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Follow along with the transcript below for episode: Happy Activists: Wilson County Kind Makes Kindness Cool [INTRODUCTION] [0:00:01] PF: Thank you for joining us for episode 474 of Live Happy Now. We know that kindness is crucial and sometimes these days it seems to be in short supply. But today, we're talking to a couple of happy activists who are creating kindness in a place you might not expect. I'm your host, Paula Felps, and this week I'm joined by Mayor Randall Hutto and Project Administrator Susan Shaw, who are the driving forces behind an initiative in Tennessee called Wilson County Kind. As the name implies, Wilson County Kind promotes kindness, starting with local government. Randall and Susan are here to share how this initiative started, why it's important for governments to embrace kindness, and what effect this has had on their community. Let's have a listen. [INTERVIEW] [0:00:49] PF: Mayor Hutto, welcome to Live Happy Now. [0:00:52] RH: Thank you for having me. [0:00:53] PF: This is a wonderful thing that we're going to talk about today. It's something, I love the fact that it comes from a government agency. I love the good that you're putting out in the world. So, before I ask you any more questions about it, why don't you tell us, tell our listeners what Wilson County Kind is all about. [0:01:09] RH: Well, thank you for having me on the show. For us, we get lots of conversations, and lots of traffic that comes through our office. Normally, it's an opportunity for us to help people. They have an issue, many people don't walk to the door saying, “Hey, you're doing a great job.” Again, it becomes an opportunity for us to really do a setback and take a chance on how can we help that person that comes in. Normally, we're able to do that. Sometimes we're not able to, but most of the time we are. But we realize that as we began to see people come in and how happy they were leaving, the focus though was always on what's not done right, what's missing, what's not there. It reminds me of a story that I heard about a professor given a test to his college class. He handed a piece of paper out. He told him to leave them all face down. Then he was going to give them a little bit of time to write on that project and write on the test. Then took it back up and began to read what they wrote. Anyway, the test was really a white sheet of paper with a black dot in the middle of it. When they all flipped it over, he said, “Now, write what you see.” Everybody spent time writing. They talked about the dot. It was black and it was in the middle of paper, but nobody focused on the white area that was outside it. That was the point that he was making there that a lot of times when we go through life, what we focus on determines our attitude, maybe how we live. So, that was the piece that we noticed here. Once we solved that problem, those people were happy that were mad when they walked in, and we realized that there were a lot of good going on in the county, but people were just focusing on the bad things. Many times, we saw that, for sure, on Facebook, where they talked maybe about the government. We were trying to figure out how can we get the message out here that this is not really what's happening and tell the story, but many times when we did that, it would just balloon into something that would get out of control, because they would start fussing about something else. We said, what can we do to bring positivity to the people in the county for them to realize all the good things. There are definitely some things we need to get better at, things we need to correct. That's where we started the initiative in Wilson County Kind, and we said, focus on something that's good. When you see a good act, post that on social media. Send a story to the paper on that. Let somebody else know that something good has happened. So, that got the story started. Then I had an episode with a young lady that I met at the Wilson County Fair. She came up to me and we normally made it to fair and ride some rides, but she came up and said, you know what? Her goal was, was that she wanted to do something nice for Wilson County, so she made some bracelets that said Wilson County Kind on it. She gave me a couple at the fair. I wore those for a while. Then I asked her a little bit more about this. I said, “Tell me what you're doing here.” She said, “Well, I'm going to sell these bracelets for whatever anybody wants to give me. Then once they give me the money, I'm going to do something good with that money. I'm not going to pocket it for myself. I'm not doing it for me. I'm doing it for other people.” So, as time went on, what she did with that money was they actually made up some packets. Actually, they've given me several packets so far of things to give out to the homeless people, homeless population. Inside that back during the wintertime, I had a couple of hot hand warmers in there, a gift card, maybe a couple of other things, a bracelet. So, I went out and I just saw somebody on the side of the street that I knew who was homeless. I would hand that out. So, that became hit, but that was just one example of things that happened as we started talking about Wilson County Kind. Susan Shaw have her with me here. She's really the overseer of all this. I'll let her talk in just a minute about that, but there's been many other things, but that was the initial goal was to say, focus on the positive things that are happening here and let's put that out in social media or tell people about any time you catch a kind act. There's more good out there than they are bad, but we don't focus on it, so let's get that out there. So, that's the origination of Wilson County Kind. [0:05:15] PF: Well, when you started thinking about this, like how did it go from you thinking this would be a great thing for us to do for the county to spread this good news to actually becoming a program, because that's a big stretch of highway between those two points? [0:05:31] RH: It definitely was a concept that we had to spend a lot of time on. I'm going to let Susan Shaw speak for just a second, because she really orchestrated all this and made all the mechanics fall together. I'm going to turn it over to her. Susan Shaw. [0:05:44] PF: Okay. [0:05:44] SS: Thank you for asking that. Really, it originated once the mayor, we talked about this and decided that this was something to focus on and emphasize. We decided to have a campaign launch and not just a press release or something to notify people, but a real campaign launch. There was a lot of focus put on that to have activities in that launch. So, we invited everybody that wanted to come to see this and hear about this. We introduced them to Lexi Potter, who does the Kindness Clays by Lexi. Her little bracelets. We had five stations set up that were activity stations that demonstrated kindness. One of our local artists, Kim Greg, she had some blank postcards made up and with images on there that people could color. She brought some coloring materials and people could come up to her table and color it in and write a encouraging message on the back of it. We partnered with our side, Senior Living here, and we've collected all these after they were done and we mailed them to residents at her side. We purposely did several activities that people could engage in and would demonstrate kindness and really get them motivated on it. The neat thing about this with kindness is that once you start putting a spotlight on it and a focus on it, people start to notice it more. Not only does it help the recipient of the kind act, but the person that did it feels better. Then the person that received it tells three other people, and then they might go out and do something or observe something or tell more people about it. It's kind of this leveraging effect that once you start it and it can really continue to spread. [0:07:22] PF: When did it actually launch? [0:07:24] SS: It was September of last year. People asked, “Well, when does it start and when does it end?” [0:07:29] PF: When are you going to stop being kind, Susan? [0:07:33] SS: That was the answer. You don't. We have a start date, but we don't need to have an end date and we, so we keep publicizing when we observe, or see, or people tell us about something that was a kind act, we continue to publicize that. On social media, we encourage people to use #WilsonCountyKind, because that way we can pull it up and we can see what happens. I wanted to tell you one other neat story, because you heard about Lexi and another young man, a sophomore at Mount Juliet High School that reached out when he saw the campaign launch and he said, “I want to do something and I want to help in this kindness campaign.” He had an idea that he noticed that with the athletics in the high school, that they would retire old equipment and sometime he didn't know what happened. It might be thrown out or something. He said, “I would like to collect that and where could it be given?” In the county, there's an initiative to try to start a boys and girls club. He said, “How about if I collect the equipment and if there's a place to store it, I'll collect it. I'll deliver it. Then it can be used for that purpose later.” So, he did that. [0:08:38] PF: That's amazing. I love it, because what this initiative is making people do is like what can I do? They're thinking about it. They're pausing for a moment and saying, “How can I be part of that?” That's really what it takes. Like you said, it causes this chain reaction. We'll be right back with the show, but right now I want to bring in Casey Johnson, Live Happy Marketing Manager and cat owner, who's here to tell us about her favorite new discovery called PrettyLitter. [MESSAGE] [0:09:03] CJ: I love PrettyLitter. It has changed my life truly, but three cats, I feel like I'm constantly trying to mask the smell. I feel like PrettyLitter does just that. It changes the color to help monitor early signs of things like kidney issues and urinary tract infections. Not so fun fact, a few years ago, one of my cats had to have emergency surgery. I truly feel that if I had PrettyLitter at the time, we could have detected the problem sooner and taken proper action. So, I cannot recommend PrettyLitter enough if you were a cat parent. [0:09:35] PF: All right. I know you're going to be telling us more about that in the weeks to come, but our listeners can go to prettylitter.com/livehappy and use the code LiveHappy to save 20% on their first order and get a free cat toy. That's prettylitter.com/livehappy, code LiveHappy to save 20% and get a free cat toy. Again, prettylitter.com/livehappy. code LiveHappy. Now, back to our show. [INTERVIEW CONTINUED] [0:10:01] PF: I wonder were there any challenges to implementing it? Did you hit any skepticism or people stonewalling against, because a lot of times when you try to do good, people say that's nice, but and then they tell you why it's not going to work. [0:10:14] SS: They Mayor may have a different answer, but I'll tell you what I encountered. It wasn't exactly stonewalling. It was more, well, what does this mean? Because it's very conceptual. It's not a super concrete, but we did give examples, but it was more, well, what does that mean? What is this really? What's the end game? I guess that might be the skepticism is – [0:10:34] PF: Yeah. [0:10:35] SS: Who’s going to produce? We couldn't exactly answer that at the beginning, because how can you say Lexi Potter is going to want to give back and give these care packets. Brady Patterson is going to want to collect sports equipment and give that to a boys or girls club. It's hard to know what people are going to do, but it was pleasantly surprising that so many people stepped up and had ideas. I want to tell you about one other one. We have an SRO. A School Resource Officer. This is something that Wilson County is really proud of, because we've had school resource officers in all of our schools for long before there was so much attention put on it and money put into it from the legislature. One of the school resource officers, they have a program to give out certificates for good deeds. So, they're participating in the Wilson County Kind that when they see a student that does something that is just kind to another person, reaching out a hand, helping somebody doing something, they get a certificate with their name on it and they present it to them. They take a picture. They posted on social media. So, they've been posting it with #WilsonCountyKind, but I didn't even know that they did that. So, that affected me too. It was nice to see that, and learn that. [0:11:55] PF: I love that. So, what are some of the other things that you've done? What are the actions that you've taken as part of Wilson County Kind? [0:12:04] SS: Talking about it is a big thing and that's really the putting a spotlight on it, like I said, you don't know what the end result is going to be, but we talk about it when we go to chamber meetings or meet the mayor. Inevitably, every time we talk about it, we learn about another kind action or deed or something that has happened. I talked about it at the Ambassador meeting of the Lebanon Wilson County Chamber. When I finished talking about it, the chair of that committee said, “Susan, that is so interesting.” He said, “If I think about it, as you're talking, I'm thinking about over the last week and what acts of kindness that I observe.” He said, “I hate to tell you, but I really can't tell you any.” He said, “But I can guarantee you that right now I am hyper alert and I will be looking for it. I am sure I'm going to observe this when I go out.” I thought, that's right there, that's part of the impact and what you see happen. [0:12:59] PF: What I love about that, one thing we talk about a lot at Live Happy Now is gratitude and how having a gratitude practice really changes the way that you look at the world, because if you're going to write down three things every day, you're grateful for, you're training your mind to look for things you're grateful for. That's exactly what you're doing by spreading this message. You're teaching people to start looking for acts of kindness. So, I love that. Now, instead of looking for the bad in the world, they're out there looking for the kindness around them. That's such a powerful gift to the community. [0:13:30] RH: I think it is. I don't think it's taken attraction yet enough to where it's where we want it. We've talked about it. We've got the two citizens that she just talked about, the SRO, but we know there's a lot out there. We've got to find a way to make it a everyday train of thought, not just once in a while or one or two people, because we know just like – network came out of this after the tornadoes where volunteers came together to help all across the county. There's many good things have come together to prove that Wilson County is a kind and generous place to live. There's a lot of that going on, but nobody's telling that story. We are just getting started in my opinion with Wilson County Kind, like I have a sign in my front yard, and I wonder how many people drive by and look at it and say, “I wonder what that means.” That's the goal. We're in the early stages in my mind of people that sinking in, kind of like Wilson County, the place to be. Wilson County Kind will continue to grow. We hope, and take more and more attraction. I think it takes three or four big events to happen that we can talk about that will start spreading a little bit, hopefully, like fire throughout the county, but it has not really in my mind gotten a lot of attraction, like we hope it does here soon. [0:14:45] PF: Part of what's so interesting to me is that, okay, so we know that kindness is very important, but it's not something that you would think of tackling through a government agency. How does that work with your duties as Mayor of Wilson County to behind this movement? How do you work it into part of your duties? [0:15:03] PF: I think it comes under the duties of quality of life. One of the goals here that we have, no question, we have to educate people. We have to incarcerate people. We have to make it safe, but quality of life is one of our major points that we want people to be happy while they're here and enjoy the life that they have here. We don't have to leave the county lines for anything to be honest with you. So, I think that's where it comes in as far as quality of life goes. It's important for our people at least where I sent from to know that there is a lot of, we'll take tourism, for example. There's a lot of great things to do in Wilson County that people don't know about, so we try to spread that word through tourism, but there's a lot of good activities happening. A lot of people doing good for others that we've got to get that word out there. I think it's really going to have to happen, as Susan said, when you ask a while ago the question, but what's the problem? The but is, so how do I really help? What if I'm not good at social media? I don't know how to do a hashtag. I don't know what that means. How can I still take advantage of this? I think that's the piece that is our next step is really getting a word. Here's how you can do it. [0:16:10] PF: I love that. What do you think would happen if other communities started taking this on as a governmental initiative or it's just little pockets of some citizens trying to do this, which is a wonderful thing to do, but what if governments actually got behind that and said, yeah, that's part of, as you said, that's part of our quality of life and we're going to make this about being a kind city and kind community? How would that change things? [0:16:34] RH: I think it definitely does change things. We're working to initiative here becoming an age friendly community, which allows for different things to happen for our older families here, grants to qualify for better services for those people. I think as a government as long as and what we've really tried to do smart here is that we don't use any taxpayer dollars to do this, this is just a way of thinking of life. This is a new culture. I think it'd be great for government, because right now government sometimes has a bad tone to it in our world today, but at the local level, it's not really that. I mean, we're here to provide the services that we just talked to you about, so we want to distance ourselves from any negative tone when you say government that you may feel inside of you. I think it would allow for people to say, “I like my government. I trust my government. I'm glad they're doing this. It's not cost me any money. I get benefits from it, because people are kinder as I walk across and see them walking down the street.” We know that we live in the best part of the country, probably. I think right now is when you wave at people, you don't know, you speak to people, you talk to people, you don't find a stranger. That is in our culture here, not for sure if it exists everywhere else in the country or not, but I know it exists here and we want to continue to expound on it. [0:17:52] PF: If people are hearing this and they're saying, “This is what we need to do, like we need to do something similar.” How do they get started? This might be a Susan question. I'm not sure, because it sounds like she was driving that vehicle quite a bit. How do they go from an idea to implementation? [0:18:07] SS: Well, first of all, you get the support of people like Mayor Hutto. You get the support of somebody in government like that. Also, a support from the school systems, which we had huge support. Annie Barger, she's with the Family Resource Center for Wilson County Schools and Beth Petty in the same role for Lebanon Special School Districts. They got with us and helped plan it. Then we also, because it's not paid for with taxpayer money, we needed a small amount of money to do some promotional things, like yard signs, and stickers for water bottles, and we gave out t-shirts and all those things we gave out free at the campaign lunch. What you do is we found a great partner. We have something called Ten Community here in Wilson County. It's nine or ten banks that group together to be very supportive within the county. They sponsored Wilson County Kind and basically put up some funding this small amount, but for us to be able to buy some things that help with the PR. So, you brand it, you get the support locally of whoever it happens to be, government, school systems, chambers, our Chamber of Commerce were very supportive and the banks are helpful, because ours are very community-oriented banks in the first place. We brand it. You come up with a good name. The logo was created for us by a local visionary design group who is a local marketing firm in Watertown and they did that pro bono. Then you just have to create some spark around it. Now, there's a lot more PR that we can do and we need to do and we'll constantly be thinking and building on that, but that's how we got started. We brainstormed with people to say what our kind acts, what are some activities that people do? Sometimes it's being in the line at Chick-fil-A and saying you're going to pay it for the person behind it. That it starts a lot. That happens a lot of times and people recognize that. Then talk about it, when you see something or hear something, then talk about it. Make it known. [0:20:04] PF: I love it. I love it. What's your dream? You've got it kicked off, you're going, you're picking up momentum. What's your vision? What does success look like for this program? [0:20:14] SS: I think success looks like recognition. It looks like seeing acts of kindness everywhere you go, whether it's in a store, or a school, or at a playground, or something. It's hearing about people reaching out and doing something kind for somebody else. It's hearing more, thank you. It's receiving more thank you notes in the mail. That to me is what it looks like if you're trying to create a vision. It can continue forever, and I hope it does, and I hope it just continues to grow. [0:20:43] PF: I love it. Thank you so much for sitting down and talking with me today. I appreciate both of you. Giving your time and letting us share this with our listeners. We're going to give them all the information they need to know about how to find Wilson County Kind. They can check it out. Maybe get some ideas for doing it themselves, but thank you so much for the good that you're putting out into the world. [0:21:02] SS: Thank you for asking, Paula. We enjoy talking with you about this. [OUTRO] [0:21:10] PF: That was Randall Hutto and Susan Shaw talking about Wilson County Kind. If you'd like to learn more about this initiative or follow them on social media, just visit us at livehappy.com and click on this podcast episode. While you're there, you can also sign up for our weekly Live Happy newsletter. Every week we'll drop a little bit of joy in your inbox with the latest stories, podcast info and even a happy song of the week. That's all we have time for today. We'll meet you back here again next week for an all-new episode. Until then, this is Paula Felps reminding you to make every day a happy one. [END]

