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Follow along with the transcript below for episode: How Happiness is Changing in the U.S. With Dr. Lara Aknin [INTRODUCTION]   [00:00:02] PF: Thank you for joining us for episode 461 of Live Happy Now. Last week, the annual World Happiness Report was released. This week's guest is helping break down what it all means. I'm your host Paula Felps. Today, I'm talking with Dr. Lara Aknin, a distinguished professor of psychology at Simon Fraser University and one of the editors of the World Happiness Report. She's here to tell us why the US fell out of the top 20 happiest countries for the first time since the report has been published, which age group is thriving in the US, and talk about why our young people are struggling right now. She also shares some really encouraging findings about well-being and dementia, as well as how benevolence is changing worldwide. Let's have a listen. [INTERVIEW] [00:00:49] PF: Lara, thank you for joining me today on Live Happy Now. [00:00:53] LA: Thank you for having me. [00:00:54] PF: Every year, this is such a big time for us because the World Happiness Report comes out. We dig into it, and we try to cover it the best that we can. So I appreciate you sitting down and talking about it. How long have you been involved in working with the report? [00:01:08] LA: I have been involved for about five years now, back in 2019 I believe it was. My memory since COVID is a little fuzzy, but I believe it was 2019. My colleagues and I contributed a chapter to the World Happiness Report on some of the research we do regarding kindness and happiness. Then shortly after that, I was invited to join the editorial team. [00:01:28] PF: Nice, nice. Such an important report and we learn new things every year. For those who don't know, the report has certain themes it covers every year. Then it'll kind of branch out and do other subtopics every year. One thing they talked about this year was age and happiness. I wanted to know if you had any insight into why they decided to look at that topic. [00:01:53] LA: There are lots of reasons. One major one is that there's this burst of new research looking at some really interesting ideas and questions. So you'll see one of the chapters in this year's report written by Dr. Emily Willroth and her colleagues, I think, presents some of this really groundbreaking research, trying to understand not necessarily actually the predictors of happiness across the lifespan but the consequences of happiness for really important outcomes like dementia. Their chapters kind of split broadly into two parts, but one of the parts that I find so intriguing and then so excited about is how happiness or life satisfaction and well-being might be a protective factor against dementia. As a huge subset of the population is aging, all of us eventually, hopefully will. There's no known cure for dementia. This seems like one very important meaningful way in which we can intercept and perhaps improve the lives for many people. The new research is one key reason that it was – we chose to focus on this year's report on aging and happiness. But the other is the availability of data. One of the main sources, one of the incredible sources of information we draw upon for the World Happiness Report is the Gallup World Pole, which for those listeners who don't know is probably the most representative sample of planet Earth. So it's not just convenient samples drawn from wealthy nations, but it's individuals from rich and poor countries. They go out of their way to reach those who we might not be able to reach otherwise. Now, there are almost two decades worth, I believe, of data that allow us to look back and see these not only trends in happiness over time but allows us to try to tease apart some of the cohort effects from age effects, which is really exciting and promising for getting a closer look into what's going on in happiness across the lifespan. [00:03:38] PF: They touched on so many different things. As an editor, I wondered if there was anything that stood out to you about age and happiness on a global sense, as you were working on the project. [00:03:49] LA: Yes. There are a couple notable findings, and the report is so rich with so much information. I encourage your listeners to go have a look. There's so much to be seen. But two things that jump out at me that I think are kind of remarkable across the data sets and the information presented is, first and foremost, that around the world looking at global data, the happiness is highest among the young, so those under 30. Then begins to drop and remains relatively consistent over the rest of one's life. Now, that's looking at global data, which is really interesting. But get a little bit more interesting and sometimes unfortunate when you drill down into specific world regions. One that I think might be of particular interest to perhaps many listeners is that in North America, particularly in Canada and the United States, the young have started rating their life satisfaction quite a bit lower. In fact, it is one of the only world regions in the world where the young are less happy than the old. That is kind of an interesting point of complexity and intrigue and, for many, I imagine some concern. That is one fascinating finding. [00:04:54] PF: I was completely astonished to see that because in our case of people under the age of 30 in the US ranked 62nd. To put that in perspective, Russia is 68th. Young people in Russia are not that much more unhappy than young people in the US. Do we know what is driving that? [00:05:16] LA: That is a really important question. It’s a complex answer, as you might imagine. But, yes, if I can just pause and highlight what I think is so noteworthy here, which is that, yes, within the United States, older individuals, so those 16 above, are rating their lives much better. I believe there's over a 50 ranking gap between older adults in the United States compared to those under 30. There's something pretty unique going on here with the younger individuals. Why is this going on is a difficult thing to kind of parse, right? These data sets, the complexity and the size of them give us a huge snapshot of what is going on. But the challenge of that is that there are so many moving pieces. It's hard to pinpoint one exact explanatory feature. That being said, some of the authors of chapter two in the report, Dr. John Helliwell and Haifang Huang have done some deep dives to try to understand what's going on. There's a little bit of traction in understanding. In particular, what these two and their co-authors have found is that adults under 30, so Americans under 30, are reporting some interesting differences to compare to those who were 30 several decades ago, so those who were 30 in the early 2000s and up to 2010. In particular, those under 30 these days are reporting less support from their friends and family than did earlier cohorts. They're also reporting less freedom to make life choices, more stress and anxiety, but not more anger, less confidence in the government, greater perceptions of corruption. Another important one is feeling less satisfied with their living situation. I think although incomes are not necessarily especially low, I think they're stagnating relative to the cost of living. So that might be a point of frustration or stress and anxiety for some younger Americans under 30. It seems to be this cocktail of predictors that are associated with lower levels of well-being among those under 30 and different from those that were reported about a decade and a bit ago. [00:07:23] PF: At the same time, those young people are – the report shows that those young people are more benevolent. They're more altruistic, which is so interesting that they would be dissatisfied because one thing we talk about quite a bit on Live Happy Now is how – and you would know this about practicing kindness and acts of altruism. Those increase our satisfaction. That, to me, was just a striking disparity that we have this generation that's more giving, more altruistic, but they're also more dissatisfied. [00:07:56] LA: Exactly. That was going to be my other notable thing. It's always a silver lining for me. Or a really fascinating spotlight in the report is this increase, this upshoot in benevolence, especially since COVID, since pre-COVID years. You're right. Across all three metrics of benevolence that are captured in the Gallup World Poll data, which is helping a stranger, donating to charity, and volunteering. Each of these are relatively high across the board. They're higher post-COVID than they were before COVID. There don't seem to be whopping generational differences in this. If anything, we're seeing the young being equally, in most cases, benevolent across the board. They're more likely to help a stranger and less likely to donate. That might be partially because they just have lower levels of income. But you're right. Benevolence doesn't seem to be the explanatory factor. One might wonder if this is even buffering or supporting their well-being that these differences reported might be even more extreme if these weren't the actions people were taking. I just want to point out, though, that those benevolence ratings are global, and the findings that we're talking about here are within the United States. So I don't know exactly the benevolence levels within the United States, but that would be an interesting question to drill down upon. [00:09:07] PF: The report does an excellent job of parsing out this information, but what it doesn't do and intentionally is say, “Here's the cure.” We get a lot of information, and I think that's what a lot of us want to know is like, wow, if our young people are that unhappy, what is it that we can do about it? As you mentioned, there are several factors driving this, so it's not this small ship that we can just turn on a dime. As people who are not in our 30s and younger, what do we do? How do we start helping support young people and changing the way that they feel? [00:09:45] LA: That's a really important question. Like you say, I don't know if there's a perfect solitary answer to this. I think there's a lot to be considered in part because some of these may be societal changes, right? Concerns, for instance, about less freedom to make life choices and concerns about corruption and less trust in government would be hard for any caring friend or family member to interject upon and maybe change things. It's possible perhaps that there might be other pathways that are a little bit more tractable, so for instance, the support from friends and family. Interestingly, I believe some of the data suggest that these individuals are not necessarily receiving less contact, if you will, from friends and family but perhaps feel like they're not receiving enough. Or at least they're less satisfied with the support from friends and family. One perhaps avenue or strategy for support might be to have some very open conversations with the younger adults in your life and kind of see how they're doing. Perhaps find ways to offer additional support. There might be other factors. I mean, it's hard to support someone's satisfaction with their living conditions. I mean, that's not an easy way to just step in and change. Some of these may be more systematic or societal-level concerns. I’m not saying that this is out of our reach, but I think there's a lot of conversation to be had about which ways to kind of step in and support adults under 30. [00:11:09] PF: Do you think knowing this that now we are going to do that, now that we are aware of this situation is becoming more dire? Do you think there's a community starting with a scientific community that shares this information? Then are we going to start saying, okay, we need to enact some change, some real change in the world to make this better? [00:11:28] LA: I remain overoptimistic. I think one of the main thrusts and the rationales for the World Happiness Report is to present some of this leading evidence on the science of happiness to the public and also to policymakers and individuals who are concerned about the well-being of their constituents and their community members and their neighbors. The hope is that by bringing some hard science to this question to delineate and demonstrate the trends over time and shine a spotlight on those who perhaps are not thriving or doing as well as we would have hoped can direct attention to those areas. There's always a lot of discussion. There are many governments that are trying to pay attention to these well-being reports. I know many governments are starting to ask these questions regarding life satisfaction and well-being in their census data. I think that's a step in the right direction. But as you'll see in chapter I believe it's three of this year's report, which is focused on the youth, there is actually not as much data as we would like to grapple with some strong insights, especially in developing nations. A lot of the evidence is lacking, and so that raises some questions about how people who perhaps are really struggling are not even being assessed and observed. I think that we're certainly making strides, but I think we're far from perfect data and perfect insights on how to address this. [00:12:41] PF: I think that's one thing the World Happiness Report does is every year, we talk about it. Then it's in the spotlight. It's in the news. Then it kind of, uh, slips out. That’s why I love the fact that it comes out every year. It doesn't let us forget that, hey, we still have – this is an important thing. Happiness is an important indicator, and we need to be studying it, looking at it, and figuring out what's going on in our world. [00:13:05] LA: I think it's important because happiness isn't just the absence of negative emotions. It's more than that. I think there's – as chapter four in this year's report nicely illustrates, these protective factors matter a lot. It's not just this wishy-washy vague sense of well-being that we can hope for, but that it matters for some of these really consequential outcomes, even beyond the fact