Transcript - The Science & Spirituality of Silliness With Tom Rosshirt

Follow along with the transcript below for episode: The Science & Spirituality of Silliness With Tom Rosshirt

[INTRODUCTION]

[0:00:03] PF: Thank you for joining us for Episode 529 of Live Happy Now. If it’s been a while since you’ve found yourself acting silly, we’re hoping today’s episode will change that. I’m your host Paula Felps, and this week, I’m talking with Tom Rosshirt, author of the book, Chasing Peace. He’s here to talk about the science and spirituality of silliness. As you’re about to learn, embracing your silliness can have an amazing impact on your mood, your health, and even your relationships, so get ready to learn how to take silliness more seriously.

[INTERVIEW]

[0:00:36] PF: Tom, welcome back to Live Happy Now.

[0:00:38] TR: I’m so happy to be back. Thank you.

[0:00:40] PF: I’m super glad to have you back on the show. This is a show that’s been months in the making, because when I read your book, Chasing Peace, you had a very all, it wasn’t even a full chapter. It was just a few pages that talked about the spirituality of silliness. That was, I dogged ear that page, and I went back to it multiple times because it resonated with me. I think part of it is, we don’t think spirituality and silliness in the same sentence. So, talk about what you mean by the spirituality of silliness.

[0:01:15] TR: Well, okay, so that’s sort of starting in the middle. So, I will start in the middle, which is, spirituality for me means, I decide there’s somebody I want to be, and this is how to be happy, and there’s somebody I want to be. I get high when people see me that way and I get hurt if they don’t see me that way, but that’s the focus of my life and the drive to happiness is to be this person. But the spiritual part comes in when that path, the self-image model of happiness, the pursuit of a self-image in order to make yourself happy, that fails. It has to fail, because to be this one thing, you have to deny all these other things that you are.

You realize that trying to become a self-image is really a way to avoid painful feelings. We tell ourselves, and there’s a lot of psychological research in this, but we tell ourselves, “If only I could be a very prominent writer, a great podcaster, someone who brings meaning to people’s lives,” and all these. Then, I won’t have to fight thoughts that, “I don’t belong, you don’t really matter, you’re not worthy, no one would miss you,” all these terrible feelings that make us unhappy. We want a way to drive them out and keep them out. So. we try to have this self-image. but in the end, that self-image has to fail, and it fails because reality doesn’t treat our conceits kindly. We are exposed as not being all the things we claim and being some of the things we insist we’re not. We also break down because our body breaks down from the stress of trying to defend and promote this image of ourselves.

Then, ultimately the whole path to happiness breaks down because if my self-image breaks down, and I can’t achieve it, my body’s exhausted, then, what happens to my path to happiness? So, this is all a good thing. We think it’s a terrible thing. We think it can’t possibly be good if it feels bad, if it feels wrong, but the material pursuit of happiness has to fail for us to take up the spiritual pursuit of happiness, which can in fact deliver all the things that we wanted, but the material can’t do that.

So, as I see it, the material side of life, the first half of life is trying to build up this self-image. The spiritual half the second half of life is trying to give up that self-image. So, because the self-image is built on fear, because the self-image is built to avoid certain feelings. When you drop that self-image and you enter the spiritual, you’re facing all the feelings that you created the self-image to avoid, So now, we’re in the spiritual half of life where we’re giving up this claim, and we’re giving up that claim, and we’re facing feelings that we were running from our whole life, but this time we’re feeling them. Then, we can get to the peace that’s on the other side of the pain.

But now, back to what a silliness have to do with that. When we’re being silly, we are taking a decisive step outside our self-image. The self-image is a material pursuit of happiness. But when we decide, “I’m going to step outside my self-image,” and you can say, “I’m going to step outside my comfort zone.” You can put it that way. But once we step outside the self-image and we’re doing things that we have kept ourselves from doing, because they invite the difficult feelings, then we’re in the spiritual domain. So, this is where you get to embarrassment.

