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Follow along with the transcript below for episode: Using Your Mind to Improve Your Health With Dr. Ellen J. Langer [INTRODUCTION]   [00:00:02] PF: Thank you for joining us for episode 433 of Live Happy Now. When it comes to our health, most of us believe that we just have to live with ailments and declining well-being as we grow older. But this week's guest is about to flip the script on everything you thought you knew about health and happiness. I'm your host, Paula Felps. This week, I'm talking with the mother of mindfulness, Dr. Ellen J. Langer. Ellen is highly regarded as one of America's most influential psychologists. In her new book, The Mindful Body, she presents decades of research that shows how our thoughts and perspective can change our health. She's here to tell us how we can use the mind-body connection to rethink what we believe to be true, and explains how our thoughts could be undermining our health and what we need to do about it. Let's have a listen. [INTERVIEW] [00:00:52] PF: Dr. Langer, thank you so much for being on Live Happy Now. [00:00:56] EL: My pleasure, Paula. [00:00:58] PF: You have written many books, but your latest one is truly remarkable. It has had me absorbed since the moment I got – well, actually before I even got it in the mail. I have to say that one of the first things that struck me about it was the subtitle and that is Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health. I love the idea of chronic health. Can you tell us what that means? [00:01:20] EL: Well, we have a sense of as we get older, we're going to become sick, and we have little control over being sick. All of the work, hopefully, we'll talk about some of it now, suggests to me that, no, we don't have to get sick. We don't have to go to doctors. I'm not putting down the medical world. Certainly, if I just broke my arm, I'd go to the hospital. But there are so many ways we can take care of ourselves. So much control that we have that people are totally oblivious to. So I saw it as an opportunity for me to make people aware of all this control by doing all of this research. [00:01:57] PF: Do you find any pushback from people initially when – [00:02:01] EL: You know what? It's really interesting. I would expect it, right? Doctors know or they don't know. But they're under the impression, I think, that you're going to heal faster if they pretend they know. I think that it depends on the particulars but most of the time that what we need to do is exploit the power and uncertainty. Let me talk to you about mindfulness because that's the basis of all of this. When I'm talking about mindfulness, it has nothing to do with meditation. It's the simple process of noticing. Now, why then aren't we all mindful all the time? Because most of the time, we think we know. When we think we know, we don't pay any attention. If you simply notice five new things about the environment, the person you're living with, talking to, five new things about your work, what happens is you come to say, “Gee, I didn't know it as well as I thought I did.” Then your attention naturally goes to it. When we're actively noticing, the neurons are firing. Our research has found that it's literally and figuratively enlivening. So it feels good and it's good for us. Now, what people are taught by parents, by speakers, myself excluded, are absolutes. You go to school, and they tell you things like, oh, I don't know, “One and one is two.” So, Paula, how much is one and one? [00:03:29] PF: Oh, I guess it's two. [00:03:30] EL: No, not always. If you're adding one wad of chewing gum plus one wad of chewing gum, one plus one is one. If you're adding one pile of laundry plus one pile of laundry, one plus one is one. One cloud plus one cloud, one plus one. So in the real world, one plus one doesn't equal two as often as it does. But once we think we know, we stop paying attention. So I'm sorry, Paula. For the rest of your life now, if somebody asks you how much is one and one, you're going to have to sit up and pay attention to the context to get the answer. Now, what – [00:03:59] PF: Well, because I’m already a writer, so they think I can't do math, and they're not wrong, so. [00:04:02] EL: Okay. That's great. Let me tell you something important that happened to me a while ago. I was at this horse event, and this man asked me if I'd watch his horse for him because he was going to get a hot dog for him. Well, I'm Harvard, Yale, all the way through. Nobody knows better than I. Horses don't eat meat. That's the starting point. He comes back with the hot dog, and the horse ate it. Oh, my. Everything I thought I knew now I realized I might not know. Now, some people in hearing this or figuring out that they don't know very much might be worried. But for me, I was excited because it meant all sorts of possibilities open up. That's what this book is about, possibilities. So there was a study I did. I don't know if it, although I talk about it in this book, so you'll pretend you did, even if you didn't read it yet. [00:04:54] PF: How far is it because I'm like two-thirds through. [00:04:57] EL: Okay. I'm sure. It doesn't matter. I'm sorry I put you on the spot. [00:05:01] PF: Oh, we're good. [00:05:02] EL: Okay. So basically, this was the first test of the mind-body unity idea, which goes through this new book. Now, mind-body unity means mind, body, they're one. If they're one, then wherever you put the mind, you're necessarily putting the body. You're thinking about, “My gosh, all the places I can go with my mind, and that's going to have an effect on my health and well-being.” So in this first study, we took old men to a timeless retreat that – oh, you know it. [00:05:30] PF: Oh, my gosh. I love this. I was telling a friend about this yesterday that this blew my mind, and now I want to create a retirement home like that. [00:05:38] EL: Okay. So what we did, we retrofitted the retreat to 20 years earlier. We had old men live there for a week as if they were their younger selves. That means that they talked about the past in the present tense, okay, as well as other things. Now, just a week, right? What we found was that their hearing improved, their vision improved, their memory improved, their strength improved, and they looked noticeably younger. To me, this was incredible because when have you ever heard a 90-year-old's hearing improve without any medical intervention? [00:06:12] PF: Exactly. [00:06:15] EL: So in this new book, I talk about all the new research testing this mind-body unity idea. The next study we did in that series was with chambermaids. If women are listening, they'll find this especially interesting. So we asked six chambermaids. How much exercise do you get? They said, “Oh, I'm too tired. Exercise is what you do after work, so I don't get any exercise.” So we divided them into two groups. We took one group, and we taught them that their work was exercise. They were told making a bed was like working on this machine at the gym and so on. So at the end, we have two groups. One who believes their work is exercise. The other group doesn't realize. We take many, many measures before we start. At the end, simply changing your mindset resulted in people losing weight, a change in body mass index, waist-to-hip ratio, and their blood pressure came down. All right, let me hurry along here to the newest research, although there are many in between these two testing this mind-body unity. So we inflict a wound. Now, it would have been more dramatic if I could really hurt people, but I didn't want to do that. [00:07:21] PF: Like cut an arm off or what. [00:07:22] EL: The review board wouldn't let me, even if I did live in that world. So it's a minor wound, and people are in front of a clock. For a third of the people, the clock is going twice as fast as real time. For a third of the people, the clock is going half as fast as real time. For a third of the people, it's real time. The question we're asking is how long does it take the wound to heal. Well, it turns out the wound heals based on perceived time, clock time, not real time. We have so much control over everything, and we're simply blind to it that I think, although I don't have data specifically for this, so you can imagine when I tell you how hard it would be to do the studies, that the major cause of illness is stress, major cause. Now, stress is psychological. So if you say to yourself – and it's also the case that when we're stressed, two things are going on. The first is we think something's going to happen. The second is when it happens, it's going to be awful. Well, it turns out we can't predict. If you think about it, you go back over the times you've been stressed, almost all the things we're stressed about never even happened. [00:08:37] PF: Right. It’s the stuff we're not thinking about that gets us. [00:08:40] EL: So if you said to yourself, what are three reasons this thing I'm scared of won't happen, and you're usually able to generate them. So you went from thinking it's definitely going to happen to maybe it will, maybe it won't, so you immediately feel better. But now, what I think people should do is say let's assume it happens. What are three, five reasons that it's actually an advantage? You can always come up with things. Now, what people don't realize is that events don't come pre-packaged. This is a good thing. This is a bad thing. It all depends on the way we understand our world. So the more mindful you are, the more potential understandings of any event you can come up with. An example I've used too often but I can't come up with another one on the spot