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How to Feel Lighter with Yung Pueblo

In this episode, Yung Pueblo discusses relationship mistakes and how to love better. He explores how attachments can masquerade as love and how true connection requires flexibility, sharing this powerful insight: attachment is just a deep form of inflexibility—it can look like love, but it’s often about control. Diego also delves into why growth, kindness, and compassion are green flags in a partner, and how to advocate for personal needs without clinging too tightly to rigid expectations. This insightful discussion offers practical wisdom for anyone looking to build healthier, more fulfilling relationships.

Key Takeaways:

Attachment vs. Love – Attachment can often masquerade as love, but it’s really a deep form of inflexibility and control. True love allows for freedom and growth.
The Power of Emotional Flexibility – Our ability to adapt, shift perspectives, and embrace change is essential for healthy relationships.
The Role of Personal Growth in Love – Your relationship is only as strong as your willingness to grow. When both partners prioritize self-awareness, connection deepens.
Kindness and Humility as Green Flags – Instead of looking for perfection in a partner, look for their willingness to grow, their kindness in difficult moments, and their ability to see beyond their own perspective.
The Danger of Comparison – Social media can create unrealistic expectations in relationships. Instead of comparing, focus on what truly matters in your connection.
Balancing Freedom and Commitment – Love thrives when we allow each other to change and evolve while staying committed to the relationship.

Connect with Yung Pueblo Website | Instagram

Diego Perez is a meditator and #1 New York Times bestselling author who is widely known by his pen name, Yung Pueblo. He has sold over 1.5 million books worldwide that have been translated into over 25 languages. Online he has an audience of over 4 million people. His writing focuses on the power of self-healing, creating healthy relationships, and the wisdom that comes when we truly work on knowing ourselves. Diego’s new book is How to Love Better: The Path to Deeper Connection Through Growth, Kindness, and Compassion.

If you enjoyed this episode with Yung Pueblo, check out these other episodes:

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Episode Transcript:

Yung Pueblo 00:00

If you really want a relationship to be nourishing and happy and compassionate, you got to really work on letting go of your attachments, because when you lessen the attachments, you’re increasing not only your freedom, but your partner’s potential for freedom.

Chris Forbes 00:22

Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy or fear, we see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf?

Eric Zimmer 01:07

What if the biggest thing getting in the way of love is the way we hold onto it? That was one of the biggest insights I took from this conversation with Diego Perez, better known as young pueblo. He said something that really stuck with me, attachment is just a deep form of inflexibility. It can look like love, but it’s often about control. And that really hit me. It reminded me of something my partner, Ginny has said, which is that when we fixate on one specific thing, like a cupcake, nothing else will satisfy us, but when we step back and recognize what we actually need underneath it, so many possibilities open up. That’s flexibility. And in this episode, Diego shares how meditation reshaped his relationships, why growth kindness and compassions are green flags in relationships, and how we can advocate for our needs without clinging too tightly to our stories. This was such a warm and insightful conversation, and I know you’ll take something valuable from it. I’m Eric Zimmer, and this is the one you feed.

Hi Diego. Welcome to the show.

Hey Eric, thank you for having me.

Eric: Yeah, it’s a pleasure to have you back on this time around, we’re going to be discussing your book, How To Love better, the path to deeper connection through growth kindness and compassion, and so we’ll get to that in a minute. But let’s start like we always do with the parable. In the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with her grandchild, and they say, in life, there’s two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And grandchild stops think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, Well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

Yung Pueblo: Yeah, I mean, that parable is really so powerful, and it’s nice, you know, hearing it once again and reflecting on it, and immediately it made me think back to how the wolf that I was afraid of was fear itself, like the fear to feel my own emotions. And I think what it really means is like embracing the Good Wolf, embracing like the good qualities of life, is really just having the resilience to feel, just the resilience to feel the simplicity of that and how that’s turned my life in a much better direction.

Eric: The thing that comes through in this book, very clear is your meditation practice. It’s, it’s really emphasized, I think you say in the book you’ve been at it for about 12 years, and that you have something like 12,000 hours of practice, which that’s a lot of diligence, right? I assume some of that gets stacked up in you know, longer silent retreats, but that’s a very dedicated and focused practice. As someone who’s been a long time meditator myself, I do find that the motivation wanes from time to time for you. How does it stay high enough to keep that level of continuous practice up.

Yung Pueblo 05:00

I guess I’m really motivated by the results. Honestly, I think it’s the best investment I’ve ever made. It’s, you know, better than investing in the s, p5 100. It’s just like such a strong result oriented practice where I see how when I go to retreats, I started making better decisions when I was back home, and then when I started meditating daily, my capacity and my creativity started expanding. And not only that, on the individual level, but on the interpersonal level, like all my relationships started deepening. So there are definitely times where, you know, it’s more difficult than others to sit my you know, two hours a day, but I always get it done, because I know that I’m just better off for it. And it’s almost like, you know, feeding myself daily, like I have to feed myself, bathe myself, and at the same time, I also have to tend to my mind. So it feels pretty essential.

Eric Zimmer 05:13

Have you had any time in there where you have slipped a little bit and done less of it and then been like, oh, boy, I can really tell the difference. Or are you still just sort of running off of, I know this is really good for me. Keep doing it kind of thing.

Yung Pueblo 05:28

Yeah, honestly, it would take a lot to make me not do it, but I haven’t. I’ve been doing it now for like. I started meditating in 2012 and I started going to retreats, but then I started meditating daily in the beginning of 2015 and it’s been ongoing now for, what is that like, almost 10 years in the summer, yeah, so, yeah. I mean, I’ve been, I think it was just like, you know, I’d have to be, like, really sick or something like that, or in a coma or or, you know, if I had, if I had a child, and they, like, needed me, yeah, you know, 24/7 or something like that. But because right now I have that, that luxury of, you know, not having kids and being healthy, it gets the priority it needs.

Eric Zimmer 06:10

Got it all right? Let’s move into the book itself, about how to love better. We’re going to explore some of the big ideas in the book, but I want to start with you talk about something called green flags in relationships. We’ve heard the term red flag in a relationship, but you know, three green flags that you talk about are growth, kindness and compassion. And I’m wondering if you could share a little bit about why you chose those and why they’re important for relationships,

Yung Pueblo 06:41

yeah, I think, you know, they felt really critical, especially the, you know, the growth one, where you get into a relationship, and as soon as you’re in there, you start seeing very clearly what you’re good at and what you’re not good at. You know that you can see if you lack the skill of listening well, or if you lack patience and whatnot. And I think embracing your own growth and understanding that it’s really a lifelong journey, whether you’re in partnership or not, that that’s going to help you just show up as the best version of yourself. And I think a lot of times people want to be in a relationship with someone who has their stuff figured out. But the reality is, I, like everyone comes into a relationship quite imperfect. And instead of wanting someone to like, you know, have all the emotional skill set and all of that figured out, instead what you’re really looking for is that they embrace growth, that they see, and then can hold themselves accountable, and then can step up and repair what they need to repair. The other element, you know, one of kindness, is that when you’re in proximity to someone, whomever you’re in proximity to, whether it’s a roommate, whether it’s a family member, whether it’s someone you’re you know in an intimate relationship with, the person that you’re closest to is going to see the best of you and the worst of you so being intentional about having the vulnerability to let someone see you in your down moments, but also still doing your best to be sweet with them, to give them your kindness, to treat them gently, because that kindness that you can receive from another person, it helps you move through the ups and downs of life. And then the last element of compassion. I’m speaking about a very specific form of compassion where you are doing your best to step outside of your perspective, to see the perspective of another person. Because this is the fundamental skill set that you need to be able to solve arguments when they arise.

Eric Zimmer 08:46

I was going to ask about the difference between compassion and kindness. So in this case, kindness is sort of all the gestures and the general orientation towards a person in your general interactions, yeah, the care, the gentleness, yeah. And compassion is the ability to say, Hang on, I don’t necessarily agree with what they’re saying, but I’m gonna pause, and I’m going to perhaps elevate myself a little bit and try and see their side of it before I have a reaction.

Yung Pueblo 09:15

Oh exactly. You know, it’s an element of humility, where you understand that, okay, I may be having my own set of experiences, but my perception is not perfect. I don’t know exactly what’s going on. I may know for myself, but let me take a moment to really listen to my partner and hear how things are moving for them.

Eric Zimmer 09:31

Humility is a word that you use a lot in this book, and it is not a word that shows up a lot of places very often. Now I got sober in a 12 step program, and you know, one of the steps has the word humility, or humble in it. And the aa big book talks about humility a fair amount, but I don’t see it very often. Why is that a word that resonates with you? And maybe before you tell us why it resonates with you, tell us what it means to you.

Yung Pueblo 09:58

You know, it’s funny. I’m glad that you’re like. Catching on that too, because I find that it’s not a very popular word. Like, if you try to write a post and you’re sort of building that post around the word humility, like it is just gonna flop, even for your audience, yeah, for sure. And that’s why, like, you know, a lot of the stuff that you’ll see on my Instagram account, it’s to pique your interest and to hopefully so that you can develop a sense of trust, so that you then give me your patience to then hear about subjects like humility and how important they are. I mean, to me, humility is the simple art of fully understanding that I don’t know everything, and I have a lot to learn, and that my perspectives and whatnot, what my views, they’re not complete, they’re not perfect, and that it’s worth learning and communicating with others to be able to expand what I know. That’s a great definition. Yeah, you know, not only is that like critical in your own growth journey, but in your relationship coming into it like, I think about it as if there’s another green flag, it’s when you are really getting to know somebody you see that you know they don’t act like they know everything that they ask questions that they’re like, curious about. You know, tell me more. Like, tell me more is one of my favorite sentences. Yep,

Eric Zimmer 11:13

the definition that I had heard for a while is slightly different. I think it’s just a slightly different orientation of the same idea, which is that it’s about having a very accurate assessment of your good and bad qualities, right? It’s not about knowing all about what’s bad about you. It’s not about denying what’s good about you. It’s about having a relatively clear picture of here’s the type of person I am, but I really love that idea of just recognizing you don’t know everything, and being open like that is such a important skill. And talk about, like green flags, it is one of the things that attracts me to other people in any way, shape or form, and perhaps handles me from people who think they know everything, like, I’m allergic to it a little bit, you know, like, almost to the point that I need to, like, get over it a little bit, but it’s one of my least favorite character traits. I’m

Yung Pueblo 12:07

with you, and I think when I encounter people who have that humility to learn more from others, to me, it’s an immediate sign of intelligence and that they have the sort of, like, mental capacity and framework for for higher intelligence to be able to, like, keep building on complexity, because any views that any human is going to develop, they’re just going to be very tilted, tainted, imperfect, like we can only see so far. That’s why we need each other.

Eric Zimmer 12:36

So let’s move into one of the first key ideas in the book, to me, which is that our own personal growth is really foundational to a good relationship.

Yung Pueblo 12:48

You know, to me, it was quite shocking that I went into meditating for my own personal development, for my own healing, and I started receiving the results of that pretty quickly. I started seeing that my mind felt lighter. Self awareness started developing. But it was a surprise, a good surprise, to see that it was immediately affecting my relationships in a very positive way, you know, started deepening my relationship with my parents, my relationship with my wife, who was then my girlfriend, started getting deeper, even relationships with friends, and it started really dawning on me how my relationship was just showing me so much of where I needed to grow, and if I refused to grow in these areas, like listening better, having more patience, pausing, slowing down, my reactions to just, you know, give myself time to think, if I didn’t accept that challenge to grow, then the relationship is just going to keep staying hard and probably getting harder. So, you know, in my mind, there’s no other alternative than to understand, like, whether you meditate or not, like, you know, there’s a lot of room for growth in a relationship for every individual.

Eric Zimmer 14:00

Well, you could just focus all your energy on getting the other person to grow and change. Does that work?

Yung Pueblo 14:08

And I know, I know from experience, yeah,

Eric Zimmer 14:10

that’s often the standard approach.

Yung Pueblo 14:12

The first six years of my relationship with my wife, it was just like a giant blame game. You know? It was just like, How can I figure out, how can I make this tension in my mind your fault? Yeah, and we never won. Neither of us won.

Eric Zimmer 14:28

No, it’s funny to me, and I laugh from having been in this exact situation at times where I’m sitting there learning something new about growth and thinking in my mind like, you know, who really needs to hear this?

Yung Pueblo 14:45

Oh, I know. And the answer is, me. It’s like, it’s you, the person who’s looking in the mirror.

Eric Zimmer 14:49

You make an interesting point, though, about how growth from both people is sort of important, and I’ve seen this happen a lot. My peers are older than yours. But I’ve seen this happen a lot with people you know, somewhere near my age, the kids are finally up and out of the house, and one of the partners just really embarks on like growth and change and wanting to be a different person in a lot of ways. And the other person just says, Think, I’m just gonna stay right here, yeah, and that becomes really problematic and really painful for everybody involved, because, on one hand, you can’t fault the person who’s like, but we’ve been in this marriage all these years, and you were this way, and now you’re different, and you’re expecting me to come along like all of a sudden, right? And yet, you can’t fault somebody either for being like, I want to change. I want to grow and and I think we can talk about this a little bit more later in the conversation, but I think some of figuring out, is this workable? Am I okay with this in those situations where it’s a little more nebulous, right? Like, nobody’s done anything wrong, right? Both people in the relationship are kind and good people, yeah, you know. And figuring that out is really difficult, yeah.

Yung Pueblo 16:05

And I think, you know, it’s funny, because that even comes back to humility in a certain degree, where you have to learn to be okay with people growing in their own way, and also, and also growing at their own speed, yes, like, we’re not going to grow this, like we have such different conditioning, you know, some people have experienced immense amounts of traumas. Others less so. And so that means, like, you know, when you’re trying to grow, like, developing some qualities might be super, super difficult, like someone developing patients when all they’ve known for years is survival, yeah, and they’re just like, you know, trying to dodge things so that they can not be hurt. So I think understanding that one, we don’t have to change the same way. We don’t have to change at the same speed, and that growth for you may look super different, yeah, for me, like, if someone is really adamant about I don’t know, like meditating or going to therapy or just doing whatever it is, and maybe another person just needs to accept they just need to accept themselves as they are, and that can be one of the biggest growth moments for them in their life, because they’ve been striving, striving, striving, and, you know, trying to be a very productive member of society or whatnot, and to just be able to accept yourself as you are, could open up a world of peace inside of you, and I’ve seen it work in a lot of different ways. You know, with couples of all ages, where one person is really interested and takes care of themselves by hiking and being in nature, doing art, other people who really enjoy therapy, really enjoy meditating. I think people just have different tools that connect with them well.

Eric Zimmer 17:44

Yeah, I mean, one of the things I’ve realized as my partner and I have been together longer, and I think we’re in essentially our 10th year, is in the beginning in a lot of relationships, I think there’s a certain amount of you sort of move towards each other because you’re trying to connect and and then over time, if things are good, you this is another theme we’re going to get to, right, this ability to sort of have freedom to grow and change and move in a relationship. And so with my partner and I, Jenny, I’ve noticed that we have grown apart in some areas. And I don’t mean a part as a couple. I mean like, I like this, and she likes that. Yeah, in the beginning we might have both been a little bit more like meeting on that, and now there’s a little bit more like just letting the other person be like, Oh, I like this, and me making sure that I like this only means I like this, not you should like this, right, right? Like, you know, thinking that the choices that I make are somehow more conducive to a good life or whatever, and realizing, like, that’s preposterous. Like, no, it’s not. It’s really preference and who we are as people, and allowing that to sort of be that’s something I continue to learn.

Yung Pueblo 19:03

Yeah, thank you for sharing that, Eric, because that really to me, it’s a sign of very healthy love. Because, from my perspective, you’re not only getting the safety of commitment right, clear commitment towards each other, but because that is so firm and established, you have the freedom to explore, to explore your interests, to like, just go and, you know, see what’s out there in the world, and still be able to come back home and have that nourishment of your partnership there. And I think a lot of people get scared by the word freedom, because you immediately think, Oh, they’re gonna start sleeping with other people and dating other people, but that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about the freedom to like, let your preferences change, to let like, even something as simple as like what you like to watch on TV, and for it to like become something different, or what you like to read, for it to you know, evolve and change over time and and. Even the way that you like to show up for people, and I think that’s one of the beauties, is like, if you’re really feeling nourished by your relationship, you will have that element of freedom to be able to continue evolving. And just because you don’t have the same tastes doesn’t mean you’re going to stop loving each other. I think it was one of the hardest journeys, something as simple, because in our relationship, you know, Sarah and I, we, like, had this long series of years where we really enjoyed moving lockstep with each other, just like we’re eating the same foods, doing the same exercises, like, you know, just like existing as similarly as possible. And that felt right for the time. But then we started learning that, oh, actually, the diet that she needs needs to be drastically different from my own, yeah, yeah. And the exercise that she needs is also not the same. And now, like, you know, we have learned the peculiarities that we need for the both of us to optimize and feel like our best version of ourselves, and it’s not the same. And I think, honestly, it was hard to accept in the beginning, but then I realized, Oh, this is actually like us actively caring for each other, is giving each other that freedom.

Eric Zimmer 21:10

So let’s go back to that a little bit. We’ve kind of hit on a few of the different points, but I want to talk about sort of between freedom and connection. So you know, you differentiate between love and what we would call attachment based behaviors. So first, let’s lay out kind of what we mean by that, because I don’t think we can have the right balance between freedom and connection if attachment is the thing that’s running the show.

Yung Pueblo 21:42

Totally, totally and just to clarify too, whomever is listening to we’re talking about not the Western psychology style of attachment that is quite popular nowadays, but we’re talking about the old school type of attachment that the Buddha put forward, you know, as one of the causes of misery and by attachment in the book, I’m talking about the craving for things to exist in a very particular way, you know. And that could mean like, you know, having your partner act in very specific ways, or having, you know, all the things that you love always be there, and you being, you know, clinging for all the things that you really enjoy to always exist, the rigidity of attachment, it’ll first manifest in your mind as a certain mental image. You know, this is what I want to happen. But the way it manifests through your actions is that it emerges as control. You know, you’re sort of like just really stiff about how you want things to exist. And if you really want a relationship to be nourishing and happy and compassionate, you got to really work on letting go of your attachments, because when you lessen the attachments, you’re increasing not only your freedom, but your partner’s potential for freedom.

Eric Zimmer 22:55

Before we dive back into the conversation, let me ask you something. What’s one thing that has been holding you back lately. You know that it’s there. You’ve tried to push past it, but somehow it keeps getting in the way. You’re not alone in this, and I’ve identified six major saboteurs of self control, things like autopilot behavior, self doubt, emotional escapism, that quietly derail our best intentions. But here’s the good news, you can outsmart them, and I’ve put together a free guide to help you spot these hidden obstacles and give you simple, actionable strategies that you can use to regain control. Download the free guide now at one you feed.net/ebook, and take the first step towards getting back on track.

I want to go back to what you said there about, we’re talking about attachment in a classic Buddhist sense, often translated as craving, is another word for it. And then saying, you know, we’re not talking about Western attachment, but in a sense, we are, I think, in that, if we talk about attachment styles, there’s one style that I never get my terms right, but it’s basically securely attached. That’s the good one. And then there’s, I think, avoidant and anxious attachment. And my favorite, which is, you do both, you’re completely confused, which is me like, I just Okay, that didn’t quite work. I’ll try the other one. Wait, that’s not working. I’ll try, yeah, like, bounce back and forth. Like they call it, like it’s not a term confused. It’s even better than that, because I do think that those styles that we’re describing are what happens when we don’t have the secure attachment. And it’s one thing to say, like, I want to give my partner all the freedom in the world, right? But like you said, that’s really hard to do if you don’t have some sort of secure attachment. But then, ironically, it’s very hard to have a true secure attachment when you’re interested in controlling your partner, right? It can be this difficult game because you’re wanting to control your partner. Because you’re afraid they’re going to move in a direction you don’t want, and that very active then controlling is causing them not to be securely attached to you.

Yung Pueblo 25:08

And it’s interesting, because I think those frameworks are really helpful to people, but I’m one who, you know, I honestly have an aversion to all labels, like I feel like human beings, they exist on such a wide spectrum that, like, one day I have secure attachments another deck and have anxious attachments, and it’s just like, you’re just going to be changing all the time. So to me, it’s like, how can I simplify my approach? And instead of focusing on attachments and expectations, why not just fully vocalize how I like my happiness to be supported and see where we can make commitments to each other, you know, like, if I can tell my wife, this is how I like my happiness to be supported, and she says, Oh, I can do X, Y and Z for you. And like, This feels good to me. This is a way that I can try to show up for you. And from commitments can come a level of security that has nothing to do with, you know, the coercion that sometimes happens from expectations or from attachments, where it’s like you’re demanding someone to really exist in a particular way for you, and instead, you’re just saying, like, these are my needs, and this is how they might relate to, like my past traumas, or how I’ve experienced life. And you know, from how these breakups and you know, these things that have happened that have really affected the way I show up now and how I’m currently working on them, but having things be clear and well informed between the two of you just really sets you up for success. Because, you know, expectations and attachments like, you don’t want things to be a mystery. You don’t want to set up traps for your partner. You want clarity for them?

Eric Zimmer 26:42

Yep, I have a few thoughts there. I also am not a huge fan of labels. I think they serve a purpose for a certain period of time. I think they help us see patterns that we get stuck into where it’s like, yes, okay, you know what, like? I don’t want to say I am that, but you know what, I keep doing that. So there’s a pattern there that that’s worth seeing, but they’re only useful, I think, until they start limiting you. The question here around attachment is this all sounds good in the I tell my partner the way I would like them to support my happiness, and they say yes, and then they support my happiness in that way. And everything’s great, except when it doesn’t quite work that way, meaning, like, these sort of nuanced things you get into in relationship, and I’m just going to pull out two cliches, right? One is one partner wants more sexual attachment than the other, more sexual contact than the other, like, it’s a connection point, right? The other would be somebody who says, like, I’d like my partner to be more emotionally expressive, right than they are. And those things are, there’s often still a tension there, and I think it gets tricky. At least I have found it tricky in my life to see when am I calmly advocating and stating what I would like in a relationship? When am I having an expectation and attachment or craving to things being a certain way? And it gets in that nuanced area where, like, you know, again, there’s the perfect world where, you know, we say what we want, we get it all the time. There’s the other world where we say what we want, we never get it. Those are pretty easy, right? But most of life happens in between those in relationships. So I’m curious how you think about particularly that like I’m stating what I want and my partner isn’t quite able to meet me there. It seems to keep coming up for me. How do I let that go? I just think that’s something I’ve been in, and I’ve seen others in that just gets trickier.

