliness changed at all since 2020, and how have you seen loneliness change in society? [0:03:47] JN: All great questions. First, just for clarity, Project UnLonely isn't its own organization. It actually is a project, it's the signature initiative of The Foundation for Art & Healing, which is the organization. Although we formally launched Project on lonely in 2016, we actually started doing the work to understand loneliness and how the arts connect well before that, around 2011 or 2012. Then, the question is, how did the pandemic change the approach to loneliness? I think what it did, in general, was shine a spotlight on it. As you mentioned, we had loneliness well before the pandemic, but somehow, it became part of all of our consciousness in a very different way. As you mentioned, I start my book, Project UnLonely: Healing Our Crisis of Disconnection. Very first page with how dramatically my world got upended in March 2020. Plans, relationships, teaching, travel, all of this just went on hold as we all tried to navigate this new reality, which forced us to have a kind of isolation to protect us and our neighbors from the virus. While isolation is different than loneliness, it's highly associated with it. So, many people experience loneliness in a way they had not before. [0:05:09] PF: I want to touch on that, what you just said, because we do equate isolation with loneliness. We have had an aunt who spent a lot of time alone, and she told me she's like, "I have never been lonely." Even though she was isolated, she didn't feel lonely. What is the difference between isolation and loneliness? Because you can be in a crowd of people and still feel lonely. [0:05:30] JN: Exactly. One of the real goals of my book is to demystify loneliness and humanize it. The first really important lesson, if you will, is that being alone is not the same thing as being lonely. Being alone is objective. It's the absence of social connection. This can be, if you're in a rural setting, or even isolated in an apartment in an urban setting, where, let's say, you've got a disability, you can't leave easily, or you're fearful about going outside. So then, you are alone. But being alone can be such a positive experience of thoughtful reflection, consideration, the bigger world picture, contemplation. We have a high-class word for it. We sometimes call it solitude, and we do need solitude, but that's different than being lonely. Here's what loneliness is. It's subjective, it's a feeling, it's a mood state. It's the difference between the social connections with other people that we would like to have and what we feel we do have. That gap is what we experience as loneliness. As you pointed out, you actually can be lonely in a crowd. It has nothing to do with whether there are other people around you. It's whether you have the social connections you want. If you're with other people, but don't feel connected to them, you feel lonely. That introduces what I found, a really important observation, and I think, maybe your community will also, is that they're different types of loneliness. [0:07:10] PF: I'm so glad you brought that up, because you talk about three types of loneliness. I was like, I thought there was just loneliness. Can you dig into that and tell us about that? [0:07:17] JN: Right. Well, I thought so too, until we actually started going out and talking about it. So, very simply, there's psychological loneliness, which is, "Do I have a friend? Is there someone I can tell my troubles to?" That's what many people think of when they think of loneliness. But then, there's also the loneliness of systematic exclusion. We call that societal loneliness, because of race, or gender, or disability. Do people evaluate you in that very superficial characteristic and treat you differently, and, in a sense, withdraw from you in a systematic way? That's very different than not having a friend. You could have plenty of friends, but if you feel, for instance, are in a racist workplace and it's not safe to be in certain conversations, you're going to experience loneliness in even though you might have friends. The third type of loneliness, which I am very interested in, and it's been around thousands of years, is where do I relate to the bigger world, the narrative of human experience. People with a religious orientation often call kind of the religious world, God, the universe. But you don't have to be religious to have a sense of curiosity about how your life fits into the bigger story. What was here on the planet before I arrived? What will be here after I depart? Does my life have meaning, consequence? If you don't have solid grounding and answers to those questions, you can feel quite lonely. I think that's the loneliness that's affecting a lot of what we know is the loneliest demographic, 18 to 28 years old. They have plenty of friends, they're connected on social media, but they're wondering, "What am I doing? What's my future? Does my life have meaning? Do I matter?" That could be quite distressing, and it's its own form of loneliness. [0:09:13] PF: Is the way that you address those different forms of loneliness, does that differ? [0:09:20] JN: Absolutely. As someone who in the public health world, and through Project UnLonely, we're trying to design interventions that are powerful for people, as you might imagine. If the loneliness is the loneliness of uncertainty about your meaning in the world, that's very different than the loneliness of not having someone to talk to. So, if you think, "Okay. What do I need to feel less lonely?" One of the first important questions to ask yourself is, what type of loneliness am I experiencing? In my book, I provide different questions we can ask, but they're kind of what you might think. Do I enjoy relationships with others where I can have a chance to have authentic conversations? Or, are those missing from my life? If they're missing from my life, how might I pursue having more of them? So, we lay out some of the strategies for that also. If your feeling of loneliness is uncertainty about your own positioning in the universe, of meaning, and is there purpose. Then, you might want to ask yourself more about how you want to relate to that, how you feel you can be more meaningful, and part of the bigger story. There's some strategies I talked about in the book for that too. [0:10:33] PF: How did you come up with these different strategies? Obviously, you're a fabulous researcher. How did you come to understand those different types of loneliness, and this is what would resolve them? [0:10:45] JN: It's a really great question. The way, again, research works, science works, it's driven by one thing. By the way, it's the same thing that drives the arts, and that's curiosity. As we started going out, and doing programs, and having conversations with hundreds of people about their loneliness and what their experience was, we began to see patterns and trends. It's also important to know that of these three types of loneliness, you could have one type, two types, or three types altogether. That was the first thing, was the observation, awareness. In terms of what works to impact it, some of that is based on psychology research in laboratory settings. We can study what seems to activate people, to embolden them, to be able to connect with others, and tolerate what I sometimes call discomfort of disclosure. Because if you reveal something authentic about yourself, and then someone says, "Sorry, you're too boring. I don't want to have a conversation with you."   [0:11:48] PF: Or, "That's just too much for me."   [0:11:50] JN: Exactly. Or, "I can't handle that." Then, you might feel rejected, abandoned, critiqued, and that hurts. So then, you're reluctant to do that. People, in a way, they connect with others, have to learn to tolerate the fact that you're not always 100% successful, and to keep going just like – you have to explore, and try different things, and see what works for you personally. [0:12:16] PF: That makes so much sense. There was a report that caught everyone's attention. I think it was within the last year, and it's really quoted quite a bit, and that is that loneliness is more dangerous than smoking. We hear that a lot, but we don't hear the reasoning behind that. Could you explain to us why it's so harmful, and also, physically, what loneliness does to us? [0:12:41] JN: Absolutely. That work, that sound bite about being smoking. It can be as dangerous as smoking – loneliness can be as dangerous as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Why is that? Because at its chronic extreme stages, loneliness actually changes how the brain functions, and it also increases inflammation, a real driver for illness, and it impairs immune system function. So, many of these excess deaths that lead to a 30% increase risk of a shorter lifespan are not because of suicides or overdose, drug overdoses. You could imagine loneliness could cause those, and it does. Those are factored out of these scientific analyzes. Most of the deaths are cardiovascular, it's heart attack, it's stroke, sometimes it's cancer death, or metabolic death. Disease and illness related to diabetes. It's important to know that loneliness unchecked, unattended to, when it spirals out of control can be very, very hard on our physical systems too, not just our mental attitudes. [BREAK] [0:13:50] PF: We'll be right back with Dr. Jeremy Nobel, but I wanted to take a moment to talk about how you can beat the heat and get better sleep this summer. I've become such a big fan of Cozy Earth sheets for a lot of reasons. But as the temperatures rise, I've found one more reason to make them the only sheets I want to sleep on. Thanks to their cutting-edge temperature regulating technology, Cozy Earth's bedding lets me stay cool and comfortable, even on the hottest days and nights. That means, I can wake up refreshed and ready for the day. Here's the best part, our exclusive offer for listeners like you gets you a 30% discount and a free item when you use COZY HAPPY at cozyearth.com/livehappynow. These sheets also offer the unbeatable combination of softness and durability, giving you an incredible, comfortable sleep experience. So, invest in your sleep health this summer and stay cool backed by Cozy Earth's 100-night sleep trial and a 10-year warranty. Visit cozyearth.com/livehappynow, and use the code COZY HAPPY to unlock this special offer and optimize your sleep for better health. After placing your order, be sure to select podcast in the survey, and then select Live Happy Now in the drop-down menu that follows. Now, let's get back to my conversation with Dr. Jeremy Nobel. [INTERVIEW CONTINUES]   [0:15:10] PF: I recall, even, probably about 20 years ago, having a friend who was going through a divorce and she said, "I'm lonely." It struck me, because I think, that was the first time it actually had somebody say that to me, like it was almost a shameful thing to say, "I'm lonely." What was that mindset and does any of that still remain? [0:15:32] JN: We started Project UnLonely with three goals, Paula. One was to increase awareness of loneliness, and how toxic it can be for your health. The second, which is what we're going to talk about, is to reduce the stigma that surrounds it. The third is to put these powerful imagination, creativity-fueled programs out in the community, so people can be better engaged. But let's talk more about stigma. Many people feel that if they're lonely, it's their fault, that there's something about them, that they're broken, they're flawed, they're incomplete, they're inadequate. This is all just a social personal construction. That's what they believe. The only good news about that is that, anything that's socially and culturally constructed can be culturally reconstructed. So, I think we have an enormous opportunity. I first heard this idea from John Cacioppo, University of Chicago, who died, unfortunately. Shortly before the pandemic, it's a real pioneer in understanding loneliness, and how it impacts not just our brains, but our behaviors. He said, "Why don't we think about loneliness as a signal that there's something we need, a biologic signal? Just like thirst is a signal, we need hydration. Loneliness is a signal that every one of us needs some degree of human connection." Obviously, most people don't feel embarrassed or guilty about thirsty. Why do we feel embarrassed about being lonely? It goes back to this cultural assumption, in our cultural kind of matrix of, kind of how we put things together. People, as I said, feel that they're flawed. What if we can shift that to just say, "Hey, it's just a signal. What do I need now?" Human connection. "How do I find it? What type of loneliness do I have?" Then, you follow the reasonable paths to get better connected, either psychologically, or societally. or spiritually. [0:17:30] PF: As people become more willing to explore that, how is that going to open up the world a little bit better? You reference Gen Z and how they are incredibly lonely despite being connected. How, as we change this conversation, do you see the world is going to open up? [0:17:48] JN: All right. Here's an experiment I do when I do public speaking now. I ask people, raise your hand if you know someone who is seriously and significantly lonely. Not if you're lonely, but if you know someone. Hundred percent of the hands go up. Then, I say, "How many people have you heard say out loud, 'I'm lonely.'"