In this episode, Allison Aubrey explores midlife reinvention and how to create your own script for what comes next. She shares why midlife can be less about winding down and more about rediscovering parts of ourselves that may have been set aside during years of work, parenting, and responsibility. Allison and Eric discuss moving from performance to play, working with fear and self-doubt, reconnecting with intuition, and finding a renewed sense of purpose. They also explore the surprising role dreams can play in revealing what we really want and how to close the gap between knowing what’s good for us and actually doing it. Her new book, Your Turn: How to Create a Midlife You Love, is out now.
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Key Takeaways:
- Why midlife can be a time of possibility rather than decline
- Moving beyond the expected “learn, earn, retire” script
- Returning to the interests and joy you may have left behind
- How fear and self-doubt can cut us off from intuition
- Shifting from a performance mindset to a mindset of play
- Why knowing your “why” helps you move through difficult transitions
- Using dreams as a tool for discovering what you really want
- Closing the gap between knowing what’s good for you and actually doing it
Allison Aubrey is an award-winning science and health correspondent for NPR News and a contributor to CBS Sunday Morning. Her stories can be heard on Morning Edition and All Things Considered. She is the creator of the How to Thrive as You Age project. Aubrey is the winner of two James Beard broadcast awards, a National Press Club award for consumer reporting, and a New York Press Club award for excellence in journalism.
Connect with Allison Aubrey: Website | Instagram
If you enjoyed this conversation with Allison Aubrey, check out these other episodes:
The Midlife Makeover: Redefining Success and Happiness After 40 with Chip Conley
Life Transitions with Bruce Feiler
Successful Aging with Alan Castel
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Episode Transcript:
Allison Aubrey 00:00:00 Fear cuts off intuition, and when we’re cut off from intuition, we just can’t move forward like we stop ourselves before we start. So I think when I say learn, earn, return, what I really mean is return to that child within the person who could laugh, the person who could be goofy, the person who was vulnerable because there. That’s freedom.
Chris Forbes 00:00:31 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 00:01:15 Allison Aubrey was 12 or 13 when her grandfather took her to Churchill Downs to watch the horses race, and he told her to watch the third turn. He said that’s where the horse nobody expected finds a second wind and surges. And she asked him, why is it there? And he said, because that is where you can see the home stretch. And a sense of urgency arrives. If not now, when decades later, she’s in her 50s, 25 years into a newsroom career, and the word waiting for her was retire. It is not a word that she wanted. Her new book, Your Turn, is what she went looking for. Instead, I’m Eric Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Hi, Alison, welcome to the show.
Allison Aubrey 00:02:02 Thank you for having me. It’s great to be here.
Eric Zimmer 00:02:05 We are going to be discussing your wonderful new book called Your Turn How to Create a midlife You Love. But before we do that, we’ll start like we always do with the parable. And in 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.
Eric Zimmer 00:02:24 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 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.
Allison Aubrey 00:02:51 I love that parable, and I love that you start this way. What comes to mind for me is that Alexander Solzhenitsyn quotes that idea of the line between good and evil doesn’t cross continents or states. It divides the heart of every man or person. And to me, that idea is that we all have good and evil within us. Like we can be called the light and we can be called to the dark. And really, when you can sort of see the light, when you can sort of feel that divine spark, you’re called to the light. But it’s a choice. And just like you say, it’s which one you feed.
Eric Zimmer 00:03:31 I love that. That is a great quote. So take me into why you decide to write a book about midlife. Besides, I assume being in midlife, but there’s lots of us that are in it that aren’t writing a book about it. Tell me about that.
Allison Aubrey 00:03:47 Absolutely. Well, really, I wanted to write a book about midlife because I wanted to know how to find a midlife pivot. So I have worked inside of a newsroom for 25 years, and I love being in a newsroom. You feel like you’re at the center of a lot of things. There’s always excitement. You’re always living in present tense, always on deadline. And as I watched people 10 or 15 years older or retired, not just from the newsroom, but my own parents and people here in my neighborhood, I would start to I’d hear excitement like, oh, the bucket list of trips, or renovating the house, or buying that building, that cottage you always wanted to build.