Yung Pueblo 28:47

Oh totally, totally. And it gets very nuanced, and it’s very situational to like the intrinsic qualities of your relationship, especially when you’re hearing different people’s advice, like, does it really match to your situation and the current conditions? Yeah, I think a lot of times, like one from my experience, like the arguments have decreased in terms of their level of tension, because we’re less attached. But often the arguments are the same. It’s like, we’re still, like, you know, argument about similar things over and over, and it’s because we have deeply ingrained patterns, you know, like, I’m more of a people person. Sarah is more reserved, like, I’m more forward. She’s, you know, a little less forward, and is just like more calmly, exists within herself. And there are these aspects and, you know, character types that we have, that we have to kind of work with, and what you end up finding is that you want to have a healthy balance of giving and receiving. And I think that’s where, like, a lot of the tension gets resolved, where, like, if you feel like you’re doing your part to care for your partner and you’re doing your best to. To meet their needs and meet the way that they like to be supported. That doesn’t mean you’re going to get 100% all the time. Yeah, right. That just means that you’re trying and you’re you have some clarity around it, but then there are going to be some months that are way harder than others, and you’re not going to be able to show up as well. But I think having the sense of like, one you’re not always going to get what you want. Like, you’re not like, that’s not what a relationship is. It means like you’re joining this journey and this like, in some ways, it’s a joyful challenge. They add so much beauty and harmony to your life and elevate your life. But it’s also it’s going to have its own ups and downs, and you’re just never expecting your partner to be perfect. You’re just expecting them to show up for you and have a degree of accountability when they make mistakes. You know, basically the simple accountability of apologizing and trying to change the behavior when something does go wrong. But I really think, like, you know, you just can’t expect things to always go your way, and if you do, then there’s a problem there. There’s something that you need to work on within yourself, because your partner is not like they’re a human being who also, you know, is going to ebb and flow in their energy, and they’re not always going to be able to give at the same rate. So we need to be mindful of that. You know, is there balance with our giving and receiving?

Eric Zimmer 31:15

Yeah, I have been in some, uh, distinctly unjoyful challenges also, in the past, my current one is a joyful challenge. I’ve been in the unjoyful challenge. There’s something you say, though that I think that gets to the heart of this a little bit. And it is that you say attachment is a deep form of inflexibility, yeah. And I really like that idea, because I think when we’re looking at a relationship as by talking about what we did earlier, right, sort of going up a level and looking at the thing as a whole, there are going to be places where perhaps I would like to be supported in that way there, but I’m not as much as I would. But you know, these three other areas, boy, I’m really deeply supported over there. And when we become inflexible, which is like, no, it’s got to be that way and this way. And you talk in the book about how it’s good to recognize that, like you ask your partner how they want to be cared for, is good. And I think that’s important. And we’ll talk about that. There’s also something to be said to being flexible enough in certain cases that you let your partner care for you in the way that they like, you know what I mean, like, yeah, the way they naturally show care and support. But I just love that idea. I love the idea of flexibility in general, and I love the idea of thinking of attachment as deep in flexibility.

Yung Pueblo 32:42

Yeah. This all really stems from, you know, understanding how essential this law of impermanence is to the entirety of the universe, like, literally, you know, at the atomic level, the biological level, the cosmological level, like, everything is always changing. So what that’s taught me is that I need to work with the universe and not against it. If everything is changing and flowing forward, what does that tell me? It means I need to embrace change. When change comes and I can’t do anything about it, and my actions can’t, you know, resolve things or change things in a way that I would prefer, then I have no other opportunity but to accept, yeah, and it feels like this, you know, inflexibility. You’re basically trying to move against the river of the universe, where it’s just flowing and changing and moving forward. So work with the universe, not against it.

Eric Zimmer 33:36

You may know this being a poet, in addition to the other things that you do. But I just had a conversation before this one with a mathematician, and we were talking about calculus. And he then referenced the poet Adrienne Rich, which I did not see coming out of a calculus conversation, but he talks about her poem, which the famous line in it is the moment of change, is the only poem which just made me as you were talking about sort of that dynamic nature of everything, I just think that’s such a beautiful line.

Yung Pueblo 34:06

Oh, it’s so beautiful. I haven’t heard that one. It’s literally like, when I think about what I’m learning in this lifetime, it’s just that, it’s like, I’m just learning to embrace change.

Eric Zimmer 34:14

Yeah, I don’t know what the poem is called, but the moment of change is the only poem I would go look at it, because it unfolds on a bunch of really, sort of, to me, mind blowing levels about how she just keeps going, like, one level deeper, you know, into like, this is the poem. But wait, no, that’s the poem. No, not that, you know. And it’s sort of like, when you start looking at like, I know, you think about this stuff a lot, like the nature of self, you just keep going down another level and the bottom keeps falling out, yeah, and this poem kind of does that. So it was kind of amazing.

Yung Pueblo 34:45

I just wrote down the line. I’m gonna look it up after, after we finish our chat,

Eric Zimmer 34:49

not being flexible and insisting on things being our way, that’s a problem. I also know that I’m guilty of the other side of it, which is that I go, ah. You know what? I guess that I’m not going to get that from them, and so I’m not going to say anything again. Why bring it up again? You know, I end up sort of faux accepting. Yeah, I end up sort of accepting on the outside, and yet inside, there’s still a little bit of churning going on and and I think I know for myself, how to figure that out, but how do you think about that?

Yung Pueblo 35:23

I think that’s a great point, and it’s such a like an everyday point where, you know, you may have requests of your partner, but they’re not able to meet them, and you feel that sense of, you know, a small bit of agitation that you’re not getting what you want. And I think what really helps is having your sort of own internal measuring system of like, let’s say you’ve been traveling too much and let my wife know that my parents have been going through a hard time. It’s really important to me to go visit my parents, and would be more than happy if you come with me, but you don’t have to. But you know, as long as, um, I have your support to, like, go and be with them, and just letting let you know. And that’s one example. Just, like, but you’re letting an individual know when something is really important to you and when you’re really asking for their support. Because a lot of times, like, do I really need to argue about this? Like, do I really need to fight about this? Like, is this, this important to me? Like, usually now, like, usually I can just let it go. But then there are other times where, like, something feels really critical and you have to just express it, vocalize, like, communicate about it, so that you’re on the same page.

———–

Eric Zimmer 36:32

I think what I figured out for myself is, if I’m in a position where I’m like, Okay, I think I need to go accept this, and I go do the work of trying to accept it, and yet I can’t. I don’t, yeah, right, like, it keeps sort of churning inside me. Okay, yeah, that’s a sign that it may not be an easy conversation. We’re gonna have to find a way to be able to talk about this, because as much as I want to just let this go, I don’t seem to be completely able to and sometimes that’s our own work to do. But there are other times where I think it’s not our work, where I think we can go, You know what, for whatever reason, for my makeup, this thing is genuinely, really kind of a big deal, yeah. And again, for me, that usually comes after I will try to accept too hard. Like, I mean, that’s my nature. Like, I’m going to go off and try and figure this out myself, because I don’t want to put my stuff on anybody else Exactly. Yeah, that’s a big value of mine. But eventually I might go, Well, you know what? Like, I’m in relationship. Like, that’s part of being relationship

Yung Pueblo 37:36

totally. And you know what’s interesting, building off of what you’re saying, it’s reminding me of something that I’ve been seeing sort of evolving in my relationship now, where there are times where there’s some agitation that lingers. There are so many situations that pop up that are not just like between the two of you, but how the two of you handle other situations that arise, that are problems that the two of you need to solve together. And you know, it could be like a family member getting sick, or, you know, something happens. And there are times where I found myself, you know, letting my wife know, like, Oh, I’m so agitated about one of these decisions that we made. I don’t have an answer, but can we talk about it more? Yeah, I don’t really know what we should do, but let’s just talk about it more, and in the process of like, both of us sharing the way that we feel, where it’s not combative, it’s just like, you know, like there’s something here. It’s quite nice, because even if the decision doesn’t change, there’s still a greater opportunity for both of us to feel seen.

Eric Zimmer 38:36

I go back to something you said earlier that I wanted to touch on, and we just kind of moved on from but I thought was very well said, which was this idea of the same problems sometimes are there, but our level of emotional turmoil over them is lessened. Yeah, we keep coming sort of back to this same thing, because it seems to be an area that we do have some some degree of an incompatibility, or some sort of thing that doesn’t line up, but it’s far less important than it used to be. So it’s not gone. And I often think about that being a version of that, of, like, the metaphor of like a spiral staircase and growth, like, if you imagine, like going up a spiral staircase and there’s a picture on the wall, like, you keep coming back around to that picture, but ideally, the next time around, you see the picture from a slightly different angle. You’re a little higher up and a little higher up,

Yung Pueblo 39:28

you’re really making me think too. Like my wife and I have this very simple, like argument that, you know, pops up every now and then, and it’s we’re so different in our character, where I’m very touch oriented, like, I need hugs from her. I need, you know, kisses, or even just like having, like my arm on her leg, or, you know, just like some sort of touch. And she’s much less so she’s very sort of, like action oriented, you know, will care for you through, through activities and through. I don’t know, moving things forward, and we joke, you know, like, I joke with her, and I’m like, Oh, I’m, I’m touch sensitive, you know, like, if you don’t touch me, I get sensitive. And it’s, it’s a common thing, but I think when the argument comes up, it just doesn’t come up with that same intensity of, you know, feeling uncared for or feeling unloved, because I’ve learned more about her. Yeah, I’ve learned that like, oh, actually, it’s not that she doesn’t care for me. It’s just that she has particular ways that her conditioning shows care. And we’re trying to meet each other in the middle. I’m trying to work on receiving the way that she likes to care for me, because it’s valuable, and like, I’m also learning from that and learning how to care in that way too. And she’s doing vice versa, like, you know, understanding the way I like to be cared for too. But it just feels like such a learning moment, and the valve of tension is released, because having spent all those years together, I just see more about her, like, I’ve had more time to understand where she’s coming from.

Eric Zimmer 41:05

That’s a great example. And I like what you said there about you’re trying to meet in the middle, right? Because in the book, you do talk about, like, it’s really helpful to a state how you like to be cared for, and it’s ideal as a partner, to try and care for the person in the way they they want to be. And as we’ve said, like, you know, you can’t always get things exactly the way you want. So you and your wife are trying to sort of meet, you know, she’s trying to say, Yes, I recognize that’s important to you. I’ll try and think to do that. But you know what, it’s not my natural way of doing things. So I may need reminded totally, you know, and you’re going, it’s okay not to be that way. I see your perspective. And it’s that meeting in the middle that I think is often so important.

Yung Pueblo 41:45

And it’s so funny how, like, the little things, where a hug to me is just as valuable as like me taking care of the compost for her, like, that is to her, it’s like, oh my gosh. Like, he’s really, like, it’s just he’s really showing up for me right now, and I’m like, Oh, I’m like, teaching myself that and trying to show up the way, like she likes that care.

Eric Zimmer 42:06

Speaking of labels, there was that book that, you know, got so much attention five love languages, where it talked about, like, you know, each person has, like, a certain love language. And totally, I found that a that’s illuminating in that we feel cared for in different ways, and a little overly simplistic. Because actually, I think, yeah, right, we all have some varying degree of many of those things, and they often shift over time. And so let’s talk about comparison, and you talk about how you know, comparing our relationship to other people’s relationships can be very problematic. And you mentioned, one of the key ways this happens today is social media. I’m curious about, you know, broadly speaking, how you feel about social media, because it’s been, I would say, largely right, like what, sort of launched your career and sustains your career. So there’s clearly some good things about it, and there’s clearly lots of difficult things about it when it comes to talking with other people about how they might engage with social media. How do you think about it? It’s

Yung Pueblo 43:16

a like and dislike relationship. I think there are so many adverse effects of social media where, you know, if you were just to not bring any analysis to it, and you were examining your own relationship, by looking, you would think, Okay, how much I love my partner is dependent on how many vacations we take together, you know. But like, it’s just full of illusion. And honestly, my recent approach is, like, obviously, I still post on Instagram, and I keep that going, and I keep trying to put up good material on there, but I’ve been leaning on the longer format, like going back to the essay format, you know, doubling down on the newsletter as like a means of deeper communication. And I find that I think it’s really interesting. Like my my guess, if I were to make a real bet about what’s going to happen with social media is, I think that there’s always going to be a place for it, but because of the advent of AI, it’s making things so fake and so untrustable. Like, you know, I’ll literally, like, I go online and I’ll see videos and whatnot, and I’m just like, I don’t even know if that’s real. Like, I don’t I don’t know if it’s real, yeah. So it’s totally losing my trust, yeah. So what does that mean? I’m hoping that this puts a new premium on human to human interaction, where we’re like, going out to hang out with friends more often, where we’re going out to see plays, or we’re going out to like book readings, you know, or where we can, I can literally see that what you’re putting forward is real. And, yeah, I think, you know, social media will have its place, because it’s important for us to be connected. Each other, but I think it’s losing everybody’s trust, particularly

Eric Zimmer 45:02

if you have some sense of what AI is capable of, you’re a little bit, like, terrified by it, you know, yeah,

Yung Pueblo 45:08

and even from, even from six months ago, yes, like, it’s so much better now. Like,

Eric Zimmer 45:12

all the cute animal videos that I would see of animals doing something incredible, and now I’m like, is that? I don’t even know if that’s real. Like, is that guy? Is that dog really on the surfboard? You know? Does that dog really love that duck? You know? Like, it’s taken all the fun out of it. For me, even

Yung Pueblo 45:27

with the news, I’ve seen things like this on Tiktok and Instagram where, like, they’ll set up situations where it literally looks like a real reporter, and it’s not real. It’s not like, it’s not real news, and it’s so hard to just know, like, what you can trust. I

Eric Zimmer 45:44

I was talking with Deepak Chopra recently, and he’s created digital Deepak, and I was like, You know what? We are six months away from, probably, with just a little bit of effort, digital Eric being able to interview digital Deepak, yeah, and it largely being impossible to tell. I don’t know what to do as a person who creates content sort of for a living. What you do with that?

Yung Pueblo 46:09

You know? And it seems initially like a clever idea, but I think what we’re going to learn from that is that what it just produces is repetition and stagnation, right? Because how creative can it really get? And you know, like you’re losing the magic of life, like you’re losing the magic of you, and I like we’re literally just wrapping together. We’re just like, we’re building, bouncing off each other, like I had no idea where this conversation was going to go. And I know that, you know, AI podcast can do something similar, but because of our imperfections, because of our conditioning, interacting in this moment, there’s some beauty to that that you can’t really replicate. And, you know, I wonder about, we were just talking about this too, with different meditation teachers in the tradition I’m a part of where, you know, some teachers are going to try to keep themselves alive forever and like, you know where they’re just like, all the teachings are encoded, and I’ve heard about this from many different traditions now, but you’re losing the magic of teacher to student. Yeah, transmission. You know, where it’s like, you’re have a student in front of you, and they’re asking you a question, and you’re almost looking past the question to see where is the real block, and AI is not going to be able to do that. It’s just going to regurgitate

Eric Zimmer 47:31

before we wrap up, I want you to think about this. Have you ever ended the day feeling like your choices didn’t quite match the person you wanted to be? Maybe it was autopilot mode or self doubt that made it harder to stick to your goals, and that’s exactly why I created the six saboteurs of self control. It’s a free guide to help you recognize the hidden patterns that hold you back and give you simple, effective strategies to break through them if you’re ready to take back control and start making lasting changes. Download your copy now. At one you feed.net/ebook let’s make those shifts happen, starting today. One you feed.net/ebook

I think it’s very interesting, because there are studies out there that have shown things that are kind of, again, for those of us, I think that are arguing on the human side, that start to become concerning, like people will rate an AI therapist as a better therapist than a human therapist, very often, until they know that it’s an AI therapist, of course, at which point they’re like, hell no, they’re creeped out, yeah, but I’m not sure that people that are 10 years younger than you are gonna feel that same way. And so, you know, I think it’s a both, uh, fascinating and interesting and terrifying time, yeah, and you can

Yung Pueblo 48:54

look at it from different perspectives, where, like, maybe because the AI therapist has this wide knowledge base, and because it’s not a real human being, you can feel that you can really just say exactly how you feel without being judged. And I can see some people, you know, putting a high value on that. But at the same time, I think the human condition requires a wide variety of tools for human beings to feel like they’re flourishing. For human beings to feel like, you know, we’re growing and evolving and overcoming our past hurts. So in one way, I’m glad, I’m glad that there’s a variety of tools that can meet people where they’re at. But at the same time, I think over the next five to 10 years, everything’s going to drastically, drastically change. And what I’m hoping for is that, you know, the same way, when, like the iPhone popped up and we all became these digital human beings, I think with AI, like AI, is going to support us in being healthier, being more connected and whatnot. But it’s good. It’s just going to. Right, push us back outside.

Eric Zimmer 50:02

That’s certainly my hope. You and I are going to continue in the post show conversation. I want to talk a little bit about the art of arguing, and we started to talk about comparison a little bit, but I really do want to talk about, how do I know, like, is my relationship good enough? Am I comparing it to something that’s unrealistic. You know the nuance that we get into there. But before we wrap up completely, if you wanted people to take away, sort of like one key idea about love, what might it be? The key

Yung Pueblo 50:33

idea that I want people to walk away with is that love is not constant excitement. It’s not perfection. It’s not going to take all your problems away. If anything, it’s going to make you see more of yourself, and that’s going to be challenging at times. But a challenge appearing doesn’t mean that you’re necessarily in an unhealthy relationship. If anything, ups and downs are absolutely natural in a relationship, and when the downs appear, there’s usually opportunities to develop deeper connection with each other. It’s a block making itself very clear so that the two of you can undo it so you can understand each other better.

Eric Zimmer 51:16

That is a beautiful place to wrap up. Diego, thank you. I always enjoy talking with

Yung Pueblo 51:20

you. Yeah. Thank you so much, Eric, this is really fun. Thank you so much

How to Be Okay When Life Feels Overwhelming with Liz Fosslien

March 7, 2025 Leave a Comment

Embracing Emotions at Work with Liz Fosslien (2019)

In this episode, Liz Fosslien discusses how to be okay when life feels overwhelming. Do you ever feel overwhelmed by emotions like anger, envy, or uncertainty—and then feel guilty for feeling that way? Liz challenges some of the biggest myths about emotions. She also dives into why negative emotions aren’t actually bad, how perfectionism holds us back, and why uncertainty feels so unbearable. She shares research-backed insights and actionable strategies to help us navigate difficult feelings in a more constructive and self-compassionate way.

Key Takeaways:

00:00 – Introduction to Big Feelings and Emotional Myths
05:55 – The Illusion of Certainty and Why We Overestimate Risk
14:37 – The Cycle of Anxiety, Thought Filtering, and Anxious Fixing
22:53 – Perfectionism as Fear of Failure and How to Break the Pattern
32:35 – The Power of Language: How “Always” and “Never” Reinforce Negative Thinking
38:39 – Comparison Isn’t the Problem—How to Use It for Growth
48:54 – Time Chunking: A Survival Strategy for Emotional Overwhelm
54:49 – Closing Thoughts: Accepting Big Feelings as Part of the Human Experience

Connect with Liz Fosslien Website | Instagram | X | LinkedIn

Liz Fosslien regularly leads interactive, scientifically-backed workshops about how to create a culture of belonging, help remote workers avoid burnout, navigate different work styles and effectively harness emotion as a leader. Her work has been featured by The New York Times, Ted, The Economist, and NPR. She is also the co-author and illustrator of The Wall Street Journal bestseller, No Hard Feelings along with the book discussed in this episode, Big Feelings: How to Be Ok When Things Are Not Ok.

If you enjoyed this episode with Liz Fosslien, check out these other episodes:

Befriending Difficult Feelings with Adreanna Limbach

By purchasing products and/or services from our sponsors, you are helping to support The One You Feed and we greatly appreciate it. Thank you!

Episode Transcript:

Eric Zimmer (00:00.0)

Have you ever had a day where you just feel off? Not sad exactly, not mad either, but just a swirling mess of feelings that won’t sit still? I certainly have. And as it turns out, that is completely normal. In fact, my guest today, Liz Fossiline, has spent years studying why we feel the way we feel and why we often believe we shouldn’t feel that way. She’s here to bust some of the biggest myths about emotions, like why anger isn’t actually the enemy, where envy can be useful, and why it’s not just you feeling like everyone else has it figured out. By the end of this episode, you’ll walk away with a whole new way to think about your emotions. One that just might make your life a little lighter, a little easier, and a little more human. I’m Eric Zimmer, and this is the one you feed.

Hi, Liz, welcome to the

Liz Fosslien 02:31

show. Thanks so much for having me. Really excited to be here again, yes, excited

Eric Zimmer 02:35

to have you back again, and you have a new book called big feelings, how to be okay when things are not okay, which is a great topic that I know listeners are gonna love. But before we get into the book, let’s start like we always do with the parable. There’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild, and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and thinks about it for a second and looks up at their grandparent says, Well, which one wins? The grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Yeah,

Liz Fosslien 03:22

I like that. It acknowledges that we all experience these emotions and have these within ourselves. I think that’s a common misconception when people maybe feed or feel the sort of quote, unquote, negative emotions that they’re alone in it. So I really like that. And then I think the concept of feeding these emotions is really great too. Something that I look at a lot in my work is when you’re experiencing something that’s difficult, how do you learn from it, but then try to move through it so that it gives you some useful information, but you don’t get tangled up in it and continue to feed it and get dragged into it. So I really love that parable

Eric Zimmer 04:00

you hit on something there that you talk about early on in the book, which is really some myths about, you know, what you’re calling big feelings. You hit one of the, you know, myths there. But can you talk about a couple of the others?

