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Follow along with the transcript below for episode: Discovering the Happiness Essentials With Maria Baltazzi [INTRODUCTION] [0:00:02] PF: Thank you for joining us for episode 441 of Live Happy Now. When you're going on a trip, it's important to make sure you pack all the essentials. And when you're starting a journey to well-being, you need to pack the happiness essentials. I'm your host, Paula Felps. And this week, I'm talking with Emmy award-winning television producer, well-being teacher and author, Maria Baltazzi, about her new book Take a Shot at Happiness: How to Write, Direct & Produce the Life You Want. A world traveler who has developed and produced TV shows around the globe, including the hit reality show Survivor, Maria has truly used the planet as an extraordinary classroom. That led her to earning her PhD in Conscious Centered Living. And her book explores the eight happiness essentials she's discovered and teaches us how we can use them to improve our well-being in our daily lives. Let's have a listen. [INTERVIEW] [0:00:59] PF: Maria, thank you for joining me today. [0:01:02] MB: Oh, I'm so excited to be here. Thank you for having me as a guest. [0:01:05] PF: You are the first guest that we've had who is a happiness explorer. Tell everybody what a happiness explorer is and does. [0:01:13] MB: It's someone who travels, who goes through the world and takes that perspective of seeing what is good, what is right, what is positive and embracing that. [0:01:30] PF: Is that a natural talent that you have? Has that always been your mindset? Or is it something that you've cultivated over the years? Because we talk on Live Happy about the negativity bias that we have and the happiness set points. What about you? Are you naturally happy? Or did you cultivate this over time? [0:01:48] MB: I promise you, I cultivated it. [0:01:51] PF: Everyone's like, "Okay." [0:01:53] MB: Yes. I 100% cultivated, which is why I wrote my book, Take a Shot at Happiness, because it came from a place and a point in my life where I was not happy and I wanted to do something about it. And so, when you start doing those intentional activities that boost your happiness level, when you go out into the world, you notice things differently. And I travel for a living. By virtue of that, started to notice the world differently. [0:02:27] PF: And so, you said it takes a minute. Over what period of time did you start noticing this evolution of your happiness? [0:02:36] MB: March 21st, 2015. [0:02:43] PF: That is specific. What happened then? [0:02:45] MB: I just was sitting in my office in Los Angeles. I come from a television background, which is also why my book title is called Take a Shot at Happiness. Because I draw from my life in television. And as I was sitting in my office, I was at a place where I was not enjoying my career. I was not enjoying my personal life. I felt that I had hit my lowest point personally and professionally and I just felt I did not want to stay in that place nor did I want to be defined by it. That's what started reading my next book. Going to courses, and then certification and then degrees. It just kept unfolding. [0:03:33] PF: And I really commend that. Because, so often times, when we hit that point, we feel so despondent that we don't even have the energy to reach out and pick up that book or even to know that's what we need to do. What was it that was within you that drove you to say, "I've got to get out of this? And this is how I'm going to do it." [0:03:53] MB: It was the feeling of despondency. I didn't want to keep feeling that. And the only way that made sense to me to do something about it was to take action, which started with just reading. Starting with some affirmations and making that a conscious practice every day. And as I started to feel better, I wanted to learn more. It just kept expanding because I was feeling good and I kept wanting to feel better. [0:04:27] PF: I love that. [0:04:28] MB: Yeah. I think that that's the beauty of this work once you understand it. Once you get into it, it seems that it takes a lot of effort and time. However, when you start to see the benefits that you are experiencing, you are feeling better inside your skin. You are having better relationships. You are being more conscious of the choices that you are making, the boundaries that you're drawing. How you're sleeping and eating and all of those things. When you notice how it's impacting you in a positive way, it motivates you to want to keep doing more. [0:05:09] PF: That makes absolute sense. And you are so interesting because you have a master's in film and a PhD in Conscious Centered Living. And that's a very unique combination. How did you combine that adventurous spirit that you have with your quest for this conscious centered living? How did those two things work together? [0:05:29] MB: I first got the master's degree in film. I've been a storyteller. I've Loved story all my life. It was the storytelling part that I did first. And then in my business making television, whether it's a very small production or a very large production. When I say small, it's myself, a cameraman, a sound guy and maybe some kind of an assistant. And when I say big production, I could have a team of 120 people. And the shows that I did, did and do, are in remote locations. They're shot on location. I'm already out into the world. And what I was noticing