Follow along with the transcript below for episode: Overcoming Loneliness With Dr. Jeremy Nobel [INTRODUCTION] [0:00:02] PF: Thank you for joining us for Episode 472 of Live Happy Now. Loneliness is one of the major challenges facing our society today. Since this is Loneliness Awareness Week, it's a great time to look at what's behind this loneliness epidemic. I'm your host, Paula Felps, and this week, I'm sitting down with physician, teacher, innovator, and author, Dr. Jeremy Nobel. founder of The Foundation for Art & Healing, and the Project UnLonely initiative. Jeremy, who is also on the faculty of the Harvard Medical School and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, has published the book, Project UnLonely: Healing Our Crisis of Disconnection. He's here to talk about what loneliness is doing to us and what we should be doing about it. Let's have a listen. [NTERVIEW]   [0:00:50] PF: Dr Nobel, thank you so much for joining us on Live Happy Now. [0:00:54] JN: My pleasure to be with you. [0:00:56] PF: It's so important to talk to you any time of the year, but right now, we really are excited to talk to you, because we have Loneliness Awareness Week. Boy, loneliness is such a huge, huge issue for so many people today. I was curious, first of all, where did your interest in not just studying loneliness, but resolving the crisis begin? [0:01:16] JN: Well, actually, it really began in an interesting way after 9/11, but I didn't know that I was really focused on loneliness. I was actually very interested in the trauma of 9/11, as an experience for many people, particularly children. That's what got me started, and I started The Foundation for Art & Healing, 501(c)3 nonprofit. The idea was to promote creative expression as a path to health and wellbeing. Really focusing on the power of the arts to really help us make sense of the world in positive, healthy, stress-reducing, trauma recovery-oriented ways. As we started doing this work with the arts, we quickly found that many people with trauma and dealing with that stress were also quite lonely. They told us that the work we were doing with the arts to engage, and activate, and have kind of exciting conversations, storytelling, and so on, made them feel less lonely and more connected. That really got our attention, and that's what launched Project UnLonely. [0:02:19] PF: What is the connection between trauma and loneliness? [0:02:22] JN: When you're traumatized, so what is trauma? It's a painful, hurtful injury or experience. As you can imagine, when you have something painful, and even if it's something just like touching a hot stove, if you remember all those stories. You learn not to touch hot stoves, you back away from the threat of a hot stove. Many times, trauma is associated with engagement with other people. So, this could be everything from military trauma, to domestic violence, to the repeated marginalization of racism. This is all painful, and so, we withdraw. Almost anything that leads to trauma, in a way, does set you up for a kind of isolation, a kind of loneliness. That relationship is pretty clear. The real challenge, we'll talk more about it, is how do you move from that loneliness towards a sense of connection. [0:03:15] PF: Now, your organization started in 2016 and there was no clue at that point that the loneliness crisis was going to get so bad. In fact, as you mentioned in your book, 2020 was going to be a bang-up year for your organization. You had so much research that you were going to present, and so many speaking engagements, and then that all disappeared. Thank you, COVID. So, has your approach to loneliness changed at all since 2020, and how have you seen loneliness change in society? [0:03:47] JN: All great questions. First, just for clarity, Project UnLonely isn't its own organization. It actually is a project, it's the signature initiative of The Foundation for Art & Healing, which is the organization. Although we formally launched Project on lonely in 2016, we actually started doing the work to understand loneliness and how the arts connect well before that, around 2011 or 2012. Then, the question is, how did the pandemic change the approach to loneliness? I think what it did, in general, was shine a spotlight on it. As you mentioned, we had loneliness well before the pandemic, but somehow, it became part of all of our consciousness in a very different way. As you mentioned, I start my book, Project UnLonely: Healing Our Crisis of Disconnection. Very first page with how dramatically my world got upended in March 2020. Plans, relationships, teaching, travel, all of this just went on hold as we all tried to navigate this new reality, which forced us to have a kind of isolation to protect us and our neighbors from the virus. While isolation is different than loneliness, it's highly associated with it. So, many people experience loneliness in a way they had not before. [0:05:09] PF: I want to touch on that, what you just said, because we do equate isolation with loneliness. We have had an aunt who spent a lot of time alone, and she told me she's like, "I have never been lonely." Even though she was isolated, she didn't feel lonely. What is the difference between isolation and loneliness? Because you can be in a crowd of people and still feel lonely. [0:05:30] JN: Exactly. One of the real goals of my book is to demystify loneliness and humanize it. The first really important lesson, if you will, is that being alone is not the same thing as being lonely. Being alone is objective. It's the absence of social connection. This can be, if you're in a rural setting, or even isolated in an apartment in an urban setting, where, let's say, you've got a disability, you can't leave easily, or you're fearful about going outside. So then, you are alone. But being alone can be such a positive experience of thoughtful reflection, consideration, the bigger world picture, contemplation. We have a high-class word for it. We sometimes call it solitude, and we do need solitude, but that's different than being lonely. Here's what loneliness is. It's subjective, it's a feeling, it's a mood state. It's the difference between the social connections with other people that we would like to have and what we feel we do have. That gap is what we experience as loneliness. As you pointed out, you actually can be lonely in a crowd. It has nothing to do with whether there are other people around you. It's whether you have the social connections you want. If you're with other people, but don't feel connected to them, you feel lonely. That introduces what I found, a really important observation, and I think, maybe your community will also, is that they're different types of loneliness. [0:07:10] PF: I'm so glad you brought that up, because you talk about three types of loneliness. I was like, I thought there was just loneliness. Can you dig into that and tell us about that? [0:07:17] JN: Right. Well, I thought so too, until we actually started going out and talking about it. So, very simply, there's psychological loneliness, which is, "Do I have a friend? Is there someone I can tell my troubles to?" That's what many people think of when they think of loneliness. But then, there's also the loneliness of systematic exclusion. We call that societal loneliness, because of race, or gender, or disability. Do people evaluate you in that very superficial characteristic and treat you differently, and, in a sense, withdraw from you in a systematic way? That's very different than not having a friend. You could have plenty of friends, but if you feel, for instance, are in a racist workplace and it's not safe to be in certain conversations, you're going to experience loneliness in even though you might have friends. The third type of loneliness, which I am very interested in, and it's been around thousands of years, is where do I relate to the bigger world, the narrative of human experience. People with a religious orientation often call kind of the religious world, God, the universe. But you don't have to be religious to have a sense of curiosity about how your life fits into the bigger story. What was here on the planet before I arrived? What will be here after I depart? Does my life have meaning, consequence? If you don't have solid grounding and answers to those questions, you can feel quite lonely. I think that's the loneliness that's affecting a lot of what we know is the loneliest demographic, 18 to 28 years old. They have plenty of friends, they're connected on social media, but they're wondering, "What am I doing? What's my future? Does my life have meaning? Do I matter?" That could be quite distressing, and it's its own form of loneliness. [0:09:13] PF: Is the way that you address those different forms of loneliness, does that differ? [0:09:20] JN: Absolutely. As someone who in the public health world, and through Project UnLonely, we're trying to design interventions that are powerful for people, as you might imagine. If the loneliness is the loneliness of uncertainty about your meaning in the world, that's very different than the loneliness of not having someone to talk to. So, if you think, "Okay. What do I need to feel less lonely?" One of the first important questions to ask yourself is, what type of loneliness am I experiencing? In my book, I provide different questions we can ask, but they're kind of what you might think. Do I enjoy relationships with others where I can have a chance to have authentic conversations? Or, are those missing from my life? If they're missing from my life, how might I pursue having more of them? So, we lay out some of the strategies for that also. If your feeling of loneliness is uncertainty about your own positioning in the universe, of meaning, and is there purpose. Then, you might want to ask yourself more about how you want to relate to that, how you feel you can be more meaningful, and part of the bigger story. There's some strategies I talked about in the book for that too. [0:10:33] PF: How did you come up with these different strategies? Obviously, you're a fabulous researcher. How did you come to understand those different types of loneliness, and this is what would resolve them? [0:10:45] JN: It's a really great question. The way, again, research works, science works, it's driven by one thing. By the way, it's the same thing that drives the arts, and that's curiosity. As we started going out, and doing programs, and having conversations with hundreds of people about their loneliness and what their experience was, we began to see patterns and trends. It's also important to know that of these three types of loneliness, you could have one type, two types, or three types altogether. That was the first thing, was the observation, awareness. In terms of what works to impact it, some of that is based on psychology research in laboratory settings. We can study what seems to activate people, to embolden them, to be able to connect with others, and tolerate what I sometimes call discomfort of disclosure. Because if you reveal something authentic about yourself, and then someone says, "Sorry, you're too boring. I don't want to have a conversation with you."   [0:11:48] PF: Or, "That's just too much for me."   [0:11:50] JN: Exactly. Or, "I can't handle that." Then, you might feel rejected, abandoned, critiqued, and that hurts. So then, you're reluctant to do that. People, in a way, they connect with others, have to learn to tolerate the fact that you're not always 100% successful, and to keep going just like – you have to explore, and try different things, and see what works for you personally. [0:12:16] PF: That makes so much sense. There was a report that caught everyone's attention. I think it was within the last year, and it's really quoted quite a bit, and that is that loneliness is more dangerous than smoking. We hear that a lot, but we don't hear the reasoning behind that. Could you explain to us why it's so harmful, and also, physically, what loneliness does to us? [0:12:41] JN: Absolutely. That work, that sound bite about being smoking. It can be as dangerous as smoking – loneliness can be as dangerous as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Why is that? Because at its chronic extreme stages, loneliness actually changes how the brain functions, and it also increases inflammation, a real driver for illness, and it impairs immune system function. So, many of these excess deaths that lead to a 30% increase risk of a shorter lifespan are not because of suicides or overdose, drug overdoses. You could imagine loneliness could cause those, and it does. Those are factored out of these scientific analyzes. Most of the deaths are cardiovascular, it's heart attack, it's stroke, sometimes it's cancer death, or metabolic death. Disease and illness related to diabetes. It's important to know that loneliness unchecked, unattended to, when it spirals out of control can be very, very hard on our physical systems too, not just our mental attitudes. [BREAK] [0:13:50] PF: We'll be right back with Dr. Jeremy Nobel, but I wanted to take a moment to talk about how you can beat the heat and get better sleep this summer. I've become such a big fan of Cozy Earth sheets for a lot of reasons. But as the temperatures rise, I've found one more reason to make them the only sheets I want to sleep on. Thanks to their cutting-edge temperature regulating technology, Cozy Earth's bedding lets me stay cool and comfortable, even on the hottest days and nights. That means, I can wake up refreshed and ready for the day. Here's the best part, our exclusive offer for listeners like you gets you a 30% discount and a free item when you use COZY HAPPY at cozyearth.com/livehappynow. These sheets also offer the unbeatable combination of softness and durability, giving you an incredible, comfortable sleep experience. So, invest in your sleep health this summer and stay cool backed by Cozy Earth's 100-night sleep trial and a 10-year warranty. Visit cozyearth.com/livehappynow, and use the code COZY HAPPY to unlock this special offer and optimize your sleep for better health. After placing your order, be sure to select podcast in the survey, and then select Live Happy Now in the drop-down menu that follows. Now, let's get back to my conversation with Dr. Jeremy Nobel. [INTERVIEW CONTINUES]   [0:15:10] PF: I recall, even, probably about 20 years ago, having a friend who was going through a divorce and she said, "I'm lonely." It struck me, because I think, that was the first time it actually had somebody say that to me, like it was almost a shameful thing to say, "I'm lonely." What was that mindset and does any of that still remain? [0:15:32] JN: We started Project UnLonely with three goals, Paula. One was to increase awareness of loneliness, and how toxic it can be for your health. The second, which is what we're going to talk about, is to reduce the stigma that surrounds it. The third is to put these powerful imagination, creativity-fueled programs out in the community, so people can be better engaged. But let's talk more about stigma. Many people feel that if they're lonely, it's their fault, that there's something about them, that they're broken, they're flawed, they're incomplete, they're inadequate. This is all just a social personal construction. That's what they believe. The only good news about that is that, anything that's socially and culturally constructed can be culturally reconstructed. So, I think we have an enormous opportunity. I first heard this idea from John Cacioppo, University of Chicago, who died, unfortunately. Shortly before the pandemic, it's a real pioneer in understanding loneliness, and how it impacts not just our brains, but our behaviors. He said, "Why don't we think about loneliness as a signal that there's something we need, a biologic signal? Just like thirst is a signal, we need hydration. Loneliness is a signal that every one of us needs some degree of human connection." Obviously, most people don't feel embarrassed or guilty about thirsty. Why do we feel embarrassed about being lonely? It goes back to this cultural assumption, in our cultural kind of matrix of, kind of how we put things together. People, as I said, feel that they're flawed. What if we can shift that to just say, "Hey, it's just a signal. What do I need now?" Human connection. "How do I find it? What type of loneliness do I have?" Then, you follow the reasonable paths to get better connected, either psychologically, or societally. or spiritually. [0:17:30] PF: As people become more willing to explore that, how is that going to open up the world a little bit better? You reference Gen Z and how they are incredibly lonely despite being connected. How, as we change this conversation, do you see the world is going to open up? [0:17:48] JN: All right. Here's an experiment I do when I do public speaking now. I ask people, raise your hand if you know someone who is seriously and significantly lonely. Not if you're lonely, but if you know someone. Hundred percent of the hands go up. Then, I say, "How many people have you heard say out loud, 'I'm lonely.'"? Only 50% of the hands go up. If this were even five years ago, only 10% of the hands will go up. So, we're making progress. We have a long way to go, but we're making progress. So, that's encouraging. I think a lot of it is the younger demographic that I mentioned, the loneliest demographic, 18 to 28 do seem willing to talk about their mental health and so on, and take the risk of being judged, criticized, excluded. I admire that courage. What we're trying to do with project and lonely is to actually also give them workshops. and programs that they can participate in, that are delivered not by us. We develop our programs and then they're delivered by colleges, by libraries, by faith-based groups, by community centers. Because as our surgeon general calls for in the report, you mentioned, we need to create a culture of connection, where it's not viewed as an illness or a flaw, loneliness. The connection is valued as something we celebrate at a personal level. We do it with friends, with family. We actively look for opportunities to get together and have the, sometimes just very simple conversations that can still be quite meaningful. They don't have to be deep, heart-to-heart disclosure conversation every time. It can be, "Hey, what's lighting you up these days?" "Let me tell you." "Oh." It's so important, these casual networks of human exchange, and not just social media, memes, and likes, and follows around short videos, but actual conversations in real life. [0:19:54] PF: Can just the acknowledgement, even to ourselves that we're lonely. Does that start changing things for us? [0:20:01] JN: I think it does if it isn't also associated with guilt and self-blame. So, to say, "I'm lonely because I'm a loser, and I've always been a loser", is not a very helpful step forward. But to say, "I'm lonely." But loneliness, and I truly believe this is the world's most human feeling, the need for other people. It's a signal that there's something I need. How do I follow that signal and lead myself forward to a path of personal discovery? Because I think if we're not comfortable knowing who we are, it's hard to have authentic conversations, and friendships with others. But then, how do I feel part of a bigger world where, "Yes, I exist as a person, but I'm part of a much bigger story." That often makes people feel better and feel connected. [0:20:48] PF: We all feel lonely time to time. But how does someone know if it's a problem, if it's chronic loneliness, versus just something we're going through right now? [0:20:58] JN: That's a really great question. I think part of that is really to pay a lot of attention to how you're doing, feeling in kind of navigating the world. In the book, I call this the pyramid of vulnerability. Imagine a pyramid with three layers. The bottom layer is where we all are all the time. Every human being, as I said, can feel lonely from time to time, so that's us. At that bottom layer, we should be trying to do things to build our social resilience, our social connection levels. But yet, no matter who you are in your life and all of our lives, we will be faced with challenges that really do increase our risk of loneliness. That moves us to the middle tier. So, that could be loss of a loved one, the breakup of relationship, a new serious illness, whatever it is, loss of a job, concern about some future event like the national elections. That starts a kind of risk for a spiral, where you start to withdraw. That's when it's most critical to say, "Okay. Am I starting to feel more anxious? Am I having trouble sleeping? Am I having trouble concentrating? Maybe it's because I'm lonely." Ask yourself that. Then, if you are, to go through this exploration, well, what type of loneliness is it. Then, follow the strategies to get connected. Because if you can interact at that middle tier of vulnerability, and then reduce the risk to spiral down into a good direction towards the base, you avoid spiraling up into the highest tier of loneliness. That's where loneliness becomes a serious medical issue, where it is like smoking 15 cigarettes a day, where you have a 30% increased risk of heart attack. or stroke. or death from either. But we don't have to get to that level if we can engage earlier and kind of reestablish balance, and a sense of comfort and connection, calm it down, so we're back down to the bottom tier. Does that make sense? [0:23:04] PF: It does. I wondered as you were talking, because once you reach that top level, it seems like it's going to be most difficult to pull yourself out. What then should those around you – because if I'm your friend and I see this, it's probably going to take some sort of intervention or outreach from me. Because once you hit that top, you're a goner, but you're in deep. [0:23:27] JN: You are in deep, and that's when you're really most in need. As you point out, it's often where you are least able to navigate your way out of it completely on your own. That's where one of the things we can do in building a culture of connection, is to kind of keep an eye out on our friends, family, even neighbors, and not be their therapist, not be their parent, but be their friend. Bear in mind how even a simple kind word, when you're passing by somebody on the street can totally change their day, can totally change their sense of optimism, of positive possibility, curiosity for that day. Stabilize them from what otherwise could be very difficult thoughts, sometimes thoughts of self-harm, and just kind of remind them that, "Hey, there's some positive things going on in the world. I'm out here too, and you're not alone, you're not broken, and you're not defective." It doesn't require a therapist to have these daily reminders that we're all human, we're all connected. We all feel lonely from time to time, but we can be part of a larger and connected story. I think the arts and imagination, obviously, can give us kind of fun ways to tell that story of being connected, and then share those stories with others. [0:24:42] PF: Yes. I love that your solution goes to the arts. Can you talk about the role that creative and artistic expression plays in combating loneliness? Then, give us some ideas for how people can use that in their own lives? [0:24:56] JN: Absolutely. I think, first of all, it's now really clear that arts and creative expression change the brain. When we change the brain, we change our minds. We change our minds, we change behaviors. Here's how arts change the brain. One major way the arts and all the arts, by the way work. So not just the traditional arts like music, visual art, language arts like poetry, movement arts like dance, but culinary arts, cooking. The creative assembly of food ingredients, the taste, the smell, the sensation in your mouth as you eat fun food. So, that's a creative form. Textile arts, these have been around for centuries. Knitting, crocheting, quilting, these are wonderful creative activities. Then, gardening. Just bringing four things from nature, what a friend of mine calls the world's slowest performance art form.   [0:25:54] PF: I love that.   [0:25:56] JN: These are how the arts can change us. They reduce cortisol levels, the stress hormone that puts us on edge, drives fight or flight, which means we're always hyper vigilant. That does increase inflammation. It's what alters the immune system. But the arts also increase levels of dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, the so-called feel-good hormones. Then, very importantly, the arts also change how we make sense of the social world. What otherwise we might see as threats, like somebody walking towards us through the arts, particularly the ones that increase our sense of compassion, empathy, that person can look like an opportunity, someone I can have a conversation with. That's kind of the cascade of how changes in the brain from the arts, then literally change our levels of optimism, possibility. Sometimes, this is all in the positive psychology realm, as you know. But then, most importantly, it changes how we behave. We're willing to smile at a stranger, we're willing to take the risk of even a little piece of casual conversation in the grocery store. Then, if you take that risk and people respond, it starts moving your brain and mind in a more positive way, and the positive spiral happens. This is why the arts, I think, can be such a catalyst for connection. [0:27:17] PF: I absolutely love that. Big question is, where do people start? [0:27:22] JN: I think, if it's around the arts, I think it comes back to curiosity. Explore the world in some creative form that you enjoy. If you don't know what you enjoy, yet, try different things. Try drawing, try just kind of move with colored markers on white paper, and just say, "How am I feeling today? We have prompts and activities for this on our website. Imagine a time in your life that was meaningful to you. Then. don't draw the experience. Let yourself feel the feelings associated with that time, and then try to draw the feelings using color and shade. There's no wrong answer to these exercises. So. you get it all out on the page. Then, in many of our workshops, what we do is, we do this as a group. We make the art on our own, but then we pair up and we tell our personal stories. That's the second really powerful things the arts do. They invite and allow us to share our stories. Because almost every creative form, whether it's a casserole, a chocolate chip cookie, or a Picasso painting is a form of a story. It's a narrative, we're trying to express something. So, the arts enable that. Then, the last thing the arts do, and I particularly feel this with certain kinds of music, is they kind of transform us to a kind of awe and wonder about the world. I feel this in poetry also. I'm a poet, and reading a poem by who might no longer even be alive with us can still make me feel like I'm a small but important part of a very big and very wonderful story. [0:29:03] PF: That's fantastic. Now, we're going to tell the listeners how they can find your website, how they can find your book. As you said, you have resources on the website so they can start doing some of these exercises. Your book has prompts and walks us through this. What is it that you want everyone listening to know and understand about loneliness? [0:29:23] JN: Let me go back to some of the things we talked about. By the way, thank you for helping get the word out. The other thing we have that's a lot of fun for people who aren't immediately willing to, "Oh, I'm going to make some art." Is, we use the power of the arts in the form of short films. We're now working with Steve Buscemi, the celebrated actor and filmmaker. He's an ambassador for what we call Project UnLonely Films. You come to our website and there's a whole portfolio of short films that look at loneliness and some of the major social territories in which they exist. So, trauma, aging, illness, difference, the modern world. You get to explore loneliness through the lens, literally, of someone who's making a film on it. Then, if you watch it with a few other people, you can just say, "Hey, what did we just watch?" and have a conversation. Don't overlook the opportunity. Come to our site, watch some of our films, sign up for our newsletter, so we'll send you a little link every week or two with a film and some conversation starters. So, there are lots of ways we can move from being a little bit cautious in a defensive crouch, which we're all in post-pandemic, to something a little bit more open-hearted, a little bit more open-minded. [0:30:40] PF: That is fantastic. The work you're doing is amazing. It's very necessary, and I truly believe it's going to help move that needle on loneliness in our society. So, I thank you for the work you're doing, first of all. Then, secondly, I really appreciate your time. It was an honor to sit down with you and talk about this. I know our listeners have gotten a lot out of this conversation. [0:31:00] JN: Thank you. It's my absolute pleasure, and even this conversation makes me feel more connected. So, thank you for that, too, Paula. [END OF INTERVIEW] [0:31:08] PF: That was Dr. Jeremy Nobel, talking about loneliness. If you'd like to learn more about Jeremy, check out his book, Project UnLonely: Healing Our Crisis of Disconnection. Visit his website for resources or follow him on social media, just visit us at livehappy.com and click on the podcast tab. While you're there, be sure to sign up for our weekly Live Happy newsletter. Every week, we'll drop a little bit of joy into your inbox with the latest stories, podcast info, and even a happy song of the week. That is all we have time for today. We'll meet you back here again next week for an all-new episode. Until then, this is Paula Felps, reminding you to make every day a happy one.   [END]