Liz Fosslien 04:14

Yes, I think the one you’re mentioning I hit on, which I actually think is worth revisiting again, is for the book. We surveyed about 1500 people all across the world from all different backgrounds, and we asked them, Have you experienced any of these big feelings, which in the book include things like anger, envy, burnout, perfectionism, and basically, to a person, everyone said, Yes. And so I think one of the myths is, again, that when we experience envy, that we should feel ashamed because we’re the only person feeling that which is absolutely not true. Another one is just around the intensity of those feelings that people often also think, in comparison to others, that they’re the only ones that are really getting bogged down in. Think depression is a good example of this. When you feel despair, often you feel like everyone else is thriving, and that’s one of the ways in which it warps your view of the world. And that’s just also not true. And then the last one that we cover in the beginning of the book is just that there are good, quote, unquote, and bad feelings, so things like envy, anger is one too. We’re often taught that anger is associated with violence and is really harmful to other people, and there are absolutely ways that you can express anger, like punching a wall or punching a person, that are harmful. But at its core, Anger can motivate us. It’s just a flag that there has been a violation, so it can motivate us to advocate for ourselves, to find a better situation for ourselves, to advocate for someone else. So I wouldn’t call that a bad emotion. You can take bad actions based on it, but at its core, an emotion is simply data and something that your brain is producing,

Eric Zimmer 05:55

right? And we’ve got this podcast parable that talks about good wolf and Bad Wolf, which, if we’re not careful, sets that myth up, which is that negative emotions, quote, unquote, negative emotions, are bad. It’s why I love the the take that you had. It’s one of the reasons I love the parable, is it just says, like, hey, everybody has these. You know, that’s, I think so, so important. And, you know, the thing that’s really interesting. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, because we’ve had a couple of guests recently that have talked about this. One is a woman named Sarah Fay, who just released a book she’s diagnosed with six different things over her life, right? And she sort of takes on the DSM, which is the way that, you know, mental health professionals diagnose people. But I think it gets to the question of, when is something normal human emotion that we all go through, and when is something what we would classify as mental illness, and is that distinction even useful? Curious? Your thoughts?

Liz Fosslien 06:53

I’m not a licensed psychiatrist to make these calls. Yeah, of course, sort of. My intuition on this is that when it becomes something that you really can’t move through, and when you’re actively harming yourself or other people, that’s when it requires, maybe medication or like, more professional help. But that said, I mean, I think medication and professional help can be useful even if you’re sort of depressed but functioning? Yeah. So I think it’s, it’s always valuable to consider these things on a spectrum, yep. And so I think there’s not like a clear line. Sometimes it’s just a judgment call that you make yourself, or the people around you make, or your therapist makes of okay at this point, there needs to be some more serious intervention. But I think I don’t feel like the depths of some of these, like, really more sort of, quote, unquote severe disorders that are in the DSM, but on any given day, I feel good, and then an hour later I feel bad. And, you know, like, is that? Yeah, am I, like, vacillating too much between emotion? I don’t know. That’s my baseline, yeah. So these are all definitely, like, arbitrary lines that are still useful to have in some cases,

Eric Zimmer 08:03

totally Yeah. And I do think every case is different, and it’s something I think a lot about as someone who has what I would call, maybe today, I’ll call it depressive tendencies. Instead of saying, I, you know, I have depression. I have a tendency in that direction. But at the end of the day, I think that the tools that are very useful for working with a lot of these things are the same, regardless, and that’s really where you guys spend a lot of time. In the book, you go through these big feelings, and for each of them, you talk about some myths, and then you talk about how to work with each of them. I love the structure of the book. It’s laid out very clearly, very helpfully, and of course, it has the drawings for which you guys are are very well known. They’re so great. They really add so much that we just won’t get in a visual or we won’t get in an audio only conversation. But they add so much to the book. Let’s jump into some of the big feelings. Is there anyone that you would like to hit? One that feels like more top of mind today for you than others? I’ve got a couple I might choose, but I’m curious what you might choose.

Liz Fosslien 09:09

Yeah, I think I would choose uncertainty and perfectionism. Uncertainty. You know, the last two years easy to say they’ve been very uncertain indeed. That’s one that I’ve struggled with a lot, and I think a lot of people have as well. Okay,

Eric Zimmer 09:25

so what are some of the myths around uncertainty? Two

Liz Fosslien 09:30

that resonated with me when I first started to investigate them. The first was that certainty is attainable. It’s really comforting to think, Oh, I just wish I could go back to when I was a child and things were certain, or pre pandemic, when life was more it was obvious what was going to happen next, and I could plan for it. And the truth is, you can never plan for the future, because you can never exactly predict what it is. And yes, there are times when there’s more alarm. Confirming things that could happen in the future. But generally, I think it’s actually really useful to let go of this myth that there is a perfect stability that you can attain, because again, it helps you look back at your life and say, I’ve always been operating in some level of uncertainty, and for the most part, I’ve been able to successfully navigate it. I’m still here. So I think that can help you even in moments that feel a little more unstable than others. And then the second myth is that the anxiety we feel in the face of uncertainty is perfectly predictive of how much risk we face. So I think it’s so easy to wake up in the morning with this like nebulous pit of anxiety in your stomach, and then lean into that and say, Oh, because I feel bad, that means something bad is going to happen, and now I need to be on full alert and in panic mode. Yeah, funny thing that I don’t know, funny, but somehow a lot of the research around uncertainty involves shocking people, like giving them harmless but painful electric shocks, like every single study involved this so uncertainty researchers loved electric shocks. That seems actually fair. But in one of these, okay, but in one of these studies,

Eric Zimmer 11:13

I’m not going to sign up for any studies around uncertainty. I do not, as somebody owned an old guitar amplifier in really lousy houses in long time ago, I used to get shocked all the time. I hate it, yeah,

Liz Fosslien 11:24

yeah. So same. I’m not signing up for any of those. But in one of these studies, they segmented people randomly into two groups, and one group had a 90% chance of getting shocked, so it was pretty much guaranteed that that they were going to get this painful experience, the other group had a 50% chance, and the group that had a 50% chance was three times more stressed than the group that was certain they were going to get shocked, which speaks to this, like we would rather know that something bad is going to happen, then not know what’s going to happen. So we really, really hate uncertainty, which, again, speaks to like, you can be super anxious, but that doesn’t mean that you’re guaranteed a horrible thing that’s about to happen. There’s a

Eric Zimmer 12:08

couple things in what you said there that I think are important, that this idea that certainty ever exists is certainly a myth. Like, I think those who study Buddhism, they sort of Bang us over the head with this sort of stuff. Like, you know, it doesn’t exist. There’s a poet, author out there, Mark Nepo, who talks about something called the terrible knowledge, which is that anything can happen to anyone at any time. And I think that’s true. But I think there’s a positive too to recognizing uncertainty, besides feeling less anxious about it. The other positive is you don’t take things for granted as much if you actually realize the true uncertainty of things you recognize, like, oh, you know, let me be grateful for my dog who’s laying here right next to me, because I just don’t know how much longer that will happen. You know, it can knowledge of uncertainty can also contribute to our lives in positive ways. Yeah,

Liz Fosslien 12:59

absolutely. I have a friend who is, you know, in his early 30s, extremely oppressive athlete, eats very healthy, and he had some pain in his ankle last year, which then was diagnosed as bone cancer and needed an amputation. And just like, you know, had a horrendous year, and now, luckily, seems to be in remission. But I just remember that experience like, it really felt like out of nowhere. Yeah, I don’t want to use his story as like, it made me feel really good, but it did. It kind of crystallized, like, out of all of us, he’s the last person I would have predicted to have such a health crisis at this age, and that it just like, put my own health in much more perspective. And I agree with you, it made it was like, wow, things like this do happen, and it’s horrifying. And so even if I’m not having a great day, I’m still grateful that generally things are okay, yep.

Eric Zimmer 13:53

And the next question I’m going to ask is, you know, as we look at working with emotions, and people who talk about emotions and theorize about emotions. Some people have a belief that like, thoughts cause our emotions. You know, there’s a there’s a, you know, thoughts leading to emotion. There’s other people that think it’s a more complicated than that. And when you were talking about anxiety, it made me think of that sense of some how some days you just wake up, and before you’ve even had a thought, there’s a mood, and then it’s like every thought gets filtered kind of through that mood. Is that sort of what you were talking about with, like anxiety, like you wake up and it’s just, you know, you feel a certain way, and now all of a sudden, your thoughts all take on the color of that feeling absolutely

Liz Fosslien 14:37

yes. So my view is that emotions are often the product of like stimuli we’re taking in, and it can just be a result of our brain chemistry, which is often the cause as well. And so I think it depends on how you define a thought, but then like the conscious thoughts we have get, as you said, filtered through this emotion that’s coming up. So one example. Example of kind of how I consider emotion is way, way back in the day, if a lion was charging towards you, it was really important that you just feel fear right away, that your brain was able to process like lion coming fear right away, and that it wasn’t like this very conscious like, oh, there’s a lion. Perhaps, you know, and you can, I think you can debate forever, if the thought comes first what a thought is, but then everything after that is filtered through this, like physiological response you’re having in response to that emotion, and with anxiety, I think it’s the same, right? So if you Doom scroll late at night, go to bed, have bad dreams, or there’s just this, like subconscious thing running through you that the future is really scary. There’s all these horrible things happening in the world. You wake up, you have this pit. You’re not even really conscious of what thoughts are driving that. But then that starts to create these thoughts that might not necessarily be true for me personally, which, as I’ve talked to people, I think a lot of people experience this. It also generates this frantic energy that leads you to kind of exhaust yourself in an effort to get over the anxiety, but because you’re not sitting with it and really trying to understand what might be driving it, it’s not productive. So to give more color to that, I used to wake up, especially during the early days of the pandemic, feel so anxious, and I would just vacuum the floor. I would answer all my emails. I would create all these new projects for myself. I would call someone. I would just have this to do list and mercilessly bang my way through it. And at the end of the day, I was just exhausted, but I had never stopped to think, why am I anxious? Like, what can I actually do about that underlying emotion. So I just didn’t feel any better. Actually felt way worse. And so I think that’s also sometimes it’s not even that we have thoughts that are helpful. It’s like the thought becomes, I just want to run away from this. What can I do? What can I do? And what our brain generates is like what I can do next often, isn’t actually what we need to do to address that underlying emotion. So

Eric Zimmer 17:01

what are some tools for working with uncertainty? Yeah,

Liz Fosslien 17:05

so the first is just to stop this cycle of what psychologists call anxious fixing. So this is you feel anxiety, and it feels good to cross things off a checklist, and so you do and you do and you do, but you’re not actually addressing that underlying need. So it’s really just, in this case, when you feel that overwhelming panic or anxiety, it’s to stop and don’t rush into anything else. Just sit there and say, like, I’m this moment, I’m very anxious, and then try to think through, like, what are my fears? So anxiety is more nebulous, this sort of anxious feeling we have, versus a fear which is centered around something specific. And so you might say, you know, over the past years, like, I’m afraid I’ll get COVID, I’m afraid someone I love will get COVID, and those are terrifying things. But once you actually map out the exact fears you have, it’s easier to start thinking, What can I do to prevent that? What steps can I take? Versus with anxiety? There’s not a clear next step, so I think the first piece of advice would just be, just stop and sit with it, as uncomfortable as that might feel in the moment. It’s really important. Yep.

Eric Zimmer 18:16

And then you sort of led into another one there, which is to try and go from vague anxiety into more specific fears, like, what am I really afraid of? And, you know, the more specific oftentimes, the better. Yeah.

Liz Fosslien 18:29

I think one thing that came up a lot as I was speaking with both experts and then just people about this, is some people mentioned they find it useful to ask themselves, what’s the worst thing that could happen? And then realizing that it’s not so bad is comforting to them. And so if that works for you, that’s great. I do want to share that tip for me personally. I can come up with some really doomsday so, you know, like, what’s the worst thing that can happen? I am very creative when it comes to this question. So if that’s you, I would not ask that, or I would say, what’s the worst thing that could happen, and then follow it up with, what’s the best thing that could happen, and what is the likelihood that the worst thing happens? Because often it’s like, yeah, I dreamed up this nightmare scenario, but it’s extremely unlikely that that’s actually what’s going to happen tomorrow. And so it’s important to keep that in mind as well.

Eric Zimmer 19:25

Makes me laugh. My partner’s mom has Alzheimer’s that that does not make me laugh, but within that, you know humor is is helpful. And she would get these anxious fears. And so I would try and reason with her like she was always afraid she was going to starve to starve to death. And I’d be like, what you’re not, you know, and I’d start going into why she’s not going to starve to death every time, she would just come up with a more and more fantastical story about how this was going to happen. And I just after a while, I realized, like, this, this is, this is not working, like, you know, like, this is one where. Her, her ability to dream up scenarios is well beyond my ability to, you know, come up with contingency plans. And I know some people who are like that also like, you know, what’s the worst thing that can happen? They’ve got some doozies, you know.

Liz Fosslien 20:13

Oh, yeah, that’s definitely me.

Eric Zimmer 20:16

What’s the worst thing that can happen for me is generally a pretty good one, you know, because I’ll go like, well, you know, I guess we won’t make any money if we don’t make any money for a few months, you know, I’ll figure it out. Which sort of leads me to another one of your tips for uncertainty, which is to sort of reflect on moments that bring you confidence, or reflect on your ability to cope with what uncertainty brings. Yeah,

Liz Fosslien 20:41

so this is, I think, one of the best ways to navigate uncertainty. It’s not about creating confidence for yourself that something’s gonna happen at a future point in time, because, like we said, you can’t really do that. It’s about building confidence that you will be able to handle it. And so one great way to do that is to look back and try to find moments when you were overwhelmed or you didn’t think you could make it through an experience and you did. So, for example, I actually, for I don’t know, 20 years, struggled with a really intense needle phobia, and I went to cognitive behavioral therapy to overcome it, but it was an example of where my anxiety was absolutely not proportional to the risk, right? Like, getting your blood drawn is a very low risk procedure, and I would, like, faint I couldn’t sleep for days. I would avoid going to the doctor because I just didn’t even want to risk needing blood work. And so through CBT, I was able to, like, gradually, like, expose myself to the situation more and more, and now it’s still an unpleasant experience, but every time I feel this fear, I remind myself think back to the last blood draw where everything was fine. You didn’t pass out, you were able to make it through. And so every subsequent blood draw has been easier and easier, because I’ve built that confidence in myself. And so the same thing can be applied to uncertainty. If you’ve gone through something really hard. Often we wish we hadn’t had to go through that hard thing, but you can take away the lesson that you are capable of surviving it and of making it through. And one quick phrase I want to end with on this is I found it so valuable to also tell myself, I’m a person learning to x, so when you’re confronted with uncertainty saying like, I need to have it all figured out right now, I can’t do this just I’m a person learning to continue to move through uncertainty. And I’ve done it before, and there’s lessons there, but I’m still going to find new ways to do it. And I think that phrase can really help you shift your mindset to be more open to it’s okay, I will make it through

Eric Zimmer 22:47

this excellent Well, let’s move on to I think you chose perfectionism as your next one, right? I did.

Liz Fosslien 22:53

Yes, this is a big one for me. Tell us about your perfectionism. Yeah, my perfectionism definitely manifests in my work. So just, I think, becoming overly obsessive with getting to 100% versus, you know, saying, like, in this case, actually 80% is more than enough, and it’s actually better for everyone if I don’t spend more time on this. But it also has shown up a lot in my personal relationships. So when I first started dating my now husband, I felt in many ways, that I was two people. And the first was me who sometimes, you know, likes to stand in my kitchen in ratty old pajamas and eat cheese directly from the fridge. And then the person that I was when we were dating and not living together, which I always, you know, I would put on makeup and tried to be funny and gregarious and have stories and would eat really politely, and then when the relationship was going well, and then we talked about moving in together, and that was terrifying for me, because I was like, Oh, my God, he’s going to discover this person that’s so different, that’s kind of a mess, that has anxiety attacks at night. I just hidden that all away because I really thought that to be in a relationship, to have someone love you, you just had to be perfect, and you had to be fun to be around all the time. So it’s for a lot of my life, shown up sort of In every facet of both professional and personal life, music,

24:39

music.

Eric Zimmer 24:53

Before we get into coping tools, let’s follow the way we’ve been going, which is what’s a couple of myths people have about perfectionism. So one

Liz Fosslien 25:00

myth is that you’re not a perfectionist. And I think people who have perfectionist tendencies often they’re so hard on themselves that it’s incomprehensible to them that they’d be a perfectionist, because they’re like, I’m not perfect, I’m a complete failure. I’m not perfectly dressed for every situation. I don’t ace every single presentation at work. How can I be a perfectionist? And perfectionism is not about like color coded folders and looking a certain way or behaving a certain way. It’s about desperately trying to avoid failing. So it’s one thing to aim for 100% on a test and get 94% and feel pretty good. It’s another to aim for 100 get 98 and then beat yourself up because you didn’t get that one question, and that’s perfectionism. So I think being honest with yourself that you might have these tendencies, even if you don’t think of yourself as perfect or perfectionist. And then another one is that perfectionism helps us. I think a lot of myself included. It was like, Oh, if I abandon this, if I try to move away from these thoughts or tendencies, I’ll turn into a couch potato and I won’t have any drive, and I’ll just be a complete basket case on the floor when, in fact, perfectionism, a lot of research shows, makes you focus so much on this fear of failure that it holds you back much More than it helps you move forward. So the two are, you might have perfectionist tendencies, even if you don’t think and then once you accept that it’s okay to move away from them, they are not as helpful as you think they are. Yeah. And

Eric Zimmer 26:33

then the third myth is what you sort of hit on in your personal story, which is, you know, I have to be perfect to be valued.

Liz Fosslien 26:38

Yeah, exactly. And I think that for many people shows up in their personal lives,

Eric Zimmer 26:44

yep, yep. How have you worked with perfection in your own life? And then, you know, we can go into some of the the tools from the book, but I’m just kind of curious, like, in your personal life, like, that’s a big one, you know, how have you worked through that? Yeah,

Liz Fosslien 26:55

so I did see a therapist, which was really helpful. And the story I share in the book that has stuck with me the most is my therapist asked me to recall a time like just a really great experience I had with a pet. And I remember this like Grumpy Persian cat that I used to Cat sit, and she, you know, she had the face that indicated she hated everyone, and she had a breathing problem at that point, so she would have these little snorts. And I adored this cat. And she would, you know, she would just like, come and sit, and sometimes she looked, she seemed like irritated there, but just by sitting there, like I just liked to be around this cat. And my therapist said, Isn’t it possible that, like your boyfriend, just likes to be around you, and even if you’re just sitting on the couch and you’re not telling a joke and you don’t look a certain way, that there’s just a lot of comfort and having another person be there, even if they’re just being there. And so that is something. And I also think about my mom. If I call her, I have a close relationship with her, it helps me feel better. And that’s how I felt about my boyfriend, like he didn’t, you know, if he just woke up and had bad head and everything like, I don’t know, I just loved that he was there. And so starting to see things from that perspective. And then the second was also actually one of the tips that is in the book, too, is about moving away from avoidance goals to approach goals. And so an avoidance goal is avoiding failure, so I don’t want him to see me without makeup. And an approach goal is about attaining something positive. And an approach goal is inherently more exciting, and you feel good when you reach it right, like, if you just avoid failure, that’s not an inspiring goal. You’re going to avoid failure. And it’s like, Great, okay, I don’t get anything out of this. So in the context of that relationship, an approach goal might have been, I’m gonna put on my ratty pajamas and I’m gonna show him my favorite cheese, and we’re actually gonna have like, a fun time eating cheese out of the fridge, you know? And like, that was like, opening up a little more. But then it was also it culminated in this, like, really fun bonding experience. And so often we we just get into this mindset of, I don’t want to mess up this presentation, and instead, if we think free of expectations, how can I just really show people how excited I am about the material? And that’s a really different way of starting to work on that presentation.

Eric Zimmer 29:24

You talked about not needing to get things to 100% as being, you know, one thing to do, how do you start to know within yourself when you’re sort of in that zone of like, okay, I’m spending a ton of extra time to get very little value out of that. How do you know that? Because I think that’s hard for perfectionists. And then secondly, once you know that, what are some of the things you might say to yourself to actually get you to set it down and move on? Yeah.

Liz Fosslien 29:55

So one question that I found helpful is, when would I. Be ready to ask someone for feedback, and they could give me useful feedback. Usually, if you get to 100% you’re actually not open to feedback anymore, because you’re like, This is great. I don’t why

Eric Zimmer 30:12

should I need anyone to help that’s so interesting? Yeah? Like, if

Liz Fosslien 30:15

I’m, let’s say I’m writing an article. I also can’t hand someone a page that just has completely incomprehensible notes on it. They’re not going to give me feedback. So I think that’s a nice heuristic of like, when is this in enough shape where someone gets where I’m going and they can provide useful direction? I think that’s one. And then I think it’s also just opening yourself to learning. And so saying another thing that I found useful is if I am in a silo working on this to 100% I might get to 100% and realize this is not something that resonates with people or not what my boss wanted. So I’m actually creating more work for everyone, as opposed to, like, handing it to her at like 70% and then maybe making some course corrections. So it’s about creating some breaks for yourself. And then also, I really like this question of, like, when would this be ready for feedback? Yeah,

Eric Zimmer 31:10

my partner and I were talking about that recently in that, you know, when I’m giving a talk for our spiritual habits program, or, you know, the second spiritual habits circle of connection, she co teaches, but I tend to start the lessons, and what I realized was exactly what you just said, although I wouldn’t articulate it as well, which is that I think I’m almost done by the time I bring her in, and at that point I don’t really want feedback, because what I want is to be done, you know. Like I think I’m done, you know, right? And so we talked about like, I gotta bring her in, like, there’s got to be enough there for her to critique to your point, like, but I need to bring her in much earlier, because I may be way more open to feedback at that point and not take it in the way that I, you know. Sometimes I just get a little grumpy, you know, yeah, and the more time I spend with it, oftentimes, the more attached I get to the way it is totally which is in the music business, we used to call it rough mix. Itis right. You’ve listened to it this certain way in this rough mix for so long that that’s how you think it should sound. And somebody comes along and may have a much better mix, but you’re not open to it, because you’re sort of mired in in what your idea of it was,

Liz Fosslien 32:20

yeah, I love those examples. That’s exactly what I’m talking about. You also

Eric Zimmer 32:24

talk about one of my very favorite topics, which is how extreme language can cause extreme emotion. And you talk about getting rid of always and never.