The self-image, we create the self-image in part to protect ourselves from embarrassment. “I’m really good at this. I’m very capable. I’m reliable. You can always count on me. I’m a serious, purposeful person. I always deliver results.” Whatever that is, when you step outside that and maybe you miss a deadline, or you blow a project, or you submit something with a mistake in it, you’re embarrassed. You want to go back to your self-image to avoid the embarrassment. But if you go into the embarrassment and you’re able to sit with it, then you basically are winning the right to be yourself. The embarrassment is what culture uses to control us, to keep us smaller, to keep us more narrow. So, let’s say, if I’m going in to an interview for a job that I really want, and I’m young, and I’m striving, and I’m 30 years old, I’m going to be very purposeful, very serious, I’m not – there’d be no silliness at all.

[0:06:02] PF: Correct.

[0:06:03] TR: Right? But now I’m on the other half of life, I’m 65 years old. I work with a group of people that I adore, and partly, because I’m one of the founders in the originators. I can be silly, I can be not serious purposeful, I can admit my flaws, I can own my mistakes, all these things that are outside of self-image. But anyway, so shortly, this is just part of being silly. If I am purposely being silly, like if I stood up and did itsy bitsy spider close up the water spout. But that feels silly for me as 65-year-old serious person doing itsy bitsy spider makes me feel embarrassed. Even if I’m doing it by myself, it makes me feel embarrassed. So, either I recoil and say, “That was silly” or I just do more of it, and then, I start laughing. I start laughing partly because it’s embarrassing, but I start laughing partly because of the liberation of doing something that only a child would do when I’m not any longer a child.

So, there is my too long answer. We can follow up. But yes, that’s why it’s spirituality. It’s stepping outside of this narrow vision of who you think you have to be to be happy. Silliness is a bold, aggressive, audacious step outside of that smaller, more constrained, more culture obedient self?

[0:07:32] PF: Well, because I had read your book and read your thoughts on it, I of course got interested in the topic. I had to dig a little bit deeper. So then, I actually found that there is science behind silliness, because it does activate the prefrontal cortex, which is where we regulate our emotions. It helps us boost creativity, and it also reduces the activity in our amygdala, which means it lowers our stress response. So, that makes it a pretty powerful tool just by being silly. I never dreamed that it would have those kind of effects on us physically and emotionally.

So, let’s talk a little bit about how you discovered, I know you use silliness as a tool to shut off negativity. How did you discover that? Because I don’t know if you did the same, “Hey, ChatGPT, tell me more about what this does,” or if you just discovered it on your own?

[0:08:26] TR: No, no, I can’t claim credit that I did it on my own. I got wise to this when, and you know, because you had me on, and we talked about Chasing Peace, that I went through a decade of really painful, serious, stress-related conditions that sent me out of my house. I was afraid of everything, every substance, every smell, every light, sound, every food. I was in practicing avoidance because I thought everything was giving me anxiety, everything was making me ill.

Then, I found Annie Hopper, who is a healer of stress-based conditions, right? She does a dynamic neural retraining system. You can find her at retrainingthebrain.com. So, I went to Annie Hopper when absolutely nothing else was working for me, and I was running from things, thinking that I was moving away from danger. But I discovered, I was actually running away from fear, which intensified the fear, and fear was the cause of all my conditions. So, I went to Annie and she was magic for me.

Like other people in her field, she’s able to identify when the limbic system goes on high alert and never comes back. When the amygdala is firing and you have all kinds of dangerous signals coming into you from things that are not dangerous, but your brain perceives them as dangerous. So, you got cortisol, and adrenaline, and norepinephrine pounding in your system, and there’s no end to the symptoms that you can experience or the suffering you experience.