now. [00:09:27] PF: So let's do it again. [00:09:28] EL: Okay. Let's say you and I go out to lunch, and the food is wonderful. Wonderful, it's a win. You and I go out to lunch. The food is awful. Wonderful, I'll eat less, and that'll be better for my waistline. [00:09:39] PF: I like that. [00:09:40] EL: All right. There is always a way of interpreting things. It's also true for people, which we don't tend to realize that we tend to see people by dispositions. Paula, you really are getting on my nerves because you're so inconsistent. I'm getting on your nerves because I'm so gullible. Well, it turns out for every single negative description we can give to somebody, negative way we understand what they're doing, there's an equally strong but oppositely balanced alternative. What is negative is equally positive. So you're not inconsistent. From your perspective, you're flexible. I'm not gullible. From my perspective, I'm trusting. This is true no matter what words we come up with to insult ourselves or other people. So now, all the times you're stressed because I keep trying to change you, I can't stand you’re so inconsistent. Now that I realize you're being flexible, hey, now I appreciate you. As I appreciate you, you appreciate me. Because we're both less judgmental, our relationship improves. As our relationship improves, we get more support. With that support, we're going to experience less stress, and we're and going to end up healthier. [00:10:54] PF: I love the way you tie that all back together. As we talk about health, it's really clear that we have turned the power of our health over to our practitioners. Will you talk about how we can kind of start reclaiming control of our health from our practitioners because to your point, they don't know everything. [00:11:15] EL: Oh. Well, you can challenge them, but why bother? What I would suggest is that we stay healthy in the first place and that when we have symptoms, we engage in what I'll talk to you about after, the next three things you want to talk about, attention to symptom variability. Let me throw one thing in there, is a one-liner that I've come up with that is so meaningful to me. You can ask yourself with anything. Is it a tragedy or an inconvenience? Almost all the time, you realize so what I burned the dinner? So what I missed the bus? So what I didn't get the project done on time? Just by asking that question then we relax. Again, as we're relaxing, we're becoming happier and healthier. What we need to understand is that symptoms, no matter what we have, if we're depressed, we're stressed, we have Parkinson's disease, multiple sclerosis, a broad range of things, the mistaken assumption people make is that their symptoms are going to stay the same or get worse. Well, it turns out nothing only goes in one direction. Now, so what we did, we took people with major diseases, and we set this up where we were going to just call them at random times throughout the day, throughout the week, and ask them, “So how do you feel now? Is it better or worse than before, and why?” Okay, now what happens, the first thing you see is that, gee, I'm not stressed all the time, or I'm not in pain all the time. So you immediately feel a little better. Second, by asking why, why does it hurt now and it didn't before, you're going on a mindful search. I didn't mention it explicitly, but several experiments that we've done showed just by becoming more mindful, you live longer. So it's very potent, even if you stop there. Then finally, if you look for a solution, you're much more likely to find it, and you're engaged. Engagement itself is the essence of being mindful. You're taking care of yourself, so you feel good about it. We've done this now with people who have Parkinson's, stroke, multiple sclerosis, arthritis, chronic pain, depression, and just imagine stress. Paula, let's say you feel you're stressed all the time. No one is stressed all the time. It's just that when you're not stressed, you're not thinking about being stressed. [00:13:44] PF: Oh, that's a great point. [00:13:44] EL: Then you get stressed again. So point A, you're thinking about it. Point C, you're thinking about it, and you assume it's all the time. You do this thing. How do you feel right now? Are you better or worse than before and why? After you do this, you discover I'm maximally stressed when I'm talking to Ellen Langer. Well, if that's the case, the solution is easy. Don't talk to me or talk to me differently. Talk to me in the way you talk to people when you're not stressed. This is just part of the control we have over ourselves. That placebos may be our strongest medicine. As everybody knows, the placebo is a sugar pill, or it's something inert. You take this thing that's nothing, and you get better. Okay. So clearly, you're making yourself better. All of my work is designed to find out how to do that more directly where we don't need to go to a doctor. People would be surprised. I don't know if I should reveal this or not, but much of the medication that we're prescribed are, in fact, placebos. So you go to a doctor. You get a placebo. You take this placebo, and now you get better. One of the things that people don't realize, and there's no reason why people who aren't scientists necessarily should, is that experiments, the medical experiments, all experiments only give us probabilities. All right, now those probabilities say that if we were to do the exact same study again, and we can never do the exact same study, but let's say we could, we're likely to get the same findings. Those are translated as absolutes. You have cancer. Horses don't eat meat. One and one is two, so on and so forth. So the first thing we have to do when we're given a diagnosis is to say, “Well, okay. Maybe, maybe not.” Even if so, it doesn't mean it has to follow any particular course. Because once we assume that we have this disease, and this disease follows plan A, B, and C, then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. I believe that way back when, when people were told cancer is a killer, that many of the deaths that occurred were not a function of the cancer but a function of giving up because of the belief that the cancer is a killer. [00:16:11] PF: You showed – you gave a wonderful illustration. It's early in your book, talking about being diagnosed as pre-diabetes and showing like that borderline, that 5.5 difference to 5.6. [00:16:24] EL: I'm glad you mentioned that. Yes. Okay. You want to tell everybody, but I want to tell everybody. [00:16:28] PF: No. I want you to tell it because I'm going to mess it up. [00:16:30] EL: Okay. I don't think so. But as I said, I'm on a roll. All right. So this – what I call the borderline effect, if people just imagine. So let's say, Paula, you and I take an IQ test, and you get a 70. That means you're normal. I get a 69. That means I'm cognitively deficient. What we used to call retarded. All right. Now, nobody in their right mind, even if nothing about statistics, would think there's a meaningful difference between 69 and 70, right? I could have sneezed, misread the question, so on and so forth. All right. However, once we're in those two different categories, our lives unfold in very different ways. Everybody knows we treat you differently from poor me who is cognitively deprived. All right. Well, it's the same for every diagnosis. There are some people who fall right above the line saying you're healthy, those who fall right below it, which means you have the disease. Now, if those two groups are not different at the start and go forward a month, three months, six months, and they're different, well, what's causing that difference? They’re the same, and now they're different. It's their psychology. All of that, again, speaks to the control we have over our health. [00:17:52] PF: If we have so much control over our health, how do we think better? Because as you point out in your book, every thought we have affects our health. [00:18:02] EL: Yes. That's the mind-body unity. It's one thing. [00:18:05] PF: So how do we think better. [00:18:07] EL: Yes. Okay. [00:18:07] PF: How do we start practicing that. [00:18:09] EL: Well, you don't have to practice it. All you need to do is recognize that the things you're taking as real can be understood differently from different perspectives. The more mindful you are, the more choices you have. So if you just recognize that things themselves, as I said before, are neither good nor bad, whether or not we experience things are good or bad depends on our perspective. The more mindful, the more choices we have again. Now, if you think of anything that you think is bad and just sort of think of your friends and all the people you know and have known, is everybody responding to it the same way? Well, if not, then what are they doing differently? That it's not the thing. Events don't cause stress and unhappiness. Our views of events cause stress and unhappiness. Let me tell you about something that had happened to me many years ago. I was at a friend's house for dinner. It was late, and I came back to my house, and my house had been burned to the ground. So the next day, I called the insurance agent. He comes out and he said in the 25 years he's been doing this work, this was the very first time that the call wasn't as bad as the damage. Everybody, “Oh, my God. Oh, my God.” You see it, and it's not so bad. Here was the reverse because I had already lost all of that. Getting myself crazy, throwing my sanity away also I wasn't going to help. There's so much to say about this, but let me jump to the end. This was around Christmas. So I was staying in a hotel. I went out Christmas Eve, and