Liz Fosslien 32:35

Yeah. So those are two words that usually show you’ve slipped into your perfectionist tendencies and that your self reflection has turned self destructive. So examples are good. Parents never yell at their kids. Great. Employees are always turning everything in five days before the deadline, and those are extreme views of the world that just aren’t true. So again, it’s usually a sign that whatever thought is banging around your brain is not an accurate perception of reality. And so I think it’s nice to have those words so that when you notice them say like, oh, okay, I see what’s happening here. I need to think about this differently. So, you know, like, good parents never feel frustrated at their kids and actually say, like, good parents do feel frustrated. It’s totally fine. How can I just navigate through this situation? How can I make it better in a work context? You know, great employees or employees who get promoted never make mistakes, also not true, and so allows you to step back from that and say, I made a mistake? Can I ask my boss for advice on how to avoid making that mistake in the future? I think it just allows you to detach a little bit from these extreme ways of thinking that cause us to berate ourselves and then start to feel really down and low.

Eric Zimmer 33:56

Yeah, those two words tend to be destructive wherever they show up, whether it’s in our own lives. Like you said, a good parent should never get angry. Or when we’re communicating to somebody else, you always do this or you never do that, you know, like they just, they’re troublesome words, yeah,

Liz Fosslien 34:10

I love that you brought up too in communication and conversation. You know, if you say you always do X, that person is just immediately going to come up with an example of when they didn’t do it 100% Yep, it’s not a useful conversation.

Eric Zimmer 34:24

I’m sure I’ve done plenty of the saying always or never, but I know for sure I’ve been in relationships with people who have used those phrases. And you’re right, I’m immediately like, but that’s not true. You know, like, you know, which is missing the point totally. A more nuanced version of me would be like, All right, I understand what they’re saying underneath. Ignore the word, you know, that’s a feeling, but, but it’s very hard, totally, it’s very hard to not counter, you know, a factual incorrectness there. Yeah. You talk about naming your inner perfectionist and finding a non perfectionist role model. Say a little more about that.

Liz Fosslien 35:44

Yeah. So it’s, again, a method to allow yourself to distance yourself from your thoughts. And so you know, for your perfectionist, it might be a part of you that is useful to engage with sometimes, but you don’t want it to consume all of you. And so calling your perfectionist, I think in the book, we give examples of like, grace or Darth, Vader or Bozo. Can be a goofy name, whatever feels good to you, yeah. And then when you start to have these thoughts, like, good parents always do X, great employees never do Y, saying like, Oh, that’s Bob, my inner perfectionist, yeah, and I’m actually gonna say, like, what does Bob want in this moment? Right? Like, there actually might be some useful information in there. Like, Bob really wants to be a great employee. It’s useful to know that, like, Oh, I do want to do well in this job. But you’re not sort of like leaning into those emotions and taking them or those thoughts and taking them as fact and then a non perfectionist role model. I think it’s actually really useful if there’s someone at work that you really admire, a mentor, just someone in your personal life, to also note when they flub something or they don’t immediately respond to an email, because, again, I think it helps you realize that everyone makes mistakes. No one is like on their A game, 24/7, and so you can still be successful and impressive and this incredible person in someone’s life, even if you’re not, you know, striking a home run every second of the day. If

Eric Zimmer 37:15

anyone needs a clear example of non perfection in their life, I offer myself up. Say, I love that. Yeah, I love naming my inner characters I’ve shared often. You know about my inner depressive tendency? Person is Eeyore, you know, from Winnie the Pooh. You know, that’s a good Yeah? And it makes me kind of laugh every time I start putting my thoughts in yours voice, you know? Yeah, it’s good. So I’ve had people ask me if I would record whole guided meditations for them in yours voice, but I have stayed away from that for now. All right, now it’s my turn to pick a a I’ve got a bug flying around here. I’m not going to fall into the perfectionist idea of that, like it should never have a bug in your house.

Speaker 1 38:04

Yep, bugs are everywhere. They’re everywhere. Yes,

Eric Zimmer 38:08

I’m gonna pick my big feeling, and I’m gonna go with comparison, not actually, because it’s one of the ones that I struggle with as much, because I actually don’t as much anymore in my life, but it’s one I know a lot of people do struggle with, and I found a lot of the things you guys had to say about it, in a lot of cases, counter intuitive and counter to what people think. So let’s talk a little bit about comparison. It can be one of the most painful, big feelings out there. What are a couple of the myths around comparison? Yeah,

Liz Fosslien 38:39

I think nowadays, so much of the conversation centers around social media, and so I think it’s easy then, to assume if I get off of Instagram or Facebook, I will be free of comparison. And that’s just not true. There’s infinite examples of like your neighbor, your colleague, your whatever. You’re still going to compare yourself to people. So it can be absolutely helpful to limit social media intake, but it’s not sort of the magic wand with which you can eradicate all of these emotions. The second one that we talk about in the book is, if you just get to a certain point, you’ll feel great about yourself, and you’ll never compare yourself to anyone else. You know, it’s very true that there’s always going to be someone who is better than you, quote, unquote, on some metric. If you have infinite money, you’re suddenly going to turn to like looks, or, I don’t know, access to some whatever, or maybe even like meaning or whatever it is, you’re just you can never be the best at everything. And so I think it’s really useful to catch yourself when you hear yourself saying, like, I’ll be happy when blank, because the truth is, that’s not guaranteed, and it’s more important to figure out how to be happy with what you have. Those are two. Big ones, and then the one that I find the most interesting, which we stumbled across this research a couple years ago, and it’s been really helpful to me, is that to overcome comparison or to envy, you should compare yourself less. So that’s the myth. Is that just like don’t look at other people. And the truth is, it’s actually research shows makes you feel better to compare yourself more. So what the researchers find is they asked people like, how good of a runner Do you think you are? And people said they were not good runners, because in their head, they thought of the absolute best runner they knew. But when the researcher said, list out in your life 10 people you know personally and how well they run, and now evaluate how good of a runner you are. People were like, Oh, I’m pretty good, yeah. And so it’s like, I think it’s really easy. If we think about, you know, how successful Am I, we think about Mark Zuckerberg, and we’re like, I’m so unsuccessful. But then if you actually put it into perspective, like you’re in the top 5% of all money brackets, or what or whatever it might be, or you think about your peer group, you’re usually not like far, far, far behind everyone else. And so I think actually having a wider comparison range can put things into better perspective.

Eric Zimmer 41:15

Yeah, I also think that ideas around what types of comparison can actually be helpful is really interesting. Yeah, absolutely.

Liz Fosslien 41:23

So comparison is sort of inevitable. So then it starts, you start to think about when I have when I notice myself comparing, or I notice myself being envious of someone, what is helpful to me and what is harmful. And so what is helpful is to take a step back from that emotion and say, What is my envy telling me? So envy can reveal what you value. So it might be you really envy a colleague who just got promoted. And what you learn is that maybe you really want to be promoted too, or you really want to do well, but then it’s still useful to kind of drill down of like, yes, you want that. But do you want the day to day of that? Because it might be that you’re envious of a CEO because they’re successful, and you’ve been sort of socialized to want to be the most successful. But do you actually want to do everything it takes to be a CEO? Is that the work life balance you want is that this want to make the same sacrifices? And so I think it’s about really asking yourself this series of questions that can then highlight when the comparison isn’t useful and it’s flawed, and then it allows you to more easily step away from it.

Eric Zimmer 42:32

Yeah, I really love that idea of really thinking about I’m looking at this thing that I think I want. What does that really entail? What do I really need to do to get there? What are some questions that are helpful for getting into that? I think you guys call it the nitty gritty, right? Getting into the nitty gritty of, like, I look at somebody and I’m comparing myself the CEO one is a is a great one. You know? I could think about, I could look at somebody, a male model, Men’s Health Cover Model and look at that me like, well, I want to look like that. But when I think about the way that guy has to live, yeah, I suddenly go, Ah, well, you know, I think I’m doing okay, you know? Like, I’m not sure that I want that life. Yeah,

Liz Fosslien 43:13

absolutely, yeah. So I think the first question is just like, what do they have that makes me feel less than in that example, it’s like they have whatever this body that is on the cover of a magazine. And then it’s also useful to think about, like, do I really want that? And am I willing to, like, you just said, like, live the life that would lead to that. And often we say no. So one example I share in the book is I’m an introvert. My worst days are when I have, like, back to back meetings. I’m just exhausted. And I have a friend who is very successful was promoted, and like took over a team of 200 people. And I initially was really envious of her, and then I saw her Google Calendar, and was just like, Nope, you know, I could not do that. It’s not for me. And then it it just really helped those feelings abate quite a bit. So I think the day to day question is really great, but then it’s also useful to ask, like, what void would having that fill? Because often we anchor too much on the specific thing versus like, what actually is like the bigger need behind the feeling of envy. So it might be that it’s not really that you want the body that’s on the cover of a magazine. You just wish you could feel more confident. And then it’s useful to think like, oh, there’s actually many other ways that I can improve my confidence that don’t have to do with me, like never touching anything with sugar in it again,

Eric Zimmer 44:43

right? I just go over to Chris’s and look at his body, and I suddenly feel way, way better. It’s not nice. And I’m just kidding. I’m just kidding. You’ve got a question in there too that I love, which is, you know, swap out the question, why don’t I have that with Do I have enough? Yeah,

Liz Fosslien 45:00

again, it’s so easy for us to anchor our comparison benchmark on people who are better than us, or not better, but like, seem like they’re doing better. That was a correct wording. And it is then really useful to think, like, actually, I’m pretty happy with my life. And, you know, I don’t want for many things. And so right now I’m really just comparing myself to this, maybe 10,000 extra dollars, you know, every two years would be really nice. But fundamentally, like, I live in a safe country with a stable government, and like, it’s just useful to remind yourself of that as well, of like, all that you have, as opposed to only focusing on everything you do not have.

Eric Zimmer 45:44

Yeah, I had a moment. I’ve shared this a couple times on the podcast, but it was a really poignant moment for me. It was years ago. We were relatively early in doing the podcast, and we went out to LA and we interviewed Lewis Howes, who has gone to be a huge podcaster. He’s been on, like, Ellen and all this stuff, and so he had this really nice apartment in Hollywood, and I went out on his balcony, and I was just looking down at the view, and I was just thinking, like, Man Lewis has got it all. Like, wow, this is incredible. And feeling a little bit of envy, and I looked up over my shoulder, and what I saw were these just incredible houses on the hill. And I went, you know what? I bet Lewis looks over his shoulder at those houses. And to your point, that that never ends, right? That is an endless process. And so that’s one of the best things for me. And why I like that question of, you know, do I have enough? Is when I really start to recognize that again, I think what you’re saying is that recognizing what we’re envious can tell us a little bit about what we value, which is true. And sometimes it can be really helpful to realize this thing that I think if I had it, then I would just that I would be happy to realize, like, that’s not true. Yeah, like that happiness doesn’t work that way. It doesn’t come from like, Oh, if I just was in Bali this week, like, those people are I would be happy. Like, that’s not true. I’ve been on vacation in beautiful places and been perfectly miserable. You know? It just helps me to recognize that sort of unwind some of those feelings.

Liz Fosslien 47:18

Yeah, same. I’ve also been, you know, on the trip of a lifetime, and just been not happy at all. It’s in the book, we talk about something called the new level, new devil phenomenon, which is actually from video games, but it’s often, yeah, it’s like, when I achieve X, I’ll be happy. So it might be when I become a manager, I’ll be happy. But when you become that your peer group also changes somewhat. And so now everyone around you is also a manager, because now you’re going to manager meetings. And so it sort of normalizes this thing that seems really unattainable at some point. And so you just start looking upwards again. So it’s kind of like whatever level you get to, there will be a new devil of the new thing that would, quote, unquote, make you happy?

Eric Zimmer 48:03

Yeah, we’ve talked about it as sort of that, you know, if this thing, then I’ll be happy. And one of the things that a, getting older and B, having some degree of success will do for you doesn’t always do this, but it can confer a certain degree of wisdom, because you have enough opportunities where you’re like, Oh, I got what I thought I wanted, and look, it didn’t do it right. Like, it didn’t fix me, you know, it didn’t. And you really start to go, oh, okay, you know, what are the skills that I can have that allow me to actually inhabit where I’m at right now more fully? Yeah, totally. Is a way through that. Well, we’re nearing the end of time. What other things from the book really stood out to you, or from this work that you feel like would be really helpful for listeners as a last couple things, if anything comes to mind, if not, I can certainly drum up another question or two. But

Liz Fosslien 48:54

yeah, I think something that I found really valuable actually comes from our chapter on despair, and it’s this concept of time chunking, which is, you know, the emotions we’re talking about are really hard. There’s often messaging that’s like, you know, this was meant to happen for a reason. You know, this is a learning experience. And though you know, like, it’s a sure, maybe it’s a learning experience a year from now, maybe you can look back on it and craft a meaningful story. But I think most of us something like grief or deep regret, we’d rather not experience it. And so in those moments when it’s just like, so so hard, I think it’s so easy to be like, this is how I’m going to feel forever. And what I found really valuable is time chunking, which is then I need to get through the next hour. And it might be like I need to get through the next moment, and then I need to get through the moment after that, I think it’s fine to say there are days when my goal for the day is to make it through the day. Yep, you know. And like, just what do I need to do today? Because maybe after. Sleep tomorrow will look a little different. Maybe I just need to, like, watch Netflix all day. Maybe I need to, you know, like, lie on the couch and just be sad. And often, when we talk about these big emotions, there’s not enough that’s focused on just like, how do you just make it through when you’re in the worst of it and in those moments when it’s actually hard to believe there’s a better and it’s hard to believe that this will ever be a memory that is meaningful or has created meaning for you. And I think it really comes down to like one foot in front of the other, or like one breath at a time, if you’re lying down, can’t get up, yeah? But time chunking is something I’ve come back to, yeah,

Eric Zimmer 50:39

as a recovering alcoholic, right? I mean, aa, I think is the place that sort of, that probably didn’t invent it, but certainly the place that made one day at a time, like the popular phrase that it became, because it’s so valuable. You know, when you’re first getting sober, it’s so overwhelming to contemplate, like, I have to do this forever. Are you out of your mind? Yeah, like, there’s no possible way. So, okay, just today. And like you said, sometimes it’s like, just this hour, just don’t take a drink this hour and hope that something shifts. Yeah, that time chunking is such a valuable skill to be able to do. And I love what you said about recognizing, like, okay, maybe this is a growth lesson, and I’m gonna grow from this is one of those things that I always find it when somebody’s in despair, I feel like I’m always trying to balance when I’m trying to help somebody who’s in despair, like 97% of me is going I feel you. I simply like I’m with you. 3% of me wants you just to keep your eye just a little bit on the horizon that says, like, this is going somewhere for you, so not to minimize what you’re feeling like the vast majority of is like, it’s okay not to be okay. And I know when I’ve been in despair, it’s always helpful to have just a little bit of looking at the horizon where I realized, like, this will change. I’m gonna grow from this. What’s the right balance of that? I think is always challenging, but I find it really helpful to have both those things in my awareness a little bit.

Liz Fosslien 52:09

Yeah, absolutely. I think that often when someone comes to us, or when we just notice that they’re suffering or going through something, it feels good to be like, Okay, I have solutions. I’m gonna help you fix this, and that’s not a bad thing, necessarily, but I agree with you. It’s like, first, you just need to say, you know, maybe I don’t totally know what you’re going through, but I acknowledge that, like, this is really hard, and I’m here for you, and I, you know, just like, it’s okay, whatever you’re feeling, it’s okay. I’m here. And I think that is just so, so crucial before you start doing this, like it’ll get better, or there’s like a light at the end of the tunnel type thing, I think too often we just skip that part entirely. Yeah,

Eric Zimmer 52:48

there’s a psychologist at the University of Michigan. His name’s Ethan cross, and he wrote a book called chatter. I don’t know if you’re familiar with it, but he had some really interesting studies about helping people who are going through really difficult times. And what these studies seem to point to was only sympathizing with people didn’t lead to good results that you did need some degree of that solution oriented piece. And when I was reading it, it just sort of struck me that, like, of course, it’s both right. We all know, if you skip right past the empathy, sympathy part of the game and you try and shepherd somebody right to solutions like that doesn’t work. Nobody wants nobody wants that. So it is a matter of like, okay, how can I be with you in this first and how long that takes really depends on the person, right? Like, I can’t say, like, well, all right, I gave you your 15 minutes, and now we’re going to talk solutions. Like, it really does depend on the thing. But I found the research interesting that it sort of said you kind of need both. And it made me think about the argument that I hear a lot between men and women, where, you know, women are saying, I just need you to hear me, and men just want to solve the problem. And when I was reading it, I went, like, we’re both right. Like, there’s value in both of those. How do we make sure that they’re both there? But you can’t get to the second one, I don’t think, effectively without the first one

Liz Fosslien 54:17

totally. Yeah. Agree with all of that, and that research is super interesting. Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 54:22

Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. It is such a pleasure to have you back on. I love the book, like I said, I love the way it’s organized. I love the title, how to be okay when things aren’t okay. And I love the drawings. It’s really well done. We’ll have links in the show notes to where people can get access to you and to the book, and all of that is there anywhere you want to point people to

Liz Fosslien 54:43

no show notes. The book is available everywhere books are sold, so hopefully you can drag it down, yep,

Eric Zimmer 54:49

yep. And it’s called big feelings, how to be okay when things are not okay. Thanks again. Liz, it’s always lovely to see you. You

Liz Fosslien 54:56

too. Thanks for having me. You.

Chris Forbes 55:13

If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the one you feed podcast when you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive, members only benefits. It’s our way of saying, Thank you for your support. Now we are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn’t be able to do what we do without their support, and we don’t take a single dollar for granted to learn more, make a donation at any level and become a member of the one you feed community. Go to one you feed.net/join the one you feed podcast. Would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show.

The Happiness Formula: Using Your Body to Transform Your Mind with Janice Kaplan

March 4, 2025 Leave a Comment

Ruth Whippman on the Complexity of Happiness

In this episode, Janice Kaplan explores the happiness formula and how to use your body to transform your mind. She discusses the powerful connection between our bodies and our minds. Drawing from her latest book, What Your Body Knows About Happiness, Janice shares groundbreaking research on how our physical state directly influences our emotions, thoughts, and overall well-being. You’ll discover how simple bodily changes—like posture, movement, and even temperature—can dramatically impact our happiness.

Key Takeaways:

How your body sends signals to your brain that shape your emotions
Why small physical changes (like sitting up straight or smiling) can boost your mood
The surprising ways environment and sensory input influence perception and behavior
How chronic pain can be “rewired” in the brain and why movement is key to relief
The underestimated power of touch and human connection in emotional well-being
Why new experiences—no matter how small—can dramatically improve happiness

Connect with Janice Kaplan Website | Instagram | Facebook

Janice Kaplan is a journalist, TV producer, and the author of seventeen popular books including
the New York Times bestseller The Gratitude Diaries and her new book What Your Body Knows
About Happiness. Janice was editor-in-chief of Parade magazine and the creator and executive
producer of more than thirty primetime network television specials. She has appeared regularly
on national TV shows including Today and CBS Mornings and hosted the daily podcast “The
Gratitude Diaries” for iHeartMedia. An energetic speaker at events around the country, she
graduated from Yale University and lives in New York City.

If you enjoyed this episode with Janice Kaplan, check out these other episodes:

How to Unleash the Power of Happiness and Success with Emma Seppala

Hope for Healing Chronic Pain with Yoni Ashar

By purchasing products and/or services from our sponsors, you are helping to support The One You Feed and we greatly appreciate it. Thank you!

Episode Transcript:

Janice Kaplan 00:00

Go to a farmer’s market and buy a fruit that you’ve never tasted and taste that I think there are so many ways that we can awaken our experiences. Our brains, again, great as they are, as we’ve been saying, like to let things go, and it’s much easier for our brains if everything is the same, they don’t have to pay attention. You Music.

Chris Forbes 00:26

Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true, and yet, for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.