is that just the demands of production. The demands of being responsible for so many people or even a few people in environments that don't always have the creature comforts, or the necessities, or medical help or whatever it is being in these remote locations. After a while, the demands of television production and trying to please the network, trying to please the production company, trying to please the talent, yeah, it just got to me. And I was noticing that other people's stuff was becoming my stuff in a very unhealthy, unsustainable way. And that's when I was sitting in my office in Los Angeles saying, "This is not working. We have to do something different." It was an act of self-preservation. [0:07:12] PF: That makes complete sense. And let's talk about that past of yours a little bit. Because, fun fact, you were one of the original supervising producers of the TV show Survivor. I find that so fascinating. Because that changed everything for people. What an incredible show to be part of. First of all, can you talk about how that became part of you and you became part of that? And then how that opened up your mind to more exploration? [0:07:41] MB: When I came to Survivor, I was already traveling and doing shows. What was unique about that particular show is there had never been a competition show set on a remote island. That's what made it different. And I always did the very last episode. I was with the Survivor contestants all the way through. And the thing that always struck me is you would get towards the end of the game. And time and again, I would sit in interview with the contestants and they would be saying, "You know, this isn't really me. This is just me playing a game." And I kept thinking, "But it is you. Because your actions and behavior." And what I came to realize, and I think about this all the time still, is that we don't know what we are capable of doing until we are in that situation. That shade of your personality hasn't been put into an environment for itself to express. And that's what I thought was so interesting. Because I just saw it time and again. [0:08:56] PF: And how did it affect you to be in that environment? Because you weren't having a cushy life either. It's not like you're going back to a five-star hotel at the end of the day. You were toughing it out as well. We would follow their stories and see how they evolved and changed. What was going on behind the scenes with you? [0:09:14] MB: Interesting, oddly enough, I liked it. I like being out there. I like being in the environments where you didn't have everything with you. And it taught me to not need so much. And that started me to understand the beauty and blessing of detachment. That you didn't need to have just 500 pairs of shoes and a hundred dresses. You didn't need all of that stuff. In many respects, I arrived in that environment. I liked it. [0:09:55] PF: And that's interesting. Because LA is such a glitz and glam town. And so, to go, to have that juxtaposition between those two worlds, what was that like? Were you like getting back to LA, "I'm glad to be back home? But I want to get back to the island." [0:10:10] MB: I have said for a very long time that I have my bush world to appreciate my urban world and my urban world to appreciate my bush world. Each one has its specialness. And I would not want to exist in either world exclusively. [0:10:32] PF: That makes perfect sense. Because you get lessons from both of them. [0:10:36] MB: Absolutely. [0:10:38] PF: what would you say are like the greatest happiness lessons that you learned from Survivor? You talked about the detachment and not needing stuff. What are some of the other things that you feel it taught you being out there? [0:10:50] MB: I would say the majority of my happiness lessons came after I left the show. That show taught me what I was mentioning before. It taught me you that your personality has different shades to it and has to be in the right environment for it to express. And it also taught me not to judge a book by its cover. Because you have people in every size, shape, ethnicity, the diversity that is on the show. Not to judge a book by its cover. Because we could be interviewing somebody in a hotel room and they are physically fit. They are articulate. And you think, "Ah, they're going to be great." And then they get out onto an island, into an environment that they've never been in before and they just collapse. They can't handle it out there. And what I saw through that is that there is different kinds of fitness. There can be a gym in urban fitness and then there can be an outdoor being in the elements fitness. Those were the two big lessons that I took away leaving that show. The real happiness journey happened after the show at that moment on March 21st when I was realizing, "This isn't happening. And I got to change things." [0:12:21] PF: As you change things, you've done a lot of amazing things. You have done charity walks and treks on all seven continents. Talk about how that came about and what that means to you. Why you do that? [0:12:32] MB: I have this misi-like ability to walk distances. I don't have to think much about going and walking three, four, five, 10 miles. It doesn't faze me. I can just go do it. And I wanted to do something useful with a natural ability. And it came by way of Ethan Zohn who was the Survivor Africa Season 3 Winner. He came down with cancer. And my mother had cancer. And my sister