that we care about our own and our neighbor’s well-being. It predicts some really mean meaningful hard outcomes. I think it helps, like you say, shine a spotlight on some of these important pressing issues. [00:13:37] PF: We've talked about the not-so-great news with the young people but great news with the boomers. US is number 10 among the age group, the baby boomer age group for happiness. That's incredibly good news. That means we're doing great in terms of people, what is that, from 1964? [00:13:55] LA: Yes. I think it – yes. I think you're right. I think you're right. I think it's 1964. Yes. [00:14:01] PF: Why? Why? [00:14:03] LA: I think we know less about that. I mean, part of it is I think although objectively boomers have, I think, less in the way of social contact, I think that there is a greater satisfaction with it. That is one memory I have from reading this report multiple times. But I don't think we have never done a drill down among the older boomers in the United States or even the boomer generation just globally to figure out what is exactly the unique predictors there. What we do know is that countries that rank highly among the older boomer generation tend to be those that are ranked more highly overall but to be in the top 20 and certainly among the top 10 and 15. I think the United States is an interesting case where the happiness of the young, those under 30, is really [inaudible 00:14:48] the average ranking of the United States because these adults under 30 are reporting significantly lower levels of life satisfaction. Yes, for the first time in a number of years, the United States has dropped out of top 20. I think the boomers are what's elevating the ranking, but the young are what is dropping it down. [00:15:06] PF: That's interesting. When I first started covering this, we were at number 13. Then it was 50. It’s like – [00:15:13] LA: I mean, we don't have any measurement of this but some. It might have to do with political tensions or divisions in growing levels of income inequality but also well-being inequality that is mentioned a bit in chapter two of the report. But it is also, I think, those societal, political level factors in the United States might be contributing perhaps especially. Who knows? This remains to be tested. Perhaps might be shifting the well-being of the young or influencing the well-being of the young perhaps more so. [00:15:43] PF: Well, does what drives happiness in older populations differ from what drives happiness in younger age groups? Is that part of it at all? [00:15:52] LA: It certainly could be. I don't think chapter two includes any analyses that would answer that question specifically. I mean, many of the – because it's a global report with so much data, usually the focus is on looking for commonalities, not differences across the world but also across the ages. But I don't think there was any analysis that looked at whether, for instance, social relationships was a greater predictor of well-being amongst the old versus the young. That's a really intriguing question. There are some interesting psychological theories that might bring to bear on this question. I'm happy to mention them, but I don't know if it – they weren't tested directly in the report. So you can let me know if that's a – [00:16:31] PF: Yes, go ahead. I'd love to hear it. [00:16:33] LA: Sure. Laura Carstensen has this really fascinating theory arguing that when we're young, time seems expansive. Normally, people prioritize these kind of efforts to go out to search for unique new experiences. People prioritize having usually a diverse set of friends, a diverse set of experiences because it's all about learning and trying new things. It's like this very exploratory mindset. Then as people get older and people start to realize that time is not infinite, instead of taking this purely exploratory approach as they navigate the world, they prioritize things that are particularly meaningful and valuable and positive to them. How this matters, for instance, for predictors of happiness but also for relationships might be instead of trying to maintain dozens of different friend groups, people might prioritize these three, four individuals, these three or four networks in their lives that tend to bring them the most joy and meaning and whatever it is they prioritize. This theory suggests that the predictors of happiness may vary slightly as a function of age. Generally speaking, most people derive a lot of joy from helping others, from being with others. But who exactly are those others may differ, right? When you're 18 and starting college, that might be trying everything there is. When you're 75, that might be your closest friends. Social relationships might matter across the lifespan, but who are those contributing individuals might vary. [00:17:59] PF: That makes so much sense. To me, it was so interesting that this report really focuses a lot on age because when we look at how aging is portrayed like, “Oh, you're going to be lonely. You're going to be falling apart,” there are so many messages that's negative about aging. When you look at this report, it's really an inspirational read. It shows you that that's not what is going on. Has that actually changed, or has it just been always portrayed incorrectly? [00:18:32] LA: It's important to note it might be inspirational for folks living in North America and Australia, New Zealand, where this trend is happiness generally speaking across the lifespan is on an upward trajectory. But there certainly are world regions where the reverse is true. For instance, in Central and Eastern Europe, I believe that it's a downward trend across the lifespan. There are some notable differences across the globe. Different cultures hold aging in different regards, right? In many Eastern cultures, it's an honor. There's a lot of honor and respect for the elders, whereas that isn't necessarily true across all different nationalities and ethnicities and religious affiliations. So perhaps in North America it's kind of seen like as you get older, you're out of touch. You're falling apart. It might be a lot of negative portrayals. But I don't think that's always the case worldwide. But I agree with you. I think certainly from a North American perspective, especially Canada and the United States, the older adults are reporting their lives as much more aligned with their ideal than are the young. That is perhaps inspirational for many people who are in that generation. [00:19:39] PF: Yes, because we're all headed in that direction. We want to know it's getting better, right? [00:19:44] LA: Hopefully, it's all getting better. Yes, for sure. [00:19:47] PF: Well, there's so much in this report. What is it that you would think that is a takeaway that you hope that everybody would get from sitting down and spending some time with this report? [00:19:59] LA: Well, I think broadly speaking, I think the report does what I think and perhaps I'm very biased here, but I think it does a really great job of showcasing what I think is some of the best science on the question of happiness around the globe and some of the most cutting-edge interesting findings. Details aside for a second, I think the report, hopefully, is a nice demonstration, is a convincing demonstration of where the science of well-being is at and convinces many people that this is not a floofy self-help grounded literature but rather a hard science where people are able to self-report how they feel about their lives and how scientists can try to understand what are these correlates, and how does it track over time, and how does it differ across age and region. Many important variables that help us give some traction on perhaps how to improve the lives of others. I hope, big picture, people walk away with an understanding that this is a hard science and one that we can really sink our teeth into and try to improve the lives of many people with. I think two highlights for me in this report are, one, the benevolence finding that we talked about already. I realized that there are some mixed pictures. There’s a lot of nuance in this report. Looking across the world is always difficult with hundreds of thousands of individuals offering their take on their lives. There's so much data to dig into. Normally, just looking around the globe is complex and nuanced enough. But now to split it by age group and cohort or generation is even more nuanced. But I think the benevolence finding is one of the clearest cut across the globe, which is that there's been this increase in benevolence that it's pretty consistent across the generations. I think while many things can sometimes look a mess in this world and in people's well-being, this is one very rosy optimistic picture showing that people are in perhaps better – higher than we would assume, looking out for one another and helping their neighbors, helping their communities. The other finding that I think is really important and worth showcasing is the findings from chapter four, which is on the dementia findings I mentioned earlier, which is just how all of us are, hopefully, getting older. Unfortunately, dementia is one thing that raises significant challenges for many people who are facing these cognitive impairments. But also for their friends and their family who are trying to help these individuals be well and enjoy their lives, even with this very difficult diagnosis. I think there are some really interesting and important information to bring to bear in this year's report about how well-being and life satisfaction can be a really important protective factor for that. I just think it raises the stakes for some of the – thinking about some of this research. It's not just about feeling good, which I think is motivation enough in itself to care about our own and other’s well-being. But I think it really raises concerns about what it is we want in our communities and our societies and how we take care of each other. [00:22:48] PF: I agree 100%. This was so interesting. Lara, I appreciate you sitting down and talking with me. You really distilled a lot of great information for it. We're going to tell our listeners how they can find the report, how they can digest it. We're going to run some things on our website about it. But thank you for making sense of it for us and taking this time with me today. [00:23:07] LA: My pleasure. Thank you for the invitation. [00:23:12] PF: That was Dr. Lara Aknin, talking about findings from the World Happiness Report. If you'd like to download a full copy of the report, read additional stories about the findings, or learn more about Lara, just visit us at livehappy.com. We hope you've enjoyed this episode of Live Happy Now. If you aren't already receiving us every week, we invite you to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. While you're there, feel free to drop us a review and let us know what you think. 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: Rethinking Your Relationship with Dr. Julia DiGangi [INTRODUCTION] [0:00:03] PF: Thank you for joining us for Episode 454 of Live Happy Now. It's February, which means a message of love and Valentine's Day is all around us. But did you know that this is a make-or-break time for many couples? I'm your host, Paula Felps. Today, I'm talking with Dr. Julia DiGangi, a neuropsychologist and author of the new book, Energy Rising: The Neuroscience of Leading with Emotional Power. She's here today to talk about some of the common mistakes we make in our relationships, and how we can improve those relationships by learning more about what our brains, not our hearts are doing to complicate things. Let's have a listen. [INTERVIEW]   [0:00:42] PF: Well, Dr. Julia, welcome to Live Happy Now. [0:00:45] JD: I'm so happy to be here, Paula. Thanks for having me. [0:00:47] PF: It's February, love is in the air, but sometimes it's not. That's what we want to talk about, because we have Valentine's Day coming up. This is a whole month, I know it's Heart Month. We talk about our hearts and we talk about love. That puts a lot of pressure on people. One reason I wanted to talk to you is your team had sent me some pretty revealing stats about what this time of year does to couples. It said that a survey showed 19% of respondents say that Valentine's Day is when their relationships hit the breaking point. What's going on with that? [0:01:22] JD: I think that one of the hardest things. I'm a neuropsychologist, which means, I'm a clinical psychologist with specialized expertise in the brain. I'm always thinking about our relationships through the lens of neurobiology, which sounds not romantic, but I swear to God, it's very romantic. The brain hates nothing more than dissonance. The brain is a prediction machine. It's a pattern detector. So your brain is moving you through life going apple, apple, apple, fill in the blank. Should it be an apple? Well, on Valentine's Day, what this means when our brain is quite literally in the business of predicting things based on context, your brain is going, Valentine's Day, hearts, love, romantic love, super intimate connection, sexual satisfaction. All these expectations really start to get pretty intense. For those of us who don't feel like our relationship meets those expectations, that disconnect between what we think it should be, and what the brain is actually experiencing can be quite painful. [0:02:27] PF: Do men and women experience that differently. [0:02:30] JD: Let me approach the question this way, and then you can tell me if I've answered it. Is the brain a pattern detector on both men and women? Absolutely. But then, when we get into these questions of like, well, what are the patterns that are programmed in our brains as women, versus what are the patterns that are programmed into our brains as men? So I think what happens is the function, the structure, and the function of the brain, we've done a lot of research around this. And we do not today think there are meaningful differences between the women's brain and the male brain. What I do think happens is there's different predictions, which a lot of us call expectations, which a lot of us call culture, which a lot of us call roles. What those are at the neurobiological level, though, are these predictive codes. I as a woman should do X. You as a man should do Y. One of the things that I do a lot of is I work with a lot of men. A lot of men gravitate toward my work. What I have seen over and over again is, society has set up a pattern, where men, when they were boys, when they were tiny, tiny boys were told to sever themselves from their emotion. The brain undergoes spectacular – I mean, it gives me chills to think about. In the earliest years of life, in year zero through five, the brain is doing something like a million, a million neural connections every single second.   [0:03:51] PF: A second?   [0:03:53] JD: A second.   [0:03:54] PF: Wow.   [0:03:55] JD: I know, it's incomprehensible. Well, what happens is we say, "Well, I don't really remember when I was born, one, two, three, four, five. So maybe, it didn't get me. Well, no, your brain was encoding your most formative lessons, specifically around relationships, around what love feels like, around what we're supposed to do with difficult emotions, about how safe intimacy is or isn't. So we've gotten messages in our childhood, we all did about how safe people are, about how much access we have to them. We continue to play that out. One of the things I think is very healing for people to understand, I got a couple of things to say about this. The first is, there's no relationship on the planet, there's not a single relationship on the planet that is more complex than the adult long-term romantic relationship. [0:04:47] PF: I think many people agree with that. We're relieved to hear that, because sometimes, we're made to think it should be easy if the media makes it look easy and it's not.   [0:04:57] JD: It's not. It's not easy at all. I think for a lot of us, because we have either shame, or we're confused, we then – I call it a pain sandwich, our relationship doesn't feel good. Then, because we don't know how to get the relief we want, we're in even more pain. But the things that we ask from our long-term partners, the number of roles. They're supposed to be our lover, or confidant, our caretaker, our coparent, our house manager, our business partner, it's insanely complex. So when there's a lot of complexity, there's always confusion. The confusion is happening in real time, meaning it's happening in our households on a day-to-day basis. But also, and this is a piece I would love to talk to you about. We do not partner for life by mistake, we partner for life to finish our unfinished childhood business. [0:05:54] PF: Oh. Yes, let's talk about that. Because I see a lot of articles where people say, "Well, maybe we weren't meant to be with one person for the rest of our life." Is that true? Or is it that it actually gets so difficult or so intense, that it's like, "Hmm. I think I'm going to go start this with somebody else"? [0:06:13] JD: I do not think that there's an answer to it. In other words, I think some relationships are meant to go on forever. I think some relationships are meant to end. I don't actually think that's the most powerful mission, if you will, of the long-term relationship. I think the holy hope, believe it or not, of our long-term romantic partnerships is to show us precisely where we still hurt. Where we hurt has been where we have hurt since childhood. Why? But like, most fundamentally, the brain is moving us through our life. I mentioned patterns. But it's even more fundamentally than just any type of pattern. It's moving us through our life based on emotional patterns. What does an emotional pattern sound like? It sounds like some – I'll give you a couple examples. "I never get what I want. I never get what I want. I never get what I want" or "No one will help me. No one will help me. No one will help me" or "People don't listen to me. People don't listen to me." So then, what happens invariably, there's always two relationships that there are tremendous similarity. That of our parents, and that of our partner. In other words, how we were parented, that plays out always in the long-term romantic relationship. So if I feel from my childhood, I'm still carrying these wounds, I just feel like people don't hear me. When I try to communicate my distress to my parents, they're too busy, they work too much, they have their own mental health issues, there's too many kids in the house. I mean, there could be a million good reasons. But nonetheless, I, as a four-year-old have this feeling that I'm not heard. I promise that plays out in the long-term romantic relationship. I know how excruciating long-term romantic relationships can be. I'm not being funny; they really can be devastating. Well, I think a lot of us think, "Let me get out of this and let me try to partner again." But there's an interesting, you mentioned statistics at the beginning of our conversation, there's other really interesting statistics. Second marriages fail more than first marriages. And third marriages fail more than all of them. If this doesn't make logical sense, in other words, the more I try to do something, the better I should get at it. Ride a bike for two years instead of one year, and three years instead of one year. My bike riding skills should get better. They don't. Why? It's because until we address the underlying childhood injuries, they continue to play out. Now, of course, and I think this goes without saying, but you'll humor me. Plenty of us are in abusive relationships where there's violence and there's abuse. I think there are relationships that are meant to be left. But I think for part of the, both the curse, and the blessing of the romantic relationship, is that it brings to the surface injuries. The greatest power of the long-term romantic relationship is in its potential. Meaning, my old injuries are going to get activated, am I now going to exacerbate them or am I going to heal them? [0:09:13] PF: As people are in that state, where the injuries have surfaced, it presents as turmoil within the relationship, it can present as discontent with your partner. One thing I see a lot of times when I'm feeling very discontented with my partner, and I sit down with myself, it's actually things I'm mad about with myself. That has nothing to do with what she's got going on. Because her actions have not changed, it's what's going on with me. I think that's probably pretty common too. [0:09:40] JD: It's very common. I think we all relate to that, and I think it's incredible that you're giving yourself that pause and that reflection, because I think when we're around people, and we feel bad, it's very natural. Like there's no shame, there's no weakness. It just seems like you were in my environment when I was having this bad feeling, you must be the source of it. Now, this is complex because our partners do legitimately do like, in other words, if your partner had a bad day, and they're being gruff with you, that hurts. But I think the work is so much around, what are the kinds of the pattern conclusions that I'm drawing? One of the things I would love to talk to you about, because I think it's so healing in relationships is when we get upset with our partners, when our relationships start to fall into distress, we draw all these conclusions. Again, like these patterns, "You don't really love me, you don't really care about me, you don't really validate me, you don't really desire me." I mean, we could go on and on. What I'm saying is, what we have to understand that never gets talked about is the emotional state of confusion, the emotion of confusion might be singularly the most difficult emotion for the brain to process. Let me explain this. If the brain is a pattern detector, going Apple, fill in the blank, the only emotion that works against the fundamental design of the brain is confusion. In other words, if I'm angry, the brain knows what to do about anger. If I'm sad, the brain can predict what to do about sadness. If I'm afraid, the brain can predict what to do about fear. But when I'm confused, it literally stops the pattern detection abilities, because the brain goes, "Apple, apple, apple. Well, what's next?" What happens is, because your brain is always fundamentally invested in survival, meaning, keeping you out of pain. This is a great paradox. Your brain will predict conclusions that actually make you feel bad. In other words, the brain says, "It's better that you're vigilant and defensive, rather than soft and connected." When my partner walks in, after a long day of work, and he doesn't greet me, it violates my expectation. I'm thinking, "Oh, I'm going to see him, we're going to talk, da, da, da." He walks in, kind of nods me, and walks upstairs. I initially had that, "Huh?" But the brain can't huh for long, it has to very quickly move that. Instead of interpreting that violation to the pattern is like, maybe he's tired, or let me give him 15 minutes, I start to stew. I don't know why he treats me like this. Does he think I didn't have a hard day? Why can't we ever connect? Before I know it, my whole marriage is on the rocks. But can you see that all of that actually started if we really dismantle it, and talk about the emotional math. All of it really began based on the energy of confusion. I just wrote a Book Energy Rising, and I talk extensively about this energy of confusion, or sometimes we call it unclarity or uncertainty. It's this energy of who do I become when I don't know. [0:12:55] PF: I think that is so important that you brought that up, because anybody who's in a relationship has seen this exact thing play out for them. I've got a friend who talks about when she and her husband disagree, she's in the next room. They've been married for 30 years, and she's in there figuring out like, "Okay. Well, how are we going to divide up the house?" It goes from fine this morning to like, "I'm going to file for divorce." We have talked about how ridiculous it is, but that's just what happens to her. It just sets off this little domino effect, and she's got herself signing papers by the end of the night. [0:13:28] JD: It's great that we can all laugh about this, but I just want to normalize. It's so normal, and the reason it's so normal really has to do with our neurobiology. [BREAK] [0:13:36] PF: Today, we're talking about your heart and brain. So how about if we add lungs to the conversation. If you're spending a lot of time indoors this winter, chances are you're breathing in polluted air. In fact, indoor air is up to five times more polluted than outdoor air. That's why I'm loving my new air purifier from AirDoctor. It filters out 99.99% of harmful contaminants so your lungs don't have to. AirDoctor has a wide range of purifiers, so you can get the size it's right for your space, and you can breathe easy with its 30-day money back guarantee. So if you're looking to eliminate allergens, pollen, pet dander, and even bacteria, and viruses from your home or office space, check out AirDoctor at airdoctorpro.com. If you use the promo code LIVE HAPPY, you'll get up to $300 off and get a free three-year warranty. That's airdoctorpro.com, and use the promo code Live Happy. Now, let's get back to my conversation with Dr. Julia, as she tells us how our brains respond to conflict with our partners. [INTERVIEW CONTINUES] [0:14:46] JD: The reason it's so normal really has to do with our neurobiology. In other words, it sometimes tickles me and sometimes frustrates me, like we pay more attention to the intelligent operating of our cell phones, and ChatGPT than we pay attention how to intelligently operate the most exquisite machine on the planet, which is our own brain and nervous system. Well, in order to intelligently engage with the nervous system in the brain, we've got to understand what it does. The brain is telling us, when it comes to confusion, when it comes to uncertainty, I do not like it. So if we want to powerfully engage in our lives, with our emotions, with our partners, we got to have reverence and say, "When I'm confused, let me really take a beat, and try to not make any interpretations. Because if I do not slow my roll, my interpretation will be, I need to file for divorce by 7pm this evening." [0:15:47] PF: Then, what happens too is your reaction then sets off everything that's going on with them. I mean, so say your husband has come in, he's already had a bad day, didn't act the way you wanted. Now, you're like a house on fire and attacking him. That's not what he was expected. He probably just wanted some alone time, and like, "Let me get this day out of my head" and now it's escalated. How do you create a practice both individually, and as a couple that went to identify when you're in that state of confusion, your brain is confused, and to take that pause, and step back, instead of letting all of this escalate? [0:16:25] JD: I think the most important piece, and again, I think this is what I mean when I say, like really have reverence for the machine. Far, far too many of us want to do the work when we're activated. They're saying to me, because I do a lot of work, I do a lot of couples coaching, couples therapy. They'll say, like, "When we start to get in a fight, how do we solve it?" Well, you know how when a toddler is in the middle of a meltdown, really, the only thing you can do is wait for the storm to pass. And in fact, for those of us –I have little kids, they're not toddlers anymore, but they're still little. It's like, if you try to engage when they're activated, and you can try to be the most soothing, be like, "What can I get you honey? Do you want to cookie and a warm blanket?" It's like, when people are activated, what has to happen is we've got to restore emotion regulation. In the moment, a lot of times, the best we can do is go for a walk, take a deep breath, blah, blah, blah, we've heard it a million times. The powerful transformative healing work comes in the questions we ask ourselves, and the actions we take when we are not activated. I have a responsibility to own my childhood injuries as I bring them to my marriage. There's a classic pattern that plays