Follow along with the transcript below for episode: What’s Driving Gen Z’s Anxiety (and What to Do About It) With Dr. Lauren Cook [INTRODUCTION] [0:00:02] PF: Thank you for joining us for Episode 471 of Live Happy Now. Younger generations are experiencing stress and anxiety differently than previous generations. That's something we're making part of the ongoing conversation here at Live Happy. I'm your host, Paula Felps, and this week, I'm joined by author and clinical psychologist, Dr. Lauren Cook. Her latest book, Generation Anxiety looks at why Millennials and Gen Z are so anxious and how that's affecting them. She's here today to talk about some of the things that are driving that anxiety, and importantly, offers insight into what we can do to help change this downward spiral, and what that will mean for future generations. Let's have a listen. [EPISODE]   [0:00:46] PF: Lauren, welcome back to Live Happy Now.   [0:00:48] LC: It's so good to see you again, Paula.   [0:00:51] PF: I'm really excited to sit down have this conversation with you because you're doing some incredible work with Gen Z and Millennials. As you know, you and I have talked about this. Live Happy Now is really concerned about the mental health of Gen Z. We're really committed to keeping that dialogue open. So, your book does an excellent, incredible job of looking at, not just Gen Z, but Millennials. I wanted to kick it off, I wanted to know if you could talk about why both of those generations are so anxiety-ridden. [0:01:23] LC: Yes. We are really seeing an increase in anxiety both in prevalence, meaning more and more people and severity. Intensity of symptoms is increasing as well. So, we're seeing it horizontally, longitudinally, all the ways. Anxiety is absolutely increasing for folks. I think it's happening both personally, but also very much communally. When you look at what's happened in our country in the last two decades, in particular, it's been one thing after another. There's a really interesting survey that asked people, "What's been the most significant effect generationally that's happened to you in your lifetime?" You, as Baby Boomers, you asked the great generation who experienced the depression, World War Two, Gen X. They all say – you can probably guess what it is. The number one significant event in their lifetime and Millennials will say this as well.   [0:02:18] PF: 9/11.   [0:02:18] LC: September 11th. There you go. However, if you look at what's happened in Gen Z's lifetime, we've got the Trump election, Black Lives Matter, George Floyd's murder, climate change events, the Me Too movement. I mean, I could keep going for quite a while about the long laundry list of things. I don't say that to be political. These are historical events that are happening. It is really affecting young adults to be living in this world where they're just inundated by chaotic and distressing news. And, you also have what's happening personally in their lives as well, with social media, academic pressure. These two generations, even though they're the most educated, are the most financially worse off than their previous generations. That's really frustrating, to feel like you're told this myth of like, "Work hard and you will be able to succeed." They're working really hard, and it's very hard to succeed, to own a house, all these different things. That breaks the person down over time. [0:03:24] PF: Can you talk about how they're different from previous generations? Because I want to dive into that a little bit, because I've heard people who seem to not really understand. They think like, basically, we're all the same. We were just born at different times. So, can you correct that way of thinking? [0:03:42] LC: Yes. Social media, it sounds almost like low hanging fruit at this point. But it really, I think, has made a difference for Millennials and Gen Z. They grew up at this time when – especially Millennials like myself, social media was just coming on the scene. We didn't know what was happening. Gen Z, in particular, have been the guinea pigs of social media, of having technology, getting a cell phone when they're 10 years old, right? We didn't necessarily know what effects this was going to have on the brain. But now, we're seeing this play out, where we're seeing social anxiety increased. So many young adults, they don't know how to answer the phone, they don't know how to have a conversation with a stranger. They also feel really unsafe in this world. The Stress in America survey asked young adults, "What are you afraid of?" Seventy-five percent said their greatest fear is gun violence. For this generation, to wake up and they see movie theaters, concerts, schools, places of worship, no place is safe. Now, everybody looks around their shoulder every time they go out. Am I safe? Is something going to happen to me? Is something going to happen to my loved one? We could have a whole conversation about separation anxiety, Paula, and how this generation really experiences it. Because our world just feels incredibly unsafe to these young adults. When you look at what has happened, I think it's understandable why. [0:05:10] PF: Does the fact that parents are also then trying to protect those children? We're doing it from a good place, but doesn't that also increase those feelings of the world's not safe and I should be afraid? [0:05:22] LC: Exactly, exactly. It's a really fine line, between wanting to protect our kids. And at the same time, not over protecting where our kids are learning this message, "I can't do anything in my life." I cite this in Generation Anxiety, my book, a really interesting study. That when parents give this message to their kids, that the world is unsafe, people are going to hurt you, we do see that there are increases in depression and anxiety for kids. When parents have a more optimistic outlook, go out there. live your life, yes, bad, scary things can happen. But statistically, the chances of that are pretty slim. Go out there and experience your life. Those kids are less likely to be anxious and depressed. Even though we turn on the news, and we hear these difficult things. We also have to remind ourselves, okay, what is the chance of that happening to me when I go to a movie theater, when I go to a concert, and not keeping ourselves in such a small box at the same time? [0:06:23] PF: You know, that's something Deb Heisz, CEO for Live Happy and I have talked about. We've talked about it on the air that when you're constantly watching the news, you do start seeing the world as unsafe, and very scary place. I think it is important for parents to be mindful of what children are being exposed to, in the home in terms of what kind of news, what kind of television is on at any given time, because that is having a deep, deep effect on them. [0:06:52] LC: It is. It is. There's really great conversations happening right now about parental attachment, and really taking time to be with our kids, to be present with our kids. I'm a new mom myself. My son turns one this Sunday. [0:07:07] PF: Well, congratulations, first of all. [0:07:09] LC: Thank you. I'm super excited about it. But we don't even, I think realize at this point how much we use our phones. I catch myself doing it where, "Oh, let me just answer a few emails. Let me get to a few text messages." Meanwhile, my son is right there by me playing, and he's, I'm sure, perceiving me being sucked into a phone. That's something Gen Z has experienced too. Even though I don't think it's intentional, we just haven't had as much face-to-face interaction with each other because we're face-to-facing with our phone. [0:07:44] PF: From a parent's standpoint, if you have someone who is part of Gen Z, what are some things in terms of that mindset of safety? Because, again, we want to keep our children safe, we want to be there. But how do we do that, and advise them without terrifying them? Because the world, we can make it pretty terrifying if we really talk about it. [0:08:06] LC: We definitely can. I approach things with this mentality, I call them powered acceptance. First piece is, we have to accept what's going on in our world. If our kids ask about it, we can't lie to them. We need to be honest about what's happening, and we need to really have a sense of what's going on in our world. If we don't know what the problems are, how do we fix them? But we also have to be empowered, we have to take action. This is the thing; anxiety makes people want to avoid. It makes people want to run away and say, "I don't want to get on that plane. I don't want to go to that show. I don't want to ask that new person to be my friend because it makes me feel anxious." Anxiety just grows bigger and bigger and bigger. So, we have to be empowered and start to kind of push the boundaries of what our anxiety is wanting to make us do. We have to take action to see, "Oh, I can ask somebody to hang out, even though that makes me feel anxious." Or, "I can go to that concert because I love Taylor Swift. Sure, something scary could happen, I will deal with that." At the end of the day, anxiety is about not wanting to face the reality of that things end, that things change, that we can experience pain. These are not necessarily warm, fuzzy ideas, right? But if we actually teach ourselves and our kids that we can sit with distress, we can sit with discomfort. The world opens up to us in a whole new way and we no longer have to be in fear of pain. [0:09:40] PF: How do you start sharing that message? Because that's huge, to be able to sit with discomfort, especially in a time when there are a million distractions that we can have at our fingertips. First of all, how do we as the adults in the room, how do we learn how to do that, and then, how do you pass that along? [0:10:03] LC: We have to model it ourselves. We have to show our kids that we're okay handling discomfort. They are watching us so closely to notice when we avoid when we lean in. Sure, sometimes we do need to take a step back and rest. It's not always about powering and pushing through. It's just as important to show our kids how we can set healthy boundaries, how we can say no sometimes. But our kids also need to see us getting a little bit uncomfy, even if it's something like giving a speech at work, or having a tough conversation with our partner, but in a healthy, appropriate way. These are all modeling examples that our kids are really taking in. Aat the same time, I think when we can show our kids and encourage them to lean into their discomfort, and cheer them on for that, that's so, so helpful. Because I do see a lot of parents enable their kid's anxiety, they feel like it's an act of love to let them get out of things. But if we can show them, hey, you can actually go to that soccer game when you felt really nervous about it rather than stay home. We're teaching our kids their resilience in those moments. [0:11:14] PF: I love that. I absolutely love that. What are some of the signs that we should be looking for that someone is struggling with anxiety? Because we can kind of tell internally, when we've got it going on ourselves, but we might not always see it in someone else. [0:11:28] LC: I'm really glad you asked that, Paula. There's a few things to really make note of. If you notice any sleep difficulties, that's a classic one of someone who's having trouble falling or staying asleep. If you notice somebody's having difficulty concentrating. Sometimes that can get a little confusing with ADHD, but that's also a sign of anxiety. If somebody feels or notices that they're really keyed up or on edge, it's like a hamster on a wheel, go, go, go. Here's one that people often miss, irritability. We think irritability is its own thing, but irritability is actually often a sign of anxiety and depression. So, if you notice somebody's getting snappy or quiet, that's something to pay attention to. Again, any kind of avoided behavior, if you notice your kiddo or yourself, "Oh, we used to always go out to dinner together, and now my kid doesn't want to go out for a meal." Or, "I'm noticing my kiddo doesn't want to go on car rides, or plane rides." All these different things where avoidance could be really coming into play, that's a hallmark of anxiety. [0:12:32] PF: So then, once you start seeing it, and not just as a parent, because I'm not a parent, but I have a lot of young people in my life. You're in it, it's a different situation, because there's a lot of things you cannot do. So, what is it? If you see anxiety, if you start recognizing, "Hey, this person might be struggling with anxiety." What are some things that you should start doing to reach out to them? [0:12:59] LC: Self-disclosure here is really powerful. Anxiety is something that, just about everybody has some touchpoint with. Self-disclosing when you yourself have felt anxious and humanizing yourself in that way is so relieving to someone with anxiety. Because the thing, and I see this with so many of my clients, they don't want anyone to know they're anxious. They think it's so embarrassing, and it's like, welcome to the human club. If we can make it okay to be anxious, ironically, that's actually when anxiety starts to go down. But people get so much anxiety about hiding their anxiety. "I don't want anyone to notice." It really magnifies it for them. So, if you yourself, show your humaneness of like, "Oh my gosh, I felt really anxious about this or really worried about this, how do you feel about it?" It really opens that door for someone to share what's behind their own curtain. [0:13:57] PF: Then, once they start sharing that, and once they kind of start unpacking the cause of their anxiety, where do you go from there? I mean, one thing is, I'm reading your book. Just the depth and the breadth of how far-reaching anxiety can be, and how deeply emotional river that runs through it is, it made it a bigger issue than I even really had looked at it from. So, once someone shares with you, then what do you do? Other than say, "Call Dr. Lauren Cook." [0:14:28] LC: Thank you, Paula. Well, I'd like to take a holistic approach. That's something I really hope comes across in the book to move beyond just a westernized model of care. I am all for therapy, I'm all for medication. I'm a psychologist, so I'm very much for those things. However, I also believe there's a lot of different things that can work for people with anxiety and anxiety is such a physical experience. I mean, especially when you look at the gut brain access connection, and how much of our anxiety really can settle into our gut and our stomach. We've got to look at all of those different things. The food, the drinks we put into our bodies. Amazing book on this is Dr. Uma Naidoo's This is Your Brain on Food, and really getting curious about what we're eating is either inflaming or healing our gut. Quick tip, everybody listening, please get your bloodwork done. Because people can spend thousands of dollars on therapy, when something is going off in your chemistry. Your vitamin D levels are low, magnesium, B12. If those things are out of whack, doesn't matter how much cognitive therapy you do, you're going to feel anxious, my friend. It's important to do the due diligence of looking at yourself holistically, not just from the neck up, but really looking at our entire physical body for overall healing. [0:15:54] PF: I love that you brought that up. Because for myself, I'm very big on what I eat. I know that everything has – there's a cause and effect. So, being very careful about avoiding preservatives, and dyes, and sugars, and things like that. I see that as an area where that does get overlooked, because so much of what we have on our shelves today is – well, it's not food, actually. It's just chemicals in a really nice package. So, I'm super happy to see you bringing that up. Do you see that when people change some of the things that they're eating, they start having a different experience with anxiety? [0:16:33] LC: Big time. big time. Yes. It's everything from cutting back on preservatives, cutting back on sugar. That's hard for me, because I'm such a sweet tooth myself. Alcohol is a big one. A lot of my college-aged clients will tell you, "Oh, I have anxiety" on the next day. They get bad anxiety with the hangover. So, a lot of them are starting to get sober curious, as we say, and starting to play with, "Okay. What happens when I'm not drinking for a while?" Because, even if someone's drinking every other day, their sleep patterns never have a chance to equilibrate. Sleep is a huge part in anxiety and treatment. So, this is all wrapped up in itself. Even hydration, staying hydrated with water. We see when the brain is not getting enough water, things spiral quickly. So, absolutely, I think that's something that has been missed in the narrative, because it seems so simple. We're told from a young age, eat your fruits and veggies, blah, blah. It has a real effect on brain health. [0:17:39] PF: That is great. I hope more people will jump on that and look at what they're putting in and what that's doing to their bodies. I know Dr. Drew Ramsey, is someone we've had on the show before. When someone comes in with depression, the first thing he does is look at what they're eating. Before he tries medication, he will have them change their diet, and most times, medication is not needed. That just really supports the kind of work that you're doing too. [0:18:07] LC: That's incredible. I believe it. [0:18:10] PF: So, as I said, your book really outlines just how massive this issue is right now. Do you see this as a solvable problem? Because it is huge. It's kind of like, can we have world peace? I feel like this is somewhere out there with it. [0:18:25] LC: I did have a stint in beauty pageant days. So perhaps, this is my world peace moment. I don't know. I am forever an optimist. I love Seligman's work on positive psychology, and the effects of optimism. I do believe that things can get better. I always have that hope. I'm also a realist, though, and the book is not about trying to make anxiety go away. It's about learning how to live with anxiety. I think that's something people get a little bit lost on. They feel like they're a failure if they can't get their anxiety to stop. The reality is, sometimes your anxiety may be here to stay. But the more you fight it, the more the beast is going to grow bigger in you. But if you embrace what I call your inner sea otter, lay back in your waters, and say, "All right, I'm anxious. So, what?" It really starts to lose its power. I've seen that in my own life. I'm very open about my own lived experience with anxiety and emetophobia in particular, which is a phobia of vomit, really fun. But I'm very open about how I've lived with that and have worked hard to not let it stop me living the life that I want to live. [0:19:40] PF: Yes. What's interesting in your book, you also explained where that came from. I found that very, very fascinating. I'm not going to tell the listeners how because now they have to go find your book and look it up.   [0:19:51] LC: Tease.   [0:19:52] PF: It is. That actually played into another question that I had for you, which is about generational trauma and epigenetics is such a huge area of study. I think it's been disregarded a lot in the past, where we don't look at the effect of what happened with our parents and our grandparents, and how that anxiety and other types of traumas get passed along. Can you talk just a little bit about what role that intergenerational trauma plays and how we kind of can use that and correct the trajectory of that trauma? [0:20:27] LC: I'm really happy that you reference that, because I think we can get very quickly into the blame game of, "What's wrong with me? What am I doing wrong?" It is generational buildup, it's like emotional tartar that has been passed down. One study, I found this so fascinating in the research for the book about Holocaust survivors, how it was actually their grandchildren that had more anxiety than the Holocaust survivors themselves. Really seeing how this generational trauma gets passed down. Now, I also found research though that it can be changed as well, in a better way as too, that diet, nutrition, what people eat can really make a positive impact for people. But it makes us really think about. "Wow, the choices I'm making for myself now, it doesn't just affect me. It affects my kids and even my grandkids." You even look at studies with smoking, and how that impacts people for generations to come. This is something I think we can get more curious about. I think we were really just at the tip of the iceberg with epigenetics research. I'm staying closely aware of it, because I think we're only going to see more and more. This is where I do have an optimistic lens here, that we can make better choices that are going to be good for more generations to come. [0:21:51] PF: If we don't figure this out, what are the consequences for future generations? Knowing what we just said, that it's passed down. If we cannot start correcting the true trajectory of happiness for Gen Z now, what is the consequence? [0:22:09] LC: Unfortunately, I think it means we're only going to see more anxiety, more depression, and potentially even more suicidality. That's something that I think is very important for us to talk about, as well, that we lose on average 12 people a day to suicide between the ages of just 15 to 24. That's one every two hours. That's incredibly concerning to me. This is something we're all going to have to collectively get on board with, especially when it comes to climate change for example. There is more and more research about kids who grow up in environments where there's a lot of smog in the air, that we're seeing increases in anxiety and depression for those folks. How do you tackle that? That is going to be more than just food and drink. That is something we are all going to have to really get on board with. I think part of it is really tapping into our empathy for the human experience. My husband and I were just talking about this the other day about how we live in such an individualistic society. You see cars cut in front of each other, people cut each other in line. We're so much thinking about what's fastest and easiest for me. I think we really have to get into our empathy of, how might someone else be experiencing this, what is it like for the life of someone else, and how can I make changes in my life? Not just to self-serve me, but to serve someone else. We know that is so good for our brain, ultimately, to tap into altruism and generosity, but it's a practice. I think as we become more isolated, we have become more individualistic and selfish, so we've got to really start pushing up against that. [0:23:57] PF: I agree. I know during the pandemic; they saw empathy decline greatly. We weren't face-to-face, we were in our little silos, and bubbles, and didn't interact. I don't know what current research shows if we're bouncing back from that at all. But what is your recommendation? Okay, doctor, what's your prescription for us? Where do we start and how do we start changing things for Gen Z and for subsequent generations? [0:24:26] LC: I think this is one of the greatest strengths of Gen Z. They really care about other people, even though they may be more socially anxious around other people. They do really have compassion for one another. You see that when they have these protests on gun violence, when you see them protesting what's happening in Gaza. They're doing it because they're thinking about somebody who's thousands of miles away. So, that ability to empathize with another person's experience in that lens, I think is really inspiring. I think it's something that we all need to get called back into, of realizing a lot of us got a lucky draw, honestly, to be born where we may live, have the families that we may live. I think sometimes, we can think like, "Well, I earned all this." Sure, we all work very hard, and at the same time, realizing when we wake up, I could have just as easily been that person down the road or that person in another country. How can I have empathy for that experience, even though it may not be my own lived experience that's uncomfortable? But the more we build our distress tolerance skills of being willing to sit with discomfort, I think the better off we'll be. Lastly, I'll say, giving ourselves the permission to hold the dialectic, because I see people get a little bit all or nothing with this of like, "Well, if I sit with the sadness of what's happening in the world, I'm never going to be happy." But really, we can expand it where our human emotions can hold great capacity to say, "I feel the pain of the world, I acknowledge it, I feel it, and I still can give myself permission to enjoy and savor the life that I have at the same time." Both can exist. [0:26:17] PF: I love that. it also can just be a way to encourage us to do something for others. Being able to sit with that and say, "Alright. What can I change? I cannot change what's going on across in another country. But I can change what the experience is for my neighbor, or for this person down the street. or for the homeless person on the corner." [0:26:38] LC: Yes. I really do believe that the tiniest little things make a positive impact. If we would just smile at each other, the world, would feel that change. So, I'm always encouraging my clients and young adults that I work with, lift your head up from the phone, share eye contact with someone, feel another person's humanity, things will start to feel a lot different. [0:27:06] PF: That is excellent advice right there. That's what we all need to be doing. This is fantastic. I know your book gives so much information, so much insight. It's obviously a labor of love and research, and very, very well done. I'm excited to tell our listeners about it. I think we might be having something from you on the website coming up. We'll keep talking because Gen Z is front and center in our minds right now, and we want to keep this conversation going, and I appreciate you sitting down and being a part of it. [0:27:39] LC: Paula, the feeling is mutual. Thank you so much for caring about this and bringing a microphone to it. I'm grateful for you. [0:27:47] PF: All right. Well, Lauren, until next time. Thank you so much.   [0:27:51] LC: Thanks, Paula. [END OF INTERVIEW] [0:27:55] PF: That was Dr. Lauren Cook, talking about anxiety and Gen Z. If you'd like to learn more about Lauren, check out her book, Generation Anxiety or follow her on social media. Just visit us at livehappy.com, and click on the podcast tab. While you're there, you'll also find an article from Dr. Lauren, explaining why the world looks so different for Gen Z and how that's affecting them. We hope you enjoy this episode of Live Happy Now. If you aren't already receiving us every week, we invite you to subscribe wherever you get your podcast. While you're there, feel free to drop us a review and let us know what you think of the show. That is all we have time for today. We'll meet you back here again next week for an all-new episode. Until then, this is Paula Felps, reminding you to make every day a happy one.   [END]