Allison Aubrey 00:04:27 And people started out with such excitement about leaving the workplace. And oftentimes what I heard when they came back after a year, or I would see them again or touching base with people I’ve known my whole life, they would say, oh, I miss the workplace. I miss the connection. I miss that sense of purpose. And so it started to dawn on me that if some of the people I’ve known my whole life who are a bit further ahead if they’re struggling to sort of make that transition from full time work to a life that is full of purpose and joy in this post-work period that’s coming for all of us at some point. What does that crossfade look like? Like what do we need to start doing now in our 50s or earlier, to kind of set the stage for a life of joy and momentum and purpose when we’re no longer exclusively focused on parenting in the paycheck?
Eric Zimmer 00:05:24 Yeah. When I started my one on one coaching practice, I don’t know, it’s probably been nine years ago. I was surprised.
Eric Zimmer 00:05:31 And one of the things I was, the thing I was surprised by was how many of my clients were people who were retired. You know, I expected it was people who were trying to build a business or finish a creative project or move up in the workforce. And yeah, I got those people, but I got a lot of retired people. And it was because when all structure disappeared, even if they had a general idea of what they wanted to do, they found it really, really hard to do it. And so I do think that transition is really a big one, and it’s one that I think those of us that are still working, I certainly feel and it’s I feel like it’s a oftentimes an in-between place. You know midlife sometimes feels in-between things to me.
Allison Aubrey 00:06:15 Yeah. That’s a really good way of putting it. I think the literature the scientific literature, I’m a science reporter and I Revere the scientific process, the ability to sort of ask a question, look at data, evaluate.
Allison Aubrey 00:06:28 And I think when you look at the data like what’s super duper clear about making this transition and as you call it, this in-between space, which I completely agree, it’s sort of like you’re on this bridge and you’re going to leave something behind. And as you cross it, you’re crossing into something new. You got to have some ideas about and some intention about what’s going to be on the other side, because it doesn’t just happen. I mean, we know from the science that having a sense of purpose, people who in survey data that they have a sense of my life is worth living. I have something to do when I wake up in the morning when you have that sense of purpose, whether it’s big or small, doesn’t matter. It’s linked to less cognitive decline and longer lifespans.
Eric Zimmer 00:07:13 Again, very early in the book, you bring up some depth psychologists, particularly James Hollis, who’s a psychologist slash Jungian. And I’ve interviewed James and several of those people. And I always find their work. I find it confusing and what I mean, and your book kind of hits this from a couple different angles, which is, let’s just say you’re having a midlife malaise.
Eric Zimmer 00:07:41 Is it because your psyche is calling out for a deeper purpose. Is it because your hormones are changing? Is it because you’re taking care of yourself isn’t on point? I always find these questions so interesting when you get into them, trying to sort them out, and I feel like there’s a lot of that that starts happening even more in midlife, because there’s a lot of factors coming together at the same time.
Allison Aubrey 00:08:07 Yeah, absolutely. I think the short answer is I think it’s a yes. And it’s all of these things coming together. I would say you bring up James Hollis. What I distilled out of my conversations with James and reading his books is pretty simple for me. He talks about this midlife passage right where you pass to the stage of life where you’re not living by societal expectations, you’re creating your own script. And I think the societal script is a good one, right? For Gen Xers, I think that the expectation was sort of learn, earn, and then retire, right? Like, be as good of a student and go as far as you can academically.
Allison Aubrey 00:08:49 Then get as you know, great of job as you can get. Go as high and far as you can get because the world is your oyster, right? And oh, along the way, have some kids and a mortgage and a spouse and lots of responsibilities and don’t complain about it because, look, this is all an opportunity. And then at the end of 25 years, you do have a lot to show for it. I’m extremely grateful for my career and for my kids. But I also think that you hit a point where you’re like, wow, this societal script is a lot right? And a lot of it is based on keep going, right? Right. Keep chasing those accolades and keep chasing those things that society says are really important. And what I was starting to feel inside was like, I’ve done the things like I have followed the societal script, I have done the learn and the earn. And when I started to hear that, that next chapter was retire. That’s when I was like, oh no, I do not like that word.
