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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: Commit to a Summer of Fun with Mike Rucker, PhD [INTRODUCTION] [00:00:01] PF: Thank you for joining us for episode 473 of Live Happy Now. Summer officially begins on June 20th and that’s the perfect time to launch Live Happy’s Summer of Fun. I’m your host, Paula Felps, and this week, I’m joined by Mike Rucker, an organizational psychologist, charter member of the International Positive Psychology Association, and author of The Fun Habit: How the Pursuit of Joy and Wonder Can Change Your Life. We’ve teamed up with Mike to offer a free, eight-week email course that will set you on track to have a fun-filled summer, and today, he explains why fun is so important, how to make more room for it in your life, and what to expect when you commit to having a summer of fun. Let’s have a listen.   [INTERVIEW] [0:00:49.3] PF: Mike, thank you for coming back on Live Happy Now. [0:00:51.5] MR: Oh, my goodness, I love being here, so thanks for having me. [0:00:54.5] PF: Well, you’re so great to talk to you because you’re one of the few people that I know who studies fun, and what a great career pursuit that is, you know? It’s like, I’m going to study fun. So, I wanted to find out, I don’t think I’ve ever asked you this question, like, what made you realize the importance of prioritizing fun? [0:01:16.1] MR: Yeah. So, my story really is being an early part of the International Positive Psychology Association, when that started in 2000, right? Cheek sent me, “Hi, I’m Martin Seligman.” You know, brought all these folks together, was lucky enough to be, you know, one of those early folks, and rightfully, we’re all looking at happiness, right? Because that – at the start, I think, as an ideal, trying to figure out how we can make the world, you know, happier, was a good goal. We ultimately called it thriving because we added elements of subjective well-being, right? You know like academics, we have to make everything [crosstalk 0:01:53.7]. I’m working on this on the academics now with regards to fun and I feel like in the book, The Fun Habit, I made fun fairly easy. You know, we’ll just get real quick to my definition, it’s essentially anything you find pleasurable and then I’ll circle back to your question. But now, because we can bring it down to levels, right? We’re now talking about fun in different context and I find that fascinating because again, you know, academics picking up where I left off now, you know, fun has 30 different subcategories and I think that’s great but you know, because fun in the broad context can, you know, you can start to make it too ambiguous where people are like, “You know, what does that mean for me?” And the good news is, you get to define it and we’ll get into that as we talk but what happened with happiness is that unfortunately, and we kind of have a term for it now. So, and I’m sure you’ve had podcasts about it, the term being toxic positivity, we turn happiness into an ideal. So, instead of valuing happiness, where there’s no problem with that, right? Wanting people to be happy, wanting your family to be happy, wanting to be happy, that’s not problematic. But it’s when we turn folks into being concerned about, “How can I optimize for happiness?” paradoxically, what we did was created some of the most unhappy people and I happen to be one of them, I talk about that a little bit because I was literally looking for correlations and always ruminating on you know, how I could become happier. When that happens, what we now know is you create a gap between where happiness lives because it’s always out there in the future and where your feet are. And so, the short answer to your question is, fun as a construct, is really rooted in mindfully being attentive to the pleasurable things that you do but then, also, understanding that you have the agency and the autonomy to bias your life towards those. [0:03:45.8] PF: So, why is it more helpful to pursue fun that to pursue happiness? You kind of touched on that. [0:03:52.2] MR: Yeah. So, happiness is really this lagging indicator, right? When we are asked, “Are you happy?” It is an act of retrospection, right? We have to think in the rear-view mirror, like, “Am I happy? Hmm, that’s interesting” right? So, we start comparing ourselves to our neighbors, we think about our life circumstance, which can oftentimes be ephemeral, right? We might have won the lottery, so in that moment, we’re really happy, right? But then, we ask you six months from now because some of that money has gone and you’ve kind of fallen off a cliff, right? Where fun is just something we have access to in any moment and so sometimes, it’s referred to as contentment but when you focus away from happiness, right? So that there’s something to be built further, it’s this end goal or there’s something to be achieved and then all of a sudden, happiness will occur. The fun, which can really happen in any moment, so you know, it’s this product of enjoyment and the things that we do. Once we sort of focus on that, then we do pay attention to where our feet are, like, “Wow, I’m not enjoying what I’m doing, let me change, maybe the environment or the people that I’m with or the activity that I’m doing.” We can do that in the moment and the beauty of it is once we start to index these micro-joys in our life that corpus of micro joy starts to remind us that we’re happy. So, happiness is this beautiful byproduct, and we start to become less concerned with being happy because we know that joy is right in front of us by deliberate design that we don’t have to wait around for it to happen. [0:05:30.1] PF: You know, and as kids, we pursue fun, like, that’s just our natural state. We’re looking for fun things to do and we find them and somewhere along the way, we get serious and that wears off. Is it hard for people to learn to seek out fun again? [0:05:48.2] MR: It’s not hard, that’s the beauty. I think once you kind of wake up to it, it’s clear that when you just do a couple of exercises, like the ones that we’re going to do this summer, and you become mindful that, “Wow if I enjoy myself.” I colorfully call this building my fun cup, right? “That the rest of my life is better.” And so, if there are any science nerds listening, I’ll only give a couple quick science lessons. The principle here is the hedonic flexibility principle and as I was creating the book, it was the big lightbulb, right? And so, similar to what we learned about sleep in the 90s, you know, in the 90s, we’re all wearing sleep depravation as a badge of honor, right? Because it’s how you hustle, that’s how you became more productive, right? Like, you know, winners became winners, you know, after the kids went to bed. We now know that’s an asinine assertion, folks that are in a sleep deficit are some of the least productive folks, and we’re now learning the same about leisure. Folks that don’t live a balanced life, that aren’t finding joy or at least, simple pleasures in the things that they do are also falling victim to burnout, and so under that guise, right? Fixing that becomes important and so, once you kind of understand that, once you sprinkle in some of these fun things. And just like sleep, it’s not about, you know, finding whimsy in a hundred and six to eight hours, right? Like, I’m not prescribing 12 hours of sleep. It’s that most of us aren’t having any fun at all and so, we need to figure out how to create that balance by deliberate design, and as I alluded to, it’s really easy. What I found is folks that do it well are the ones that are going to do the exercises we’re going to get into this summer. Just being deliberate, you know? What is it that I, you know, find enjoyable? Reframing what fun means to you. You know, for some folks, they’ll say, “I’m just not a fun person.” And then when I dig deeper, it’s because they believe that what’s marketed to us, right? This high arousal, “I must be at a rock concert with all my friends drinking because that’s you know, what fun is.” Or at least, that’s what Instagram tells me. No, it could be a low arousal activity where the most amazing summer for you is some alone time at the pool, engrossed in a good book that if I ask you in a couple of weeks, you know, “What was it about?” You could tell me in rich detail because that’s how meaningful it was for you and so, figuring out what those things are, and if they’re not in your schedule, being deliberate about scheduling them in, we’re almost halfway there already. [0:08:22.0] PF: Oh, that’s terrific and you know, you and I have been talking about doing this for over a year, we wanted to do a summer of fun. We talked about that and summer is marketed as being so much fun but the reality is, it’s not as lighthearted as we want to think. It’s like, crazy busy, there’s so much pressure, so many things that we have to get done, and it’s compacted into like this three-month period. Why is that a great time to start doing these exercises and make them habits? [0:08:49.5] MR: Yeah, so, I think it’s access would be the biggest one, right? I mean, there is a lot of different reasons but I have this tool called “SAVOR” and it’s essentially just an acronym and so, the “O” in SAVOR stands for “Options.” When we have better options, we tend to have more fun, and the summer just provides so many options, right? I mean, even for small communities like my own, there are things that are available to us for free that we can engage in and discover which you know, and we’re learning how to do that and that becomes a proxy for actually getting it done. You know, we’re kind of in the winter months, and no one’s leaving their homes, it’s so easy to just essentially be in the groove that we’re habituated life and let that time pass us by but the extended daylight that summer provides, the fact that folks tend to have a little bit more autonomy and agency and then again, just access to activities, quite frankly, sometimes, for us, it can be a nostalgia because as you mentioned, as kids, a lot of fun in the summer, and so wanting to get back there, using that as a lure to be like, “You know what? Summers are meant for fun.” All of these can encompass, you know, good tailwinds for getting us started. [0:10:05.8] PF: And you’ve created for us, we’ve partnered with you to do – provide this eight-week email course for free and I absolutely love it. I’m so excited to share it with everybody. Can you kind of talk us through just really, briefly touch on these eight steps and what they’re going to learn along the way? [SPONSOR MESSAGE] [0:10:22.6] PF: We’ll be right back with Mike, but part of having fun this summer, includes, getting better sleep. I’ve become such a big fan of cozier sheets for a lot of reasons, but as the temperatures rise, I found one more reason to make them the only sheet I want to sleep on. Thanks to their cutting-edge temperature-regulating technology, Cozy Earth bedding lets me stay cool and comfortable, even on the hottest nights. That means, I can wake up refreshed and ready for the day, and here’s the best part, our exclusive offer for listeners like you, gets you a 30% discount and a free item, using code “Cozy Happy” at cozyearth.com/livehappynow. I 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 109-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, and 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, and now, let’s find out Mike Rucker’s eight steps to having a summer of fun. [INTERVIEW CONTINUED] [0:11:37.3] MR: Yeah, so, the first thing is really just being aware of what you find fun, right? For adults, oftentimes, we do need to reconnect to, “What is it that I want to integrate?” And the issue there is, especially folks that find themselves in that sort of inverse euchre of happiness that so many of us talk about, right? And for folks that aren’t, you know, familiar with that, essentially what we know is that because between, you know, let’s say, 25 and 65, let’s cast a wide net, with some of the [inaudible 0:12:04.5] time for us, right? And we’re not in school anymore so we kind of lost some of the agency and autonomy we had there and so, we need to deliberately integrate some fun into our schedule, and so that’s the first step. Like, “What is it that I want to do?” Because if we allow, you know, FOMO and kind of the rhythms of our family to dictate everything, then oftentimes, we can feel very passive in that. We want to feel active, and then it’s pre-committing to those things. So, really early on in this course, we’re going to pick a few things that we want to do and make sure they happen and that doesn’t necessarily mean that we have to pay for them in advance. We’re going to learn, you know, some simple tactics to just make sure that we’re actually doing the stuff that we want to do this summer, and then the rest of the course is just an ode to things that can kind of amplify our fun. So, are there opportunities in your schedule to at least get out in nature to some degree? Are you connecting with the people that you love? Because, even if you’re an introvert, right? At least, having some prosocial interaction is what we know great and set, latency, enjoyable experiences, and then it’s, how do you invite yourself to the local culture because like I said, summertime is really great because there are all these opportunities to enjoy your township or the county that you live in. And yet oftentimes, if we don’t go looking for it, we don’t know it’s there and then one of the last modules is about kindness because I think kindness really does pair with fun. We’ll get in, for the folks that want it, I’ll send links to the studies but really doing that in a joyful way, like, “How can we play with kindness in a sort of fun way to end this strong?” And then the last module would be, how can we use all of these tools that we learned over the duration of the course to kind of move into fall and continue to benefit from what we’ve learned over the summer? [0:13:58.0] PF: It’s such a great set of action steps and I was curious how you developed this process because it’s very thoughtful, very measured. You know, it’s so easy to do and I’m like, how did you come up with all of this? [0:14:12.9] MR: Well, an ode to one of my collaborators, Haley, who is a diehard introvert and so we would go back and forth because as she was helping me put together – she’s been my blog editor too for like, 10 years and so the kernel of the idea really started with her because she was like, “Okay, you know, you’ve over-emphasized” on sort of higher all activities in certain content that I put out and you know, I am doing this with my friend. And I am doing this with my friend and so I started to pick up on that. I was like, “Wait a sec, are you guys doing this in a systematic way?” And she’s like, “Yeah, we kind of, I’ve pre-commended to this and we made sure you know, that we do X, Y, and Z.” And you know, for folks that are listening, you might know that movie Tag about adults that have kind of committed, you know, enjoying each other’s company every year. And so, as we were putting this together, we realized that folks that either had some sort of program were a lot more successful than folks that did it in an ambiguous way. So, the short answer is this is really just a reboot of the year of fun, which was a program, you know, to stretch it out an entire 12 months but because the summer you know, is so ripe with opportunity for fun and then as you know serendipitously, right? As we were putting this together, the New York Times reached out, you know, because they