Follow along with the transcript below for episode: Supporting Mental Health Through Music With Brandon Staglin [INTRO] [00:00:04] PF: What’s up, everybody? This is Paula Felps, and you are listening to On a Positive Note. We've talked about how music can boost our mood and even help our bodies heal. Today, we're looking at what it can do for our mental health. For this episode, I'm talking with Brandon Staglin, co-founder and president of One Mind, a mental health nonprofit organization committed to improving brain health by supporting research and providing resources. Central to their mission is music, which Brandon explains has been an incredible healing tool in his own struggle with mental illness. He's here to talk about the One Mind music festival for brain health, and how that has helped build awareness for their mental health mission, and how he uses it for healing and connection in his own life. Let's have a listen. [EPISODE]   [0:00:51] PF: Brandon, thank you for joining me on On a Positive Note. [0:00:54] BS: Thank you, Paula. So much happy to be On a Positive Note, and it's a great day to talk about music and mental health. [0:01:00] PF: And you're a fantastic person to talk to about this subject. I've been following One Mind for a while. The work that you do is absolutely amazing. For those who haven't been following you, let's start by talking about what one mind is and what it does. [0:01:15] BS: One Mind is an organization that started 30 years ago, and it was founded by my family. My family founded One Mind, thanks to our shared experience with my schizophrenia diagnosis and recovery. I was diagnosed when I was 18 years old, back in 1990. It was an incredibly scary and dark time in my life, and in that of my whole family. There was a stretch of about a year when we didn't really know whether there would be any positive future for me at all. I was terrified that at any moment, I might go straight to hell, like I had this delusion in my mind that demons were after my soul, and that if I made any slight moral mistake, they pounce on me, and drive me off to hell for all eternity. It's just a terrifying thing to think every moment of every day, if you can imagine that. That drove me to exhaustion, and despair. Even though I was getting treatment for my mental illness, it wasn't working very well for the first six months. There were moments when I was so depressed that I felt suicidal, and moments where I seriously considering ending my life. Fortunately, I'm very grateful to be alive today. What saw me through those really dark times were three main factors in the beginning. One of them was the unconditional love of my family. They made sure I knew how deeply they loved me by telling me so in ways that reached me. There was a moment when I was shuffling around the house, just so dark, just so down, and depressed. My dad saw me there in the kitchen. He said, "There's a lot of love coming from here, Brandon." Even though I had not, I couldn't feel the love back at that moment. I wanted to feel that love again. That drove me to want to recover again, to be able to feel that love again for my family back with them again. That was a major factor in driving me to continue to work for getting well again. Then, other factors included a sense of purpose through staying involved with community activities, and volunteering, and education while I was recovering. As well as, early science-based medical care. From those experiences, I've learned principles that love is an important factor for life. That curiosity is also an important driver of motivation for people, and can lead to discoveries that can help people out there in the community. And that having a sense of purpose is essential to drive people forward toward recovery and toward a good life. Based on all we've learned through my experience in schizophrenia, my parents decided to found One Mind in 1995. They started out with the realization, learning from me, and from other families around us who had experienced similar challenges with our young ones. That the science was not up to par in terms of its ability to enable people to access treatments that were helpful for them in a way that would help them to get all the way to recovery. I was taking medications at the time that were somewhat helpful. But as I mentioned, they had not the full effect that I wanted, had terrible side effects. My parents realized, and now it's an important part of One Mind that precision medicine be a part of mental health care. Meaning that, science must develop ways to develop treatments that can help people right from their diagnosis, right in the very beginning of their illness. And not have to go through months and years of trial and error, and agony for finding something that could help them recover again. That was how we started One Mind. The very first event we had ever in 1995 called the Music Festival for Brain Health, and that's how music comes into play here in the conversation. [0:05:00] PF: I'm really curious to know why they built it around music, because you and I know now that that's such a natural tool for healing and for bringing people together. Wat was their thinking behind using music as the central focus of that event? [0:05:15] BS: The music festival was launched in 1995, with the intent that music could bring people together, as you say, in a way that transcends inhibitions, that transcends fears, and then brings people to have a deeper pour for each other, and love for each other in the moment, celebrating together. We call the music festival a celebration of life. Ever since the beginning, it's been like that. I remember in 2001, when September 11th happened in the United States. There was a lot of trepidation about whether we could put on the music festival. It was just days after that took place. But we did, we were able to get conductor to come, and orchestra to come. They played Ode to Joy during the music concert of that event, people were in tears. The conductor was just so overwhelmed by the response that he just – we have a photograph that he gave my mom this enthusiastic hug, and just the embrace was just great to see. But that's an example of how music can bring people together, and transcend fears, and overcome barriers to connection. Then, we make that a hallmark at the festival today. Basically, I make sure that everyone understands when they come to the festival, that it's a safe place to open up to each other about the challenges that they're facing with their mental health, and their families, and open place to talk about and share those experiences with each other. [0:06:45] PF: What else goes on? You have a concert, but you have events leading up to the concert as well throughout the day. Can you talk about the other things that happen before the music? [0:06:54] BS: Absolutely. It's a really special event, the music festival for brain health. It starts today with a science and innovation symposium, where we have the scientists who we fund, and support give talks about the amazing discoveries they're making. Every year, they come out with something new that blows me away, and really thrills the audience to know that these nutrients are coming down the line to help them and their families. We added on a component in the last year, in 2023 of innovation as well. We have a program called the One Line Rising Star Awards, which enables young, promising mental health scientists to make these discoveries toward better treatments, by giving them funding, and by giving them leadership training, so that they can grow their careers as influencers for better mental health research. And improve the field in ways that reflect the interests of people like me, like people, so many people out community who live with mental illness, and work to improve their lives. The other program that we offer through a science and innovation division at One Mind is called The One Mind Accelerator. Through this program, we help entrepreneurs who are taking some of the discoveries, like those our scientists have made, and turning them into products, and services, that can then be commercialized and scale to reach people all throughout our society. This is a kind of an outgrowth, our focus on science toward innovation. So, it's been a very successful 30 years of doing these programs now together. We've made some great breakthroughs, including ways to treat mental illness with electricity that are safe and actually remedy the symptoms using brain stimulation, including microbiome-based treatments for mental illness. Like what happens in your gut, the bacteria in your gut to treat depression, for example, and including peer support models for young people facing suicidality. Happy to expand more if you're interested later on. The gist of it is that, the scientists and innovators speak during the symposium of the music festival. That gives the audience so much hope to know that these innovations are coming down the line to help them and their families. [0:09:13] PF: Who's likely to attend the festival? [0:09:15] BS: Well, because the festival includes not only the science innovation symposium, but also, the most amazing wine tasting anywhere. [0:09:24] PF: Yes, you got three different – I feel like you have three different audiences for this. [0:09:28] BS: Yes. The festival goes like this. It includes the science innovation symposium, the wine tasting reception, following symposium. Then, there's the concert, which is kind of the highlight of the day. Then, there's the exclusive dinner up at my parent's home, at the top of our vineyard property in Napa Valley, which is where it takes place. That combination of events is something that really revs people up to be excited about the future for mental health and their families. Because it's a fundraiser, it helps them want to donate to support cause. Those are the four parts of the event. The kind of people coming would mainly include people with lived experience in their families of mental illness. So, families that have got young people, or brothers, or sisters who live with schizophrenia, who live with bipolar disorder, who live with major depression, eating disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder. We aim to help them have that sense of community at the festival, so they have that common bond, and reveling each other's company as well as in the events taking place. [0:10:35] PF: Let's talk about the music component of it and how that's really grown. When you first started, what kind of artists were you bringing in? Because you've got some – you have some very impressive lineups in the last few years. Talk about, when it first started, what was that like? [0:10:48] BS: Yes. We started out with orchestras playing, and we had celebrity conductors, conducting the orchestras. First year, we had Richard Williams, and another year, we had Ben Zander of the Boston Philharmonic, very charismatic conductor, who wrote a book called, The Art of Possibility. He's the one who conducted during the post September 11th festival that we had. Then, we evolved into jazz. We had Ramsay Lewis and his trio play. Then, we evolved into pop, and country, and R&B. Had artists like Gladys Knight, Brian Wilson performed, who was amazing. He totally brought it, he did it for no cost for us, because he believed in what we're doing. Then, we found artists like Jennifer Hudson, we had Tim McGraw, Sheryl Crow, and Lyle Lovett, and Jewel more recently. There's some really great stories about these artists and how they've been part of the festival. [0:11:42] PF: I know Jewel. I saw a lot of posts and things that she said about this, wrote about this. I would love to hear their experiences, because it's touching to me that there are so many artists are being so open about mental health, and how music has helped them. [0:11:57] BS: Yes. It's great to know that artists are being open about that, because it lets people know it's safe for them to talk about it too. These are role models for so many people, or at least people that feel close to through the music that they produce, and that they hear. So, yes, Jewel is actually a One Mind champion. She's an official ambassador for One Mind. We've worked with her for a few years now. She performed in 2022, as well as in 2014, so twice for us over the years.   [0:12:24] PF: Wow.   [0:12:24] BS: Yes. Had her back. She's just so great. She's been very open about her experiences, mental illness, and that's inspired a lot of people to know that recovery is possible for them to other artists who stood out, include Lyle Lovett, who lent me his guitar to play a song that I wrote about recovery from schizophrenia. That's a cause that is very dear to my heart to help people recovery is possible even from serious mental illness. There's still amazing things you can do left in life after recovery, during recovery. That song is called Horizons Left to Chase, and it's available on YouTube. When he lent me his guitar, like he was handing it to me like it's a baby or something. It was very gently, and making sure that I held it carefully. And I had it, and I say, "Okay. Well, here we go." I played it, and played my song. He listened very intently to the song like he was very interested. But people loved hearing the song too, which really gratified me. [0:13:19] PF: You have artists who perform who have talked openly about their struggles with mental health. Then, you have others who are just supportive of the mission. Is that correct? [0:13:28] BS: Yes. Yes, that's right. When Jennifer Hudson performed, she spoke a lot about her family's experiences with mental health. When Tim McGraw performed, he also supports brain injury, causes, and One Mind was involved in Brain Injury Research at that time. He was deeply involved in that. So many of the artists that I featured on brainwaves, that webcasts that I hosted for about 11 years were very open about their experiences with mental health, and mental illness. Artists deal with a lot of challenges with their mental health, and music is a way to kind of process those. I've personally discovered those experiences with music. [0:14:04] PF: That's what I'd really like to talk about, is how does music help people who are struggling with mental health. And if you have your own experiences that you can give us examples, that'd be fantastic. [0:14:14] BS: Yes, I'd love to do that. When I was about 35, it was about 17 years after I was initially diagnosed. I was into my recovery, but not fully well yet. I wasn't very socially adept, and so I didn't have a lot of friends or social connections that I could turn to for support, or just have fun with. So, I realized that if I learned to play guitar, I'd have a hobby that would be something that connect me to other people, as well as be something that I could really enjoy on my own. I took up guitar lessons that year, that was about quite a while ago, almost 20 years ago. I began to practice, and I found that playing guitar offers me amazing benefits. Not only is it a lot of fun, but it also helps me to focus, and to understand that I can feel real emotions. When people live with schizophrenia, we take medication so often, dampen our emotions due to the dopamine effects in the brain. The illness can have that effect to for people. Feeling the genuine emotions that the music brings out in me, is something that reconnects me to more parts of myself and makes me feel more whole as a human being, and a more spiritually full. Then, also the mastery aspect, like getting better at a practice is something that I love to engage in. It gives me a sense of humility to see how I'm not that adept yet at playing guitar, but I want to be better. So, it's a driving force for motivation in my life. [0:15:52] PF: Then, physically, it has so many great benefits too, because when you're playing and you sync with a rhythm, and you start, it has so many different physiological effects that you can benefit from as well. [0:16:05] BS: Yes. Just hearing the strings ring out when I'm tuning the guitar, focuses my mind, my attention, and it calms me down. I'm reading a book now called Your Brain on Art by Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross. It was published last year, it's a New York Times bestseller, and it features my story in it, and how I've used music for my recovery. Susan Magsamen, who's the head of the International Arts and Minds Labs at Johns Hopkins University interviewed me year before and put my story in the book. But she talks about how music does affect the brain in the body, and how it can lower cortisol release, which is a stress hormone. It can put your body into a parasympathetic nervous system framework, so that you calm down and it aids your sleep. I experienced that too. I sleep so much better if I play guitar recently. It also brings in together so many different aspects of brain activity in sync with each other. That can kind of account for the experience I have of feeling more like a whole person after I play music, I think. [0:17:10] PF: Now, what about if you're just listening to music. Because I am a big proponent of playlists. I have a playlist for every mood, everything that can possibly happen in my life, I've got a playlist. I go to a playlist for it. How about that? Do you use recorded music as a way to manage emotions and regulate yourself? [0:17:28] BS: Yes, I do. I do. I really do. Like every morning when I'm driving to work or driving home from work, I put out some music to start the day well with things that are meaningful to me. Like songs that I really love, and bring me a sense of peace or inspiration. Many years ago, when I was first ill with schizophrenia, it was immensely beneficial to listen to my favorite songs that helped me to refocus on the moment and stopped associating into the psychosis that would be creeping up on me from time to time. Listening to music has been really something part of my life for like my entire life. It's a touchstone for me that helps me to cope and feel good. [0:18:08] PF: What are some of the things that musicians that you've talked with that perform at your festival? What are some of the ways that they say that it's helped their mental health? [0:18:17] BS: The musicians who perform the festivals, I haven't talked to them directly about how music benefits mental health, except for Jewel. She and I, during the dinner portion of the Music Festival event, in 2022, sat together at the dinner. So, I had a long conversation with her. For her, music has been a double-edged sword, it helps her to work through the challenges and experiences in her life, by articulating them, and kind of processing them through that lens of seeing them out there as a creation. But the thing that has come with her music is something that she wants to not have too much of, because fame can change people's perceptions of themselves, of the world around them, of reality. It can also impact your private life in so many ways. She has changed her genres many times throughout her career, and I really respect that she does this as a means to [inaudible 0:19:13] to be creative and create the kind of music that she wants to, and that's innovative for her, and brings her a sense of fulfillment, but keeps her fans guessing and on their toes at the same time. I have followed her throughout her career ever since the early 2000s, and all of her albums, even though she's been very multifaceted and eclectic in the genres that she's used. [0:19:33] PF: Yes. I had read an interview with her, where she said that she had intentionally stepped away right after she hit big, and she knew that this could be – it would be phenomenal for her career, but it can be very damaging for her mental health. So, she took a step back. I thought that was so wise and insightful for her to recognize what that could do to her. An artist, you're there to get famous, you're there to have a living you, and to have that right in front of you, and to be able to say, "But my mental health is more important," it's just absolutely incredible. [0:20:05] BS: Yes. It's incredibly wise to do it, like you say, and she has a song called Goodbye Alice in Wonderland on her album of the same name. She talks about in the song, in the lyrics that there's a difference between dreaming and pretending. She's found in her life through the fame that she's found that she doesn't want to pretend anymore. She wants to live a genuine life, and that's why she's leaving Wonderland, so to speak in the song. [0:20:32] PF: That's fantastic. There's so much good that comes out of music. One mind is doing so much good to help bridge music and mental health. For the people who are listening to this, if they have a family member who has recently been diagnosed, and things are becoming clearer, or if they have been living with this for a while, what is the thing that you want them to know about the journey that they're on? [0:20:57] BS: Yes. They should know that there is a light at the end of the tunnel, that recovery is possible, even from the most serious of mental illnesses. That if you love somebody who's living with mental illness, you should also know that they're still them, even though they may not seem like them. Medication can change people's personalities, so can the illness. But deep inside, they're still who they who you've always known. And they can live a full and meaningful life again, if you continue to love and support them and access treatment that can help them. [0:21:29] PF: That's terrific, Brandon, we're going to tell everybody where they can find out more about the One Mind Music Festival. [0:21:35] BS: It's the One Mind Music Festival for Brain Health. This year, it's our 30th anniversary event. It's on September 7th 2024. We invite people to check out our website at music-festival.org to learn more about that wonderful event. [0:21:49] PF: All right, that is terrific. I appreciate you sitting down and talking with me today. It's been a pleasure to talk to you. Like I said, I've been following you for a while. It really is an honor to be able to chat with you about it. [0:21:59] BS: Thanks, Paula. It's great to talk to you too. I love your podcast and it's been great to be on. Thank you. [END OF INTERVIEW] [0:22:07] PF: That was Brandon Staglin of One Mind, talking about music and mental health. If you'd like to learn more about One Mind, or the one Mind Music Festival for Brain Health, explore some of their resources, or follow them on social media, just visit livehappy.com and click on the podcast tab. I hope you've enjoyed this episode of On a Positive Note and look forward to joining you again next time. Until then, this is Paula Felps, reminding you to make every day a happy one. [END]