passed away from cancer. And so, I wanted to do something that was supportive of Ethan. And he was that year's LIVESTRONG Ambassador for the New York Marathon. And I just asked him, I said, "Well, I've never done a marathon, but can you hook me up and let me support you?" Next thing I knew, I was doing the New York Marathon and walking it. And after I did the New York Marathon, I thought, "Well, I'll do Los Angeles." I did Los Angeles. And then I found out that there was the 2500th Anniversary of the original marathon in Greece. [0:13:49] PF: Oh, my God. [0:13:50] MB: Having a Greek background, I now had to go do that. And there, I found that you could do a marathon on every continent. And I'm like, "That's fantastic." Because I've always admired the seven summiteers. The ones who climb the tallest peaks on every continent. As soon as you put on crampons, I am over it. [0:14:11] PF: Not going there. [0:14:13] MB: No. I'm not going there. But walking on every continent, now that was a great goal. And so, I set out to do it. And it was always for charity and primarily for cancer awareness. [0:14:25] PF: That is so terrific. And so, it's interesting how you've really created this mission, this happiness explorer mission that you're on. And how did all of this journey lead to you writing your book? [0:14:39] MB: As I was feeling better and better about my life and seeing what intentional activities can do. And this is something that Sonja Lyubomirsky talks about in her how – [0:14:54] PF: We love Sonja. [0:14:54] MB: Yeah, she's fantastic. As soon as I was seeing that I could do specific activities to make me feel better, I thought, "I have to share this with other people," and especially other creatives and other creatives in the entertainment industry. Because the business that I come from, it's very demanding. There's a lot of ups and downs. It's a tough business emotionally, physically. And I wanted to help other creatives, which is also why I take a creative approach in how I share what I consider the happiness essentials, which there's eight of them in my book that I talk about. [0:15:40] PF: Yeah. Can you share your favorite three? Are they like children where you say, "Oh, I don't have a favorite." But you do. Or is it, "Ah, these are my favorite three." [0:15:47] MB: I have a favorite foundational three. [0:15:50] PF: All right. Let's talk about those. [0:15:52] MB: In my mind, everything starts with faith, however you define that. I'm not pushing any sort of religion or spiritual doctrine. And I think that faith can be defined in so many ways. But for me, faith is believing in something greater than yourself. Something that's going to support you. Something that's going to give you hope and solace. That is my first foundation. The second is love. How many things in the world can be solved if we were just more loving? [0:16:31] PF: That is huge. And I think that's often overlooked when we're talking about happiness. I think about that and that doesn't really come up. We talk about kindness. We talk about gratitude. But we don't talk about love. I'm so glad you brought that up. [0:16:45] MB: And then the third one is health, three dimensionally; mind, body and spirit. You have to have it all. That's where I begin. And I keep adding on to that. [0:16:56] PF: I love that. Because with a good foundation, you can really build as high as you want and as wide as you want. And that's obviously what you're doing. And with this book, explain to our listeners a little bit about what this book will do and kind of take them through what they can expect from it. [0:17:12] MB: The book goes through eight happiness essentials. And they are virtues, and qualities and habits that I qualify for myself and then went out to find the research to back it up. And that became my book. [0:17:31] PF: Love it. [0:17:32] MB: And what I do is eight is very significant. Because you see it throughout my book. There's eight happiness essentials. There are eight bullet points. And eight is important to me. When you take the number eight and you put it on its side, it's the sign of infinity. [0:17:53] PF: Yes, it is. [0:17:54] MB: And we're always continually ebb and flow, growing, expanding. That's one of the reasons that 8 is so significant to me. And then coming from a creative background and a television background, a visual background, I use a lot of terms as a fun way to frame the book. Each chapter begins with my viewfinder. It's my macro idea of how I think about faith. And then I go through eight different points. And then at the end, I have a big picture, which is a summation of everything that I've just talked about. And then with each, what I call snapshots, talk about faith. There are eight snapshots. There is then a photo op and an action opportunity. And the photo op and the action opportunity is a way to help anchor, help the reader absorb what they were just reading about and learning. Because I think when you can engage creatively, you just take in the information in a more heart-centered way. And the reason I chose writing, journaling if you will, and asking specific questions that relate to faith, or love, or health, whatever that snapshot is, is that, when you are writing, especially when you were in a state of upset, it takes that blob of stuff that's going on in your head. And you start to be able to organize it and get clarity through it. And that becomes its own catharsis for you. And then the photo