Allison Aubrey 00:09:44 I mean that word. Retire. I mean, listen to it. Tired. Retired. It’s like you’re just tired. You’re giving up? Yeah, and it just really misses the mark for what we can look forward to. So I needed to redefine midlife. And really, the process of writing my book and my curiosity tour helped me see what’s possible and more importantly, helped me believe that a third turn, a third quarter, this passage into like this life that is led by heart and intuition. It’s my own script, not the societal script, that it was really possible that this could happen not just for me, but for the 65 million Gen Xers like me.
Eric Zimmer 00:10:26 Yeah. Talk to me about the third term. What analogy is that?
Allison Aubrey 00:10:29 Yeah, sure. So I grew up in Kentucky, in Louisville, and when I was like 12 or 13, I went to Churchill Downs, the home of the Kentucky Derby. And often in a horse race, there’s the front of the pack and the race starts out and there’s a lot of horses.
Allison Aubrey 00:10:43 Sort of neck and neck. And then something very unexpected happens, usually around the third turn of the track, as they call it. And my grandfather later said to me, he said, Alison, pay attention there. This is when the horse and the jockey that you’ve least expected finds the second win and surges ahead. And that’s what makes the race exciting. And I sort of said, well, why? Like why here? And he said, because when you can see the homestretch, when you can see the finish line, a sense of urgency arises. It’s sort of like now or never, right? If not now, when? Now, decades later. For me, I thought, wow, what an amazing midlife metaphor.
Eric Zimmer 00:11:28 You just a minute ago said learn, earn, retire. And I think you’ve rephrased that into learn earn return.
Allison Aubrey 00:11:37 That’s exactly right. Yeah.
Eric Zimmer 00:11:39 What are we returning to?
Allison Aubrey 00:11:40 Yeah, well, it picks up on the sort of horse track circle that we’re not. The Alpha.
Allison Aubrey 00:11:44 The Omega. Right. I don’t know. I’m starting to think in circles. Right. I think we’re returning to the child within. And what I mean by that is part of the work I did in writing this book, and sort of excavating my own wishes and dreams for the future, was to go back to the kid I once was. And I realized that as an eight year old, I would roam the woods behind my house and I would come home like muddy and my hair in a disastrous ponytail. And I was just carefree and blithe and like, that was my happy space and I was mercurial. But I was also, like, fun loving and a little goofy. And I laughed a lot. Right? Kids laugh a lot. And I realized that I had left behind a lot of my most joyful parts. That somewhere in this striving life of accomplishing all these things and being on deadline and raising three children, that I wasn’t laughing as much and that I’d have to kind of like joyful part of me in the dust.
Allison Aubrey 00:12:43 And when I really started thinking about my own third turn, it was very clear to me that I needed to bring that back. I also realized that I had a lot of fear about the future, and I don’t think that’s uncommon. Like this ticker tape would run through your mind of like, oh, we’re the best years behind you kind of thing. It’s like a kind of time anxiety, right? And time is a thief kind of thing. And I realized that I just really needed to sort of get away from that entirely. And I think in bringing freckles back, I sort of let go of fear. And I realized that fear cuts off intuition, and when we’re cut off from intuition, we just can’t move forward like we stop ourselves before we start. So I think when I say learn, earn, return, what I really mean is return to that child within the person who could laugh. The person who could be goofy. The person who was vulnerable because there. That’s freedom.
Eric Zimmer 00:13:44 You make the analogy in the book between midlife and adolescence.
What are the parallels there?
Allison Aubrey 00:13:53 Yeah. So one of my intellectual inspirations behind my thinking here was Mary Katherine Batson, who was the daughter of Margaret Mead and wrote several books on this stage of life. She’s now deceased, but I read one of her books 5 or 6 years ago, and at that time she created this idea of what she called the second to adulthood, that this in-between sort of 50 to 75 in 100 year lifespan, let’s just say optimistically, by 2050, there’s going to be an estimated 3.7 million centenarians. So at a time when it is possible to have a 100 year lifespan, 50 to 75 is kind of the third quarter. Right? 50 is the start of midlife. And when Mary Katherine Batson started writing about midlife, she called it a second adulthood, which I really liked. She kind of likened it to Eric Erikson’s phases of development, like where you’re asking these key questions between adolescence and adulthood of who am I? What is my self-identity like? What’s happening to my body? You know, as teenagers become adults.
