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Follow along with the transcript below for episode: Happy Activist Dawn McMullan: Changing Lives in the Congo [INTRODUCTION] [0:00:01] PF: Thank you for joining us for episode 426 of Live Happy Now. I'm your host, Paula Felps. This week, we're introducing a new occasional series called Happy Activists, where I sit down with someone who is doing amazing things to make our world a little bit happier. Our very first happy activist is Dawn McMullan, a freelance writer and editor whose life changed when she met a woman who had fled the Democratic Republic of Congo. As she learned more about the plight of girls and young women in the Congo, Dawn was compelled to act, and as you're about to learn, she has become part of a nonprofit organization called Congo Restoration that has already changed hundreds of families and continues to grow. Let's listen as Dawn tells us how giving back to others has given her a greater sense of purpose. [EPISODE] [0:00:50] PF: Well, Dawn, thank you for joining me as our first Happy Activist episode on Live Happy Now. [0:00:55] DM: Thank you for having me. I'm honored to be here. Very, very excited. [0:01:00] PF: I just had to get you on the show, because I've known you for a very long time, full disclosure. I've watched as you become really passionate about helping others. As long as I've known you, you have always made it a point to give back. I've seen you take your entire family to Mexico and work on homes. You've collected donations for refugees who are starting over in the US. It seems to me like you are always doing good for others. I wanted to know, first of all, where did that come from and how did that start? [0:01:31] DM: I'll correct you that when we met in our 20s, I was probably not doing that, but – [0:01:31] PF: We had other stuff going on in our 20s. [0:01:39] DM: Exactly. But how it started was that I had kids. I think there's a shift in a lot of parents when they have kids and how you're engaging with the world and your child looking at you engaging with the world. That really is how it started. We go to a church and that, unfortunately, or fortunately, is a way a lot of people connect with doing good in the world. I say, unfortunately, because I have a lot of friends who don't go to church and they have a difficult time finding ways to involve their kids and do good in the world. That's how it started with us. We started going to church, because our kids started asking questions. Then here we are with this little liberal church in Dallas, doing a lot of good in the world. One of those ways was to go to war as and build houses, and that's a fun thing to take little boys to do. So, it started as a way I wanted to parent and teach my kids about the world. Then as with a lot of things, then it became much more than that for me. [0:02:41] PF: I think it's important to note that now your little boys are young men, and they're still doing that. I just went back to Mexico with your husband, their dad, and did it again. I was really surprised to see that, gosh, after all these years, they're still doing that, because you don't think of – well, think of us in our 20s. We were not going to Mexico and helping others, but they do. It's still important to them. I love that that instilled a sense of helping others in them. [0:03:07] DM: Yeah. They were five and eight the first time we took them. They're 26 and 23 now. Yeah, they take turns going with their dad. Sometimes they all go together, but once a year, there's some combination of our family. I've opted out of that, because I've decided at 55, I don't want to do manual labor as much anymore, but luckily, I gave birth to these people who do. I feel like I've checked that box. [0:03:31] PF: That's terrific. You do other things, though. That leads us to the Congo Restoration Project. How is, first of all, what that is, how this all started? [0:03:41] DM: Congo Restoration is a project out of the Democratic Republic of Congo. A dear friend of mine, Gorethy Nabushosi is Congolese. She is from the eastern part of Congo, which border is Rwanda. Now, most people don't know much about the Democratic Republic of Congo. Most people are familiar with Rwanda, where the genocide happened in the mid-90s. There was a lot of publicity about that. There was a movie about that. It got all the guilt, money and good deeds done, because it's a very famous thing. A million people died in the genocide. I was just there. Actually, one week ago today, I was at the genocide museum. It's all very fresh to me. [0:04:22] PF: Wow. [0:04:23] DM: Six million people died in Congo, right across the border from partially the genocide expanding into that area. The people who did the killing escape to that area, that reached some havoc. A lot of the turmoil there has been because there's a mineral in the Democratic Republic of Congo called Colton. 70% of the Colton in the world comes from this area. It is required in every single phone, every single laptop, every single iPad. This is required to run them. You would think that it would be just a super-rich country, right? Because they have the minerals that we all need, but that's not the case, because it's a corrupt, generally been corrupt government. A few people at the top get rich and it's one of the poorest countries in the entire world. My friend is from there. [0:05:16] PF: Did she come to the US and that’s – you met her here in the States? [0:05:20] DM: Yes. Yeah, she was a refugee who came shortly after the genocide, actually, when there was a lot of unrest, because of that. She's an attorney by trade. She was trying to fight for women's rights. That is so not a thing in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In fact, it's still not a thing, but it was even worse this time. She was in danger. She came here. She has six kids. They were aged three to 11 at the time. The way that asylee status works in the States, you come by yourself and then you try to get status for the rest of your family. She fled here, literally made smoothies at Whole Foods, because your education doesn't really count once you get here and got asylee status. Then the rest of her family joined her. This is in Dallas where I live. She raised her family here. Then she went back at some point about 10 years later, right before I met her. She went to a hospital that was treating women for injuries of rape, because at one point, Congo was the rape capital of the world. It was used as a weapon of war. It's still not uncommon there, but at least I don't think they have that title anymore, but at the time they did. She went because women's rights were really her passion at that point. She went to this hospital and all the women were just saying, “I don't know where my kids are.” Like they'd been – war, war is chaotic. They'd been pulled away from their family. She went to this village and found the kids, found, basically a lot of orphans and took them in, took 30 kids in, called her husband and said, “I need a thousand dollars to figure out what to do with these kids. I can't leave them.” Okay. So, that's how Congo Restoration began. That's our origin story. I met her shortly after that. She came home and just made a random call, like looked up. I know Methodist church on the internet and called the main office in New York. My church is Methodist. I'd happened to connect – I had connected with somebody there recently. That's how we got connected. It's a super random thing. [0:07:16] PF: That's amazing, like that meant to be. [0:07:20] DM: Yes. They’re like, “I don't know what to do with you, but Dawn's in Dallas. Call her” [0:07:26] PF: What was it that made you connect with it? Cause there's so much need. We are constantly hearing tragic stories. It's like everywhere we turned, somebody needs help. There's a nonprofit that needs our money. What was it that made you say, “Yeah, I'm going to invest, not just my money, but my life and my time into this?” [0:07:45] DM: I had been to Rwanda the year before on a trip with also connected to my church. We had just seen how the systems work and don't work in that same region. This is all the same region. In Rwanda, because of the genocide, there were tons of orphans that were heads of household. This nonprofit was trying to help those oldest kids of these families really start a community, because a lot of the adults were just gone. You had to create a new system, basically. I'd gone on this trip and just really seeing things I didn't know existed. Like I – like you mentioned. I've been to Mexico. I've been to El Salvador. I'd seen poverty. I'd seen deep poverty, but I hadn't seen the lack of infrastructure where there's no way you're going to have running water in your life, probably, where just basic human needs were just unreachable. I hadn't seen anything like that in my life. I don't know. It just seemed so ridiculous in whatever year this was that I went 2008. It's also ridiculous in 2023. I just came back and saw the same thing. There was something about, and you never know what's going to reach you. You just never know. If you get out there and say yes to interesting opportunities in life. You may – like I never, if you'd asked me 15 years ago, “Hey, do you think you're going to be passionate about Eastern Africa?” I'd be like, “I don't know. Never been.” [0:09:13] PF: Do they have gorillas there? [0:09:14] DM: Yeah. They have gorillas there, which is a nice little bonus to my work. Yeah, I can't quite explain it except the – I didn't know that situation really existed in the world on that level of being in the middle of it. Then there was just something about the people there and the region that just really touched my heart. Again, that's different for everybody. That's what mine was. When Gorethy came into my life, six months later, I was already somewhat familiar with the situation and just had this great, inexplicable passion for it. From there, from that beginning, we started what Congo Restoration is now, which I'm happy to tell you about whenever you're ready to hear about. [0:09:57] PF: Yes. So, what is it? What exactly does it do? [0:09:59] DM: Our basic mission is to empower women and girls through education. Gorethy was also an orphan. Her parents died really young. Her siblings made sure she finished school and not only did she finish school, she's an attorney. She was a, as I mentioned here, she was asylee here, working at Whole Foods. Her husband was a pharmacist, but also that did not translate here. They went from high – [0:10:28] PF: A comfortable life. [0:10:29] DM: Comfortable life there to minimum wage here. They had six kids, all of them went to college, like education was very core to everything she believed. Of course, I agree with her. There's so many problems when you go into a place like Congo. It just seems like, “Well, how can I make a difference here? It's just nothing works.” It just seems like nothing works. If you come at that in a smaller way, which is how it's always good to come in a problem. It's like, “Well, what can we do?” We can lift up women through education. That's where we focus. After the orphans, which we took in. She took in the 30. The next project was a sewing school for women who – girls there often don't finish school, because it's not mandatory and it's not free. If you're going to spend $15 a month or $5 a month on uniforms and tuition for public school, you're going to send your boys. That's just the culture there. Girls and women are meant to work in the field, so if you put them in school, you're also cutting down on the fact that they're gathering food for the family that you're going to eat that night. These are very different priorities that they have to have and they do have as far as eating and food, food, security and girls and boys. There were a lot of young women who didn't finish primary school. They – a lot of them back then had been raped in the conflict. That was another overlaying factor. They are just the bottom wrong of society. Those couple of things. We started a sewing school. They learn a skill. They study for six to eight months. When they graduate. We give them a sewing machine and a sewing kit full of things they need for their sewing business, and they start a business. We've had more than 800 women graduate, and all but two of them have done exactly that. The other two moved off to – [0:12:12] PF: That is amazing. How many years have you had the school up? [0:12:16] DM: Since 2010 – [0:12:19] PF: How many women? [0:12:21] DM: I think it's actually 850 from the graduation. I just went to about – [0:12:23] PF: That is absolutely incredible, that you've impacted directly that many lives. [0:12:29] DM: Not only does that give them a way to make money that they didn't have before, but it also raises them up in society, like they're no longer the lowest ranks of society. They are respected women, because they have a business. They send their kids to school, because they can make money. They're in charge of their financial destiny. That is not a thing in the Democratic Republic of Congo that a woman would be in charge of that. Statistically speaking, no offense to men. If you invest in women, if you give women an opportunity to make money, they will invest it in their families and in their community at a much higher rate than men will. Again, no offense. [0:13:08] PF: Are you starting to see that next generation yet that's being affected by it from the early graduates? [0:13:14] DM: Yes. We have – I mean, they're still running their businesses. They are hiring. I went to a shop just a couple of weeks ago when I was there, one of our graduates she graduated about three or four years ago. She has a shop. She's hiring three other people in her shop. She's not only running her own business. She's actually employing people. Her kids go to school because she's in charge of that money. She makes that decision that they're going to go to school. I mean, when you throw education at people, there's nothing that's going to – it's going to do, but lift them up. Just fight me on that. There's just nothing that – it can only lift them up. I don't have the statistics right in front of me, but that's just the case. We're – seeing that. [0:13:56] PF: Then how does it change the community that this is in where they see these young girls, these women creating a different life? How does it change the way that they view their own roles in society and what they can accomplish? [0:14:10] DM: It's interesting, because when we first started in 2010, a couple of things happened. One, Gorethy had to go – we have 40 women at a time. She had to go to almost all the homes of these young women and convince the parents to send them, because, again, what are you doing? You're taking them out of the fields. [0:14:28] PF: Right. She had to convince them that this is a long-term thing. We have gone through phases where we would give out soap or salt or something that was valuable, so that their families wouldn't think they were wasting their time. There is no way to control how many kids you have in Congo, really. A lot of these young women would have kids. We'd have to convince the parents it's worth your time to watch their toddler while they're in school. Let's think long term. We used to have to do that. Now there are hundreds of women who line up when it's time, when we're about to graduate a class who line up wanting to be in that next class. One, that's changed. Two, in the beginning, she would have a lot of pushback from the leaders in the community, who were all men, saying, “Why are you wasting your time with these women? Why are you investing in women?” They didn't want to come to graduations. They didn't want to be – they just thought, they didn't like what Gorethy was doing. Now they come to our graduations. Now there is still some pushback of why we mainly help women and girls. I'll get into, because we have another project that's with girls in a minute, but generally, their families come. They're so excited. Their families cry when they get their diploma. It's a shift in how the community sees these women. You can also see the shift in the women. I always meet when I go to a graduation, which is every few years. We'll have the graduation celebration. Then usually the next 40 women will be there at the end and I'll meet them. They just have a look about them. They don't see their own value. You can see it in their eyes. You can just see it. Then you look at our graduates and you can see them around town and they are just – they definitely see their value. We teach them a lot of things in that six month. Sewing is one of them, but there's also, there are other things we teach them about how valuable they are. You can visibly see that in their eyes. The other project we have, because Gorethy saw like, this is making a huge difference, but it's not going deep enough, because these are again, women who have had just a primary education. They've not had secondary education. They need to know how to read and write, so they can take orders from customers, but that's really all. She wanted to go deeper. We started an all-girls primary school in fall of 2019. Not amazing timing with the pandemic right around corner, but who knew, who knew. [0:16:50] PF: Well, you did not. [0:16:51] DM: We did not. We have, as I mentioned, school is not free or mandatory. Often girls don't get to go to school. We started a primary school. As of September we will have grades one through six, 160 girls. That again was a bit of a battle. Gorethy had to really talk it up like, well, first of all, we made it free, some people were somewhat interested in that. They didn't have to pay for anything. Our sewing school makes the uniforms. Uniforms are mandatory. [0:17:16] PF: Oh, nice. [0:17:17] DM: Throughout Congo, so that's another obstacle. If you want to send your kids to school, you have to buy uniforms. We don't have to worry about that. Our sewing school makes those. Then we decided to feed them breakfast and lunch, which is highly unusual. Parents really liked that. These are kids who were eating one, probably not super healthy meal a day at home. So, to feed them two at school? That, one, is just good for their brains. Two, was a reason that parents were willing to send them. Again, now that school is very popular. People