assignments, one of the things that I notice is – and you don't have to be a photographer to do my book. But one of the things that I noticed when I was taking photos with my camera is how calm I would become. [0:19:56] PF: Oh, interesting. [0:19:56] MB: I would find something that would literally stop me in my tracks. The way the sun is hitting a rose in the morning and there's still dew on it. I'll stop and I'll focus just on that rose. Only look for the picture information that I want to represent that rose. And in that moment, everything else falls away from me. I'm not thinking about what I'm going to eat. I'm not thinking about how I'm annoyed at somebody. It all goes away. Because I am focused. I am present on that one thing that I'm photographing. And it becomes its own kind of meditation. I learned early on as a child reading books and then noticing my thoughts is I think in pictures. And I think most people think in pictures. And we have this constant film, this constant stream of images that run through our head usually unconscious about it. And training yourself to see exactly what you want helps you to become aware of your thoughts. And when you become aware of your thoughts, and especially the negative ones, you can then reframe them, pun intended, to be something that's more productive. I don't even talk about – well, sort of do. Positive thinking. I think the better term is productive or constructive thinking. And that's what you want to be doing with your thoughts. And doing the photo assignments, we don't think about it. Often, we get these books. And, yeah, sure. Write this. And, yes, I have the journaling. But what are you doing to actually learn how you see the images in your head? [0:21:50] PF: What I love about that too is there was a study that came out a couple of months ago and it was talking about how taking fewer photos will actually make you happier. Because people have gotten so into like – they're taking photos of everything and missing the moment. What you're doing is honing in and making them appreciate that moment. And it's like this is why we're supposed to have cameras, is to capture that moment and appreciate it. I love that you take that and you make a practice out of it. [0:22:18] MB: One of my favorite teachings comes from Dr. Rick Hanson, which is about savoring the good. And taking a photograph in such a mindful way, such a present way helps you with savoring in the good. Because Dr. Hanson talks about you know really staying with a pleasant experience for 20 to 30 seconds and doing that time and time again. So, you start to create a positive neural pathway. I think that taking the photos, as I have in my book, helps you learn that lesson, learn that habit. [0:23:01] PF: That's excellent. There's a lot we can learn from this book. And it is – as you said, it's presented great for creatives. And I love that because people – to your point, we learn differently and different things appeal to us. And I think this makes happiness practices so accessible to people. And what is it that you most hope to accomplish with this book? [0:23:22] MB: That people can understand that happiness is a choice and that's where it begins really. You have to want to do it. And then you have to back it up. If you say, "Oh, I want to be happy." Great. If you don't do anything about it, you're dreaming. [0:23:42] PF: Right. Right. [0:23:43] MB: I want people to understand that happiness is a choice. It's well within their control. And there are things that they can actually learn and that they will become better, more aware, more present, more resilient. I think happiness is another word. It's a pretty word for resilience. [0:24:07] PF: I would agree with that. [0:24:08] MB: Yeah. [0:24:08] PF: Maria, thank you so much. Thank you for coming on the show. Thank you for writing this book. We are going to tell our listeners how they can find you. How they can find your book? How they can follow you? You're going to have stalkers now. No. But I really appreciate this. I think this is so important. I love this mission. And I appreciate your time today. [0:24:25] MB: Thank you. Thank you so much. I really feel honored to be here. [OUTRO] [0:24:33] PF: That was Maria Baltazzi talking about the happiness essentials and how you can discover them. If you'd like to learn more about Maria, check out her new book, Take a Shot at Happiness: How to Write, Direct & Produce the Life You Want. Or follow her on social media. Just visit us at livehappy.com and click on the podcast tab. That is all we have time for today. We'll meet you back here again next week for an all-new episode. And until then, this is Paula Felps reminding you to make every day a happy one. [END]

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