So, with Annie, one of the things that she said, there were five steps I remember taking for six months as I was working this program very diligently. One of them was, elevate your mood throughout the day. So, that was a challenge for me, because anybody who’s done depression, we know that the real sneaky power of depression is it strips away our desire to do anything. We just want to sink in, we think there’s no hope, there’s no point, there’s no reason to do anything. But that’s just a lie we tell ourselves when we don’t want to get better, but I wanted to get better.

So, every time I felt depression, I felt a call to elevate my mood. So, I was exploring different ways to elevate my mood. I found quickly that laughter was an instant mood boost. So, I tried different forms of laughter, like I would be in some frustrating situation and I would say, “I love this.” That would make me giggle, or I would clap my hands together, and I would jump up and down. I would be relating this to a friend of mine, I said, “You know what I’m doing now? I’m clapping my hands together.” She says, “Clapping your hands?” And I said, “Yeah, clapping my hands together like a small child.”

So, her reaction let me know that I had jumped the border from laughter to being silly. So, I recognized that silly was just a high-powered way to get to laughter. So, that’s how I went into silly. Then, I created a whole repertoire of silly actions and behaviors that I would practice. But that’s how I got there from trying to elevate my mood.

[0:11:41] PF: That is awesome. As you point out, people who have a dignified presence, which is you, they’re often reluctant to embrace silliness. So, how do they kind of get past that, and how do you learn that, hey, it’s really – it’s not only okay to have this silly side, it’s actually beneficial?

[0:12:01] TR: Yes, the first thing you do is, you do it when you’re alone.

[0:12:06] PF: So, don’t go and start like in the middle of Time Square and –

[0:12:08] TR: No, don’t start in the middle of Time Square. Time Square might be fine, but everything’s okay in Time Square. But no, you don’t want to do it in public at a party, at a dinner party, or something like that where people don’t know you in particular. So, my first practice was on my own and my practice in my basement. I would do goofball things like singing, and dancing is sort of an obvious start. Clapping, jumping up, and down, saying things like cookies, cookies, horrific cookies. But I even like memorized the Oath of Office of the President of the United States. I placed my left hand on a literal Bible, and put my right hand, and I recited the Oath of Office, which is only 35 words. I think, you know, it’s good to memorize it because you never know what might happen. These are unpredictable times. I want to be ready.

[0:13:00] PF: You just might, I don’t know.

[0:13:03] TR: But the thing that I go to most often is John Philip Sousa marches. I don’t know whether this is why, but when we were little kids, my mom, she used to be ironing in the basement and we were five boys. She didn’t want us all in the basement, but she said, she gave us the tops of pots and pans, and put on John Philip Sousa marches, and had us march around the dining room table clanging these pots and pans. She would know because of the clanging that, okay, we’re up there, we’re fine.

[0:13:38] PF: Ah, you’re not getting into other mischief.

[0:13:40] TR: Right. Anyway, I think that maybe that prompted me. But if I – and there’s a theory of this I want to talk about, because you raised the science part of it. But if I wake up and this doesn’t happen that much anymore, because all these practices that have borne good fruit But if I wake up and I am depressed, like depressed, and I feel really heavy. I go into this office where I am now, I have a little house in my backyard where I work from. I go to John Philip Sousa marches, and I put on Stars and Stripes Forever. I start literally marching back and forth. I feel like a total clown and then I start laughing out loud.

Then, sometimes, I start to cry. It’s like so much emotion, but depression can’t stand silliness. A depressing thought or depressing feeling, they need each other to perpetuate the mood. If they run into something silly, if they run into laughter, they get stalled, they lose traction. So, I found that when I’m depressed and I do something silly, like of Sousa march, it’s like taking a hot frying pan and putting it in the cool sink of water, and you hear – but that heat can’t stand in the cool water. That’s what I think the effect is.