are always asking us why they can't send their boys. Somebody else needs to come in. I'm going to do a shout out. Somebody else needs to come in and educate boys in that area, because girls are – Yeah, it's just it lifts the whole village up, because there's something exciting coming there. The first graduation. The first sewing school graduation I went to in 2015, two UN white Jeep, land cruisers, right? Land Rovers, whatever they're called, pulled up dramatically outside the school. We were having this big festival, this big like celebration. These guys get out and I'm still connected to one of them actually on social media. This guy from Pakistan says, “What's going on here?” Very like somewhat aggressive. I said, “Oh” I explained what was going on. I said, “Did you have questions?” He goes, “No, I've been here for two years and I've never seen joy, so I just had to stop and see.” [0:18:35] PF: Oh, my gosh. [0:18:36] DM: He stayed for the whole thing, because he's just like, “I've never seen anything like this in this community.” I think what our schools do in this village, even if you're not directly involved, like you're not a student or your kids not a student or your daughter's not a student, is it offers hope. It offers hope, which is something hard to come by in this area of the world. [0:18:59] PF: It's so essential. That is just absolutely amazing. Tell me, we can see what it's doing for the women and the girls that you're working with. What has it done for you? How has it changed your worldview and how you welcome others into your life? [0:19:15] DM: I think it's just, it's changed so much. It's hard to not be changed by visiting that part of the world. Now I was involved in – I went to Rwanda. Then I was involved with Congo Restoration for six or seven years before I actually went. You should not look up the state departments warning about whether you should go to Congo. There was a little bit of a pause of me actually getting to convincing my family that was a good idea. It's perfect. I've never had a problem. [0:19:42] PF: Mommy will come back. It's fine. [0:19:43] DM: Yeah. Mommy will – my husband's always joking, he has to get down to his dating weight before I leave. But I've never had any problems there. Certain parts of Congo, I wouldn't go to. This part of Congo has been fine. To live in our world where just, literally things work. Let's set aside the poverty for a minute, but just, things work. We have roads, we have water that comes out of a faucet. We have Wi-Fi that works. We have electricity that works. To leave that world for an extended period of time and to realize that most of the world lives more like that than we live. I mean, Congo is an extreme example, but honestly, more people in the world live closer to that than live as we live. To be in that world and to be in that world enough where you have friends and people you know who live in that all the time, just you can't help but come back to our world, and, well, just one, just be more thankful for it and not take it for granted as much as you can. Although, that's hard, because this is our reality. I think it makes you much more – it's hard to really complain. I mean, we can complain, but it's hard to complain a lot when we have the lives that we have. Certainly, things go wrong in our life. They do, but on a daily basis, we have food, that we have a bed to sleep on, not a floor to sleep on. Women have rights more, less than we did, but we women have rights here. Women are valued here. It's not perfect, none of it's perfect, but being a woman in Congo looks like the hardest thing I've ever seen. They will carry things on their back with a baby on their front, that look just impossible. They are, like a cow has more value, I think, literally than a woman does in Congo. To see that makes me feel like I have such a responsibility as a woman to, one, lift others up because of the privilege that I have, just from being born here. I was just born here and they were just born there. Nothing else happened. That's it. To pass that on to my sons, specifically. If I had daughters, I'd probably have a different take on it. That knowledge, yeah, it just, it can't help but change you to see how differently other people live. I have met so many interesting people that I would never know there and in other ways, because I'm connected to this. So when you say yes to something that really jazzes you, and to whatever your ability is to go all in – now I'm very lucky that I am a freelance writer and editor. I can travel this way. My work is more flexible than a lot of people's work. Right now, I'm an empty nester, generally. I have a lot more freedom in that way, but to say yes to the things that really light you up like that, I think just adds so much to your life. I can't even imagine my life without Congo Restoration. [0:22:45] PF: Yeah. Everyone connects with something a little bit different and finds that that thing that lights them up and it's going to be different than what yours is or the next person. What's your advice for anyone who's looking for that thing? Because sometimes we go through life and we're like, “Man, I want to feel like I'm giving back. I want to feel like I'm making a difference and scattershot about it.” How do you do that? [0:23:07] DM: One thing is look for how you feel, like I don't know something in your life that when you, for me, it's like when I go out with my girlfriends. When I leave that energy, like I'm driving home and I just feel like I've had too much caffeine. That's what it feels like, just a little buzz, like I can't quite just go right to bed when I get home. There's something about that energy. That's one thing I can compare it to. When I'm at Congo – when I am leading a Congo Restoration meeting or meeting with Gorethy about it. I have that same buzz like afterward. So, when you're in situations, I think look for that, it may not feel – maybe I'm just weird with this whole caffeine buzz thing, but that's what it feels like to me. [0:23:49] PF: Maybe it's just an actual caffeine buzz, Dawn. [0:23:51] DM: It might be, but I don't think so. Just look for your reaction to it, because there are some things. I mean, I have been on some boards on some very, for some very important things in the world and just been like, “Oh, I don't want to go to this meeting.” Oh, this is such important work, but it's not interesting to me. That's okay. Everything's not interesting to everybody. I don't think you need to force a situation that doesn't jazz you. It's like when you're looking to make friends or you're looking to date somebody. If you're open to it and you're saying yes to things and you're exploring around, there'll be some hits and misses. But if you're open to it and you say yes to things, I think that you'll find it. I would also like look around your normal world, like if you would rather cuddle with your dog than go out to dinner with your significant other, I'm not judging you. I get it. That might be – [0:24:41] PF: Are you speaking, specifically to me right now? [0:24:44] DM: I mean, I might be. Also, talking to myself, but like that might be like ding, ding, ding, maybe animals are the thing or if you like a certain region of the world. If you think about what jazz as you already maybe start out in that direction. Again, church is an easy way to do it. there are other ways to do it that don't involve church. If you're open to it. I think being open to it is key. [0:25:11] PF: Yeah. Then this seems idealistic, but let's go there for a minute. How would our world look different if everyone would find just one thing that lights him up and find one way to give back? [0:25:23] DM: Oh, I just think it would be amazing. I mean, how could it not be different? There's so many people in the world that just have their job and their family. Their friends and they watch Netflix at night. I do those things too. I also think there are people who like, are at the grocery store and everything's giving round up to the nearest dollar for the food pantry and check the box. Go for that. Please do that. That's important. If everybody in the world did something with the passion that helped some do good in the world, one, there's just no way the world's not benefiting from all those good deeds and all that good energy. Also, it's just such a, for yourself. There's very few things like giving back. When I go to Congo, when I'm doing my things for the schools, I get so many things from the people there. Thank you for doing this. Thank you for doing this, like, but you have no idea how much you're changing me, how much you're teaching me. I just learned so many things. To have that energy from something you're doing just makes you different, so you're different, the people you're helping are different. There's just no bad scenario to all that happening. I just really wish people would find the one thing, if everybody would find the one thing that they – you don't have to go to Congo. I'm an extreme example. You don't have – [0:26:50] PF: You go to the animal shelter. [0:26:52] DM: Yes. You can go to the animal shelter. If you, do it regularly, like working out, like if you do it regularly, that's where the difference is made. You're changed, they're changed. Relationships are made and that is where the magic happens. [0:27:07] PF: Love it. Dawn, thank you so much for joining me today. I am so thrilled to be able to have you as our very first happy activist and couldn't think of a better person for it. Thank you for the good that you're putting out into the world. Thank you for coming on and telling us about it. [0:27:21] DM: Thank you. [OUTRO] [0:27:26] PF: That was Dawn McMullan talking about her work with Congo Restoration has helped make her own life better. If you'd like to learn more about Dawn and the Congo Restoration Project, just visit us at livehappy.com and click on the podcast tab. If you have a happy activist in your life that you'd like to see featured in a future episode, please email us at editor@livehappy.com and tell us all about them. That's editor@livehappy.com. That is all we have time for today. We'll meet you back here again next week for an all-new episode. Until then, this is Paula Felps reminding you to make every day a happy one. [END]

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

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

Follow along with the transcript below for episode: Processing Grief Through Music with Morgan James [INTRO] [00:00:04] PF: What's up, everybody? This is Paula Felps, and you're listening to On a Positive Note. We know that listening to music offers a soothing emotional experience. But what can it do for the person who writes that song?   Today, I'm joined by Morgan James, a Juilliard-trained singer, whose diverse talent has taken her from performing on Broadway stages, to working with symphony orchestras, to writing and recording soulful R&B music. While working on her latest album, she and Doug Wamble, her husband and co-writer, both were grappling with devastating illnesses of dear friends. They put the tangled emotions of uncertainty, grief, and loss into a song called I’ll Be Holding On, which also has become the album's video centerpiece. In this interview, Morgan shares how writing and performing this song has helped her come to terms with grief and how performing music helps her heal. Let's have a listen. [INTERVIEW] [00:01:00] PF: Morgan, thank you so much for sitting down with me today. [00:01:03] MJ: Thank you so much for having me. [00:01:05] PF: You have an incredible body of work. Just first of all, we're going to tell our listeners how they can discover all the different types of music that you've done because you've done some amazing projects. The reason we're here today is to talk about a song I'll Be Holding On. This is such a powerful piece of music, and we need to start by letting our listeners know the story behind it. Can you talk about that? [00:01:27] MJ: Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me and for listening to the song, the song I wrote with my husband, Doug Wamble. When we were working on the album, we were going through a pretty traumatic period of time with our respective best friends. My best friend, Richard, was going through a health crisis. Doug's best friend, Lanie, was also going through a health crisis. We didn't know if they were going to make it, and we wanted to write something to help ourselves through the feeling of helplessness, of not being able to save them, not being able to help them. We wanted to write something that might reach them and help ourselves at the same time. I don't normally write something inspirational, so I really wanted to dig in and write something that felt like it could speak to our friends in our particular stories but also to everyone. What exacerbated the emotion of the song was the fact that Lanie passed away in a very, very tragic way and unexpectedly at the end of this journey. So our kind of worst fears came true that we had to say goodbye to someone we couldn't bear to say goodbye to. That was how the song came about. When it came time to make the video to go with the song, my director, Jonah, really wanted to create a detailed story of friendship and love, and tell something that was so specific and so detailed and yet could be universal. I think that he really hit it out of the park. [00:02:57] PF: Yes, he did. That's an amazing video, and we are going to talk about that. But I wanted to dig in a little bit about what it was like for you and your husband. You're already frequent collaborators on songs. But how was it working on something that was so intensely painful and personal? Did it help? Did it sometimes hurt? What was that like? [00:03:19] MJ: Every time we've written something really personal, I've written songs about breakups from the past. We've written songs about breakups. We've written songs about things we've gone through with our family, with our parents, things we've gone through with friends. Every time that we write something personal, it's painful because it is the best and most specific tool that we have to process everything in our life is our art. It feels painful sometimes still to sing things that are deeply personal. But that's my job. There were a lot of tears because we really wanted to reach them. They both felt very unreachable in these moments, and we felt like we couldn't save them. So we cried and cried and cried, and we didn't know another way to try to reach because this is the only thing I know how to do is make music, is make art. It's incredibly cathartic as well. So it's painful but it's also freeing. [00:04:15] PF: So how did that come about? What made you two look at each other and say, “We need to write a song about this.”? What was that process like, the genesis of that decision? [00:04:24] MJ: Well, I knew I wanted a song on the album with a choir because I've always wanted to record with the Morgan State University Choir. It's been a dream of mine. Okay, well, we need to write a song for the choir. I hadn't even written it yet when I secured the choir. [00:04:37] PF: Really? [00:04:38] MJ: Yes. [00:04:38] PF: That’s safe. [00:04:39] MJ: Yes. I knew that I wanted a song. I wanted a song like Mariah Carey, Anytime You Need a Friend. I love that song, and I think that it's incredible. The way the choir functions in that song is pretty powerful. That song is very inspirational, and it's hard to write an inspirational song without being cheesy, without being trite. It's hard to write something personal that feels real. We sat down. It was a big challenge, but I said, “What should we write about?” Doug said, “We need to write this about our friends. We need to write this pain that we feel, the fear that we feel. We need to put this in this song.” So we started talking about, okay, well, what would we want to say to them. For instance, with my friend, Richard, sometimes it's hard for him to accept help, right? So these two people, Richard and Lanie, they're the ones that are always helping others. They're always doing something and neglecting themselves sometimes. How do you say that to someone kindly? How do you say to them, “I'm here. Reach out to me. Take my hand.” Accepting help is one of the hardest things to do. [00:05:44] PF: So as you were working on it, was it different than your usual collaboration? Was there a different vibe to it? Or how was that? [00:05:51] MJ: I think it's a different vibe of a song than I've ever written. I really went out on a limb and tried to write something a little different and challenged myself. It felt vulnerable. It felt a little scary. I think that we were – so often with songs, especially because they're from my album, sometimes Doug will defer to certain things that I want from my album. I think this really felt like we both had something we wanted to accomplish emotionally. Yes, I definitely think that it was extremely difficult and cathartic process writing the song. [00:06:24] PF: It's interesting because on this show, we talk a lot about how music heals and soothes us as listeners. But we have never really tackled it from the aspect of how it heals and soothes the songwriter. [00:06:37] MJ: The writer. [00:06:38] PF: Yes. So can you talk about how does it change the experience for you as you're able to write about it? Then after that, let's talk. You said that sometimes it's still painful to sing these songs. So I'd love to explore that a little bit more as well. [00:06:53] MJ: I think that every single song, there have been times that I've been writing something that I won't be able to get to the end of it in therapy or in my own process. Sometimes, a song gets me to the end of it. There are songs that I write that I'm trying to express something I can't tell a person, whether it's my mother or my father or my friends or someone in my life that has hurt me or someone I've hurt. Sometimes, the only way to get through it is in a song because songs are so unique because they're poetry, they're a journal entry, and they're also a painting. I read a great quote about paintings are how we decorate space, and music is how we decorate time. [00:07:37] PF: Ooh, I love that. [00:07:39] MJ: Music is – sometimes, a song will come on, and we'll start weeping because it will take us to a moment that no words could ever describe. It will take us to our eighth-grade dance. It will take us to a funeral. It'll take us to a wedding. It will take us to a memory. It's transformative. So when I'm writing songs, I don't always hit them out of the park, but they're always about something real. I don't write songs about nothing. When I've gone on co-writes, let's say in Nashville or Los Angeles, sometimes people will want me to write songs about nothing, just to get a song done. It's just not how my mind works. It has to be about something that I have seen or known or experienced. How lucky am I that I get to process my memories that way. [00:08:22] PF: Right. Does it change the way you see those memories sometimes? [00:08:27] MJ: It does. Sometimes, when I sing songs, I have a song about someone who left me, right? Now, the hurt is gone, but I have put in a capsule the way it felt to be there. So I'll always remember. Even though my memories of it have softened, it's almost like it marks time. Songs mark time. There have been a few songs that have been so cathartic to me that they actually – I get over them. I get over the hurt or over the pain because the song takes me over the hump. The song helps me heal in a way that other things could never help me heal. Just talking about something could never help me heal the way a song could help me heal. [00:09:10] PF: Do you have that moment where you kind of look back at it and say, “Oh, my gosh. I completely changed the way that that feels within me.”