Eric Zimmer 01:11

There’s a common idea out in the self help psychology world that our thoughts create our reality, and while that is true some of the time, it’s not the full story, because what about those mornings where you wake up feeling off before you’ve even had a thought, or the days when your mood shifts just because you stood up a little straighter? Those are certainly experiences I’ve had that have made me wonder, well, are my thoughts the whole thing? And that’s where today’s guest Janice Kaplan comes in her latest book, what your body knows about happiness reveals something surprising. Your body is also shaping your emotions. Often before your brain even catches up, we dig into why posture, movement and even the weight of a clipboard can influence how you feel. For me, this conversation put words to something I’ve sensed for years, our bodies aren’t just reacting to our emotions, they’re helping create them. It gives credence to one of my favorite phrases, which is sometimes you can’t think your way into right action. You have to act your way into right thinking. And once we understand that, we can start using our bodies to change our minds. I’m Eric Zimmer, and this is the one you feed. Hi, Janice, welcome to the show. Thanks, Eric. It’s a pleasure to be here. We are in our studio in Columbus, Ohio, and you are with me, so that is always a pleasure when we get to do these in person. So I appreciate you coming over to do this. You’re in town to give a talk for your latest book, which is called what your body knows about happiness. How do you use your body to change your mind? And you’ll be talking tonight at the library about that, and that’s what we’re going to be talking about right now. But before we do let’s start like we always do with the parable. In the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with her grandchild, and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops. They think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent. They say, Well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you how that parable applies to you, your life and the work that you do. Well,

Janice Kaplan 03:26

I absolutely love that parable, and it’s one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you. I just it’s such a perfect way of talking about so many things that matter. And I had not heard it, frankly, before I discovered it through you, but I realized that it’s very much what I’ve been talking about and writing about for years, because the book I did, the gratitude diaries, was really about that idea that it’s how we look at events, it’s what we bring to the world, it’s what we bring to the experiences that we have that matters. And we spend so much time thinking that it’s the events that are shaping us. And in truth, there are always different ways to look at them, and always different things that that you can bring get from them. And as your parable suggests, it’s really up to you, whether it’s going to be the good or the bad, whether you’re going to look back on a day and say, What a great day I had or what a terrible day I had. And I think once you realize that you have that control and that you have that power over your life, it makes a big difference,

Eric Zimmer 04:25

right? I always like to think of it is, it’s not the events themselves exclusively. It’s not only how we think about them, it’s a co creation. Things that happen to us matter in life, and how we respond to them matters, often far more

Janice Kaplan 04:42

Absolutely. And when you think about there are certain people who you know that if they’re going to get sick, they’re going to tell you how horrible it is. They’re going to be sick for a week, they’re going to be complaining endlessly. And there are other people who are just going to say, Yeah, I’m okay, and who are just going to move on, right? And of course there are terrible things that happen, and of course there are terrible circumstances that people go through, and I certainly never, ever would undermine that. But I was so struck when I wrote, and we’ll get to my new book soon, but when I wrote the gratitude diaries, and I toured extensively and talked extensively with that book, and I knew that when I wrote that book, it was about bringing my life from good to better. I’ve had a good life, and I don’t pretend otherwise. But I spoke to so many people who would come up and thank me and tell me how the book or the sense of gratitude had helped them through. And they would tell me these dreadful situations, health issues, suicide, family tragedies. And I was always so moved by that to realize that, yeah, you got to wake up the next morning, you have to put your feet out of you the next morning, and you get to figure out how you’re going to feel when you do that.

Eric Zimmer 05:52

Yeah, it’s interesting, because mindset stuff like this, or self help, or however we want to categorize it in the political dialog of the last few years, and I’m not going to go into politics, is presented as something that is for the privileged. And I understand what people are saying by that, right? Like, if you’re going to meditate an hour a day, it’s a privilege to have the time to be able to meditate for an hour a day, et cetera. But I think if we look back at and it’s a reason why I am, and I think a lot of people are inspired by people like Victor Frankel, who is showing these same ideas were helpful in the furthest thing from privilege you could possibly have in a concentration camp, right? These things were useful and valuable there. And so they are ways of looking at and thinking about the world that serve us, regardless of where we are. And I think that painting these things out to be things that are only for the privileged is the wrong way to look at it again. I understand what’s being said, but I think it sends a message that people who aren’t don’t have time for this stuff, and I think we all have time to at least reflect on how we view the world and respond to

Janice Kaplan 07:00

it. I completely agree. And some years ago, I co authored a book with a woman who had had a truly terrible tragedy in her life in New York. It was known as the wrong way on the Taconic accident. It was a pretty famous accident that there were documentaries about it, and the woman’s three children had been in the back seat of a car driven by her sister in law. The woman went the wrong way on a highway in New York, and the three children were killed. Can you imagine anything more horrible? Somebody connected us together. We met, and the first time we met, she was suicidal, as you can imagine, her three small children had just been killed. She was a very religious woman, and frankly, she wanted to go join them in heaven. And as we were talking, she was so frail and so fragile. And then at some point, she said, and I’m so grateful to my friends, because after this happened, they came over every single day, and I’m so filled with gratitude to them, and I couldn’t have gotten through if not for them. And she was going on and on about her gratitude to her friends, and this was well before I wrote the gratitude diaries, but I think it was one of the things that stuck with me and then inspired me afterwards, because I thought, if somebody in this position can use the word gratitude, then who can’t.

Eric Zimmer 08:13

And I think that speaks to like a really important truth, which is that you can be in a huge amount of pain. And you can also be grateful for certain things. Like, we can have multiple coexisting emotions or feelings about things, right? She was on one hand despairing, on another hand starting to see, like, oh, well, this part of it is okay, this part of it’s good, yes. And

Janice Kaplan 08:39

being grateful doesn’t mean accepting things as they are, right? If there are things that you can go out and change, if there are events that you can change in your life or in the world, or in any way, go out and do them, but if not, we have to take stock and see where we are. And appreciating where you are at the moment doesn’t mean you don’t want things to be better going forward, and what you were saying about happiness being an advantage of the privileged, we’re always looking at people who have more than us, and we don’t do a very good job at looking at the people who have less than us. And think about all the people who are looking at you, or any of your listeners, or any of the people who think that they don’t have enough, and are saying, Boy, I wish I were in your position. So turn it around that way, and it gives you a different perspective, yep.

Eric Zimmer 09:23

So let’s now turn our attention to your latest book. And you tell a story early on about how you know gratitude was useful to you in a situation, but you realized it wasn’t the whole story. Maybe walk us through that story, which sort of is the origin of where this book came from, right?

Janice Kaplan 09:41

Well, I had written the gratitude diaries, and I do believe the things about reframing situations, looking at things from a different perspective, actually do work, and I’m not going to have anybody’s sympathy as I tell this story, because I was going on a vacation one day and but it was one of those days where you feel like everything is. Going wrong. You know, you lose your luggage, and the play everything feels like it’s going wrong. And I was standing in a very small airport, and I was trying to do those gratitude games that I had taught myself, like, Well, my luggage is lost, but I’m grateful because I have a bathing suit in my carry on, so it’s going to be okay, yeah. And, you know, my husband was teasing me about it, but I was trying really hard. We’re on vacation. I don’t want to be negative. And cut to we get to we were actually going to an island, as I said, nobody’s going to have sympathy for me on this story. And so I’m on a boat. And all of a sudden, I felt differently. All of a sudden, the sun was shining, the water was drifting by, and I suddenly felt happy, and I realized I didn’t have to do any of those reframing, rethinking, gratitude games. I suddenly felt different, and I thought what just happened, and how can I put myself in situations where that happens again? And the Epiphany, if you want to call it, was that our bodies are constantly sending information to our brains, and we don’t realize the power that our bodies have to change how we feel, to change the happiness we feel, to change the joy or despair that we feel in a moment.

Eric Zimmer 11:12

Yeah, I’ve thought about this ever since we started the show, and it’s a it’s a question that I’ve asked in 1000 different permeations over time, because it’s the question of one view of emotion is that thoughts cause emotion, and we all know what that’s like. If you told me right now that our podcast had just been canceled from I heart, I would feel terrible, right? My thought would cause a feeling, you know, the information. But it seemed to me that it also went the other way. Like there were days that I would wake up and before I’d had a conscious thought, it was like the weather just inside fell off, and then my thoughts all took on the color of whatever that internal feeling was. And so I was like, so it’s clearly not a one way, thoughts to emotion or thoughts to body sensation. There’s clearly feedback going on back and forth. And so you sort of talk about, you have a line early on that, I think is great. You say the connections between body and brain are thrillingly complex. You have a lot of great both personal stories and studies throughout the book that show, wow. You know, there really is this connection that goes both ways. Tell me one or two that feel thrilling to you, the thrillingly complex aspect of this?

Janice Kaplan 12:30

Well, there are so many. And to just first to pick up on what you just said about how you feel, and which comes first. It goes back 100 years ago, to William James, the psychologist and philosopher who gave the example of you’re walking down the street, or, I guess, you’re walking through the woods, in his case, and you see a bear. Or I like to tell that story, if you live in, you know, I live in New York, you’re walking down the street, and you get to a dark alley, and all of a sudden your heart is pounding, your hands are sweaty, and you feel scared. So the question is, do you feel scared because your heart is pounding, or is your heart pounding because you feel scared? Well, most of us are brain centric, and we think I see the bear or I see the dark alley, I get scared, it makes my heart start pounding. Now we’re talking about obviously split milliseconds here, but newest research seems to suggest that it works the opposite way, that your body responds first, and your brain is constantly scanning your body, and your brain is going, ooh, chest, pounding, hands, sweaty. I think we’re scared. We better do something and run away from that. Yeah. Now, obviously it happens a lot faster than that, but people get very dubious about that because they want to think their brains are in control. But we know that the body has a lot of power. If you touch a hot stove, you’re going to pull your hand back well before you can think about it. If you run into the street and a car is coming at you, you’re going to be happy that your body knows to leave that scene well before your brain can even register that the car is coming. You really don’t want your brain to have to tell your eyes to blink 9000 times a day, and what would happen while you were asleep to your breathing. So we implicitly understand that things like that occur, but on a bigger level, we forget that our brain, brilliant as it is, is just a three pound blob sitting in a very dark skull, and it is completely reliant on the sensations, on the environment, on the information that it’s being fed.

Eric Zimmer 14:27

Yep, I think that it’s important to talk about the role the body plays in comparison to the brain, because, as you said, we’re so brain centric. More and more as I think about this, I start to think we’re dividing these things into two things, and they’re not our brain is a part of our body. It’s all wired up like we keep dividing them again. I think there are useful ways of, you know, for making that distinction. But I also think it makes a lot of sense to just think of this as a unified system. I mean, we’ll get to some of this in the book. When you start to realize, like, how pain both comes from a sensation in your body, but is also processed and amplified in your brain, you realize that you can’t separate these two things from each other.

Janice Kaplan 15:12

It’s a body brain partnership. And you’re right. It’s a very tight partnership. Let me give you a couple of examples of stories that really surprised me. That was kind of fun research. There’s one that was done out of Yale by a professor named John barge, and he gave people either a cup of hot coffee to cold or an iced coffee to hold and they didn’t realize that this was even part of the experiment. It was while they were in the elevator on the way up to his lab, and then they were asked to evaluate how they felt about certain people and the people who were given the hot coffee to hold, describe the people as being kinder and warmer than the people who were given the iced coffee to hold. Now this seems crazy, right, but what’s happening is that somehow the sensation of warmth is sending a message to your brain of warmth, and your brain is misinterpreting that or holding on to that as it’s evaluating the person. There was a similar study that was done with resumes, where people were given resumes to evaluate. Now that’s a kind of standard psychological test. And if I gave you a resume to look at, and you knew this was an experiment, you’d think, Ah, she’s testing for unconscious bias, and I’m not going to get tricked by the name or where the person lives or anything like that. What you might not think of would be the weight of the clipboard on which the resume was sitting. And it turned out that the people who were given the resumes on heavy clipboards found the people as being more serious and better potential candidates than the people who got them on light clipboards. What is it? Maybe the body metaphor was heavyweight versus lightweight. Yeah. And, you know, there are stories like that that go on and on, and the research is actually really good and really impressive. Yeah, things

Eric Zimmer 16:55

like that are just amazing, because we think we are these creatures of a great deal of rationality, and we are influenced by so many things we just don’t understand, and we don’t understand how they go together. We don’t understand how the weight of the clipboard interacts with how I feel this morning. And so when I think about all that, I learned to take my mental perceptions, hold them a little bit more loosely, you know, like, how did I arrive at this conclusion? It’s probably not as straightforward as I thought. Well,

Janice Kaplan 17:26

it’s great that you think that and you’re aware of it, because we’re not usually aware of it. There was another study that intrigued me. It was out of a business school, a professor who is now at the University of Michigan, and he was looking at negotiations. He was having people negotiate for a car, and that was theoretically, of course, but during these car negotiations, he found that when people were sitting on hard chairs, they negotiated harder than when they were sitting on soft chairs. So what’s going on there? Well, maybe when you’re sitting on a hard chair, you’re feeling edgy, there’s some message that’s coming from your body, and you’re a little bit tenser, and maybe you’re a little more on edge physically. And so you respond by negotiating harder. When you’re sitting back in a soft chair, you’re comfortable, soft chair, soft, hard. Who knows? And so if you asked the people when they were negotiating, what influenced you, nowhere on the list

Eric Zimmer 18:17

would never be a chair, a chair, right? Yeah, you never think of it, and if you realized it, you initially might be appalled, right? Yeah, I think about these fundamental things that affect us that we don’t think about now, one that I do know affects us, but I was just talking with my partner about it last night, and I’ve used this on the show a number of times, but it is how easily even the smallest amount of friction causes you to do or not do something. The classic example I give is my guitar. If my guitar is on the stand, I’m going to play it like 10 times more than if it’s in the same spot in a case, right next to it. That’s ridiculous. It takes three seconds to open a case. I mean, like, what kind of weird animal Am I that that’s the case, but I’ve learned not to fight it, because it’s unquestionably true. And so I think the point of learning some of these, and I think we’re going to get into a lot of them as we go into your book, is we can learn these little things that we can do with our bodies that are going to change how we feel overall, right?

Janice Kaplan 19:19

You know, it’s a very cold day here in Columbus, and if we had not had this, this lovely session scheduled, I would not have left my hotel room this morning, right? Yeah, you know, friction certainly weather influences how we behave, how we feel. Sure, I think that one we’re usually a little more aware of, at least you.

Eric Zimmer 20:02

So let’s talk about how your body can make you happier. What are things we can do with our body that can improve our moods? Well,

Janice Kaplan 20:14

some of the things are really small, and we can do it right now. Everybody who’s listening sit up a little bit straighter or stand up a little bit straighter. There’s really good research showing that when you sit up straight, you are able to access positive emotions much more easily. When you’re depressed, you naturally slouch. And so if you’re slouched, just because that’s how you’re sitting, as your brain, as we said before, is scanning your body, it’s going ooh, slouched. We must not be feeling so good today, and it becomes very easy to access negative emotions when you’re in that position. And simply sit up a little straighter, and it’ll give you more access to positive feelings. There’s been great research about smiling, and it goes way back to an early study that I’m sure you’re familiar with, where people were told to put a wooden pencil in their mouth, and some of them held it in such a way that it made their facial muscles in a smiling position, and some in this Browning position, and the people who were smiling ended up being happier and finding things funnier. And that research has challenged a lot. It’s been done over and over again, but I think there are now 128 studies around the world that have been looked at, and it really holds up to be true. Now you would like to think that your brain is smart enough to know the difference between a real smile and a wooden pencil in your mouth, but in fact, it’s kind of not. There’s something called the facial feedback hypothesis, which says that the muscles in our face are constantly sending information, and that’s one of the ways our brains are figuring out how we feel. Well,

Eric Zimmer 21:47

it’s one of the reasons that I’m not going to get this exactly right, but that Botox can be used as an antidepressant because you can’t frown with it, right? It takes away your ability to make the frown, which somehow makes you better, and I’m always amazed by that smile one and again, we’re not talking about like I smile and my problems melt away, right? We’re talking about it’s just a subtle thing. But I’m a big believer in feedback loops. I’m a big believer in upward and downward spirals, and if I feel a little bit better from a smile, then I might just feel good enough to do the next thing that I need to do that’s going to be good for me, which is going to then amplify that. One of my mantras is, little by little, a little becomes a lot. And so this idea of, yeah, sure, a smile that makes you feel a little bit better, so what? But it can be the beginning, and you do that often enough, and it turns into something really different. I

Janice Kaplan 22:43

think that’s a really good point to make, which is that we’re not talking about dramatic changes in feeling or behavior by any of this, but it’s really for most of us, it’s those small changes on the edges that do make a difference. And I love that idea that you’re suggesting that it all builds on itself. And that’s absolutely true. I just mentioned the cold, but one of the other things that does make a difference that we can do with our bodies is to go outside. One of the big findings is that people feel better in nature. Your well being improves very dramatically when you’re outside. And it happens to be that when you’re near water, one study found that people who were near water two hours a week felt better and improved their well being. And it doesn’t have to be by the ocean, if you’re by a pond or a lake or a stream, or if you’re somewhere inland. And there’s no such thing I was going to suggest, just get one of those little electric windmills, you know, waterfalls, those waterfalls that you can put in your living room and plug in. I tried that. I actually think it’s very calming. There’s something about water that has a very calming effect.

Eric Zimmer 23:48

Yep, you reference in this chapter about, you know, how our body can make us happy. I always say her name wrong, but marvelous. Miss Maisel

Janice Kaplan 23:57

myself. I think it’s Mrs. Maisel basil, yeah, you

Eric Zimmer 24:01

know, they have a line in there. Tits up because what our manager says to her before she goes out on stage. But it’s really true, like you kind of perk up a little bit and, you know, stand in a certain way makes a difference, right?

Janice Kaplan 24:12

Yeah, standing up straight, presenting yourself that you feel good, tells your brain that you do feel good. Yeah. It’s very interesting that we are able to change how we feel, but we can’t necessarily change the message our body is sending. So let me give you an example about that. If you’re like Mrs. Maisel, and you’re going out to do a stand up act, and you’re suddenly nervous about it, and you’re again, we’re back to the chest pounding. If you tell yourself, Oh, I’m actually calm. Everything is fine. Your brain is not going to buy that. Right? Brain is just not buying it. It’s going, excuse me, chest, bounding, hand sweaty. You’re calm, yeah, but you can turn it around. You can take those symptoms and you say, Well, what else do those symptoms mean? Those symptoms also mean excitement. So. Go, Hey, I’m really excited to go out on this stage. And so if you’re interpreting those symptoms as anxiety and you’re slouched over and you’re scared and you’re tense, that’s going to be one presentation as you get on stage. But if you use body and brain and let your brain say, Okay, no, this is excitement, and excitement means stand up, be ready strut out on stage, then there’s going to be a completely different presentation.

Eric Zimmer 25:25

Yeah, and I think that’s the thing that I come back to as I go through your book again and again, is this dance between the two, because what you just described, there is a cognitive approach to a feeling that’s coming up, right? The feeling is generating something, but I’m choosing to think about that feeling in a particular way. And yet, there’s plenty of other cases where we’ve talked about where there’s a signal coming that never even becomes conscious, that is affecting us. And so it’s how do we use our body and our brain? And I think it brings together your two books to make ourselves feel better,

Janice Kaplan 26:00

yes, and I think so often we just don’t have that awareness. For most people, we live entirely in our brains, and so we’re we’re not aware of those signals that are coming. And so yeah, some of them are so subtle that it’s really hard to understand, like the hot coffee we were talking about before, or the hard chair. But being able to put yourself in a position where you do say, Okay, this is how I’m feeling, but how can I give that a little twist that’s going to make this situation better? And you know that works if you’re going in to ask your boss for a raise, or if you’re getting a toast at a friend’s wedding, think of it a little bit differently. Think, no, I’m not worried that I’m going to blow this toast and be embarrassed and everybody will laugh at me. I’m feeling this way because I care about these people, and I want to do my best, and I want to let them know how much I love them,

Eric Zimmer 26:46

and my body’s preparing me for action, right? This body piece is why I’ve dealt with depression on and off throughout my adult life. It’s been largely well managed. Once I kind of got out of my 20s, I use a lot of different things to work with it. But if you forced me to say, you only get one, Eric, you can only have one, the one I would choose would be exercise, which is a body thing, but it’s that, because when I exercise, my body feels better, which then the signal that’s going to my brain is a more positive signal. And we can see the exact opposite when you’re sick. My brain turns particularly dark when I’m sick, right? I just have to tell myself, like, just don’t believe your brain today you’re sick. No time for existential crisis, no big decisions, just and it’s all because, to use the term that you use in your book, The interoception, my internal sense of how my body feels, feels lousy, and that translates to lousy in the brain.

Janice Kaplan 27:46

Absolutely and and I so agree with you about the exercise of depression, and there have been a lot of studies on that, and it is very, very powerful. And of course, when you’re feeling depressed, getting yourself up to exercise. And even I find it, you know, even when I’m not in a bad mood, just making myself exercise is sometimes hard, and I always wonder why? Because as soon as I do it, as soon as I get in from a walk or get off the treadmill or the elliptical or the exercise bike or whatever I’ve used that day, I feel great.

Eric Zimmer 28:20

I asked that question for years on the podcast, because I was like, every time I do it, I feel better every single time. I’m like, I’m glad I did that. You would think, if you understand reward learning theory, that I would run to exercise. I think that what I’ve gotten from evolutionary psychologists is sort of even more important than reward. Learning Theory is basic, like law of least effort. Like as an animal, your job is to conserve energy, and anything that takes a big amount of energy is going to face some degree of resistance, right?

Janice Kaplan 28:55

And I talk about that in the book too. There’s a wonderful book called exercised by a professor at Harvard who was an anthropologist, and he looks at that and, you know, he explains that any hunter gatherer worth his salt would not run a marathon. You know, that’s just a crazy thing to do. Precisely.

Eric Zimmer 29:13

There’s you’ve got to be balancing reward versus effort. You know, you’ve got a great story in the book that shows how our physical response often precedes our brain, and it has to do with you and your husband in a car together. Would you share that story with us?

Janice Kaplan 29:29

Yeah, my husband hates that story, but it’s he’s not here, but it’s absolutely true, because he is usually the driver when we’re in the car, and he’s a good driver, but you know, when you’re driving a lot, or, I guess when you’re a guy driving, you tend to sometimes drive a little too fast, or get a little too close to a car. And I will always gasp when he’s too close, or he puts on the brake, I’ll go. And it really annoys him. Sure, it just annoys him. And. As I was doing this book, I realized that what I have always known, but I now had the research to show it. I’m not gasping on purpose. I’m not thinking first, oh my goodness, you’re going too fast, or, you know, got a little close to that car and then gasping to give him the information. My body is responding. My body is responding in a moment of fear. Now, if I could actually stop that gasp before it happened, I would, because it’s not worth the argument that follows in the car,

Eric Zimmer 30:28

right, right, right, yeah, but

Janice Kaplan 30:31

yes, that is an example. That’s

Eric Zimmer 30:33

a great example. Like, if I’m in the passenger seat and somebody’s driving in a particular way, there are times I cannot help my foot, like mimicking it’s on the brake pedal, right? It just does it, because it’s just, you know, that’s the habitual response, right?