[0:15:15] PF: We’ll be right back with more of Live Happy Now. Now, let’s hear more from Tom Rosshirt. One thing that struck me, because you talk about embracing silliness requires overcoming embarrassment, and we don’t like being embarrassed. And even as you stated, even if you’re by yourself, you feel silly, and awkward, and embarrassed. But you said in your book, and I’m going to quote this. I try to find the border where embarrassment begins, and then, I cross it. So, how do you do that? How do you find that ability to push yourself across that line of embarrassment to actively seek that out? Then, what kind of reward, what shifts in your brain when you do that?

[0:16:05] TR: I do come to a moment where, and I’m throwing in things that make me even sillier. I’m pretending I’m in a float waving to people, or that I’m marching, or that I’m playing a pipe on the 4th of July, marching down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D .C. I just try to throw in more things that make it more embarrassing. Then, I usually come to a border or a barrier was like, “Okay, you’ve gone too far.” This is when, “You’re an idiot. You’re humiliating yourself. But there’s no one here. You’re humiliating yourself.” Then, just think, that mood can’t last. Either I withdraw and I think, “Oh, you’re right, I’m an idiot” or I go through it and say like, “Hell to you. I’m going through it.” Then, I go through, and then usually, I break into laughter,” and it’s a relief.

Here’s the thing that’s interesting. When I’m all alone and I do something that feels embarrassing, it’s proof that the culture is in my head.

[0:17:15] PF: Oh my gosh, I love that, yes.

[0:17:17] TR: Right. Because how can I be embarrassed, there’s no one here, and yet, everyone’s here because I’ve given them space in my head. So, Renee Brown put this in the book, Rising Strong, where an editor asked her that, what is the seal of liberation, and that Nietzsche said, it’s to be no longer embarrassed in front of yourself or to have no shame in front of yourself. If that’s the seal of liberation, it means you have expelled culture from your mind. There’s no one – because people can only embarrass me if they form an alliance with an inner accuser that I have. If that inner accuser is gone, they have no leverage over me. So, that’s really the exciting thing about being embarrassed and you go through your embarrassment is, you are taking on the culture right now. It’s like nature.

Martha Beck does this brilliantly in her book, The Way of Integrity. There’s a battle constantly going on between nature and culture. You defy your nature, often damage your nature in order to accommodate culture. So, you have to win that battle for nature, but in a way that honors culture. You don’t want to destroy your relationships, you don’t want to destroy your reputation, so you need to manage those emotions that could get you in trouble with people, and harm your relationships. On the other hand, you don’t want to genuflect the culture when your nature demands a different response. The embarrassment is really, it’s a way to get free.

[0:18:52] PF: That’s an amazing path that most of us haven’t considered and I would dare say. It can be difficult to find the courage to step into our silly side. So, let’s talk about how some tools like animals and children, how can they help us because I have animals and that’s huge for helping me connect with silliness because that’s all they are. So, let’s talk about that. How you can use them as stepping stones into the silly side.

[0:19:20] TR: Well, that’s a great question because there are zones in life where we’re allowed to be silly. It’s as you say, little kids, puppies, dogs, all that. So, I remember when our dog Chester died, we didn’t just miss him, we missed the way we were when we were around him. So, after a pause, we got another dog, and we restored silliness to our home. But for me, when I was the father of little boys, I could be as silly as I wanted. That was great, because that’s the role of a father.

I also remember honestly, my dad, which I described in the book was a man of many generous impulses and a lot of kindness. He was also really grouchy at times. I’m sure nobody can relate to that.

[0:20:14] PF: I can’t understand. He had five boys. What could he possibly have to get grouchy about?

[0:20:18] TR: Yes. Oh, gosh. He would always bark at us, do what you’re supposed to be doing. We would laugh because it was his shorthand where he couldn’t articulate what he really needed, was just, he needed his anxiety to drop down. So, his way to ask for that is to say, do what you’re supposed to be doing. But I remember once we were on a trip together, and my father was in the lobby of a hotel in the afternoon and all five of us boys found him. My younger brother, Matt said, “We’re just going to follow you around and embarrass you. He said, “You’re not going to embarrass me” and Matt said, “We will if we’re naked.”