? Only 50% of the hands go up. If this were even five years ago, only 10% of the hands will go up. So, we're making progress. We have a long way to go, but we're making progress. So, that's encouraging. I think a lot of it is the younger demographic that I mentioned, the loneliest demographic, 18 to 28 do seem willing to talk about their mental health and so on, and take the risk of being judged, criticized, excluded. I admire that courage. What we're trying to do with project and lonely is to actually also give them workshops. and programs that they can participate in, that are delivered not by us. We develop our programs and then they're delivered by colleges, by libraries, by faith-based groups, by community centers. Because as our surgeon general calls for in the report, you mentioned, we need to create a culture of connection, where it's not viewed as an illness or a flaw, loneliness. The connection is valued as something we celebrate at a personal level. We do it with friends, with family. We actively look for opportunities to get together and have the, sometimes just very simple conversations that can still be quite meaningful. They don't have to be deep, heart-to-heart disclosure conversation every time. It can be, "Hey, what's lighting you up these days?" "Let me tell you." "Oh." It's so important, these casual networks of human exchange, and not just social media, memes, and likes, and follows around short videos, but actual conversations in real life. [0:19:54] PF: Can just the acknowledgement, even to ourselves that we're lonely. Does that start changing things for us? [0:20:01] JN: I think it does if it isn't also associated with guilt and self-blame. So, to say, "I'm lonely because I'm a loser, and I've always been a loser", is not a very helpful step forward. But to say, "I'm lonely." But loneliness, and I truly believe this is the world's most human feeling, the need for other people. It's a signal that there's something I need. How do I follow that signal and lead myself forward to a path of personal discovery? Because I think if we're not comfortable knowing who we are, it's hard to have authentic conversations, and friendships with others. But then, how do I feel part of a bigger world where, "Yes, I exist as a person, but I'm part of a much bigger story." That often makes people feel better and feel connected. [0:20:48] PF: We all feel lonely time to time. But how does someone know if it's a problem, if it's chronic loneliness, versus just something we're going through right now? [0:20:58] JN: That's a really great question. I think part of that is really to pay a lot of attention to how you're doing, feeling in kind of navigating the world. In the book, I call this the pyramid of vulnerability. Imagine a pyramid with three layers. The bottom layer is where we all are all the time. Every human being, as I said, can feel lonely from time to time, so that's us. At that bottom layer, we should be trying to do things to build our social resilience, our social connection levels. But yet, no matter who you are in your life and all of our lives, we will be faced with challenges that really do increase our risk of loneliness. That moves us to the middle tier. So, that could be loss of a loved one, the breakup of relationship, a new serious illness, whatever it is, loss of a job, concern about some future event like the national elections. That starts a kind of risk for a spiral, where you start to withdraw. That's when it's most critical to say, "Okay. Am I starting to feel more anxious? Am I having trouble sleeping? Am I having trouble concentrating? Maybe it's because I'm lonely." Ask yourself that. Then, if you are, to go through this exploration, well, what type of loneliness is it. Then, follow the strategies to get connected. Because if you can interact at that middle tier of vulnerability, and then reduce the risk to spiral down into a good direction towards the base, you avoid spiraling up into the highest tier of loneliness. That's where loneliness becomes a serious medical issue, where it is like smoking 15 cigarettes a day, where you have a 30% increased risk of heart attack. or stroke. or death from either. But we don't have to get to that level if we can engage earlier and kind of reestablish balance, and a sense of comfort and connection, calm it down, so we're back down to the bottom tier. Does that make sense? [0:23:04] PF: It does. I wondered as you were talking, because once you reach that top level, it seems like it's going to be most difficult to pull yourself out. What then should those around you – because if I'm your friend and I see this, it's probably going to take some sort of intervention or outreach from me. Because once you hit that top, you're a goner, but you're in deep. [0:23:27] JN: You are in deep, and that's when you're really most in need. As you point out, it's often where you are least able to navigate your way out of it completely on your own. That's where one of the things we can do in building a culture of connection, is to kind of keep an eye out on our friends, family, even neighbors, and not be their therapist, not be their parent, but be their friend. Bear in mind how even a simple kind word, when you're passing by somebody on the street can totally change their day, can totally change their sense of optimism, of positive possibility, curiosity for that day. Stabilize them from what otherwise could be very difficult thoughts, sometimes thoughts of self-harm, and just kind of remind them that, "Hey, there's some positive things going on in the world. I'm out here too, and you're not alone, you're not broken, and you're not defective." It doesn't require a therapist to have these daily reminders that we're all human, we're all connected. We all feel lonely from time to time, but we can be part of a larger and connected story. I think the arts and imagination, obviously, can give us kind of fun ways to tell that story of being connected, and then share those stories with others. [0:24:42] PF: Yes. I love that your solution goes to the arts. Can you talk about the role that creative and artistic expression plays in combating loneliness? Then, give us some ideas for how people can use that in their own lives? [0:24:56] JN: Absolutely. I think, first of all, it's now really clear that arts and creative expression change the brain. When we change the brain, we change our minds. We change our minds, we change behaviors. Here's how arts change the brain. One major way the arts and all the arts, by the way work. So not just the traditional arts like music, visual art, language arts like poetry, movement arts like dance, but culinary arts, cooking. The creative assembly of food ingredients, the taste, the smell, the sensation in your mouth as you eat fun food. So, that's a creative form. Textile arts, these have been around for centuries. Knitting, crocheting, quilting, these are wonderful creative activities. Then, gardening. Just bringing four things from nature, what a friend of mine calls the world's slowest performance art form.   [0:25:54] PF: I love that.   [0:25:56] JN: These are how the arts can change us. They reduce cortisol levels, the stress hormone that puts us on edge, drives fight or flight, which means we're always hyper vigilant. That does increase inflammation. It's what alters the immune system. But the arts also increase levels of dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, the so-called feel-good hormones. Then, very importantly, the arts also change how we make sense of the social world. What otherwise we might see as threats, like somebody walking towards us through the arts, particularly the ones that increase our sense of compassion, empathy, that person can look like an opportunity, someone I can have a conversation with. That's kind of the cascade of how changes in the brain from the arts, then literally change our levels of optimism, possibility. Sometimes, this is all in the positive psychology realm, as you know. But then, most importantly, it changes how we behave. We're willing to smile at a stranger, we're willing to take the risk of even a little piece of casual conversation in the grocery store. Then, if you take that risk and people respond, it starts moving your brain and mind in a more positive way, and the positive spiral happens. This is why the arts, I think, can be such a catalyst for connection. [0:27:17] PF: I absolutely love that. Big question is, where do people start? [0:27:22] JN: I think, if it's around the arts, I think it comes back to curiosity. Explore the world in some creative form that you enjoy. If you don't know what you enjoy, yet, try different things. Try drawing, try just kind of move with colored markers on white paper, and just say, "How am I feeling today? We have prompts and activities for this on our website. Imagine a time in your life that was meaningful to you. Then. don't draw the experience. Let yourself feel the feelings associated with that time, and then try to draw the feelings using color and shade. There's no wrong answer to these exercises. So. you get it all out on the page. Then, in many of our workshops, what we do is, we do this as a group. We make the art on our own, but then we pair up and we tell our personal stories. That's the second really powerful things the arts do. They invite and allow us to share our stories. Because almost every creative form, whether it's a casserole, a chocolate chip cookie, or a Picasso painting is a form of a story. It's a narrative, we're trying to express something. So, the arts enable that. Then, the last thing the arts do, and I particularly feel this with certain kinds of music, is they kind of transform us to a kind of awe and wonder about the world. I feel this in poetry also. I'm a poet, and reading a poem by who might no longer even be alive with us can still make me feel like I'm a small but important part of a very big and very wonderful story. [0:29:03] PF: That's fantastic. Now, we're going to tell the listeners how they can find your website, how they can find your book. As you said, you have resources on the website so they can start doing some of these exercises. Your book has prompts and walks us through this. What is it that you want everyone listening to know and understand about loneliness? [0:29:23] JN: Let me go back to some of the things we talked about. By the way, thank you for helping get the word out. The other thing we have that's a lot of fun for people who aren't immediately willing to, "Oh, I'm going to make some art." Is, we use the power of the arts in the form of short films. We're now working with Steve Buscemi, the celebrated actor and filmmaker. He's an ambassador for what we call Project UnLonely Films. You come to our website and there's a whole portfolio of short films that look at loneliness and some of the major social territories in which they exist. So, trauma, aging, illness, difference, the modern world. You get to explore loneliness through the lens, literally, of someone who's making a film on it. Then, if you watch it with a few other people, you can just say, "Hey, what did we just watch?" and have a conversation. Don't overlook the opportunity. Come to our site, watch some of our films, sign up for our newsletter, so we'll send you a little link every week or two with a film and some conversation starters. So, there are lots of ways we can move from being a little bit cautious in a defensive crouch, which we're all in post-pandemic, to something a little bit more open-hearted, a little bit more open-minded. [0:30:40] PF: That is fantastic. The work you're doing is amazing. It's very necessary, and I truly believe it's going to help move that needle on loneliness in our society. So, I thank you for the work you're doing, first of all. Then, secondly, I really appreciate your time. It was an honor to sit down with you and talk about this. I know our listeners have gotten a lot out of this conversation. [0:31:00] JN: Thank you. It's my absolute pleasure, and even this conversation makes me feel more connected. So, thank you for that, too, Paula. [END OF INTERVIEW] [0:31:08] PF: That was Dr. Jeremy Nobel, talking about loneliness. If you'd like to learn more about Jeremy, check out his book, Project UnLonely: Healing Our Crisis of Disconnection. Visit his website for resources or follow him on social media, just visit us at livehappy.com and click on the podcast tab. While you're there, be sure to sign up for our weekly Live Happy newsletter. Every week, we'll drop a little bit of joy into your inbox with the latest stories, podcast info, and even a happy song of the week. 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 Driving Gen Z’s Anxiety (and What to Do About It) With Dr. Lauren Cook [INTRODUCTION] [0:00:02] PF: Thank you for joining us for Episode 471 of Live Happy Now. Younger generations are experiencing stress and anxiety differently than previous generations. That's something we're making part of the ongoing conversation here at Live Happy. I'm your host, Paula Felps, and this week, I'm joined by author and clinical psychologist, Dr. Lauren Cook. Her latest book, Generation Anxiety looks at why Millennials and Gen Z are so anxious and how that's affecting them. She's here today to talk about some of the things that are driving that anxiety, and importantly, offers insight into what we can do to help change this downward spiral, and what that will mean for future generations. Let's have a listen. [EPISODE]   [0:00:46] PF: Lauren, welcome back to Live Happy Now.   [0:00:48] LC: It's so good to see you again, Paula.   [0:00:51] PF: I'm really excited to sit down have this conversation with you because you're doing some incredible work with Gen Z and Millennials. As you know, you and I have talked about this. Live Happy Now is really concerned about the mental health of Gen Z. We're really committed to keeping that dialogue open. So, your book does an excellent, incredible job of looking at, not just Gen Z, but Millennials. I wanted to kick it off, I wanted to know if you could talk about why both of those generations are so anxiety-ridden. [0:01:23] LC: Yes. We are really seeing an increase in anxiety both in prevalence, meaning more and more people and severity. Intensity of symptoms is increasing as well. So, we're seeing it horizontally, longitudinally, all the ways. Anxiety is absolutely increasing for folks. I think it's happening both personally, but also very much communally. When you look at what's happened in our country in the last two decades, in particular, it's been one thing after another. There's a really interesting survey that asked people, "What's been the most significant effect generationally that's happened to you in your lifetime?" You, as Baby Boomers, you asked the great generation who experienced the depression, World War Two, Gen X. They all say – you can probably guess what it is. The number one significant event in their lifetime and Millennials will say this as well.   [0:02:18] PF: 9/11.   [0:02:18] LC: September 11th. There you go. However, if you look at what's happened in Gen Z's lifetime, we've got the Trump election, Black Lives Matter, George Floyd's murder, climate change events, the Me Too movement. I mean, I could keep going for quite a while about the long laundry list of things. I don't say that to be political. These are historical events that are happening. It is really affecting young adults to be living in this world where they're just inundated by chaotic and distressing news. And, you also have what's happening personally in their lives as well, with social media, academic pressure. These two generations, even though they're the most educated, are the most financially worse off than their previous generations. That's really frustrating, to feel like you're told this myth of like, "Work hard and you will be able to succeed." They're working really hard, and it's very hard to succeed, to own a house, all these different things. That breaks the person down over time. [0:03:24] PF: Can you talk about how they're different from previous generations? Because I want to dive into that a little bit, because I've heard people who seem to not really understand. They think like, basically, we're all the same. We were just born at different times. So, can you correct that way of thinking? [0:03:42] LC: Yes. Social media, it sounds almost like low hanging fruit at this point. But it really, I think, has made a difference for Millennials and Gen Z. They grew up at this time when – especially Millennials like myself, social media was just coming on the scene. We didn't know what was happening. Gen Z, in particular, have been the guinea pigs of social media, of having technology, getting a cell phone when they're 10 years old, right? We didn't necessarily know what effects this was going to have on the brain. But now, we're seeing this play out, where we're seeing social anxiety increased. So many young adults, they don't know how to answer the phone, they don't know how to have a conversation with a stranger. They also feel really unsafe in this world. The Stress in America survey asked young adults, "What are you afraid of?" Seventy-five percent said their greatest fear is gun violence. For this generation, to wake up and they see movie theaters, concerts, schools, places of worship, no place is safe. Now, everybody looks around their shoulder every time they go out. Am I safe? Is something going to happen to me? Is something going to happen to my loved one? We could have a whole conversation about separation anxiety, Paula, and how this generation really experiences it. Because our world just feels incredibly unsafe to these young adults. When you look at what has happened, I think it's understandable why. [0:05:10] PF: Does the fact that parents are also then trying to protect those children? We're doing it from a good place, but doesn't that also increase those feelings of the world's not safe and I should be afraid? [0:05:22] LC: Exactly, exactly. It's a really fine line, between wanting to protect our kids. And at the same time, not over protecting where our kids are learning this message, "I can't do anything in my life." I cite this in Generation Anxiety, my book, a really interesting study. That when parents give this message to their kids, that the world is unsafe, people are going to hurt you, we do see that there are increases in depression and anxiety for kids. When parents have a more optimistic outlook, go out there. live your life, yes, bad, scary things can happen. But statistically, the chances of that are pretty slim. Go out there and experience your life. Those kids are less likely to be anxious and depressed. Even though we turn on the news, and we hear these difficult things. We also have to remind ourselves, okay, what is the chance of that happening to me when I go to a movie theater, when I go to a concert, and not keeping ourselves in such a small box at the same time? [0:06:23] PF: You know, that's something Deb Heisz, CEO for Live Happy and I have talked about. We've talked about it on the air that when you're constantly watching the news, you do start seeing the world as unsafe, and very scary place. I think it is important for parents to be mindful of what children are being exposed to, in the home in terms of what kind of news, what kind of television is on at any given time, because that is having a deep, deep effect on them. [0:06:52] LC: It is. It is. There's really great conversations happening right now about parental attachment, and really taking time to be with our kids, to be present with our kids. I'm a new mom myself. My son turns one this Sunday. [0:07:07] PF: Well, congratulations, first of all. [0:07:09] LC: Thank you. I'm super excited about it. But we