out in most relationships. There's sort of three attachment styles. The first is, securely attached. This is the idea that our parents had a great intelligence of how to attend to our emotions. They really nailed it, and I can simplify this considerably. They really nailed this complex dance between connection and autonomy. In other words, they really knew when to soothe me, and they really knew when to trust me. They really knew when to be around me and they really knew when to give me my freedom. The second is something called anxious. So anxious attachment is when my parents sometimes shown the great, glorious golden light upon me. But then, sometimes, they went cold. I as a little child could not figure out the pattern. A lot of times, this happened in household with addiction, where there's a lot of emotional volatility, there's a lot of moodiness. Sometimes my parents were telling me how great I was, and then sometimes, I really needed mom, or I really needed dad, and even though I tried my little four-year-old heart out, I couldn't get them. The third category is what we call avoidant, and I'm oversimplifying for the purpose of it. But avoidant is basically, my parents chronically, totally miss my emotional needs. I learned as a very small child that I am an island unto myself. I learned that relying on other people for my needs is totally dangerous. Now, all of us have some aspects of these in all of us. In other words, these are not clean categories. They're continuums of behavior. But it's a very classic dynamic to have an anxious person, a person who's more anxious, pair with a person who has a more avoided pattern. So you get in this classic approach, avoidance dance, where the anxious person is saying, "Please come closer to me. Are you mad at me? Can we talk about this? Let's be more intimate. Let's talk about this. I love you. Do you love me?" They're more asking for this like chronic kind of anxious anxiety. The energy of anxiety is propelling this like, affirm your attachment to me. The avoidant is more like, I am so overwhelmed by emotion. I am so overwhelmed by, I know, because I'm now an adult in an adult relationship that your needs are on some level my responsibility. We're in a partnership here. No one ever taught me how to even get my own needs met. Now, it's kind of a double whammy. I don't know how to meet my own needs. I sure as hell don't know how to meet yours. I run from the room screaming on fire. Well, as I run from the room, screaming on fire, the anxious goes, "No, don't leave me," and then chases after them. You get in this classic, anxious avoidant standoff. [0:20:36] PF: That's so interesting, because, first of all, I could see that being a great little cartoon visual. But that is, it's really common. What then do people do? Do you just have to recognize this as my pattern to start healing this, or how do you start breaking it down so that you can make it work? Because obviously, people got together for a reason. They've been together this long, for a reason? What is it that made that happen, and how do you get past these patterns to get back to what is real and genuine, which is the love and affection that you have for each other? [0:21:08] JD: Such a great question. I'll sort of answer like this. First of all, I think these are the biggest questions of our life. They're enormous. I like to simplify them from people, which doesn't necessarily mean they're easily. Not necessarily, they're not easy. But I think we can do a lot of simplification. When couples come to me, they are very clear on the pain being caused by the other. They'll sit on my couch, either virtually, or in real life. They will say, "He doesn't respect me." "No, she doesn't respect me. She doesn't listen to me. No, she doesn't listen to me. She doesn't love me. No, she doesn't love me." So I say, "This is very valid. When we feel like our partners aren't seeing us, loving us respecting us, I got it. Totally going to get to this. Let's just put a pin in it for one second, and I have a different question. Give me all the evidence. In other words, tell me all the ways that you profoundly respect yourself, that you profoundly love yourself, that you profoundly see yourself." I got to be honest with you, Paula, I almost never get an answer to that question.   [0:22:15] PF: Really?   [0:22:16] JD: In other words, people kind of look at me like, "Well, I'm not sure how that works." Now, pay attention here, because I think this is a really important piece. We're saying, because in our marriages, in our long-term relationships, we die a death oftentimes by a million paper cuts. Even when there's catastrophic betrayal trauma, people aren't having a great marriage on Tuesday, and then cheating on Wednesday. You see what I'm saying? There's this growing disconnect. Both of us need to assume radical responsibility for our relationship. If I look at my partner, and I say, "You don't wash the dishes." The conclusion I draw about you now washing the dishes is catastrophic. In other words, if you don't love me, you don't respect me. You don't listen to me. How could I then not have an equally discrete – because washing the dishes on Wednesday is a very discrete thing. How could I not then be able to identify an equally discrete thing for myself, and put that same amount of emotional loading on it? In other words, when I do leave the house and get a massage, I feel the same degree of anger, I feel the same degree of self-love. When I tell myself, I'm going to walk away from this conversation, I am profoundly listening to myself, and now I'm in a state of joy. I'm in a state of exuberance, like how much I respected myself. People will say, "Well, that's silly to tell me to go get a massage or hold my boundary. You don't understand how miserable it is that they're not washing the dishes?" Well, you're taking a discrete behavior, and you're putting a ton of emotional loading on, it's fine. We all do it. This is how we make meaning out of life. There's no problem there. What I'm saying the problem is twofold. Do I have any examples in my own camp? And if I don't, and if I believe that this pattern has been with me since childhood, years, and years, and years before I even met my partner, what is my own responsibility? Not responsibility like [inaudible 0:24:07]. What is my own profound ability to my own injuries? When I really see people taking radical, self-loving responsibility for the ways I have heard for decades, and decades, and decades, and decades, far beyond the marriage, for example, this is when you start to see radical healing in the couple. [0:24:29] PF: I love this because you're giving responsibility to both parties, and you're breaking it down. Each one has their own way that they're going to have to set out to resolve this. It's not like if he starts doing the dishes, then, "Hey, everything's good." It goes so much deeper. How do people start doing that? How do couples start doing that, and start deciding where they need to focus on individually to come together as a couple? [0:24:57] JD: Great question. I'll say like, all of Energy Rising has a ton of these examples, case studies, exercises. I'll give you one brief one here, but I just want people to know, there's a lot of material. I would go to myself and say, "What is my primary emotional pattern around my pain in this relationship?" I gave a lot of examples, "I'm not seen, I'm not heard, I'm not loved, I'm not listened to, I can't get what I want." I would listen to myself and be like, "Okay." Say, mine is, "I can't trust you." I would say, that's valid. I'm not saying that our partners don't have work to do. Of course, they do. I'm saying, but just for a moment, let me ask the question to myself. What are the ways I don't trust myself, and I would write down 10 examples. I didn't trust myself to stop working today at five o'clock. I felt like I had to overwork, but I really wanted to stop and go play with my kids. I told myself that I was going to get out of bed this morning and go to the gym, and I didn't. When I make those kinds of commitments to myself, and I go back on my own word, I give myself a lot of good reason not to trust myself. You see. I start to say, I want a lot of evidence, 10 examples of how I don't trust myself, and I start to clean it up there. I start to become – because what we're really saying to our partners is, I can't rely on you. Well, can I rely on myself? I think what we start to see in a lot of cases is, no. Now, we partner precisely for reinforcement. I get that. In other words, if we're all perfectly islands unto ourselves, then why would anyone need – but a lot of us are coming, and when I say a lot of us. I mean, a lot of us. I'm a child of a psychologist, so I come from a lineage. I've been watching this conversation for 40 years. There's been profound evolution. I feel incredibly hopeful. But we know more than our parents knew, and our parents knew more than their parents knew. A lot of us are now taking, I think, radical responsibility for our injuries. We're doing this, yes, for our partners. Yes, for our children, but also for ourselves.   [0:26:58] PF: Absolutely.   [0:26:59] JD: We feel better in our own bodies, when we're not so on edge, when we're not so triggered. Here's the truth. If I feel like shit, my partner could be an angel. My partner is not an angel. Love him to death, but not an – let's imagine that we were married to a saint. I still got to go face the rest of the world. The people in traffic are still pissing me off. The people on social media are still making me angry. The people in my job – you see what I'm saying? [0:27:24] PF: Yes. You still have all these external factors that are going to trigger you, and then, you get to go home and take it out on your spouse. [0:27:31] JD: Yes. Yes. The holy hallucination, called the holy hallucination is that our partners are going to rescue us from our own nervous systems. There's no human being on the planet that can come into your nervous system, and ding, ding, ching, ching, ching, ching, chong, ching. It doesn't go like that. This is really a radical conversation. When I talk about power, Energy Rising is a lot about emotional pain and emotional power. I'm not talking about power, like lording over people, like my way or the highway. I'm talking about this beautiful life-giving wholeness, this profound courage, this profound resilience, this profound relationship with myself. Do you see when we give that to ourselves, we become the most magnetic thing on the planet? We change our frequency as a partner, as a spouse, as a lover, as a parent, and we feel great about it. A lot of us are out there being totally codependent, working ourselves to an absolute pope, "serving" other people and feeling like absolute shit about it. It doesn't have to be that way. [0:28:37] PF: I think there's so much that you can teach us. Obviously, it's not just our romantic relationships, this changes every relationship that we have. I think the work that you're doing is really incredible. As I said, we just have so much to learn from you. As I let you go, what is the one thing, the one thing that you want couples in particular, no matter where they're at in their relationship, what do you want them to keep in mind as we enter Valentine's season and go through this time? [0:29:05] JD: Like so many things going through my head. I think I'm going to say this. It's a big thing to metabolize, and it's really the reason. I've been asked to do kind of other public-facing projects, and I've always said no. I'm a Midwest academic, who likes to go to two parties a year and then spend the rest of the time alone in my office. The reason I agreed to write Energy Rising is, I feel like the work of my life, I was put on this planet to give this message. That all of those horrible feelings, it's so easy to feel. Anxiety, fear, frustration, rejection, humiliation, and all of them. They are not here to torment you. They are here to lead you home. Those feelings are telling you is they're calling you into your next level of power. The reality of our life is there is no way to have more connection with other until we come into a new relationship with the energy of rejection. If I can't hold the possibility of rejection in my nervous system, I will never have real intimacy. All of us want more self-confidence. The only way I negotiate more self-confidence is by coming into a more expansive relationship with doubt. Do you see, there are opposite sides of the same coin? The more I face my own doubt, the more confident I become. The more I say, "Am I really being rejected here?" As I contemplate it, it doesn't feel great. But then, I start to see very quickly, I get relief and say, "Oh, no. It's okay that he's not available for me tonight." I don't have to come up with this horrific thesis nightmare about how like, I'm alone in the world, and I'm going to destroy my family. It doesn't have to be that way, but we need a more intelligent relationship with the feelings we don't want to feel. [0:30:49] PF: Excellent. Fortunately, your book is a great primer for how we start feeling those feelings and get in touch with ourselves. Dr. Julia, the work you're doing, like I said, is just amazing. I so appreciate you taking this time out of your busy schedule, and sitting down, and talking with me about it. [0:31:05] JD: I so thank you for having me, Paula. Thank you again. [END OF EPISODE] [0:31:12] PF: That was Dr. Julia DiGangi, talking about how to make the most of our relationships. To learn more about Dr. Julia, find her book, follow her on social media, or watch her fabulous TED Talk. Visit us at livehappy.com and click on the podcast tab. Speaking of love, we would love to hear how we're doing. Please leave your comments and ratings wherever you download your podcast and let us know what you think. 