Janice Kaplan 30:46

The other funny thing with driving is the opposite of that, or sort of what you’re describing, that physical response where I talk about, I think, I think I tell the story in the book of driving, and there was a small child in the back seat with me, and he was saying, which is the break, is it on the right or the left? And I’m trying to drive and, okay, I guess it’s and now, are you putting your foot on the brake? Are you putting it on the left foot or the right foot? And you completely cannot drive when somebody’s making you think about it that way, because it’s just not how you think your body is responding to that. So that’s a little bit different than what we’re talking about, but it is, it is those physical responses.

Eric Zimmer 31:25

That story about you and your husband comes from the chapter about senses. What are some other ways that we can use our senses to improve our mood or our happiness? I

Janice Kaplan 31:38

think we don’t always realize the power of touch. You and I have the pleasure of being in the same studio right now. So much of our lives lately is on Zoom and is remote, and because, for very good reasons, we’ve become fearful of touching people. And touch is a very powerful mood changer and a very powerful we need touch as human beings and a positive story about my husband, and he’s a wonderful man. I adore him.

Eric Zimmer 32:05

Don’t get in the car.

Janice Kaplan 32:09

We had some silly argument one night not terribly long ago, and we got into bed, and I could, you know, you can feel that tension with your partner sometimes, and and I thought, we can have the 20 minute discussion of what just happened, and nobody was right or wrong. It was just something silly. And instead, I just reached over and touched his arm and just rubbed his arm for a moment, and I could feel all the tension just disappear from the room, yeah. And we just, you know, we were able to then it was gone. There was nothing further that needed to be discussed. We both fell asleep, very happy. And I think that power of touch and of of letting somebody know how you feel that way is really important. Yeah,

Eric Zimmer 32:53

I love that story when I read it. So senses play a role. Our environment plays a role also. And you talk about places, and you reference a quote in the book that people often say, which is some variation of like, wherever you go, there you are. Meaning, wherever you go, you take yourself with you. I was a drug addict in my early 20s, and I tried to move different places to try and suddenly I thought, if I just him somewhere else, it’ll be different, and it didn’t turn out to be different. And yet, environment and where we are does play a role. Share a little bit more about that. It

Janice Kaplan 33:30

does play a role. And I think what you said earlier about nothing is as dramatic as we like it to seem. So I can understand why drug addiction did not end by moving to a different place, precisely, but maybe it had a smaller effect. Maybe in some places you felt better, maybe in some places you were able to take a step forward that you might not have been

Eric Zimmer 33:49

able to and with other support. What I will say for sure was avoiding certain places was really important. As I was getting sober and I had other support, it was really important that I not go to where I used to buy drugs. So place does play a role, right? You know, so even in the same story I’m telling, I can give you the flip side of it, where, yeah, place mattered, yeah,

Janice Kaplan 34:09

in less dramatic circumstances, the idea of wherever you go, you take yourself with you, I think, is not true, because you feel differently. If you’re sitting in a dark room looking at a back alley, or you’re sitting out on a beach looking at a vast horizon, you feel differently, and you’re a different person, and you have different experiences. There were some things that fascinated me on that score, in terms of how our senses are always working together with each other. And so there was a fascinating study out of the UK where a researcher set up three different rooms, and he had them as dramatically different environments. One was meant to feel like the outdoors, and one was meant to be like a jazz club and so forth. And he gave people glasses of whiskey, and they were holding the. Glasses of whiskey as they moved from room to room, and after they had spent a certain amount of time in that room, they were asked to take a sip of the whiskey and describe write down how they felt about the whiskey, and the people described the whiskey differently in each room that they were in. So when they were in the outdoorsy room, they described the whiskey as tasting grassy, and when they were in the jazz room, they described it as tasting brassy. They were picking up different subtleties in the whiskey. And he pointed out that they were holding the whiskey glass the entire time. So at the end of it, they knew nobody had been tricking them. They had been tricking themselves. That how you experience something is affected by where you are. Now we would think how something tastes shouldn’t change depending on where you’re drinking it or tasting it, but it does, and it tastes different depending on what the lighting is in the room. It tastes different depending on the color of the plate. I talk about another researcher who wrote a paper called The Provencal rose paradox, which is that wine always tastes better. Rose wine always tastes better in the south of France than it does any place else. And I’ve certainly discovered that with Paris, you know, you have a meal in Paris and it just is wonderful. Everything tastes good. Try to have the same meal at home. Not going to taste as good, because when you’re in Paris, you’re not just eating the food, you’re eating the environment, you’re taking in, the beautiful cafe, the experience, the sense that you’re in Paris. And so being aware that, yes, place does make a difference, and it does change how you experience things and how you feel about things is really important.

Eric Zimmer 36:45

Yeah, you tell a story about being in Paris and going to the doctor, right?

Janice Kaplan 36:51

I had an eye infection, and we needed medicine. It was a very complicated story, and the pharmacy won’t let you do it. You have to go to this doctor, and we climb up these stairs, and it was this ancient room and this ancient doctor, and we ended up spending half a day doing that. And at the end of the day, I said to again, my beloved husband, that was so much fun. What a fun day that was. And he said, What are you talking about? You had to spend half the day dealing with with medicine. And I said, it was such a great experience. Wasn’t it fascinating and fascinating to see that doctor and to go into that house, and yes, so having a different experience, being in a different place, can have such a different resonance than you would expect. Yep,

Eric Zimmer 37:32

yeah, my partner, Ginny, loves, loves, loves France, and I’ve been able to observe very clearly in her, and I’m not saying like, I don’t have the same things happening with me. It’s just sometimes easier to see with someone else, the things that I don’t think she would like in the US, she likes in Paris or in France, because it’s French, like she has this association with it. She sees through a different lens, because it’s a place she has really good feelings about absolutely

Janice Kaplan 37:58

and I bet everybody who is listening has something somewhere in their house or apartment that they bought on a vacation that seemed like such a great idea and so charming and delightful and adorable when they saw it on vacation, and it is now way in the back of a closet somewhere, because when you got it home, You went, what? Because, yes, when we’re excited about something, and part of it is also just the idea of having a new experience, because it is very powerful. New experiences wake up our bodies, wake up our brains, we feel alive. And when you feel alive, you feel better. And that’s probably what your partner is experiencing in France, in part, and also the joy of being somewhere new, seeing new things, and yes, it does Make everything you touch, see, smell or taste, feel better.

Eric Zimmer 39:09

Something I’ve realized about myself over the last few years is that I am in the personality tests they talk about different traits of personality, there’s openness to new experiences. Is a personality trait, right? I think I’m very high on that. And the combination of both the pandemic and I’m a longtime Zen Buddhism student. And Zen Buddhism is kind of focused on, like, just pay closer attention to what’s right here, and it will become special. And I believe that that is true, and I believe that I need new experiences. I mean, I just do better with them, so I have to really, sort of consciously court them. And I think it’s easy to understand why we would feel better in Paris. And most of our life is not a vacation, right? Most of our life, you know, we can’t just be like, well, I’d like to feel better, so I’m going to fly to Paris. So it’s more subtle than. That, what are some of the subtle things that we can do to use place as a way of improving how we feel? Well, I don’t think

Janice Kaplan 40:08

you need to fly to Paris to have a new experience, right? You can drive on a different route to the grocery store than you usually take, and you’re going to see things a little bit differently. I live in New York, and I took a subway to a part of the city that I had never been to, and I explored it for an hour or two, and I felt like I had been to Berlin. I mean, it was like I had been to some exotic place that I’d never visited before. You know, go to a farmer’s market and buy a fruit that you’ve never tasted, and taste that, I think there are so many ways that we can awaken our experiences, our brains, again, you know, great as they are, as we’ve been saying, like to let things go, and it’s much easier for our brains. If everything is the same, they don’t have to pay attention. Then again, you’ve mentioned evolutionary biology, and it makes sense, right? When everything is the same, you don’t have to worry. As soon as something changes, you better pay attention, because it may be a danger. And so in a bad way, I was at a one person show off Broadway the other night, a wonderful comedian, by the way, named Gary Goleman. He was in the middle of one of his very touching pieces, by the way, and there was a siren outside, it’s New York, and he got distracted. And you could almost see him get distracted. He’s smart and quick enough that he was able to make a joke about it. He then did some improv about the siren for a couple of minutes, and then he went back to what he was doing, but he got distracted, because a change in the environment distracts you, and that can be a bad thing if you’re trying to do a one person show, but in most of our lives, it’s a good thing to have that distraction, to have something new, to have something that tells your brain wake up and pay attention.

Eric Zimmer 41:48

Yep. And I think that term distraction is a term that we often associate negatively, like it’s not good to be distracted. And I’m going to use that to segue to where I wanted to go next, which is talking about the complex relationship between our body and our brain when it comes to pain, and we’ll get to how to work with it more. But the spoiler alert is distraction is part of that. So there’s my fancy segue, but let’s talk about that relationship between our body and our brain and how it relates to pain. Well,

Janice Kaplan 42:19

it’s important that you said it that way, because it is our body and brain that relates to pain, and we don’t usually think of it that way. We think of pain as being very localized and physical, and we should make the distinction between two kinds of pain, between acute pain and and chronic pain. Most of the research that we’re going to be talking about has to do with chronic pain an acute injury. If you fall down and break your leg, if you cut your hand, your body is crying out in pain, and it is for a reason, because something has happened, and it’s saying emergency do something. But what tends to happen is, let’s say you’re you’re out shoveling snow, or you pick up a child and you rent your back, there’s an immediate pain. It lasts maybe for a couple of weeks with a lot of people. And in fact, something like 80% of Americans have chronic back, shoulder or knee pain. The pain never goes away. You just continue to have that back pain, and you go, boy, it’s ever since that day I shoveled the snow Well, physically, you’ve recovered physically, whatever injury was done is gone. And if the pain has lasted more than, I think, they say three months, it’s now considered chronic pain. And what happens is that the pain signal is going from that localized area in your body up to your brain, and your brain is interpreting it and sending it back out and telling you you’re in pain. What happens is that long after the physical pain is over, it is continuing, and your brain is continuing to send the message. And so most of the research into chronic pain now is focused on, how do we change the signal that’s coming from the brain? Now this is a really hard thing for people to accept, because people will say, Hey, I’m sorry you don’t understand my back hurts. Don’t tell me, otherwise, my back hurts not all my head. And you know, there’s a wonderful doctor at Stanford said to me, it’s not all in your head. I understand. It is not all in your head. It is in your brain, but it is not in your head. And I said, Wait a minute, isn’t your brain in your head? And he said, Yes, but there’s a very different nuance to that. When you tell somebody it’s in their head, it means they’re making it up. When you tell them it’s in their brain, you say, of course, you’re feeling pain. I have no question but that you’re feeling pain. Nobody is suggesting that you’re making up this pain, but understand that the pain signal is coming from your brain and not from your back. You know, one way I like to think of it is, remember those electrical circuits that you did a science project when you were a kid, or before your kid and the. Goal was to get a little light bulb to light up, and if you break that circuit, anywhere, the light bulb goes off, well, I think of that as being a pain circuit, and the light bulb is the pain. And what you’re trying to do is turn off the light bulb. And it doesn’t matter if you turn off the circuit at your back or in your brain, you’re still turning off the circuit.

Eric Zimmer 45:19

Yeah, my mother has suffered chronic pain for years. I feel like I live in this nexus. And I’ve interviewed people about this idea, and I think it’s another one of those things that gets to be a little bit tricky and nuanced, because sometimes it is physical signals from the body, sometimes it’s the brain stuck in this on position. Sometimes it’s a combination of these things, so it gets very difficult to sort out. But I want to break this down into two separate areas. I think one is what actually happens in our brain when that pain circuit gets locked on. The second piece is, I also want to explore what happens to our perception of pain depending on how we relate to that pain. You talk about both these things in the book. So let’s stay first with the one we’ve been covering, which is this pain circuit sort of getting locked on. I interviewed somebody, Yoni Ashar, I believe, is the name a doctor about this. And one of the studies they’ve done that that showed this was they were able to see that as pain moves, and you may have talked about this a little bit, as pain becomes chronic, they start to notice where it is in the brain starts to move, and it moves to areas that are much more memory related, meaning there’s a memory of the pain. And again, none of us are saying you’re not feeling immense amounts of real pain. It’s just like you said, where kind of is it coming from? Now let’s also talk about, though you call it the cycle of rumination, magnification, helplessness, right? This is an amplifier of even perhaps legitimate pain that’s still coming from our back. This is a way I think we amplify, right?

Janice Kaplan 46:58

And the more we worry about pain, the worse it gets, and the less we move, which makes our pain worse, and the tenser we we make our muscles, which makes our pain worse. And yes, it was one study that was looking at, I believe it was post surgical pain, and it found that the number one correlation to what caused post surgical pain was not the skill of the surgeon, and it was not where the surgery was done. It was how much the person worried about being in pain beforehand, and so how you feel about your experience makes a huge difference. And the reason that some of the studies that I’m sure you’ve seen and that I talk about in the book on behavioral therapy for pain work is because it gives you a different way of thinking about the pain. And pain is scary when you’re in pain, wherever it’s coming from, whether it’s your back or your brain, it’s scary. And to get a new way of thinking about the pain to be told, okay, well, let’s laugh at this pain. It’s coming from your brain. Your brain is tricking you. Don’t worry about it. You’re not gonna hurt your back by going out and walking. You’re not gonna hurt yourself no matter what you do. We gotta figure out a way to stop your brain from sending these signals. But stop worrying about your back, changes how you think about it, and changes how you feel about it, and changes how you move. And so I think that’s one of the reasons that kind of behavioral approach has been so effective in so many clinics.

Eric Zimmer 48:33

Yeah, I think with post surgical pain, the other thing, and I was just reflecting with another guest recently about this, because we’ve been through it, and a friend of mine went through it recently, which is, people come out of surgery and they’re in pain and they think there’s something wrong, whereas if had they just been told, by the way, you know, we just did a back surgery, don’t expect that when you come out, your back’s going to feel immediately better. You’re going to be in some degree of pain, because post surgical pain is a real thing. But what happens is people get themselves all amped up like, what’s wrong, what’s wrong, what’s wrong. The surgery didn’t work. All of that when what you’re dealing with is the very normal acute pain that comes from having your body sliced open and something done in it. It’s that rumination, magnification, helplessness loop that somebody’s in in that case, whereas if they understood what was happening, they could turn down that rumination, they could turn down that magnification. That’s

Janice Kaplan 49:29

a great example. You’re right, because if you come out of surgery and you know that it’s going to be painful, and you were told, you’re going to have a miserable three days, and then by the end of the week, you’ll probably start feeling better. You’re going to deal with that so much differently, and it’s going to give you a very different experience. My dear husband, who we’ve mentioned a couple of times, is a doctor, and I have the advantage of that, you know, I’ll get a cold or the flu or whatever, and he’ll say, Yeah, you’re going to feel lousy for two days. But I’m seeing this all. Over, everybody’s got it, and after a couple of days, everybody gets better, and then you’re going to be fine. Yeah, fine. No problem anymore. Two days, I can deal with it, right?

Eric Zimmer 50:07

Precisely, yep, yep. You know, you talk about your own back pain in the book, and I’ve talked about my back pain before, which has really been managed largely by a how I think about it is a big piece, and how I talk to myself about it, you know, instead of saying My back is killing me, I’ll be like, oh, there’s some tightness in my back. But the other thing that you talked about is you started doing core exercises, and the core exercises may have helped with the back pain, because your core is taking weight off of your back. So yes, it may be helpful, but you talked about how it was also helpful because you felt like you were able to do something about your pain. You went from helplessness to a position where you had some agency. I think

Janice Kaplan 50:49

that is so important, and I use that even now. And I don’t have particularly bad back pain by any means. But you know, we all get those twinges or those moments we feel a little stiff, and I do find that as soon as I feel that way, I go, Oh, I’m just gonna go do a few, you know, tummy tightening exercises, or this or that, or the, you know, the four exercises that I’ve learned to do. And it does give you that sense of I’m doing something, and I’m able to make this better. I’m able to make this go away. I think I suggest in the book that I think my back pain improved much faster than my core. Did you know that my core had gotten stronger when my back pain went away? But it was that sense of, Okay, I’m back in control.

Eric Zimmer 51:31

It’s funny, you say that though, because I recently was having some low back pain, and so I did my like, Okay, what did I used to do? What exercises did I used to do? And looked them up and started doing and you’re right, they probably couldn’t have helped as quick. Helped as quickly as suddenly I started feeling a little bit better. I think they do help, of course, right? It’s both. And the body is sending real signals that are important, and our brains are amplifying and modifying and choosing how we perceive those signals. You

Janice Kaplan 51:58

know, we get embarrassed when we talk about something like that and say, like, oh, that’s just the placebo effect. The placebo effect is a good thing. We should see that as a wonderful positive, not something to be embarrassed about. It’s your body making you better, it’s your brain making you better and able to take over, instead of drugs or other things having the same effect. So it’s wonderful if you’re able to enact the placebo effect. Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 52:25

The amazing thing about the placebo effect is that sometimes it doesn’t just change your perception. It’s changing actual biomarkers that people can measure, right? It’s crazy that that is happening, because it’s easy to see how the placebo effect might make me think I feel better, but when you’re actually able to measure things that show that people indeed do feel differently, you’re like, Wow, this is really kind of a remarkable thing, 100%

Janice Kaplan 52:49

and it’s a great thing if our bodies can manufacture the chemicals that we need. Bravo. That’s that’s what we need.

Eric Zimmer 52:59

Yep. So I’d like to end with kind of where you end the book, which is with what you call the body mind happiness plan. And in it, you have us walk through a different aspect of body mind connection. Each day, I’m going to just read what they are. So listeners kind of get the pick, and then I’m just going to ask you to comment on one or two of them. So Monday is creating a cozy environment. So we sort of talked about how our environments matter. Tuesday is whole body happiness. Wednesday is time outdoors. Thursday is reinterpreting body signals, which is what we were just talking about. Friday’s movement and exercise. Saturday is eating for pleasure, and Sunday is walking and creativity. So if you would just pick one or two of those to leave listeners with couple practical strategies they can use based on your plan here.

Janice Kaplan 53:49

Well, let’s go to the last one. Okay, the walking for creativity, because we haven’t talked about that. And it was fascinating to me to discover that, you know, most of the time when we’re dealing with a problem or a work problem, we hunch over our laptop more and more, and we, you know, we just, I’m gonna sit here till I figure this out. And you should do the opposite, Get up, take a walk, go outside, because the fluidity of your body encourages the fluidity of your mind. Creativity in your body. Movement in your body causes creativity and to realize that you can almost feel it. And so put yourself, I think, in the positions where good things can happen to you. Allow yourself to be in those places that are beautiful. Allow yourself to be outdoors. Allow yourself when you’re unhappy, to say, I just want to taste something that’s going to make me happy and just a tiny taste that will awaken my senses and make me feel good. So I think that pleasure of letting your body move, letting your senses experience things, is really very helpful in any situation that you have.

Eric Zimmer 54:51

Wonderful. Well, I think that is a great place to wrap up. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for coming here to sit down with me in person. And the book is called what your body knows about happiness, how to use your body to change your mind. And we’ll have links in the show notes to where people can get the book and where do they can find you online. So thank you. Thank you. Applause.

The #1 Mindset Shift to Stop Overthinking and Start Living with Nikki Eisenhauer

February 28, 2025 Leave a Comment

How to Harness the Chatter in Your Head with Ethan Kross

In this episode, Nikki Eisenhauer shares the #1 mindset shift to stop overthinking and start living. She explores the profound role of insight, emotional maturity, and personal responsibility in personal growth. With her extensive wisdom gleaned from her 17+ years of experience working with highly sensitive individuals, she dives into why some people change while others remain stuck, how overthinking can become a trap, and the importance of balancing self-compassion with accountability.

Key Takeaways:

00:00 Insight is the Key to Change
04:37 Maturity Matters More Than We Think
08:37 Your Feelings Don’t Have to Drive the Bus
14:09 Overthinking is a Coping Mechanism
33:40 Stillness is a Superpower in a Distracted World
45:41 Personal Responsibility is Empowering, Not Harsh

Connect with Nikki Eisenhauer Website | Instagram | Emotional Badass Podcast

Nikki Eisenhauer is a Licensed Professional Counselor (LPC) and Licensed Chemical Dependency Counselor (LCDC) and has been in private practice since 2009. She is a passionate mentor, teacher, and healer who transforms head knowledge into heart knowledge to help Seekers move from surviving to thriving. Nikki is also the host of the podcast Emotional Badass: Where Moxie Meets Mindful, which has over 3+ million downloads in 100+ countries. She shares her recovery story as a mentoring healing tool to empower highly sensitive people (HSP’s) to embrace who they really are in this one precious life.

If you enjoyed this episode with Nikki Eisenhauer, check out these other episodes:

Overthinking and Internal Soundtracks with Jon Acuff

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Episode Transcript:

Eric Zimmer 01:48

Hi, Nikki, welcome to the show.

Nikki Eisenhauer 01:49

Thank you for having me.

Eric Zimmer 01:50

I’m excited to have you on and talk about all kinds of different things, you have quite an interesting background as a psychotherapist, as a coach as a podcast host, and you cover all kinds of topics. So it’ll be really interesting to see where we end up. But we’ll start in the place that we always do with the parable. And in the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild, they say in life, there are tools inside of us that are always at battle. What is it good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops. Think about it for a second, they look up their grandparents, they say, Well, which one wins, and the grandparents says the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life. And in the work that you do.