Follow along with the transcript below for episode: Tap Out Anxiety With Brad Yates [INTRODUCTION]   [00:00:02] PF: Thank you for joining us for episode 438 of Live Happy Now. Do you ever wish you had a secret weapon to help calm your mind and body during stressful times? Well, this week's guest says you do. I'm your host, Paula Felps. This week, I am talking with Brad Yates, an expert in emotional freedom tapping or EFT. Tapping, as it's commonly called, combines the principles of acupuncture and positive psychology to help people overcome fears, relieve stress, and just enjoy greater well-being. Today, Brad author of the best-selling children's book The Wizard's Wish and co-author of the book Freedom at Your Fingertips is going to explain how tapping works, why it works, and how we can all get started. Let's have a listen. [INTERVIEW] [00:00:49] PF: Brad, thanks for being with me here today. [00:00:51] BY: Oh, my pleasure, Paula. I'm very happy to be here. [00:00:53] PF: This is a great topic. I was excited when I was approached about having you on the show because tapping is something that I've studied, I've used in my own practice for many, many years. I think before we dive into why it's so awesome, I'm going to have you explain what it is. [00:01:11] BY: So tapping, other than the tap dancing and all these other ways that we can use tapping to be happy, this is a process based on acupuncture. So for thousands of years in Chinese medicine, they've said there's a flow of energy through the body along pathways that are called meridians. When the energy is flowing naturally, we experience our natural state of health and well-being physically and emotionally. When that energy gets stuck, we don't feel so good. When we don't feel good, we don't think as clearly. We don't make the best choices. There's all kinds of unfortunate consequences for that. So in traditional Chinese medicine, the doctor would stick needles in these key points around the body to stimulate that healthy flow of energy. What we're doing is just using our fingertips to tap those same points. It downregulates stress in a very profound way. It's the simplest, quickest way that I know to reduce stress. [00:02:07] PF: Yes. It was the nineties when someone introduced me to it, and he was telling me about it. He was a musician, so I thought, “Well, you're just high because there is absolutely no way that this works.” So then he's like, “I swear, Paula. Just try this. Try this.” I was really amazed at how it could calm me in stressful situations. It's not woo-woo. There is science and research behind it. Can you talk about that for a little bit? [00:02:34] BY: Yes, absolutely. It's wonderful that we have this growing body of research validating this process. Some of my friends who were doing this, Dr. Dawson Church and Dr. Peta Stapleton, are two of the leading researchers. Dawson did a study with cortisol levels. So when we are experiencing stress, this part of our brain called the amygdala that looks for threats and puts us into fight or flight, and we start pumping cortisol through our body. So they did a test where they measured people's cortisol levels. It was a double-blind study. They had a control group. They had somebody just deep breathing or something like that and then the third group doing tapping. When the researchers were testing the cortisol levels before and after, it said that the cortisol levels had dropped by an average of 24%. They said that's not possible, threw it out, and recalibrated the machines, ran it again. It's like, “Oh, no. That's actually what's happened,” and different tests have replicated that showing. Because it's one thing for us to tap and say, “Yes, I think I feel better.” Sometimes, we profoundly feel better. Sometimes, we may not notice it. It may be very subtle, but there are biological markers that we can measure like our cortisol levels. My friend, Dr. Peta Stapleton, has done FMRI studies where we can see the parts of the brain that light up and the different activity in different situations. Then after tapping, how that brain activity is calmed down. So, yes, there's hundreds of studies now in peer-reviewed journals. They've mashed it up against CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy, which is sort of the gold standard of therapy. It has performed showing results quicker, longer lasting. One study that was done, the people running the study who were CBT people said, “Well, you can say that the tapping was not inferior to CBT.” [00:04:40] PF: Spoken like a true researcher, right? So we know what it's doing. We can see the results. Have they been able to explain why it's so effective? [00:04:52] BY: Yes. There are a number of theories as to why it is. Obviously, the original theory that was when tapping was first discovered. Well, it had been discovered many, many years ago. But the way that we do it now by a psychologist named Dr. Roger Callahan back around 1980 or so was just based on acupuncture. So saying, okay, well, this – it's the meridian system. Either it's stuck or it's flowing, and the tapping stimulates that healthy flow. We can look at it in terms of there's a phenomenon when we're tapping on these key points. It's called piezoelectricity. It sends a bioelectrical signal to the brain that calms down that part of our brain, the amygdala and the limbic system, that is reacting to circumstances or what we believe the circumstances might be. That's the great thing is it doesn't tap away justified fear or stress. It's not like if we're being chased by a bear. It's like, “Well, this is really uncomfortable feeling. I'm going to tap, and I'm going to calm myself down.” [00:05:59] PF: Much better. Yes. [00:06:00] BY: “And I'm going to be so relaxed as I get eaten.” That's one of the things is when we hang on to fear and anxiety, it's because part of our brain says we need this. If I don't feel this fear, I'll be stupid. I'll make bad choices. The funny thing is it's just not true. [00:06:21] PF: We sometimes make a habit out of feeling fearful or feeling anxious, and it's not something we do consciously. But I know that has happened