Follow along with the transcript below for episode: Changing the Conversation on Mental Illness with Patrick J. Kennedy [INTRODUCTION]   [00:00:02] PF: Thank you for joining us for episode 469 of Live Happy Now. May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and today's guest reminds us that we can't just be aware of the problem. We need to take action. I'm your host, Paula Felps. This week, I'm joined by mental health advocate Patrick J. Kennedy, whose new book, Profiles in Mental Health Courage, shares the dramatic stories of people who are living with mental illness. Because of his own challenges with mental illness and addiction, the former congressman is on a mission to change how we view mental illness in this country and, importantly, change the way we treat it. His bold plan for the future of mental health includes bipartisan action to identify, treat, and manage conditions earlier to enrich the lives of all those affected. Let's have a listen. [INTERVIEW] [00:00:54] PF: Patrick, thank you for joining me on Live Happy Now. [00:00:56] PK: Paula, it's good to be with you. [00:00:58] PF: Well, this is Mental Health Awareness Month, a fantastic time to talk to you. I'm so impressed because you have been very open with your own mental health and addiction struggles. So I wondered what led you to initially disclose all that. [00:01:12] PK: Well, I didn't really have a choice. Being a Kennedy and in the public eye, I tried to keep my addiction secret as all of us try to do because of the shame and stigma. But I had a roommate in drug rehab who sold his story of being in rehab with me, with a Kennedy, back when I was starting my political career. Of course, I thought my political career would be short-lived after that disclosure. But I was fortunate to represent a district in Rhode Island. My constituency, the only thing they disliked more than drug addicts were people who ratted on drug addicts. I survived that election, and then I went on to Congress. Because I had been outed, I was able to put my name on mental health bills, whereas my colleagues might have been more reticent because it was already out. I wasn't afraid like most of my colleagues would have been to be asked, “Well, why is this something you're signing on to? Does it perhaps maybe – do you have a mental illness or addiction?” Of course, most of my political colleagues don't want to go down that rabbit hole. But I had already been out it, so it was less of a risk for me, obviously. [00:02:30] PF: Being part of such a high-profile family, obviously, that was why your roommate from rehab wanted to sell the story because it had a net worth to it. But what was that like then for the extended family? Because most families – I'm not a scientist. I won't say all, but I would say most families have an issue of mental illness and addiction somewhere in their family. But they work very hard to keep that quiet. For it to come out in such a public family, how did that play out? [00:03:00] PK: Well, power of the silence and the stigma is so overwhelming. My family was well-known to suffer from addiction. They say addiction, alcoholism runs in families. In my family, it galloped. It was just serious, and everyone knew it but us. There was – if you went through the Kennedy section of the bookstore, two-thirds of the books would have been covering the various “scandals” that my family, my father, my mother had been through because of a direct result of their alcoholism. Yes, the problem with me coming out is that it kind of added to that narrative. I felt shamed by it because I grew up with a mother who was shamed because of her alcoholism. I would literally try to hide her when my friends’ parents would come over to pick up my friends from our house. I'd be trying to hide my mother because I didn't want any of them to see her inebriated in the middle of the day. I used to watch Saturday Night Live, and they'd do skits about my dad. I mean, it was really powerfully painful. I mean, being open about it now is kind of a way I fight against that shame which still exists. I can't help but cringe when I have to talk about this to some extent. But I find that it's therapeutic because this is a brain illness. No one wakes up, Paula, and tries to shame themselves, their family. Put their own physical lives at risk, become potentially at risk for being arrested. People don't choose to live on the streets. They don't choose to have untreated mental illness and end up in our criminal justice system. I mean, we still have not turned the corner to really understanding that these “behaviors” of people with brain illnesses are symptoms, and they're not reflections on a person's moral character. Now, being in recovery myself, I have a moral responsibility to do everything I can to keep myself from falling back into addiction. I attend 12-step meetings. I have addiction-certified psychiatrist. I worked the program, as they say. I have a moral obligation because if I drink or drug, I put not only my own life at risk. I put others at risk. I had three DWIs, and I'm – by God's grace, no one was injured. But I can't take that chance again and none the least of which I just don't want to go down that path again. I'm so grateful I have the life that I have today. [00:05:55] PF: Do you think it's more impactful because you are in a position of being able to – people will listen to you. You're in a higher-level position. Do you think it makes it more impactful, your story is more impactful, and that it feels more universal to others if you can be open about it? [00:06:12] PK: Well, when I came back from one of the DWIs and I had to go to rehab, I was asked to come and meet with so many of my congressional colleagues in Congress who I thought wanted to talk to me about legislation. Of course, I'd show up with my staff because the staff do majority of the work in Congress. My colleagues would always say, “Could you and I just talk?” Then they would tell me their own stories. [00:06:39] PF: Oh, wow. [00:06:39] PK: It occurred to me that I was the only person they knew in Congress that has a drug addiction and alcoholism. What was amazing to me is because of the anonymity and the shame of these illnesses, they knew no one else that they were working with who also shared their own illness except for me. I met with colleagues who none of them knew each other had these illnesses, and they would walk around in the halls of Congress not knowing they were walking by someone who had similar life experiences they had and were suffering from similar struggles. I wrote this Profiles in Mental Health Courage because it's still a big deal for people to share their stories. As I said, I didn't choose to do this, but these people who are in my new book, they chose to use their real names and their real stories to try to break the stigma. Unlike a lot of these self-disclosures, these people really told it all. Today, you hear a lot of people say, “Oh, I have a diagnosis,” or, “I'm in recovery.” But they don't really describe what it's like to live with these illnesses. Yet in this book, these 12 people really tell their full experience. It's a very diverse group of people who have different illnesses. I hope it's going to be helpful to people who may think of themselves as being unique and all alone. In 12-step recovery, we have some big book, and we get to read about others who also like us have had these experiences suffering from alcoholism and addiction. I have found those so comforting reading these stories because then I realized I'm not alone. Yet most Americans don't often benefit from that experience of being in recovery and having all of those tools easily accessible, especially hearing that they're not alone and what they're going through is really quite common. That was kind of the point for me to try to interview these people and have them share their full stories. [00:08:53] PF: It is so thoughtfully written. One thing that really struck me is how it shows just the universality of mental illness, of addiction. It's indiscriminate. It can take out anyone from any walk of life, any profession, vocation. How did you identify who to write about? It sounds like it wasn't very difficult to get them to open up and tell their stories, which was amazing to me because they are so personal. [00:09:21] PK: They opened up to me because, frankly, I was able to ask them to do it for our country. It’s not me, but I have this great last name. When my uncle challenged the country to ask not what their country could do for them but what they could do for their country, that kind of feeling is alive when I talk to people. They want to be part of something bigger than themselves. I just gave them that opportunity and platform and told them, yes, they were taking a big risk at disclosing their own challenges. But they also felt they had an opportunity to help others. For those of us in recovery, that is the key to our own recovery is making our own experience worthwhile, so we can try to help someone else. In helping others, we get liberated from our own self-imprisonment and our own self-centered selfish behavior. It's really the antidote for our illness to speak out and not be shamed and to help others. That's the way we get freedom from ourselves. [00:10:35] PF: Do you have an overall goal for the book? I imagine your goals for this book are not measured in sales. I feel like you have such a grand plan for this. What do you hope to see as a result of this book coming? [00:10:47] PK: Well, thank you, Paula. I started a campaign. It's not a political campaign for office. It's a campaign to build a movement for those suffering from mental illness and addiction, which of course, are treated separately in our reimbursement systems. We do not have a system, so to speak, that treats these as biopsychosocial illnesses. Biological because they're brain-based; psychological because they're mental health; and social because if people don't get support of housing, support of employment, they're just not going to have the same opportunities to succeed in recovery, which of course, we don't emphasize in the treatment of these illnesses. We only treat them in acute episodic fashion, as opposed to treating them as the chronic illnesses that they are. I have something called the Alignment for Progress because I believe we have to align financial incentives. We spend tons of money on the criminal justice system, on fire and police, on emergency rooms, on lost days and productivity and disability. I mean, we are spending so much money not taking care of these illnesses that I think if we align the budgets to actually prevent many of these illnesses from pathologizing, i.e. let's treat these like we do cancer, which is screen for stage one. Not wait till people are at death store and in a stage-four crisis. These are the things that I think we need to build into a national agenda. When I was in Congress, I could go to any special interest group, and they would tell me. The labor unions would tell me, “This is what is overtime pay. These are health benefits. This is pension and retirement. These are safe working conditions.” They literally have their whole agenda organized. I hate to say it but in mental health and addiction, we do not have a consumer-driven movement like every other patient advocacy movement. We don't have a common agenda. Everyone is marching up to Capitol Hill with their own diagnosis and bipolar over here and depression over here and anxiety over here and alcoholism over here. Even alcoholism and opioid use disorder are treated separately in terms of people's mindset. You could go on and on. The problem is we're all united on 99% of the same things, and yet we're not organized like a AFL-CIO or a League of Conservation Voters. [00:13:21] PF: Why do you think that is? If you look at the sheer volume of people who are suffering from it, you would think that someone else would have thought of this before now and started bringing it together under one umbrella. [00:13:33] PK: Well, the psychologist can't convene the psychiatrist and vice versa. The peer support people can't convene the social workers and marriage counselors. The schizophrenia people want SMI as the priority, which they deserve. Then we need mental wellness, but we don't really have that covered because that's not a diagnostic group. That falls into public health category. My point is no one's been able to kind of bring them all together. As I said, I was really honored to be the author of the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act because as I said, I was outed, so I had no choice in the matter. I felt like I could put my name on a bill that had mental and addiction in it because, essentially, I had already been outed. That bill really affects all groups because it calls for reimbursement by insurance companies, including the federal government, for mental illness and addiction in a way that's no different from other chronic illnesses like asthma and cardiovascular disease and cancer, so forth. That is a bill that is kind of like a medical version of civil rights. It affects everybody that's kind of marginalized from these illnesses. Because of that, I have kind of a unique opportunity to kind of pull everyone in together because everyone, whether you're a psychologist, social worker, peer support specialist psych, you all benefit from this. If you're an inpatient hospital or an outpatient clinic, they all benefit from ending discrimination in reimbursement and coverage by insurance companies. I'm the guy that brought that, so I can call these people and basically say to these folks, “This is the new frontier for us. We need to band together and build a voice.” I often say it's like that Godfather film where they say, “We're bigger than US steel,” back in the fifties, talking about organized crime. This is the biggest special interest group in this country. If you count all the families affected by overdose, suicide, those living with these illnesses, there's no doubt everybody's affected by these illnesses, including the family members who are often left out of the narrative. If we ever organized, can you imagine the power we would have to transform the system? That's what I'm after. In the back of the book, I have a QR code which links people to a policy guide. I'm literally trying to get donors to allow us to build literally a movement. Let's get the number of people that care about this on listserv. If someone's running for office, they know how many people in their district, whether it's a state or federal office care about this issue. If we start doing those things, I am telling you we'll get more than the money we're getting today, and we'll get more of the urgency than we're getting today. [00:16:47] PF: How are you seeing the attitudes changing? How is that going to affect how it moves forward? Then part three of this question is in what still needs to happen. [00:16:57] PK: If we normalize this, if we allow people to get screened at every place of their medical system, if they're a cancer patient, they had better be screened for anxiety and depression and trauma. If they're having heart disease, they're four times more likely to die of a heart attack if they have depression. If they are diabetic and they don't have their alcoholism treated, just forget treating diabetes and so forth and so on. Our whole medical system ignores mental health and addiction. I think the more people we normalize this and just treat it as part of treatment for every illness, the less kind of bound up and stigma will be. Look at what we've done with HIV/AIDS. You look on the TV and you see ads for HIV drugs. Look on the TV and there's ads for erectile dysfunction and STDs. I mean, there's no difference in terms of the stigma that those illnesses had to overcome and the stigma we have to overcome. We can do this. We just have to do it as soon as possible because too many people are dying out there. [00:18:16] PF: Do you see it getting worse or getting better? Are there higher incidents of mental health problems? Or are we just more aware of it? What's the research and numbers showing? [00:18:25] PK: Well, the bottom line is we're playing a lot of catch-up because we've never invested in this space. Today, there's greater demand. Part of that's reduction in stigma. But part of it is the real trauma that people are living with today and the toxic world that we're living in and the ubiquitous technology that's sapping us. I think we're going to continue to see tragically worse and worse statistics in terms of the number of people dying of suicide and overdose, unless we take a fundamentally different approach. That means not just treating these illnesses after they occur but doing our best to try to prevent these illnesses from occurring by embedding, if you will, coping mechanisms, stress management, problem-solving skill development for our kids in elementary and secondary education. If kids cannot learn to self-modulate, in other words, understand how to manage their emotions, they can learn all the numeracy and history and literacy and not be successful in life because if you can't manage your feelings, then you're just not going to be successful in life. Then what we need to do is, just as I said, screen early so that for those who have kind of more predisposition for illnesses, severe mental illnesses, schizophrenia, bipolar, we know who's at risk. We could deploy a lot better early detection and screening. We need to be doing that because if we intervene, for example, with people who have their first psychotic break, we can dramatically reduce the disability that comes from that illness. We just don't treat people with schizophrenia, and we don't get their coordinated care, which is the evidence form of intervention put in place until after they've had multiple psychotic breaks, which frankly really pathologizes their illness, which means they have to take higher medications for their illness. If you have to take higher medications, then there's higher side effects, which means people don't want to take those medications. Imagine if we treated them early and they didn't have to take those high doses. They could probably stay compliant and live much more productive meaningful lives. [00:20:58] PF: Is this a solvable problem? Can we manage it if we start really working together and implementing these solutions that you're talking about? [00:21:07] PK: 100%. We can do this. We could literally – if we have this as an objective, we can align all of our federal agencies and departments and coordinate with county and municipal and states to really address this in a comprehensive way. I said there's so much cost to us not doing this. We just need to organize ourselves with all the resources. Now, when there's a tornado or hurricane or fire, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA, comes in to manage the aftermath. We need a FEMA for our homeless population with mental illness. We need a FEMA for the scourge of addiction in this country, which means we need a comprehensive approach. When FEMA comes in, they support the housing. They support the employment. They give small business loans. They help with food. They will help with clothing. They coordinate with Social Services. We need that type of approach for these illnesses. We need a multipronged systems-based approach to addressing these. If we do that, and we can do that, we will dramatically reduce the number of people dying of these illnesses and people who are suffering. Keep in mind, even if someone's not dying, they're dying inside. They're not living their full lives, and they're not living their lives. It's one thing to live physically. It's another to live spiritually and socially and emotionally. We don't look at that in our medical system and understand the value of people living free, of being hostage to their brain illness. [00:22:58] PF: You're doing such incredible work. We're going to let our listeners know how they can find your book. We'll give them links to the work that you're doing, connect them with that QR code, and so they can really support this. Because I know it's something everyone's concerned about, everyone is affected by. I think a lot of times, we don't know what to do, and we feel like, yes, there isn't a joint movement. There isn't something that I can do that can help affect change. I so appreciate all the work that you're doing and the fact that you're going to let our listeners jump in and help you on that mission. Patrick, I wish you the best of success with Profiles in Mental Health Courage and with all the other amazing projects you're working on. [00:23:33] PK: I want to thank you for allowing me to come on, and I appreciate the chance to speak to you and your listeners. [END OF INTERVIEW] [00:23:44] PF: That was Patrick J. Kennedy, author of Profiles in Mental Health Courage, and an advocate for mental health and addiction education and treatment. If you'd like to learn more about his initiatives, discover his book, or follow him on social media, just visit us at livehappy.com and click on the podcast tab. While you're there, be sure to sign up for our weekly Live Happy newsletter. Every week, we'll drop a little bit of joy in your inbox with the latest stories, podcast info, and even a happy song of the week. That is all we have time for today. We'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: Repairing the Mother/Daughter Relationship With Leslie and Lindsey Glass [INTRODUCTION]   [00:00:02] PF: Thank you for joining us for episode 468 of Live Happy Now. Mother's Day might be behind us. But for many moms and daughters, that holiday can be less about celebrating and more about surviving one another. I'm your host, Paula Felps. This week, I'm joined by co-authors and mother-daughter duo, Leslie and Lindsey Glass, who have just released the book The Mother-Daughter Relationship Makeover. They know all too well how fraught this relationship can be. They're here to talk about what makes this relationship so difficult for some and how you can rebuild that relationship, find a positive pathway to peace, and finally restore the love between you. Let's have a listen. [INTERVIEW] [00:00:47] PF: Leslie and Lindsey, thank you so much for joining me on Live Happy Now. [00:00:51] LESLIE GLASS: Oh, we're delighted to be here. [00:00:54] LINDSEY GLASS: Yes, good to meet you. [00:00:55] PF: I want to start with the big question, and that is the one most of us have, and that is why is the mother-daughter relationship so challenging. [00:01:04] LINDSEY GLASS: I'm going to start because I – [00:01:05] PF: Let the daughter start. [00:01:09] LINDSEY GLASS: I think there are a lot of reasons, and I will certainly let Leslie jump in. One of the things that I think is the biggest factor is that often moms feel that daughters are reflective of them. If daughter isn't dressing right, if she isn't acting right, if she's doing things that are embarrassing, that is a reflection that maybe mom didn't raise her right. I also think in a situation like ours, I look just like her. My mom was perfectly dressed at all times and quaffed, and that was not my style. She likes to call me, what a street rat, which is very kind. But it was the eighties and the nineties. It was grunge. It was hip-hop. I did not follow her style. I did not follow her interests. She cooked. She knitted. She planted flowers. Now, the irony is I do now, but then I didn't. That's what I think is a big trigger for moms. This child looks like me but is nothing like me. [00:02:15] LESLIE GLASS: All right, I'm going to take us on a completely different track here. [00:02:19] PF: I love this. [00:02:21] LESLIE GLASS: I think the conflict between mothers and daughters begins with the fact that mothers have control in the young years, and they need to have control. Moms are the ones who tell you what to eat and when to go to bed and how to do everything. I think that moms do this because it's their job to keep their children safe, and it's their job to kind of raise their children well. I think what happens when daughters go to middle school and high school, that's where the independence, the – of course, starting at the age of two, they want their own independence. But going into middle school, when girls have their own secrets, they have their own friends, they have extreme challenges, especially nowadays. Wanting to have moms not in their head, not telling them what to do, not telling them how to look, all of those things create conflicts that begin kind of in the teenage years, and they can get stuck there. Lindsey says it's about daughters being the reflection of moms. I think moms want their daughters to be safe. I think they want them to be safe. I think they want them to behave well and achieve well. Who wants to do that when you're a teenager? [00:03:38] PF: Exactly. Well, how is it different than sons? I have friends. I don't have children but I have friends. Pretty much all my friends have children, and I see a big difference with those who have boys and those who have – I have one friend, very good friend, and she's like, “I would much rather have my two boys and put up with all the things that come with boys than navigate with girls.” What's the difference? [00:04:01] LESLIE GLASS: I'm going to start. I think that very often, you just give your sons a lot of slack. You think they're handsome. You think they're wonderful. You think they're doing well. But we can't make generalizations about anything. I think we’re – I would say girls are prey animals, so we are very, very concerned about keeping our daughters safe. I will say that over and over and over again. Your son is going to get into fights. He's going to tussle. He may start drinking early and do bad things. But you kind of let it go because you think they're tougher, and they can handle it. Of course, some mothers in many cultures think their sons are perfect, no matter what. [00:04:42] PF: Absolutely. [00:04:43] LESLIE GLASS: What would you say, Lindsey? [00:04:45] LINDSEY GLASS: Yes. I think it's just less emotionally charged with boys. I've certainly seen dads who are really hard on their sons, and let the girls get away with everything. I do think the wanting to protect the daughter and keep her safe and know everything has a lot to do with it. Yes, I think boys just share less also, so you don't necessarily know. A mentor, and I was talking to one of my colleagues there, and I was like, “How are you doing?” She goes, “I've got a teenage daughter,” and I just started laughing. [00:05:20] PF: It’s like that’s all you need to say. [00:05:22] LINDSEY GLASS: I said, “What's going on?” She goes, “She's in her feelings.” No one needed to say anything else. Everyone in the room understood. [00:05:31] PF: It's like a moment of silence for Mom. [00:05:32] LINDSEY GLASS: That 13, 14-year-old. Yes, inner feelings. I think that's part of it. The girls will come home, and sometimes they share. Sometimes, they don't. “Oh, they cut me out of the friend group. I didn't get invited to the mall.” I think it opens the door for a lot more drama. [00:05:50] PF: Right. Now, you all have an interesting relationship, and this book is a product of that. First of all, I have to say this book is so insightful, and it takes us through so many areas of conflict that makes us realize how universal this is. Just that recognition is incredibly helpful. But can you talk a little bit? Tell our listeners a little about your relationship and how that led to writing this book. [00:06:16] LINDSEY GLASS: I'll jump in on this one. We went off track in my teen years, and we got into the fighting habit. I call it the fighting habit. We had different communication styles. We had different personality styles. We just started clashing at a certain point and really struggled as the years went on. We were always close. There were times we were very close, but we would just battle. As the years went on, it becomes more and more toxic to have somebody in your life that you're battling and issues of control, issues of boundaries. That kind of split us up. We both went off and did a lot of our own work and found our way back. Here are a few of the things we realized. Almost everybody's struggling with a few of these issues. Too, we're so busy pointing fingers at other people. We forget sometimes to step back, stop fighting, and look at ourselves. There were so many universal things that we were experiencing that we were seeing happening with. I'm in recovery. I sponsor young women. I’m sponsored, which means I work with younger sober people, and we were hearing the same things, and nobody had tools. We were seeing tons of people who just were screaming at each other with no tools on how to stop. We've been