Allison Aubrey 00:14:54 And thirdly, like, what is my generativity, which was Erikson’s word or what is my purpose? And these are tough questions. When teenagers ask these questions, we expect that they’re going to be angsty, that they’re going to be broody, that they’re going to be full of hormones, and we give them a lot of space, right? We chalk it up to like sort of teenage angst or even we have a term teenage rebellion. We expect it. As I entered this phase, which I entered just as my daughter Lillian, who is 15 now, was sort of going through this adolescent process and still is. I started to think, you know, what our experiences are really mirroring each other here. She’s asking like, who am I? What do I want to be in the world? And I’m also asking, like, who am I now, right? What is my purpose now that so many things are shifting our relationships and our responsibilities at this stage? So I call it a second adolescence.
Eric Zimmer 00:15:50 I agree that we’re in like the third quarter, 50 to 75. If we lived to 100 optimistic, which I hope if you lived to 75, I’m closer than I think I am. So we’ve got these years and sometimes it seems to me, and maybe I just feel like I’ve always been on a different developmental path, but that, like, there might be multiple turns in this period. About 12 years ago, I started this podcast, and then about six years after that, I started doing it full time. And so that was a big change of leaving the software career behind. All of that, that turn. And now it feels like I intuit something else. And it seems to me that if we’re around from 50 to 100, there could be multiple turns in here.
Allison Aubrey 00:16:36 I love that, and I hope that there are. And I 100% agree with you. I think the third turn doesn’t mean that you’re making one pivot to do one new thing, or that you’re going to commit to some project that you’re wedded to from 50 to 75. What I mean by it is really a mindset shift. When you’re in the third turn mindset, you’re living by your own script. You’re living by intuition, you’re living by heart. There might be 55 different things you try. And that’s the freedom of this stage of life, too, right? You just have to commit to a shift in your mindset that this is a stage of opportunity.
Eric Zimmer 00:17:46 One of the things that I loved that you did in the book. You obviously did a lot of research you are a science reporter, but you also went out and found profiles of women who had done something different in their third term. First, tell me about what your worry was about, who could make this sort of third turn, like what kind of people could, and what did you discover? And then maybe tell us about some of the people that you discovered?
Allison Aubrey 00:18:11 Absolutely. I think I was worried that the stage of freedom was reserved for like billionaires or Olympians or social media influencers or movie stars, that it wasn’t for the average folk, It wasn’t for women and people like me who’ve been in the trenches working and parenting for three decades.
Allison Aubrey 00:18:31 Right? I really want it to know myself. Like, what does a third turn look like for people who have caregiving responsibilities who might still need a paycheck? I mean, keep in mind. Women retire with 30% less than men. Many of us I don’t need to tell. You, have responsibilities on both sides aging parents and children, even after they launch. We’re still parenting. So I wanted to know where were the people like me and I indexed for that when I set out on my curiosity tour. So one of the first places I went was Maine, where I had seen an image of a woman named Christy Callaghan, and she was up on stage singing, and a friend had showed me this image. She’s a photographer. And she said, oh, I was doing a shoot at this of my friend Christy. And she showed me this woman who if a picture paints a thousand words, this one painted one word like transcendence. This woman was just like up on stage, singing her heart out like the world was her oyster.
Allison Aubrey 00:19:34 And she was at the center of doing the thing that made her heart sing. And I said, I’d have got to meet this woman. I imagine she was some sort of, like, famous musician on a big tour. No, no, no, she is not. She has a day job. She’s a physician’s assistant in Maine. She has children, right? Lots of responsibilities. And when she was 50, she decided to kind of step back on stage for the first time, singing. After many decades as a young adult, she had lived in Italy and been part of the music scene. This had all gone away for 30 years while she was working and parenting, and she was determined to bring it back. She worked really hard to get her voice back. She put on a house concert for her friends, and her friends were blown away. To make a long story short, within a few years she became the lead singer in this band, which travels up and down the coast and gets paid to perform at different events and weddings.