? [00:09:19] MJ: Yes. I think it's over time. It’s a process where all of a sudden you look back, and you’re further along than you thought you were, these moments of healing. There's a couple songs that I'm very proud of that that I look at them and I say I was able to capture exactly what I wanted to say in that. That's the hardest thing about songwriting. Sometimes, you miss. You miss a lot. You write a lot of bad songs, songs that don't really hit the nail on the head. Then there are a couple that you are able to say, “I said exactly what I wanted to say, and I was able to satisfy myself and others.” I mean, that's really hard. You want to write something so specific that it is in turn universal. Like the best songs everyone can relate to, and yet they're specific to the writer. That's the biggest challenge of songwriting I think. [00:10:08] PF: Oh, yes. At what point in your life did you start using songwriting as an outlet? When did you realize just how much power it had for you and that that was what you wanted to do? [00:10:19] MJ: Oh, my gosh. I came to it so late. I came to it so late. I still consider myself a new songwriter because John Lennon said, “You can't call yourself a songwriter until you've written 100 songs.” I came to it very, very late. I didn't know that I was going to be a songwriter until I was in my 30s. [00:10:36] PF: Really? [00:10:36] MJ: I probably didn't write my first song until my late 20s. Even at that, I was tiptoeing because I was very intimidated because I am in awe of songwriters. I thought that it was such a difficult task and such a high art. So I think that what has helped me is writing a ton of songs and understanding that it's okay that a lot of them will be bad or won't fit somewhere. It’s okay if they remain orphans or if they don't find a home because the art of it is actually the doing. [00:11:07] PF: Right. [00:11:07] MJ: Yes. I came to it very late in life. [00:11:09] PF: So what brought you into it? At what point did you say, “Okay, I'm going to try this.”? [00:11:14] MJ: Well, when I started my first band, I started playing shows out in New York, and I got a music manager, and I started trying to get a record deal. A lot of people around me were like, “You need to have a stake in your music. You need to sing something that's from your heart that's original. You need to have original music. I think that's the way that you're going to break through.” I've always sung covers, and I always will. But I started being encouraged by my management to write. So they would send me on co-writing dates, which is like speed dating, which is hilarious, where you sit down with a stranger and try to write something from your deepest depths. I started just trying it. I think a real breakthrough for me was my manager sent me to Nashville for a writing week, and I did two writing sessions a day for a week. So I did 14 writing sessions with 14 different collaborators. I realized, okay, I can do this every day. Also, I was always kind of intimidated. They’re an experienced songwriter. I'm not. But then I realized, oh, I know more about this. I'm better than I think. I should be confident. I should lean in. I should celebrate my ideas more. That was really liberating. [00:12:29] PF: Oh, that's amazing. So if – your music, do you usually know, hey, this is a great one, and this one's not as good? Or is it they all feel the same or they're all your babies? How does that work for you? [00:12:42] MJ: Doug and I have been writing together for 10 years, and we know if a song doesn't come together and kind of get finished within an hour or two. We give up and walk away and start again another day. So I think that a good song will show itself to you really quickly. We'll write in in a couple hours, and then like we have the general sculpture, and then we'll chisel away at the details. I tend to think if it's taking too long, it's not right. If you're on hour 7, 8, 9, 10 and you still don't have a song, something is not right. Some songs just don't – I have a couple songs I love that just never fit anywhere, never found a home. I call them like the orphan songs. [00:13:22] PF: You can do the orphan album one day. [00:13:24] MJ: Exactly, like the B-sides, like we used to do B-sides. So, yes, some songs I love and other people don't respond to. Then some songs I think are fine and other people love. So the longer I write and the older I get, I get more picky and scrutinizing with my lyrics to really fine boil things down to the finest point. Doug can play anything. So our problem is narrowing down and getting very, very specific because I can sing most things. He can play most things. So we have to use our critical thinking and really get hard on ourselves. Is that good enough, right? Is what you played good enough? Is what you sang good enough? Is that lyric good enough? That's a really fun part of the puzzle. [00:14:06] PF: So at what point did you know I'll Be Holding On was good to go, like that's what we wanted to say, and it's ready? Did it take a lot of polishing? Or did you pretty much put it out there together, and it came together quickly? [00:14:18] MJ: Usually, when we write, we'll write a song, and then we'll step away from it. Within a few days of writing, it will make a demo. We'll sit with it and see if it feels cooked. When we started putting together the instrumentation, we recorded it with just vocals and the whole band. Then when we took it to – there were lots of layers that we started adding. But the chorus, to me, I think we had to work a lot longer on the verses than the – the chorus, to me, felt right right away. We wrote the chorus first, and then we had to go back and through and write the verses. I think that you kind of feel when a song is cooked. Then adding the choir just felt like that was the final glaze. [00:15:01] PF: Yes. So the video, we got to talk about this because I can't even call it a video. It's a film. It's a short film and incredibly well done. How did that come about? Was that your vision? Was it Jonah's vision? Was it a combination? [00:15:16] MJ: So when I sent the entire album to Jonah, I said, “Let's make a video together. Pick a song, any song.” He picks the longest, most dramatic song on the entire album, and I'm like, “Wow, okay.” He goes, “Tell me what it's about,” because he just listened to the song and didn't know the story. I told him the story, and he was like, “Well, now, I really want to do this.’ He sent me a screenplay. He sent me a full – [00:15:38] PF: Wow. I'm going to interrupt real quick because we should tell people. I know who Jonah is, and you know who Jonah is. Why don't you tell our listeners who Jonah is? [00:15:47] MJ: Jonah Z. Helms is my friend, my incredible filmmaker friend. He also directed my video for Give You Up, which was totally different vibe, completely inane and wacky and fun. He's an incredible empath, like one of the most heartful, thoughtful people I've ever known. I really trusted him to tell this story. He wanted to tell a story of taking a friend, a terminally ill friend, on a road trip to see the ocean one last time. He wrote this beautiful screenplay with like so much detail and so much thoughtful ideas. Everything in the video, from the car, everything in the car, it was set dressed. Everything that you – the crowns. His partner made the crowns that we wear. Every detail was so thoughtfully executed, and the ideas were so clear and beautiful. I don't have that visual storytelling mind. I just think it's genius. I wish I had it. But when you are around someone who's that's their gift, it's just so amazing. We did it on a shoestring budget over three days in the desert. We actually did a road trip. We drove that ‘72 Bronco, the two of us, and they filmed it. [00:17:06] PF: First of all, where did you all even find that Bronco? Because that was like, “Oh, my God.” [00:17:11] MJ: Oh, my God. It's a character in the little film. [00:17:14] PF: It is. [00:17:15] MJ: He found it. He rented it from a place that rents exotic or interesting cars. He rented it in LA. We filmed in Southern California. Then we drove up to Pismo Beach to go on the dunes. Yes, we filmed for three days straight in the desert with a very, very small crew. I think there were only six of us, including Pearl and myself, a very small crew. What we got done in the time that we had, I mean. We also shot so many other scenes that we couldn't include. So it was incredible. [00:17:48] PF: So when he gave you that vision, were you immediately like, “This is everything.”? How did that land with you? [00:17:54] MJ: We got on Zoom, actually. Pearl, Jonah, myself got on Zoom and went through every single scene and talked about every portion of it, just like we would. We had like a rehearsal, just like we would for a film and all the beats, everything. The second I read it, I sent it to Doug to read, and he just fell apart crying, just reading it. That's how I knew it was right is that it was really important to me to capture because Doug lost his best friend. It was really important for me to capture that deep love that you have in a friendship that is inexplicable. I wanted to capture the helplessness, and I wanted it to be cathartic for him to watch. [00:18:35] PF: It is. It’s so tender. It's joyous, but it's also heart-wrenching. As I was watching it for like the fourth time, I was wondering how it was for you to film that because you’re not just an actress. You have lived this, and this is part of your story. [00:18:53] MJ: It was so painful. I cried for three days straight. I mean, the tears are, obviously, real. Pearl and I bonded so much in the filming and in the road trip that we shared things that we had never shared with anyone else before. So the grief is also her grief. It's mine. We were like channeling things that we needed to process in a deep way, and we had this vehicle, which was – it was also exhausting. The day on the dunes, like we were physically exhausted, and he was pushing us to our physical limits. It was one of the most fascinating and challenging experiences of my career, and I just needed to cry for three days. We just ended up filming those three days of crying. [00:19:42] PF: So what kind of response have you had since its release, the song and the video? [00:19:47] MJ: I've had a pretty amazing response to the video. A lot of people sending me selfies of themselves crying, which I think like really touches my heart. I mean, the biggest compliment I could ever receive is that someone is moved by something I create. I think it's also people aren't watching it saying, “Oh, I'm sad for you,” or, “Oh, what an interesting story.” They're watching it and saying that felt like I was there. It felt like I felt my mother, my sister, my father, my friend. I remembered a moment with my best friend. I remembered a moment with my sister. People are feeling connected to it for their own personal life, and that is the goal. That's the goal. [00:20:27] PF: Yes. It's beautifully done. It does give a voice to something we've all felt at one time or another. I think that's why it just pulls us in and makes it our own story. So it's just incredibly well done. What do you hope it accomplishes? [00:20:42] MJ: We recorded a few versions where I'm lip-syncing like a traditional music video. In the end, we didn't use any of those, and I'm so glad because it's a powerful story with no words, right? It shows the power of our imagination and our eyes and our minds and what we can say without speaking. I hope that people watch it, and it puts voice to something that they have not been able to articulate in their own grieving. I think that so often, it's just so hard to explain how we feel. It just feels so painful, and it feels locked up inside of our throat or our heart. I want this to speak to that. [00:21:22] PF: So it's beautiful. It's so well done. Morgan, thank you for coming on and talking about this. We're going to tell our listeners where they can find the video, where they can find you, see more about the music that you're doing, and just get to know you a little bit better. [00:21:36] MJ: Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having this conversation about something that's important to me, and it means so much. [END OF INTERVIEW] [00:21:47] PF: That was Morgan James, talking about how songwriting has helped her manage loss and grief. If you'd like to learn more about Morgan, listen to her music, or follow her on social media, just visit livehappy.com and click on the podcast link. While you're there, be sure to check out our very cool perfect-for-summer tie-dye Live Happy Now t-shirt in the Live Happy Store. I hope you've enjoyed this episode of On a Positive Note, and I 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: Fostering Pets for Greater Well-Being With Brittany Derrenbacher [INTRODUCTION] [0:00:02] PF: Thank you for joining us for episode 421 of Live Happy Now. This month is filled with holidays that celebrate our pets, so that's what we're going to do. I'm your host, Paula Felps, and June happens to be National Adopt a Cat Month, National Microchip Month, and National Foster a Pet Month. We also have National Dog Dad Day on June 17th, National Dog Party Day on June 21st, and National Take Your Dog to Work Day on June 23rd. That is a lot of partying with your pet. Today, we want to focus on fostering and how it can help improve your well-being while changing the life of an animal forever. I'm bringing in Live Happy's resident pet expert, Brittany Derrenbacher, Founder of Luna Bell's Moonbows Special Needs Fostering in Louisville, Kentucky, to talk about how we can make the world a better place one foster pet at a time. Let's have a listen. [INTERVIEW] [0:00:56] PF: Brittany, welcome back to Live Happy Now. [0:01:00] BD: I'm so excited to be back. [0:01:01] PF: This is such a natural topic for us to discuss, because it's National Foster a Pet Month. You and I actually met, because of you foster animals, I needed an animal, we connected, it's been a great thing. During the pandemic, a lot of people were adopting and fostering pets. It was shelters were empty. There were waiting lists. Where are we at now? What's the current situation and the need for fostering? [0:01:29] BD: I think despite COVID and how that drastically changed things, there is always a need. There will always, always, always be a need until we have legislation that changes, or some type of very serious systemic change politically to change the environment that is resulting, right, in these animals most of the time from overbreeding. COVID was so interesting, because it's like, it was such a positive boom. It was such a positive shift. All of these people wanted animals. They wanted to give love and they were going to shelters. They were going to rescues. People were stepping up to foster, because they had so much time. I think, even though we don't really have enough adequate data, I think eventually, we will see how this has changed and affected. I think it's only natural to assume that everyone went back to work, everyone went back to chaotic schedules and life. Because of that, I think that there has been a shift, especially in rescue. There's not a single volunteer in shelter and in rescue right now that I don't know that it's just inundated. I mean, at capacity, full of animals. I mean, it's tough. I think we're seeing it all play out in real time right now. [0:02:50] PF: I wondered if it was just me, or my area that I live in, because I've seen so many posts lately about like, “Our shelter is full. We cannot take anymore. Please, if you can foster, if you can adopt.” I've seen this so much in the last few weeks. Is that a product of us pendulum swinging from having done the fostering, having adopted and now people are going back and saying like, “I'm not cut out for this”? [0:03:16] BD:  I think that is definitely a piece. I think, also, we're seeing the result of breeding picked up. We needed to make money. I also think there was a need for it. It picked up in all areas, right? We're just seeing a result of that. I just think that shelters literally all over the country, shelters that normally would have, or rescues that normally would have been more open for being the ones that would have been reached out to, to say like, “Hey, we're full. Can you help?” They're full. So, that I think is telling. [0:03:52] PF: Fostering, you have so much, of course, it gives a lot to the animal. It gives so much to the person who does that. We're going to get into that. First, tell us about your story and how you became involved in fostering, why you wanted to do that, because it really does take a special mindset and a special person to want to do it at the level that you do it. [0:04:10] BD: Yeah. This is a topic that is just so heart centered for me, because it