were like, “Let’s invite our readers to fun.” It was all, I think, the universe saying like, let’s – with November coming up, no matter what your slant is I think we’re all kind of bracing for you know, fall, maybe not being as enjoyable as we would like and so, having this opportunity to you know, make sure that we maximize our enjoyment with both what we want to do but then also sharing that with our loved ones became important. [0:16:02.2] PF: Yeah, I love the way that all came together. [0:16:05.0] MR: Another thing that I think we’re really awakening to is that fun is one of the most useful aspects for engaging in all of these lifestyle changes that we’d talked about for what? The last 50 years? [0:16:16.2] PF: Get up, move around, healthy behavior, yep. [0:16:19.3] MR: But instead, we’ve been talking about want for the last quarter of a century, right? Like, you know we get fixated on the World Health Organization and I am guilty of this too, like I have to get that 115 minutes of exercise and yet, we never stop to ask, “Are the things I’m doing for exercise enjoyable? Am I drawn to them? Do I find them pleasurable?” Now, studies are finding that if we ask that question first, that is actually the most successful moderator with regards to anything that we can do with health interventions. And so, that one is just serendipitous for me, you know, the fact that I have looked at enjoyment for so long and oh, it just happens to be the most useful tool when it comes to you getting people to engage in healthy behaviors. That’s been such a pleasant surprise for me. [0:17:04.2] PF: That’s awesome and so what do you hope that people will get out of doing the summer fun eight-week email course? [0:17:11.2] MR: Well, obviously, I hope they have a lot more fun. [0:17:13.2] PF: Yeah. [0:17:13.9] MR: And like I said, you know, these tactics aren’t going to be earth-shattering and luckily, we’ve made them very bite-sized, right? So, this isn’t going to take much time for people to get through but the nice thing is these simple and not just really can right that ship. If you feel you know, life has gotten a little bit mundane, you know, you feel a little bit stuck, all the you know, adult life is about habituated behavior. You know, we’re going to kind of unroot that and hopefully, sprinkle on some of those micro joys during your summer. So, a few more smiles and a few more hugs, and a few more belly laughs. [0:17:47.4] PF: Something we can all benefit from. [0:17:49.8] MR: Exactly. [0:17:50.7] PF: So, fun is one of those things that doesn’t seem like, A, that anybody would be opposed to it or that there should really be any stumbling blocks to having fun but I am sure there are things that keep people from having fun. What are they, what keeps people from practicing fun? [0:18:06.6] MR: You know, there is so many that it’s going to be different for each person but certainly, we’re time [importer 0:18:14.2] right? So, it really does require a little bit of deliberate design and so we’ll get into that. For some, it is a sense of guilt. A lot of folks and there’s gender slang to this, you know, it is certainly excuse the female but they feel like they find joy in serving, right? It’s called the sandwich generation, right? So, they want to take care of their kids in a very loving way, they have aging parents that they want to make sure they’re okay and they feel like if they take time off the table, and when I say that, I am not just talking about females. Again, it’s just we know that there is a bias towards that data that they tend to be the family caregiver, right? That if they are engaging in some sort of self-care that they can’t fully be in it because they feel guilty because it is taking time away. And what we’ll learn in the course is that that’s anything but, that to be the best version of yourself so that you can be the most productive and have the vigor and vitality to be that good person when you are doing these things, those require just a little bit of time for you to enjoy life because when you don’t, what happens is you ultimately end up getting depleted and even the best of us, right? So, the last chapter in the book, I look at folks that have essentially dedicated their whole lives to serving others with regards to nonprofit and when they’re completely selfless, eventually, they won’t have anything left in the tank to get and so, when you think about it as being the long game, then fun in that sense really does become important and so once you learned that, I think it’s easy to then recalibrate. Like, “Wait a second, this isn’t a guilty pleasure, right?” Which is such a horrible word anyways, this is really something that is going to impact me in a positive way where I can bring that to the folks that I love, and then if you want to get even geekier about it, that’s actually contagious. When you are happy about what you are doing, you tend to set ripples, you know, both at work and at home that will then catch on with the folks around you. And oftentimes, you can create positive upward momentum in really easy ways, you know, just by doing a few things that you have to look forward to and like to go one level deeper, the reason is, is that we know that folks that don’t have something to look forward to even if it is just an hour out of the 168 that you have in a week, if you have like a really tough three or four days and we all have them and there’s nothing in your schedule that you’re like, well, at least, you know, something as simple as, “I might go have ice cream with my best friend.” If you don’t have that to look forward to, then you really lack one of the significant tools of resilience because like you just – then what your brain starts to feel is, “This crappy day is just going to be on repeat” right? But again, just some small form of simple pleasure to kind of root yourself like, “Okay, I’m in it right now but I know that something down the pipe is going to be fun and I’ll get there soon enough” is all it takes. [0:21:21.8] PF: We’re big on that on our house, making sure we have at least one fun thing going on. Like there’s got to be something on that calendar that we’re going to do that we’re really looking forward to and it does make a difference. [0:21:34.7] MR: Yeah. I mean, you already know because you’ve been living it for a while but I think you know, for a lot of busy adults we just forget, right? That we have some of that control. A study that I bring up all the time and I think you had him on the podcast because she has an amazing book herself called the Happier Hour. So, you know, her vacation mindset study, she didn’t do anything but just remind folks that they have agency and autonomy as they go in. And just remind yourself that this is meant to be a reprieve and you know, all of the positive benefits. Essentially, what they found was they saw some of these benefits you would get from an actual vacation just having a vacation mindset going into your weekend and so it’s this small sort of reframes, you know, what I call story editing, that can be really powerful but yet, so accessible to almost all of us. [0:22:24.8] PF: One thing has struck me as I was going through the emails and what you have planned for this course is this would be a great thing to do with an accountability partner because it’s like, you sign up for it and it’s like, this is going to be fun but as you said, we have to commit to that time and it can be easy to let it slip away. So, how do we do that, how will that help if we get somebody to do this course with us? [0:22:48.0] MR: Well, it will help on multiple levels, right? So, one, especially if you want to do some fun things with you know, a good friend, then that social contract is precommitment and so you’re going to get those things done, right? I mean, you started talking about it, it’s much more likely that happen. I would say that that’s the biggest benefit but then also, you can share ideas, right? Oftentimes, brainstorming is really enriched when you can say, you know, and I’ve actually seen this, which to me, it’s a little bit foreign. So, like I love when it works but I don’t quite understand why some people need to do this. A good friend of mine who I don’t think, I’ll just say his first name so I don’t out him but I literally had a conversation with a good friend a week ago who wanted to read, go through the play model because he felt that his life had gotten habituated. And he asked his wife, “Where do you see me light up? Like, where do I have fun? Because I’ve kind of lost that scent, you know?” Life is so busy because they have two small kids, like, “When can you just tell like, I’m in my moment.” And she gave him those clues because he couldn’t find themselves and she was spot on, and so sure enough, he implemented that in and I just checked in with them and yeah, you know, they were working. And so, for some folks, you know, that type of communication with a good friend that can kind of gut check you and go, “Really?” You know? Like – because sometimes too, you know, I think we talked about this last time, you can trick yourself. I mean, at the lowest level, it’s social media use, right? Often times, we’re just escaping frustration and boredom so we can trick ourselves into thinking like, what we’re doing is enjoyable when it’s not really. It’s just something that we’re doing to pass by the time and get away from the garbage. So, being a little bit more proactive, what, in geeky behavioral science we call, active leisure can be helpful too and so, having an accountability partner like, “Is that really fun or should we go do this because it’s a little bit more challenging?” And I think, will lead to kind of a richer experience, it can be helpful. [0:24:52.8] PF: That’s awesome. So, I’m really looking forward to seeing what people say about this, what kind of experiences they have. What I’d like to do is have you back at the end of the summer and we’ll talk about this. We’ll get feedback you heard, what we’ve gotten back from it, and really, you know, I’m going to walk through this experience too and really talk about how it changed and then how we can take that into the fall and winter months because, as you noted, it might be one to buckle up for. [0:25:19.7] MR: Well, and we call it the fun habit for a reason, right? Might as well turn it into a habit so that you know, this is again, the long game, right? Not just something that is episodically done and then moved on from – we’re not meant to just have fun this summer. [0:25:33.0] PF: All right, well, we’ll do it all year long. Mike, thank you so much for sitting down, I’m so excited to share this email course with our listeners and I will see you back here in a couple of months and we’ll talk about it again. [0:25:43.5] MR: Yeah, I can’t wait. [END OF INTERVIEW] [0:25:49.2] PF: To sign up for the Live Happy Summer Fun with Mike Rucker, just visit us at LiveHappy.com and click on this podcast episode. We’ll also tell you how to find Mike’s book, The Fun Habit: How the Pursuit of Joy and Wonder Can Change Your Life, or follow him on social media, and while you're there, you can also 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’s all we have time for today, we’ll meet you back here again next week for an all-new episode, and until then, this is Paula Felps, reminding you to make everyday a happy one. [END]

Follow along with the transcript below for episode: Repairing the Mother/Daughter Relationship With Leslie and Lindsey Glass [INTRODUCTION]   [00:00:02] PF: Thank you for joining us for episode 468 of Live Happy Now. Mother's Day might be behind us. But for many moms and daughters, that holiday can be less about celebrating and more about surviving one another. I'm your host, Paula Felps. This week, I'm joined by co-authors and mother-daughter duo, Leslie and Lindsey Glass, who have just released the book The Mother-Daughter Relationship Makeover. They know all too well how fraught this relationship can be. They're here to talk about what makes this relationship so difficult for some and how you can rebuild that relationship, find a positive pathway to peace, and finally restore the love between you. Let's have a listen. [INTERVIEW] [00:00:47] PF: Leslie and Lindsey, thank you so much for joining me on Live Happy Now. [00:00:51] LESLIE GLASS: Oh, we're delighted to be here. [00:00:54] LINDSEY GLASS: Yes, good to meet you. [00:00:55] PF: I want to start with the big question, and that is the one most of us have, and that is why is the mother-daughter relationship so challenging. [00:01:04] LINDSEY GLASS: I'm going to start because I – [00:01:05] PF: Let the daughter start. [00:01:09] LINDSEY GLASS: I think there are a lot of reasons, and I will certainly let Leslie jump in. One of the things that I think is the biggest factor is that often moms feel that daughters are reflective of them. If daughter isn't dressing right, if she isn't acting right, if she's doing things that are embarrassing, that is a reflection that maybe mom didn't raise her right. I also think in a situation like ours, I look just like her. My mom was perfectly dressed at all times and quaffed, and that was not my style. She likes to call me, what a street rat, which is very kind. But it was the eighties and the nineties. It was grunge. It was hip-hop. I did not follow her style. I did not follow her interests. She cooked. She knitted. She planted flowers. Now, the irony is I do now, but then I didn't. That's what I think is a big trigger for moms. This child looks like me but is nothing like me. [00:02:15] LESLIE GLASS: All right, I'm going to take us on a completely different track here. [00:02:19] PF: I love this. [00:02:21] LESLIE GLASS: I think the conflict between mothers and daughters begins with the fact that mothers have control in the young years, and they need to have control. Moms are the ones who tell you what to eat and when to go to bed and how to do everything. I think that moms do this because it's their job to keep their children safe, and it's their job to kind of raise their children well. I think what happens when daughters go to middle school and high school, that's where the independence, the – of course, starting at the age of two, they want their own independence. But going into middle school, when girls have their own secrets, they have their own friends, they have extreme challenges, especially nowadays. Wanting to have moms not in their head, not telling them what to do, not telling them how to look, all of those things create conflicts that begin kind of in the teenage years, and they can get stuck there. Lindsey says it's about daughters being the reflection of moms. I think moms want their daughters to be safe. I think they want them to be safe. I think they want them to behave well and achieve well. Who wants to do that when you're a teenager? [00:03:38] PF: Exactly. Well, how is it different than sons? I have friends. I don't have children but I have friends. Pretty much all my friends have children, and I see a big difference with those who have boys and those who have – I have one friend, very good friend, and she's like, “I would much rather have my two boys and put up with all the things that come with boys than navigate with girls.” What's the difference? [00:04:01] LESLIE GLASS: I'm going to start. I think that very often, you just give your sons a lot of slack. You think they're handsome. You think they're wonderful. You think they're doing well. But we can't make generalizations about anything. I think we’re – I would say girls are prey animals, so we are very, very concerned about keeping our daughters