I got back to the hotel, and my room was full of gifts. Not from the people who own the hotel, not from the management, but from the so-called little people, the chambermaids, the waiters, the waitresses, the people who park my car. It’s only recently that I'm able to tell the story without it bringing tears to my eyes. Now, I'm not saying everybody should hope that they experience a major fire. But I must say that I remember virtually nothing that I lost in the fire. Every Christmas, I think about this, and it renews my faith in people. So was it good or bad? [00:20:23] PF: That's just incredible. The perception and the perspective makes such a big difference. I think that was so amazing throughout this book the way that's emphasized over and over. There are so many stories. First of all, you're such a wonderful storyteller. [00:20:37] EL: Thank you. [00:20:37] PF: And you have so many excellent stories and examples of how our mind can really change our outcomes. I do want to ask you one thing I hear a lot of probably because of recent birthdays. I hear so much my people around me talking about how I'm too old to do this. I can't do something like this because I'm old. To put that in perspective, my partner who is older than I am is participating in a CrossFit tournament tomorrow. So don't tell me – [00:21:04] EL: Yes, yes. No, I think it's terrible. The other day – [00:21:06] PF: How does that affect our aging process if you’re – [00:21:08] EL: Well, of course. [00:21:09] PF: Constantly saying that. [00:21:11] EL: Okay. So if we associate old with becoming decrepit, losing your memory, falling apart, as soon as you see yourself old, you're going to attend to the ways you're falling apart and so on. Some of it doesn't have to be a mystery. If you're 20 years old and you hurt your wrist, you do things to make your wrist better. If you're 70 years old and you hurt your wrist, too often people say, “Well, what do you expect? I'm 70 years old. I'm starting to fall apart.” So then it becomes you don't do anything, and so it does get worse. Yes. Now, I think – well, I may be strange in this regard. I don't know. The other day, I was helping a woman with something, an old woman I thought. My spouse told me, “She's probably 10 years younger than you are.” So I've never let age influence what I do. Now, there are changes as you get older. But I see the changes. Most of them is glorious. Not to worry about some of the silly things we used to worry about when we were younger. [00:22:11] PF: I absolutely love that, and one thing that you talk about, it's an assertion that we think we are doing the best we can, that we're doing great. But you say that we aren't, that we're not even close to doing the best we can. Talk about what you mean with that. [00:22:25] EL: Well, I don't want people feeling good that they're doing well to feel bad. All I'm suggesting is whatever is, there can be more and that we need to not limit ourselves with the notion of limits. This may be a little far afield again. But years ago, I was on the Committee on Aging at the Harvard Medical School. My friend, Jack Rowe, who was the chair, I called him and I said, “Jack, how long does it take for a broken finger to heal?” He said, “I don't know, a week.” I said, “What would you say if I said I could heal it in five days?” He said, “All right.” I said, “What about four days?” He said, “All right.” I said, “What about three days?” He said, “No.” I said, “Okay. What about three days and 23 hours?” Where is the point where here we can do it and here we can’t do it? So for anything that we want to do, there's a step that's small enough between where we are and where we want to get to that we can take it. If that doesn't work, make it a little smaller. Somebody is trying. So Zeno was a Greek philosopher, and Zeno’s paradox with respect to distance was if you always go half the distance from where you are to where you want to get, you're never going to be there. I'm an inch away. I'm a half an inch away. I'm a quarter of an inch. Zeno was [inaudible 00:23:47]. Langer's reverse Zeno is that there's always a step small enough from where you are to where you want to get. So you want to not eat the box of cookies you eat. Okay. Eat half the box. You can't eat half the box. Eat a quarter of the – everybody can eat it crumbless, and that's a new starting point. Then we're able to achieve all sorts of things that we were oblivious to before. I mean, there's so much that we have wrong, even notions of fatigue. We have lots of research that [inaudible 00:24:20] the book on this, but let me give you the overall, so it's easy to understand. If I say to people, “Do 100 jumping jacks and tell me when you get tired,” most people are going to get tired around 67. If I ask you to do 200 jumping jacks, most people get tired around 140. [00:24:40] PF: Amazing. [00:24:41] EL: So that's why I'm saying that what we build into everything we do is a mistaken notion of limits. You can never, there is no experiment, no science that can prove that we can't. All we can prove with science is that what we tried on our personal science, so to speak, what we've tried didn't work. Trying new things is fun. People think they want to be perfect at things. You can either be imperfectly mindful or perfectly mindless. Once you've got it, you don't pay attention to it anymore. You want to win. Play Tic-Tac-Toe against a four-year-old. You can always win. People who play golf think they want to get a hole in one in each shot. Well, if you do that, now there's no game. [00:25:27] PF: Yes. They lose their being special. [00:25:29 EL: Exactly, right. So trying new things with your health, with your performance is actually energy-beginning. Mindfulness we found and very clearly makes us more energized, happier. When you're mindful, people see you as more charismatic. They see you as more authentic. Relationships improve. Being mindful in this act of noticing way even leaves its imprint on the things that we do, so it feels good. It's good for you. Everybody responds. Why not? Because it's fun. It's what you're doing when you're having fun. So if you came to my house, Paula, you've never been here. You don't have to practice being mindful. You assume, “Gee, it's all going to be new,” so you take it all in. What I'm trying to explain to people is that everything is new. We just make it old by holding our mindsets about it still. The underlying phenomenon is always changing, always potentially exciting. [00:26:34] PF: Our job is then to notice it and curate our thoughts, as we walk through that experience. [00:26:41] EL: Enjoy our thoughts. Yes. [00:26:42] PF: Yes. I love that. So we are going to tell our listeners how they can find you, where they can find your books. But what do they do right now, as they're listening to this and they're saying, “Yes, I want to create chronic health in my life, and I want to notice more.” What are a couple of things that you would tell them to start doing right now? [00:27:00] EL: Okay. Well, the first thing is to make a universal attribution for uncertainty. I don't know. You don't. Nobody knows. We can't know because everything is always changing. Everything looks different from a different perspective. So you don't need to pretend, and not knowing is a good thing. It makes us curious. It makes us involved in what we're doing. Every time you hear yourself, call yourself something negative, or see somebody else in some pejorative way, recognize that there's an alternative that's equally potent to that that's positive, that's going to make you feel better and also improve your relationship. I think that just by realizing that this act of noticing is good, that no matter what we know, there's always a new way to know it. I think people will begin all of this. Now, we've all been trapped in being mindless. I asked you how much is one and one. You said two without thinking. But at the least, what people can do is when they're unhappy about something is to remind themselves of all that we're saying now. How else might they look at the situation? How might that thing actually have more than a silver lining, if silver lining sounds like it's just on the bottom. It's not so important. I'm saying the whole thing is actually an advantage. Then, of course, I must say that when you forget everything that I've said, you go back to the book, and you look at it again and reread it. [00:28:35] PF: I love that. I love that. You have so much to teach us. This information is truly life-changing, and I'm so happy that it was shared with me and that we were able to talk about it. I appreciate all the research and the information that you're bringing into this world because you really are changing the way that we look at our bodies and the way that we move through this world. [00:28:57] EL: Thank you very much, Paula. [END OF INTERVIEW] [00:29:03] PF: That was Dr. Ellen J. Langer, talking about the mind-body connection and how it affects our health. If you'd like to learn more about Ellen and her new book, The Mindful Body: Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health,” learn about her other books, or follow her 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]

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]

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

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

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