really comes from my relationship with my soul dogs, Sunshine and Zoe. They just taught me so much about myself. They brought so much joy into my life. My relationship with them is what led me into fostering, because I just had a lot of love to give. I was in my early twenties. I loved doing volunteer work. I loved giving back. Since I was a child, I think I've always had a really unique bond with animals. I've always played into that advocacy role for animals. I felt very passionately about caring for them. I just started doing research on my end and looking into breed specific rescues, because Zoe and Sunshine were beautiful Boston Terriers. Like, perfect. Yeah, so I started doing research. That's how I found the rescue that brought us together. Boston Terrier rescue of East Tennessee, the Kentucky division. I started following them on Facebook. That is, I mean, that was all it took. I loved following the dog stories. I loved seeing them end up in forever homes. I put in an application. There's a process that I had to go through, some interviewing and having someone come to my home and make sure that it was going to be a safe and supportive environment for an animal. I mean before I knew it, I had my first foster dog. His name was Louis Pierre. It started it all. [0:05:40] PF: Fostering is such an interesting relationship. I used to tell people it was like dating, because it's like, I know I'm not going to have a permanent relationship with them. I am just getting them ready for their next perfect relationship. It can be hard for people to understand how you can take a dog and give it your all, give it your entire heart, all your love, and then send it to another family. Talk about the mindset. I know that you've coached people on this and helped them get through it, because it can be tough the first couple of times. What kind of mindset and what does it take to go in and have that pet foster parent attitude? [0:06:13] BD: Yeah, I'm glad that you asked this question, because I think mindset in this role and in this job is key. Intentionality is key. My advice is to go into this relationship and roll with curiosity with patients, an eagerness to learn and a genuine heart-centered approach for meeting the animal where they're at. What I mean by that is like, we have to be able to meet this animal at this very traumatic stage in their life and be willing to allow them to grow. They're not going to come to us perfect. That is rare. It does happen. It's like the unicorn and rescue work, where you just get this dog that it's like, okay, this dog's ready for its home. Nothing that we need to work on here. Many times when we get a dog into rescue and work to find a foster home for them, folks will ask, “Are they potty-trained? Do they like kids? Are they leash chained?” In a perfect world, those would be really easy questions, right? Every single animal has their own story. There's no way that any of us can predict, or know. Most of the time, they will not come with a story, right? They were found on the side of the road. I think their own past and experiences of how they ended up needing rescue, it's a variable, right? Oftentimes, we just don't know any of those things. All we know is that they need rescuing ASAP. I think the biggest thing that people don't see behind the scenes is the immediacy and the urgency that often happens in needing to get that animal into care quickly. We just don't have the ability to stop and see, is this dog potty trained? Is this dog going to be okay with your kid? We just have to be willing to meet them where they're at and give them time, give them the opportunity to be nurtured under care and safety of a loving foster home. Typically, this is the case. They will be nurtured. They will be loving, amazing animals. All of that will be super reciprocal, too. They nurture us and we also grow. If we're willing to lean into that and have patience with that, I think that's the mindset. [0:08:31] PF: When pets come in, and to your point, they often are not perfect. I think I've had one dog in 20 years that he came in, he was potty-trained, he was good to go. They have a lot of damage to them. Let's talk first about what the pet receives when we become foster parents. [0:08:49] BD: For the pet, I just think that the field of animal sheltering has come a long way. I definitely want to say that. I don't want it to come off like, this is in any way, shaming shelters. I just think that even in the best circumstances, animal shelters are a stressful place, right? It's a stressful place for animals, especially if they've been traumatized to come into an environment that's loud, uncertain, with a lot of moving pieces. That's what I mean by saying that it's stressful. Loud, overwhelming to the senses. A lot of shelters will work on those sensory things. That is part of volunteers’ jobs is to literally go around and give a treat, to make a sound, whether it be chimes, just sensory things to keep the dog and engaged. But the environment is still so overwhelming for animals and it causes them to shut down emotionally. It enacts that freeze response in the animal. Sometimes they display reactive behaviors due to the stress, that then labels them as the bad dog, right? [0:09:57] PF: Doesn't that keep them from getting adopted? [0:09:59] BD: Oh, yeah. They quite literally will be moved to a different part of that shelter in quarantine, away, and you can't go past that area, right? It completely denies them the ability of being seen. Foster homes uniquely allow that animal to be seen, right? To decompress from the stress of living in the shelter. They just work wonders for an animal's nervous system. It gives them the chance to live in a home, where they have the grace and the ease to safely express their personality. It's amazing to see that. It is amazing to see that animal come in that doesn't even play with a toy. That won't even come near you. It gives them such an opportunity and a chance to overcome fears and many times, recover and decompress from that trauma, right? [0:10:53] PF: Yeah, it does. One thing that I've had people – I wouldn't say it's their argument, but they say that, well, isn't it hard on the animal because now you've taken them out of an unknown situation, which we don't know before they dumped, where they lost, whatever it was, and you're giving them a home. Then you pull them out of that home again. I know you've gone through this process many, many times. Can you address that? [0:11:17] BD: That is probably one of the most frequent questions that I'm asked, is how do you just continue to pass the dog along? That's how it's perceived to others. [0:11:25] PF: Right. [0:11:26] BD: To me, it's like, this is the safe landing pad. I'm going to empower you. I'm going to give you all the skills that you need to succeed. I'm going to find you your perfect match. That family is out there that can meet every single one of those needs. When you move into that space, when the animal moves into that space, it's going to flourish. Animals are the most resilient creature. I think a lot of the times, we project our human emotions onto these animals. Really, they are a shining example of post-traumatic growth. [0:12:03] PF: Yeah, because I've seen dogs who have been through an amazing amount of trauma and abuse, and the way that they're able to love and heal and become kind and tender. Beans has always amazed me. That was one thing that attracted me to fostering was because I was dealing with some trauma in my own life that I was trying to work through and being able to work with animals during that time and see them come from abusive situations and become whole was really, they were teaching me. I was learning a lot from them about that. I think it's just been an incredible journey for me to watch how animals do heal and how they teach us to heal our hearts. [0:12:43] BD: Right. Because, essentially, we're giving a voice to the voiceless. You will see that a lot of people that are in some type of animal care work will have had trauma at some point in their life. Because I think this work just so deeply is connected to that need to help and to give a voice and to advocate. That comes from a place. [0:13:09] PF: Talk to me about the mental health benefits that we receive as foster parents. Because I've discovered so many benefits from it. It's just an incredible experience. [0:13:19] BD: Yeah. Shout out to one of our past episodes together, right? We love to talk about animals and mental health. If you haven't listened to the episode already, it's called celebrating our pets, and we really go super deep on all the benefits of that. Literally, animals improve everything, everything. They improve our mental health period. Mentally, physically, spiritually. Another thing that we've explored together is that they improve our lives cognitively. I think the unique thing that fostering does that can be really important for people that have busy lives, or don't really have the ability to have an animal in their home full-time is that it gives them companionship and joy with an animal without that lifelong commitment. It can be like, “Let me do this for a couple of weeks. Take a little break. A couple of weeks, a little break.” It's like being the cool aunt, or cool uncle, right? You get to send them home. You get to send them to their forever home. I think that's really cool. Most importantly, in regards to mental health, is that it gives us purpose. That's huge. [0:14:31] PF: That can be big for someone who say, is suffering from depression and has trouble. Doesn't have a reason to get off the couch. Doesn't have a reason to do something. If all you have to do, like let me get up and feed this cat. Let me take this dog outside for a walk. You start making these small things, because you have to. It starts snowballing into an upward mental health improvement. [0:14:56] BD: Yeah, you're needed. You're giving back. You're enacting change in someone's life. That's rewarding. That gives a person hope. That gives a person confidence. I think that animals do such a good job of relieving stress in our life and helping us cope easier with life changes. They more than anyone know that, too. They can teach us all of those things. They know the best ways to relieve stress. They know how to cope with changes and transition. This foster will know all of those things. [0:15:32] PF: They're living it. [0:15:34] BD: Absolutely. I just think that it's such a very special reciprocal relationship in regards to mental health and to those benefits. [0:15:45] PF: One thing that you brought up, you mentioned that if you don't have the time, you don't have to have this as a full-time foster. I think that's something that's really important to bring up, because there are several programs where you can do something for a day. When I was in Nashville, there was a guy who, his dog had died and he didn't really have the time to take on a new full-time dog. He would go on his lunch hour and he would walk dogs at the shelter. I've got friends who take their kids every weekend and they meet dogs. Part of their job is to learn how these dogs do with children. There are other things besides having this dog full-time. Can you talk about that, how you can find some of these opportunities? [0:16:23] BD: Yeah. Every single volunteer position matters. I cannot stress that enough. It is rescue work. Shelter work is a well-oiled machine that requires a lot of people in different pieces, right? It is not just one person fostering. It's not just one person adopting. There is so much happening behind the scenes that require sometimes very minimal effort that's still super rewarding. Like you said, you can go and stop at the shelter and walk the dog, or stop by the shelter and pet the cats. You can pick an animal up and you can take them out for the day and socialize them, right? You can give them that one-on-one attention. You can be the transport driver that picks the animal up from wherever it is, takes it to the vet, or takes it to the foster home. Every single piece matters. As a volunteer, you really are in a valuable part of this life-saving team. It's teamwork. [0:17:18] PF: You feel that reward, because it has that same – it doesn't really matter what role you're playing. You still have that same team mentality. It's like, we place this dog, we found her this home. Now we get to watch her flourish on social media. Yeah, it really does become this great team effort. Let's talk about children and what children can learn. The last dog that I adopted had been fostered by a woman who had two young children. I thought that's so great, because I saw how her children were with Rocco. I thought, man, that's really incredible for them to be raised in that environment of fostering and knowing like, “I'm going to care for this dog and then I'm going to give them to this forever home.” Tell me what that can do for children and how that's going to affect both the children and future animals down the road. [0:18:07] BD: Fostering is a very unique and empowering way to teach your children responsibility, right? Responsibility and pet ownership, but also just responsibility and things around them, compassion, helping others. I think that parents worry a lot about their kids getting too attached. But in my experience, the kids are the most resilient. Again, it's like these adult humans projecting a lot of their – a lot of their stuff on these animals and the kids and really, the kids are the understanding ones. They're so, so helpful and essential in these transitions. What's most helpful, again, is the intentionality you take before stepping into this role as a foster. Taking the time to really be diligent about talking to your kids about this important job that they have. You are going to be doing such an important job in this animal's life and preparing this animal to go to their forever home. How cool is that that this is your job? By letting them go to the families who will love them, we're doing the best thing for them. In turn, we're getting to help more animals. That's the message that you want to give the kids. Also, give it to yourself. Personal advice, give it to yourself. [0:19:22] PF: Listen to yourself while you’re talking. [0:19:24] BD: Yeah. I think that kids in general raised around animals have better self-esteem, better confidence, connections to love and compassion, empathy. The coolest thing is non-verbal communications. Animals uniquely teach us that. Kids are able to learn that. I think, something also worth mentioning here in regards to kids is most high schools across the US require service hours from their students. Animal care services count for that. I want to give a plug for that, because that's something that I really loved anytime that someone reached out to the rescue and talking about their kid needing service hours like, “Hey, can we foster a dog?” “Yes, you can.” [0:20:08] PF: Yes, as a matter of fact. [0:20:09] BD: It's a win-win. Yeah. [0:20:10] PF: Right. Oh, that's terrific. I hadn't even thought about that. I do love seeing when kids are involved in it and how that changes it. That's super, super cool. I know that you've seen so many different situations and you went next level with your special needs foster group. Tell us a little bit about that and how it started. [0:20:30] BD: My favorite story to share, our rescue is named Luna Bell's Moonbows Special Needs Rescue, and it's named after our first special needs dog. Her name was Luna Bell. She came to us at three-days-old and had a cleft palate. It taught me so much about myself. It taught my husband so much about himself. We really thrived in that environment and advocating for her and learning about her. When she ultimately – she had a lot of other complications that typically happens when you have an animal that has a congenital issue. We had her for little close to two months. We just wanted to honor her life. Once she passed, we just felt so strongly that we wanted to continue to give back in that way and learn as much as we could. I feel it universally opened this door, where people started reaching out to us. It really grew over time, because how we started to conceptualize what this work meant really started to broaden, where we were taking in elderly animals, needed some medical care, or needed to be permanent fosters. We took in animals that maybe had behavioral challenges due to trauma and we worked with them for long periods of time and found them very special foster homes. [0:21:54] PF: I wanted you to tell that story, because I really do want to bring this up. I've heard people talk about like, “I can't take in an elderly dog. I can't take in a special needs, because it's too heartbreaking.” You and I, one thing that we share is when I was doing fostering, I always went with the elderly dogs. There was just something to me about being able to care for a dog, knowing that they were going to spend the last days of their lives being loved, that I knew they would not die alone. That took the difficulty out of helping them pass somehow. Talk about that. When you foster special needs, or elderly pets, what keeps you fostering, despite the fact that you know you're going to lose them? [0:22:37] BD: It is such a gift to be able to give love in that way and create space for that animal, who often would have been overlooked, who often would have maybe been euthanized. Giving them the opportunity to find peace and love and wholeness in a home. To me, there is no greater gift. It has been the most rewarding years of my life to be able to give back in that way to these animals. I have gained so much from that. Like, confidence, empowerment, advocacy tools, empathy. It really drove me to become a therapist, right? It drove me to continue to broaden this idea of what our relationships are with people and with animals and to lean in to providing pet loss care and grief support for people. I just think that our relationships with these specific animals, especially uniquely abled animals and elderly animals who show up with so much gratitude to us. Just gratitude for the opportunity to just be. [0:23:53] PF: What's hard to explain to people, it's obvious what the pet is getting. It's obvious that the animals getting a lot of love. They're getting a lot of care. It might be more difficult from the outside to see what we as the carer and the care provider is receiving, but the gifts are incredible. It's such a huge award that you get from just being able to have the honor of being that person in that pet's life that that gives them that soft landing place and takes them through to the end of their life. If someone's interested in fostering, where do they start? [0:24:28] BD: Say, you want to foster breed specific. What's your favorite animal, right? Say, your favorite animal is a Boston Terrier and you live in Maine. Start googling those rescues and just start following them. Just be a curious observer and ask questions. Keep asking the questions. Keep being involved in the process. [0:24:51] PF: That's great. That's great. We're going to give them some information about your site and where they can find more about the work that you're doing and maybe some links on where they can start looking into how they can foster. As we let you go, knowing that this is National Foster, or Pet Month, what is the one thing that you want everybody to take away from this? [0:25:13] BD: Fostering saves lives, and it is the most reciprocal relationship that you will have. Just do it. [0:25:22] PF: Love it. Brittany, thank you so much. You always have so much to tell us about living our lives better with animals and I appreciate you doing that. [0:25:29] BD: Thank you so much. [END OF INTERVIEW] [0:25:35] PF: That was Brittany Derrenbacher, talking about the many benefits of fostering a pet. There's such an enormous need for foster homes right now and we'd like to encourage you to consider fostering a pet from your local shelter, or rescue group. If you'd like to learn more about Brittany and Luna Bell's Moonbows Special Needs Fostering, or follow her on social media, just visit us at livehappy.com and click on the podcast tab. That is all we have time for today. We'll meet you back here again next week for an all-new episode. Until then, this is Paula Felps, reminding you to make every day a happy one. [END]