safe. I will say that over and over and over again. Your son is going to get into fights. He's going to tussle. He may start drinking early and do bad things. But you kind of let it go because you think they're tougher, and they can handle it. Of course, some mothers in many cultures think their sons are perfect, no matter what. [00:04:42] PF: Absolutely. [00:04:43] LESLIE GLASS: What would you say, Lindsey? [00:04:45] LINDSEY GLASS: Yes. I think it's just less emotionally charged with boys. I've certainly seen dads who are really hard on their sons, and let the girls get away with everything. I do think the wanting to protect the daughter and keep her safe and know everything has a lot to do with it. Yes, I think boys just share less also, so you don't necessarily know. A mentor, and I was talking to one of my colleagues there, and I was like, “How are you doing?” She goes, “I've got a teenage daughter,” and I just started laughing. [00:05:20] PF: It’s like that’s all you need to say. [00:05:22] LINDSEY GLASS: I said, “What's going on?” She goes, “She's in her feelings.” No one needed to say anything else. Everyone in the room understood. [00:05:31] PF: It's like a moment of silence for Mom. [00:05:32] LINDSEY GLASS: That 13, 14-year-old. Yes, inner feelings. I think that's part of it. The girls will come home, and sometimes they share. Sometimes, they don't. “Oh, they cut me out of the friend group. I didn't get invited to the mall.” I think it opens the door for a lot more drama. [00:05:50] PF: Right. Now, you all have an interesting relationship, and this book is a product of that. First of all, I have to say this book is so insightful, and it takes us through so many areas of conflict that makes us realize how universal this is. Just that recognition is incredibly helpful. But can you talk a little bit? Tell our listeners a little about your relationship and how that led to writing this book. [00:06:16] LINDSEY GLASS: I'll jump in on this one. We went off track in my teen years, and we got into the fighting habit. I call it the fighting habit. We had different communication styles. We had different personality styles. We just started clashing at a certain point and really struggled as the years went on. We were always close. There were times we were very close, but we would just battle. As the years went on, it becomes more and more toxic to have somebody in your life that you're battling and issues of control, issues of boundaries. That kind of split us up. We both went off and did a lot of our own work and found our way back. Here are a few of the things we realized. Almost everybody's struggling with a few of these issues. Too, we're so busy pointing fingers at other people. We forget sometimes to step back, stop fighting, and look at ourselves. There were so many universal things that we were experiencing that we were seeing happening with. I'm in recovery. I sponsor young women. I’m sponsored, which means I work with younger sober people, and we were hearing the same things, and nobody had tools. We were seeing tons of people who just were screaming at each other with no tools on how to stop. We've been writing for our website for 12 years on relationships and mental health and behavioral health. We said, “Hey, we actually have a story to share, and we have the tools to share.” Because we're a family in recovery, we're very solution-based. We'll talk about the problem, but we want to move on to the solution, so less takeover. [00:08:01] LESLIE GLASS: You did that really well, Lindsey. I've been a good trainer as a mom. I think that – [00:08:08] LINDSEY GLASS: She talks about it like a horse trainer. [00:08:10] PF: Exactly. [00:08:10] LESLIE GLASS: She's got a great gate. She can [inaudible 00:08:13] a pony. [00:08:14] PF: She can move her head the right way. [00:08:16] LESLIE GLASS: I think that Lindsey hit the nail on the head. We've been writing about relationships for 12 years, and I've been a novelist for 30 years before that. I'm a novelist. I was a journalist before that. When Lindsey and I started working together, our whole purpose was to try and create the content, a body of content that would lift the stigma from addiction and explain what life in recovery looks like. In order to do that, we had to kind of out ourselves. I mean, we had to say, “You want to know what recovery looks like or if you think recovery isn't working, we're in recovery. This is what recovery looks like. It looks like the two of us.” [00:08:58] LINDSEY GLASS: Not always but sometimes. [00:09:00] LESLIE GLASS: Well, yes. I mean, it doesn't always look like us because there are some families where part of the family is in recovery and part of the family isn't in recovery. There are a lot of clashes over that. We had a mission. I think that Lindsey and I have been writers forever and ever and ever. That is part of our solution. Our part of our solution is creating the tools and being able to understand what's happening. We've been writing about this family function, dysfunction, addiction, what is addiction, what is recovery for a lot of years. We decided because self-help books can be kind of descriptive in terms of telling you what to do prescriptive but without having the background of being able to say, “Well, how does change really happen?” The evolution was to take the knowledge that we had acquired over 12 years and put it in one book. [00:09:51] PF: One thing I really liked about this is you have the journal prompts at the end. It is a very interactive book because it's not something that you just read and you're getting information thrown at you. You actually participate in it and decide how this affects you and what you need to do. I really love that about this book. [00:10:09] LESLIE GLASS: Not everybody likes to write, but there are ways that you can use the journal prompts. The idea is to start in the beginning by telling your story and getting some understanding about where you and your mother come from. What are your backgrounds? The idea is to start getting in the habit of kind of writing things down and with the idea that in the beginning of the book, you think one way, and then you go through these 61 journal prompts. At the end of the book, look at it and say, “Oh, wait a minute. Okay, I'm different now. Or I can look at it, and my perspective has changed.” [00:10:43] PF: That's super important, and I love that you brought up the fact that you dive into your background because so many books, so many resources, they look at the immediate problem. Can you explain to us why it's so important for you to go back? You went way back, not just how your mother was raised. I found it fascinating as you tied all these threads together and showed the way that your great, great grandmother's upbringing influenced you. Can you talk about that, why it's so important to dig back into that? [00:11:14] LESLIE GLASS: I will because I think when we just look at our mother, we're just looking at this person who irritates us. No matter how great your relationship is, this person who raised you is going to be irritating or in some way or another. But how did she get the way she is, and how did I get the way I am? As we started to write our own stories, I wanted everybody to go back and be able to see, “Well, my mother was an immigrant,” or, “My grandmother was an immigrant.” Or she was Greek or she was Irish or she was Swedish. How does that culture inform our behavior? A lot of our behavior, a lot of our beliefs come from our culture and our religion. How do those different components on make our mother act the way she did, our grandmother act the way she did? Now, I'm acting the way I am because the way I act are things that were taught to me by my grandmother who lived a hundred years ago and my great-grandmother who raised her. When you understand the components and the history of the women in your family and what they've been through, maybe the traumas that they've been through, you have more perspective, and you have more compassion for the way you were raised. All of us have toxic aspects to our relationships. [00:12:35] LINDSEY GLASS: I think that's really, really good. I think one of the things I just wanted to expand on for a second was it's that compassion and that point of view. I was so angry at my mom about certain behaviors and certain things. Now, I'm an adult. I'm in my 40s, and I'm writing a book, and I'm reading about how she had nobody to help her when she had young children. Her mother died when she was young. People were trying to get her not to work. All she wanted to do was work, and they didn't want to let her work. There were just so many things and traumas that happened in her own life that I didn't know. As a teenager, you’re so angry like, “What's wrong with you?” Then as an adult, you're like, “Oh, my gosh.” She was dealing with mental health stuff, whatever the situation was. She was in a tumultuous marriage. She had no female support in her life. We didn't live in a world where we could talk about how we were feeling. This is a relatively new thing. Learning that mental health history is also really important, so you're not sitting here going, “Why do I feel crazy? Why do I –” Well, maybe there are reasons. [BREAK] [00:13:42] PF: We'll be right back with Leslie and Lindsey Glass. But I wanted to take a moment to talk about how you can make your day more comfortable and more stylish with help from Franne Golde. This line of clothing was created by a Grammy-winning musician who knows the importance of looking good on the road. But she didn't want to sacrifice comfort, so she created a line of wrinkle-free essentials to build a wardrobe that feels as good as it looks. Right now, Franne Goldie is providing Live Happy Now listeners 20% off their first order of $75 or more. You can go to frannegolde.com/podcast and use the code HAPPY for 20% off. That's F-R-A-N-N-E-G-O-L-D-E.com/podcast for 20% off your order of $75 or more with the code HAPPY. Now, let's get back to my talk with Leslie and Lindsey to learn more about how to repair a fractured mother-daughter relationship. [INTERVIEW RESUMED] [00:14:41] PF: As you came to grips with everything, your relationship, all the dynamics of it, how did you outline how to put that into this book? It's very thoughtfully arranged and it takes us through this. As you said, these steps at the end, you're like, “I'm a changed person.” How did you come up with this outline? [00:14:59] LINDSEY GLASS: What most people don't know is we actually wrote a different version of this book 14 years ago. We were glad that version never made it because we had so much more to go through, and it was a much darker story. It didn't have the self-help stuff because that's something our business has grown into. We had a lot of the story that we wanted to tell about ourselves already in our heads. Then as far as how we actually outline the steps, we really wanted to take the reader on kind of a transformative experience so that when they started, they were over here thinking, “Oh, she's the problem. This is what's happened in my life.” We followed almost a 12-step formula, which is we want you to get some understanding about who you are and what's happened. Then we want you to understand what the issues are, so we chose the eight biggest issues that mothers and daughters fight about for part two. Then for part three and part four, that's pretty much all self-help. Part three, obviously, if you're in this situation, you need healing and forgiveness. We spent four years doing that. We're going to talk about all the things we did. Then the end is some people are not going to be able to reconcile if there's addiction or serious mental health issues or somebody is unsafe. These situations happen, and we wanted to create a section for what to do if you can't reconcile. Because we love recovery, it changed our lives. We did a whole recovery lifestyle piece because any family that's been through dysfunction, everybody's recovering from something. Has a family member been sick? Has there been suicide in the family? Did somebody lose a job and it created financial instability? All of these things you can find recovery from. That's the sort of model we followed, and we got a lot of good advice along the way. [00:17:06] LESLIE GLASS: I think it's funny because our contract says that we need to write kind of a self-help book in 165 pages, right? When Lindsey and I started getting into it, we knew that the issues that mother and daughters fight about, the eight issues that we chose, was almost the book contract. [00:17:24] LINDSEY GLASS: Length of the book, yes. [00:17:25] LESLIE GLASS: Yes, the length of the book. You can't just start with triggers and traumas. You can't start a book with what are your triggers because you have to first understand who you are. What is it about my daughter that's making me angry? Does it come from me or does it come from my mother, right? We really felt that you need to have a background for everything that you're talking about. You can't just – Lindsey, you said it perfectly. So many self-help books that we read, they're taking the problem. You're fighting. You may be addicted to fighting because it's bringing those bad hormones front and center. [00:18:01] LINDSEY GLASS: We used our own story for there always to be a little bit of background. Here's what happened to us. Now, you can figure out what happened to you. [00:18:11] PF: I like that because kind of like sitting down with a therapist where you're not just having to say, “Okay, here's what's going on.” Or it's like you soften us up a bit by sharing you're so vulnerable and open with us about your story, which makes me as a reader more willing to be open. I think that's very well done with this. [00:18:29] LINDSEY GLASS: It's just interesting. When you start to actually talk about these kind of – I don't want to call them shameful but issues that nobody likes to admit. People don't like to admit that there are problems in the family or that somebody's lying or that somebody has an addiction. I'm sure you know as well as I do. Addictions don't have to be just to drugs and alcohol. [00:18:50] PF: Right. I would love for our listeners to hear about some of the universal conflicts because you do break it down where someone might be reading it thinking, “I thought it was just me and my mom that went through it about this topic.” Let's talk about what are the major areas of conflict between mothers and daughters. [00:19:08] LESLIE GLASS: I'm going to start with food because I think food is a big one in this country right now, and we do talk a lot about food. I was overfed as a child. That meant that people were pushing a lot of food into me all of the time when I wasn't hungry, but I wasn't allowed to have snacks. Now, all day every day in America, people are feeding their children snacks all day long. Then they're worried about whether they're too heavy or they're not too heavy. The whole idea of what the food industry has done to us in terms of not eating meals anymore. We used to eat meals. We used to have breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Now, it's like snack time all day long. [00:19:49] PF: We graze. We don't eat. We graze. Yes. [00:19:51] LESLIE GLASS: I think it's very difficult to be thin in a family where people are big. I think it's very difficult to be big in a family where the people are thin. I think there's a lot of conflict around food and culture and confusing food with love and all of that. I would say food is a big one. [00:20:14] LINDSEY GLASS: I'll list them out, and then I'll tell you the ones