Follow along with the transcript below for episode: Writing for Well-being with Beth Kempton [INTRODUCTION]   [00:00:02] PP: Thank you for joining us for episode 425 of Live Happy Now. What would you say if I told you that picking up a pen could change your life? I'm your host, Paula Felps. And this week, I'm talking with Beth Kempton about how writing can help you connect with your feelings, your creativity and ignite your dreams. As the author of many books, including her latest, The Way of The Fearless Writer, Beth knows firsthand how writing can help boost our well-being. More than 30,000 people have taken her online writing courses. And today, she's here to talk about why becoming a writer is more about what it does for your soul and becoming a bestseller. Let's have a listen. [INTERVIEW] [00:00:42] PP: Beth, thank you so much for joining me on Live Happy Now. [00:00:47] BK: Oh, it's my pleasure what a treat to get to talk to you about writing and call it work. [00:00:52] PP: I know. I'm so excited to have this conversation because, you know, writing has been part of my life since I was a child. And I think it's an amazing way to connect with ourselves, connect with others. And to begin with, I wanted to find out about your writing journey. Tell me how writing started for you. [00:01:09] BK: I don't remember not writing. I mean, I was surrounded by books since – well, for as long as I can remember. They were a part of decoration in my house as a child. Books everywhere. And even when we didn't have much money, my mum would always prioritize buying books, going to the library. And interestingly, we would be rewarded with books. And I remember she had this bin bag. Here in the UK, we have black bin bags. Well, these days it's just landfill. But back in the days of no recycling, we used to have these big, heavy, black bin bags that she would fill with books. And if it was a rainy day, we'd get to go in the cupboard under the stairs and pick one out. Like a lucky dip. So it always just been such a wonderful part of my life. I didn't get to writing books until much, much later. But I have always written. I mean, I have over a hundred journals in cardboard boxes in my attic. And not always writing the same thing. Not always – only journaling. Not always writing stories. Not always writing lists. Just literally, it's just a mishmash in every journal. And it's very interesting to look back through certain periods of my life and see how what I wrote changed. How I wrote changed? And even the style of writing changes. Like if I'm very excited, and traveling and good stuff going on, I tend to write like really loopy and big. And then some of my journals are like really, really tiny neat writing. As if everything is – I'm very constricted. It's very interesting to look at that. And I wasn't aware of it at the time. But when I came to write about writing, I started to think about all these things and realized how I've really traced a path through my whole life with words. [00:02:55] PP: And that's interesting that you saved all that. Because that's important. I know, as a child, I would write a lot of stories. And when I read them now, I'm like, "Oh, did no one call CPS?" Because I was working out a lot of family stuff in my stories. And my mom ended up saving them. And I read them now and I'm like, "Oh, my gosh. I was a little kid trying to process trauma." And I was doing that through telling these stories. [00:03:22] BK: That's incredible though, that you did that and put it on the page. [00:03:27] PP: No. That was just such a way – even back then, without me realizing, it was such a way for me to speak my truth and be able to tell a story even though I was telling it as fiction as somebody – it was happening to somebody else. And it was happening in other times. You know, like medieval times, or Hobbit times, or whatever. [00:03:44] BK: Yeah. [00:03:46] PP: But, yeah. For myself, that's where it began. Like I started using storytelling to work through some of that stuff that I couldn't process as a kid. And so, I think it's so wonderful that you were able to save all that and look back really on your life through the eyes of your younger self writing that story. [00:04:05] BK: Yeah. I mean, one of my favorites is a five-year diary from when I was a teenager. Um, it's one of those where it's got the same day every year for five years on a single page. So you can see how I'm maturing in the way I write. And also, the things I notice and care about and write, it's fascinating. I wish I'd kept that up all my life. [00:04:25] PP: Oh, yeah. Oh, man. That's a great one for our listeners to jump on to. That'd be a great practice to start where, one day, you pick the same day every year and you write about where you're at. That's fantastic. [00:04:37] BK: Yes. And I think what's wonderful about that is that when you get back to the first page, January the 1st, or whenever you started, you realize how far you've come. And I think sometimes when things are really difficult, it feels like we're treading water or we're kind of going through mud and nothing's changing. But something is always changing. And it's not always a good idea to go back and read everything. Sometimes I think just getting onto the page and getting it out is the best place for it to be. But for little snippets like that, it can be really good to remember, "Oh, yeah. I was experiencing that. And I don't feel like that anymore. And I've come far." Whatever. It can really help you notice those changes however small or big. [00:05:19] PP: And what I love about that too is you can look at it. If you're going through a difficult time one year, you can look back and say, "Okay. But three years ago, look how good things were." And you can see, like it can get back to that again. You start recognizing how cyclical everything in life is. And you're going to have years that are amazing. And you're going to have yours that you barely survive. But you can kind of track that. [00:05:45] BK: And see that the difficult periods end as well. Everything ends at some point, which can be hard to see when you're in it. But it's a beautiful way to capture that, for sure. [00:05:55] PP: That's a terrific tool. I love that. At what point did you realize what writing could do? That it was more than just something you were driven to do. But you really realized it was a need? [00:06:08] BK: Well, I think I wrote my way out of my corporate career just in terms of what I wrote in my notebook. And I was just talking to my husband about this the other day actually. Because we're soon on our way to Japan for the summer. And we're taking our children now. And they've never been. But we got engaged there 12 years ago. And he took a sabbatical from work for six months. And he took a notebook, a brand new notebook with him, and he went to Japanese school in the morning. And every afternoon, he would cycle down the river and sit by the river and write in his notebook. And he'd never done that before. It was like a whole new thinking. And he wasn't really aware of what he'd written. And then he said – he was looking on the plane home and realized he'd written, "I must quit my job," about 15 times in his notebook. And he hadn't even realized he'd written it. And so, he came back and quit his job and joined my company. And we've been working together ever since. But I think that often happens. It's what you write over and over again without realizing it. It's like you're trying to send yourself a really important message. I've done that as well. But in terms of understanding how it can help us through difficult times in – I mean, in my work, my company is called Do What You Love. And I help people to navigate difficult times in their life or change career and find ways to do what they love. And most of my teaching is online. And I've always had a lot of very interactive exercises, which I think in the beginning I didn't realize how much they would generate words. I would just ask people questions. And I think it's strange to – especially being British, to name my own superpower. But if I have one, it's probably asking questions. Just asking people exactly the question that they need to hear to find their own answer. And so, that's what a lot of my courses have done. And what I was finding was that people were just writing and writing and writing and finding that that in itself was helping them. Never mind the answers that they were discovering in the writing. I felt that more than a decade ago. And as we've gone on and I've started teaching actual writing classes. Not very conventionally. There's never any feedback in my writing classes. And they're very warm, comforting places. There's absolutely no critique or anything like that. It's absolutely just about learning to trust yourself and getting your words on the page. But it's amazing to see how people open up. And when they start their writing habit, you come – I do a lot of seasonal writing courses. And so, they come back the following years. This is what we were talking about with the diary. And they've kept their writing habit up all year round and they come back again. Say, they were in the winter one. They come back the next winter. And you can see how they've worked through so much in their life. But also, how their writing has developed. Because they're allowing themselves to just write whatever wants to be written rather than trying to call something on the page. And I've found it in my own life. But more than ever this year. Because I lost my mum a few months ago. And it's just been such a difficult time. I was very close to her. And it's interesting because I had a very strong 5am writing habit before she became ill. I'd done it all the way through writing The Way of the Fearless Writer. And it's really how I get books written as somebody – a mother of two small children. I have to be up early in the morning. But that whole