Anyway, sometimes, the playfulness of the kids gets the dad into a playful mood. But this is a long way of saying, the happiest times of my home as a child was when my dad was being silly, and the silliness was like a celebration, and the silliness is a sign that everything is okay. Because you have nothing to fear from someone being silly. They’re being vulnerable, they’re being intimate. My dad, when he was being silly, he was an ace. He was amazing at being silly.

Oh, I have a good friend and I said I was going to come on your show and talk about silliness.” She talked to me about her dad when they were little girls, and they had five girls, my family had five boys, but they had five girls. She said, “Dad, on the way home from church, dad would pretend that the breaks had gone out. And he goes, ‘Oh no, oh no, we’re going to make this time, we’re going to make this time, it’s time, we got no breaks.'” He did it in a way, they remembered as hilarious good fun, which is, wow, I’m surprised you don’t remember it as a terrifying experience.

[0:22:07] PF: Exactly. We’re all going to die, oh my gosh.

[0:22:09] TR: She had the same feeling that when dad was being silly, everything was joyful.

[0:22:15] PF: That’s an awesome take on it. Because yes, oftentimes, parents have too much stress, have too much on them, and they don’t necessarily take the time to just be silly. Once we’ve surpassed that small child stage, we kind of start getting too serious, too fast.

[0:22:34] TR: I agree. I completely agree.

[0:22:37] PF: So, right now, don’t know if you’ve noticed it, but it’s a little bit challenging out there. Things are tough. It’s a hard time for people in many, many ways, and that makes it even harder for people to be silly. It feels like there’s kind of this weight that’s always hanging behind us, no matter if we’re relaxing, whatever it is we’re doing. There’s a reminder of the turmoil that’s going on around us. So, I have several entry points into this topic of the importance, why that makes it even more important to be silly, and then, also, sometimes we feel guilty. People are suffering, horrible things are happening. How can I be silly in times like these.

[0:23:23] TR: First of all, when the culture is raging with contempt, we need to protect ourselves by creating a subculture where we treat each other well. Even in the most raging storm of political hatred, if we can find a group that agrees that we’re going to treat each other well no matter what, then that group improves the lives of everyone in it, and soon, people outside it as well. So first, we have to find a refuge and a place where we are going to treat each other well.

I would not frankly recommend that anyone try broad displays of silliness in public in these times, because they would be offensive to people. They would think what? You have no empathy. That’s a legitimate concern. I don’t demean that. I would just say, find a safe place to be silly. By being silly, you make it even more safe. So, I would say, and I say this in the book that, how can you be silly when people are suffering? My answer is that, only love can heal the world and laughter is the gateway to love and silliness is a shortcut to laughter. So, it’s really a track to love, because the only way we’re really going to make a difference in the world is not just to be meaner and nastier than the other people, and fight them harder. But rather to try to open to the grace that is around us, that surrounds us, and let it flow in us so we can reach out with grace to people who are on the other side. That’s the only way.

Even reducing the antagonism toward the other side isn’t going to change things. It’s active gestures of dignity, honoring the dignity of the other side, treating the other side with respect, listening carefully, giving people the benefit of the doubt, acknowledging what people are going through, understanding that whatever behavior you’re troubled by, that doesn’t define them. They are larger than that. They are capable of more than that. Treating people with dignity can encourage people’s best and discourage their worst. So, this silliness can be a part of giving you the grace to look differently at the other side. But again, it needs to be in a small, safe group of people who are trying to hold together during this storm.

When things are really dark, one of the darkest parts about the darkness is it makes us think, love is irresponsible and love is the only way out, right?

[0:26:21] PF: Right.

[0:26:19] TR: To be generous, to be gracious, to be charitable is the only way out. And just when we need it most is when it seems like it’s not safe to practice it. So, we have to find a safe place to practice silliness and understand how it sustains us, and it can prepare us to be more gracious to the people on the other side of whatever dispute we’re having.