that we struggled with. We did boyfriends, girlfriends, romantic partners. I mean, come on, endless possibilities. Does mom not like the boyfriend, the girlfriend? Are there sexuality questions that family members don't understand? Romantic partners was a huge one. That wasn't an issue for us actually. She was very, very accepting of my friends and partners, so we didn't actually have that one. We had money. Money was one of our biggest trigger issues because my mom was successful. She spoiled me, and I grew up thinking that what she had I had. We had to do some real boundary work. We can talk about money in a second. There was food, independence, and codependence. [00:21:05] LESLIE GLASS: Codependence. [00:21:06] LINDSEY GLASS: Those issues of mom wanting to know where you are, what you're doing, are you calling me, what's your curfew, and daughters wanting to be more independent. Or for every one of these situations, there's the opposite. There's the good girl with a party-girl mom. Why aren't I being picked up on school? Why am I the only one left over at the sleepover whose mom hasn't picked her up? My mom would forget me and bring me places on the wrong day. Guess what? So did her mom, did the same thing. Full taffeta dress, party gift in my hand, knocking on the door. “Leslie, today is not the birthday party. Take her home. It's next week.” [00:21:44] PF: Oh, no. [00:21:47] LESLIE GLASS: I have trouble with numbers. [00:21:50] PF: That's because you're a journalist. [00:21:51] LINDSEY GLASS: And I inherited that. Appearance and style, that's another big one. I was a club kid and a grunge kid, and that was infuriating to my mother, boundaries and detachment. Then the last two, and this isn't for every family, but when these are involved, they're a huge deal, drugs and alcohol and mental illness. Those to us and from a little bit of research seem to be the biggest global issues that mothers and daughters fight about. For us, obviously, drugs and alcohol, independence and codependence, those were our big ones. [00:22:31] PF: Right now, mental health is such a huge concern. We just did something, the World Happiness Report, and it showed how Gen Z in particular is suffering. Their mental health is very, very poor. Then the millennials aren't doing great either. Gen X is a little better, and then the boomers are fine. What then, as parents, if you're a mother and you have a daughter who is part of Gen Z, who is going through this mental distress that's happening globally really, what are some of the ways that they can navigate that? [00:23:05] LINDSEY GLASS: When I talk to parents, one of the things we want to have them do is really pay attention. Don't look the other way. It's not a phase. It's usually not a phase. Or the boys will be boys, that's not acceptable. These are not acceptable things anymore. We have to really look at the behavior and ask questions and not all always – here's the thing. No one wants to believe their child lies, no one. But some do, and it's very hard when you talk to parents because they say, “My child would never lie to me.” Then I get in the room with the kids, and I'm like, “How many of you are actually telling your parents everything that's going on in your lives?” Not one hand goes up, so they have to check. My mom talks. She goes, “I never called any other parents.” I believed her. I was never where I said I was. Had she called once, she would have known. I was never where I said I was. I mean, I might have gone to that person's house at the end of the night, but we certainly weren't sitting home baking Toll House cookies and watching movies. [00:24:10] LESLIE GLASS: You said you were. [00:24:10] PF: That is not what was going on. [00:24:13] LINDSEY GLASS: That's what I kind of say to parents. Take it really seriously, and always feel good and okay about getting outside help. Kids don't want to talk to their parents. They're going to talk to somebody else. When you ask kids why they don't want to talk to their parents, they don't want to disappoint them. They don't want to worry them. They don't want to start a fight. Kids aren't being bad. They're just – I didn't want to say to my mom, “I think I'm a drug addict at 15.” Mom, do you want to add stuff? [00:24:43] LESLIE GLASS: I do because you write a lot about despair. I think what happens in middle school and high school, kids experience trauma, a lot more trauma than in earlier generations. I think a lot of the trauma happens then. It happens because of drinking. It happens because of bullying. It happens for a myriad of reasons. But kids are – threefold concern is how am I achieving, how do I look, and how do I behave. That's how parents and their teachers are looking at them. They're being judged by their looks, their behavior, and their achievement. Basically, what makes us good human beings and what makes us happy human beings later in life have nothing to do with how we look, how we achieve, and how we behave. It's what's happening inside. The one thing that parents are not talking about, except your friend who you were mentoring the other day said inner feelings, but basically parents are not really connected with their children's inner feelings. They don't have the tools for children and young adults to be able to talk to them in a way that inspires them and helps them move past whatever destructive feelings or conditioning they're getting elsewhere. We just aren't helping our teens and our young adults. They don't have that drive and ambition. A lot of them don't have it, so it may be because marijuana is more prevalent, and it makes you not care a lot. I think that we're missing a step in development, and that's emotional development. Because we're not working on that piece of human development, our young people are feeling empty, lost. They don't know what their place is in society, and they're scared. [00:26:32] LINDSEY GLASS: Let's be honest. There were no shootings in schools when I was growing up. There was no climate catastrophe. We were way, way more protected in the world in the early nineties than we are now. [00:26:44] LESLIE GLASS: I think every student, every young person, whether it's a high school student or a college student, knows somebody who's died or maybe a number of people who have died. Their siblings are may be using drugs. They may be incredibly frightened. We're concerned about mental health, but are we using the kind of tools that we need to stay connected emotionally with our children? Mental health is not jumping off the roof. It's finding ways to live happy. Live well and be happy. [00:27:13] PF: It is. It is. When children are born, you hear parents say, “I don't care. I just want them to be happy and healthy.” Then by the time they're three years old, they're like, “I want them to get into this school, and I want them to do this, and I want them to be a doctor or a lawyer.” It’s interesting to see how every parent wants their child to be happy, but we're not really equipping them with the tools and skills to achieve happiness. We teach them how to be successful, but we don't teach them how to be happy. [00:27:40] LESLIE GLASS: That's right. Yes, that's right. [00:27:42] PF: One thing that struck me as I was reading your book is how this is about changing the relationship between the current mother and daughter. How, in doing that, is that going to change subsequent generations? That’s what strikes me is like this is a book that does just change the two – the mother-daughter. You can affect generations by making these changes. Have you talked about that? [00:28:06] LESLIE GLASS: Absolutely. It's like breaking the cycles, breaking the cycles, breaking all destructive cycles, whether it's a fighting habit, whether it's being judgmental about everything the other one does, whether it's that fight or flight kind of slamming doors or that being silent, that being silent and being cold to each other. The whole idea is to find compassion for the other person and have the tools, have the actual ways to stop your fighting, have the – we talk about triggers and how to stop your triggers. I think that once you create new habits and new cultural habits with your mother and daughter, your grandchildren are going to repeat it, your sons. It will also work with all your other relationships. [00:28:56] PF: About that, go ahead and answer. I was going to ask about that, too. [00:28:59] LINDSEY GLASS: Well, I'm going to lead right into that question because often when one person changes, people follow. If one person gets sober, sometimes other people get sober. If one person in the family says, “Hey, I'm not going to fight anymore. You want to talk to me. Here's how you have to talk to me,” and it sticks. Then, yes, you're going to be moving forward. I think the whole thing about stopping the generational stuff is clarity because people are walking around not even understanding that they're behaving in ways. I have heard so many women tell me how crazy their mother is. Then I'm looking at their lives and their behavior and their relationships, and I'm like, “Apple doesn't fall far from the tree, honey.” In our family, we said, “Hey, we've got X, Y, and Z going on, and we don't want this going on to the next generation. So here are the things we're willing to do.” Here's the problem with outing yourself. Once everybody knows, you have to be accountable. There's a certain amount of accountability that we're forced into just by – I'm like – now, I can't scream at people in the car because somebody will recognize me. [00:30:15] LESLIE GLASS: She's not so recovered. [00:30:18] PF: As I said, this is an incredible book. It has so much advice and so much insight to give. What is it that you hope to see come out of it? [00:30:25] LINDSEY GLASS: My big thing was hope because when we were in that bad place, it felt hopeless. It wasn't until I went into certain kinds of groups that I even knew other people were dealing with it. My hope is that it shares with a lot of people that a lot of us are going through this and that you're not alone. If you struggle with your mom or daughter, you are just not alone, and there are some solutions. What about you? [00:30:50] LESLIE GLASS: I just want people to understand more about the female experience. I want people to be able to look and say, “Oh, my gosh. I didn't know that about women. I didn't know that about women. I didn't know.” It was looking back a hundred years of the way my great-grandmother probably didn't know how to read. She raised nine children, and they all went on to be successful people. I just want people to understand how much trauma and how difficult it is to be a woman. How great we are. The Chinese say that we hold up half of the heaven, but we probably hold up the whole heaven because there wouldn't be any humanity without us. I want mothers and daughters to have more compassion for who we are and what we've accomplished in the world, what we have to go through. [00:31:44] PF: Lindsey, Leslie, fabulous spending time with you today. I know our listeners are going to love this. We're going to tell them how they can find you, how they can find your book, and how they can start healing their own mother-daughter relationships. [00:31:56] LESLIE GLASS: Awesome. [00:31:57] PF: Thank you for what you've done. [00:31:57] LINDSEY GLASS: Thank you. [END OF INTERVIEW] [00:32:03] PF: That was Leslie and Lindsey Glass, authors of The Mother-Daughter Relationship Makeover. If you'd like to learn more about them, discover their book, or follow them on social media, just visit us at livehappy.com and click on the podcast tab. We hope you've enjoyed this episode of Live Happy Now. If you aren't already receiving us every week, we invite you to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. 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]

Follow along with the transcript below for episode: Embrace Earth Day With Casey Johnson [INTRODUCTION]   [00:00:02] PF: Thank you for joining us for episode 464 of Live Happy Now. This week, we're celebrating Earth Day, and that makes it the perfect time to talk about what we can do for our planet. I'm your host, Paula Felps. Today, I'm sitting down with Live Happy Marketing Manager, Casey Johnson, who created this year's Earth Day #HappyActs campaign. As you're about to find out, that campaign grew out of her passion for the planet. So she sat down with me to talk about how we can all take small steps to create big changes. Let's have a listen. [INTERVIEW] [00:00:33] PF: Casey, thank you for joining me on the show today. [00:00:35] CJ: Thank you. It's great to be here. [00:00:38] PF: Well, Earth Day is coming up. [00:00:40] CJ: It is. [00:00:41] PF: There are so many ways to think about it, celebrate it, and talk about it. People probably don't know that that is one thing that you and I have in common. We like animals. We like the planet. We have a lot of things in common. I wanted to bring you on and talk about it because over the years that I've known you, I've just seen how intentional you are with your life and with taking care of the planet and taking care – [00:01:04] CJ: Thank you. [00:01:05] PF: Well, I wanted to talk. What do you do in your daily life? Let's forget about Earth Day for a second. What do you do for the planet just on a day-to-day basis? [00:01:14] CJ: This is one of my favorite topics, so happy to share. I'll start off with this. I mean, people might find this interesting, but I limit my plastic consumption, which is no shock. But I have not bought Ziploc bags in over five years. I will not buy them. [00:01:30] PF: Oh, my gosh. [00:01:31] CJ: I know. I haven't bought them in over five years. [00:01:34] PF: Yes, because I have wanted to cut out that kind of plastic consumption, and it is so hard. How did you do that, and what do you do instead because they're a staple? [00:01:44] CJ: I know. It was honestly really difficult at first. But I've replaced all of it with Stasher bags. That's the brand, Stasher. I mean, they're basically Ziploc bags. They're dishwasher-safe. You can even put them in your oven to a certain temperature, and they won't melt. They're safe. If they get warm, they won't get chemicals on your food or whatever. That’s what I do. [00:02:06] PF: You’re not going to have a BPA sandwich. [00:02:08] CJ: Exactly, yes. No chemicals. That's what I've used in replacement of Ziploc bags, and it's made it just so easy, and they sell them in different sizes. I feel like I should be sponsored right now. Sponsor me, Stasher. Please. But I have them in so many different sizes. I have really large ones to even super small ones where I can even hold ChapStick and small little makeup items. You can repurpose them. They're not just for food. You can use them however you'd like, but that's what's made the transition away from Ziploc bags work for me. [00:02:40] PF: How did you do that? This is incredible. [00:02:42] CJ: I know. People are so shocked when I tell them I don't buy Ziploc bags. [00:02:45] PF: I know. What made you decide like, “I'm not going to do that anymore.”