writing for our website for 12 years on relationships and mental health and behavioral health. We said, “Hey, we actually have a story to share, and we have the tools to share.” Because we're a family in recovery, we're very solution-based. We'll talk about the problem, but we want to move on to the solution, so less takeover. [00:08:01] LESLIE GLASS: You did that really well, Lindsey. I've been a good trainer as a mom. I think that – [00:08:08] LINDSEY GLASS: She talks about it like a horse trainer. [00:08:10] PF: Exactly. [00:08:10] LESLIE GLASS: She's got a great gate. She can [inaudible 00:08:13] a pony. [00:08:14] PF: She can move her head the right way. [00:08:16] LESLIE GLASS: I think that Lindsey hit the nail on the head. We've been writing about relationships for 12 years, and I've been a novelist for 30 years before that. I'm a novelist. I was a journalist before that. When Lindsey and I started working together, our whole purpose was to try and create the content, a body of content that would lift the stigma from addiction and explain what life in recovery looks like. In order to do that, we had to kind of out ourselves. I mean, we had to say, “You want to know what recovery looks like or if you think recovery isn't working, we're in recovery. This is what recovery looks like. It looks like the two of us.” [00:08:58] LINDSEY GLASS: Not always but sometimes. [00:09:00] LESLIE GLASS: Well, yes. I mean, it doesn't always look like us because there are some families where part of the family is in recovery and part of the family isn't in recovery. There are a lot of clashes over that. We had a mission. I think that Lindsey and I have been writers forever and ever and ever. That is part of our solution. Our part of our solution is creating the tools and being able to understand what's happening. We've been writing about this family function, dysfunction, addiction, what is addiction, what is recovery for a lot of years. We decided because self-help books can be kind of descriptive in terms of telling you what to do prescriptive but without having the background of being able to say, “Well, how does change really happen?” The evolution was to take the knowledge that we had acquired over 12 years and put it in one book. [00:09:51] PF: One thing I really liked about this is you have the journal prompts at the end. It is a very interactive book because it's not something that you just read and you're getting information thrown at you. You actually participate in it and decide how this affects you and what you need to do. I really love that about this book. [00:10:09] LESLIE GLASS: Not everybody likes to write, but there are ways that you can use the journal prompts. The idea is to start in the beginning by telling your story and getting some understanding about where you and your mother come from. What are your backgrounds? The idea is to start getting in the habit of kind of writing things down and with the idea that in the beginning of the book, you think one way, and then you go through these 61 journal prompts. At the end of the book, look at it and say, “Oh, wait a minute. Okay, I'm different now. Or I can look at it, and my perspective has changed.” [00:10:43] PF: That's super important, and I love that you brought up the fact that you dive into your background because so many books, so many resources, they look at the immediate problem. Can you explain to us why it's so important for you to go back? You went way back, not just how your mother was raised. I found it fascinating as you tied all these threads together and showed the way that your great, great grandmother's upbringing influenced you. Can you talk about that, why it's so important to dig back into that? [00:11:14] LESLIE GLASS: I will because I think when we just look at our mother, we're just looking at this person who irritates us. No matter how great your relationship is, this person who raised you is going to be irritating or in some way or another. But how did she get the way she is, and how did I get the way I am? As we started to write our own stories, I wanted everybody to go back and be able to see, “Well, my mother was an immigrant,” or, “My grandmother was an immigrant.” Or she was Greek or she was Irish or she was Swedish. How does that culture inform our behavior? A lot of our behavior, a lot of our beliefs come from our culture and our religion. How do those different components on make our mother act the way she did, our grandmother act the way she did? Now, I'm acting the way I am because the way I act are things that were taught to me by my grandmother who lived a hundred years ago and my great-grandmother who raised her. When you understand the components and the history of the women in your family and what they've been through, maybe the traumas that they've been through, you have more perspective, and you have more compassion for the way you were raised. All of us have toxic aspects to our relationships. [00:12:35] LINDSEY GLASS: I think that's really, really good. I think one of the things I just wanted to expand on for a second was it's that compassion and that point of view. I was so angry at my mom about certain behaviors and certain things. Now, I'm an adult. I'm in my 40s, and I'm writing a book, and I'm reading about how she had nobody to help her when she had young children. Her mother died when she was young. People were trying to get her not to work. All she wanted to do was work, and they didn't want to let her work. There were just so many things and traumas that happened in her own life that I didn't know. As a teenager, you’re so angry like, “What's wrong with you?” Then as an adult, you're like, “Oh, my gosh.” She was dealing with mental health stuff, whatever the situation was. She was in a tumultuous marriage. She had no female support in her life. We didn't live in a world where we could talk about how we were feeling. This is a relatively new thing. Learning that mental health history is also really important, so you're not sitting here going, “Why do I feel crazy? Why do I –” Well, maybe there are reasons. [BREAK] [00:13:42] PF: We'll be right back with Leslie and Lindsey Glass. But I wanted to take a moment to talk about how you can make your day more comfortable and more stylish with help from Franne Golde. This line of clothing was created by a Grammy-winning musician who knows the importance of looking good on the road. But she didn't want to sacrifice comfort, so she created a line of wrinkle-free essentials to build a wardrobe that feels as good as it looks. Right now, Franne Goldie is providing Live Happy Now listeners 20% off their first order of $75 or more. You can go to frannegolde.com/podcast and use the code HAPPY for 20% off. That's F-R-A-N-N-E-G-O-L-D-E.com/podcast for 20% off your order of $75 or more with the code HAPPY. Now, let's get back to my talk with Leslie and Lindsey to learn more about how to repair a fractured mother-daughter relationship. [INTERVIEW RESUMED] [00:14:41] PF: As you came to grips with everything, your relationship, all the dynamics of it, how did you outline how to put that into this book? It's very thoughtfully arranged and it takes us through this. As you said, these steps at the end, you're like, “I'm a changed person.” How did you come up with this outline? [00:14:59] LINDSEY GLASS: What most people don't know is we actually wrote a different version of this book 14 years ago. We were glad that version never made it because we had so much more to go through, and it was a much darker story. It didn't have the self-help stuff because that's something our business has grown into. We had a lot of the story that we wanted to tell about ourselves already in our heads. Then as far as how we actually outline the steps, we really wanted to take the reader on kind of a transformative experience so that when they started, they were over here thinking, “Oh, she's the problem. This is what's happened in my life.” We followed almost a 12-step formula, which is we want you to get some understanding about who you are and what's happened. Then we want you to understand what the issues are, so we chose the eight biggest issues that mothers and daughters fight about for part two. Then for part three and part four, that's pretty much all self-help. Part three, obviously, if you're in this situation, you need healing and forgiveness. We spent four years doing that. We're going to talk about all the things we did. Then the end is some people are not going to be able to reconcile if there's addiction or serious mental health issues or somebody is unsafe. These situations happen, and we wanted to create a section for what to do if you can't reconcile. Because we love recovery, it changed our lives. We did a whole recovery lifestyle piece because any family that's been through dysfunction, everybody's recovering from something. Has a family member been sick? Has there been suicide in the family? Did somebody lose a job and it created financial instability? All of these things you can find recovery from. That's the sort of model we followed, and we got a lot of good advice along the way. [00:17:06] LESLIE GLASS: I think it's funny because our contract says that we need to write kind of a self-help book in 165 pages, right? When Lindsey and I started getting into it, we knew that the issues that mother and daughters fight about, the eight issues that we chose, was almost the book contract. [00:17:24] LINDSEY GLASS: Length of the book, yes. [00:17:25] LESLIE GLASS: Yes, the length of the book. You can't just start with triggers and traumas. You can't start a book with what are your triggers because you have to first understand who you are. What is it about my daughter that's making me angry? Does it come from me or does it come from my mother, right? We really felt that you need to have a background for everything that you're talking about. You can't just – Lindsey, you said it perfectly. So many self-help books that we read, they're taking the problem. You're fighting. You may be addicted to fighting because it's bringing those bad hormones front and center. [00:18:01] LINDSEY GLASS: We used our own story for there always to be a little bit of background. Here's what happened to us. Now, you can figure out what happened to you. [00:18:11] PF: I like that because kind of like sitting down with a therapist where you're not just having to say, “Okay, here's what's going on.” Or it's like you soften us up a bit by sharing you're so vulnerable and open with us about your story, which makes me as a reader more willing to be open. I think that's very well done with this. [00:18:29] LINDSEY GLASS: It's just interesting. When you start to actually talk about these kind of – I don't want to call them shameful but issues that nobody likes to admit. People don't like to admit that there are problems in the family or that somebody's lying or that somebody has an addiction. I'm sure you know as well as I do. Addictions don't have to be just to drugs and alcohol. [00:18:50] PF: Right. I would love for our listeners to hear about some of the universal conflicts because you do break it down where someone might be reading it thinking, “I thought it was just me and my mom that went through it about this topic.” Let's talk about what are the major areas of conflict between mothers and daughters. [00:19:08] LESLIE GLASS: I'm going to start with food because I think food is a big one in this country right now, and we do talk a lot about food. I was overfed as a child. That meant that people were pushing a lot of food into me all of the time when I wasn't hungry, but I wasn't allowed to have snacks. Now, all day every day in America, people are feeding their children snacks all day long. Then they're worried about whether they're too heavy or they're not too heavy. The whole idea of what the food industry has done to us in terms of not eating meals anymore. We used to eat meals. We used to have breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Now, it's like snack time all day long. [00:19:49] PF: We graze. We don't eat. We graze. Yes. [00:19:51] LESLIE GLASS: I think it's very difficult to be thin in a family where people are big. I think it's very difficult to be big in a family where the people are thin. I think there's a lot of conflict around food and culture and confusing food with love and all of that. I would say food is a big one. [00:20:14] LINDSEY GLASS: I'll list them out, and then I'll tell you the ones that we struggled with. We did boyfriends, girlfriends, romantic partners. I mean, come on, endless possibilities. Does mom not like the boyfriend, the girlfriend? Are there sexuality questions that family members don't understand? Romantic partners was a huge one. That wasn't an issue for us actually. She was very, very accepting of my friends and partners, so we didn't actually have that one. We had money. Money was one of our biggest trigger issues because my mom was successful. She spoiled me, and I grew up thinking that what she had I had. We had to do some real boundary work. We can talk about money in a second. There was food, independence, and codependence. [00:21:05] LESLIE GLASS: Codependence. [00:21:06] LINDSEY GLASS: Those issues of mom wanting to know where you are, what you're doing, are you calling me, what's your curfew, and daughters wanting to be more independent. Or for every one of these situations, there's the opposite. There's the good girl with a party-girl mom. Why aren't I being picked up on school? Why am I the only one left over at the sleepover whose mom hasn't picked her up? My mom would forget me and bring me places on the wrong day. Guess what? So did her mom, did the same thing. Full taffeta dress, party gift in my hand, knocking on the door. “Leslie, today is not the birthday party. Take her home. It's next week.” [00:21:44] PF: Oh, no. [00:21:47] LESLIE GLASS: I have trouble with numbers. [00:21:50] PF: That's because you're a journalist. [00:21:51] LINDSEY GLASS: And I inherited that. Appearance and style, that's another big one. I was a club kid and a grunge kid, and that was infuriating to my mother, boundaries and detachment. Then the last two, and this isn't for every family, but when these are involved, they're a huge deal, drugs and alcohol and mental illness. Those to us and from a little bit of research seem to be the biggest global issues that mothers and daughters fight about. For us, obviously, drugs and alcohol, independence and codependence, those were our big ones. [00:22:31] PF: Right now, mental health is such a huge concern. We just did something, the World Happiness Report, and it showed how Gen Z in particular is suffering. Their mental health is very, very poor. Then the millennials aren't doing great either. Gen X is a little better, and then the boomers are fine. What then, as parents, if you're a mother and you have a daughter who is part of Gen Z, who is going through this mental distress that's happening globally really, what are some of the ways that they can navigate that? [00:23:05] LINDSEY GLASS: When I talk to parents, one of the things we want to have them do is really pay attention. Don't look the other way. It's not a phase. It's usually not a phase. Or the boys will be boys, that's not acceptable. These are not acceptable things anymore. We have to really look at the behavior and ask questions and not all always – here's the thing. No one wants to believe their child lies, no one. But some do, and it's very hard when you talk to parents because they say, “My child would never lie to me.” Then I get in the room with the kids, and I'm like, “How many of you are actually telling your parents everything that's going on in your lives?” Not one hand goes up, so they have to check. My mom talks. She goes, “I never called any other parents.” I believed her. I was never where I said I was. Had she called once, she would have known. I was never where I said I was. I mean, I might have gone to that person's house at the end of the night, but we certainly weren't sitting home baking Toll House cookies and watching movies. [00:24:10] LESLIE GLASS: You said you were. [00:24:10] PF: That is not what was going on. [00:24:13] LINDSEY GLASS: That's what I kind of say to parents. Take it really seriously, and always feel good and okay about getting outside help. Kids don't want to talk to their parents. They're going to talk to somebody else. When you ask kids why they don't want to talk to their parents, they don't want to disappoint them. They don't want to worry them. They don't want to start a fight. Kids aren't being bad. They're just – I didn't want to say to my mom, “I think I'm a drug addict at 15.” Mom, do you want to add stuff? [00:24:43] LESLIE GLASS: I do because you write a lot about despair. I think what happens in middle school and high school, kids experience trauma, a lot more trauma than in earlier generations. I think a lot of the trauma happens then. It happens because of drinking. It happens because of bullying. It happens for a myriad of reasons. But kids are – threefold concern is how am I achieving, how do I look, and how do I behave. That's how parents and their teachers are looking at them. They're being judged by their looks, their behavior, and their achievement. Basically, what makes us good human beings and what makes us happy human beings later in life have nothing to do with how we look, how we achieve, and how we behave. It's what's happening inside. The one thing that parents are not talking about, except your friend who you were mentoring the other day said inner feelings, but basically parents are not really connected with their children's inner feelings. They don't have the tools for children and young adults to be able to talk to them in a way that inspires them and helps them move past whatever destructive feelings or conditioning they're getting elsewhere. We just aren't helping our teens and our young adults. They don't have that drive and ambition. A lot of them don't have it, so it may be because marijuana is more prevalent, and it makes you not care a lot. I think that we're missing a step in development, and that's emotional development. Because we're not working on that piece of human development, our young people are feeling empty, lost. They don't know what their place is in society, and they're scared. [00:26:32] LINDSEY GLASS: Let's be honest. There were no shootings in schools when I was growing up. There was no climate catastrophe. We were way, way more protected in the world in the early nineties than we are now. [00:26:44] LESLIE GLASS: I think every student, every young person, whether it's a high school student or a college student, knows somebody who's died or maybe a number of people who have died. Their siblings are may be using drugs. They may be incredibly frightened. We're concerned about mental health, but are we using the kind of tools that we need to stay connected emotionally with our children? Mental health is not jumping off the roof. It's finding ways to live happy. Live well and be happy. [00:27:13] PF: It is. It is. When children are born, you hear parents say, “I don't care. I just want them to be happy and healthy.” Then by the time they're three years old, they're like, “I want them to get into this school, and I want them to do this, and I want them to be a doctor or a lawyer.” It’s interesting to see how every parent wants their child to be happy, but we're not really equipping them with the tools and skills to achieve happiness. We teach them how to be successful, but we don't teach them how to be happy. [00:27:40] LESLIE GLASS: That's right. Yes, that's right. [00:27:42] PF: One thing that struck me as I was reading your book is how this is about changing the relationship between the current mother and daughter. How, in doing that, is that going to change subsequent generations? That’s what strikes me is like this is a book that does just change the two – the mother-daughter. You can affect generations by making these changes. Have you talked about that? [00:28:06] LESLIE GLASS: Absolutely. It's like breaking the cycles, breaking the cycles, breaking all destructive cycles, whether it's a fighting habit, whether it's being judgmental about everything the other one does, whether it's that fight or flight kind of slamming doors or that being silent, that being silent and being cold to each other. The whole idea is to find compassion for the other person and have the tools, have the actual ways to stop your fighting, have the – we talk about triggers and how to stop your triggers. I think that once you create new habits and new cultural habits with your mother and daughter, your grandchildren are going to repeat it, your sons. It will also work with all your other relationships. [00:28:56] PF: About that, go ahead and answer. I was going to ask about that, too. [00:28:59] LINDSEY GLASS: Well, I'm going to lead right into that question because often when one person changes, people follow. If one person gets sober, sometimes other people get sober. If one person in the family says, “Hey, I'm not going to fight anymore. You want to talk to me. Here's how you have to talk to me,” and it sticks. Then, yes, you're going to be moving forward. I think the whole thing about stopping the generational stuff is clarity because people are walking around not even understanding that they're behaving in ways. I have heard so many women tell me how crazy their mother is. Then I'm looking at their lives and their behavior and their relationships, and I'm like, “Apple doesn't fall far from the tree, honey.” In our family, we said, “Hey, we've got X, Y, and Z going on, and we don't want this going on to the next generation. So here are the things we're willing to do.” Here's the problem with outing yourself. Once everybody knows, you have to be accountable. There's a certain amount of accountability that we're forced into just by – I'm like – now, I can't scream at people in the car because somebody will recognize me. [00:30:15] LESLIE GLASS: She's not so recovered. [00:30:18] PF: As I said, this is an incredible book. It has so much advice and so much insight to give. What is it that you hope to see come out of it? [00:30:25] LINDSEY GLASS: My big thing was hope because when we were in that bad place, it felt hopeless. It wasn't until I went into certain kinds of groups that I even knew other people were dealing with it. My hope is that it shares with a lot of people that a lot of us are going through this and that you're not alone. If you struggle with your mom or daughter, you are just not alone, and there are some solutions. What about you? [00:30:50] LESLIE GLASS: I just want people to understand more about the female experience. I want people to be able to look and say, “Oh, my gosh. I didn't know that about women. I didn't know that about women. I didn't know.” It was looking back a hundred years of the way my great-grandmother probably didn't know how to read. She raised nine children, and they all went on to be successful people. I just want people to understand how much trauma and how difficult it is to be a woman. How great we are. The Chinese say that we hold up half of the heaven, but we probably hold up the whole heaven because there wouldn't be any humanity without us. I want mothers and daughters to have more compassion for who we are and what we've accomplished in the world, what we have to go through. [00:31:44] PF: Lindsey, Leslie, fabulous spending time with you today. I know our listeners are going to love this. We're going to tell them how they can find you, how they can find your book, and how they can start healing their own mother-daughter relationships. [00:31:56] LESLIE GLASS: Awesome. [00:31:57] PF: Thank you for what you've done. [00:31:57] LINDSEY GLASS: Thank you. [END OF INTERVIEW] [00:32:03] PF: That was Leslie and Lindsey Glass, authors of The Mother-Daughter Relationship Makeover. If you'd like to learn more about them, discover their book, or follow them on social media, just visit us at livehappy.com and click on the podcast tab. We hope you've enjoyed this episode of Live Happy Now. If you aren't already receiving us every week, we invite you to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. While you're there, feel free to drop us a review and let us know what you think of the show. That is all we have time for today. We'll meet you back here again next week for an all-new episode. Until then, this is Paula Felps, reminding you to make every day a happy one. [END]