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: Navigating Grief During the Holiday Season With Gina Moffa [INTRODUCTION]   [00:00:02] PF: Thank you for joining us for episode 448 of Live Happy Now. Managing grief is a challenge at any time of the year. But during the holidays, it becomes even more difficult. Today, we're talking about how to navigate your grief during the holiday season. I'm your host, Paula Felps. Today, I'm sitting down with Gina Moffa, a licensed psychotherapist and mental health educator who specializes in treating trauma and grief. Her new book, Moving On Doesn't Mean Letting Go, offers new tools and perspectives for managing grief and loss. She's here to talk with me about how we can manage our own grief and how to provide support to others who are grieving this holiday season. Let's have a listen. [INTERVIEW] [00:00:47] PF: Gina, happy holidays. [00:00:49] GM: Hi, Paula. Happy holidays to you. [00:00:52] PF: I am so excited to be able to talk to you today because it's a difficult time for a lot of people right now. Of course, I wanted to – there are so many things that are going on. So many people I know that are experiencing loss. You and I talked about that a little bit before we started recording. It just really led me to say once again I feel like this is a topic that we need to sit down and discuss because we don't talk about grief quite enough. I wanted to start by talking about your own experience because in your terrific new book, you talk about when you lost your mother. Even though you had been doing this work with others, it was different when it happened to you. So I love that perspective that you give. Can you talk about that story just a little bit? [00:01:40] GM: Sure. Thanks for asking. Yes. It’s kind of a funny tale of the grief therapist that got grief wrong because I thought with all of my training and with all of the tools and the years and the education that I would have kind of a step up in a way, right? There was this arrogance that I came with, thinking I've got all the tools. So when my mom was diagnosed with cancer, and she was misdiagnosed for a good year, I don't talk about that in the book. But she went to the doctor, knew something was wrong, tried to advocate for herself, and really wasn't getting anywhere. By the time they did catch it as a cancer, it was stage four, and there wasn't a whole lot they could do. There was a little bit of trauma in that of like what – if only, if we only could have caught this. So I felt like at that particular time then when we did lose her that I needed to have some semblance of control. I really thought that having the intellectual understanding of grief would give me a leg up. I could sort of stand on top of the rocks and throw up my flag of victory, and that would be my path. I was sadly mistaken and really deeply humbled because what I didn't understand at the time was that grief is a full-body experience. If you're not allowing yourself to feel what you need to feel, and you're not mindful of how it could show up in your body and really taking very good care of yourself, it will come and knock very hard on your door and sometimes knock you down. That was one of the really, really big lessons for me, but it was also sort of contending with the idea that you could have all of the tools in the world. You could have all of the education, years and years of different trainings, and still be taken down by loss. It’s so much less science and so much more mystery. It was one of my biggest learnings. [00:03:42] PF: I thought that was such an important lesson to share because on the one hand, we might take away like, well, if a grief specialist can't handle it, how can we mere mortals do it. But instead, what you really show us is, yes, this is a human experience. We can apply all the psychology and the science and the how-tos and should-dos to it. But it's still an individual personal painful experience. [00:04:06] GM: Yes, absolutely. I think one of the other lessons was that we could also say I've gone through different losses, I've had a divorce, or I lost a pet, other really substantial life-changing losses. But every single loss is different, and how it comes to us is different, and how we metabolize it is different. So I think that was another lesson in of this is really understanding not only is it personal. But within our personal losses, each one comes with a different flavor and a different way of processing it. [00:04:38] PF: I think that's such an important point to make because as I was reflecting on that, I was thinking of, yes, I've lost both my parents. I've lost a beloved aunt. I've lost pets. Each one does land differently. Even with, say, having lost multiple dogs, the loss of each dog is different. [00:04:56] GM: Yes, absolutely. [00:04:57] PF: We don't necessarily give ourselves that grace of just because I handled this well means I'm going to handle this loss exactly like that. [00:05:07] GM: Right. I mean, look, and I hate to say it, but I blame society. We were never taught about grief. We were never taught how to show up for our feelings or how to understand and support ourselves in loss. It's always just been a hurry up and get over it or cry and feel sadness. But that's really it, and I think it's such a complicated, incredibly unpredictable experience. I think if we were taught to do better, we would be able to give ourselves that grace and that patience and the space to show up in whatever ways that loss asks of us. [00:05:41] PF: Yes, because I think, especially with like the stages of loss and things like that, we have this idea that there's a checklist that we're going to go through and then move on. That’s not at all what happens. [00:05:56] GM: Right. I'm really surprised that Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s five stages of grief still exists in so much literature because it really was intended when she wrote it to be for the terminally ill themselves, where there would be an end time, right? So the acceptance would be something they would have to come to. But I think one of the things that's tricky is on the one hand, it's great that we have kind of a structure of some kind that these are some things we can expect, sure. But that there's so much more involved in that, and there's no end time, and that it will with us forever. I think that can be a real shock to people when they come into my office, for example, and I'm saying to them grief will be with you always. People, they’re like, “Wait, what? When do I get to acceptance? I thought this is just I get through these stages, and then I'm better. Now, you're talking to me about anniversaries and holidays and death days and meaningful days, where it's going to come up and bite me, and I'm terrified of that. That sounds terrible, but like how do I get out of here?” That’s the realistic view of grief is that our people will always be with us. With that love comes great, great anguish and despair as well. It's balancing the two for the rest of our days. [00:07:15] PF: Yes. I'm so glad that you bring that up because I think also as observers, sometimes we think someone should be more healed than they are. It's like, no, if they lost their person, and it's like I can't imagine going the rest of my life without my person. Why would I expect that somebody else after a certain period of mourning or certain period of years would be able to just resume their life as if that's just history? [00:07:44] GM: Right. I mean, imagine somebody going through open heart surgery. You just say, “Okay, great. Get back to working out. Get back the next day.” It’s just we look at loss or we look at even mental health challenges as something that we can just hurry up and get better with because we can't see it. The truth is it's as specialized as spinal surgery or open heart surgery when we go through loss. The recovery time is indefinitely in a lot of ways. Obviously, as a therapist, my hope is that we aren't isolating or ruminating for too long or really getting trapped in the what ifs and the should haves and all of that because that can lead to much more despair and mental health challenges, deeper ones. I mean, yes, I think that we rush people through because we're scared, and we don't know better. It's hard for us to put ourselves in the shoes of somebody's individual experience because we're just not good at it. [00:08:41] PF: I would say that's very, very true. One thing that you introduce in your book is the idea called grief fall. Will you explain what that is? You're going to say this so much better than I do. [00:08:56] GM: I don’t know. Well, I was thinking of the time that I got the call that my mother had died from my father. I had just called to check in to let them know I would be on the next train. I just had to come back to the city for just an hour to do something and was headed right back. Within that time frame, my mother died, and I got the call. As soon as I hung up with my father, he called me right back and said, “In the time I came to talk to you, your mother died.” It was this moment where I just – it was a portal for me. It was the moment that I knew nothing would ever be the same. It was that call where my entire body felt flushed. I could feel pins and needles in my face. I could feel the blood rush around in my body, trying to find its center. It was an experience that I can recall even telling you right now. But it was, for me, a free fall. I needed it to have a name because I know that we all have this sensation when we get a diagnosis, or we get that phone call also, or we're holding our pet’s paw. This moment that we know will never be the same, and it's a free fall. We don't know exactly where we will land or if we will land or where that will be or what that will look like. It feels like a foreign landscape and another planet. To me, you're not grieving until you find your landing. It’s that portal into grief, that moment that we know. Everyone can recall a time where they – that remember when moment when I got the news or I lost something or someone incredibly significant to me. It felt important to give it a name because it's a defining moment for so many of us. [00:10:46] PF: That's such an appropriate name for it because as you said, like you have one moment where things – it's the world as you know it. In a split second, everything is different. Everything feels different. You know that it's never going to go back to being the same. [00:11:02] GM: Yes, yes. It’s the day that I’m walking down a street in Manhattan, and I'm like, “I no longer have a mother. That's it. For the rest of my life, I no longer have this person who was my lighthouse, who was my due north, the person I needed for the smallest of things.” How long can I keep this chicken in my refrigerator, the things that you would need a mom for and thinking, “Wow, this is it now for the rest of my life.” I don't even – I haven't reached the tip of what this actually means or what this will feel like. But I know that I'm in the fall of it. So, yes, it could be incredibly traumatic. [00:11:43] PF: You had alluded to the fact about how grief affects your entire body. Can you talk about some of the ways that grief does manifest itself physically? [00:11:52] GM: Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think it's one of the things we often forget is that grief is a stressor, a huge stressor. All the things that come along with a major stress; increased inflammation, immune response, if you find yourself bumping into things more, if you find yourself exhausted or you can't sleep, if your appetite has shifted in some way. Your libido is different. People are getting headaches, or they can't see well. People are having stomach aches. I mean, these are just some of the things. There is such a thing as the mind-body connection, and we know it in theory. But I think we don't often think about it when it comes to something as much as losses. It affects every one of our systems. We have 12 systems, and the brain is – the nervous system comes into play. It's scanning for danger. When we are going through a loss, it's got a lot of work to do, the nervous system itself. It creates anxiety. Our heart races. We get sweaty palms. Our nervous system itself is seeking danger because its actual only job is to keep us alive. When we have a loss significant in our lives, our nervous system will go off and say, “Okay, this is possible. What other danger will happen? What could be next, and how will I ever be okay?” There's a multitude of ways that grief comes to our bodies, and it could be small ways where you just are having appetite issues, or you can't sleep as much. But it could be as big as you actually develop. There's such a thing as brokenhearted syndrome, where you do actually have restricted blood flow to the heart, and you get hypertension, and your entire equilibrium can go off. That's why I really, really press people. I say it's not important to have self-care. It's survival care. You have to – you cannot ignore the body's doorbell. We have to really figure out how we can take care of ourselves, even when we don't have the energy, we don't have the desire, or we don't have the time, which is something that I said in my book. I don't have time. I have too many things to do. It was over and over. I just kept moving and pushing until I wound up in the ER with pancreatitis and later on a thyroid disorder. So it was really – when I said earlier it was a humbling experience to go through the grief process as a grief therapist, it certainly was head-to-toe humbling. [00:14:32] PF: Did that change how you approach it with clients at all? Or did it just kind of reinforce what you've known? [00:14:38] GM: It did change it because it was one of the things I hadn't learned in any of my education. Mind you, at the time, I was in graduate school. Actually, including now, there still is no main curriculum that teaches any clinician whatsoever about loss that isn't either just centered around end-of-life care or spiritual aspects of loss. So I didn't know. I really didn't understand how the body could play a part. Now, of course, it is one of the things I talk about the most, which is when we're in fresh grief, one of the things we have to remember is that grief takes endurance. One of the ways it will show up is it will exhaust you. It's not a sprint. We're not trying to get to the end of that fifth step. This is