Follow along with the transcript below for episode: Growing Happiness by Gardening With Joeleen Davis [INTRODUCTION] [00:00:02] PF: Thank you for joining us for Episode 420 of Live Happy Now. This is National Garden Week, so it's a great time to talk about what plants and planting can do for you. I'm your host, Paula Felps, and this week I'm talking with Joeleen Davis, a master gardener and owner of Wine Cottage Gardens near Nashville. Joeleen has discovered the amazing power of gardening as a tool for social connection, exercise, helping others, and mental wellbeing. She's here today to talk about all those benefits and more. Let's have a listen. [EPISODE] [00:00:36] PF: Joeleen, thank you so much for joining me on Live Happy Now. [00:00:40] JD: Well, thanks for having me. [00:00:42] PF: This is an exciting conversation to have because I met you over a year ago, and you have this amazing place right outside of Nashville. It's called Wine Cottage – [AUDIO OVERLAP] [00:00:52] PF: – it's National Garden Week, let's kick it off by you explaining what Wine Cottage Gardens is. [00:00:57] JD: Okay. It all started with a sea shed. But how common is that? I wanted to create a wine shed. We call it the Wine Cottage. Then, we started to build raised beds. It just went off from there. Now, we are vegetable farmers and a little bit of flower farming, and also, beekeeping. [00:01:21] PF: It's pretty amazing. It's a magical place and it's extensive and just absolutely beautiful. When did you first start it and how long did it take for it to get to what it is now? [00:01:33] JD: We are going into our fourth growing season, and we had done row gardening, I would say about 13 years now. That was my husband's thing. I don’t like row gardening. I have no control over the weather. I don't like to till. So, I took it over and it's been four years now. [00:01:52] PF: You have accomplished a lot with it. I know people use it just as a place to come and really absorb the energy and reset themselves. But you've also used it as a tool for giving back – [AUDIO OVERLAP] [00:02:02] PF: – during the pandemic, I think it was five families, you said you were able to keep fed with the work that you were doing. How did that come about, where you started saying, “Okay, we want to do this as a way to give back to others.” Then, how did you find the people to give back to? [00:02:15] JD: Finding the people was the easy thing, just being social and conversations and going for a deeper relationship in those conversations. They don't always say that they're hungry, but you can kind of get those into windows a little bit and watching the kids especially. I would say, I started to seriously want to feed people during COVID. It wasn't necessarily a food bank, it was more like what can I do in my backyard to help these families. We abundance of tomatoes. Tomatoes are the easiest thing, because you can do so many things with them, from sauces, to chilies, to pasta, just whatever, and we gave bushels and bushels of tomatoes to these people. They would come pick it or we would take it to them. I would list it on Facebook, we've got this ready or that ready, and I wasn't really getting the engagement that I wanted. So, we chose individual families based on relationships in our lives and it really worked. Then, tenfold a year later, I realized that giving them food wasn't fixing the situation, but teaching them how to grow the food was where I wanted to go with it. [00:03:28] PF: That is so cool. How did you start teaching them? Is that when you became a master gardener? Or were you already a master gardener or what? [00:03:35] JD: I started master gardeners, for me, I read probably 35 books and then there's always Google. [00:03:44] PF: That's the thing. People need to know, you are the most voracious reader I know. [00:03:47] JD: Thank you. [00:03:48] PF: Oh, my gosh. You are always have a stack of books that, “Oh, I just finished that today.” [00:03:54] JD: I do, and I make notes when I read it because that's how I learn. I'm a visual learner. I write it down. I look back at it. I'm like, “Oh, yeah, that's right. Sunflowers are toxin miners”, because I wrote that down. I read all these books and it just didn't seem like enough, so I wanted to go back into the classroom and I did the Master Gardeners program that you met other people through that program, and I just started to have people want to come to my garden to do tours or see my setup, because they had seen pictures of it posted online, and it just started from there. It wasn't a teaching intention. It just turned into that. [00:04:30] PF: It's also been featured on PBS, right? [00:04:32] JD: It was on PBS twice, and I think it's because it's different. There's the Wine Cottage, made with recycled materials. There's the chicken coop, again, recycled materials. Then, there's a pergola we built ourselves. We did it all ourselves with the help of a few friends that really loved us, because it was hot when we're laying in August. [00:04:54] PF: Yes, you've got such a beautiful, beautiful place. When people come out, do they take classes? How do you go about teaching people? [00:05:03] JD: I just answer their questions. I never want someone to come to my garden and feel like they can't garden, because I'm going to bombard them with all these factual things. They just come through and start to ask me questions. If they're not asking me questions, I will ask them a question to draw something out of them. “Do you want to plant tomatoes? Do you want to learn how to grow these? Look how great these are doing. Are you curious why there's Basil with these tomatoes?” It's just saying things like that. But I find that most of the people that come out, bring their kids, which I love, and they start to ask me questions like, “How did you do this? How did this start? Did you do this all yourselves? This must have taken so long. I want to know more about it.” I just want everyone to feel like they can do this. It's not hard and it doesn't have to be hard and it does not have to be expensive. [00:05:54] PF: Yes, one of the things that's so interesting is the way that you discovered how powerful gardening can be. Can you talk about that, like, why you actually started gardening and how it has helped you with your mental health? [00:06:10] JD: My daughter lost her husband tragically. She had just had a baby and he was in the NICU. All of this happen within four days. [00:06:18] PF: Oh, my gosh. [00:06:20] JD: And we packed up our family here and went 14 hours south to spend time with her and help her through that. We were down there for 10 days, and my ex was there. He was my abuser for almost eight years. I couldn't function. I couldn't function through a dinner. I couldn't make decisions. I think that's the first time I realized that I had to share our grandchildren. They've always been mine. These kids were mine, I raised them. I always had possession of them, and protected them. Then, all of a sudden, this man that beat me for years was their papa. I couldn't cope with it. I put on a strong front, took all the emotions down, I get home and I can't function. I can't shower. I can't get up and have coffee. My husband didn't know what to do or how to help me. So, I went to the garden and I just thought this is where I need to be. I need to dig in the dirt, plant some stuff, and just let it all go. Listen to the birds and just be one with nature. [00:07:34] PF: That is so incredible. Because we now know that science shows there's so many benefits of the garden for mental health. We're going to talk about those in a minute. But at what point did you start realizing it was making a difference? [00:07:50] JD: Almost immediately. [00:07:52] PF: Really? [00:07:52] JD: Yes. I just knew that every time I went outside, I felt better and it was – the garden back then was not as elaborate as it is now. It was just a few raised beds, and there was meant growing, which is very evasive so you have to keep tending to it. I would go pull mint and I would feed it to the chickens. It was immediately that I realized that when I came back in, I felt better. I could function. I could think. Then, I was there for our children here and then our grandchildren here and it really did help. Then, the garden just started to get bigger. [00:08:29] PF: I love this because it's kind of like this upward spiral that it created. It's like you had created the gardens, and then you're using the gardens to make yourself feel better, and that in turn makes bigger gardens, better gardens, and more people benefit from it. [00:08:44] JD: There's such a joy in growing something. You plant a seed or plant, there's no shame in planting plants and you watch it grow, and you tend to it and you're taking care of it. Then, you wait for harvest. Hopefully, you get it before a worm does or the birds do. But you bring that in and you feed it to your family. Or you pick that and then you gift it to someone and it's just the joy that you see on their face is so impactful in your own life. [00:09:10] PF: That's really great. Because one of the things that I had read about gardening is it talked about how studies show it gives you a sense of purpose. It can be very good for someone who's suffering with self-esteem issues or feeling – maybe you've lost a job, maybe you've lost direction, maybe your life situation has changed dramatically and you're not sure where to go next. The studies were showing that this can give you something to focus on, give you that sense of purpose, and you get daily rewards of accomplishment because you do see it grow. That's exactly what you're talking about. You're watching it grow and you're caring for it and seeing it improve. [00:09:48] JD: One hundred percent. It's something that you have to do. So, you have a purpose when you wake up. I have to go outside and plant these tomatoes or I need to go tie these tomatoes up. Or after a rain shower, I need to go out there and see the magic that happened because your plants will just jump. You have a purpose and a reason for getting up. Even if you don't want to get out of bed, you have something that you're taking care of. [00:10:15] PF: That's really important because, especially, if you're dealing with depression, a lot of times it is difficult to get off the couch. You can't get out of bed. How can you use that as a motivational tool, if it's depression that you're dealing with? [00:10:30] JD: Depression is hard, because you basically just don't want to do anything. It's hard to even brush your teeth when you're depressed. I would say that just grab your coffee, or your water, or whatever that drink is in the morning and go sit outside in your garden, even if you haven't had a garden planted, but you just want to be outside. There's something about that, that is enlightening, and is so good for your soul just to be outside and not in the house, sometimes that can feel like entrapment. [00:11:01] PF: Yes. We know that fresh air sunshine that does something great for us. But what is actually putting your hands in the soil do? Because you had some interesting things that you had told me about this. [00:11:11] JD: Yes, there's actually an antidepressant that's in the soil and – [00:11:15] PF: It’s not like we have to dig for this, like it's a pill that we're digging for, right? [00:11:18] JD: No, it's a natural chemical compound and when you are in the soil, and you're breaking it up, or digging that plant, or just in it, just close to it, you inhale it, and it makes your serotonin just go crazy high. That is that good feeling. When you are outside, and you're inhaling just the air outside, you're inhaling this. It's incredible just to be in it and just releasing that chemical. [00:11:45] PF: That's amazing. What about anxiety and stress? How does it help with lowering anxiety, reducing stress? Because on the one hand, you could be like, I get stressed, if it's like, “Oh, my gosh, we need to weed the garden. We need to do all this. I get like really hyped up about like all the stuff that has to get done with it.” But it's actually an anxiety and stress reducer to garden. [00:12:06] JD: It is. The trick to not getting overwhelmed is just to start. Don't let your mind play those tricks on you. Just get up and go outside and start somewhere. Start in one bed and work your way down. Or just say, “Hey, today, I'm just going to pull weeds right here.” Then, just pull those weeds and you'll find that you're out there a lot longer than you ever anticipated. When you come in, you're tired, but you have this really good feeling. You don't have anxiety when you're listening to birds. You don't have anxiety when you're hot and that breeze comes. All of it is just tied in to being outside. I think that if we get outside more, we'd start to realize that our anxiety is in all the stuff in our head, like all the stuff we have to do. The dirty dishes in the sink, or the kids need socks. It's all of the stuff. But outside there's no stuff. There is just a garden and you're just planting, or harvesting, or just looking and just seeing. [00:13:03] PF: That speaks to the mindfulness aspect too, because to your point, you have to put all the other things out of your mind. You're talking about, okay, what do I need to do for this plant? What do I need to do right here? You turn your focus completely on your garden on your plants and the soil, instead of having your mind raced and be thinking about a million different things that need to be done. [00:13:24] JD: It's 100% true. You just go outside and even if you just go outside to sit there and you're not going to do something strenuous, it's just uplifting. Again, to hear the birds and to feel the wind or Tennessee summers are really hot, so you really have to go out in the morning, or in the evening. We have lights in our garden that come on. They’re solar lights. They come on at night so we can use our garden until those lights go off, if we want. [00:13:50] PF: Right. Nighttime garden. I really love that because you're also getting all the Biophilia benefits of just like grounding and earthing, being in that soil, and the way that it connects you to the energy of the earth. [00:14:07] JD: Yes. There's something to be said about that first tomato that you find or that first blossom that opened or watching people come through my garden with their kids and the joy they find when they go into the coop and get an egg, or they see a bird they've never seen before just perched on an arbor. It's amazing. When anyone, an adult or a child runs their hand through the mint, and they can just smell that aroma, and they're just shocked that you can eat that, but it's growing outside. You know what I mean? [00:14:40] PF: Yes. I remember years ago being in Cabo, and we were eating at a restaurant, and we were living in Dallas, pretty urban, and we're at this restaurant in Cabo, and the chef opens a window and reaches out and picks a sprig of mint and takes it in for our meal. We're like, “That would be the coolest thing ever, just to walk out and pick the stuff for your food.” Now, we're doing that and it is pretty amazing to just be able to walk out and pick your meal. [00:15:11] JD: Oh, the kids love it the most, I think. They can pick a flower and put it in iced tea or their water. Like nasturtium or mint, and they just get a kick out of it that it's not going to kill them, that they take something from the garden. It has to go back with teaching them when they're young to grow their food and know where your food comes from. The moms that come, single moms come all the time and they just say how can I do this? We just give them the lesson, like this is what you just need to do. We'll put it in one raised bed and go from there. [00:15:44] PF: The day this release is also National Gardening Exercise Day. So, nice little tie in. Let's talk about that for a minute, because it is great way to, in addition to connecting with the earth and calming your mind, it's a great way to get physical exercise. [00:16:01] JD: One hundred percent fantastic way, and you don't even know your exercising. [00:16:05] PF: That's the key. [00:16:06] JD: You have no idea. A few years ago, I had a pretty debilitating back injury. Two back surgeries, ended up with a spinal implant and sitting for me is the worst