routine went out of the window when she was diagnosed with cancer. And I spent the last weeks of her life by her side the whole time. There was no routine, whatsoever. But I kept writing in all sorts of ways. I had a journal. I'd write a lot on my phone. I would speak into my phone as well. And I recently put this all together. And there are thousands of words. And where my brain has kind of went to mush and I couldn't really remember the details of what had happened. And I'd find myself going towards biases of certain things. Things were really difficult. Things were really beautiful. Things were really challenging. Depending on my mood, that's how I was reflecting. I looked at my notes and it gave me a much clearer picture of the whole thing. And I'd captured entire conversations with my mother. And I'd captured my own experience of going through something that I never experienced before. And now I'm still in the very early stages of grief. But without question, writing words myself and reading, poetry especially, it's been incredibly feeling. [00:10:51] PP: Yeah. What a gift you gave yourself to – because when you're in the middle of that journey. And as you said, it's a blur. You're going through it. You're on autopilot a lot of times. There's so many big emotions involved. And to be able to sit down afterwards and see what you were feeling and what you were going through. And you find – you discover good times that wouldn't have stuck out to you had you not written it down. I think that's such wonderful advice. And like I said, it's such an incredible gift that you give yourself, give your future self, to be able to document challenging times and see how you made it through. [00:11:26] BK: And I think that's exactly the right word, to document. And I wasn't differentiating between what's a beautiful thought, or a poetic thought or something, "Oh, I must capture this." Because I just had an idea about the meaning of life or whatever. I was capturing everything. There's medical notes. How much she drunk, you know? Or pain relief she'd been given followed by a line that might be in a poem. Followed by what the weather's like. A conversation I'd had with one of my brothers. You know, it's a real mishmash. But it's so interesting to have it all as a picture. And actually, I'm working on another book now. And a whole chapter is based on those notes. I didn't write them to become part of a book. But as it so often happens, when we're completely honest with our words, something really important bubbles up out of it. And you can sense a kind of truth that maybe doesn't sit in the individual words. But when you look back at the whole thing, you can kind of see into the heart of it. And that's certainly been my experience these past few months. [00:12:31] PP: Yeah. And I want to talk about the fact that, so oftentimes, people say, "Well, I want to be a writer." And they feel like if they're not going to write a book or if they can't get a book published, there's really no reason to write. And I come from a very different place on that. I have had some books published. but I've also written manuscripts that were entirely for the journey of writing it. It was telling the story. And it didn't really matter if that story ever got out. It was my need to tell that story. Can you talk about the importance of people considering writing even if it's never going to be published? Even if only one other person reads it. Or if nobody reads it. What is the value of discovering that writing journey? [00:13:15] BK: It's such an important thing to ask ourselves. And I'll be completely honest and say, when I got my first piece of paid writing published, it was in a travel magazine. I was still quite young in my early 20s. But I think I thought, "Oh, my goodness. I'm a writer now. I've had this validation from an editor who thinks it's good enough to pay me. And they paid me enough money to buy a visa to go to China. Oh, my goodness. This is like the real deal." But, obviously, in the year since I'd come to realize that writing has nothing to do with money. For me, writing – there's many reasons to write books. But the financial side of things purely buys me time to do more writing. That's really what it's all about. And I think our society has a lot to answer for in terms of why we feel that way. And, I mean, I've had thousands of people through my courses. And the same things come up again and again. And we trust other people's opinions. And we value other people's opinions more than our own. Why is that? It's crazy. When you start writing from that point of view, you expect what you write to begin with to be – has to be really good. Otherwise, I'm going to get – someone's going to say my writing's rubbish. And then my confidence is going to be crushed. And then – well, probably. But nobody said you have to share your writing with someone as soon as you put a sentence on the page. I mean, if you go back through my journals and my notes, even notes from my MacBook manuscripts, until very far down the line, they're a little rubbish to someone else reading them. And I put a lot of effort into polishing my sentences towards the end. But I'm interested in what comes from my heart and spills onto the page. And some people call that flow. What is really important to remember is that flowing the writing doesn't mean flow in the reading. [00:15:19] PP: Ah. That's true. Yeah. That's a good point. [00:15:21] BK: It really doesn't. There's work to do to make it flow when you read it. But the flow in the writing is I feel like it's connecting to something very, very deep and important in the human experience. It's very bizarre when you get to a point that you can spill words in a way that you almost can't remember what you've written until you look back and read them. And so often, what you read back just feels like something you knew but you don't know how you knew it. And when you get to the point that you can do that, which simply comes from practice, from ritual, from seeing writing as a sacred thing that you do in your life. You might light a candle before you write. You might just find other ways to close kind of – I like to think about going to another room not necessarily physically. But a different space away from the rest of my life to write and come back again. If you give yourself the grace to do that, whether that's for five minutes, or five hours, or five days, you're sending yourself a really important message about the fact that getting to know who you are, and what matters to you, what words live inside you, is important to you. Because, for sure, it's important. That is what is going to guide you authentically through your life and help you stop being swayed by what everyone else thinks and help you make better decisions as much as anything. I mean, I think it's a real life tool. And then there's the creativity aspect of it. Just the beauty in some words landing on a page and feeling like a poem. That's just gorgeous. That's as beautiful as any flower you'll find in your garden. [00:17:14] PP: That is so true. Because as you're speaking, it occurs to me like I do. I feel like my smarter self shows up to write. And then I come back through and read it and go, "Oh, okay. That's a great thought." And that's what you're talking about without flow. Like we have an innate wisdom. We have things that our head is too busy to hear. And when you really release on a page and you let yourself write at that level, then things come out that, like I said, you're just too busy to hear. [00:17:43] BK: Yeah. And I think there's a lot of things that we struggle to articulate in words out loud to another human being if things are difficult. If we're trying to make a decision, or we're not happy with something in our life, or there's a relationship difficulty, or we're struggling because of grief or whatever it is that is difficult for us. I find, if I'm in my head, which is where I am often when I'm talking, although I'm learning to talk from somewhere else, I struggle with the words I want to say. And because, often, somebody – in conversation, just the way we often talk to each other, they then come back and then I have to respond to them. And blah-blah-blah. And I don't really get to what I want to say. But when it's just you and the page, the page doesn't say anything back to you. It just accepts whatever you put on to it. And I think, that way, you can work through a lot of your suffering or also your joy and capture it in a way that might get cut off in a conversation. Whether that's because of the other person or just because of your own brain going, "You haven't said that very well. Stop talking." [00:19:00] PP: Well, and I think it's important to point out. Like, to mothers, that might be the only conversation you have where nobody talks back to you that whole day. [00:19:09] BK: Absolutely. And any kind of life situation that feels lonely, I think words are amazing. And any life situation that feels overwhelming, because you've got too many people around all the time, it's also respite from that. It's just the easiest, cheapest, most wonderful tool I think that we have to use in so many ways. I think one thing that does happen though is people say I'm not a writer yet. I have to become a writer first. And to me, writing is literally just writing words on a page. It's taking what's in your head and heart and spilling it and just capturing your experience of being a human. Nobody before or since will have the exact experience as you. So don't be selfish. Share that with everybody. [inaudible 00:19:58]. [00:19:58] PP: Exactly. Yeah. Even if you feel like you don't need to share it with