going to be with us over and over in different ways, in different intensities. When we're feeling overwhelmed or when we're just enduring a loss, it's most important to make sure that we're drinking enough water. We're getting enough nutrition. We're getting movement. We're getting fresh air. That we're getting enough rest. Even if we can't sleep, that we're resting our body. That we're really just mindful that the body is going to play as equal a part to our processing and experiencing loss as our emotional aspects, so absolutely. [00:15:59] PF: I love that you bring that up. I just love the way you approach it because I feel that's so often overlooked. I wanted to talk specifically about grief in the holidays. What I was thinking about as you're talking about it is this is also a time of the year where there is more stress. So even without the grief, let's look at it. Our schedules are packed. There's more stress. There's bugs like the one I have circulating around. [00:16:23] GM: I'm with you. [00:16:24] PF: It's great, yes. There's all this added stress and pressure. Now, we throw in the component of grief in the holiday season. So how important is it to be able to address the pain, the agony, the challenges of grief? [00:16:45] GM: I think it's going to be just incredibly important to become more aware, right? The first few years after a loss can be incredibly overwhelming. For so many people, whether your loss is recent or whether it's years ago, there is a heaviness that can start to grow for people when we hit the month of November, especially if you were in some ways someone who enjoyed the holidays or had special traditions or rituals with your loved ones who are no longer here. I think one of the things it brings up is the holiday spotlight, everything that we're missing. It puts in so much pressure to find cheer and look on the bright side and look at the silver lining. It can really feel like a forced sense of cheer when all you really want to do is hide away until January 2nd. But there are ways that you can survive it. Sometimes, I don't say have a good holiday. I'm like, “Have a holiday.” Have a day. Just get through the day. That's all it has to be. If it hurts, we don't have to give it the attention. We don't have to pretend that. We don't have to pretend that we're feeling festive in any way. [00:17:58] PF: I like that you say that because I do think people feel like, “I need to put on a brave face. I need to participate in the holidays. I need to be filled with cheer.” It's like if you're not feeling it, you don't have to do it. [00:18:12] GM: Exactly. I think people are often nervous to tell their loved ones that they don't want to participate. But I think there's ways to prepare for the holidays as a griever that can make it a lot easier for you. At the end of the day, it's what can I do for myself to take the pressure off. We need time for ourselves as grievers. We're going to need the time to have solitude and self-reflection and to feel our feelings. So we may not be able to do the things that we've done in the past. I think communicating that, if somebody doesn't get it, which we would hope our loved ones could understand. But in the case that they don't because they are uncomfortable or because they think that being around people could cheer you up, I think it's okay to say I'm not going to be able to do what I've done in the past. I'm not okay, and I'm going to do my best. But if I need to forego this holiday, please forgive me, and please be with me and support me in that. [00:19:09] PF: Yes. I think that's so important to be able to say, especially because, all right, the holidays have already been forever changed. So if you're changing one more component of it, that shouldn't bother somebody else. It's like I'm adapting to fit my needs, and that's just kind of how we have to do. It’s about healthy survival. It’s not just about survival. It's about being healthy throughout that. [00:19:31] GM: Absolutely. Thank you for saying that. Saying no is healthy, and it is self-care. Celebrating is counterintuitive to the way that you're feeling with loss. Christmas comes around every year. So if you have to skip it, it's okay. It's not a once-in-a-lifetime event. So I think it's okay to give ourselves permission to say no is a complete sentence, and it is the highest form of self-care. [00:19:59] PF: Yes, yes. I think that's so true. When I was about six years old, my favorite aunt and uncle – my uncle died on Christmas Eve. He always played Santa Claus for all the cousins, and he was also – that's where we did Christmas Eve together, everyone and all the whole family. So everyone was, “We were going to cancel it.” My aunt Lillian was like, “No, this is for the kids. We're going to do it.” I've always wondered about that because I remember that Christmas Eve so clearly because there was not even a sense of loss. There was a sense of joy. It was an awareness that it was different. But there was also such an appreciation because this was still going on in the wake of this loss. It was a very unique experience. I regret that I never asked my aunt about how she felt about that and what that did for her. [00:20:53] GM: That is – no. I mean, what I love about that is that it brings up another angle of the holidays, which is that some people will really, really feel so much comfort in continuing the traditions and continuing the rituals and having their loved ones around them in some way to celebrate the goodness of the person and the special way that they were in the world with people or in the family. That is a way of grieving, too. That grief itself doesn't have to just look like sadness and isolation. That it can actually look like coming together and celebrating a person who isn't there in the same ways that we would celebrate as if they were. So I think that's also really important to point out. [00:21:37] PF: Another thing, and you mentioned this earlier when you talked about this can go on for years, and we tend to think like, okay, someone's first year is tough. Then, okay, now we're back on schedule. I think it's so important to realize that each year is going to be different. I have a friend from high school who lost her husband last year, a great guy. Oh, my gosh. So last year was difficult because all the first holidays, all the firsts without him. As the holiday started coming around this year, I reached out. I said, “How are you doing?” She said, “For some reason, this year is more difficult.” I think people get puzzled by that because we're kind of taught that, oh, get through that first year, and it gets better. But that's not necessarily the case. [00:22:24] GM: It's absolutely a myth. The thing about the first year is that it's a year of firsts. That is exactly what it is. It is a year of getting used to it. It's a year of shock, but it's also a year that more people are supportive. There's more people around to say, “Hey, I'm thinking of you this Christmas,” or, “I'm thinking of you on so-and-so's birthday.” The real loss itself hasn't sunk in yet. It's when people decide that your morning period is over and life is back as we know it, year two through forever, that the real reality of our losses can sink in. We forget that life does go on, which means that we can have hard days that don't have anything to do with our loss. But that can make our loss feel harder when it comes about, and so the world at large. When the world is at war, for example, or we're looking at poverty around us or whatever it is, or we lost a job. It can make losing a parent or a spouse or a child so much harder. We often don't take that into account. We always sort of isolate our losses. But at the end of the day, it all plays into it and how we metabolize emotions and our experiences. As I'm talking to you, my mother's death anniversary is this week. I was thinking it's going to be seven years, and it feels like such a long time. Every year feels different, but this year also feels hard. It could be that we just sold our family home, but it could be that the world is just feeling very uncertain. I think some of that plays into it. So in the air of transparency, it does – every year can feel really different. I remember last year not feeling quite as intense as it does this year. So I think we have to really bring that word grace as a companion with us every single time we're looking at loss. [00:24:21] PF: Then what tools do you have for dealing with that? How do you make it through each year? If you can't say, “This is what I can expect,” how do you walk on that path with grief as your companion if it's going to be a different journey each year? [00:24:38] GM: Yes. It’s really interesting because some of the best advice I can give, even in the unpredictable, is to be prepared. I, for example, will plan getting together with friends and either toasting my mother or creating a meal that she loved and honoring her in some way. That's the way I like to prepare so that I'm not alone and that I'm with people who loved her or who knew her. We can tell stories. For other people, maybe being alone and watching a movie is what they want to do. So I think even in the unpredictable, we can prepare in a way that we can ask ourselves, okay, maybe I'll have a plan A, a plan B, and a plan C. I can decide that day, depending on how I feel, if it's more intense or less intense, which one I'm going to do. But I think what it can help with, and I say this a lot about the preparing for the holidays, is that the worst part is the anticipation and the anxiety leading up to it, the not knowing, right? Having a plan or several plans for that specific day, even if you decide to forego them, can really relieve some of that anxiety of the unpredictability. [00:25:50] PF: That's a great tip. Obviously, some years, we may be the ones doing the grieving. Other years, it's someone else sitting in that chair for the first time. First of all, if we're grieving, how do we let others know what we need? That means even if we don't know what we need, how do we let them know what we need from them? [00:26:10] GM: Well, I mean, I think this is the hard part. I think letting people know that and exactly this, right? Sometimes, it’s please read this book, right? I have a section in my book that speaks to people supporting grievers. But other times, it can be I really don't know that I can do this right now, and I don't want to commit to this. Or, hey, I could use some support this year or some help this year. I think we have to be able to reach out, or we have to be able to communicate if people around us are not getting it or at least being the ones to initiate whether or not we need asking, whether or not we need help. I mean, I think we have to sort of play it by ear and say, “Hey, I don't know how I'm going to feel this day. But I do know that I'm not going to be able to do as much as I have done before, and so perhaps we can figure that out.” “I'm not going to be able – someone else may have to do the shopping. Someone else may have to do the cooking. Someone else may have to decorate or wrap. I don't believe I can do that this year. And if I can, then I will certainly show up and do that. But right now, I have to play that by ear.” I think we have to be able to say that. [00:27:25] PF: That makes a lot of sense. Then what if this loss is extremely fresh? Some people have what I'll call the luxury of it, being a few months since they lost someone as we enter the holidays. For others, it is so fresh, so raw. What's the best way to approach the holidays and your self-care if everything is still very fresh for you? [00:27:49] GM: I think that really it kind of is the same in a lot of ways. I say often go gently. Be as gentle as you can as you approach the holidays and, like I said, even earlier. Whether it is the holidays or whether it is anything else in our lives, the best advice is to try to still be prepared, even if we aren't, even if we're overwhelmed, and even if we're inundated with things. We're probably still at the point where there's a lot of shock and that the information hasn't necessarily sunk in. Or perhaps we've had a sudden unexpected loss, and we're in the trauma of that. I think is we must expect that the holiday will not be what it was before. But if we don't have people around us to know that or to help us with what we need, it is really important that we just go as gently as we can plan for the things that we're able to. But also expect that more often than not, we probably won't be able to do the things we thought because we're simply in survival mode. If we want to stay home and eat cookies and sit on the couch and cry, that has to be okay. It's certainly okay in my book. I think this is the time where we say give grace and not advice, right? [00:29:03] PF: I love that. Yes. [00:29:05] GM: More than anything, what we need is to keep our advice and our opinions to ourselves on how people will spend that day. This is where we need presence and patience for the people that we love. [00:29:16] PF: Yes. Sometimes, bare minimum is quite enough. Getting out of bed, if that's what you can accomplish that day, good for you. You did it. We don't give ourselves enough credit for that. [00:29:30] GM: It’s so true. You know what? Some days, though, if it's Christmas Day and it was important and you need to stay in bed a little bit longer, that's okay, too. You just don't want to make a habit out of isolating. Yes. I think that's what it is. I think the grace comes however we can get through the day. Sometimes, it will be to stay in bed. Sometimes, it will be just to shower. Sometimes, it will be because we have a pet that needs to be walked, so they get us out of bed. Whatever that is, that can be a triumph. Let's celebrate those little things, just getting through the day. [00:30:05] PF: Is there a point at which you look at it and you say okay? I don't want to say I should be doing this, but where you say, “Okay, I feel like I'm not making any progress in this grief walk, and I need some help.” What would you say would be the signs that after a certain period of time, you really need help walking down