Nikki Eisenhauer 02:39

It means so much I used to teach a group with that parable. Well, before I even knew what a podcast was, it hits me in a lot of ways, I think we have so much power to feed the good to feed what serves us. I think the confusion is that sometimes we don’t know what we’re feeding, or we don’t know that we have that power to feed different beasts inside of us, if you will. And so to me, that parable is all about the empowerment of that choice, and being mindful and intentional, so that we’re feeding what we really want to feed so that we’re growing in a direction of lightness, of ease of peace, of joy of really experiencing what is good in this one precious life and letting go of the rest.

Eric Zimmer 03:25

Yeah, you know, as I was listening to a couple of recent episodes of yours, they were what 17 years of working with my clients has taught me and there’s there’s lots of interesting lessons in there. But I kind of want to pivot a slightly different direction off of that, which is that 17 years of working with clients is a long time, you’ve worked with a lot of people. And in that time you have seen people grow and prosper and change and just beautiful stories. And you’ve seen tragedy and heartbreak. You’ve seen people who don’t change people who die all the negative outcomes we could think of, and I’m curious if you have any wisdom about what it is that allows some people to change and others not. Because any of us that are in this field for very long, or even if you’re not in it directly, if you observe people in your own life, it is a mystery, right? Like, why was Bob able to, you know, moderate his weight and his health and his cholesterol and become healthy where Sam is now a type two diabetic and only gets out twice a week? Like we see it all around us? And I’m just curious if you have some thoughts on what are some of the key factors in people’s ability to make change?

Nikki Eisenhauer 04:37

That’s a great question. I think the main thing that is so hard to put our finger on or name about that difference that is so easy to see. Because you can really see it especially when you do this work over and over again. It’s like what is that stuff that that one person has that motivates them towards this change? And what is the stuff that this other person is missing? That doesn’t seem to be able do that work or to let go of what isn’t serving them? To me that stuff is insight. And insight is one of those things that we can’t really teach. And we don’t really know why. This is something that I had professors in my counseling program when I was in my master’s program, teach and what they taught brand new green therapists was that we were really going to try to hammer in insight to people that just didn’t have it. And their intelligence level would make it seem like they should be able to connect these dots and make these changes and go forward. And that that very thing that seems to motivate changes in sight and its sight. And just like our eyeballs, like if you and I are standing next to each other, looking out at a landscape, I live in the mountains, I can see the mountains right now, as we’re talking outside of my window. If you and I are standing there looking at those mountains, we know very well that you’re going to have a different sight ability, I’m going to have different sight, maybe one of us has glasses. But when it comes to things like our intuition or our insight, we can’t really measure it like we can to get prescription glasses. So I think it’s harder for us to really understand that other human beings have different parts of them. And it’s part sensory, maybe it’s part spiritual, maybe it’s the different karma so that we’re living out why some of us are born with insight. And some of us aren’t, I tend to work with very high insight people that come from family systems, where most of the players seem to suffer from and really suffer, whether they know it or not, from low insight. And that’s just our ability to look inward, our ability to observe ourselves, our ability to see our own patterns, our own inclinations, our own motivations, our own desires, and question them that if we can’t see those things, then it’s not going to be easy to question those things, or to change them. So I think the stuff that you’re talking about insight, and you and your work, I’m sure of it. And me and mine, we do insight oriented therapies, or coaching, or we’re helping people who already have insight connected, and many of them are hurt in the world by people that just don’t seem to have that insight. And likely never will, which we don’t like, right, like I’m all about hope and change. And so one of the things I teach in my boundaries course, every October is that we also have a dysfunctional hope. You know, we’re kind of supposed to give second chances, not infinity chances. So I think there’s a lot that plays there about that ability, that willingness, that seeker spirit that drives us to change.

Eric Zimmer 07:47

I have 1000 Follow on questions about that. So when we say insight, I think it’s worth talking a little bit more about what that is, because I’m certain that you see this and I’ve seen it, I got into recovery at 24 years old. And I’m hate to say 52, right. And so I’ve been watching some people change and other people not for a long, long time. Right. And what I have seen is people who show up and put in effort, who appear to have some degree of insight because they wouldn’t be there putting in the effort if they didn’t have some insight, or they can pare it back some insight maybe. What is it you think that they need to be seeing that oftentimes people are not connecting or are not seeing more deeply?

Nikki Eisenhauer 08:37

Maybe it’s how deep our personal responsibility really runs. And I also think we’re not so aware naturally, of what our motivating factors. So I’ve worked in addiction, where people live for residential treatment, and I did intensive outpatient. That’s where I started my career. And very often someone could speak the speak, right talk the talk. And the truth is, as a trained therapist, we want tangible evidence based stuff to help people with and to speak from what I learned as a human being going through that experience beyond a therapist going through that experience was that I had to decipher and it was a feel is very hard to put into words. It’s a feeling because two people can stand next to each other and utter the same thing, the same desire. But I can feel the difference between someone who is genuinely passionate and driven about going after the very behaviors and mindsets that will serve them and someone else may say the exact same phrasing, but it feels empty, it feels hollow. And often the difference there is they’re not really motivated to do it for themselves. We don’t understand motivation. And when we have lower insight, we also tend to have a lower empathy and a lower maturity. So So often what I think is at play is a lower maturity. And we don’t do a great job in mental health. I think even in spiritual circles, just as people, I don’t think we talk about maturity in any kind of self development space. But we can see that there was a philosopher that I very much identified with when I was going through my schooling I think of as Erickson. But I’m not great at remembering the names and pairing them with the right information. That’s not my strong suit, my strong suit is the how to heal. But in that one of those philosophers theorized that most people did not truly emotionally develop into adulthood, most stayed kind of stunted in adolescence. And for me, that was a gobsmacked moment to hear that information, because I could see in my own family system that was very dysfunctional. And in the family systems I was working with, and learning about at the time, that that was very, very true that often there was a younger person who had been parentified, who seemed to be born an old soul, like just born with some kind of maturity. And we can really see that a lot of people have parents, a lot of people have family members, a lot of people themselves, may really be operating emotionally, like a 12 year old, they really may be operating like a 16 year old. And some of that is temperament. Some of that is experience. Some of that is nature, some of that is nurture. Some of that is drug and alcohol use stunting emotional development, we certainly know about that. But I would also say growing up with chaos, for certain personalities can stunt that development. So when we say trauma or dysfunction, those are overused, they’re overplayed. They’re almost like the word good at this point. It’s like we all know what it means. But it doesn’t mean much of anything anymore. Things that would not traumatize us today that would just be annoying to us today are truly traumatic for a child, we need a certain amount of peace. So if we grew up with chaos, that may become traumatic in a way that today would just be annoying. But for the child, we were was really unfortunate for the development of our own maturity, our own ability to communicate with more and more age and wisdom instead of reaction, being able to really respond with greater wisdom. And if we come from people that functionally didn’t mature, I can very much say that’s true in my family system, that is so confusing and frightening. And so if we have a portion of the population that isn’t emotionally maturing, then of course, that’s going to affect how they grow and develop, because an immature person is going to want to eat that whole bag of Oreos, it takes a certain amount of maturity, to go wait a minute, even though part of me wants to just stuffed my face with all those Oreos, another part of me has to step in and know Hey, that’ll make me sick. And we need to know that about all these more complex interactions and dynamics and motivations and desires. Who are we doing things for we pleasing the people in our family? Because they want us to get sober? You know, we want them to quit ride in our asks. So we learn to say the right things? Or are we really cultivating an inner drive towards expressing in this life to to our highest potential is that our driving force? Are we just trying to get by and feel good in the moment. And if we’re immature, I suspect we’re more likely I know that we’re more likely to reach for those in the moment feel goods that really support our personal development and our security, and our groundedness. And even developing things like a certain amount of wealth and financial stabilities. Because money is choice, and its power, and its comfort, it’s so many things. So I think so much plays on what comes together to really drive a person towards seeking and working and it’s work. And again, if you’re immature, how do we convince somebody that the work is worth it? If their immature part is just like, I don’t want to do that uncomfortable stuff? I’d rather sit and watch TV, how do you motivate that if we’re not really talking about maturity in these spaces, too.

Eric Zimmer 14:09

So I think there’s a lot to be said for this idea of maturity, when you’re talking to made me think of Ken Wilber who formulated that sort of, we need to clean up grow up and wake up, right? There’s these three elements. Some people even include showing up in that. What I think is interesting, though, is that by definition so many of us arrive at the process of change, very mature though, growing through and maturing is part of it. But is that the essential element because many of us don’t have it when we get here. I know I didn’t write you know, when I got sober. I’m a little bit grateful. You know, I got sober and kind of a hard ass a environment and today’s world it would not be smiled upon too much. Maybe there were some things about it that were not great, but there was a real strong gonna focus on personal responsibility. And growing up and being an adult and taking care of your business. And that was really good for me, I really needed to see that element of like all the different ways that I show up in life. But the other thing that that time really taught me that I think is interesting about thinking that insight is the stuff was, you know, what I was really taught was, sometimes we can’t think our way in the right action, we have to act our way the right thinking. And so my focus was always on, like, let me just do what I’m being told to do. Let me just try and do the thing, even though my brain still feels like an angry four year old all the time.

Nikki Eisenhauer 15:40

So I work with a lot of highly sensitive people. And often I think I shocked them, when I say you cannot be so feeling driven. Our feelings are liars part of the time, we have to do hard work, despite how we feel. We cannot let how we feel drive the bus of our life. Like I’m from New Orleans, it is the land of vices, we eat, and we drink, we feed people, we hand people drinks, we almost don’t know how to socially relate unless we’re doing it through food and alcohol. So we have to be able to get real about the difference between what we want, and what we need. When I’m talking to highly sensitive people. That is shocking. And it used to not be shocking. I’ve been doing this for 17 years. And it used to not be shocking. And I think it’s part of, frankly, where mental health has failed in the last two decades. It’s becoming so soft. And so listening of emotion, that we’ve forgotten that we need a balance between Yes, of course, we need to listen to ourselves and each other. We need to pay attention to emotions and their inherent information. We need to check those things out. But I believe we very much need to have that real world grounded basic, Hey, you are going to have to grow up, hey, you can’t give in to every feeling you have if you want to have a really good life. It is just that simple sometimes, and I believe sometimes therapists to get caught in overcomplicating what really is simple in this way. That’s why AAA has saying it’s like just do the next right thing. No matter how you feel. Stop paying attention to how you feel in that moment and just do the next right thing. So as a profession, I think mental health has gone way too far into holding space for emotion, dropping the ball of that personal responsibility. And I think that is why we are seeing skyrocketing depression, addiction and suicide. We need to tell people that they must take responsibility for their lives. There’s no getting around it. There are no people with white knights that will come and save us. I know I waited for one for a while I hoped for one I fantasized about somebody coming and doing the work for me. That may be part of the grief process, the bargaining stage of grief. But to get real deep down into the nitty gritty of my life comes down to me no matter what happened to me in childhood, no matter what choices, my own immaturity made. If I want a mature life, I have to actually take myself towards that maturity. And as myself sees me do those actions, I will mature. I also think like in your story, yes, of course you came to it with a maturity. But whatever that stuff was that insight that went, Hey, this isn’t right. For us. This feels icky. There’s got to be a different way. That desire to want to mature, I believe is the insight.

Eric Zimmer 18:38

Yeah, there’s a few different things there. I tend to agree with you. I’ve been doing this podcast about nine years, I feel like even just in this nine years, I have seen a shift where I can see it even in the answering of the wolf parable, right? Because on one level, the wolf parable is a simple parable about choice, right? Our actions and our thoughts and our behaviors, they all matter. And we have a choice in them. Right? So on one level, it’s a very straightforward and simple parable. And once upon a time, that was how most people would answer it. More and more. Now the answers are about how we need to embrace and love our bad wolf. And I think that’s an insight that’s important and useful. I’m not saying we shouldn’t be doing that. But I do think we need to listen to our feelings. I do think we need to hold space for emotion, all that stuff. But I agree with you. I feel like the pendulum has just swung a little bit too far in the direction of being a victim of being traumatized have not been able to do something away from empowerment. I mean, I don’t think we want to go back to something that’s very extreme and I don’t think my early days in AAA were great right? I had to actually move out of that for a period of time where I was like, You know what, they just keep saying it doesn’t matter what happened to you just act like a certain person. I was like, Well, okay, but at a certain point certain level of healing. I’m Gonna have to deal with what did happen to me I have to deal with trauma, I do have to deal with the ways in which I didn’t develop. So it does feel like the pendulum is a little over too far. And I’m waiting to see it sort of start to swing back because I feel like it will. I think it has to, I just hope it doesn’t snap back. Right. So I think it’s, you know, let’s kind of come back in the middle, because I think that actually the answer is, it really is in the middle, right? It is a case of like, yes, we’d need a really strong sense of personal responsibility and accountability, and a real focus on like, here’s the right thing to do, here’s the right action. And we need to be compassionate and kind to ourselves and others about the challenges we faced and the ways that we haven’t developed, I think your work actually strikes a pretty good balance between those two things, which is partially why I wanted to talk to you,

Nikki Eisenhauer 20:49

I’m passionate about that balance. I mean, for years, my clients would probably tell you that balance was the word that came out of my mouth the most. And we’re complicated. And it’s something that I’ve had to work on accepting myself, I think most highly sensitive people walk the world, like, Hey, when are you going to accept me, and then tell me that I’m okay. And it doesn’t work that way. If it did, I wouldn’t be uttering these things out of my mouth, what works is to work on accepting who we are. So I had to do a lot of work on hey, I’m an intensely feeling person, hey, I have had a lot happened to me in my history, I have survived the abandonment of one parent, I have survived the sexual abuse of another parent, I have survived a mother that is a sociopath and an ice queen and not warm with me, those are things that need to be considered and who I am, how I developed, how those shaped me what I want to let go of what I don’t want to take forward. There’s a lot there. But there’s also a point at which I just have to do the next right thing in this present moment. So talk therapy sometimes gets people lost, I see people sometimes partnering, like you said, embracing our inner dark parts, or our inner dysfunction, I see people more in the last three to five years, partnering with their depression, instead of seeing it acknowledging it and then fighting their depression. Yeah, so there’s nuance there that I think gets missed, you know, like the internet connected you and I, you know, there’s so much power. In this technological contraption, we’re all using way too much. But there’s also downside. And so as much as these messages get celebrated and shared more, they also get watered down, the nuance gets lost. And you have to be really real with yourself. therapists have to be real with themselves. Are they enabling people to just keep circling their story? Are they helping them really connect the dots and move forward? And as a patient or a client of a coach or a therapist? Are you asking that person to challenge you to help you get unstuck? Are you helping them just kind of circle and circle and circle like, everybody has to take responsibility for their part and their role, and I’m passionate about if we do that, we really are healing the world, one person at a time, as corny as that might sound. And that is our job. It is your one precious life, you’re responsible for it. If you keep trying to farm that out. I think you’ll just be resentful later for the time wasted, not taking responsibility. I don’t live with a lot of regret. But if I could go back in time, I would tell myself, stop thinking so hard, do some of these healthy things and move forward, you’re gonna have a chance to process but move. Yeah, like with trauma. Yeah, you have to move slowly, sometimes, but you got to move. And too many people are getting comfortable in their feelings. And in swirling the story instead of figuring out how to really move forward.

Eric Zimmer 24:02

It makes me think of one of my favorite tropes about depression, which is depression hates a moving target, because that’s just been my experiences, I just have to move. You know, whether that be physically emotional, I mean, it’s it movement in all the different ways you can think of it. Now one of the cruel paradoxes of depression is it sucks the energy out of you, and you don’t have much energy to move. And so I think sometimes we have to recognize what is the next right thing for me and my actual real capabilities, right? So the next right thing for me, I may be able to take a bigger next right step than the next person or vice versa, right. But I do strongly believe there are always positive steps to take, even if they’re really, really small, and we need to be taking them. And one of the other things you’re talking about made me think of is I interviewed a guy named Ethan Kross. He’s a University of Michigan researcher and he wrote a book called Chatter, which is all about kind of the internal chatter, but he references a study in there that has really stuck with me. Because the question was, when somebody comes to you with a problem, what is more helpful? Is it more helpful for you to listen? And empathize? Or is it more helpful for you to offer solutions and advice or to give them a gentle nudge? And what this study found was, surprise, surprise, it’s both. Right, that what’s actually most helpful is both, you have to start at least my experience has always been you have to start with the listening and the understanding, and letting someone know, they’ve really been heard, that is essential. If that step is skipped, the next one simply won’t work. But then there is a point where sometimes we need a nudge from the people who care about us.

Nikki Eisenhauer 25:50

Yes, it’s interesting to hear you use that language that is almost verbatim the language I use with individual clients, I will often at the beginning of a session a couple of minutes and say, What do you need today? Do you need to vent? Do you need to talk this through? Do you need some strategies? Do you need some tips? What do you want? What do you need? And the interesting thing about me leading with that question frequently, is that I can see and people will tell me, ha, they basically don’t realize that those are the two options. So a lot of people I think get caught in that story or that venting as a mode. When I asked that question, it’s also a teaching of, hey, you have the empowerment to decided. And you need to be mindful about what you’re doing there. Because there needs to be a time to be done with the venting, at least in this day and this season. Sure, we might revisit it if it’s impactful for something that’s happening in our in our future. But there’s a point at which is that enough? So that’s another question I will ask them on is, Hey, have you vented about that enough? And watching the wheels turn off? Have I? And sitting with that question, Have I does that ego want to just complain about this some more? Because you can start to feel it if you’re paying attention to it. There’s a point of diminishing return for all things, right? Yes. So I want my people I want anybody listening to me to know that you have the power inside of you to start sensing, is this useful for me and helpful? Have I said enough, then let me be done with that venting part and move on. And that’s the kind of nuance skill that sounds so freakin simple when I say it out loud. But it’s the very thing that somebody doesn’t ever intentionally teach us as a kid. Unless you’re doing this kind of process with me, and then you pass it on to your child. Most of us did not organically come to that kind of nuanced, emotional education about sensing yourself.

Eric Zimmer 27:46

Yeah. And what’s interesting is that it does seem that people by default fall to one side, or the other of that more naturally, one side is the stereotypical man who just doesn’t think about or process emotion at all. It’s just here’s what we need to do cuts right to it, right. And then the other would be the person as you’re describing the classic ruminative person, right, who gets completely stuck in their head, and it just spins and it spins and spins. And what we’re looking for, at least for me, is sort of like you said, it’s that middle ground that middle way between those two things, where we’re able to do it, and I agree 100%, there is a point where the thought processes has diminishing returns and use one of my favorite phrases in there, which is useful, right? With thoughts is this useful? Because there are some very difficult negative thoughts that are very useful at times, they are very helpful. They have a lot to teach us, you know, we can be very uncomfortable. And then there’s a point where they’re no longer useful. And you know, knowing that point can be really helpful. I mean, for me, I’m kind of looking at like, am I covering the same ground again, and again, with no new back to your word earlier insight, like nothing new is popping up like the first five times I thought about the conversation I had with my partner. Each time I went through it, I saw something slightly different. So I went back through it and all I saw this and Kai, that makes me cringe, but at least I know, you know, but now, the last five times that my mind has circled it, it circled it in the exact same way at which point diminishing returns. And now it’s moving into okay, this thought now is becoming not useful, even possibly destructive and harmful. Now, how do I move out of that

Nikki Eisenhauer 29:34

I am passionate about helping people understand that if they’re over thinkers, likely they’re very smart. And likely they started overthinking as a kid in my own life. Because I didn’t have a lot of emotional nurturance or understanding of what I was going through that could help me understand what I was going through. I believe I had a lot of intuitions that I could do anything with because my intuition would say, Hey, your mom’s real scary right now, maybe you’re about to be hit. And as a child, I couldn’t do anything with that intuition. I couldn’t get in my car and drive off. You know, I couldn’t handle the situation any better than just taking it because I was a kid, or trying to mouth off and rebel against it. But I was a pretty good girl growing up in the South to good good southern girl, like you just don’t fight back. So if we really understand that concept, if we grew up with a lot of stress, if we grew up with a lot of unsafe parenting, or immature, inadequate parenting, and you’re really smart, your energy had to go somewhere. So I think it leaves the intuition and goes to the head. And we start overthinking in those moments where we can’t escape with our bodies. So when we start to understand that, I can help people manage their own inner child, and be able to say in that moment to themselves, when they catch that cloud of overthinking that starts, or Oh, this isn’t useful. I’ve already thought this, from the beginning to the end, and through 10 different times, I don’t need to think about this, again, that it is your job. And it’s it’s a gift, it’s a gratitude that it gets to be your grown up job to do for your own inner psyche, your own inner child, what your parents or your childhood situation didn’t know how to do for you, you get to step in now and go oh, sweet boy are all sweet girl in there. This is a time where grown up me says we don’t need to overthink this, we’ve thought about this enough. And learning how to internalize enoughness with the overthinking that so many of us do when we have a lot of emotion, a lot of passion, a lot of intensity with who we are. And we’re really smart. And the way I say it a lot is you gotta be smarter than your smarts. Because your critical voice and the overthinking part are going to be just as smart as you are. So we’ve got to out think you’re thinking parts so that you stay sort of in the integrity of using your intelligence for your own greater good, and not letting your critical voice or that overthinker grab your intelligence and you know, dig a hole into the ground with it.

Eric Zimmer 32:07

That’s really great. Because oftentimes, I naturally go back to my sort of early recovery days, right? And there was a real sense there that like being smart was a bad thing. Because of what you’re describing, right? Because you would just overthink things. And this is not a time for overthinking. Right, this is a time for taking the actions that will keep you sober, right? It’s time to stop the overthinking. But it’s sort of cast that thinking as a negative, it’s one of the things that ultimately sort of pulled me away from that place. And I’m not saying all 12 Step programs or a are like this, by the way, I want to be extraordinarily clear. This was a particular group of people at a particular time and place in history, you know, 2526 years ago. So don’t think listeners that all 12 Step groups are like this at all. So I just feel like I always have to say that, but knowing that I was somewhat intelligent, you know, it ultimately sort of drove me away, because I was like, But wait a second, my goal here is not to dumb myself down. Right. My goal here is not to cut out my thinking brain. Right. So to your point, it’s how do we do it? So let’s say that we have realized like, okay, too much enough? You know, I am past the point of usefulness in this thinking, what are some of the strategies that you recommend that people use to try and deal with that inner chatter? Because just because I’ve realized that I don’t want to think about it anymore, certainly does not mean that I have the skills to not think about it.