don't even, I think realize at this point how much we use our phones. I catch myself doing it where, "Oh, let me just answer a few emails. Let me get to a few text messages." Meanwhile, my son is right there by me playing, and he's, I'm sure, perceiving me being sucked into a phone. That's something Gen Z has experienced too. Even though I don't think it's intentional, we just haven't had as much face-to-face interaction with each other because we're face-to-facing with our phone. [0:07:44] PF: From a parent's standpoint, if you have someone who is part of Gen Z, what are some things in terms of that mindset of safety? Because, again, we want to keep our children safe, we want to be there. But how do we do that, and advise them without terrifying them? Because the world, we can make it pretty terrifying if we really talk about it. [0:08:06] LC: We definitely can. I approach things with this mentality, I call them powered acceptance. First piece is, we have to accept what's going on in our world. If our kids ask about it, we can't lie to them. We need to be honest about what's happening, and we need to really have a sense of what's going on in our world. If we don't know what the problems are, how do we fix them? But we also have to be empowered, we have to take action. This is the thing; anxiety makes people want to avoid. It makes people want to run away and say, "I don't want to get on that plane. I don't want to go to that show. I don't want to ask that new person to be my friend because it makes me feel anxious." Anxiety just grows bigger and bigger and bigger. So, we have to be empowered and start to kind of push the boundaries of what our anxiety is wanting to make us do. We have to take action to see, "Oh, I can ask somebody to hang out, even though that makes me feel anxious." Or, "I can go to that concert because I love Taylor Swift. Sure, something scary could happen, I will deal with that." At the end of the day, anxiety is about not wanting to face the reality of that things end, that things change, that we can experience pain. These are not necessarily warm, fuzzy ideas, right? But if we actually teach ourselves and our kids that we can sit with distress, we can sit with discomfort. The world opens up to us in a whole new way and we no longer have to be in fear of pain. [0:09:40] PF: How do you start sharing that message? Because that's huge, to be able to sit with discomfort, especially in a time when there are a million distractions that we can have at our fingertips. First of all, how do we as the adults in the room, how do we learn how to do that, and then, how do you pass that along? [0:10:03] LC: We have to model it ourselves. We have to show our kids that we're okay handling discomfort. They are watching us so closely to notice when we avoid when we lean in. Sure, sometimes we do need to take a step back and rest. It's not always about powering and pushing through. It's just as important to show our kids how we can set healthy boundaries, how we can say no sometimes. But our kids also need to see us getting a little bit uncomfy, even if it's something like giving a speech at work, or having a tough conversation with our partner, but in a healthy, appropriate way. These are all modeling examples that our kids are really taking in. Aat the same time, I think when we can show our kids and encourage them to lean into their discomfort, and cheer them on for that, that's so, so helpful. Because I do see a lot of parents enable their kid's anxiety, they feel like it's an act of love to let them get out of things. But if we can show them, hey, you can actually go to that soccer game when you felt really nervous about it rather than stay home. We're teaching our kids their resilience in those moments. [0:11:14] PF: I love that. I absolutely love that. What are some of the signs that we should be looking for that someone is struggling with anxiety? Because we can kind of tell internally, when we've got it going on ourselves, but we might not always see it in someone else. [0:11:28] LC: I'm really glad you asked that, Paula. There's a few things to really make note of. If you notice any sleep difficulties, that's a classic one of someone who's having trouble falling or staying asleep. If you notice somebody's having difficulty concentrating. Sometimes that can get a little confusing with ADHD, but that's also a sign of anxiety. If somebody feels or notices that they're really keyed up or on edge, it's like a hamster on a wheel, go, go, go. Here's one that people often miss, irritability. We think irritability is its own thing, but irritability is actually often a sign of anxiety and depression. So, if you notice somebody's getting snappy or quiet, that's something to pay attention to. Again, any kind of avoided behavior, if you notice your kiddo or yourself, "Oh, we used to always go out to dinner together, and now my kid doesn't want to go out for a meal." Or, "I'm noticing my kiddo doesn't want to go on car rides, or plane rides." All these different things where avoidance could be really coming into play, that's a hallmark of anxiety. [0:12:32] PF: So then, once you start seeing it, and not just as a parent, because I'm not a parent, but I have a lot of young people in my life. You're in it, it's a different situation, because there's a lot of things you cannot do. So, what is it? If you see anxiety, if you start recognizing, "Hey, this person might be struggling with anxiety." What are some things that you should start doing to reach out to them? [0:12:59] LC: Self-disclosure here is really powerful. Anxiety is something that, just about everybody has some touchpoint with. Self-disclosing when you yourself have felt anxious and humanizing yourself in that way is so relieving to someone with anxiety. Because the thing, and I see this with so many of my clients, they don't want anyone to know they're anxious. They think it's so embarrassing, and it's like, welcome to the human club. If we can make it okay to be anxious, ironically, that's actually when anxiety starts to go down. But people get so much anxiety about hiding their anxiety. "I don't want anyone to notice." It really magnifies it for them. So, if you yourself, show your humaneness of like, "Oh my gosh, I felt really anxious about this or really worried about this, how do you feel about it?" It really opens that door for someone to share what's behind their own curtain. [0:13:57] PF: Then, once they start sharing that, and once they kind of start unpacking the cause of their anxiety, where do you go from there? I mean, one thing is, I'm reading your book. Just the depth and the breadth of how far-reaching