thing. But getting up and walking in the garden and being fluid and just lifting and pushing and pulling all of these things that you do, keeps me very active. It keeps me not pain free, but nearly pain free. It's just amazing. You can go from one side of the garden to the other and do all of these activities within 20 minutes and never feel like, “Oh gosh, can I get through this cardio?” [00:16:46] PF: Yes. It's not like HIIT. But it does. It uses all the major muscle groups because you're pulling, you’re raking, you're weeding, you're doing all these things. And you don't realize it till the next day when you wake up and you're like, “Oh, my God, why are my hamstrings” – [00:16:59] JD: And squats have never been easier. [00:17:01] PF: There you go. I love that. Yes, so that's so cool. I think that's a great aspect of it, too, is just the fact that it does give that physical movement that we try to get, but we feel like we can't fit in to our schedule. [00:17:17] JD: Yes, and you can. You can really do it. With gardening, when you plant a garden, you're excited, especially new gardeners. You're out there in the morning, you go out there midafternoon. If it rains, you run back out there. Every time you go back out there, you do something. Then, at nighttime, when it's cooler, you go back out there. You could be in your garden as a new gardener, three to four times a day just from excitement, not realizing that every time you go, you're going to pull weed, or swat down and plant something, or harvest something. You're constantly active. You're never still. [00:17:51] PF: Yes. Then, with yours, when you created a place that’s so beautiful, and then at the end of the day, you can sit, you can watch it, you can just look at it. That too has a great calming mental effect. It just is so relaxing to be able to do that and sit there and that sense of accomplishment like we created this. [00:18:10] JD: We added bench seating just throughout the garden. Then, we added a picnic table with an umbrella. We have a swing by our bird sanctuary, which we keep wild for nature. We just have different places to sit and rest, so you're not always having to work or feel tired. You can always just relax and take it all in, especially in the evenings when it's cooler. The birds are starting to calm down. It's just different. [00:18:34] PF: Yes. It does change throughout the day. So, you've helped other people start their own gardens, and you're even going to Portugal next year to work on a big gardening project there, which is super cool. What changes do you see in the people you work with? When they start gardening, how does it change them? [00:18:53] JD: One of the gardens we just put in for a friend of ours. She's a single woman, she runs a daycare out of her home. Most of her kids are babies to four years old, and she asked us to come look so we went and looked and she only wanted two beds. Well, we ended up putting in six, and I helped her plant it. I did our planting plan for her. She just loved it. Now, when those babies come, when they're dropped off at her house, they run outside with excitement because they want to know what's growing. They help plant the seeds. It was just like the involvement and just showing someone that you can do it. It doesn't have to be Instagram worthy. You can plant in a bucket. You can just do it. Just plant something and it's contagious. You'll start with one plant and you'll end up with 50. [00:19:43] PF: That's cool. Because another project you're doing and I don't know a lot about it is in downtown Nash – [00:19:50] JD: We're working with a woman downtown and she is in charge of a men's drug rehab facility and they put in some rooftop rice beds, and they're doing it to give them purpose to build, to grow. I believe they have a chef that pulls the spices and the herbs and create stuff for them. But they get up and they have something that they're in charge of. So, they're growing basil or oregano or just whatever and it just helps them. That serotonin again in the soil keeps them happy. [00:20:26] PF: That's amazing. That's a great way to go about it. [00:20:29] JD: Back in the 1940s, well, before the 1940s, mental institutions or homes had gardens, and all of the patients work these gardens. They grew their own food, they went and cooked it, they did all this stuff. And rehabilitation was like, I believe, 65% to 75%. Then, pharmaceuticals came and they started to treat them with pharmaceuticals. Then, the gardens came out. They took the gardens away. Now, they're trying to push gardens back in, because they realized that when you're outside, you're happier and you don't need the pharmaceutical. You can just garden. [00:21:08] PF: I love that. I hope that catches on because it is so – it's such a lifeline for people. What about people who don't have rolling acreage or any kind of acreage? If you're in an apartment? If you're in a in a townhouse? How do you go about starting your garden? Because your idea is you can grow plants anywhere. You can have your own garden even if it's on a windowsill. So how do they start doing that? [00:21:34] JD: All you need is soil, sun, and a seed or a plant. That's it. That's all you need. You can grow in a bucket, a box, a windowsill, as long as you provide those essential nutrients for your plants. Just water and you can grow anywhere. I would just say just plant the seed or buy the plant. If you fail the first time, just keep going. Don't give up. You're just trying to recreate nature. [00:22:00] PF: Yeah, because I killed an air fern once in high school, in all honestly. [00:22:04] JD: I can’t grow succulents. [00:22:06] PF: Okay, good. I don't feel so bad. [00:22:09] JD: I try to love them too much. [00:22:12] PF: That's funny. Oh, man. I love this. I love this topic. I love being able to talk to you about it. You're so knowledgeable about it. But what's your favorite thing? You're so passionate about gardening and everything that it does. What is your favorite thing about it? [00:22:27] JD: Currently, because it changes. There's always seasons. Currently, my favorite thing to do is to help one of our local nonprofits in Lebanon, Wilson County to put in school gardens. They put in a school garden and the teachers take care of it. Master Gardeners volunteer and take care of it. But the kids come out, and they weed, and they plant, and they take home the vegetables that they're growing. But it's really just the joy. It's the joy of growing a plant and sharing your knowledge. Your knowledge could be this is how you grow a tomato plant, or this is when you pick it. It doesn't have to be hard. It's not hard at all. It's just doing it. [00:23:07] PF: Joeleen Davis, I appreciate you coming in. So what, of anything, what do you hope that people take away from this conversation? [00:23:15] JD: That they can garden. You can plant. You can grow food. One tomato plant, you'll have fresh tomatoes by June or July. You can do it. It doesn't have to be hard or expensive. You just need some soil and a seed. [00:23:27] PF: I love it. Joeleen, thank you so much for talking with us. We're going to tell everybody how they can find your website, find Wine Cottage Gardens, and learn more about you. But thank you. Thank you for sharing this time with us. [00:23:38] JD: Thank you. It was wonderful. [END OF INTERVIEW] [00:23:46] PF: That was Joeleen Davis, talking about the many benefits of gardening. If you'd like to learn more about Joeleen and Wine Cottage Gardens, or follow her on social media. Just visit us at livehappy.com and click on the podcast tab. That is all we have time for today. We'll meet you back here again next week for an all new episode. Until then, this is Paula Felps, reminding you to make every day a happy one [END]

Follow along with the transcript below for episode: Using Travel to Boost Well-Being With Dr. Andrew Stevenson [INTRODUCTION] [00:00:02] PF: Thank you for joining us for Episode 419 of Live Happy Now. With Memorial Day behind us, our thoughts are turning to summer vacations. We know they're fun. But do you know how good they are for us? I'm your host, Paula Felps, and this week, I'm talking with Andrew Stevenson, a social anthropologist, filmmaker, and senior lecturer in psychology at the Manchester Metropolitan University. Andrew’ s new book, The Psychology of Travel, looks at what travel can do for us, and he's here today to talk about how we can approach it differently to get the most out of it. Let's have a listen. [INTERVIEW] [00:00:38] PF: Andrew, thank you for joining me on Live Happy Now. [00:00:41] AS: Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here, and hopefully we can have a good conversation about travel and health. [00:00:48] PF: Yes. Oh, it's such a wonderful – first of all, it's timely, because audience doesn't know until right now, that on the day we're talking, it's the day your book is being published. It's a very great day for you. [00:01:02] AS: It's a good day. This is a project which really came out of the pandemic, I supposed, when we had the lockdown imposed upon us and there was no opportunity to travel. I was thinking about travel a lot over about a year or 18 months and decided to put some of my interests in psychology alongside my interest in travel. I was quite surprised how many different directions – [00:01:25] PF: I do want to dive into that answer just a little bit. What made you decide to look at it through the lens of psychology? Can you tell us a little bit about your background and why that was the natural path for you to go down? [00:01:35] AS: Yes. Well, I, in my day job, I'm the professor in psychology or lecturer in psychology at Manchester Metropolitan University, here in Manchester. My specialist subject in psychology is culture and space and place and I'm really interested in the way that places affect the way that we feel and think and act. Of course, that's never more relevant than when we're actually experiencing new places. Travel is – I mean, somebody said that travel is the best bits of our lives, isn't it? It's the bits that we tend to remember. Of course, not being able to do it for a couple of years, you brought this into sharp focus. I was missing it. I wanted to think about it and use some of the psychological concepts that I had worked with every day. [00:02:25] PF: Yes. You've delved into it so well, in your book. I was curious how you go about studying this. We have a lot of travel books. We have a lot of different ways to look at travel. How do you actually study the psychology of travel and how that affects us? [00:02:42] AS: That’s interesting. I think, it was combination of bringing together some of the areas that I personally have researched. Some things I’m interested in include things like, migration and movement, and the way that movement across borders affects our perceptions of people, that kind of thing. I’m also interested in social psychology and the way in which people behave differently in groups. Of course, when we travel, we're thrust into all sorts of groups, people we don't know, surrounded by people. As well as some of my own personal interests. I also was aware that quite a lot of people have written about things like fear of travel, wellbeing and travel, mindfulness, and travel memory, and those types of things. I decided, I also was aware that there isn't really a book about the psychology of travel, even though there are lots of academic interests and academic articles, which are quite inaccessible for most people. So, I thought, well, my job here is to just take some of the most interesting articles and topics that I've looked at travel from a psychological point of view, and put them into a coherent collection that we can all enjoy. I tend to write in a slightly more accessible way than some of the articles I've been reading. That's not a criticism. It's just the way that things are, I think. [00:04:04] PF: Yes. I think that is important to know, because when you hear about the psychology of travel, it sounds heavy. But it's really not. As you said, it's a very accessible read, and very engaging. [00:04:16] AS: I think, travel is something that we all enjoy doing. Psychology is really just about people and how they behave and think differently. Bring those two things together, you're bound to get some interesting things. [00:04:28] PF: Yes, and one of the things that you talk about, you say it's virtually impossible to travel alone. Can you explain that and then talk about how other people affect our travel experiences in the way that we see travel? [00:04:41] AS: Yes. It's something that dawned on me really, is people often say, I'm going traveling alone.” But of course, I defy anyone, really, to genuinely travel alone. Because whenever we move from one place to another, whether it's on foot or across the city or by air, we're surrounded by people, and we're surrounded by people, most of which we don't know. We may travel without our own family. But our decisions, even if it's down to things like which restaurant shall I go to? Which beach shall I go to? Whose are these footprints? We can even be influenced by people who aren't even there anymore. But the idea of a crowd will affect our destructive decisions. We may visit, for example, a monument or a gallery, because other people are doing it. We may be tempted to stay in that hotel because TripAdvisor says, “You've got lots of good reviews, and those people are affecting us.” If on the other hand, you'll be anti-social like me, you might be more likely to go to a place where it’s practically empty because you quite like to get away from the crowds. But these are both – whatever direction you're interested in, whether you want to do things that are conforming, or whether you want to be a rebel, you're doing it in relation to what other people have either done or not. [00:06:07] PF: Then, I know from my experience, you can make incredible friends and strike lasting friendships with people that you meet while traveling. I've got people that I met 20 years ago, and we've stayed in touch and it was one encounter. We haven't seen each other since then. But we have stayed in touch. How does that shape our lives too? We're getting all these experience with people from other cultures and other walks of life? [00:06:32] AS: Yes, it's fascinating. There are so many different ways to answer that question. I mean, first of all, there's the social aspect of traveling with somebody we already know, and having been on a journey with somebody who you may have known a bit before you went traveling together, that can really draw you together. Because what you're doing there is you're experiencing, not everyday life. You're experiencing a particularly intense part of your life, but the best bits of your life. You're traveling with somebody and two weeks with somebody who was a friend before or an acquaintance before, then you really become a lot more friendly with within those two weeks. You get to know about all their characteristics and so on. That can really propel a friendship forward into the future. There's that aspect. How it affects the friendships we already have with the acquaintances. But the other thing is as well, how does traveling to a different country, for example, affect your attitude towards the people who already live there. There's that whole thing about hosts and visitors, isn’t it? It's a bit – it could go either way, and a lot of researchers found that when you interact with cultures who you may not have met before, the most meaningful way of doing that, and the way that produces the best relationships is the way you interact with people on an equal footing, that can often mean meeting people socially. So, if you go to Mexico, for example, and you meet people who are from Mexico, and you meet them as colleagues, or you meet them as equals, then your attitudes towards that entire group of people is likely to be a lot more positive than if you only ever meet people who are for example, serving you coffee, or cleaning up after you. To me, so there's that status issue. But there's also, there's no doubt. But just being around people from different cultural groups, means that you've got much more firsthand experience of people that you may otherwise only read about in the press. We all know that that can lead to some kind of prejudice. [00:08:48] PF: It also, for myself, it has created such a deep appreciation for the life that I lead, and where I have so much gratitude. We'd spent some time in Canada up with the indigenous people a by the polar bears. We were there to see polar bears, and it's an indigenous culture up there, and seeing how they live and how challenging their lives are, what they have to go through to get food, to get water, things like that. It just instilled in me such an incredible appreciation for the simple things of being able to walk to a tap and turn it on and get a glass of water. [00:09:23] AS: In the whole – I identify without a lot because the whole idea of appreciating cultural diversity and realizing that the way that we live in our bubbles in our day to day existence is just one way of living, isn't it? In a way, the ideal of travel is to highlight the commonalities that we have with other people that we may not have met, before but also to appreciate distinct challenges that they may also face. I do a research project in Central America and we have collaborators in Guatemala City and we do a lot of work with young people there. One of the things that we're looking at is the concept of resilience and how people overcome challenges that they face in their everyday lives. It's never anything other than surprised and impressed by the way that people cope with things that often we don't cope that well here. The traffic in Guatemala City, is to me who live in Manchester, in England is incredible. But I would say the level of stress that the traffic causes is much lower. People just accept it as part of the everyday life. Here in Manchester, where I live, often the level of what we call road rage is quite a lot higher. The differences, the way that we cope with – the way that people cope with everyday challenges, we can understand that a lot better through travel, I think, and learning about different cultural groups. [00:10:56] PF: That is so true. Obviously, not everybody loves to travel. Some