anyone, it changes you. And so, can we talk about that? How you've seen people change when they connect with themselves? Connect with their writing? What does that do for them? [00:20:13] BK: I think it changes the way that people see the world, and respond to the world and see their place in the world. I'm speaking very much from experience. But also, from what it's reported back to me from students. I think if you have been able to draw out the words that have been stuffed down, there's a liberation in that. Just as some people use breathwork for trauma release, for example, writing can be just as powerful as that. You're physically letting something out of your body. So you're not carrying it anymore. And people say that they're walking through the world much more lightly. And they're noticing things that they were totally closed off to before. They find themselves having conversations with new people because, suddenly, they realize that everybody is inspiration as well as everything else. And also, I think it can help you relate to other people better. Because you realize that just as there's things behind the mask for you, things below the surface, you start to notice that in other people too, which can lead to really amazing connection. [00:21:26] PP: Yeah. Throughout your book, you have some wonderful lessons. And I think it's important to note that it's not just about – it is about writing. But this is not a semantics of writing book. And one of my favorite chapters is the one on releasing. And I thought that was so amazing because you give us exercises. You give us ways to really go deep and release things through our writing. I thought that was really incredible. One of the statements that you have in there, and you have great little sayings in the margins, but you said, "Words heal. Apply liberally." [00:22:01] BK: Yeah. [00:22:02] PP: And tell me where that came from. Because I absolutely loved it. I'm like I need to make a sticker of that and put it on my wall. [00:22:10] BK: Oh, I love that idea. But like I always say to people, you are right that the world needs your medicine. But before you can start administering that medicine to anyone else, you have to administer it to yourself. And really, words are so healing. Of course, they can also be damaging if they're used in the wrong way. But in the sense that I'm talking about, which is just getting words out onto the page. And also, filling your life with words. Reading beautiful words from other people. Just the more you do it, the better you get. Like if you need medicine and you take it in the doses that you're supposed to take it in, you'll probably get better. It is just the same thing. [00:22:56] PP: But what I really want to know from you is tell us what it means to be a fearless writer. Because your book is called The Way of the Fearless Writer. And explain to us what a fearless writer is. [00:23:09] BK: For me, a fearless writer is just somebody who allows themselves without editing, or criticism, or any kind of barrier to spill what is in their heart and their head onto the page. That's where it all begins. That's how books get written. That's how hearts get healed. That's how things get figured out. It really is just that. The fearless part of it I think – well, I did a survey not long ago with more than a thousand writers in my community. And a hundred percent of them said that self-doubt got in the way of them writing what they want to write. I mean, I've never done a survey where 100% of people have said the same thing. And it was incredible. That's actually partly why I wanted to write the book. Because it's such a – we love to talk about the fear of writing as well. We love to talk about writer's block. We'd love to talk about how hard it is and all of this. And I really wanted to write a book which gave people tools that they could give themselves permission to not be afraid to write. Because sometimes that's all it is. [00:24:19] PP: That is the perfect way to wrap this up. Because you've given us a lot to think about. And your book has so many wonderful exercises. So many tips. We're going to tell our listeners how they can find it. We're going to let them download a free chapter of it. And I really appreciate you sitting down with us today and talking about this. [00:24:37] BK: Oh, it's such a joy. I'm so grateful for everything that writing has brought to my life. Just in the pages of my notebook at five o'clock in the morning with a candle and the early sunrise. And also, the doors that writing books have opened to new people and new opportunities. Things I never could have dreamed of. And it all begins with just writing words on a page, which anyone can do, right? [00:25:00] PP: That's great. Beth, thank you so much. [00:25:04] BK: Thank you so much. What a joy. [OUTRO] [00:25:10] PP: That was author, Beth Kempton, talking about how writing can help you connect with your feelings and your dreams. If you'd like to learn more about Beth and her books or her online writing courses, follow her on social media or download a free chapter of her latest book, The Way of the Fearless Writer, 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. And until then, this is Paula Felps reminding you to make every day a happy one. [END]

Follow along with the transcript below for episode: Living With Intention With Dr. Greg Hammer [INTRODUCTION] [00:00:02] PF: Thank you for joining us for Episode 423 of Live Happy Now. By now we're all aware that the mind and body are connected. But how do we use that knowledge to create our best life? I'm your host, Paula Felps, and this week, I'm talking with Dr. Greg Hammer, a professor at Stanford University School of Medicine, physician, and a mindfulness expert, who developed the four-step gain method of mindfulness. As he explains in his book, Gain Without Pain, this is an acronym for gratitude, acceptance, intention, and non-judgment. He teaches this method to reduce stress and increase wellbeing. Today, he's going to talk about how you can create a more intentional and happier life. Let's welcome Dr. Greg Hammer. [INTERVIEW] [00:00:50] PF: I'm so excited to talk to you. You have a lot to tell us about the power of intention. But before we get to that, I want you to tell our listeners a little bit about yourself, because you've been so instrumental in showing us how our mental state affects our physical wellbeing. Explain to us how you became so attuned with that and why it's so important to you? [00:01:12] GH: I have been a lifelong fitness enthusiast in every sense of the word, mental, spiritual, physical. About 10 years ago, I joined a directive at Stanford called Well MD, that was convened in order to address the growing prevalence of burnout among physicians, which has only probably gotten worse since then. But in any case, I joined Well MD, and then I was asked to give a talk on burnout and wellness at a national meeting, and then another talk, another other talk, and then I had some sabbatical time, and I decided to write the book. The first book that I wrote. In the meantime, I've been – went to medical school because of my interest in in the human body and the miracle of how all the parts are interrelated, I found that I really had an affinity for people that work with children. They don't seem to take themselves quite as seriously as some of the people in adult medicine and that comported with my personality. So, I did a residency in pediatrics and loved Intensive Care Medicine. So, I did a residency in anesthesiology, and then fellowships in pediatric anesthesia and critical care. I've been working in both arenas, the pediatric intensive care unit and cardiac anesthesia for over 30 years. I have a research lab at Stanford where we study developmental pharmacology from babies up to adults. Again, my interest in in wellness has further intensified, I would say. I've been a student rather of Advaita, or non-duality for 12 years or so. That has certainly influenced my ways of thinking. So, everything I talk about with you, probably for the rest of this session is going to have something to do with all of that. [00:03:05] PF: Are you seeing more of that in the medical community where they're not just treating the body, but they are looking at things like mindfulness. You're huge on mindfulness and you're a trailblazer in that way, because I know in my own life, just having a physician that sees things that way, has been a challenge. Do you see that changing? [00:03:24] GH: I do. I think that just like our medical system as a whole has really focused on disease more than preventing disease. That ship is kind of slow to turn, as we put more resources into preventive medicine now, which is absolutely requisite if we want to be a well society. Similarly, I think that physicians and others in medicine have focused on disease and finding, taking sort of a reductionist approach to health, I would say, trying to break things down into their component parts and figure out how to cure things. I think, that colors the profession as a whole, and what we need to do is really move much toward prevention in our own wellness, because unless we are, well, it's going to be difficult to take care of others. It's sort of the put your oxygen mask on first. Your own oxygen mask before you take care of the child or someone who's acting like a child sitting next to you on the aircraft. Yes, I think things are changing. But the culture is very well entrenched, and it is a big ship and slow to turn. But I do think things are changing in medicine for the better. [00:04:43] PF: That's good to hear. And you are so pivotal in this and you teach us so much about what it does