? [00:02:49] CJ: Yes. I mean, I just see all of this pollution and plastic waste, single-use plastic. I just thought, one, and I won't request plastic ware when ordering takeout. That's another simple thing. But, two, Ziploc bags. I'd go to family gatherings, and they'd give me leftovers, and they would give me 10 different Ziploc bags. Then I would just throw it away. So if you add that up every day, it's hundreds of Ziploc bags per household each month. Just eliminating that alone I feel like makes a big difference. [00:03:20] PF: That's amazing. What are other areas where you've cut out? Because I cut out plastic but not as well as you have. I haven’t – [00:03:28] CJ: I know. [00:03:28] PF: Done the Ziploc thing. [00:03:29] CJ: I’m extreme about it. [00:03:30] PF: I love that. I love that. What are some of the other things that you've done? [00:03:34] CJ: Yes. I eat meatless meals. I was actually vegetarian for 10 years, but I had to incorporate meat back into my diet. I only eat meat like one to two times a week, and I feel like that is a significant way to reduce your carbon footprint. [00:03:51] PF: That's terrific. If you're already living like this and then you have Earth Day, do you do anything special? The things that you're doing are things that people would say like, “I'm going to try that for Earth Day,” and then the next day go back to their habits. Then how do you observe Earth Day? Do you do anything special? [00:04:07] CJ: Oh, man. I love Earth Day for so many reasons. I love spending time outdoors and connecting with nature. It just brings a lot of joy into my life. I mean, since I have these daily practices already in place, on Earth Day, I try to spend as much time as I can outside. We have a pond near our house. So maybe I'll go bring some grapes and seeds for the ducks. But, yes, I really just love to be outside. One thing we're doing this year in celebration of Earth Day is #HappyActs to celebrate Earth Day, so eco-friendly #HappyActs. I'll definitely be doing some of those as well. [00:04:44] PF: Yes. We're going to talk about some of those before we end this broadcast. [00:04:47] CJ: I know. I'm jumping ahead. [00:04:49] PF: No. No, you're not. But what I wanted to do – no, that's a teaser. It's like, “Everyone, stay tuned, and we're going to –” [00:04:54] CJ: Yes, the teasers. Stay tuned. [00:04:56] PF: Casey's tips for #HappyActs for Earth Day. What's interesting to me is that you and I are from different generations, not in spirit. [00:05:05] CJ: Hardly. [00:05:08] PF: That’s something I have really seen is people of my time don't have the same kind of compassion and passion about the Earth that my generation's children have and that Gen Z has. Can you talk about that? Did you grow up with the passion for the planet? Or how did this come about? What sparked all this, and what is happening with younger people in terms of how they view the planet? [00:05:37] CJ: Yes, that's a great question. No, I did not grow up with this instilled in my brain or in my lifestyle. It's just something that I've just developed over the years. I think the driver behind this younger generation is that we're extremely aware of the impact humans have on the environment. It's all we've known. We've grown up in a world of climate change, pollution, plastic waste, what we were talking about earlier. [00:06:03] PF: Or millennial. After you, you have Gen Z. [00:06:08] CJ: Gen Z. [00:06:08] PF: How do you think they are even more affected by this? [00:06:12] CJ: They're huge advocates because many schools, they teach kids about climate change and pollution. I think this education just leads to a greater understanding of the importance of sustainability and eco-friendly practices and just saving the planet. [00:06:30] PF: Right. I think that's very cool that they're being raised to think this way. [00:06:35] CJ: They're very vocal. [00:06:36] PF: Yes. We didn't even talk about it. Nobody thought. It's like our whole thing was like, “Don't litter.” That was it. That's as far as it went. [00:06:44] CJ: You got to start somewhere. [00:06:45] PF: Exactly. But what's very interesting to me is how I'm seeing different aspects of loving the Earth come up in my podcast interviews. Just a couple of weeks ago, I had Caroline Paul on, and she was talking about outdoor adventure and how it's so good for us as we – especially for women who aren't encouraged to be adventurous. As they age, it's really fantastic for them. But one thing that she brought up toward the end of the podcast, and she brings it up very well in her book, is that we need to get outside because the outside is going away. If you look at what is happening, we are losing our green space. We are losing our fresh air. So get out there and enjoy it. That has been interesting to me. Then another thing that's come up is just gardening, getting out and tending to the garden. How good it is for you to be in the soil, dig in it, breathe that air. It's amazing the health benefits that it has for you. [00:07:44] CJ: Yes. Grounding, too. [00:07:46] PF: Yes. I've started doing that. Since we moved from downtown Nashville to the rural area, I started earthing a lot. I walk around barefoot a lot, just to get that – [00:07:59] CJ: I love that. [00:07:59] PF: Connection with the Earth. It makes a huge difference to be able to get out and enjoy a green space and to really have that Earth connection. [00:08:07] CJ: Yes, I agree. I mean, I think everyone loves nature. There's just so much science behind it. It does so much for you. One thing I love about Gen Z is that they're demanding action to save our planet. They are demanding it. They're keeping businesses accountable for their environmental practices and demanding cruelty-free ingredients and clean ingredients and just keeping everyone responsible so that we can enjoy these green spaces. [00:08:37] PF: Yes, yes. They do go away, and I noticed quite a bit. I know Dallas is going through the same thing where it just keeps expanding and expanding. Nashville has – [00:08:45] CJ: It’s a concrete jungle. Yes. [00:08:47] PF: It is. It is. Nashville has experienced that. Now, even it's coming out by where we live. We talk about that. Where is the food going to be grown? Where are people going to get that green fix? Where do you get that? We have so many people. We live on a lake, and so we have people already booking for the summer, now booking for the summer 2024, where it's like, “Can we come out? We want to kayak. We want to do this.” All these things that you just can't have access to. I'm impressed, and just I'm surprised to see how much people feel like they need that. I think it's really indicative of how much our green spaces are going away. [00:09:28] CJ: Yes. I mean, gosh, you got me talking about the environment, so I'm going here. Going back to keeping businesses accountable, people want these beautiful spaces. People want to be in nature. Limiting our plastic consumption, we're not using plastic straws. But I think it all comes down to these businesses who are the huge drivers behind climate change and pollution. It infuriates me so much, and I just like hearing you talk about the lake and how people are seeking that out. From the city, they're coming out to basically the country to be in nature. It proves that people want more green spaces and less concrete and buildings. [00:10:14] PF: Yes. Because what's happening, too, in a lot of cities, obviously, it's great to take a walk. Get out in nature. If you're walking on a sidewalk, okay, at least you're getting – there's, hopefully, some trees around you, and you're getting some of that interaction because trees are so good for you. Oh, my gosh. Just everything that they put off and they’re so, so healing. [00:10:31] CJ: Hug a tree on Earth Day. [00:10:33] PF: Exactly. If you can get off that sidewalk and actually find something green to walk on, it's incredible. This is what Caroline Paul talked about in one of her chapters. She was walking with this 93-year-old woman, I believe, and the woman refused to walk on the sidewalk. She was walking through a neighborhood, and the woman's walking in their yard. Caroline's waiting for them, somebody to come out and be like, “Get off my lawn.” The woman's like, “I'm not going to walk on a sidewalk. It's a completely different experience. I want to be in nature, and that's being on the grass.” That's the thing. We don't get that when we're just walking on a sidewalk, even, though, yes, it's good to be outside, breathing the fresh air. Then one thing I saw a lot of is, say, they'd open a new dog park, and they put AstroTurf in there. [00:11:17] CJ: Oh, you know. [00:11:18] PF: It's like, “How's my dog –” [00:11:19] CJ: Don't even get me started on AstroTurf. [00:11:23] PF: You know. So it is. We've gone to that, too, where we we're getting away from nature. In what you're seeing, I see so many ways where we're getting away from nature. How do you see us also getting back to nature? [00:11:37] CJ: Yes. That's a good question because I see little green patches in the middle of a city. Well, that's nice. It also kind of makes me sad in a way. We have this little sliver of green. But then surrounded, it's just the hustle and bustle of the city, although I do see some things on a more positive note. I see in other countries and, hopefully, the US can adopt this, but they're adding greenery to buildings, adding plants on the outside structures of buildings that you're getting that clean air, and just to kind of combat all of the emissions from cars and stuff. Plus it's pretty to look at. I feel like business or building structures now, they all kind of look the same. So I feel like adding the greenery just makes it even more beautiful, beautiful and functional. [00:12:24] PF: Yes. Vertical gardens. Yes, vertical garden. [00:12:27] CJ: Vertical gardens, yes. Yes, exactly. [00:12:28] PF: I love that. I love that idea. Just it's so functional. Like you said, it's beautiful to look at, and it just gives you a different feeling than staring at some concrete. As we move toward Earth Day, you've created some #HappyActs that we could talk about. How do you propose that people can get out there and help celebrate Earth Day? [00:12:52] CJ: Yes. I don't think we've ever done Earth Day #HappyActs before. [00:12:55] PF: We have not. We have done holiday #HappyActs. We have done Halloween #HappyActs. Now, we have Earth Day #HappyActs. [00:13:02] CJ: Yes. I think a lot of this stemmed from wrapping up our 10th year of our annual #HappyActs celebration last month in March. We didn't want to stop there. [00:13:15] PF: We didn't want to stop happy acting. [00:13:17] CJ: No. Happy acting all year round, but yes. Starting this week, we're going to start sharing some eco-friendly #HappyActs leading up to Earth Day, just to make the world a happier and healthier place. [00:13:30] PF: Pray tell, Casey. What would a Earth Day happy act look like? [00:13:34] CJ: Yes. One of them is starting a compost bin for organic waste in your home. They make a lot of – I know a lot of people are like, “Oh, that's going to be so smelly.” They make a lot of small compost bins for your kitchen that you can just put in the corner, and it's not smelly. They have some that actually look aesthetically pleasing, so it can match your kitchen décor. You can also repurpose that for garden. [00:13:59] PF: Can I tell you about our composter? [00:14:01] CJ: Please. [00:14:02] PF: You will just geek out over this. We've discovered something called Lomi, and it's – [00:14:08] CJ: What’s that? [00:14:08] PF: Electric. It's beautiful. It's gorgeous design. It's L-O-M-I. We can put all our food waste in there. Then we turn it on when it's full, and it takes 16 hours. At the end of that, you have this beautiful, dark compost that can go directly into the garden. It's amazing. [00:14:26] CJ: Oh, my gosh. [00:14:27] PF: The amount of food waste that we have eliminated between being able to do that, and then, obviously, there's still stuff that you can throw directly out. It's been amazing. It's been absolutely great for the garden, and it's so simple. You feel great doing it. [00:14:45] CJ: That's amazing. You're living my dream. I want to live out in the country and have a garden. I want to compost the way you guys are. You guys are doing it right. [00:14:54] PF: Come on out, Casey. [00:14:56] CJ: I will. Don't tempt me. A few other happy acts. I could talk about composting all day, but just a few other ones, I saw this on Instagram, actually. I thought this was a really cool idea. One, it eliminates food waste we were talking about. But you can also support your local wildlife by creating a bird feeder. You can cut an orange in half, and scoop out the part that you would eat, and then use the peel as a bird feeder. Just put seed in there and then you can hang it from a tree. [00:15:24] PF: How nice. [00:15:25] CJ: Yes. It’s also bee-friendly. We got to save the bees, too. [00:15:28] PF: Oh, that’s cool. [00:15:30] CJ: Yes. [00:15:30] PF: Oh, Yes. You got to take care of them. That’s cool. [00:15:32] CJ: I thought that was a cool way, yes, to just eliminate food waste and support the birds and pollinators. [00:15:39] PF: I like that. How many happy acts do you have in total you're going to share over the next week? [00:15:43] CJ: I think we have four, five. They’re super simple ways. The whole purpose of this was to make it simple and sustainable for everyone, not make it too complex, simple actions that you can apply in your day-to-day life. I don't expect people to ditch their Ziploc bags right away like I did. [00:16:01] PF: We got to ease into it. [00:16:02] CJ: Yes. You got to start somewhere. [00:16:04] PF: I like that. Where are they going to find the happy acts? Is it – are you sharing it on social? Is it – where's the best place to look for that? [00:16:11] CJ: Yes. We'll be posting that on social; Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Then I'm sure we'll also be sending out a newsletter just for easy access with all of them in one place. [00:16:22] PF: I love this. I love that you took the initiative to create this, and I'm really excited to see how it does. [00:16:28] CJ: Thank you. [00:16:28] PF: I just love how you're so diligent about – it's like Mother's Day for the Earth for you. [00:16:34] CJ: It is. Protect our mother. [00:16:36] PF: I love how you do that. [00:16:36] CJ: Our Mother Earth. [00:16:37] PF: Exactly. She's the only one we got, so – [00:16:41] CJ: That’s right. [00:16:41] PF: Let’s take care of her. I love it. Thank you so much for sitting down and talking about this. I know we can just geek out on this all day, but I really wanted to talk to you about it. [00:16:51] CJ: Of course. Thank you for having me. I love, love, love, love talking about the Earth and how we can make it a better, healthier place. [00:16:58] PF: Let’s do it. [END OF INTERVIEW] [00:17:04] PF: That was Casey Johnson, talking about how we can all care for the planet this Earth Day and beyond. If you'd like to learn more about our Live Happy Earth Day #HappyActs or follow us on social media, just visit us at livehappy.com and click on the podcast tab. While you're there, be sure to check out our article by Dr. Randall Hansen, who explains the history of victory gardens, the benefits of gardening, and explains why we should all be looking at how to start our own garden no matter how small it might be. You can also sign up for our Live Happy newsletter to make sure you're getting a little bit of joy in your inbox every week 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: The Joy of Senior Pets With Dr. Julie Buzby [INTRO] [00:00:08] PF: Welcome to Happiness Unleashed with your host, Brittany Derrenbacher, presented by Live Happy. November is Adopt A Senior Pet Month, and that makes it the perfect time to talk to Dr. Julie Buzby. Julie is an integrative veterinarian with a special place in her heart for senior pets. She's here to talk with Brittany about some of the misconceptions we often have about senior dogs and why, in many cases, a senior pet may be the best option for adoption. So listen in as she and Brittany talk about what senior pets can do for