this path? [00:30:26] GM: Sure. I think that time is a tricky thing because we always say time heals all wounds, but it really doesn't. It’s what we do with the time that matters. It's how are we using tools or what are we using in the time to connect with other people. Connection in and of itself is one of the deepest healing tools there is; safe, genuine, loving connection. I would say this. If you're somebody who is ruminating over the loss, if you're somebody who just can't accept that the loss has happened, if you are somebody who's really struggling with the acceptance that this person is gone and/or feel some sense of responsibility, if you are also isolating yourself, like I said earlier, and you don't want to see people more and more and more, if your daily functioning seems to be lessening day by day, I think these are the times that reaching out for help will be the most vital for you because, otherwise, grief is this full-body experience that will change our lives and throw us off course and throw us off center. That's not always something that needs therapy, and it's not always something that needs a support group, although I always encourage it if you want to, of course. That would be – I can't be a therapist and not encourage therapy. [00:31:45] PF: Exactly. No, you're fine. Get back out there. [00:31:48] GM: Exactly. For some people, therapy is not it, right? For me, it's what does therapy provide. A sense of safe connection and validation. That's for people going through sort of what I'll call a normal grief experience, where they aren't ruminating or isolating or feeling responsible or stuck in the throes of trauma. If you are experiencing any of those things, it is really incredibly important to reach out to a therapist or a professional, someone you trust or someone who specializes in grief specifically. [00:32:23] PF: Yes. I do think that's an important distinction to make because I will never bash therapists. But I will say not all of them were equally skilled. [00:32:33] GM: Oh, for sure. [00:32:35] PF: I have sought help in dealing with certain losses, and the people were not skilled at dealing with loss. That was not their bag. So you really do. If you're seeking help for grief and loss, you do need to make sure that the person you consult has expertise in that area. [00:32:53] GM: Absolutely. I always bring it back to the doctor metaphor in that same way, which is you're not going to go to a podiatrist for a heart problem. Because of what I said earlier, people were not receiving specialized grief training and education in graduate school. You have to seek that out yourself. So it is important that if you don't already have a therapist that you feel safe with that you do, you make sure that you do whatever research you can or have someone else do it for you. Also, even the training itself is not always everything. You have to feel safe with this person or you're not going to share. You're not going to be as honest. Therapy is so helpful, but it has to be the right person with the right training. [00:33:37] PF: Yes. That is so true. The last question I was going to ask you is what's the one thing everyone should keep in mind this holiday season, whether they're experiencing grief or helping someone else through it? [00:33:50] GM: Earlier, I said something about patience and presence being the biggest gift that we can give somebody who's grieving this holiday season. It's also something that we need to give ourselves. If we can be present, allow our feelings, allow the time to feel our feelings, do what we can to take the pressure off of ourselves, plan for our grief. Don't be afraid to create new rituals or expand on the ones we've already had. As a griever and as somebody supporting grief, as I said before, walk beside somebody. Don't try to lead them. Don't try to carry them. Don't try to push them towards healing. Be with them. Be present. Be patient because this is a time like no other in their life. Despite it all, we do remember these moments. As much as we have brain fog, we remember who walks with us on this path. I think the biggest pieces of advice I would say, both as a griever and as someone supporting them, is to be present and patient on this path because it does take endurance, and it can be incredibly lonely. [00:34:58] PF: That's so well said. Gina, thank you so much for sitting down with us today. You have so much to teach us on this subject. Your book is amazing. [00:35:06] GM: Oh, thank you. [00:35:06] PF: I know that you're offering a free chapter when they visit our website. We're going to tell them how they can get that and just a fantastic well-written, much-needed book. Thank you for writing that, and thank you for coming on and talking about grief today. [00:35:21] GM: Paula, thank you so much. Thank you, again, for all you do and bringing the light and the spotlight to something that is incredibly hard to talk about. For all the aching hearts out there, my heart is with your heart. So thank you, Paula, for all of this. [END OF INTERVIEW] [00:35:41] PF: That was Gina Moffa, talking about handling grief during the holiday season. If you'd like to learn more about Gina, explore her new book, Moving On Doesn't Mean Letting Go: A Modern Guide to Navigating Loss, or download a free chapter, just visit us at livehappy.com and click on the podcast tab. That is all we have time for today. From all of us at Live Happy, this is Paula Felps, wishing you and your loved ones a truly happy holiday season. [END]

Follow along with the transcript below for episode: Tuning Into Sound Therapy With Laura Widney [INTRO] [00:00:04] PF: What's up, everybody? This is Paula Felps, and you are listening to On a Positive Note. Science is increasingly giving us more information about how sound frequencies can not only change our mental state but change how we feel physically too. As you're about to hear, after seeing how sound frequencies were helping her wellness clients reduce things like stress and anxiety, Laura Whitney set out to find a way to make sound therapy more accessible. She has done that by creating an app called Soaak that provides sound therapy on the go. She's here with me to talk about how sound affects us and how we can use it as a daily wellness practice. Let's have a listen. [INTERVIEW] [00:00:44] PF: Laura, thank you so much for coming on the show with me. [00:00:47] LW: Yes. Thank you for having me. I'm so excited to be here and talk with you. [00:00:50] PF: I love what you're talking about today because it's sound and all the ways that it affects us. To kick it off, I want to know your story. How did you get so interested in this topic? [00:01:01] LW: I was a hair stylist for the first part of my life. For the first 16 years of my life, I did it professionally, and I own different salons. So through a series of events, I had a really good friend of mine that was a naturopathic doctor. Me and her talked for years about natural wellness. What I did in the kind of beauty industry was I’m basically like an honorary therapist, where I listened to my clients all day. I just really had such a heart for helping people. I felt like I was helping people in what I was doing because when you look good, you feel good. So there was a component to that in what I did. But after years of really kind of wanting to make a change in my life, I went towards the holistic wellness profession. I sold my salons, and I kind of dove off a cliff, so to speak, and went into this holistic health. That's when I really started studying everything I could get my hands on, as far as energy medicine and holistic modalities, everything from IV therapy, to body work, to chiropractic, just everything. Everything that helps heal the body I really dug in. So I opened a wellness clinic, and I had that for about five years. That was really where Soaak was born because we did frequency therapy in clinic. So that was one of my favorite modalities was that sound vibration therapy because it's non-invasive. It works really good. With our Soaak app, it's now inexpensive versus the clinic. Anytime you go into any holistic wellness, you're going to spend some money. It's expensive, and it's not covered by insurance. So that was why I just loved frequency therapy. I loved sound therapy. It changed my life in so many ways, which I can get into some stories later. But that's really kind of how I got into what I'm doing now and creating my company called Soaak is from my experience with my wellness clinic. Having frequency therapy and sound therapy is one of the modalities in the clinic. [00:03:01] PF: Break that down for the listeners a little bit because when we talk about sound and frequencies, we know what music is, but we might not necessarily associate sound and sound frequencies. Can you really explain what it is we're talking about? [00:03:13] LW: Yes, okay. So the frequency specifically are specific megahertz. It's a sound, and so there's a lot of different frequency generators that generate the actual sound of the frequency. So there are trillions and trillions of frequencies in the world and in the universe, and we are all made up of a frequency. So your individual human being has its own blueprint, its own signature blueprint frequency. It's different from everybody else's. Not one person has the same frequency. We are made up of a composition of frequencies, basically, but everything has a unique frequency. So a healthy heart has its unique frequency. Skin has a unique frequency, hair. Even a cancer cell has a specific frequency. Royal Rife years ago actually was able to identify all of the different frequencies in which actual megahertz paired with what thing in our body and what physical thing. So when you play a frequency, you can play a specific megahertz, and it resonates that thing on your body. So what we did in our clinic was we actually made frequency compositions. So you can go online and Google 432 hertz, for example, or 528 hertz. Well, that is one specific frequency that's a megahertz. So it's 432 hertz. We would take those frequencies, and we would layer them with other frequencies. We did a lot of clinical trials, research stuff in our clinic that helped us identify, let's say, if you're having issues with your digestive system. It could be from a lot of things, and so one specific megahertz isn't necessarily going to fix everything. So we would identify, okay, what is wrong with the digestive system. Could it be something you ate? Could it be an allergic reaction? Could it be lack of sleep? Could it be stress? Could it be the vagal nerve, all of these things? So then we created these frequency compositions that are layered with all these specific megahertz to address that one area of the body. Everything in the universe is a frequency. My voice is a frequency. Our thoughts are omitting a frequency. We are all just reverberating these frequencies from the inside out. So it's very similar to music, where you hear a country song, for example. It puts you in a certain mood. Like it just changes what you're thinking about. It changes the way you feel inside, your emotions. You can just start crying. Then you put on your favorite gym workout playlist, and that's a completely different emotion that it stirs up in you right at the moment. Music is like a perfect example of kind of how frequencies affect you, but nobody really thinks of it like that because it's just music. Music is like a universal language. When you think about actual Soaak frequencies or megahertz, they're kind of doing the same thing. They are tuning your body to a certain frequency. So they're helping your cells, talking to your cells, and helping them oscillate at a certain frequency for optimal health. [00:06:12] PF: Are those frequencies paired with a certain type of music? Or how is it – I've seen it done different ways. How exactly do you do that? [00:06:20] LW: So we actually do all of the above. On our app, we have different listening options. So you can do the raw frequency, which is just that raw. You'll hear it when you go on the app. It's a raw frequency. Some of them are really pleasant, really relaxing. Some frequencies are pretty high-pitched, a little less palatable. So because of that, we paired them with music, which is guitar. Then we also have another option, which is nature sounds. So even our nature sounds like rain or thunder, stuff like that, and the guitar, we tune those sounds also to a certain frequency that kind of matches the frequency, that underlying frequency that it's with. We have lots of different options because everybody's different, and I get tired of listening to just the raw frequencies. Sometimes, I just want to listen to some music. Sometimes, I want to hear the rain with the nature sounds. So we have lots of options. [00:07:10] PF: Yes. I think it's really important to point out that there is just a ton of science that supports what this does. A few years ago, when I started doing some stories on this, people were like, “You're crazy,” because there was not as much research out there. Now, people really come to understand like frequencies, how they affect us, and also things like our digital world. How does that affect us? Okay, it's going to be like a two-part question because I want to talk about how this is affecting us and then how we can kind of counter that through using sound frequency. [00:07:43] LW: Yes. Again, I'll go back to the statement that everything is frequency. It is so much more popular now. You're hearing about 5G and standing close to a microwave and all of these things that were kind of they've always been a thing. But now, they're becoming a lot more popular for people to talk about. People understand it and realize, okay, yes, this invisible force that is going on around us all the time is actually affecting our emotional health, our physical health, our mental health. We get bombarded on a daily basis with frequencies of all kinds. You're driving and you hear a horn honk. That frequency alone can stress you out and make your cortisol rush through the body and really kind of negatively affect you. It's the same with standing close to the