[0:26:46] PF: So, a million-dollar question then is how do people start that? Where do they start the process of exploring their silly side of discovering it for some that may have been buried for years and shut down? What are simple steps to get that started?

[0:27:04] TR: I think it’s going to be a different path for everyone, and it depends on people’s privacy. It’s like, where can you find a moment of privacy? Is it in your car? And being in your car, are you able to sing, for example? Are you comfortable singing? Are you comfortable dancing? I’m in this office, it’s a renovated garage where I work, and it’s a wall of windows. Outside the windows is a garden, and I was dancing one day, no one here but me, and I had music on, and I was dancing. And someone came to do gardening work, and they were like pulling weeds, and they’ve had sort of an angry, “I’m working too hard, it’s too hot out here” kind of face on, and they were yanking weeds. I laughed at it, but I shut down the dancing. I couldn’t bear it.

I couldn’t bear it if he could have looked at me at any moment and the contrast between my lighthearted dancing around and him sort of grimly pulling weeds was too much for me to imagine. So, dancing is something that people can find. I mean, if you’re a gifted dancer, it’s not going to embarrass you, right? But if you’re a clumsy dancer, maybe that’s good. Find something that you’re kind of clumsy at. Or go play a child’s game, or go do a nursery rhyme, or do like the itsy-bitsy spider, complete with the cute hand gestures. A child’s game, child’s play, reciting a poem, singing a nursery rhyme song or something like that. These are childlike activities are often something you would do with a child, but boy, you would never do it by yourself, because that would be embarrassing. So, I would start with that, and people will know from the inner feeling they have of how deep the embarrassment is, and keep it to what you can manage.

[0:29:03] PF: I love it. Tom, that is great. I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. Love the idea of exploring our silliness, especially in this hot summer with so much going on. So, thank you for coming and sitting down and talking with me about it.

[0:29:16] TR: My pleasure, I love it, and thanks. Just one last point for silliness, if we got an extra half minute is, it’s so powerful. Because, first of all, it’s an instant mood boost, and we all can use those. But there are some instant mood boosts that aren’t good in the long run, right? We know, there are all kinds of addictive substances that will give you an instant mood boost and will make you pay. Silliness will not make you pay. It will keep giving returns. But the other part is, it also takes you outside your self-image and that’s into the spiritual. So, from my point of view, it is both soothing and it is healing. By healing, you’re going to feel these feelings that you used to run away from, and now, you’re embracing. If you can go be silly, and you feel that embarrassment, and you don’t run from the embarrassment, but you sink into it, and you get cozy with it. That’s a spiritual gain. So, I think it’s soothing, and it’s healing, and it’s fun, and everyone should try it.

[0:30:18] PF: That is fantastic. I love it. I hope they will. We’re going to tell them how to find out more about you. We’ll give them some other resources on silliness, but thank you, Tom. Thanks for sitting down.

[0:30:28] TR: My pleasure. Loved it.

[0:30:32] PF: That was Tom Rosshirt, talking about the science and spirituality of silliness. If you’d like to learn more about Tom, follow him on social media, or check out his book, Chasing Peace. Just visit us at livehappy.com and click on this podcast episode. That is all we have time for today. We’ll meet you back here again next week for an all-new episode. Until then, this is Paula Felps, reminding you to make every day a happy one.

[END]

In this episode, you’ll learn:

How silliness acts as a spiritual practice.
Why laughter and childlike play can retrain the brain and reduce stress.
Simple, everyday ways to embrace your silly side (even if it feels embarrassing at first).

Visit Tom’s website here.

Discover his book, Chasing Peace: A Story of Breakdowns, Breakthroughs, and the Spiritual Power of Neuroscience.

Follow Tom on Social Media:

Instagram: @TomRosshirt

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