us and what we should be doing for them. [INTERVIEW] [00:00:41] BD: November is National Senior Pet Month. So let's just dive right into this topic that is near and dear to my heart. Dr. Buzby, why are you passionate about helping senior dogs? [00:00:54] JB: Oh, man. I just love senior dogs for so many reasons. I am an integrative veterinarian certified in animal chiropractic and veterinary acupuncture. So the majority of my patients at this point in my career are senior dogs. People are coming for mobility management, pain management. So I get to spend my day with them. I mean, just inherently, they just are so sweet. They've lived through so much. They've seen so much. Their little sweet, gray muzzles, like they just have such an expressive unconditional love oozing out of every hair follicle. But I think the other thing that is in the back of my mind is they have, for the most part, lived with these families for a long time, a decade or more. I've heard so many stories over the years of how they have been there for their person through a bad divorce, through the loss of a spouse, through the loss of a child, through whatever tragedy life might bring. That dog was their rock and provided unconditional love. Whenever they were – whatever emotional state they were in, they could count on the dog to be there for them. I just respect that, and they just play such an important role as a family member. I just appreciate and love them for everything about them. [00:02:16] BD: For the purposes of this conversation, just so listeners have background on many of the topics that we're going to be covering, what age are dogs considered seniors? [00:02:27] JB: That's a fabulous question, and the answer has evolved over for the years. So when I graduated from vet school, there was this big senior at seven campaigning, going on by one of the major companies in our industry. We now know there was just, I think, a study out of the Texas A&M University Vet School, I think, in 2019 that really kind of put things in perspective. There's this linear – well, there isn't a direct linear correlation that just kind of always goes up on this trajectory evenly, this line that goes up on a graph. We now realize there's more of a line that goes up, and then it plateaus off. So it's not just, hey, multiply by seven, and you have your dog's age. Of course, we all know that larger breeds, giant breed dogs tend to have a shorter lifespan than smaller dogs. So to answer the question, I would say small dogs, maybe 10-plus. For a senior medium-sized dogs, eight to nine. Large breed dogs, giant breed dogs, six maybe and seven for large breed dogs. So it just varies by the dog's height, weight, breed. [00:03:33] BD: Right. When we're talking about integrative vet care, how do you describe that? How would you describe what integrative and holistic approach for our pets? Like what does that mean? [00:03:48] JB: Yes. So I'm not sure this is the appropriate universal definition, but I'll give you my definition. So holistic care, for me, is alternative. It's alternative to Western medicine, chiropractic, acupuncture, Chinese herbs. The list goes on. Then, of course, Western medicine, we think of the traditional medications, surgery, just everything that the standard veterinarian trained by a US or even foreign veterinary school probably delves into. So as an integrative veterinarian, I like to integrate both. So for my patients, so many times, my patients come to me, and I'm “the last resort.” Like, “Can you help our dog? We've already done what we can do.” So I don't throw Western medicine out the window. A lot of my patients are still on medications. Or let's say I have a dog that has a cruciate tear. I still consider surgical therapy, like a surgical correction of that knee to be like the gold standard treatment. Not everybody opts for that based on budget, the dog's age, the dog's status. I respect that, and we work around all kinds of parameters because every single dog and every single family is different. But I still do recommend medicine and surgery. That's the point. Then I integrate all the additional wonderful tools that I am blessed to have in my toolbox and kind of craft the best thing for each individual dog using the best of all the worlds. [00:05:24] BD: I love that this is becoming a more normalized conversation for our care for animals. In the therapeutic work that I do with humans, I believe in a holistic mind-body-spirit approach. So I love that this conversation is extending out into our fur babies. We have a special needs dog here named Samson Supernova, and he goes every month to get acupuncture and laser. He’s on a bunch of different like Chinese herbal supplements, all supplemental care that helps with his congenital breathing problem. So it supports his system holistically for the entirety of his life, and I view it as like a upstream prevention method. [00:06:05] JB: Well said, yes. I mean, one of the things I learned in my chiropractic training is we've got like an iceberg of symptoms, and the tip of the iceberg might only be 10%. So 90% of the iceberg is under the water developing, and maybe we don't even – well, we don't. Maybe a very in-tune pet parent might see little glimpses and, hopefully, bring them to the attention of the veterinarian. There’s so many times that I couldn't even begin to count them of where someone has said to me like, “You know, I don't even know what to make of this.” Or, “This is probably silly but –” Then they tell me something that's like a really big clue for me, especially thinking in the traditional Chinese medicine box. So any change, anything you note, it's worthwhile to bring to your vet's attention. But back to our analogy, if we wait until we're at the tip of the iceberg with symptoms, it's so much harder to successfully treat and address, manage, possibly reverse that. So when we're working in the preventative realm, that is 1,000% for human and veterinary health where we want to be. [00:07:16] BD: Why do you think that this is so important and unique for caring for senior animals? [00:07:23] JB: Well, I do think it's appropriate across the whole spectrum. However, senior dogs tend to have the issues with pain management, with mobility management. I'm a huge believer that mobility is a dog's greatest asset. They're made to move. They're pack animals. They travel. So I just think those are the dogs that we see more commonly for it. Also, these modalities just really can work wonders for pain and mobility. They just seem to be really perfect for those conditions. Ideally, vast majority of situations don't have any side effects as well, which is really nice compared to maybe more traditional Western medicine. [00:08:05] BD: Yes. This month being all about adopting a senior pet, what are some of the unique rewards that we as humans can experience from adopting a senior dog and for caring for senior pets as a whole? [00:08:21] JB: Right. So what I tell people when I recommend adopting seniors is you know what you're getting. If you get a puppy, you don't really know what you're getting, both in terms of like size and look and personality. Things aren't fully developed. So you might get an idea. But when you adopt a senior, you get what you see. For so many of us that have busy lifestyles, with family travel outside the home, working outside the home, I think just a senior dog slips right into family life so much easier than a puppy or young dog that you may have to still house train and keep them from chewing your furniture. They’re just so much more high-energy. I mean, that's its own reward in and of itself. Don't get me wrong. They’re so much fun. But a senior dog is like more of your ready-made pet, ready to go. I think senior dogs – I just was having a conversation last week with someone who said that they adopted this senior. Well, it was a middle-aged dog, but it had been in the shelter for a long time. He said, “My wife and I had agreed that we were not going to sleep with this dog. We have other dogs.” They have a bunch of dogs. “We had other dogs we slept with. This dog we were going to train to not sleep with us.” The wife came home from a late-night work shift, and the dog was under the covers, like snuggled in on the pillow next to the guy. She said, “What happened?” He said, “He just looked at me with this look, and he was like – it was gratefulness. Like you could see the gratefulness on this dog's face, and I just scooped him right into bed.” All my animals have been adopted. It seems a little crazy, but I truly think like they're grateful and senior dogs all the more. So there's this altruistic piece as well. Yes, here's all the benefits for the people. But if we just think about senior dogs who've maybe been in a home their whole life, that's what they've known. Then for whatever tragic reason, they now found themselves homeless in a rescue or a shelter. Just to say, you know what? I'm going to give this dog a life. For whatever many months or years they have left, I'm going to just adopt this dog and give them that security of living out their golden years in a home full of love. [00:10:38] BD: I'm so glad that you use the word grateful. I really wanted to pick your brain about this because this is November. What a time to be talking about gratitude and thanks. I believe that senior animals can uniquely teach us. Teach us about gratitude and thanks. Why do you think that senior animals are able to uniquely model that to us, this gift of gratitude and thanks? [00:11:05] JB: I keep ascribing these human traits to animals, and I'm not sure that's a wrong thing. I mean, we just talked about gratefulness. So now, I'm going to bring up wisdom. I feel like senior dogs have – just like people, when they get gray, and they've got some inherent wisdom just from living life. I feel like senior dogs might get that, too, where they're just like older and wiser. That can translate, I think, into that gratitude. So I don't know that I know the answer to your question. I just know that I have experienced it personally. [00:11:37] BD: Yes, yes. We used to have a house full of seniors. They all recently over the last couple years crossed over the rainbow bridge. But that period of time in my life where we had seven, eight seniors in our house was the calmest, most peaceful, loving container that I have ever experienced. Now, we have a lot of younger dogs, and the energy has shifted. But I love this conversation that we're having because there is – often, the seniors are overlooked in shelters. They're overlooked in rescues. I think this conversation kind of shifts that narrative. What can we expect differently from adopting a senior dog that maybe has been a misconception? [00:12:27] JB: I think people assume maybe even subconsciously it’s too painful to adopt a senior dog because they're going to die soon. I mean, I think that's in the back of people's minds, and that's too painful to go through for myself or maybe for my kids. I mean, one of the things that we laugh about as veterinarians is like for the most part, dogs don't come in with perfect records. So you don't even know their age. I mean, we don't really know. I've had so many people adopt what they thought was a senior dog and just have many, many, many, many, many more years together. For the most part, in my experience, I've been a vet for 25 years, people adopt a dog, a senior even, and have years together. So granted it's not an entire lifespan, but there's no guarantee in buying a puppy or adopting a younger dog that you're going to have all those years together anyway. So I think dogs live in the moment. It's one of the best things about them, and we can learn from that. I think it would just be great if people didn't just worry so much about the future and just embrace the present and say whatever time we have left, and I'm just going to say in the majority of cases, I do believe that that's years, we're just going to soak up the love and time together. I just can't ever – I can't think of a case where anyone's ever done that and regretted it. [00:13:50] BD: Right. Never. Talk about imparting wisdom, that loving presence and being present in the moment with our animals is something that is just uniquely modeled to us and those reciprocal relationships. But, also, like what a gift? What a karmic gift to give back to an animal in that way and care for them in their last years of life and make sure that they are given the most love that they could experience. I want to shift a little bit into the care perspective because this is something that you know a lot about. What is your advice to folks that might go to a shelter, adopt a senior dog? What are some of the biggest tips you have in caring for a senior pet? [00:14:34] JB: Thank you for letting me talk about this because it's important. So number one is veterinary care. With younger animals going to the vet, once a year is probably fine, unless they instruct you otherwise. Senior pets, you need to be there at least twice a year because things change. I mean, even if it's not senior at seven, and we do the multiplication times seven, still the lifespan is accelerated. The years are passing by, accelerated compared to human life. So you wouldn't go to the doctor every five years or seven years. Important to go to the vet, so they can get a tip-to-tail complete exam and blood work at least every six months. That's just a way that we can be ahead. We talked about preventive medicine. We can be ahead of changes. We can stay ahead of concerns and always more likely to have successful outcomes when we catch things early versus late. So that's number one We may need to make some changes in the home for senior dogs, depending on their ability or special needs status. This can be everything from using a nightlight at night for a dog. I think that's a real help for senior dogs who might struggle at night if they're up and about. One thing that senior dogs can experience is a little bit of doggy dementia with age. One of the ways this manifests is like a disturbed sleep-wake cycle, so they may be a little bit more up at night, and nightlights can help with that. If they struggle on steps, I like to recommend putting a strip across the front of steps to really demarcate. Sometimes, depth perception can be an issue. So putting a strip, a brightly colored strip, a white strip, maybe even a strip with a little grip on the front of each step can be a help. I've had clients like remove the legs off of their couch or put the [inaudible 00:16:24] on the floor to help them get up and down more easily. Certainly, ramps and steps. So those are some potential home modifications. Then finally, use it or lose it. Like these dogs need to be out. They need to be getting the stimuli to their brain of life in the outdoors, the smells, and the sights, and the noises. So even if the walks have to get shorter and doing like more frequent really tiny walks, really short walks, that's fine. But they still need to be in the outdoors. They still need to get their exercise to maintain whatever mobility and muscle mass they have. [00:16:59] BD: Yes. Going off of mobility, there's a product that we've used in this house over the last couple of years, and you developed that product. Can you tell the listeners more about that? [00:17:12] JB: Yes. So ToeGrips is my passion because as a veterinarian, I get to help one dog at a time. Because my appointments are very comprehensive with the holistic medicine added into the Western and the exam, they're usually like an hour-long. So there's only so many hour-long appointments I can get in in a