microwave when you're microwaving your food or anything like that. Everything affects us. So with sound frequencies and also with positive thoughts, because you'll know later when we talk about the Soaak app, we have positive affirmations. So we truly believe that mindset is everything. When you get your mindset into this positive state to where you're not ruminating on these negative thoughts, that is creating basically a frequency around you that is solid and peaceful. It actually – I believe it's like a shield where when you are in a good state of mind, all of this negativity, whether it's 5G or your kids screaming at you, whenever it is, it kind of bounces off you because you are in a good state, and you are holding your peace. You are holding that frequency tight and strong. [00:09:23] PF: In some cases now, I think people are so attuned to having that digital impact in their life to being surrounded by these frequencies that they either don't realize that they feel bad because of it. Or they don't associate the way they feel with the frequencies they're around. [00:09:40] LW: Yes. I think that's probably the second one is probably most of our issues. We just don't realize what's happening. We just don't realize what's going on. We get very used to things. The technology that happens around us is kind of a gradual thing. When I was 16, I had a flip phone. We didn't have a smartphone. We played outside a lot as most kids did back then. Then gradually, now years later, it's like, man, I am literally either with my computer or my phone or my iPad or at my TV. Or I am sitting next to devices all day long. It's kind of a gradual thing. Now, it's just that's life. So it's something to be aware of but also not to be scared of. [00:10:25] PF: But I see using frequencies sort of like house cleaning because it's like you collect all this garbage in your body through all the digital interactions, through all the electric frequencies that we're collecting. How does that kind of cleanse the palate as it works? [00:10:40] LW: So I always like to explain it like we're Velcro, and all the frequencies that are happening during the day, we're just like walking through them constantly, and they're sticking on us. The less protected you are and the less your guard is down, the more that things can kind of latch onto you and kind of get into your system. So we are energy, and our energy just piles on different things, different energies from other people. It can really Velcro to us. Unless you really take the time to peel off those layers, whether it's through therapy or going outside and grounding or taking a run, whatever it is that helps you clear your head and clear your emotions, if you don't do those things, then it's just layers upon layers every day. After a decade, you're going to be feeling really sick. You're going to be really depressed or whatever it is that your ailment is. With the frequencies, I always say when you listen to the frequencies, and you can equate this to like music too, your favorite song. When you listen to it within a couple minutes, you can feel. You can literally feel almost the chemical response that happens inside your body to make your dopamine or whatever go up and make you happy. You feel the difference. So that's how the frequencies work. They actually are talking to your cells, and they're telling yourselves, “Hey.” Your cells are kind of going crazy and a little chaotic because your energy is a little out of balance. The frequencies are like a tuning fork to your cell. So they're telling your cell, “Okay, oscillate properly. Oscillate properly.” So your cells listen and then attune to whatever the frequency is that they're hearing. That's how the frequencies help balance the energy system and balance the body. When that happens, it's basically like dissipates or makes that negative chaotic energy disappear. It just dissipates, and it's like you can take a big deep breath. You feel like you've just taken a big deep breath, and you feel lighter afterwards. It's really crazy, but it really helps with any emotional kind of heaviness. It just makes you feel like you just drank a big glass of water and have been out in the sunshine for a couple minutes. That's kind of what it feels like after you do it. [00:12:45] PF: Yes. You had so much experience of treating clients in your wellness center. What would you see in terms of how long it takes for that to take effect, and then how long does that last? Because that's what people want to know too. It's like is this something I am going to walk out and then it's like, “Oh, I'm right back to my old self.”? [00:13:04] LW: Yes. Energy is subtle. Any kind of modality that works with energy, energy medicine, really even massage, even physical things, it's working with the subtle energy body. So specifically, frequency therapy, you want to continue to retrain your energy to oscillate properly. So you want to do it every day if you can, and that that was one reason why. That was the main reason why we digitized the frequency therapy in clinic. That's where Soaak was really born is because people needed to come. We recommended two to three times a week because that was the practical amount of time I could get people in the clinic. It was $50 a session in clinic. That’s two to three times a week, 600; 800 dollars a month. I mean, that's a lot. But that's what was necessary. Me personally and all my staff, we did every day because we had the equipment there, and we were able to. That was what really made a difference. That's why we created Soaak because I think everybody should do it every day, if possible, and because that's what really makes it stick. But as far as how long it takes to help, within minutes of listening to some of the frequencies, you can feel it. There are some things that I have heard people say, “I have listened to this weeks and weeks and not really felt anything. But after listening to it a month, everything changed.” I really feel like we are like an onion. You peel back layers of an onion, and you don't really even feel or know you're doing anything. But you're doing a lot. Then by the time you've finally get to that one piece that's like, “Oh, man. That is what shifted it all,” it shifts at all, and then you feel better. I always tell people do it as much as you can and be as consistent as you can with it. But also have good daily habits around the frequencies. So when you're listening to the frequency, drink a big glass of water. Make sure you are super hydrated. Make sure you are either saying your mindful intentions. Or if you have time and can close your eyes and sit down, meditate while you're doing it. Make it a habitual thing every single day, where you're also layering other really good habits with it because when you do that, man, I guarantee that you're going to feel so much better every day. Over time, you're going to change big things in your life. [00:15:26] PF: Yes. It's kind of like exercise where you can start out and just do something really, really gradual. Then before it, it's become such a part of your daily routines that you can't really keep going without it. [00:15:38] LW: That's exactly right. [00:15:40] PF: Let's talk about some of the things that you've seen it do for anxiety and depression because those are two of the biggest things that we hear about across the board but then also at Live Happy. We get a lot of requests for information on that. That's always the biggest demand. What can sound frequencies do to help with anxiety and depression? Not only in adults but let's talk about children too. [00:16:00 ] LW: Yes. So that's such a huge thing that we see testimonials from people using the frequencies is really dissipating that feeling, that heaviness feeling that you get from anxiety and depression. Anxiety can come from a lot of different things. This is where my background in my wellness clinic really comes in handy because I've not only studied how energy works and what's happening to your energy when you're anxious or depressed but also the physical body. So a lot of times, anxiety can come from a food allergy. It can come from lack of sleep. It can come from a hormonal imbalance. Same with depression, it can come from pathogens in the gut or in the brain. So there's a lot of physical reasons why you have these things. It can also come from real trauma, emotional turmoil at home, and stuff like that as well. So it's not just one thing that causes it. So that's why our frequency compositions are so powerful because we took all of that into consideration when we made the anti-anxiety frequency or when we made the depression frequency because it's addressing a lot. There's a lot going on. There's places in you that get stuck and that get pent up that need to be released. So that's what sound frequencies do, again, is they help release kind of that stagnant stuck energy in that spot, and it helps your cells to oscillate properly. That's when you feel kind of that flood of relief. Or I keep saying it just dissipates, but that feeling of anxious, anxious. You're clinching your fist, and you listen to the frequencies, and you kind of just let it go, where it just kind of goes away for a second. Then that's when it's so important to get that mindset in there as well to really help yourself make it stick. You're saying, “Okay, I'm going to have a great day. No obstacle is going to stress me out today.” Really get your mind right to where you just are in a completely different thought process after that. [00:17:59] PF: Yes. Can you address how a parent could use this? Because a child – we see so much anxiety with children. The stories I've heard are just absolutely heartbreak, especially post-pandemic, and parents don't know how to help their children with anxiety. Now, a child's not necessarily going to slap some headphones on and listen to some sound frequencies. How can they do this? How can parents integrate that into their children's getting ready for school, driving to school routine? [00:18:25] LW: Love it. The cool thing about kids and even pets is they are so much more susceptible to the good energy. They just kind of receive it. They don't have any like mental blocks of like, “Oh, what is this? This isn't going to work.” [00:18:39] PF: “I'm not sure this is working.” [00:18:41] LW: Yes. They don't have that mind barrier that adults do once we get older and get our own opinion. So it seems to really work well. We've seen it with pets too. Again, you can play it through your cell phone. You don't even have to have headphones. You can just play it right through the speaker on your phone. [00:18:58] PF: I think what you're doing is just incredible, and you've referenced the app. Can you talk about how you took all this learning, all this knowledge that you had for it and then turned it into something that was so accessible through an app? [00:19:10] LW: Really the biggest barrier that I kept seeing was time and money. That's kind of the case with everything. So I kept saying, okay, how can I make this more accessible to people and more affordable? Because the essence of the treatment was really inexpensive. So I kept telling my team. I'm like, “We need to digitize this. We need to get this in an app where people can do it 24/7.” The other issue was if we have somebody with severe depression or chronic anxiety, they could come in for a treatment and do great. But what happens at midnight when something triggers them, and they're having an anxiety attack or a panic attack or deep depression? That was when they needed the frequency the most is right in that moment or if they couldn't sleep. We have a sleep frequency. So I kept telling my team, “We have to digitize this.” We got with some developers, and we were able to create an app and put all of our frequencies online. So we took the top 30 frequencies that worked the best in clinic and that we got the best reviews and testimonies. We put those on our Soaak app. So that's how the Soaak app came to be and why it's available now. [00:20:17] PF: That's incredible. I know that we're going to give our listeners a free trial to it. I know it's a company for you, but it's so much more. For you, it's a mission. I'm just impressed with how you've just kept elevating what you're doing and making it more accessible to more people. So what is it ultimately that you hope to see? As you look down the road, what do you hope that everyone starts learning about sound frequencies and how it will change the world? [00:20:42] LW: Yes. I love that. Thank you for that question. I love answering this question. The sound frequencies are amazing, and I hope everybody tries them, and I hope it gives everyone relief in the moment they need it. Because I feel like when you have an accumulation of things that happen to you that set you back, after weeks or months or years of that happening, you're just in a funk. It’s really hard to get out of that. So with Soaak, I'm hoping that people don't get in that funk. I'm hoping that they can hold their peace and hold their joy and hold on to the positive things in their life through daily mindful intentions and through daily uplifting sounds and frequencies. [00:21:23] PF: Laura, you're doing wonderful things. I'm so excited that you had time to sit down and talk with me. I thank you for everything that you're putting out. I'm really excited to share this with our listeners and let them experience it for themselves. [00:21:35] LW: Thank you for having me. This has been awesome. You've been so fun to talk to. [END OF INTERVIEW] [00:21:42] PF: That was Laura Widney of Soaak Technologies, talking about how we can use sound to improve our mental and physical well-being. If you'd like to learn more about Laura, get a free trial of her app, or follow her on social media, just visit us at livehappy.com and click on the podcast tab. I hope you've enjoyed this episode of On a Positive Note and look forward to joining you again next time. Until then, this is Paula Felps, reminding you to make every day a happy one. [END]

Follow along with the transcript below for episode: 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]