in my own life, where just certain situations will trigger it. Then you just never seem to be untriggered. So how can tapping help get out of a chronic situation like that? [00:06:42] BY: Yes. We've learned to behave in that way, and we do what works. So if we see a dog, as a child, dogs scared us. We avoided dogs because we felt that fear. At a young age, we say, “Well, that worked. I didn't get attacked by that dog because I ran away. So, obviously, having this response when I see a dog works for me.” It's obviously not the only way to respond to a dog or keep yourself safe, but it's what I found happened. So now, I may be triggered with that fear anytime I see that. So the mind is always identifying, associating, responding. We see something, and we go, “What does this remind me of? Is this something I've experienced before? Or does it look similar to something I've experienced before? How did I respond to that in the past such that I survived?” We go through this pattern without even being consciously aware of it. Ninety to 95 percent of our behavior is unconscious. We're doing things before, which is necessary as human beings because we have to learn how to do certain things and make it unconscious. Otherwise, everything would take forever. As we're growing up, we don't sit there and go, “Okay. Well, this is really helpful. Well, this is less helpful, so I'm not going to remember this.” We don't know to do that. When we're learning how to walk, how to talk, how to think, we're just taking it all in, and we're not able to be critical about some of that. So we just take that all in. So we're constantly just behaving on autopilot. When we become aware of that, and we start tapping, and I totally recommend tapping on a daily basis. To me, it should be as much a daily practice as brushing your teeth because we experience stress and anxiety on a daily basis, especially because we're walking. Most of us are walking around with a small device that is constantly telling us what to be upset about. [00:08:49] PF: Yes. It's reminding us not to relax, basically. [00:08:51] BY: Yes. “Hey, were you relaxed?” “Oh, wait till I tell you what's going on in Washington,” or whatever or a text from a friend saying, “Hey, here's something to be upset about.” So we're constantly being triggered by things, and it's like being – falling in the mud on a daily basis but never taking a shower. [00:09:14] PF: That's a great analogy. I love that. [00:09:16] BY: We practice physical hygiene on a daily basis; brushing our teeth, taking showers, whether we need it or not. Very few of us wait for a week and then notice that people around us are holding their nose and going, “Oh, that's right. I haven't taken a shower in a while. I should probably do that.” But with stress, most of us don't have a daily hygiene practice. So that's what tapping is. As we do that, we are less likely to be triggered. If we are triggered, it is going to be less profound. [00:09:47] PF: Yes. I want to dive into that. If you don't have a practice, and then you get stressed out, and you start tapping, is it going to take longer? Is it going to be more difficult for you to relieve yourself in that situation? Or how does that work? [00:10:02] BY: It's hard to say because we never really know how much is in there. There are times where we can start tapping, and the shift is profound. It's in a matter of moments. We may be experiencing stress or anxiety at an 8 out of 10. Just a few moments of tapping can bring us down to a one or even a zero, sometimes. Now, we see this happen. It doesn't happen all the time, and sometimes we bring it from an 8 down to a 7.75 after several minutes of tapping. It's like, okay, it's a little bit better. To me, hey, any relief we get is great. But what takes it down to a zero, it's hard to say why sometimes it's faster than other times. So it's not necessarily going to take much longer, but we increase the odds of it being quicker. We also increase the odds of not getting to an eight if we have a regular level because stress also has compound interest. It builds up. The thing that we're getting freaked out about may not be the thing that's happening right now but just all the other things that have been building up for a while. [00:11:16] PF: That whole cascade effect is kicking in. So what does a tapping practice look like? Is it people want things that are quick? Can you do it in a quick amount of time? Can you tell us like what is the recommendation? If you're the doctor and this is a prescription, like what are we doing? [00:11:32] BY: Yes. It's like with washing our hands during the pandemic. They said 20 seconds. Sing happy birthday. That's how long it takes to wash your hands. Now, obviously, if we've been – if you're into auto mechanics, you've been working on the engine of your car, 20 seconds is not going to clean your hands after working on your car. So there are times where we want to do it longer. But if you can only do 20 seconds, that's great. So with tapping and with brushing your teeth, they say two minutes. These are set amounts that this is helpful as a regular practice. So with tapping, if you can only tap for a couple of minutes. Hey, when you get up first thing in the morning and you're on the can, you can multitask. [00:12:19] PF: That's an easy one to do. If you're tapping, you can't be scrolling on your phone. [00:12:24] BY: Yes. [00:12:24] PF: Another bonus. [00:12:25] BY: Yes. It's certainly