to have the right mindset, and what I want to talk to you about today is intentional living. Let's start by making sure we're all on the same page. Tell us what you mean when you say intentional living. [00:05:03] GH: We can start by just acknowledging that our brains have become hardwired over tens of thousands of years of evolution, in ways that are no longer adaptive, or we might say they're maladaptive. For example, we all have a negativity bias. We tend to focus on the negative and forget about the positive. We get out of bed in the morning, and maybe we have an ache or a pain. Our back is stiff. So, we focus on that and we just initiate the day with a cascade of thoughts about woe is me, this and that, instead of focusing on the miracle of the human body, that we even woke up and could get out of bed at all, and all the good things about our physical state. So, we have a negativity bias. The other thing is, the way our brains have become wired is we're very distracted with the past and the future. So, we have a hard time being present, which is where happiness lives. It's adaptive to some extent to dwell in the past. We want to learn from our mistakes. We want to savor our good memories. But beyond that, we overthink the past and with our negativity bias, we end up with a lot of shame and regret, low self-esteem and depression. Likewise, we overthink the future, in ways that are maladaptive and we catastrophize with our negativity bias and think of the worst thing that could happen. We generate a lot of fear and anxiety. So, if we're not intentional, if we don't have a plan, then we're going to simply lapse into our default modes of thinking, and that is negative and other than present. If we want to be more positive, and really focus on all the miraculous things that are happening around us all the time, including inside us, and we want to be more present, and therefore happy. We need to have a plan. We need to be purposeful. That's really where intention is a requisite component of happiness. [00:07:03] PF: So, when you set an intention, what do you mean, how do you go about doing that? [00:07:10] GH: Sure. Well, I can just briefly tell you about the gain method, the gain meditation. So, we get up in the morning, we open the blinds, we do our morning hygiene. We find a comfortable place to sit. We close our eyes, hopefully in a quiet place, and we focus on our breath. We slow it down. So, our first intention, actually, with regard to this gain process begins the night before, because we acknowledge we're going to do this gain meditation in the morning. It may take as little as three minutes, we're going to set our alarm three minutes earlier than we otherwise would. So, who's going to miss that three minutes? Or we can go to bed three minutes earlier. Instead of getting up at seven o'clock, we're going to get up at 6:57. We're setting our intention for this whole process the night before. Then, we were sitting quietly, we focus on the breath, we slow down the inhalation, pause and take a nice slow exhalation without any effort. By slowing our breathing down, we activate our parasympathetic nervous system. We slow our heart rate, lower our blood pressure, our blood sugar, and then we begin contemplation of that for which we're grateful. We all have much for which should be grateful, so we spent 45 seconds or so just focusing on our friends, our family, our loved ones, our relative health, even if it's not perfect. It's miraculous that we're as healthy as we are, and all the other things for which we're grateful. Then, we transition to acceptance, we need to acknowledge that there is pain in life, and pain, and joy are kind of hand in hand. So, we may take something uncomfortable or painful, and actually, imagine bringing it into our bodies, opening our chest, opening our heart, bringing this experience into our heart, and nurturing it, enveloping it with our heart. We find that it's not so bad and we can live with it. Then, we transition to intention, which is where your question originated and we start by having the intention of noticing what's happening in this moment. So, we may just, for example, have the intention of noticing the pressure of the chair against our body, noticing the tingling on the soles of our feet, noticing the sounds that we're hearing as we breathe deeply and slowly. So, for me, I have a meditation room in my home on Stanford campus. I'm sort of halfway between San Francisco and San Jose airports. I often hear a plane going by in the distance – [00:09:40] PF: It becomes part of the meditation, right? [00:09:44] GH: It does. It's the part of the intention portion of the gain meditation because I'm setting my intention as you put it with what's happening right now. So, I'm just spending 10 or 15 seconds noticing my bodily sensations, noticing my perceptions, what I feel, what I hear, what I may smell, just the slight sweetness of the air, I'm breathing. So, we spend 10 or 15 seconds being present in this way, really noticing what's happening in this moment. Then, we go to our intention of generally looking at the positive side of things, rather than the negative. So, what we're doing is we're actually rewiring our brains, because as we focus on our gratitude, acceptance, intention, and then non-judgment in life, we're actually rewiring our brains toward a more positive and present way of thinking and experiencing, and therefore being more happy. [00:10:48] PF: How long does that rewiring take? Because I know that over time, it does completely start changing the way you look at the world when you get up. The ache and pain that you have, you see it differently. But how long does that take for us to start doing? When do we start seeing results? [00:11:06] GH: As in life, life is a journey. Really, there's no destination. So, I think we can notice a change in our thought processes very soon, like after days, or a couple of weeks. What happens is, when we, for example, do this gain, practice, we set our intention the night before. We sit, we breathe, we go through our gratitude, acceptance, intention, non-judgement. We return to the breath. We slowly open our eyes. We go out in the world. What happens is, even after a short period of time, in days, maybe a couple of weeks, we noticed that when we're being ungrateful, or resisting, or unintentional, lapsing into our negativity bias, or we're judging. What happens is a light bulb goes off. We just did our gain practice and we notice when we're being ungrateful, we're sort of whining and complaining. Then, we remind ourselves, “Oh, these are first world problems”, as my daughter would say. These are not deal breakers. These are really pretty much small stuff, things. That light bulb moment actually brings us a bit of a smile, and then we simply redirect our thoughts back to gratitude, acceptance, intention and non-judgment. We do our gain meditation. We go to work, maybe we drive to work, and there's a driver that is in the lane to the right of us, and he or she changes lanes into our lane, without using the turn signal ahead of us. We start to make all these judgments about the driver, and then a light bulb goes off, and we realize, I just did my gain meditation. I dropped the judgment. I realized that things don't have to be good or bad. So, I have some imagery associated with this. A light bulb goes off, and I smile, and I drop the judgment of that driver, and it actually feels good. I get a little dopamine hit. Instead of getting negative about it, and getting angry, I actually have a smile and a little positive reaction. That light bulb moment where we notice our thoughts and experiences, and we can redirect them. That happens actually just really after a short period of time. [00:13:24] PF: Yes, and I've noticed, when you start living that way, when you start thinking that way, you do offer people more grace, in situations that come up, some of the things that all have popped into my head unexpectedly and automatically, it's like, “Well, you know what, I've done the same thing.” I start seeing less judgment toward them and more like, “Okay, how many times have I done that?” That's just karma saying, “Hey, remember that time you cut someone off in traffic.” It does, it just starts changing the way you receive the experiences. [00:13:54] GH: Absolutely. So, just drill a little bit deeper into that judgment process, in the gain meditation, when we do our non-judgement contemplation, I often personally, I do this, and I recommend that others do it. Just picture an image of the Earth, one of these beautiful NASA images where the earth is apparently suspended in space. It's a beautiful planet. It's neither good nor bad. It's just a planet. So, we kind of pronounced to ourselves as we breathe slowly and deeply, and we picture this image of the earth. The earth is just a planet. It's neither good nor bad. It's just the planet that it is. Therefore, it's only rational for me to look at myself the same way. I'm just a human being. I'm neither good nor bad. I simply am the human being that I am. Then, we may repeat I am and link that with our breath. Then, we slowly open our eyes. Again, what happens is, when we find ourselves judging, like that driver, we just discussed, or ourselves, when we find that we're judging ourselves, since we're our own harshest critic, we may notice that what we're doing is judging, and we also notice the fact that we're judging ourselves with this negativity bias. So, we can have that light bulb moment and just drop the judgment and go back to, “I'm just the human being that I am, I'm neither good nor bad.” We learn that we don't have to cast a hue over the world