Allison Aubrey 00:20:27 And I went to see her and I was blown away, right? Like when she stepped on stage and took the lead vocals with singing Lizzo’s About Damn Time, I thought, wow, girl, like you are owning this. It is about damn time.
Eric Zimmer 00:20:43 Yeah, I stayed playing music into my adult years, but the last 15 years probably, I had moved away from really playing in bands and really from writing songs, and something in the last week has happened. Sometimes there’s magic in a particular guitar, and I got a guitar from a friend of mine, and I have written a song every day since. After like a decade, a drought, it’s just like, boom, I hear they all come. It’s thrilling.
Allison Aubrey 00:21:10 Wow. It reminds me of a story. I met a woman. Her name is Leslie. I met her on a flight from California to D.C.. And when she got on board, she put an instrument in a carrying case up above in the overhead compartment. And about midway through the flight, we lost Wi-Fi.
Allison Aubrey 00:21:26 And I said to her, oh, I noticed you were carrying your instrument. Do you play violin? It looked like the shape of a violin. And she looked at me and she said, no, I don’t play the violin. And I thought, okay, I’m kind of a talker, but maybe she’s not a talker. And there was this pregnant pause. I think I went glance back to my book, and then she kind of a minute later, she said, I play the fiddle really excitedly. And then.
Eric Zimmer 00:21:53 So to.
Allison Aubrey 00:21:54 Us. Yeah, exactly. And I was like, oh, wonderful. Like, I kind of. I don’t know a lot about string instruments. I kind of thought they were the same instrument. She looked at me. She said, oh, they’re the same instrument. It’s a different attitude. And she described how learning to play violin as a classical musician, you have to play someone else’s music you can become competent at that, and that’s very rewarding. But ultimately you are reading somebody else’s music, and the stress of it is like making sure you hit every note just right with the other instruments and that sort of orchestral setting.
Allison Aubrey 00:22:30 And she said over time, that just wore me down. Like it just felt more stressful. Like the performance element was overwhelming. Then when she made the shift to the fiddle, suddenly like you making your own music this week and feeling so great about it, it seems like you’re you have a spring in your step from this. She said I started making music from my heart. It was just pure improv. I was playing what came to me. I was playing by intuition and as she told the story, she just lit up. It was very clear to me. I got chills listening because I realized that she made this very simple swap, which is key to midlife reinvention for a lot of people. And that is to go from the performance mindset, which can be very stressful, right? Pleasing the cheering fans and the Stan or the audience to this other mindset of play. So think about that shift from performance to play. Which one sounds like more fun, right? It’s play. And that’s what I took from Leslie’s story.
Eric Zimmer 00:23:34 That is a great shift. And it’s a shift that even knowing it’s the shift to make is sometimes really challenging. Do. I’m working on a couple of upcoming keynotes, which I want to do it because it’s fun. And yet I get in it and it feels like I gotta get the performance right. The fear starts to creep into it. Is it going to be good? Is it going to be good? I was just asking myself this question the last couple of days. How can I get back to making this more fun? And I don’t think I know the answer quite yet. Yeah, it’s like you. And launching a book, right? There’s a lot going on. How does that become play in a way? Yeah, I.
Allison Aubrey 00:24:12 Know that fear.
Eric Zimmer 00:24:13 How do we make it fun?
Allison Aubrey 00:24:15 Yeah. I mean, there’s definitely going to be a performance angle to giving those keynotes, for sure. But if you’ve done the prep work, then and you’ve used your brain to organize and structure once you’ve done that, like let go of that process and start plugging into the intuition. Right.
Eric Zimmer 00:24:33 Right. Yeah. This is actually the hard part. I think it’s the doing those reps to get it right, to get it constructed. Because then when I do it, that’s my happy place. You write in your book about finishing your book, right? You get to this point and it just at certain points it gets hard and you’re like, wow, this is a struggle. And I think that’s kind of where I am, but I’m so close to being at that play point. I think it’s a good question. I keep saying like, how can I make whatever this thing is more fun, more enjoyable?