Follow along with the transcript below for episode: Making the Most of the Rest of Your Days With Jodi Wellman [INTRODUCTION] [0:00:02] PF: Thank you for joining us for Episode 463 of Live Happy Now. What if thinking about death could give more meaning to your life? Well, today's guest says, it can, and she has the research to back it up. I'm your host, Paula Felps. Today, I'm talking with Jodi Wellman, founder of Four Thousand Mondays, a company designed to help people make the most of their time on this planet. Her TED Talk, How Death Can Bring You Back to Life has more than 1.3 million views. And her new book, You Only Die Once: How to Make It to The End with No Regrets is being released in just a few weeks. I sat down with Jodi to find out what started this mission and more importantly, how we all can live better by counting the Mondays that we have left. Let's have a listen. [EPISODE] [0:00:49] PF: Jodi, thank you so much for coming on Live Happy Now. [0:00:53] JW: Oh, I'm just downright giddy to be here with you, Paula. [0:00:55] PF: As I told you, I have been so looking forward to this conversation. We've been emailing for a while. I kind of had to wait until we are closer to your book coming out, and it's going to be coming out soon. But even without your book being on the shelves, yet, you've been creating some incredible content that reminds us to live our life and be alive. I wanted to find out your backstory. How did that become your mission? [0:01:19] JW: Well, thank you for the compliment, and thank you for asking. I have been – I would say, appropriately interested in our mortality for a very long time, so since I was probably my early twenties. Just to cut to the chase, I really do believe that the way that we can wake up to living is through the – sometimes stark, and sometimes, a bit of a splash cold water in your face reminder that, "Right, right, right. We're totally going to die." How do we use that not to feel morbid? I found in my twenties; I was always just fascinated by it. Then, my mom died. She went and had the nerve to die, that lovely lady in her late fifties. It wasn't so much for me that she died, which was obviously a crappy thing. But it was my perception at the time that she died with a bunch of regrets. It broke my heart to see as I cleaned up her place, like the vestiges of all these dreams that were just sort of like – well, I don't know. I think I call it somewhere in the book, like the land of dormant intentions. Like all these ideas that she was talented, and creative, and fabulous and just didn't execute. It really woke me up to this idea that we have an end date, we don't know when it is. Here we are taking our time for granted. I guess that was a huge wake up for me, which was not just so much that, "Oh, you could die unexpectedly early." But it's like, oh, you could die in a way where maybe we didn't do this life justice, because we all have hopes, and plans, and dreams, and goals, and things. What a shame if we don't get to do them? [0:02:54] PF: That's so insightful that that occurred at such a young age, that you're interested in this, and your fascination, because we are immortal into our thirties. It doesn't cross our mind that anything, even when we lose friends unexpectedly, it's like well, that's tragic, and it's not supposed to happen, but it's not going to happen to me. [0:03:14] JW: Right. Thanks for touching on that, because we do a really good job of sort of just denying the inevitable. If it happens to other people, or they're older, or it is just a very rare tragedy and occurrence that will not be my fate. Then, you're right, as we age, we start to see that, "Wait a minute, maybe this ruse I've been telling myself is, maybe it's actually closer than I think." So let's use that instead of triggering an existential crisis. Let's make it like existential catharsis. Oh, we just coined something new here today. Let's use this, right? [0:03:46] PF: Yes, because you could almost call this the joy of death, the way that you approach it. I mean, you give us so much inspiration to like, "Okay, I have an end date, and here's what I've got to do before." It's not like a bucket list, it's different than a bucket list. Can you explain that? [0:04:01] JW: Oh, sure. I think many of us, I have strong feelings about the bucket list. It can be lovely just as an aside to touch on that for a sec. If we do identify things that we yearn in long to do that might light us up, but I do think that there's danger because it creates this sort of false sense of satisfaction. There's research around this, right? The idea that sometimes we identify a goal, we put it on a piece of paper, or a spreadsheet, and we put it away, and then we go and live our whole ho-hum Monday to Friday lives. Because it's this notion that we'll do it later. And danger signs, like let's have flashing lights happen, because this deferral of life. I'm not even just worried that we won't get there, because odds are maybe slim, but many of us were waiting to live when we retire. Well, being exactly in our prime at that stage of life, to be traipsing around the world. But, I just think, what about our lives now, don't they deserve something? It is more than just ticking things off a list. I think I have this framework about living wider with vitality and deeper with meaning. I love just using that as a way to stop and assess how wide and deep is my life while I'm here. [0:05:11] PF: Can you talk about Four Thousand Mondays? First of all, when it started, and then explain to us what it is because I really, really love this. And your TED Talk, we're going to give listeners a link to your TED Talk, because that is a such an excellent 15-minute explanation of it. [0:05:26] JW: Thank you so much for that. Well, Four Thousand Mondays, I named my company that because that is approximately the math of what we get if we're lucky to get that many weeks. I've chose Mondays on purpose, because they're just the most annoying and I don't want to annoy people, but I want to – if it was like 4,000 Saturdays, we’d be like, "Woohoo. Life's great, don't need to think about it." But Monday's do rankle, and I want to rankle in the right way to say, "Are you enjoying getting up on a Monday morning, or are you dreading it, or maybe somewhere in between, depending on the day and week?" So, roughly with that timeline, that's what we have. Started Four Thousand Mondays after I studied positive psychology of all things at the University of Pennsylvania. That was in 2020. A very interesting year in our globe. [0:06:13] PF: That's a great year to be doing positive psychology. [0:06:17] JW: Yes, it was roll time, didn't know it when I started. I'll just share, having been interested in this mortality topic for years, but skirting the edges of it, because I just told myself a story, that while I worked with corporations, either as an executive coach or leadership consultant. Prior to that, working corporately for 17 years. I was like, "I can't talk about the Grim Reaper and have anybody take me seriously." Then, I think I found a way; studying it. Anything that you can say that there's empirical evidence behind, all of a sudden, you can stand on a stage. At least, I could with more confidence. That for me was this, and in addition to the plague happening to our university. It was like, I think I have a chance to restart. I cannot not do this, like I was grabbed. And I don't know, I'm very visual, but I'm imagining myself literally being gripped on the arm by the Grim Reaper. I couldn't let it go. It was, I have to do this, I have to scream from the mountaintops. It's like, "Live, guys, because time is ticking." [0:07:13] PF: I love that. I mean, that's so much purpose, so much clarity of, "This is my mission, and I have to spread this message." I mean, I very rarely seeing people who are that clear, and that determined, like, this is it, and I've got to get it out, and I will find a way to do that. [0:07:30] JW: Maybe it will be a show that for some people that I work with a lot of people who are trying to find the thing that they are super passionate about. It's an important part of living a life well lived, is feeling like you did the thing that sparked you. I feel fortunate that – I think what I did was I listened finally, and lit the spark. Like I could tell that it was sizzling in the background. I feel fortunate that in my mid-40s back then, I came to this like, "Oh, no, I'm doing the thing. I'm no longer putting that thing aside. I will find a way to talk to corporations about legacy and mortality." On one hand, if you're waiting for that thing to bite you, it could still come. Also, just a little shout out to go and sus around, and find that little ember of a flame of passion, and see what's there, give it a go. [0:08:16] PF: One thing you advise us to do is to count our remaining Mondays. I did that, and then I decided like, I needed more Monday, so I decided to live longer. I expanded it. Why is it a good idea to count our Mondays? They might do like I do, where it's like, "You've got to be kidding me?" [0:08:38] JW: Right. Right. Yes. It is definitely potentially morbid, and eye-opening, and good, I say. This granularity that I am hoping we all get like I just like breaking things down to the ridiculous for the purpose of the wakeup call, right? The idea – and I have a calculator on my website if math is not a good way to spend your remaining Mondays. It's on the resources page. It's a way to say, like I know I have 1,841 Monday's left. When you do the countdown, it usually does create that little reaction, and then the science behind it is what's called temporal scarcity. That's that phenomenon that happens when we tune into something that is limited time only. Our perception about it all of a sudden is very different than when we just thought we could live forever, now that we consciously think that. But when we know something is like a pumpkin spice latte, only going to be around for a certain amount of time, or a rare gem. It's so much more valuable. That is exactly the deal with counting our Mondays. I think we get halfway there when we just talk about the idea that we are finite, "Ugh, sucks to be us. What do you want to do?" Then, go answer your next email. But when you do the math, I don't call it morbid math. I guess, I call it motivating math. That is the thing that makes you say – maybe it takes a bit your breath away. I'd like I did it recently about my working Monday's left. I don't really know if I'll ever really retire. But whatever, like at the age that I feel like I'm allowed to say no to stuff, and it took my breath away. It caused me to cease, and say, "Oh, wait a minute, that's not enough time to do the things I want to do." All right, let's just all take a moment of silence to acknowledge that, "Crap, there will never be enough time to live the lives we are to live." Okay. So now, it's just like a recalibration exercise of like, what matters, what do you want to stuff in there? My exercise was like a career exercise of, "Oh, I do not want to be doing these things anymore." So, I redesigned my business. For example, doing weight less one-on-one coaching. It's like, I want to be doing all my things over here for now. We reserve the right to change. This is that editing that we get to do. It's the reprioritizing that we get to do of, how do I fit in what matters? Presuming you've done a little bit of internal work to figure out what really does matter, now, we can do that in an afternoon at Starbucks. [0:10:59] PF: Yes. Yes. What your message does is give us hope that it doesn't matter how many Mondays we have left. I do have friends. They're either thinking about retiring, or they have retired recently. They're kind of throwing up their hands like, "Well, I didn't do that. I wish I had. Da da da." I'm like, "You still have time, especially if you're not working. You can go do it." That is what your message delivers so clearly, just because you didn't do it. Okay. So you didn't join that rock band in high school, and now you're 70. Pick up a guitar, figure it out, do it now. That is the kind of hope that you give us. [0:11:36] JW: Okay. We're right on the same wavelength, and you're just making the burst here at the seams. Because I have this notion, and it might be my next book that I would call, Not Dead Yet. It is this idea that, wow, while we still have – depending how spiritual you are, but the gift of being alive is preciousness. We're only limited by our imagination and our confidence to be super honest. I think it's fear. We all know, the dreaded F word that just holds us back. You're right, it is not too late, and this is what I call pregrets. I know it's a silly phrase, but it's this idea about –   [0:12:07] PF: I love that.   [0:12:08] JW: Okay. When you do that age-old deathbed regrets exercise, like, "Tonight was my night, what would I be thinking? I wished I did that? I didn't do that. Darn it." Make that list. The good news is that, "Well, hallelujah, you're not dying tonight." Knock on [inaudible 0:12:24], here. Yes, it's your chance. This is why it's a pregret. It is a regret in the making that if you continue down your life course, yes, you will regret not learning Italian and not getting into that band. And not maybe starting that side hustle or whatever. But good news, you're not dead yet, so you could do it. Technically now, even a small version of it. [0:12:48] PF: You know what? Last year, I covered the Rock and Roll Fantasy Camp in Nashville. That's where people who have always wanted to be musicians get to come, and they jam with big name musicians. It was the women's version of the camp. I met a woman named Carolyn Price who was 65 years old. When she retired two years ago, she was like, "Well, I've always wanted to play the drums." She went to the School of Rock. Now, if you know School of Rock, these are kids. They're like eight, 12-year-olds. Here she is in her sixties getting out there and learning how to play the drums. I saw this woman get up on stage, and jam with people 20, 30 years younger than her having the ab– she was living her dream. She told me, if that is the only time I ever got on stage like that, worth it. [0:13:37] JW: Oh my goodness, this is fabulous. You reminded me, my sister in Toronto has a friend nearby who was in her early eighties. She said, "I don't know how much time I have left. I got the convertible, and we're driving to Niagara on the Lake, and we've got scarves in our hair like they did in the old movies. And we're driving, and our scars will be blowing in the wind, and we're in a convertible that I just bought, and I just did this." We all know examples. I'm thinking of a fabulous friend who went and got her master's in her sixties, and her early seventies got her PhD. We are not limited. I mean, clearly, sometimes we're resource limited. But usually, we're just holding ourselves back. We get to live wider. Your example there of the school rock gal, that's living wider with vitality at saying, "I want to do these things. I want to feel proud that I showed up and lived it." It's not for optics, it's not just to make other people feel like, "Oh, look at your social media life. It's so glitzy." It's like, I prioritized and I made sure that this list of stuff that I thought would be pretty cool to do, and a life well lived. I made the time for it, and I didn't defer it. I didn't defer it to tomorrow that maybe wouldn't come, or I didn't defer to tomorrow when I maybe wasn't able bodied, and I couldn't actually go on the cruise, and go on the – I know people that have planned, they said I'm going to travel later when I retire, when I retire later, later, and then they did it, Then, their fibromyalgia is so bad, that they basically stayed on the cruise the whole time, and couldn't go on any of the excursions. [0:15:06] PF: Yes. It's so sad because I've seen that as well. We had done some adventure travel, probably 10, 15 years ago, and saw a couple that they had saved up, and they had lived for this adventure, and he couldn't get out of the dinghy to do the climb. Just as sad. It's like, you do, you want to act on your dreams now. One thing that you do to help us get there is you have a quiz to identify how alive we are. I want to find out like, how did you come up with this? And also, what have you discovered through this? [0:15:36] JW: Oh, I've discovered things I did not expect. It's a pretty simple quiz that gets you, it's right on the website. If you go to the website, and annoying pop up will occur, and that's the quiz that will take you there. Pop ups can be good. That it really tracks to the framework that I was telling you about earlier around this idea about living wider with vitality, and deeper with meaning. If you put those two quadrants – not quadrants, those axes together, then you get quadrants. My goal is to help us see where are we today. Are we in the dead zone? Which is like negative on meaning, negative on vitality, faint pulse. Are we vitally empty, which is where we've got lots of fun happening. We are out there, and we are going to the street festivals. But we come home, and we feel like maybe we don't have a purpose, about 10%, 15% of people follow that zone, and 10% fall in that dead zone I told you about. The meatiest zone where most people fall in it, and it oscillates between like 39%, 40%, 41% of people call themselves while they identify as through the survey meaningfully bored. That means, they have enough meaning in their life to be plus on meaning. Maybe they have a job that contribute something, or they're a parent, or looking after aging parents, or something that feels meaningful. But man, do they need a little more fun in their lives? Where's the excitement, and the novelty, and like, I haven't tried Thai food in a while. Like living a little. Maybe the sort of the all work, no play feeling. That's the majority. Like 9% of people are in astonishingly alive, which is truly positive on meaning and truly positive on vitality. That's, of course, where we're aiming to be. If in case, you're a quick mathematician, and you're wondering where the math, there's a big chunk in the middle called the mid zone. That's where a lot of people just kind of it's like a catch all where it's a little bit of everything. [0:17:31] PF: Yes. How do people become astonishingly alive? Because that phrase, it's like, I want to be that. [0:17:39] JW: I know, I know. My first step is to do what I call diagnose the dead zones. Okay. I would be a pretty horrific positive psychology practitioner if I didn't do a quick shout out to identify where the things are feeling lively in your life, and just do more of them. Amplify your positives and strengths. Do more of it, which actually is a great shortcut. It's like, if hanging around with Mitzi makes you feel just like you're laughing, and you pee your pants, and it's so good, hang around with Mitzi more. Okay, do that. But we also have to diagnose where things have flat lined, and I think sometimes we need to clue in and go, "Oh, the thing that's making me feel just kind of, "Ugh" is that I haven't really perked up my social life lately." Or, it could be that, "Wow, my recreation has just fallen off the map, and I haven't really done much lately. I used to go to concerts, or I used to take online courses and learn new things." Maybe if growth matters to you, identify where things need some CPR, so to speak. I've got all the metaphors with the jumper cables on it, and then activate by finding one thing you can do in order to help get a little bit of life back in that action. Many of us think it's an all or nothing thing, or it needs to be a big grand gesture. Like, "I need to go on a big trip I can't afford" or "I need to pick up and move across the country" or "Quit my job and go back to school" and do those things if that really gets you going. But for most of us, we just need like the subtle little sustainable things, which include having a list of things that, again, might be on your deathbed regret list. What's something you really yearn to do, that you would feel that paying of regret for if you're cashing in your chips. What would be a thing? Well, you know, I've always wanted back to speaking Italian. The good news is, we have the Internet now, and we could just look it up, and we could find a way to start to learn Italian tonight. So, just one small step forward. It's sort of committing to a small step is a really big deal. Then, back to the idea about, don't forget to count the Mondays. Don't forget. The memento mori is the concept we're talking about here. [0:19:39] PF: Can you explain that really well. Can you tell us what that means? [0:19:43] JW: For sure. Yes. It's an old Latin phrase that dates back centuries. It means, "Remember, we must die." It is just this whole entire carpe diem philosophy, which is, wow, it's only by remembering through that temporal scarcity that my time is limited. That it will actually egged me on to do those things that normally I would just procrastinate forever, and go to my grave with a whole lot of coulda, shoulda, wouldas. [0:20:09] PF: I think the timing on this, I think it's incredible that you started your map in 2020. You have this whole mission, because I've seen so many people who haven't regained their vibrancy since the shutdown. I see people who are still in their own personal lockdown. I think what you're doing here is reminding us, like, get out there, and do these things again. So, everybody needs to hear this message, because we are still locked up in a lot of ways. [0:20:37] JW: Thanks for saying that. I agree with that fully. Your discussion about get out there, I think about this, like the workshops I give, there are people that rightfully will say, "Hey, what if though, I'm more of an introvert, and getting up, and out there is actually to me my version of like a horror show." I would say, "Well, don't ruin your life. I'm not – there's not a full prescription." You must be out five nights a week? No, because I also am a homebody, and my inclination is like cozy at home with a great movie and a great meal. I also know, it's like finding your right balance for now. But I think we have that sense, if we're being honest with ourselves. Even if you've been feeling like, "No, I like the quiet life, or I just want to read, and I just want the –" great, do that. What else though, look back in history, has made you feel alive? And usually, it does mean saying yes a little bit more to some of those invitations in life. I have to force myself. I in my own case study, because my inclination like I said, "Hello, Netflix." I need to be the one to remind myself when I get an invitation to go out to a happy hour. My first thought is, "Oh, I just want to wash my face, and get in my jammies." Well, you know what? When you come home from the thing from the happy hour, how often have you regretted doing it? Not often. Usually, just makes you feel a little more invigorated and alive. I just know my dose, is I can't have more than one night a week, like one thing a week, but that's my prescription. If I go a month, where I'd have been kind of cocooning, well then, I know. "Oh, honey, you're going to need – remember, don't forget to widen your life with some vitality." What might that look like? [0:22:15] PF: I love that. I love that. You have a new book coming out. It's ready for preorder. It's coming out in May. But we're going to tell listeners how they can preorder it, we'll give them a link to that. Can you talk a little bit about what they can expect from this book? [0:22:28] JW: Oh, thanks for asking. It's called, You Only Die Once: How to Make It to The End with No Regrets. You know what? It's like everything we've been talking about here. It's 10 chapters, or we start with a premortem. It's meant to be experiential, because as a coach, it's like, I'm not just going to be telling you stuff. I want you to do, and think, and then, literally do more. But it's this premortem to analyze, like, "Where am I today? Where do I want to be? What scares me? What would like an astonishingly live life look like?" Then, we get into. Okay, let's just talk for a quick hot sec, that we are going to die, and why all this works, and how like talk a little bit about death. We go on a date with death. Then, we talk about the idea about tapping into your regrets, and how to shake things up, and bust some of your habits that might be just kind of turning you into that highly functioning zombie. Then, talking about how to widen your life with vitality, how to deepen your life with meaning. Then, I'm really literal about like a paint by numbers approach to you designing what would make you feel. Like as Hunter S. Thompson said, like skidding in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out into our graves. I want us to skid in broadside, and so, this book is helping you to figure out what's your version of skidding in broadside. Then, of course, there was a post mortem, which is analyzing, okay, wrapping it all up. What one thing do you want to do next, because it needs to be manageable. So yes, that is the experience. That's the wild ride of you only die once. [0:23:51] PF: So excited for this book to come out. So excited to see what this does and to really share your message with our listeners. If they're listening right now, they can't get their hands on it until May, what do they do right now? Where do they start? How do they get off autopilot today, and really start living with purpose?   [0:24:06] JW: Love it. Love it. Love it. [0:24:09] JW: My thought is let's just go to the good old fashioned, count your Mondays. So go to the resources page at fourthousandmondays.com. Do that. Get yourself centered, see how it feels. You may look at it. I did a workshop earlier this week, and someone was like, "Well, that looks like a lot of Mondays." I said, "Well, high five to you. Still, what do you want to do within those Mondays?" Mind you. she wasn't even at the halfway mark yet. [0:24:31] PF: Then, it seems like a lot. [0:24:32] JW: I remember those years. Yes. I would say, yes. First thing is. count the Mondays, and then. even something simple is just start jotting down notes about the stuff that you longed to do. It could be the most miniature version of a bucket list. Silly little things like – I remember when I turned 33, which was a very big year for me at that time. Three is my favorite number, so that I knew was going to be a big year. I'm going to cook my own artichoke. It just felt like that was something I wanted to do. Then, of course, there were things that were bigger scale that might sound more impressive for whatever, but who cares. Little big, minute, magnificent. Just start listing some things that you might love to fit into this one wild and precious life. Then, when the book comes out, you can make more sense of it. Absolutely. [0:25:19] PF: I love it. I love it. Jodi, we have so much to learn from you, and you make it so fun to learn, which doesn't always happen. I appreciate you sitting down, taking his time with us, and talking to us about living like we were dying. [0:25:33] JW: Well put. In a world where like time is scarce, spending this time with you has been time well spent. So, thank you. [END OF INTERVIEW] [0:25:43] PF: That was Jodi Wellman. Talking about how recognizing our mortality can help us make the most of the time that we have left. If you'd like to learn more about Jodi, take her free astonishingly alive assessment. Follow her on social media or by copy of You Only Die Once: How to Make It to The End with No Regrets. Just visit us at livehappy.com, and click on the podcast tab. While you're there, be sure to sign up for our weekly Live Happy newsletter. Every Tuesday, we'll drop a little bit of joy in your inbox with the latest stories, podcast info, and even a happy song of the week. That 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: Living Better Longer With Caroline Paul [INTRODUCTION] [0:00:02] PF: Thank you for joining us for Episode 462 of Live Happy Now. We all have one thing in common, and that is that we are not getting any younger. But today's guest gives us a whole new way to approach the years ahead of us. I'm your host, Paula Felps, and today, I'm talking with New York Times bestselling author, Caroline Paul. Her new book, Tough Broad: From Boogie Boarding to Wing Walking―How Outdoor Adventure Improves Our Lives as We Age, turns some common myths about aging completely upside down. Combining stories of women who are embracing outdoor adventure in their later years with cultural and scientific research, Caroline gives us a roadmap for improving and enjoying the journey. Let's have a listen. [INTERVIEW] [0:00:46] PF: Caroline, thank you so much for joining us on Live Happy Now. [0:00:50] CP: I'm really happy to join you, Paula. It's going to be great. [0:00:53] PF: You have written an amazing book. First of all, the title describes you, tough broad. So, that had my attention immediately. But this book is so engaging and it's so inspiring, and in many ways, a call for us to up our game as we get older. So, I wanted to find out how this book came about, and really, who you are writing this for? [0:01:15] CP: Honestly, I was kind of writing for myself. I was 55 and looking around on my surfboard and seeing no women my age surfing. I'm not a really good surfer. So, I knew there was a lot of women who could be out there, but they just weren't out there. The same when I was on my electric skateboard. I saw no women my age, certainly no women older. And when I was flying my experimental planes, the same. But I saw men my age and men older. So, I started to think, “Well, I'm seeing 60 blank on the horizon. What is my future look like?” I decided to go and ask women who – because I wanted to keep outdoor adventure in my life, but maybe I wasn't supposed to. I kind of thought I was, but I wanted to go ask women who were there already. This is about those women. It's actually about fulfilling aging and those women explained it to me. [0:02:03] PF: Was it hard to find the people? Because you cover a lot of different types of activity and we'll get into that. But was it difficult to track these women down? [0:02:12] CP: It kind of was. I mean, first of all, women tend not to trumpet themselves on social media and stuff. So, you don't find them that way as much. Frankly, it felt like there weren't a lot of women out there doing these things. It turns out that they are out there. But what I did was I told everybody that I was working on this book and so people gave me names, and that started to snowball. Then, I did hire a researcher who found a lot of people. [0:02:38] PF: Okay. That makes sense, because one thing that we really work on here at Live Happy Now is to make sure that we back everything with science. And your book, the stories are so rich, but every one of them is backed by the science of what it's doing for us. How did that all – how did you marry all that? Did the story come first, and then you did research on what it was doing? Or how did those two components come together? [0:03:03] CP: Honestly, I was going to throw myself sort of like the paraglider that I was, off a cliff, and with an inflated, shoot and float around and talk to these women, and see how the book would come about. But I knew I didn't want it to be – it's not a book about profiles about women. This is a book about fulfilling aging in the outdoors. How the outdoors optimizes that. So, in a weird way, the pandemic was good for me, because it hit just as I was about to go interview people so nobody could talk to me. I had to sit down and do a lot of research about fulfilling aging. And I started to see what we needed to keep in our lives, and I was thinking about how outdoor adventure married perfectly with that. I went out and interviewed people doing specific adventures. I went and did the adventures with them. I usually had a specific idea of where that adventure would fit in to what I considered the five pillars of healthy aging. Usually, it came out completely surprised by something new. I was constantly schooled in this book, because again, it was a quest. [0:04:05] PF: Yes. Can we talk about those five pillars? [0:04:08] CP: Yes. The first four are pretty obvious. It’s we need, and we need as human beings, but they tend to fall away as we age. So, we have to be specifically cognizant that we need community. We need purpose. We need health. We need novelty. Those four things are really important as we age and they are harder to find. The last one, the one that intrigued me the most, the one that I actually started off with was we need a positive mindset about our own aging. The reason I say that is because I was interested in the messaging that we get as older women, because I had a feeling that was why these women weren't out there in the water with me are in the air with me. Because the messaging about women aging is really toxic and subliminal and insidious and we tend to believe it and the people around us believe it. It's basically that our future is one of declining cognitive health, frail bones, and increasing irrelevance. I mean, frankly, we're boring. You'll hear – I mean, I hear this from a lot of my peers who were disheartened about their own aging. We feel invisible. We feel invisible to the culture. So, I was interested in that messaging. Then, I found research that made it even more important to pay attention to because the research says that the way we look at our own aging predicts how well we age. That means negative view of aging, you actually have a significantly higher chance of a cardiac event earlier, cognitive decline earlier, and the opposite is true. If you look at your aging as a time of vitality and exploration, then you are going to be healthier, happier, and statistically, you live seven years longer. That seemed really important, and kind of mind-blowing. But the scientists had told us this, but they didn't say how to get that positive mindset. Of course, when something, how are we going to do that in the face of such difficult and disheartening messaging, and I had a feeling that the key was an outdoor adventure. [0:06:17] PF: It was, as we discover in your book. And I want to go back to what you were just talking about, and the research about how you aging affects how you age. Because it even changes your brain. Weren't you saying that in the book, it talks about the brain of a person who had negative perceptions is actually different after death than someone who had positive perceptions about aging. [0:06:39] CP: Yes, they had all those tangles and the neural ill health that signifies memory loss. I mean, they have actually shown that conversely, if you have a positive view on aging, you have a much higher chance of not turning on that AOPE4 gene that makes you more predisposed to Alzheimer's. That's pretty big. But we think it's inevitable when we see both our parents or our grandparents have Alzheimer's. We have that gene, but it's actually not. [0:07:10] PF: That is so interesting, because we just talked about the World Happiness Report last week, which came out, and one of the chapters was about well-being and dementia. It backs up everything that you talk about in your book where they had done all this research, and people who had a positive view of aging were less likely to develop dementia. At the same time, people with dementia who had a positive attitude, fared better with that dementia. It was really interesting to me to receive this report at the same time I'm reading your book because it was just like this companion research piece. I love how you bring in the adventurer. I wanted to know as I read this, it seems like you were probably always adventurous, and what about women who haven't been adventurous throughout their lives? How can they turn into someone who is a little bit more adventurous and try some of these things? [0:08:05] CP: Yes. After I did my research, I was clear that the outdoors is really good for us. So, just getting outside is super important. Because as the science shows, it's medicinal. From the tree chemicals that are emitted, to bird song, to even the architecture of like horizon lines that are soft and rounded, and the fractal nature of the outdoors is all really good for our well-being. On a biological level, it improves our immune system. It also makes it so our brain processes less noise, which makes it healthier and able to deal with what we really want to deal with. So, people who took walks outside, for instance, tested better on cognitive and memory tests afterwards. Your brain wasn't doing the busy work when it has to filter out noise, and just all this information that urban environments in the indoors, computers and stuff give you. So, I wanted them to get outside. I knew that adventure wasn't for everybody, at least my definition of adventure, which is fairly was fairly high octane. So, I wanted to talk to all different kinds of people who got outside. Among them, for instance, was I went birdwatching. Birdwatching, no one would think of as an adventurer, including me. In fact, I was kind of like, “Yes, I'm doing a book about outdoor adventure.” Then, in my head, I was like, “You're not an adventure but I'm going to include you because I wanted everybody out there.” But it turns out, and all the bird watchers already know this, that bird watching is an adventure. Because there was the quest of trying to see the bird. There was the exhilaration when you saw it. There was the physical vitality because we actually walked and I was with Virginia Rose who's actually in a wheelchair, and so she wheeled six miles. There was a physical vitality of an adventure. Basically, birdwatching had all the rhythms of an adventure and I had to – during the quest of that, was my book. One of the things that happened to me is I had to change, I'd expand my view of adventure and realize it's not about the actual action. It's about how you feel during it. So, if you're accessing your exploratory side, feeling exhilaration, pushing maybe a comfort zone, feeling physical, vital. That's an adventure. That was exciting to me. [0:10:21] PF: One thing that you talk about, and I love this, because we've talked about it on the show, is the importance of awe, and how changing that can be to even just take a walk and experience awe. Can you kind of talk about that a little bit? [0:10:35] CP: Yes. Well, it turns out another great reason why the outdoors is so healthy for us is that it's a surefire trigger for awe. Because all is that feeling that you get in the presence of something bigger. It's something that religion has used mostly, and we associated with religion. But in fact, we feel it when we look at the big sky. We look at the Grand Canyon. Of course, I felt it on some of my adventures. But it turns out, you don't have to go. I mean, it is in the presence of something bigger that you feel, but you can also access awe. You can cultivate awe. They did studies on this here in San Francisco, where the researchers asked people between the ages of 60 and 80 to go on walks, and simply look at things with childlike wonder, with fresh childlike eyes, I think is a quote. They were basically getting their participants to access awe. Then, they had a control group that just walked like we all walk, which is we ruminate and look at our phones. And they found after eight weeks that the people who were doing the awe walks had measurably different inflammatory markers. It went way down. Inflammation is a big sign of ill health. They reported feeling weightless, anxious, and depressed. And this was kind of crazy, they felt more compassion and gratitude, which makes sense, because awe is about seeing yourself in a larger picture. So, it made sense that they feel gratitude and compassion because you feel interconnected. The other thing is, is that we live in a world of anti-awe devices, especially inside. Our phone, our computer, it's all narrowing our focus, and making us seem like we have a lot of power and control. That's the opposite of awe. It's not that good for us. It gives us an inflated sense of ourselves and that's not healthy. So, awe is good for us. Getting outside is a really easy way to access awe. [0:12:25] PF: Yes, it is simple, and it's like, if you get out every day and you do it, it will absolutely change the way that you see the world. As you bring up so many times throughout the book, your mindset makes such a difference in how you age. So, as you look at how you're changing your mindset, what role does awe in developing positivity? [0:12:49] CP: Well, I mean, I think that, just because it does – one of the things they call awe is a reset button for the brain. What it does is that it changes your neural patterns. It kind of shakes them up. It kind of opens them up. You become more open to new ideas. They found more creative. And all that is really important for, well, anything in your life, but certainly for your just exploratory spirit, and your sense that there's more to do, more to access, just that openness. So, yes, awe is indispensable for our emotional well-being. [0:13:25] PF: You talked about how good it is to be out in nature. But in the book, you really drill down into the combination of nature and movement. [0:13:33] CP: Yes. Specifically, I was interested in ironically, not movement, but the brain. I wanted to know how a novelty was good for us, because I knew that one of the big things we worry about as we age is our memory. We need to keep challenging our brain. There is a sense that our brain is hardening, that we can't learn new things, and that it's probably withering away too. Well, it turns out, that's not true. The brain is highly plastic. It is laying down new neural pathways, growing new brain cells, well into older age. I don't even know if it ever stops. Even if you slow down some of the neural pathways for some reason, the brain then decides – they'll figure out how to lay different routes. It's almost like taking a different exit on the highway. I mean, the brain is amazing. So, you can continue to learn and you continue to explore. One of the things I did was I was interested in memory, because we're afraid of losing that. It turns out navigation and memory are in the same parts of our brain. So, I wanted to find someone who navigated in their outdoor sport. I found it orienteer. I went orienteering, which is basically when you race from a start line to a finish line, but you stop on checkpoints on the way that are on your map. Using your map, she called it running with a map and compass but she really call it running and thinking. [Inaudible 0:14:56]. What I found was that researched showed that if you actually are physically moving, you are more creative in your brain. Because our brain is not like a computer. A lot of great thinkers like Einstein would go on walks, and they would come up with great ideas during or after, because there is a way that they have shown that if you use your kinetic self, when you are thinking of an idea, you have a greater chance of solving it. So, an all waves movement, which is obviously important, physically is also good neurally. Also, then you feel better about yourself. [0:15:37] PF: I love that. We've become a society that's just sitting down and stuck in front of a screen and not trying to go outside and get creativity that way. We're trying to find it within. To change that – [0:15:50] CP: We’re on the Internet. [0:15:52] PF: Yes. I'll just Google that. I'll get my OpenAI and write that for me. But it is, like to be able to change that thinking, what have you seen it do either for yourself or someone else to start adopting that approach of saying, “I'm going to get up and move because I'm stuck on this problem.” [0:16:12] CP: Well, let me just say, I'll back up just a tiny bit and just say that. Back to that messaging about how we view ourselves, we have all these sort of subtle ideas about our own limitations as older women, especially because of the messaging that we get, and that's what's stopping us from going outside a lot. Because again, the messaging is about how frail and kind of incompetent we are, and boring, like I said. It's just a sense that our life is narrowing down. But what I found with the women I interviewed, especially the ones that had never gone outside before, that when they did – so, for instance, I went boogie boarding with a bunch of women in San Diego, and they were between the ages of 60 and in their 90s playing in the water. I talked to someone named Lorraine Voight. At 60, she saw these women when she was walking on the beach during the pandemic, and she thought, “Oh, they're having fun.” But she had no outdoor experience. She didn't even like the water. But it was that inflection point. It's the pandemic and she had had really tough 50s with deaths and just a lot of like reversals in her life. It was kind of a what the heck moment, probably, and she got in the water with them, and she was hooked. But not only did she love boogie boarding, she said to me, “Caroline, boogie boarding changed my life.” Now, boogie boarding is a very simple activity. That's something that kids do. I mean, you really are just – you’re just on a little floatation and just let the wave push you to shore. How could it change your life? I asked her, “How could it change your life?” She said, “Basically, look at the big cold Pacific Ocean. Look at the tumbling that happens. Look at the fun I'm having.” Basically, what she was telling me, she had up ended her own expectations of herself by simply taking those steps into the water. Because of that, it opened up all these other things about what she could do. [0:18:02] PF: I love that you bring up fun, because as adults, we tend to forget how important that is. Adventure is fun. It can be terrifying. But also, it's fun, and we need to be able to bring fun into our lives. [0:18:19] CP: Well, I looked into play, which is an actual science. I mean, people look into the benefits of play, and it's incredibly important. I mean, it's what we do to get to know ourselves better, and the people around us and community. I mean, that's what we did as kids. That's what dogs do in the dog park. You're right. It's actually a trust exercise. It's actually, obviously, you're getting physical vitality, but then there's lots of connection because there's a dance to it. Yes, play is important, and it's especially something that we lose not just as adults, but as women, because we're sort of expected to be such a certain way and trod such a particular path. Really, women are really watched a lot during their life in certain ways and judged. So, play is something that is scary for us because it's an abandon that – I say the word unruly in the book, and I think that's really apt. Unruly is an unusual way to describe women. We don't want to be described that way usually. But play is really good for us and it lets loose this sense of judgment. You don't care what other think and you're simply connecting with somebody else. [0:19:28] PF: So, as women are listening to this, and they're saying, “Oh, my God. I want to be her. I want to do that.” But there's something that holds us back. It's like, “Oh, my husband, my spouse, my kids, whatever. What will the neighbors think?” Kind of thing. How do we break out of that kind of thinking of like, “Yes, that's great. I wish I could, but I can't.” [0:19:51] CP: I've heard this a lot from people and it is hard to break out of our comfort zone. Especially, as women, we're not really taught to. I think men are often given training for very young age to kind of burst out and try new things and explore on your own and do it on your own. We are not. I did a lot of research on this for my book for girls. We are basically taught to be fearful about a lot of things at a very young age, which means we don't have that exploratory spirit, and we don't trust ourselves. Here's what I say, I say, I'm just trying to convince you how good it is for you to go outside and have an activity outside, and experience those aspects of adventure, like I said. So, if you believe me on that, you take pharmaceuticals, for whatever ails you, because you think it's going to make you feel better. There are always side effects. In fact, there's a very long list of side effects that are really unpleasant. They look like vomiting, diarrhea, don't drive ahead a vehicle. I could go on. I mean, you see them on the TV. If going outside your comfort zone or feeling a little fear, feels like something insurmountable, I urge you to think of it as just a little side effect of this incredibly health-giving pill that you're going to take. It is not only health-giving, but it's just going to open up your life in ways that I want you to tell me after you do it. Because again, as a rebuke to all the messaging you get, you find out things about yourself in the smoke without even trying. It's not like you're sitting down at a test and being like, “Now, I have to figure out about myself.” No, you're just going outside to birdwatch. That's what I just say. It's a side effect. I want you to take a small step. Do not fly a gyrocopter like I did for the book. [0:21:31] PF: But that was a great story. [0:21:33] CP: Do not BASE jump like somebody else I interviewed. Do not scuba dive like Louise Wholey who's 80. Don't do that. Take a walk with a friend. Do not learn to swim, maybe, like [inaudible 0:21:44] did. But go to the ocean and play in the side of the waves. Just push your comfort zone a tiny bit and I think it'll start to somersault as you find that – first of all, let me add one more thing, which is that every woman told me who was older than me that the 60s was their favorite decade. [0:22:02] PF: I love that. [0:22:04] CP: I know. It was unbelievable, because we're not told that. We're told that our best years are behind us. I remember my supposed best years and they were angst-filled and insecure. Now, I feel great. I enjoy everything, because I have that capacity to do it. So, we cannot let this slip by, by giving in to things like a little fear, like a little discomfort about our comfort zone. Because it's such an opportunity. It will be the best decade of your life or if you're past 60, the 70s, the 80s. [0:22:34] PF: I had an aunt who died at, she was either 96 or 97. I can't remember which. She had told me when I was younger, I was a lot like her. I tended to speak whatever was on my mind. She explained me like, “Yes, you will get in trouble. As a child, they're going to say you're insolent. As a young adult, they're going to say you're immature. As a middle-aged person, they're going to be like, we're not really sure about her.” She goes, “Once you hit 60, you can say anything you want, then now, you're the quirky fun person.” I was like, “Oh, man, so she really had me like looking forward to this.” [0:23:09] CP: We’re underestimated, and sometimes it's good to be underestimated and so – [0:23:13] PF: Exactly. [0:23:15] CP: You're invisible. Go do what you want. [0:23:17] PF: See if anyone finds out. You interviewed so many different women. You tell such great stories. One way I look at this book is as kind of like a catalogue of adventures that you could try. Like, “Oh, I never even thought about that.” I wondered if there was any single person or adventure that affected you most? [0:23:41] CP: All these women were amazing to me. I mean, I looked at women who were of different races, because I know that it's really hard for people of color to feel welcome outside. Of course, different abilities and different knowledge. Everybody amazed me. I feel like that since I mean really honestly, the chapter that was the most moving to me, of course, was writing about my own mother, who turns out was my subliminal messaging that made me blossom because I saw the way she opened up as she aged. That chapter was, of course, really important for me to write and difficult, and perhaps the most moving. [0:24:19] PF: Yes. Did you have any surprise learnings when you set out to write a book – [0:24:23] CP: Every single time. No, I came in with a swagger like, “This is an adventure.” Then, realized, when I went on a walk with a 93-year-old, just a mere walk was eye-opening and exhilarating because of the way she did it. She looked at everything. She quoted poetry while we did it. She looked at the sky, she looked at the birds. I mean, basically we went on an awe walk. I hadn't yet discovered awe, because awe discovered in this book. I did not understand that concept at all until I found it myself. But I had gone on an awe walk with dot. So, I guess I was just continually surprised. [0:25:04] PF: And as you look back on the experience of writing it, what was your biggest learning, would you say? [0:25:10] CP: Well, that, a small thing like an outdoor adventure will cover all the pillars of healthy aging. People say, but I can go to a book club, or I go to the gym, and all that is great. You got to do that too. But I'm just saying, it's to have the whole enchilada, basically, of community, purpose, novelty, vitality, and keep surprising and up ending expectations. Keep that positive mindset about your own aging. It's really an outdoor activity that will do it for you. Here's my final thing is that, with the climate chaos, we need to get out because it's disappearing. We only save what we love, as somebody said, someone very smart. So, if we begin to see just how vital the outdoors is, maybe we can save it before it's too late. [0:25:56] PF: I love that. I love that. Caroline, you have written a fantastic book. We are going to tell our listeners where they can find it. I strongly encourage them to pick it up during your 50s or up, or if you know someone, it is truly one of those books that gives so much inspiration, and even excitement about moving into the next 30 years. First of all, thank you for writing it, and then thank you for coming on the show and talking about it. [0:26:19] CP: Such an honor. Thank you, Paula. Thank you. [END OF INTERVIEW] [0:26:25] PF: That was Caroline Paul, talking about how outdoor adventure improves our lives as we age. If you'd like to learn more about Caroline, follow her on social media, or buy a copy of her book, Tough Broad. Just visit us at livehappy.com and click on the podcast tab. While you're there, be sure to sign up for our weekly Live Happy newsletter. Every Tuesday, we'll drop a little bit of joy in your inbox with the latest stories, podcast info, and even a happy song of the week. That 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]