and see things through this veil of negativity. We can look at things just exactly as they are, without judging them to be good or bad. They just are what they are. I think that's such an important change in our thought process. [00:15:43] PF: It's huge. I want to dig into that a little bit more, because as we've talked about, we do judge ourselves so harshly. Some people – I see people who just beat themselves up over and over. How do we – before we start judging ourselves, how do we start setting our brain up to not do that? How do we get very specific and break that judgment, self-judgment habit? [00:16:08] GH: I think, when you talk about intention, we need to have a plan, and that really translate into having a practice, right? We need to have a practice that preferably is daily, because our brains are very hard wired. Again, they became this way over tens of thousands of years, and we're not going to change them overnight. So, we have to have a baby step process, preferably a daily plan, where we begin to rewire our brains. That happens only through intention. If we're not purposeful, we just lapse into this negativity, and this very judgmental way of being. Again, when we have this practice, and we find that we're judging ourselves, we're down on ourselves, we're getting depressed, we can have that light bulb moment and recognize that this is just the way our brains work. This is not something unique to us that we think this way, in this negative way. This is the way we all think. I think that's the first lesson is that this isn't our dirty little secret. We're not the only one that has these thoughts. We all have these thoughts. I was listening to a wonderful show on NPR called The Hidden Brain, and the host had somebody on who's an expert in the imposter syndrome. The message was that we all feel this way. We all feel like imposters no matter how accomplished we are. This is again that negative voice speaking to us. So, we need to have a plan to change the way we think. When we're having these very negative thoughts about ourselves, I like the cognitive behavioral approach of we're criticizing ourselves for a particular thing or things. Imagine we're talking to a good friend, who's got the same voice, who's criticizing themselves for these things, something they did or said or didn't do, would we be judging them harshly? No, we would probably be reassuring them, and not judging them. Just reassuring them that they're just a human being. We're all mortal, we're all fallible, we're not perfect. Don't be so hard on yourself. So, use that same voice with yourself when you're getting into this very negative way of thinking and judging. [00:18:24] PF: Over time, it becomes easier to do that. You start recognizing it faster. You correct the behavior sooner, and you just don't go as deep into that judgment. Is that correct? [00:18:34] GH: Oh, absolutely. One of my heroes in life is Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn who's really been a leader in mindfulness. He defines mindfulness as awareness of the present moment, on purpose, non-judgmentally. So, there are some of the gain elements. On purpose, we talked about intention. You need to have that purposefulness to have a plan to rewire our brain, because we have this wonderful quality called neuroplasticity. But we have to have a plan. So, awareness of the present moment, which is where happiness lives, on purpose, with intention, non-judgmentally, and we touched on the importance of being nonjudgmental, especially toward ourselves. [00:19:24] PF: That gives us greater happiness. It gives us greater mental and emotional wellbeing. Talk about what it's doing for us physically. Because you've, you've been so great at bringing those two things together. [00:19:36] GH: Sure. Well, we're all feeling kind of burnt out. I think that COVID amplified the stress that we all experience, which is just part of life. Burnout is simply the mental and physical exhaustion that we experience related to chronic stress. Chronic stress is a condition where we have an increase in the adrenaline or epinephrine in our bodies, increases our heart rate, our blood pressure. We have an increase in cortisol, which is a hormone that also increases our blood pressure, increases our blood sugar, predisposes to diabetes and other adverse health conditions. Stress has a number of effect physical effects on our body. It actually shortens these little protective caps we have at the tips of our chromosomes, which I likened to the little plastic protective tips at the end of our shoelaces that keep the ends of our shoelaces from becoming frayed. As we age, we have a shortening of these telomeres and that's been associated with a degradation in the function of our cells, and the aging process. That is accelerated when we're stressed. So, chronic stress actually induces changes akin to aging. There are so many physiologic effects of stress on our bodies, just about on every organ, and tissue, and cell in our body. Really, stress, ages us. So, the question is, how do we change that? That's really what we're talking about with this gain method, with a practice of non-judgment, with a practice of mindfulness meditation. These are ways of increasing our personal resilience and decreasing the amount of stress that we experience. Lowering our heart rate, our blood pressure, our cortisol, our blood sugar, reversing this process of our telomere shortening, our cells degrading, our genetics, our epigenetics degrading. So, it's so important that we recognize that we have this chronic stress, and what the effects are, and that we really make priority number one in our lives actually addressing this. [00:21:58] PF: Yes, because I've seen people being a lot less healthy since the pandemic, and of all ages. We have some fairly young friends, they’re in their early 30s, who are talking about these health problems they've started having since the pandemic. Is that an effect of the stress? Or is it because we got so unhealthy sitting around during the pandemic? What has created this? Because I'm seeing it everywhere from, like I said, early 30s, up into their 60s and 70s. [00:22:29] GH: I would say all of the above. What happens is, the three legs that form the tripod supporting our physical wellbeing, which then supports our mental and spiritual wellbeing, our sleep, exercise, and nutrition. What are the effects of stress on our sleep, exercise, and nutrition? Well, briefly, stress causes a degradation in the quality and quantity of our sleep. So, when we're stressed, we don't sleep as well. Of course, we all have experienced this. We wake up early in the morning and our minds are racing with all kinds of lists of things we have to do and anxieties and stresses. So, stress degrades our sleep, makes us fatigued. When we're fatigued, we tend to be too tired to exercise. Our exercise regimen goes downhill and we saw this in COVID, where gyms were closed, and people spent a lot more time indoors, not only depriving themselves of the magic of nature, but also not exercising very much. They're fatigued. We're not exercising. Our diet actually degrades as well. We're tired, so we reach for these sugary and fatty, so-called comfort foods, to give us a boost of energy. Of course, then we crash, and these foods are not healthy. So, our sleep, exercise and nutrition are very interrelated. When we're stressed, they all are degraded. Of course, the sleep exercise and nutrition habits and practice that we have are so integral to our health overall, when we're not sleeping well, we're not exercising, we're not eating well. Of course, we're more predisposed to hypertension, diabetes. Again, the effects of stress are magnified when we're fatigued, not exercising, and not eating well. This is all like a self-propagating loop that is causing us to spiral in a downward direction. [00:24:28] PF: It's difficult to tell someone who's going through that, that doing some meditation, or setting intentions is going to actually turn that around. [00:24:39] GH: You might advise your listeners, well, if you're tired and feel out of shape, and you're depressed, focus on the basics of sleep, exercise, and nutrition. Just for example, address your sleep hygiene. There's several things, we all know what to do, but we don't do them, typically. But we really want to improve our sleep. So, instead of perhaps recommending something abstract, like setting intentions, you can say something specific, like, let's address our sleep. Focus on your sleep hygiene and start to sleep better. What you're really advising when you ask someone to really focus on their sleep and sleep hygiene, is you're asking them to set their intention, right? That is an intention. It's improving your health by improving your sleep. That's a very tangible, easy to understand concrete bit of advice that does involve intentions. [00:25:41] PF: Well, Greg, thank you so much for taking this time with me. You're so insightful. A lot we can learn from you. As I said, we're going to tell them how they can learn more about you and your books. I just appreciate you taking time with me today. [00:25:54] GH: Well, likewise, it's been really a pleasure having a conversation with you. [END OF INTERVIEW] [00:26:03] PF: That was Dr. Greg Hammer, talking about how to live with intention. If you'd like to learn more about Greg and his book, Gain Without Pain, or follow him on social media, just visit us at livehappy.com and click on the podcast tab. That is all we have time for today. We'll meet you back here again next week for an all new episode. Until then, this is Paula Felps, reminding you to make every day a happy one. [END]