going to be much healthier for you to be tapping rather than scrolling. [00:12:33] PF: So what do you recommend? Okay, that's one way you can do it is every morning when you first get up and sit down. [00:12:39] BY: Yes. Tap while saying affirmations. Now, this is why I've created the YouTube videos. So I have like 1,200 videos on YouTube on a multitude of subjects. So whatever might be coming up for you, whether it's feeling anxiety, whether it's feeling stress, feeling anger, feeling fear, there's a tap for that. If it's something more positive, it's like, “Well, I don't want to – maybe I'm not aware of something bother me right now, but I do want to improve my relationships. I want to improve my finances.” There are tapping rounds for that. So if you're not sure what to tap on or what to say, I'm there for you. You can just go on YouTube and follow along. I've got videos. They're ranging from 3 minutes to 15 minutes depending on how much time you – [00:13:24] PF: That’s excellent. [00:13:26] BY: I have people who say, “I spend an hour going through different videos.” Some people, it's just one quick video. I have one called Amazing Day Quickie. I had done a video called Have an Amazing Day, which was like eight minutes. Then I did a four-minute version for people. It's like if you can't take eight minutes to have a better day, here's four minutes. Even just that little bit is going to make a positive difference. Over time, we improve the status of our nervous system. [00:13:59] PF: What if you're going into a day that you know is going to be particularly challenging? Maybe it's having to deal with an ex or something going on with your children or your in-laws, right? Something where it's there's a lot of potential for triggers and stress. Is there something special that you can do to kind of like rev up your system? [00:14:18] BY: Yes. Certainly, when you know you're going into something like that, I would say to someone check on how you feel right now. Close your eyes, take a deep breath, and just thinking about that event. How much anxiety are you feeling right now? Notice where in your body you feel it. What are you most afraid of? Start tapping right then because you can clear a lot of that fear even ahead of time. Then when you get to that event, when you get to that meeting with your ex or whoever it is, it's like, “Hmm, I'm not feeling as bad as I expected to.” Then there's subtle tapping that we can do where they might not even notice. I – [00:14:57] PF: I'm glad you brought that up because I was going to ask how we can do that. [00:14:59] BY: I'm looking forward to the day where everybody knows about tapping. It's just an accepted practice for downregulating stress. You could start tapping in front of someone, and they'd say, “Oh, that's a good idea. I could probably do that too.” When world leaders at Camp David are tapping to clear their egos and all the stuff, and it's like, “Oh. Now, we can find some common ground here without being all uptight,” because that all comes from fear. Ultimately, there's love and there's fear. If it's not feeling like love, it's coming from a place of fear. When we do the tapping, we calm that down. So we can do it ahead of time. We clear that anticipatory anxiety and then in the moment finding subtle ways. So we can tap in subtle ways. Like there are fingertip points that you can tap, and you can do that under the table. No one will even know that you're doing it. You can also hold your fingers on certain points and just breathe and stimulate the points in that way or maybe gently rubbing. People probably won't even notice you're doing it. [00:16:11] PF: That's such a great tool to have in your arsenal because when anxiety hits and you're in a public situation, then you’d really start feeling the overwhelm because it's like, “Okay, I have to get out of this gracefully, and I'm surrounded.” So it's a great little secret weapon to have. We've talked a lot about it in terms of anxiety. I wanted to kind of dive into that a little bit deeper because that's become such a – it was already an issue. But post-pandemic, it's become such a huge challenge for people. Can you kind of address how we can use tapping in an anxious world? [00:16:48] BY: Yes. That was a huge thing. During the pandemic, I was doing a number of Facebook lives and YouTube lives, just recognizing. I mean, it’s – tapping’s moment has really come. There's always been a lot of anxiety. [00:17:00] PF: Thanks, COVID. [00:17:01] BY: But it really amped up. We were so afraid of so many things, and it just drove all kinds of different issues. So I really at that time and my colleagues were really trying to get it out there and letting people know, “Hey, guys. There's a simple way that you can help your body calm down.” Again, like I was saying earlier, it doesn't make you stupid. It's not like, “Oh, I can just go out and put myself in dangerous situations and not care about it.” But we can reduce that anxiety. I can have common sense. I can make good choices without being driven by fear. So just allowing ourselves to tap if it's even just a few minutes a day but also anytime that you're aware of it. It's like, “Hey, you know what? I'm feeling a little uncomfortable right now. Can I do some tapping right now?” I'm at the point. I'll tap in front of people. I don't care. I'm all over the – [00:17:56] PF: It’s like, “This is what I do.” [00:17:58] BY: Yes. I’m all over the Internet tapping