anxiety can be, and how deeply emotional river that runs through it is, it made it a bigger issue than I even really had looked at it from. So, once someone shares with you, then what do you do? Other than say, "Call Dr. Lauren Cook." [0:14:28] LC: Thank you, Paula. Well, I'd like to take a holistic approach. That's something I really hope comes across in the book to move beyond just a westernized model of care. I am all for therapy, I'm all for medication. I'm a psychologist, so I'm very much for those things. However, I also believe there's a lot of different things that can work for people with anxiety and anxiety is such a physical experience. I mean, especially when you look at the gut brain access connection, and how much of our anxiety really can settle into our gut and our stomach. We've got to look at all of those different things. The food, the drinks we put into our bodies. Amazing book on this is Dr. Uma Naidoo's This is Your Brain on Food, and really getting curious about what we're eating is either inflaming or healing our gut. Quick tip, everybody listening, please get your bloodwork done. Because people can spend thousands of dollars on therapy, when something is going off in your chemistry. Your vitamin D levels are low, magnesium, B12. If those things are out of whack, doesn't matter how much cognitive therapy you do, you're going to feel anxious, my friend. It's important to do the due diligence of looking at yourself holistically, not just from the neck up, but really looking at our entire physical body for overall healing. [0:15:54] PF: I love that you brought that up. Because for myself, I'm very big on what I eat. I know that everything has – there's a cause and effect. So, being very careful about avoiding preservatives, and dyes, and sugars, and things like that. I see that as an area where that does get overlooked, because so much of what we have on our shelves today is – well, it's not food, actually. It's just chemicals in a really nice package. So, I'm super happy to see you bringing that up. Do you see that when people change some of the things that they're eating, they start having a different experience with anxiety? [0:16:33] LC: Big time. big time. Yes. It's everything from cutting back on preservatives, cutting back on sugar. That's hard for me, because I'm such a sweet tooth myself. Alcohol is a big one. A lot of my college-aged clients will tell you, "Oh, I have anxiety" on the next day. They get bad anxiety with the hangover. So, a lot of them are starting to get sober curious, as we say, and starting to play with, "Okay. What happens when I'm not drinking for a while?" Because, even if someone's drinking every other day, their sleep patterns never have a chance to equilibrate. Sleep is a huge part in anxiety and treatment. So, this is all wrapped up in itself. Even hydration, staying hydrated with water. We see when the brain is not getting enough water, things spiral quickly. So, absolutely, I think that's something that has been missed in the narrative, because it seems so simple. We're told from a young age, eat your fruits and veggies, blah, blah. It has a real effect on brain health. [0:17:39] PF: That is great. I hope more people will jump on that and look at what they're putting in and what that's doing to their bodies. I know Dr. Drew Ramsey, is someone we've had on the show before. When someone comes in with depression, the first thing he does is look at what they're eating. Before he tries medication, he will have them change their diet, and most times, medication is not needed. That just really supports the kind of work that you're doing too. [0:18:07] LC: That's incredible. I believe it. [0:18:10] PF: So, as I said, your book really outlines just how massive this issue is right now. Do you see this as a solvable problem? Because it is huge. It's kind of like, can we have world peace? I feel like this is somewhere out there with it. [0:18:25] LC: I did have a stint in beauty pageant days. So perhaps, this is my world peace moment. I don't know. I am forever an optimist. I love Seligman's work on positive psychology, and the effects of optimism. I do believe that things can get better. I always have that hope. I'm also a realist, though, and the book is not about trying to make anxiety go away. It's about learning how to live with anxiety. I think that's something people get a little bit lost on. They feel like they're a failure if they can't get their anxiety to stop. The reality is, sometimes your anxiety may be here to stay. But the more you fight it, the more the beast is going to grow bigger in you. But if you embrace what I call your inner sea otter, lay back in your waters, and say, "All right, I'm anxious. So, what?" It really starts to lose its power. I've seen that in my own life. I'm very open about my own lived experience with anxiety and emetophobia in particular, which is a phobia of vomit, really fun. But I'm very open about how I've lived with that and have worked hard to not let it stop me living the life that I want to live. [0:19:40] PF: Yes. What's interesting in your book, you also explained where that came from. I found that very, very fascinating. I'm not going to tell the listeners how because now they have to go find your book and look it up.   [0:19:51] LC: Tease.   [0:19:52] PF: It is. That actually played into another question that I had for you, which is about generational trauma and epigenetics is such a huge area of study. I think it's been disregarded a lot in the past, where we don't look at the effect of what happened with our parents and our grandparents, and how that anxiety and other types of traumas get passed along. Can you talk just a little bit about what role that intergenerational trauma plays and how we kind of can use that and correct the trajectory of that trauma? [0:20:27] LC: I'm really happy that you reference that, because I think we can get very quickly into the blame game of, "What's wrong with me? What am I doing wrong?" It is generational buildup, it's like emotional tartar that has been passed down. One study, I found this so fascinating in the research for the book about Holocaust survivors, how it was actually their grandchildren that had more anxiety than the Holocaust survivors themselves. Really seeing how this generational trauma gets passed down. Now, I also found research though that it can be changed as well, in a better way as too, that diet, nutrition, what people eat can really make a positive impact for people. But it makes us really think about. "Wow, the choices I'm making for myself now, it doesn't just affect me. It affects my kids and even my grandkids." You