week. But ToeGrips have allowed me to really have an impact on senior dogs around the world, and I'm so thankful for that opportunity. They are non-slip nail grips that go on the tips of dogs’ nails and give them traction on hard surface floors. The biggest thing we deal with is skepticism. People see them and think like, “Oh these little things, what could they possibly do?” But if you understand that a dog's natural mechanism for traction is to engage the nails like soccer cleats, that's why you don't see dogs slipping on carpet or on grass because that works. But hard nails can't grip hard floors. So just by giving them a little grip on the nail tips, voila, we have dogs that can get up off the floors and walk on the floors with traction and confidence. [00:18:16] BD: Our holistic vet recommended this product to us a few years ago, and one of our younger uniquely able dogs uses it as well. He's actually afraid of hardwood floors and transitional spaces. They have really helped boost his confidence and his mobility when he's running around the house. So, yes, thank you. [00:18:36] JB: I love that. Yes, confidence. I mean, we've talked about doggy wisdom and doggy gratitude. Doggy confidence is a very real thing. Early on in the development of this product, I was talking to a veterinary colleague whom I love. She's like a brilliant veterinarian and wonderful bedside manner. But I was talking about how ToeGrips have really impacted my patients’ confidence. She kind of laughed, and she's like, “Confidence? Why would I care about my patients’ confidence?” It broke my heart because it's a real thing, and confidence directly ties into quality of life. So these dogs that have to live in fear in their homes because they're afraid of slipping, they're afraid of getting like a slip and fall injury, especially if they've experienced that, and they're like afraid for it to happen again. We'd need our dogs to be able to live in a fear-free environment, and slipping is a very real part of that, so. [00:19:29] BD: I love to hear that you experience the confidence. Yes. I mean, and that's part of the holistic care, right, is to think about more of those outside-the-box supplemental things that we can do for our dogs to have the best quality of life, the best joy in life. I mean, mobility, that's been a huge part of this conversation, especially with senior dogs. In your experience with senior dogs and with folks that adopt them and bring them in, can you talk about the special benefits senior citizens can receive from adopting a senior pet? [00:20:03] JB: That is something that I just find fascinating to pair that up, right? So first of all, I think they can identify, right? I mean, there's some sort of root hope that comes from saying like, “Here's the senior dog, and I'm going to rescue them.” But it comes to – it begs the question that I've seen on bumper stickers like, “Who rescued whom,” right? So senior citizens often are more associated statistically with loneliness, and a pet is the best solution for that issue. I mean, you've got a 24/7 unconditional love in fur living with you. Also, we know that people with pets are more likely, especially dogs, to be active. So it gives them a reason to get up in the morning. They've got to get the dog out. It really can give them a purpose in life that may be flagging for a senior citizen who's retired and maybe not as engaged as they once were with a community. Now, they have a reason to be engaged, and that dog can even help them make friends, break into friend groups in their neighborhood or community. So it's the perfect win-win. [00:21:11] BD: I love the language that we're using in today's conversation; gratitude, thanks, confidence, purpose, loving presence. It just so illuminates the gifts that animals bring into our lives but, uniquely, in this conversation, senior dogs. [00:21:29] JB: Then there's the physical benefits, right? So we know statistically that having a dog in your life provides some distinct physical benefits. One of which is lower blood pressure, which can be good for people. So I was thinking about my Chihuahua who's a little terror, but we love him to death. So my mom is a senior citizen. She's turning 78 this month, and she has high blood pressure. My son and the Chihuahua stayed with her for a week, and the Chihuahua just wanted to be on her lap, and she was like petting the dog all week. At the end of the week, she had a routine wellness exam, and her blood pressure was the lowest it had ever been. We're all like, “It was Beanie.” So for sure, physical benefits as well for all of us and especially senior citizens. [00:22:12] BD: Every episode, I like to ask our guests, and this is probably a difficult question for you because you've had so many animals in and out of your life, both personally and professionally. But we like to share a story of an animal that has done magic or healing in unassuming ways in your life. So could you please share your favorite story of an animal that has helped transform your way of seeing animals and interacting in the world? [00:22:41] JB: Yes. So I could really go on with lots of them, but I will pick Zeke, who was a black lab. Well, he was – he looked like a black lab mix. We DNA-tested him, and he didn't have any black lab. He had Chow and Shepherd and all. He had like nine things. We adopted him years ago for one of my sons who has ADHD and is just like a restless – like he's just a ball of energy, and he had night terrors, and he would sleepwalk with that. We adopted Zeke not thinking like, “Oh, let's solve the night terrors with the dog.” That wasn't the plan at all, but it just happened that we adopted Zeke. Zeke bonded with Daniel, and he started – it was like the other story I told. By like the third day, he was in bed sleeping with Daniel, and Daniel's night terrors stopped. They stopped like instantly, and he never had them again. [00:23:37] BD: What a gift. Thank you. Thank you for sharing that. Let's say we have listeners at this very moment that are considering going to a shelter and adopting a senior dog or a senior cat. What's your call to action for them? [00:23:53] JB: My call to action is I'm going to go on out on the limb and say I stake my reputation and name on the fact that you would not regret it. You will not regret it. [00:24:04] BD: You heard it here. Dr. Buzby says go out and fill your life with so much joy by adopting a senior pet this month. Thank you so much, Dr. Buzby, for coming on the show, and imparting so much wisdom, and sharing such beautiful stories about your work and all of the magic that you bring into your community. [00:24:25] JB: Thank you for the opportunity. [END OF INTERVIEW] [00:24:27] PF: That was Brittany Derrenbacher talking with Dr. Julie Buzby about the joys of adopting a senior pet. So, Brittany, I really enjoyed that conversation. I know this is a topic that is near and dear to your heart. As I was listening to this, I'm like I have to know what resonated most with you. [00:24:44] BD: Well, first, I have to share that I was so excited to even like say her name, Dr. Buzby. How fun is that? All week, I was like, “I can't wait to say her name.” [00:24:54] PF: That's terrific. [00:24:56] BD: But the biggest part of the conversation for me that stood out is just, and this month is so important to talk about, the gratitude. Senior animals bring so much gratitude into our lives and are so thankful for just being given a space to feel safe and to feel cared for and loved and seen. I think that is such a magical gift. So any opportunity that we have to illuminate that I love senior and special needs animals, that is, obviously, our specialty here at Luna Bell’s. But any opportunity that I think we have to encourage people to go out and bring that gift into their homes and continue like bringing that good karmic energy into the universe, let's do it. [00:25:43] PF: I love it. I love it. Yes. That's – it's such a powerful thing to bring in a senior pet. I know you and I have talked about when I first got involved in rescue, that's what I did. I did the seniors, and I saw a lot of dogs over to the other side. It was heartbreaking, but there was also something so rewarding, knowing that this animal, oftentimes, they've been dumped because families don't want to deal with the decline of a dog. Or who knows what led to that situation. But to know that that dog died with love, and that's how I feel. Like no animal should have to just die alone and unloved. I know that as heartbreaking as it was for me, there was a satisfaction and a joy in knowing that that animal was being ushered over properly. [00:26:28] BD: It costs a little bit upfront for senior animals. Yes, there is maybe a shorter time that we're spending with them. But the gifts that they bring into our life far outweighs any type of vet care or monetary situation that you might be in with senior pets. I look back at all of the animals that have been in our lives that have lived long senior lives, and I don't think about any of that stuff. I just think about how much I loved them, how much they taught me, how much they brought into my life, how much joy they brought into Matthew and I's lives. That outweighs everything. [00:27:04] PF: Absolutely. Well, that was a great interview. There was so much to take away from it. If our listeners want to learn more about you, the work that you’re doing, learn about Dr. Buzby, we're going to have all of that on our landing page. They can follow you on social media and learn more about the ways that pets enhance our lives. So anybody can go to our website at livehappy.com. Click on the podcast tab, and you will see Happiness Unleashed there. Just click on that, and you can join us. Brittany, thank you, again, for another fantastic episode, and we will see you back here next month. [00:27:35] BD: See you soon. [END]

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

Follow along with the transcript below for episode: Why More Money Doesn’t Equal More Happiness With Tal Ben-Shahar [INTRODUCTION]   [00:00:02] PF: Thank you for joining us for episode 432 of Live Happy Now. We've heard that money can't buy happiness. But how does our perception of money affect our well-being? I'm your host, Paula Felps. This week, I'm talking with author and lecturer, Dr. Tal Ben-Shahar, Co-Founder of the Happiness Studies Academy and creator of the Master's Degree in Happiness Studies. Tal is here to talk about recent findings that show our perception of money has changed dramatically, and it's damaging our happiness. He's going to break down what this survey tells us and why it's so important to change our view of money for the sake of our well-being. Let's have a listen. [INTERVIEW] [00:00:42] PF: Tal, thank you so much for coming back on Live Happy Now. [00:00:45] TBS: Thank you, Paula, for having me back. [00:00:47] PF: This is a really interesting conversation to have because as you know, Bloomberg just released a survey, and it had some really surprising results on people's perception about money. It really showed how things have changed dramatically. I wondered, to start it off, if you wanted to talk a little bit about what some of those findings were. [00:01:07] TBS: Sure. So the Bloomberg study very much aligns with what we've been studying in the field of happiness studies over the past few decades, which is that people's perceptions matter a great deal more than their objective circumstances. So what they identified were people who were making a lot of money. They were in the top 10th of the population in terms of income above $175,000. Yet a large minority were feeling poor, and the majority were not feeling comfortable about how much they were making. Now, most people, probably around 90% of the population would say, “What are they about? They're spoiled, and they have so much money. They should be, first of all, grateful. Second, happy. But they're not. They're neither.” Question is why. In the article, the research tries to give the reason. They say, well, things have changed. Many people living in New York, for them, 175,000 or 200,000 doesn't go far. At the same time, many of them have homes that are paid off, so they don't have that mortgage payment. Yet they feel the way they feel. I think what's interesting to do, Paula, is for us to explore why. Even more importantly, what can we do about it if we experience dissatisfaction? [00:02:29] PF: Absolutely. Yes, yes. Because that's why I wanted to have this conversation with you. I wonder too if what has caused that mindset to change because a few years ago, it was saying, okay, if you have an income over $75,000 that that was what it took to kind of get you into a good state of well-being. Then 2021, a study came out and said, “No, we need more than that.” So now, we're looking at really dramatically different numbers. What has changed in the way that we're thinking? [00:02:59] TBS: It's a few things. The first thing is COVID. It's easy to blame COVID for everything, but it really did change the world in so many ways and mostly not good ways. So what did COVID do? It essentially took away people's sense of confidence in the status quo because suddenly this came completely unannounced, and millions and millions of people lost their jobs. Even more extreme, many people lost their lives. The sense of security was understandably affected. If before COVID the question was am I making enough money to live well, the question post-COVID for many people is do I have enough money stashed away to survive a year without a job because that happened to many people. Even if it didn't happen to you, you read about people for whom it did happen. This was real. This changes the numbers because while those who were making $200,000 a year certainly have enough to live off, most of them would not be able to survive, certainly not with the lifestyle that they're leading if they lost their job and did not have that income for a year. That became a reality. [00:04:24] PF: Is there also a sense of fear of, in addition to having that money to live on, feeling like we're no longer being taken care of? I think there was a sense that we would always be okay. Like no matter what happened, someone will take care of us. Something's going to go well for us. Did we kind of lose that mindset? [00:04:45] TBS: I think so. So in the sense that when things are predictable. Well, if we're taken care of in the past, we'll be taken care of in the future. You just induce the future from the past. But suddenly, everyone was lost. I mean, governments were lost. I mean, we're still not sure today. Did we do the right thing? Should have we been quarantined or not? There are different models. The jury is still out, and maybe we'll always be out on it. Yes. Again, people lost their sense of confidence in the authorities, so to speak. Also in their workplaces because even in the most reliable of workplaces, well, they had to lay off people. They didn't have a choice. They did that. [00:05:26] PF: So is it healthy to have that I've got to take care of myself mindset? Or is it unhealthy because we are supposed to be connected? [00:05:33] TBS: So it can go either way. COVID was a trauma, a global trauma, societal-wide trauma. The question is do we grow from that trauma, or do we break down from a trauma? In psychological language, do we experience PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder? Or do we experience PTG, post-traumatic growth? Again, the jury's out on that. Not only is the jury out on that. It's very much dependent on individual perceptions and individual choices. Let's take two examples. One