people, you mentioned it, they have fear of travel. There's travel anxiety. Where does that come from? How does leaving our comfort zone help us manage that? [00:11:10] AS: Yes, that's interesting. I mean, we talk about travel anxiety. Psychologists talked about travel fever, travel, fear, travel, anxiety, worry about travel. Think about that, they're all challenges, but some of those challenges are actually quite useful. If we take something like travel worry, it's actually quite a good idea to be slightly worried about traveling because that can heighten your defenses, and it can help plan the journey a little bit more thoroughly. It's not a bad thing to be a little bit concerned and worried so that I can help you plan. The challenge that's a bit more difficult to explain is what you might call travel phobia, where sometimes people have a – they might have an irrational fear of something like flying. In fact, statistics suggest that the chances of coming to harm in an airplane are a lot less than they would be just crossing the road or riding on a bus, for example. But some psychologists have pointed out that when you take a flight to another country, you're not just participating and potentially worrying for transport. You're actually leaving all your familiar objects and people and land. And it's that almost that fear of losing contact with things that you're attached to. So, it's almost like an attachment anxiety. Sometimes that can be one of the reasons for something like fear of flying, because the statistics don't bear out the amount of irrational fear that sometimes people have with flying. But the other thing, of course, is about anxiety and travel, is that there's this concept that we call eco anxiety. Now, I know that many people think about global warming, and the climate crisis a lot. During the pandemic, one of the perhaps, one good thing that came out of that is that – I don't know what it was like where you were living, but where we were living, we were able to take an hour of exercise every day, and we were able to go for our walks in the local community. Through that, many of us discovered green spaces and little treasure troves of green spaces that we didn't know about before. Those types of things could really help us with our mental health a little bit. It also helps us to understand that we can experience some very precious travel moments without flying across the globe. I think people are – well, figures suggest that eco anxiety is this genuine, understandable anxiety about the state of the planet. People are starting to modify their travel a little bit more now and maybe take fewer long-haul flights. Or maybe when you do take a long flight, stay in the place you're going for a little bit longer, rather than making four or five shorter journeys. I don't know about you. But the pandemic opened my eyes a little bit to the beauties in my own country. [00:14:29] PF: Absolutely. [00:14:31] AS: I'm not going to give up flying, but I'm maybe starting to think a little bit more that there were some great things to see that are on my doorstep as well. [00:14:39] PF: Yes. We had that shift in mindset of where before we take another big international trip, let's really start looking around the US because there's amazing things here that we haven't discovered yet and we've constantly said, “Oh, we want to go there, we want to go to Big Ben. We want to check out Red Rocks.” We want to do these things and we haven't so it's like, when we start getting that travel it, instead of saying, “Hey, let's jump on a plane and hop across a pond.” Let's discover what's in our backyard, because it's a big backyard. [00:15:10] AS: That's true. Quite often, quite often that the most wow moments or the great travel moments often called through some of the more mundane things that we see in our everyday lives and mindful to everyday experiences. Mindfulness is something we are encouraged to practice in our everyday lives, isn't it? The idea is that you try to appreciate the world in a constant childlike state of wonder and you can enjoy the simplest pleasures like a cup of coffee, or a walk, or stroking a stray cat and those types of things can be appreciated, not necessarily only on the other side of the world. It's about recognizing that travel, enjoyment, and pleasure, aren't exclusively on a set list of destinations that we’re told to do. [00:16:07] PF: Right. Yes, I think it can probably open your eyes to your everyday world a little bit more, and the things that, as you're talking, just the things that you can appreciate that are around you every day. [00:16:19] AS: Yes. That's right. I mean, one of the key things about mindfulness is being able to appreciate your surroundings but without making too quick of judgment about whether it's good or bad. Sometimes when we suspend judgment, we give ourselves the time to enjoy whatever it is we're doing a little bit more with taking a breath or savoring the moment a little bit. In the era of five-star reviews, and TripAdvisor, there's often a quickness to try to say yes, this is five stars, this is two stars. It might be a better idea just to be with that travel moment a little bit more, and not be in such a quick rush to keep it a certain number of stars. Because sometimes we don't realize how satisfying an experience is until we've spent a little bit more time doing it. [00:17:11] PF: Another thing that I've noticed with myself, you mentioned savoring, and I've noticed that oftentimes, when I get home, I enjoy that trip experience more than I did in the moment. I wanted to know what that's about, because there's been so many times like, especially on a long trip, by the end of it, you're like, “Okay, this is great, but I'm ready to go home.” When you do get home and you really have time to sit with it, I don't know, I just feel like I appreciate it so much more after the fact even than I do when it's happening. [00:17:41] AS: Yes, that's interesting. It relates to the idea of wellbeing and travel. I suppose one of the reasons we're talking today is just to think about whether travel makes us happy or not and it's something I've discussed in the book is the relationship between happiness and travel. Psychologists have come up with this idea of different types of happiness. One of them sometimes known as hedonistic enjoyment, hedonistic travel, which is all about pure, physical joy in the moment. We often get this experience through, I don't know, skiing down the mountain, or windsurfing, or something like that. Then the other type of enjoyment is sometimes are viewed eudaimonic happiness or wellbeing. That's the kind of wellbeing that accrues through something like developing a skill, learning a language, understanding a culture, and it's a little bit more of a marathon rather than a sprint of your life. I think that what you're referring to there is the way that the skill, let's just say, of learning a language when you visit a place or learning a little bit about a local artist that can visit Mexico City and learn about Frida Kahlo, a fascinating historical figure. Those types of eudaimonic enjoyment, are often the ones which research suggests stay with you longer after the visit. Whereas if you visit a place and you purely want to live in, maybe just live in the fast lane and purely want to have hedonistic enjoyment, that's great while it's happening. But there may be a bit of a holiday hangover when you get back and the enjoyment may not be such so long lasting and memorable. To be honest, I think, the secret really to a good visit is to try to do a little bit of both of those, so that you can have, let's just say there's a cliché, travel can broaden the mind. That would be the longer lasting enjoyment, but you might want to party a little bit as well, but I think it's being able to combine those. [00:19:54] PF: I was having a conversation with a friend a few days ago and she was talking about how her in laws always go back to the same place. They do not want to travel to other places. They find things that they like, and then they just go to that over and over. She, of course, wants to try something new every time. Does that affect us differently? Or is it just a personality type? What makes us tick that way? [00:20:18] AS: Well, that is interesting, and again, you're going to have those people who are quite habitual, and who get a lot of enjoyment through developing routines. I think there are other people who struggle with sameness, and struggle with repetition. I think, there are good and bad aspects to both of those in terms of the experience of travel, because I think there's a lot of value personally in immersing yourself a little bit in the place, and trying to find a little bit about how it ticks. If I visit a city, for example, let's just take, I don't know, Los Angeles, or Mexico City or something. If I'm there for a week or so, there's an awful lot going on there a place like that and I would be reluctant to spend a day there and then jet off to New York to see what that's like for a day, and they jet off to Washington to see what that's like for a day. Because the richness of experience that is available in any city or town or county or whatever it is or region is really inexhaustible, I think. So, it's not so much about having routines. It's about having the commitment to explore in a little bit more depth and have that mindful approach. I mean, I think the reason for this, we always talk about bucket lists, don't we? People talk about a list of things I'd like to do before we go away. I often think – or while we're away, as you say. I often think that the itineraries that we make for ourselves or develop for ourselves when we travel, sometimes there are things that are coming from our own interests. But sometimes we follow an itinerary, which is almost been presented to us, and I think we often fall victim to this travel guide. We become slaves to the travel guide. [00:22:22] PF: Absolutely, yes. [00:22:23] AS: We can often have the experience of taking the same photograph that everybody else is taking, and that kind of thing. I think there are people who are quite happy to just take the commodified view of travel and take the photograph. There might be a queue of people taking the same photograph. Well, the people are more likely to try to be a bit more immersive and find out a bit more about what's going on in an everyday sense about a place that they visit. [00:22:52] PF: Yes. We're running this as summer is kicking off, and people are starting to think about travel. Well, it is based on the book, everything that you’re studying, what's your recommendation for travelers to keep in mind this season? [00:23:07] AS: Well, I think, first of all, we need to think about who you're going to travel with, and think about what social situation you want to put yourself in. But I think my number one piece of thing to think about, really, is when you travel, are you thinking of yourself as a traveler, or as a tourist? I've got a nice little quote here from the novelist Paul Bowles, who wrote The Sheltering Sky. It’s all about difference between travel and tourism. And he says, “The difference between a traveler and a tourist is, whereas the tourists generally always back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveler belongs no more to one place than the other, moves slowly over a period of years from one part of the earth to another.” For me, the traveler is somebody who's following their own dream about discovering something about themselves, trying to be mindful, and developing their own relationship with cultural diversity and finding something interesting about themselves. The tourists may be experiencing hedonistic travel. Maybe they're having the same holiday that everybody else is having as well. I think you've got to decide which of those you want to be really. It's not that one's better than the other, but they aren't quite distinct. [00:24:27] PF: That is so interesting. Andrew, you've given us so much to think about. I love this conversation. We're going to tell people how to discover your book because it's such an important and accessible read and thank you for writing. [00:24:38] AS: But also, to say, it’s not a big book, either. [00:24:40] PF: I know. It goes quick. It's a very slim volume. You can read it on a plane. [00:24:46] AS: Exactly. [00:24:47] PF: Andrew, thank you again. I appreciate your time today. [00:24:50] AS: Thanks for having me on Paula. Have a great summer. [00:24:53] PF: You too. [END OF INTERVIEW] [00:24:58] PF: That was Andrew Stephenson talking about why travel is so good for us. If you'd like to learn more about Andrew, follow him on social media or check out his new book. Just visit us at livehappy.com and click on the podcast tab. While you're there, remember there's still time to swing by the Live Happy Store and take advantage of our spring special where you can get 25% off storewide just by entering the code Spring 25. That is all we have time for today. We will meet you back here again next week for an all new episode. Until then, this is Paula Felps, reminding you to make every day a happy one. [END]

Follow along with the transcript below for episode: Overcoming Procrastination to Boost Well-being With Sherri Fisher [INTRODUCTION] [00:00:02] PF: Thank you for joining us for Episode 418 of Live Happy Now. If you're a procrastinator, or your life is affected by someone else who is, then this week's episode is for you. I'm your host, Paula Felps. This week, I'm talking with Sherri Fisher, director of the coaching practice, Learn & Flourish, and a bestselling author, speaker, and workshop facilitator. She's here today to talk about why we procrastinate, how it affects our wellbeing, and what we can do about it. Let's have a listen. [INTERVIEW] [00:00:32] PF: Sherri, thank you so much for coming on Live Happy Now. [00:00:36] SF: I'm excited to be here. It's very nice to meet you. [00:00:39] PF: This is a conversation I wanted to have for a few months now because I get your newsletter, which we will tell people how to sign up for it, because it's a fantastic newsletter. You did a great series on procrastination. So, it's ironic that it took me so long to get you on the show after you did procrastination. But I wanted to find out, first of all, just set a baseline, how big a problem is procrastination in the world today? [00:01:05] SF: I don't have an exact number for you. But most people procrastinate about something sometimes, and people who say that they procrastinate chronically. College students, for example, 90% of them, that's the number I have for you. They say that they procrastinate chronically, and when it comes to assignments. But adults in general will make wish lists of things that they're going to do, that they just don't ever get to checking off the little boxes for. If you look at the things that those people avoid doing, it's a lot of consistent things that they don't do. Procrastination is a big problem. It costs businesses, for example, lots of money, because productivity is reduced for people. But it also eats away at our wellbeing. When you don't keep up with things, those things pile up, people feel badly about those things, and you're also not learning how to overcome them in ways that help you build habits, and to learn even small amounts of self-regulation, and to manage yourself emotionally. Underneath it all, that's really what's driving procrastination is how you feel about things. [00:02:08] PF: I thought it was interesting because I've looked at procrastination through a time management lens and things like that. I honestly had never thought about how it affects our wellbeing. You of course having your Master's in Applied Positive Psychology and coming at everything through that lens, are looking at it, and what is the psychology that drives procrastination and how bad? You said it affects our wellbeing, how badly does it affect us? [00:02:37] SF: Sometimes there are people who procrastinate, and they've kind of gotten into whatever their procrastination rhythm is. It's like cramming for a test when you're in school, and you get to the very close to the last minute, and then you stay up all night. You think, “Oh, I got it done.” That sense of accomplishment can make you feel like you're very successful. But it might have cost you sleep. It might have meant that you ate junky food. It might have meant that you didn't get to go to a social event that you really wanted to go to. It might have meant that you didn't do something with your family that you would have done if you'd planned better. What happens is it's not like a one to one correspondence. It's the spillover effect that procrastination has on all the other things that you didn't do, that you perhaps could have done when you still had choices that you could make. [00:03:26] PF: Now, will the naysayer reply that, “Well, look at all the fun stuff I got to do before then, when I wasn't doing what I was supposed to be doing.” [00:03:37] SF: Well guess what, people don't feel good about those things, really. In the moment, most people who are procrastinating are not doing happy things that they want. They are basically spinning around in place, not doing any of the things that they might. I guess, we call them time wasters. They're not being productive in other ways, either. There are people who avoid, they go out to a party or something. Those are not the chronic procrastinators, who we're really talking about. Those are people who are, socially, they're in a place their lives where they – FOMO. They don't want to miss out on something. But generally speaking, a chronic procrastinator is not having that as their motivation. They're not doing things because they find the thing distasteful in some way. Not the thing itself, maybe, because maybe it makes them feel badly about themselves. “I'm not good at this. It reminds me that I didn't go to graduate school for such and such. Therefore, I'm not ever going to be the person who my family wants me to be.” It can be a lot of things. When I coach somebody, I have to help them to peel away enough of the layers of things that might be motivating them to get them to recognize that they are emotionally stuck sometimes. It’s not that they don't know how to manage their time. [00:04:51] PF: That’s interesting. Yes, because I used to work with a time management client and he viewed procrastination purely as a time management issue. But you're saying it's more than that. [00:05:01] SF: Oh, absolutely, it's more than that. One of the first things I talk about is what I call the probably problem. Every person who I work with who procrastinates tells me, they will probably do something, 100% of the time. If I talk to them, if they can put it on a planner, they can have notifications in 15 different places, it doesn't matter how well they plan their time. It matters how aware they are of the underlying things that are making them feel like they don't want to do something. That's important. It's also important, what level of commitment they have. They're saying they'll probably do something. It's like a cue that says, probably, but maybe not. The other thing is that if you're not making a commitment to follow through, then we need to work on that part. Maybe we need to build in implementation intentions, for example. Maybe we need to figure out what are the things that you're avoiding, and what would be solutions that if you're faced with whatever the barrier thought is, if this comes up, then I will do such and such, whatever that other thing is might be. If I need to put this in my calendar, and I need to start it on time, and the barrier thought is like, “Oh, I do this.” Then, I will – I have people, they text me. I'm having a moment, and then I can talk them through things. But usually, it doesn't take very long before they don't want to tell me that they're having a moment and they just do it. The next time we meet, they say, “I didn't want to do it, but I didn't want to bug you.” A lot of times, there are different ways of putting if then in place. But the idea is that you're teaching yourself to self-regulate. You're recognizing that a barrier exists. If that barrier shows up, then you're going to do a particular thing and it automatizes the things that keep you from pushing past probably, otherwise. Push past probably. [00:06:59] PF: Let's talk for a minute about what kind of problems procrastination can create, because you see a lot of different effects that it has. Can we talk first about work, and then I want to talk about how it affects us at home. [00:07:12] SF: Okay. At work, the worst-case scenario would be that you don't get your work done, and you are let go. But it also creates for the person who is the chronic procrastinator social difficulty. So much of work requires being on a team. You are part of a greater than yourself amount of work. If you don't show up on time, somebody else might have to pick up the slack for you. Maybe a project can't go out at all on time, and the entire team gets dinged for that. That would be the biggest thing is the social impact, and the person who is a procrastinator, that chronic procrastinator doesn't have the trust of their colleagues anymore if this happens over and over again. That makes the person who is the procrastinator feel disconnected from their work, and sometimes someone will get referred to me, they blame everybody else for their lack of something. Those people don't have enough patience. They're unrealistic. They don't know how hard my life is or things like that. They're not able to empathize with what it's like to be the person who is getting the job done. Because the chronic procrastinator may have been doing this forever, until they ended up in a situation where there was no longer enough structure to help them to be able to get things done. They're on their own, then they don't have all of their good if then is in place. They may struggle a lot. That's the biggest impact at work. [00:08:32] PF: Wow. Then, when they take those habits home, what kind of effects does it have at home, when we just keep putting things off? [00:08:42] SF: Well, if you are in a couple's relationship, the things that you put off at work might make you feel like you're exhausted, maybe you've been trying to get things done, whatever that may mean, but not being successful, and you get home and you're exhausted and you have no more executive function skills left. The first three are, stop what you're doing now, switch to the thing you're supposed to be doing and start doing it. But those are so difficult. Say that you're a person, like a lot of people who I will see have learning attention or executive function challenges across the board. But when there's the right kind of structure in place, or the right self-knowledge plus structure, a lot of the difficulties are really dealt with very well. But when you don't have those things, you struggle. Home is a place that doesn't have much structure unless you can impose it yourself. If you live with someone who is really good at putting structure in place, and you as the person who needs that structure, recognize that about yourself. That's great. Very helpful. But what if you're the person who says, “I don't want that. I don't want that. But if you push back a lot, I don't need that.” That's when things start to get difficult because the person who would benefit from the help and the person who is naturally more structured start to grow apart. They don't understand what the other person needs anymore. It’s difficult to have empathy if you think the other person is just being a pain. [00:10:07] PF: Yes, at work, at least there are oftentimes systems in place to correct that behavior, give warnings, things like that. That doesn't necessarily happen at home. Basically, it's a fight, and then there isn't a resolution. How do you deal with that in a home setting? [00:10:23] SF: Well, there are a bunch of different things that happen in a home setting. Sometimes people end up going to couples counseling, or they end up getting divorced, because if they're married, they just can't figure it out. But there are things to do before you ever get there that have to do with understanding what other people's tolerance for certain things is. For instance, the messy tolerance. For a chronic procrastinator, they're also often not very well organized in lots of other ways. So, recognizing that you, the messy person, would actually benefit from having a structure in place. Putting like things together. Having labeled buckets. Yes, we did that in first and second and third grade and it was great, because you knew where to put things away, and not looking at that and say, “Well, I'm not a baby.” A lot of the defensiveness that the procrastinator has, is a really good place to start. If you're the procrastinator, you want to recognize when you're being defensive. And if you're the person who's not the procrastinator, to not say things that are going to make the person who is frustrating you so much, not going to make him want to push back. I just told you what not to do. What to do, is to recognize when things are going well. For instance, if you have something that's labeled, and the person puts it in the right place, you say, “Thanks for putting that away.” Very little things. Just notice what’s – [00:11:39] PF: I like that. [00:11:41] SF: If you're the organized person, go ahead and be organized. Then, you're going to bring the person along with you a little bit at a time. Another thing you can do, this is my favorite thing to do, no matter what it is, is to set a timer. You figure out what your optimal time is. I just pick 10 minutes, because it's a good amount and it's not so long that most people can't pay attention for that long. But even with that, I work with a high school student who never gets their work done, I might even set the timer for five minutes. Because you want the person to have the idea that they're not going to have to do the heinous thing forever. They only have to do the heinous thing for a short amount of time. But you also want them to have the lived experience of success. When they do it, you don't want to look and say, “That's all you got done?” You want to say, “That was great. Next time, 10 minutes.” You do 10 minutes for a while until you can say to the other person, “Let's do 15 minutes.” Or ask them, “How long should I set the timer for?” I usually just ask them, “How many minutes do you want?” This week I had someone say, “I want 13 minutes. I like lucky 13. Let’s do this.” [00:12:42] PF: That's specific. That's so great, because that seems, it would work with couples, it would work in parent-child relationships. It seems like there's so many ways that that can be leveraged to make that work without conflict. [00:12:57] SF: Right. Because then you're not asking someone to budget a huge amount of time that they then need to organize. The thing with time management is if you say someone is going to have to work for two hours when they get home from work, that person is going to not get much done then and they'll be angry. So, they'll have to be self-regulating their anger and maybe their tiredness, and maybe they're hungry. There could be a lot of other things that are competing for attention at that point. That's why time management doesn't work so well. But if you divide time into emotionally, micro manageable parts, then you're heading in the right direction. [00:13:34] PF: When do we know that it's a time management problem and we're overburdened versus we're just procrastinating? It's easy to say, “Well, I just have too much to do.” How do we define and determine which it really is? [00:13:48] SF: You know what’s interesting, I have a big to-do list right now sitting next to me here. It has, oh, I don't know, 15 things on it. This morning, my plan yesterday, because I took that to-do list, I stuck it right on top of the lid of my computer. My plan today was to just bang out all those things. Then, I had several interruptions that were work related interruptions and I did not get to that list. The list is still sitting here. These are things that must get done. Eventually, they will get done. But you can have the best lead time management plans, and then something will interrupt. What do you do when that happens? Is, I think, a question that people also ask. You can also use your timer for that. I can just say I will do as many things as possible that I can get done in the next 10 minutes and you just bang through them for 10 minutes. Then, I put the list aside and I'll get back to more things later when I have 10 minutes free. Because usually you will have little bursts of time, those bursts of time effective for you is much more valuable than trying to figure out how to become more efficient. [00:14:50] PF: I like that, because a lot of times, I think, when we just have a burst of time, it's like, “I've got 10 minutes. I can't really do anything.” So, we hit social media or we scroll through our phone. We waste the time almost intentionally, giving ourselves the excuse that I don't really have enough time to get things done. [00:15:08] SF: Right. But if you have 10 minutes and a list, you just get started. Another good approach is to leave the thing that is on your computer screen. The last thing before you put the lid down, to have that be the thing that is your priority, so you don't have to go looking for what to do. That's the way to go down the procrastination rabbit hole really fast. [00:15:28] PF: Oh, yes. I like that. That’s a great tip. [00:15:31] SF: Because it's right there in front of you. But the other thing, even better than that is to, especially if you're in a document where you can make comments. Go ahead and write for yourself what you're going to start with. On mine, I will write down “Start here”, and then I wrote myself what I'm going to do. Or it's just highlighted, and it says, “Start here”. If I have an idea, before I decide I'm done for the day, I might write that idea down. I'll comment on a document. I write among other things that I do besides work with people. If I lose an idea, that's not a good thing. I have loads of them. I never run out of ideas. But sometimes you have a really great one. If I plan ahead, my implementation intention is, if I have an idea, then I will record it. Finding where to record your ideas, where to record your items for your to-do list, and having it be automatized for you, so you automatically do the same thing, you're much less likely to get off track, and getting off track is the way you procrastinate. [00:16:29] PF: Is procrastination an innate behavior? Or is it something we learn along the way? Where does it even come from? [00:16:36] SF: Well, I think that I'm going to say yes and yes to that kind of a question. Is it innate? I had two kids, they were very different in some ways, and not so different from each other in other ways. Sometimes you have kids and you look at them, and you think, “Oh, how could two such different people ever have come into the world?” Plus, I've worked with thousands and thousands of people. Do I think that they came into the world as procrastinators? I'm going to say people come in to the world with varying degrees of executive function skill, and that you probably have, I don't know, a tendency to be less self-regulated or more self-regulated, and that you can learn to be more self-regulated. Another thing is, do people have a process that works for them? Lots of times they haven't learned to process without that process. They just get lost. Is that because they are innately procrastinators? Maybe not. Maybe they just didn't get taught a way to do things in a more systematic way. Another one is that the procrastination problem across all contexts, and sometimes it's not. Sometimes it only happens in one place. So, we have to look at that. Do they do everything except for like the last step of taking action? In which case we got a little, like, get them just over the edge? In which case, they probably are chronic procrastinators and that's their stuck point is right there. Those are kind of my four things. I call it the SPCA, it’s what I just told you about. Structure, process, context, actions. [00:18:08] PF: That's great. You also are very big on self-care. I think what's so interesting for me is you different from a traditional business coach, because you have that positive psychology angle coming into it. You implement so many techniques and practices that you're not going to find in a traditional business structure. Talk about self-care, and how you see that being used as part of overcoming procrastination. [00:18:34] SF: Well, I have something I call mindfulness interval training. People will say, “Do I have to know how to meditate do that?” Because some people are just like, “I can't do it. I can't sit still”. No, no, it's not about that. Mindfulness interval training is if you have interval training you're doing for exercise, you're going to take something and you're going to do it for a very short amount of time, intensively. When I say a short amount of time, I'm talking about a minute, right? When you don't want to do something, and you're like, “No, I don't want to”, and you calm yourself down. That's the first step. In a minute, there are ways to do this, so I have a list of these that you can download on my website. But you might rub your palms together, and then just put them over your eyes and just slowly inhale and exhale, inhale through your nose, exhale through your mouth. Another way of doing that is to do like five-finger breathing. You close your eyes, if you're comfortable doing that, you use one finger, and you trace on the other hand, opposite hand. It doesn't matter which hand you use as your tracing finger. Use your index finger and trace up your thumb as you inhale through your nose and then exhale through your mouth going down. Then, you would do the same thing up the next finger and you're going to inhale, tracing up your index finger, inhale through your nose, exhale through your mouth. You can do that for all five fingers. When you get done. That won't even take a minute and you will be so much calmer just from that tiny little thing that you do. That's an interval. It's something that mindful. Then, if you still want more, you can do something that’s energizing. You can take an energy break. You could run in place for a minute. Or you could do arms over the head exercise for a minute, and then just stop. Inhale through your nose, exhale through your mouth. You can do mindful eating, some small thing, no raisins, cranberries, something very small, and just mindfully chew. You can take tiny sips of cool water, no ice. Just tiny sips of cool water for a minute. Take a whole minute to drink a glass of water. Tiny little sips. You can also do some other type of mindful breathing at the end. But you could spend five minutes and you will be the most relaxed you've ever been before starting something and you'll be in a much better headspace when you do that. [00:20:51] PF: You have a lot to teach us. You have so many things that we can learn about your techniques for taking care of ourselves, learn how to build our habits better. I'm going to tell the listeners how they can find your website, sign up for your newsletter, learn more about what you're doing. But what is the one thing that you really hope everybody who's listened to our conversation today takes away from it? [00:21:12] SF: If you don't want to be a procrastinator, you don't need to be a procrastinator. There are very pleasant, doable things to help you get things done that you would like to get done, and the things that you need to get done. [00:21:25] PF: Sherri, it's been a pleasure having you on the show. I appreciate you taking time with me today. [00:21:28] SF: It was great and fun. I love talking about things that I love to do and you ask the best questions. [END OF INTERVIEW] [00:21:37] PF: That was Sherri Fisher talking about procrastination. If you'd like to learn more about Sherri, follow her on social media, sign up for her newsletter or download some of her free resources. Just visit us at livehappy.com and click on the podcast tab. While you're there, be sure and stop by the Live Happy Store to take advantage of our spring special where you can get 25% off everything in the store, just by entering the code Spring 25. I recommend you check out our cheerful, choose happy tote bag which is the perfect springtime accessory. That is all we have time for today. Well 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]