anyway. I've shot some tapping videos in public places; sitting outside Starbucks, at the zoo. You can see people walking by. It's like I want to normalize this so that people can tap in that moment and not feel because I know what it is to have anxiety and to feel that pain. What do I do? What do I do? There's nothing I can do. Oh, wait. Yes, there is a way. This is – my body is having this response, trying to tell me there's something to be afraid of. Fear and anxiety, like all of the uncomfortable emotions, anger and things like that, it's a fire alarm telling us there's something to pay attention to. When we're not – with the fire, it’s like the fire alarm goes off. “Oh, I should grab my fire extinguisher and put out that fire.” Or find out, “Oh, there's no fire, and the batteries need to be changed in my smoke detector.” But with anxiety, very often there's nothing we can do. So we're in this fight or flight, and we don't know what to do. But tapping is something that we can do and look at what is there that I can do in this moment. I might look and see there's no real danger here. It's allowing our self to recognize what I'm telling myself that's causing the anxiety is not true. I'm able to calm that down as I'm doing the tapping. There may be a part of me that resists that. We resist change. We're afraid of making changes. We want to keep things the same. So even if our lives are crap, part of us says, “Yes, but it's my crap. I know how to deal with it.” [00:19:36] PF: I’m comfortable with it. Yes. [00:19:38] BY: Exactly. I dealt with it yesterday, so I know I can deal with it today. Doing it differently feels uncomfortable, so I don't want to change that. So when I try to make changes, I have this anxious response. As I tap myself down and I recognize, oh, I can relax while I think about this change. You know what? I could actually handle this. I could make my life better in so many ways. I could allow myself to be happier, and that's cool. [00:20:05] PF: That's awesome. So it helps with anxiety. What are some other areas that you've seen people implement it to really make some big changes in their life? [00:20:15] BY: Paula, how much time do you have? [00:20:17] PF: How about 16 days? [00:20:22] BY: There's an expression with EFT. So EFT stands for emotional freedom techniques, which was one of the – what most of the tapping techniques are based on. The expression is try it on everything. Any place in your life that is not as ideal as you'd like it to be, there's probably something you can tap on there where you're holding yourself back. If I'm not making as much money as I like, if I'm not having the kind of relationships that I want, if I'm not as healthy as I want to be, what stops me? If there's some belief, some fear, some stress that's causing me to stop myself from taking the positive actions that would create this better version of myself, this healthier, wealthier version of myself, this happy version of myself. What limits happiness? Like we were talking just before about Michelangelo's David, I always use that as this metaphor. Michelangelo said the statue was already there, perfect inside the marble, and he just had to remove what didn't belong to reveal the masterpiece inside. That, to me, is a perfect metaphor for what we're doing with tapping work that our healthiest happiest version of ourselves, our most successful version of ourselves is here inside, covered under all this excess marble, which is anxiety and fear and doubt and feelings of unworthiness. These are tappable issues. As we clear those, we naturally think more highly of ourselves. We naturally behave in those more productive, healthier, more successful ways. [00:21:51] PF: That's excellent. You are doing so much good work to get this message out in the world. I know you have so many videos we can watch. We're going to tell our listeners how they can find you. We're going to send them to your YouTube page, where they can find all kinds of important resources. But as we wrap this up, what is it that you hope everyone who's listening to you takes away from it? [00:22:12] BY: Well, I would love for you to take away that you really are this magnificent child of the universe, worthy and deserving an awesome life, and that there is this simple tool that can help you clear that. That's why I have a program on my website, so free five-day program called Tap Into Your Best Self that helps you clear away the misunderstandings about yourself. I like to call myself a gift unwrapper. [00:22:39] PF: I like that. [00:22:40] BY: You are a gift to the world, and you'll unwrap that and share yourself more freely. [00:22:45] PF: I love it. Thank you, Brad. I appreciate your time with us today. [00:22:48] BY: Well, thank you, Paula. Happy to be here. [END OF INTERVIEW] [00:22:54] PF: That was Brad Yates, talking about tapping. If you'd like to learn more about Brad, check out his YouTube videos on tapping, learn more about his books, or take his free five-day tapping course, just visit us at livehappy.com and click on the podcast tab. That is all we have time for today. We'll meet you back here again next week for an all-new episode. Until then, this is Paula Felps, reminding you to make every day happy one. [END]

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

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

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

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