example is of a person who – again, let's use the numbers in the research. They're making 180,000; 200,000 dollars a year. They're saying, “I want to live the same way, and I'm staying in New York City. I'm going to spend as much as I did before and see where that takes me.” They're going to, obviously, be concerned because they know that if COVID happens again or something like that happens again, they are in trouble. Another approach would be the world has changed, and let me live more humbly. Let me maybe not buy a new car or a car at all if I'm in the city, a smaller home. Or maybe I'll move. This is something that they mentioned in the Bloomberg study. Many people are choosing to leave the city. Part of the reason they're moving to Texas, A, because taxes are lower. B, because your dollar goes a lot further there in terms of the home you can afford and even the restaurants that you can go to. So they have, in a sense, learned a lesson and said, “We're not making two million dollars. We're making $200,000.” A lot of money can go a lot further elsewhere. Maybe we can even put more money aside. Even if disaster strikes again, financial disaster strikes again, we don't need to worry for a year or two because we have enough stashed away. So these are two very different approaches. By the way, which one we take also depends on our personality. Are we more risk-averse? Are we more thrill seekers? So it depends on so many – is it possible for me to move to Texas or somewhere in Florida or somewhere in New York, where I may not be in the city, but life is cheaper. [00:07:57] PF: And it's accessible. You can get to the city. I think that's something too. You can find an area where you can access the things that you like about where you live but aren't paying the kind of rents or mortgages that you would pay in a city. [00:08:11] TBS: Yes. You know, I'm speaking here from personal experience. So we moved. Actually, just before COVID, we lived in Brooklyn, and we moved out of the city into New Jersey. We did it because we wanted quieter lifestyle, of course, but also for financial reasons. Not that taxes are not high in New Jersey. They're extremely high. But certainly, when it comes to accommodation, your dollar goes much, much farther when you're in the suburb. Of course, it is important to look at the big picture, to look at it wholistically, W-H, and to understand that there are individual differences. There are people who need the hustle and bustle and the speed of the city. There are people who would feel a lot more comfortable living by a quiet lake, where you hear the water and the birds when you wake up in the morning. Different personalities, it has to do with introversion and extroversion. It also has to do with how you've been raised and what you're used to or where you've spent the past 10 years. Because in a way, for good and ill, we become addicted to whatever it is that we're exposed to. Again, addiction can obviously be a bad thing. But if I'm addicted to the quiet and suns, or I'm addicted to going to the gym three, four times a week, that's not a bad thing. All it means is that we have neural pathways that have been reinforced over time. But there is something else that I want to say here. It's not just what I desire to do or want to do at the moment. We can also bring about change, specifically .We have become as a society addicted to noise, to novelty, to excitement, to the sensational. That is why we keep on checking our messages online because we're looking for something new and sensational. It's also why we get bored very quickly when we're sitting in our room and doing nothing or ostensibly doing nothing. You find more and more kids today saying to their parents, “I'm bored.” [00:10:21] PF: Ow. [00:10:23] TBS: You're right. More and more adults maybe not saying it but feeling it and then immediately filling up that void that is responsible for their boredom with something. Blaise Pascal once said that, “All of our troubles will be solved if we can find peace in solitude, in the solitude of our own room.” There is some truth to that, and the thing is that we can train ourselves to be less of sensation seekers and more at peace, quite literally at peace with ourselves, at peace with the absence of noise, with the absence of distractions. That would be very healthy, and one way to do that is, of course, through practicing meditation or by practicing being bored, by practicing doing nothing. We can actually get used to it. There are many upsides to silence, to solitude, to slowing down. [00:11:24] PF: Yes. It does. It absolutely changes your state. As you talked about, we're a very distracted society. There's a lot of noise, a lot of things going on. How is that playing into the way people perceive their finances and the economic environment around them? What role is that playing, and how then do they step away from that? [00:11:46] TBS: Yes. So in 1954, a leading psychologist by the name of Leon Festinger coined the term social comparison. Again, in hindsight, it seems obvious. Maybe it was also obvious in the 1950s. But we compare ourselves, and we constantly do it. It's part of our nature to do that. It’s not good or bad. It's like the law of gravity. It's a fact of nature. The question, though, is what do we do with social comparison, and how do we direct this need to compare ourselves? Do we, for example, compare ourselves to others, and that may drive us to do better and to improve and to learn from what other people are doing? Or do we become obsessed with what others have and can never be satisfied or happy because we don't have what they have? Right now, because of over stimulation, too much comparison, we, and I say we generalized, of course, not everyone. But in general, we have become, again, addicted and dependent on being better than, having more than. This plays out in terms of the statistics that we're seeing now. Yes, 180,000 is not a lot really when you compare it to someone who's making 1.8 million dollars. It’s nothing, and there are many people who make that. There are also many people who have billions of dollars, and we're exposed to all of them day in and day out through the media, through social media, or through the newspapers that writes about the very wealthy celebrities. Suddenly, what I do, oh, wow, or what I make is so little. Whereas in the past, let's say when you lived in your village, first of all, there was less discrepancy about what people made. But even the wealthy ones, first of all, they were not in my face all the time. The news isn’t in my face. [00:13:39] PF: They weren't on TikTok showing their latest acquisition, right? [00:13:42] TBS: Exactly, exactly. Also, there were many others that I compared myself to. Again, this is something natural. Who had as much or less than I did, so I felt okay when it came to social comparison. Also, you think about advertising. Advertising has one goal, to sell. Now, how does it get you to sell? It takes this tendency towards social comparison and exploits it. Oh, you don't have this new car yet. That means you can't be really happy because look at how happy those beautiful people driving that car are. Then you get that car, but there are always new ads coming on and luring. The sirens are calling you to get the next thing. Then we experience what Nathaniel Branden, the psychologist, called the nothing is enough syndrome. Nothing is enough materially. Because mind and body are connected, nothing is enough psychologically. [00:14:43] PF: Now, what does that do to our happiness when we are focused on what – our lack, the fact that we don't have enough money, even if that's just a perception? How is that undermining our well-being? [00:14:56] TBS: In the exact same way that objectively not having enough for our livelihood would influence our happiness. Because people who don't have the basic needs, of course, that's going to affect their impact. Poverty influences people's happiness. If I know that or if I don't know rather how I will get food on my table, for myself, for my family tomorrow, that I'm going to be concerned. I'm not going to sleep. Well, I'm going to be unhappy, obviously. In the same way, people who actually have enough objectively, even if they have enough for the next year to live off, but their perception is the perception of lack. Their happiness is going to be influenced just the same. Why? Because happiness depends much more on our state of mind than the state of our bank account. Again, with a caveat here, I'm not talking about extremes. Extreme actual poverty will lead to unhappiness. For those who are experiencing it or for us, we have a responsibility to alleviate that condition. That goes without saying. [00:16:03] PF: So what do people focus on? Here's where the professor really comes out. So what are the steps that people can take? How do they change their relationship with their perception of what is enough, and what do they focus on instead to start making a shift? [00:16:21] TBS: Seneca, the Stoic philosopher, who's really the father of cognitive psychology, says that one of the things that we can do is imagine ourselves without the things that we have. We're so focused on what we don't have. Let's think about what we have and imagine ourselves without it. So I have food on my table. Imagine if I didn't have that food. Well, that will make me more appreciative of the food that I do have. Or I do drive a car. Yes, I don't drive the latest model and fastest one. But it takes me from point A to point B, how convenient, how wonderful. Not to mention to become more appreciative of the things that don't cost money such – whether it's friends or family or health or nature, the gift that we received from evolution, God. Take your pick. [00:17:16] PF: So what are ways that people can start creating some sort of practice? Because we're not going to just inherently say, “Okay, those were great tips. I'm going to start doing that,” and everything changes. It gets tough because we are going to slide back in, and we are going to see that friend on TikTok who has a Lamborghini, and we're going to be like, “Come on.” So what are some practices that we can use every day to make this part of our insight? [00:17:43] TBS: I'm going to talk about some of the usual suspects here because I don't think it's rocket science. The challenge is not understanding or knowing what we should do. The challenge is to do it and to do it consistently. I will say a few words about that in a minute. But first of all, what are the things? First of all, regularly express gratitude. The key with expressing gratitude is not just, okay, so I'm sitting down now the end of the day and counting my blessings, writing down what I'm grateful for. We need to do it with what Barbara Frederickson, the psychologist, calls heartfelt positivity. So this is a practice that I've been doing since the 19th of September, 1999. I do day in and day out. The key, especially when you've done it often, is to really feel experience and savor what it is that you're grateful for. So if I write down my daughter. It’s not just writing down my daughter or her name. It's writing it down, and then I shut my eyes, and I imagine her. I see her in my mind's eye and feel the love. [00:18:48] PF: I love that. [00:18:50] TBS: There are so many reasons why this works so much better than just going through the motion. Or let's say if I write a meal that I had with a colleague, which was lovely. I actually closed my eyes and transport myself back to that experience, re-experience it. It's when we experience this heartfelt positivity as opposed to just cognitive positivity that makes a big difference in terms of the impact that it has on us. So this is one practice. The second practice, going back to sensationalism. I'm taking it from the work of Osho, who was a spiritual teacher, but also from the latest research on meditation. We can shift away from the need for sensationalism if we become more mindful of sensations. So if I sit down and focus on the air coming in through my nose and leaving through my nose and this tingling, whether it's in my nostrils or my fingertips, if I focus on that, there's so much happening there. If I learn to focus on it, I become more sensitive. When I become more sensitive, I'm more aware of sensations and therefore less dependent on sensationalism, which is sensations taken to the extreme. Again, this is not just then etymological word play. This actually works, but we need to put time aside for that by living any city. I'm outside, being constantly bombarded by these distractions which is noise, colors. Plus, I have my smartphone with me all the time that is providing me notifications or messages. I become addicted to those. Just like the antidote for taking things for granted is gratitude, the antidote to sensationalism is learning to focus on and become aware of, mindful of sensations. [00:21:03] PF: That's incredible. I love that. I know that we do have to let you go, but I really want you to put in perspective for us how imperative is it that we get our mindset about money in line for our overall well-being? Like where does that fall in importance? [00:21:21] TBS: We have within us, again, whether it's the creator put it in us or evolution put it in us, the need to accumulate. It's understandable because in the past, humans really didn't know whether they would survive the next winter. Or they only survived it if they accumulated. Unfortunately, for many people, this is still the reality. So this is, again, part of our nature; good, bad, both, neither. The question is what do we do with that. Do we take it to the extreme? Then that means even people who are making, objectively speaking, a lot of money still feel that nothing is enough. Or do we write about it, think about it, talk about it, find a more rational evaluation of what we have? So that's the first thing. The second thing, how about living a little bit more humbly? Because really, as we know from a lot of research and, Paula, you've talked about this multiple times before, yes, when we get this new thing, bigger, better, brighter thing, we'll be happy for a week or a month. That's not the path to lasting happiness. So let's be more humble about our acquisitions. Let's be more humble about what we really need. Spend more of our money and more importantly our time on cultivating those things that are free and yet so important, so fundamental for our happiness. Because spending time with my daughter or spending time going for a walk, playing with my pet, or reading a book, these are wonderful sources of what I've come to call life's ultimate currency, which is not dollars and cents. It's happiness. [00:23:18] PF: I love that. Thank you so much for your insight today. This is an important topic because it affects all of us. We all have our own mindsets about it. So I really appreciate you breaking it down for us and telling us how we can shift the direction we're going. We're going to tell our listeners how they can find you online and learn more about you. [00:23:37] TBS: Thank you very much, Paula. Again, thank you so much for all that you and your team are doing. [END OF INTERVIEW] [00:23:47] PF: That was Dr. Tal Ben-Shahar, talking about money and happiness. If you'd like to learn more about Tal and the Happiness Studies Academy or follow him on social media, just visit us at livehappy.com and click on the podcast tab. That is all we have time for today. We'll meet you back here again next week for an all-new episode. Until then, this is Paula Felps, reminding you to make every day happy one. [END]