even look at studies with smoking, and how that impacts people for generations to come. This is something I think we can get more curious about. I think we were really just at the tip of the iceberg with epigenetics research. I'm staying closely aware of it, because I think we're only going to see more and more. This is where I do have an optimistic lens here, that we can make better choices that are going to be good for more generations to come. [0:21:51] PF: If we don't figure this out, what are the consequences for future generations? Knowing what we just said, that it's passed down. If we cannot start correcting the true trajectory of happiness for Gen Z now, what is the consequence? [0:22:09] LC: Unfortunately, I think it means we're only going to see more anxiety, more depression, and potentially even more suicidality. That's something that I think is very important for us to talk about, as well, that we lose on average 12 people a day to suicide between the ages of just 15 to 24. That's one every two hours. That's incredibly concerning to me. This is something we're all going to have to collectively get on board with, especially when it comes to climate change for example. There is more and more research about kids who grow up in environments where there's a lot of smog in the air, that we're seeing increases in anxiety and depression for those folks. How do you tackle that? That is going to be more than just food and drink. That is something we are all going to have to really get on board with. I think part of it is really tapping into our empathy for the human experience. My husband and I were just talking about this the other day about how we live in such an individualistic society. You see cars cut in front of each other, people cut each other in line. We're so much thinking about what's fastest and easiest for me. I think we really have to get into our empathy of, how might someone else be experiencing this, what is it like for the life of someone else, and how can I make changes in my life? Not just to self-serve me, but to serve someone else. We know that is so good for our brain, ultimately, to tap into altruism and generosity, but it's a practice. I think as we become more isolated, we have become more individualistic and selfish, so we've got to really start pushing up against that. [0:23:57] PF: I agree. I know during the pandemic; they saw empathy decline greatly. We weren't face-to-face, we were in our little silos, and bubbles, and didn't interact. I don't know what current research shows if we're bouncing back from that at all. But what is your recommendation? Okay, doctor, what's your prescription for us? Where do we start and how do we start changing things for Gen Z and for subsequent generations? [0:24:26] LC: I think this is one of the greatest strengths of Gen Z. They really care about other people, even though they may be more socially anxious around other people. They do really have compassion for one another. You see that when they have these protests on gun violence, when you see them protesting what's happening in Gaza. They're doing it because they're thinking about somebody who's thousands of miles away. So, that ability to empathize with another person's experience in that lens, I think is really inspiring. I think it's something that we all need to get called back into, of realizing a lot of us got a lucky draw, honestly, to be born where we may live, have the families that we may live. I think sometimes, we can think like, "Well, I earned all this." Sure, we all work very hard, and at the same time, realizing when we wake up, I could have just as easily been that person down the road or that person in another country. How can I have empathy for that experience, even though it may not be my own lived experience that's uncomfortable? But the more we build our distress tolerance skills of being willing to sit with discomfort, I think the better off we'll be. Lastly, I'll say, giving ourselves the permission to hold the dialectic, because I see people get a little bit all or nothing with this of like, "Well, if I sit with the sadness of what's happening in the world, I'm never going to be happy." But really, we can expand it where our human emotions can hold great capacity to say, "I feel the pain of the world, I acknowledge it, I feel it, and I still can give myself permission to enjoy and savor the life that I have at the same time." Both can exist. [0:26:17] PF: I love that. it also can just be a way to encourage us to do something for others. Being able to sit with that and say, "Alright. What can I change? I cannot change what's going on across in another country. But I can change what the experience is for my neighbor, or for this person down the street. or for the homeless person on the corner." [0:26:38] LC: Yes. I really do believe that the tiniest little things make a positive impact. If we would just smile at each other, the world, would feel that change. So, I'm always encouraging my clients and young adults that I work with, lift your head up from the phone, share eye contact with someone, feel another person's humanity, things will start to feel a lot different. [0:27:06] PF: That is excellent advice right there. That's what we all need to be doing. This is fantastic. I know your book gives so much information, so much insight. It's obviously a labor of love and research, and very, very well done. I'm excited to tell our listeners about it. I think we might be having something from you on the website coming up. We'll keep talking because Gen Z is front and center in our minds right now, and we want to keep this conversation going, and I appreciate you sitting down and being a part of it. [0:27:39] LC: Paula, the feeling is mutual. Thank you so much for caring about this and bringing a microphone to it. I'm grateful for you. [0:27:47] PF: All right. Well, Lauren, until next time. Thank you so much.   [0:27:51] LC: Thanks, Paula. [END OF INTERVIEW] [0:27:55] PF: That was Dr. Lauren Cook, talking about anxiety and Gen Z. If you'd like to learn more about Lauren, check out her book, Generation Anxiety or follow her on social media. Just visit us at livehappy.com, and click on the podcast tab. While you're there, you'll also find an article from Dr. Lauren, explaining why the world looks so different for Gen Z and how that's affecting them. We hope you enjoy this episode of Live Happy Now. If you aren't already receiving us every week, we invite you to subscribe wherever you get your podcast. While you're there, feel free to drop us a review and let us know what you think of the show. 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]