Nikki Eisenhauer 33:40

So I can answer that for the next 1400 hours. Okay, I don’t think there’s any one tool I think it’s actually about wrapping our minds around a lifestyle change, like this is how I live now. I think the world is also speeding up so much, and requiring so much of us that no matter what our childhood state was like, or our addiction history, it was like we are really being brought into realms of just ridiculous levels of expected franticness, for lack of a better way for me to say that. So I think, yes, there’s healing childhood trauma. Yes, there’s healing and learning how to take care of yourself post addiction. But just being a human being right now, in this time period, I think requires very similar strategies. I try to live slowing down now even if that means I’m doing a lot that day and I’m moving fast. I want to understand that I don’t want that sort of frantic Go Go Go rush rush rush to be in my brain, in my mind in the tissues of my body. Yes. So it’s a lifestyle choice of practicing slowing down I’m actually it might be releasing today as we’re working According actually, I have a emotional strength training 30 days to piece course. Because it takes repetition, I can tell by the things that you offer you very much understand that it takes repetition of what it is to calm, to internalize peace and to actually value stillness in this world that gives stillness, the finger, it doesn’t value it, it dismisses it, hustle culture work harder, I’ll sleep when I’m dead. If you’re trying to heal your nervous system to that is a way to feel fried and burnt out, and how are you supposed to evolve and be your best self if you’re living from a place of fried, and burnt out. So just having a framework of I want to fold the laundry, like a Buddhist monk eats, they sit down, they don’t multitask, they sit down, they pay attention to every bite going into their mouth, when you really think about that, versus our American eyes eat while you’re driving while you’re balancing your checkbook. I mean, you know, while you’re doing a handstand, on one hand, I mean, we are expecting out of ourselves to do really a ridiculous amount of things. So that’s kind of my framework for just, let’s in general, understand the forces at play, no matter what our history was. And we have to understand that we have to combat those forces or those forces are going to take us down, we have to limit the scrolling. You know, it’s like a slot machine, you guys, and especially if you have addictive history, it’s addictive to all of us, you know, we have to do simple things like that, that our inner adolescent doesn’t want to do. It doesn’t want to put down the phone. But putting down the phone, stopping and taking a breath, meditation. And when I say that, on my show, I go, I hear the eye rolls, I feel the eye rolls, because every spiritual, psychological teacher just says meditate, meditate, meditate, all forces out there are the opposite of meditative energy. But if we really understand that, then I think it can give us a permission. Yeah, we need to counterbalance those forces in the present. And we need to do some counterbalancing of our historical forces, also. So slowing down, I try to fold laundry, like that Buddhist monk eats, I try to drive slow and calm and use each experience to be the practice of calm, instead of giving yourself five different piece practice tasks, or mind quieting tasks to do, which is just adding more things to your to do list, which, you know, technically, is correct and right, you can’t find something wrong with. But in terms of the spirit of what I’m saying, adding to your to do list, isn’t it? You don’t need 10 more things to do.

Eric Zimmer 37:44

That’s right. I mean, that’s the whole focus of the spiritual habits program that I created, which is, as we go about our day to day lives, how do we do some of these things that will allow us to access more peace without adding a lot to our to do list because there’s just no more time, there just is yes, that’s what the cause of a lot of stresses and to be told, Well, now you need to, in addition to eating right, getting enough sleep, exercising, taking care of your children having a career now you need to meditate for an hour a day and journal for 30 minutes. It’s just like, you know, it just isn’t going to happen. So there’s got to be a way to integrate more of this. And, as you said, there is something to some time and stillness, I think, being really beneficial. Whatever that way of stepping out in into stillness is for you. It could be meditation, it could be sitting quietly, it could be listening to a piece of music you love very focused and intently, but it is slowing down, nowhere to go. And some attempt to sort of put our attention on something and keep it there. I do think that is a foundational skill for humans, and one that is becoming even more important, as you said, as we become increasingly distracted and fragmented.

Nikki Eisenhauer 39:06

Yes, I think people like you and I are doing the work to hold on to that art form. So it doesn’t become a lost art of knowing the value and stillness. So many of my clients at a point wound at wind up laughing and going Nikki, am I really paying you to teach me how to just be still and do less? And in some ways? Yes. Yes. And it sounds so it sounds like the simplest thing we could possibly ask ourselves with. But it really is something that I find we need help with. I didn’t see anybody value stillness growing up not one time, not for one minute. It was doo doo doo I was raised by a German descent grandmother, who if I got still, if I just stood still for a moment, she would say what is the purpose of what you’re doing? And as a child, I could not answer that today. If she was still alive. I’d go aha, I finally know the answer that question I’m centering I’m breathing, I’m giving my nervous system a chance to just ground itself good. Yeah, I’m being a human being instead of a human doing so it’s looking at those dynamics, to understand, oh, oh, I was really taught that it was wrong and bad, to have stillness, you take that old teaching on top of what’s going on in modern life. And my goodness, of course, I have to intentionally bring in stillness. And I have to talk to my inner child, because I’m going to hear that critical voice. In some ways, I was raised by very critical people. So in some ways, that’s like my original language. I only speak English. But what we know that other speakers who speak multiple languages, they tend to think in their native language. I’ve accepted that, in some ways, I may think, in my native language of the critical voice. And so I have to know that when I get still, that critical voice might show up and go, really, again, you’re being lazy. What are you doing, and I need to know about how that voice works. Because in that moment, I’m being different. I’m being intentional. I’m doing something against my original programming, and the programming that’s going on right now. So of course, that voice is going to show up and go, ooh, Nikia. I don’t know if this is right, bad, bad, shame, shame on you. And I have to know how to feel that vibe, wash over me or hear that voice so that I know exactly what my job is, and how I can effectively combat those forces. And in that moment, if I’m on my game, I can turn to my own inner self and go, Oh, no, that would have worked before. But now I know the value in the stillness, that’s what I’m doing. And we’re going to be still grown up WISEWOMAN me decided that this is a smart, right practice for us. So we’re going to do it. And the more I do that, the more that that voice lowers and intensity and frequency, and kind of steps to the background, whereas it used to drive as the primary driver of my life.

Eric Zimmer 42:30

You said a whole bunch of great things there. I think one thing that we sort of hit on briefly was repetition and quieting the inner chatter, or quieting that inner critic, at least for me has simply been a matter of just more times than I could possibly begin to count at this point, recognizing that voice and doing something different with it, like, over and over and over. And I think one of the places that people get discouraged is they hear stuff like this, and they go, Well, I tried that last week. And I’m not better. And I do think, you know, if we want to talk about maturity, that is another sign of maturity is recognizing like, Okay, this is going to take a long time. It’s the only game in town, really, there are no other good choices, I can continue to try and believe that it’s this supplement, or this one magic trick or this one thing. But once we realize like wellness is a thing that takes a lot of repetition, a lot of time.

Nikki Eisenhauer 43:29

It’s not a thing you do. It’s the way you live. Yes. I think that is what traps people, they’re like, Hey, I went to the doctor. They gave me these meds. Yeah, okay, I did this, I did this health thing, when am I going to feel better? Living Well, is what makes us feel better. So a lot of people show up to a therapist or a coach basically saying this without realizing they’re saying this. Hi, will you please help me change? While I try to remain the same? Gee, why is this so hard? Why do I feel like I’m spinning my wheels? Why do I feel like I’m stuck in one spot? Well, because you’re trying to hold on to the sameness while you’re just using language and telling yourself thoughts about wanting to change. If we take that thought process away, what are you doing? Because you’re living the same as you’ve always lived? Or the same as you’ve lived in this last season of your life? You can’t be different in the same at the same time. What are you willing to change? And that’s not unique to any individual. That’s the human experience. There is something about being a human, where our egos, they don’t go, oh, wow, this change would be great for us. Let’s dive in. That ego really grips sameness, and I think that comes from survival for centuries since the beginning of time, the beginning of humanity, because stepping into an unknown was dangerous. And so we learned at a very deep level to just hold on to sameness, even when that sameness is screwing us over is not working. So it takes a lot of Have courage and a lot of I think just seeing and that might be insight again. But seeing Oh, that is what I’m doing. I’m trying to be the same and different. No wonder this is getting weird. And struggle Busey, let me let go of that. Let me just try to be different in these simple ways. It’s why I’m so passionate about offering simple strategies. And it’s simple. It’s not easy. But if you let it be simple, you stop chattering in your mind about it, and you just go do this stillness thing. Let’s just do this thing, Nicky or Eric suggest it, let’s just do it for a while, stop thinking about it, and do it, then you can see yourself in the change. And that becomes its own self motivator.

Eric Zimmer 45:41

Yep. I think what gets so difficult is that we have all these inner voices that often want different things. And they all sound like us. You know, I mean, that’s been one of my, my insights as well, whether it’s my alcoholic voice or my inner child voice, or my grown up voice, my er voice, whatever, they all sound like me. They all know how to impersonate Eric very well. And so what gets hard is it’s like, well, I decided I’m going to do this change. But now the same voice that decided I was going to do that change is now telling me that that stupid and it’s never going to work. And so then I believe that I often think about like, when I got sober, I sometimes feel like, like 51% of me, wanted to give up drugs, and 49% of me did not. And those two were engaged in moral struggle for a while. And eventually that proportion is changed right now. It’s like 99% does not 1% still like, wow, come on, let’s we need to think about this. But 99% of me notice, it’s a terrible idea. And I think when those things are closer to 5149, which is often the case when we start to make a change, because we’re still getting something out of the old thing. sorting those voices out is really difficult. How do you encourage people to be able to sort that out and know what’s their wiser voice? What’s their truer voice?

Nikki Eisenhauer 47:08

I think when people listen to my show over time, that starts to clarify, because very often I am speaking to different parts. And in the work that I’ve done with my clients and myself over the years, it’s in really differentiating, and learning to hear the difference in those voices. Okay, I have trained myself into nothing’s 100%, right, but damn near 100% Where I don’t make a decision. I don’t mean like what she’s do I want to buy at the grocery store, not just big decisions, I basically don’t make a decision without the check in which part of me is at the home. So that I have learned to distinguish the difference between is that an inner child part. And in that moment, I might, given what my inner child wants that might very much fit the situation. But the person that I give the power to the part that I give the power to is my wise woman. So there’s always the check in there for Hey, wise woman, what do you think about this, because my wise woman is always going to want what is best for me, because she is the wisest part of me. And I’m checking in with her for her wisdom, her hard earned wisdom and the easier wisdom to I can differentiate my inner child from my inner adolescent. When people work with me, I’m often pointing that out, because I can sense their resistance. If I throw a suggestion, I’ll go, what did your inner adolescent think about this? And they’ll go, how did you know that? I had that kind of reaction? I saw it. I felt it. I sensed it. Did you feel it and sense it? Yeah, I did. All right, what makes me call that the inner adolescent. And that’s just my name for that resistant part. And if you were neglected a lot as a kid, if you were parental FIDE if you were abused a lot, like I was, you got to deal with your inner adolescent, when therapists would tell me things that I knew damn good, and well would have been good for me to do, I would feel my inner adolescent resist. And there were not very many skilled therapists that could call me on that. It’s part of why I do. Because that inner adolescent basically pokes its head up and goes, Excuse me, you basically raise yourself. Now this therapeutic Bozo is going to tell you to do something, and what you’re just gonna do it, you raise yourself, you don’t need this shit. And that really is the vibe. Sometimes you can hear that language, but that’s really the vibe. It is a feeling that washes over. And if you don’t know, how to wrangle that how to start attending to that. I think that’s where people have tons of relapses. They have tons of slips and all kinds of different behavior not just addictively. Because they don’t understand when that part sort of takes over. And then after when your wise part comes back and you look at the choices you made, then you have to go through this whole shame process. I know better. Why did I do that? How many times am I gonna have to learn this lesson? How many times am I gonna have to talk about the same thing? What’s going on with me? Then you have to work through that too. So at a point when you start to really give the baton to your wife wise woman or your wise man, you start to realize, oh, I waste less energy processing, I make less mistakes. I kind of like that, actually, oh, that’s what’s helping that inner child and that inner adolescent actually grow up, because I’m giving them what they need. Because what they need are proper yeses and proper nose, proper encouragement and proper discouragement, sometimes, really. So I want to tap in somebody to parent me. And we all have that part. And I can prove that we all have that part. Because most people will admit to me if I said, Hey, would you say what you’re saying inside of your own head? To a five year old? Or an eight year old? No. Why? Well, because that would crush them. Then simply do not say anything to yourself, disallow yourself, tell yourself, no, tell yourself, I’m not going to listen to that. If you wouldn’t say it to a five or an eight year old, probably shouldn’t be saying it to yourself. Yep. So we are cultivating that wisdom and with more cultivation, and maybe more stillness to meditating on what was this part of me? Why did that wash over me when that person gave me that suggestion? Why did I want to give him the middle finger instead of gone? Thanks. I’ll consider that because I’m a grown up. I can take or toss out any advice? Why the resistance to hearing the advice and working through that inner adolescent resistance? I think it’s the missing piece for a lot of people,

Eric Zimmer 51:25

That missing piece being able to recognize which quote, unquote, part of us is at the hill.

Nikki Eisenhauer 51:30

Oh, yeah. Because I’m complex. And most of my highly sensitive people are, I’m super complex. I like almost everything. So asking me what I want to eat. Like, oh, my gosh, like everything, you know, like, I want to experience everything. So I have to have a part of me that is going to be at the helm. That can just say, You know what, just make a quick decision. That’s what will serve you right now. Yeah. And the more that you work with differentiating these parts, even if the even if you’re hearing me say that, and you’re like, Ah, I don’t know how to how to feel that out. That’s the very thing. Yeah, it’s like, how do you work up to big muscles at the gym, you don’t show up and lift the 100 pound weight, you might start with a three pound weight, you might even start with a one pound weight. And so emotionally, and in terms of getting to know yourself better, just start where you are, the more that you work with those parts, it’s like lifting heavier and heavier weight. And before you know it, you’re lifting heavier weight, and it feels really light, it feels really easy, because you’ve worked up to it. So just check in with yourself. And when I teach my boundaries course, every October, I lead with, hey, please don’t go to the most difficult person in your life, and try to set a boundary. And everybody laughs because that’s how almost everybody shows up to that. But they’re like, Yeah, give me the wisdom, Nicky, and then I’m gonna go tackle the tallest mountain. Yep. It’s like start small. Start small. Confront the barista who keeps getting your name wrong. No, like, like, let yourself grow into healthy confrontation with yourself and with other people. Let yourself grow into healthy yeses. And healthy knows healthiness is available. Even if you feel super lost, just start where you are, and cultivate that relationship with your wise man and your wise woman. Because you have an in there, that is definitely a part of you. And you’re either going to feed it or you’re going to feed the other parts, maybe the immature parts, maybe the dysfunctional parts, the rebellious parts, feed that wise part. Yep.

Eric Zimmer 53:26

That’s so funny. In the spiritual habits program, one of the principles is around allowing things to be the way they are right. It’s about acceptance, or it’s about not resisting. And inevitably, nearly everybody will be like, Well, how do I accept that children are being abused? And I’m like, Alright, let’s slow down. Like, I’m not asking you to accept that. But let’s not go to the very worst possible hardest things in the world. Like, can you just work on accepting that you need to go to work this morning? Like, can we start like with the little stuff? Can we stop resisting all the little parts of our day that we know we’re going to do anyway?

Nikki Eisenhauer 54:02

I think that’s a younger part. I think that’s a younger part that has misunderstood wisdom there. Because if I say it back to you like this, we can really kind of hear it. It’s like the little kid in US goes, boo. I don’t like that everybody’s gonna die. From worst case scenario. What about the worst case scenario? What about the worst thing ever? The worst thing I could think of? And so we need our wise part to come in in that moment and go, Oh, honey, you don’t have to take on the hardest thing. Yep. Right now, in this moment. That’s not going to help you talk about is that useful or not? Exactly. Yeah. As you marinate, because I think it’s more of a marinating. Than A headspace learning of the knowledge because I know this for sure. Okay. I’m on your show. I know for my show, I suspect for yours, too. There are gonna be so many people listening right now who are really frustrated with where they are. And I know part of the problem. Part of the problem is you’re just listening to podcasts. You’re just talking in therapy. You gotta let yourself actually do these things. Yes, even just sitting still, maybe your threshold is 20 seconds the first time you sit and get still. But you’ve got to encourage yourself to really do the things that will move you forward, and help yourself grow that wise woman and really do it. Give that baton to the wise woman or the wise man in you, and play around with it. Life is an experiment. And you have to sort of experiment with these things and marinate inside of them. And that’s how our change comes. It’s not because you took quick pill or you did one exercise or one course, yep, this stuff will come together, please don’t just listen to my podcast, or anybody’s like, please do the stuff. Or you’re gonna feel doubly frustrated. Because you think you’re doing the things when you’re really just thinking the things you’re gonna do the things to,

Eric Zimmer 55:57

Yep, let’s change directions a little bit here. We’re nearing the end of our time, but you’ve used the term multiple times highly sensitive, and it’s something you talk about a fair amount. So what does that mean? I have a sense in my mind of what I mean by it. But I’m curious how you’re using that term.

Nikki Eisenhauer 56:13

So there’s a lot of science behind high sensitivity. Dr. Elaine Aaron is the one that that first coined the term and she’s written the books and they’re, they’re pretty scientific, heavy books to get through. There’s a lot of science there, emotionally and functionally. We know that we have people who have different intelligences. We know we have people who have different abilities to see with their eyeballs to hear with their ears. People have different emotional intelligence to we also have different sensory systems. So there are some professionals who will make the argument that trauma is wholly responsible for creating high sensitivity. Others will say we’re born with it. I’m balanced between those two, no surprise, they’re hearing me talk about balance all show the balance there is strong for me. So I believe that I was born with a propensity a predisposition, to be more of an observer to be more feeling driven to sense my world through more of my being than my thought process. Just a difference. Just like I’m born with curly kind of wavy hair, and somebody else is born with straight hair. It’s just a difference we have, then trauma heightens our sensitivity. Because to survive, any kid growing up in a home, okay, is either trying to deny what’s going on and block it out or is observing everything and taking it in. We’re very spongy as highly sensitive people. So I say a lot I sponged up a lot in my childhood and healing has been ringing out that sponge, and being able to be more intentional with what I’m going to let that sponge soak up. Okay, highly sensitive people as a tribe. We tend to be highly conscientious, sometimes too much. So if we were conditioned to be a people pleaser, that’s a struggle. How do we please ourselves and other people enough to not be in the realm of over functioning for other people, just like overthinking versus just thinking, how do we function for ourselves and others without over functioning? Okay, we tend to be overly conscientious. We tend to be observers of others in energy and action, we tend to not too much psychic, some people might use that word I don’t. The gift of prophecy, it’s like we can sense things coming in because we can sense what’s coming, we tend to be highly attuned to preventing future struggle. So all of these little quirks that we have as highly sensitive people, take tools, take understanding, take awareness, so many people show up to me going Nikki, how do I dial down this high sensitivity, and I’m like, sorry to tell you you can, you can learn how to work with it and embrace it, and make it a tool and a gift. And sometimes it’s hard. Life is tough. It always has been for every species on the planet, you know, so this expectation of it’s just gonna be easy. At some point, no, life is gonna be a certain amount of struggle, but you get to have more ease. I think when you understand your makeup, who you are, as a highly sensitive person I heard all my life I’m too sensitive. So a lot of sensitive people, interestingly, and paradoxically, will tell me sometimes they think they’re too much and then other times they think they’re too little. So learning how to be the amount of who we are, and accept who we are. Learning how to advocate that. Yes, I’m an intense person. There’s nothing wrong with my emotionality. I’m intense. So if I’m in a coffee shop or grocery store, just randomly running errands, I can feel a wave wash over me if a baby smiles at me, I might get teary just from the beauty of this little being taken a moment to connect with me like his spirit to my spirit, and I might tear up 15 years ago, I would have been ashamed. Embarrassed, I would have held my head, I would have apologized if anybody noticed me crying today I have taught myself and grown into in that moment, keeping my head held up high. And when other people get weird, showing emotion in public, I look at them and I say, It’s okay. I’m tearful, and I’m strong. It’s all right. And watching their wheels turn on that, like, what is this crazy lady saying? And then watching them go? Yeah, okay. All right, maybe she can be strong and emotional at the same time, the more that I have worked on accepting who I am in the world, and not seeing myself as a problem, the more that I am in self respect and self regard of myself. And then I’m walking the world teaching people how to treat me and teaching them to have regard for my sensitivity to one of my things is that we are highly sensitive, we are not delicate. And I absolutely resist any teaching, any therapy, any coaching, anything that gives someone directly or indirectly the message that they are delicate, and they better tend to their delicacy. We are sensitive and we are strong, we are sensitive, and we are tough, we are not delicate. And going into delicacy is victim mode, and it will not serve you if becoming the victim actually helps you in any way I’d be all for it. It will thwart you, it will ruin a life it will ruin satisfaction, it will ruin purpose, and it will make your life small and good healthy people will not hang out with a constant victim. So this victim mentality that’s getting pushed I’m against it, particularly for highly sensitive people. You are strong and you are capable to surmount anything, even in the moments where you think you can’t. And when sensitive people step into their strength and their self acceptance. Oh, my God, are they or force?

Eric Zimmer 1:01:55

Well, I think that is a beautiful place to wrap up on that really strong message there of not being delicate, sensitive and strong.

Nikki Eisenhauer 1:02:05

Thank you sir. Thank you for having me and spending time with me.

Eric Zimmer 1:02:08

Thank you so much. I love talking with you and I will see you next time.

Nikki Eisenhauer 1:02:12

I appreciate it so much.

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