Allison Aubrey 00:25:02 I agree 100% and I am sure you are going through this process you were going to push through. Yeah.
Eric Zimmer 00:25:10 Well, thank you for the support. The cheerleading.
Allison Aubrey 00:25:13 Well, look how many times you’ve already done it, right. Like the evidence all points to you accomplishing the things you set out, right. Why would this be different?
Eric Zimmer 00:25:20 Why would this be different? Yes. That’s what certain people in my life always encourage me. Why would this time be different? I don’t know why. I’m like, well, this time. Yeah, I figured it out up till now, but this time, you know, I talked to people who’ve written, like, three great books and they’re working on their latest book. You know, like New York Times bestsellers. Like, I don’t think I can do it. I just I’m like, what do you mean? You’ve written, like, three New York Times bestsellers. Of course you can do it. And it’ll be like, yeah, but that was then. I don’t know if I still have it.
Allison Aubrey 00:25:47 The doubt never goes away. I mean, this whole part of our conversation here is reminding me of a woman in my book. Genevieve, Amara and Genevieve had this amazing success opening this restaurant in D.C., a Filipino restaurant, and she was given these amazing reviews by Pete Wells in The New York Times and Bon Appetit. And it was like her restaurant was being called one of the most important restaurants in America. This is like everything she’d ever hoped for and worked for became reality. And during the pandemic, she lost the restaurant. And to make a long story short, decided for a number of reasons after a few years, to close it. Part of that was just it’s really hard for the restaurant business to keep things going. And what you were saying about, like, can I do it? Like, should I do it? Should I go for it? Right. This questioning happens for like a lot of type ace drivers, right. Because you have this period of sort of transition, this sort of crossfade between doubt to like this reckoning of like, oh yeah, I’ve got something else in me. And for Genevieve, what was so interesting is that she walked me through this year long process when she was starting to sort through what was it from running that restaurant? Like, what were the skills and talents inside running the restaurant business that she could parlay into another phase of life.
Allison Aubrey 00:27:12 Like, what was she really good at? Because running a restaurant is a lot of different jobs. It’s managing people and being the PR face, and there’s so many jobs wrapped up in that. And so when she sort of like pulled out the things that she loved most about the restaurant, a few of them were her love of food and her love of teaching. And so she had this idea to start teaching classes where she would help people take recipes that were sort of oral tradition in their family, and kind of write the story of their family in a recipe. And when she first had the idea, her heart told her right away. Her heart leapt like, oh, I’m excited by this, let’s do it. And then she spent a good year talking herself into it and out of it. Oh, what if people never come? What if nobody’s interested? What if this is too hard to pull up? What if this. What if that? Three things to talk yourself out of it. And that’s fear, right? Fear stops us before we start.
Allison Aubrey 00:28:06 It cuts off intuition. And finally she mustered, like on this slow crossfade between self-doubt and belief, she finally broke through. But I think it’s like a part of this decision making and transition that I really resonated with, and I think seems like pretty ubiquitous to people making these kinds of transitions.
Eric Zimmer 00:28:29 Yeah, I do think doubt is just endemic. It can be worked with, but I think at least my experience is that there’s a phase in doing anything meaningful, that it gets hard. It gets particularly hard. I mean, maybe hard all along. But there’s a phase where, at least for me, where I’m just deep in it and I’m like, I don’t know if I’m going to find my way through this and that. Knowing that that’s there is actually helpful because I’m like, oh yeah, okay, I’ve been here, I’ve been here. Just patience, patience. Keep walking. Patience. But when you’re in it, it still feels incredibly real.
Allison Aubrey 00:29:05 Absolutely. I think another thing to sort of.
Allison Aubrey 00:29:09 Seems relevant at this moment, is that part of what helps us push through is to know our why. Like, why do you want this? Like, why is it important for you to do these keynotes? Right? Answering that question why? That can really help you muscle through the tough times. I think of so many of the characters in my book. One of them is coming to mind right now. A woman who’s in her mid 60s named Kathy Bull House, and she’s actually the CEO of this, like $5 billion company. And she grew up in poverty, was had many siblings. Her mother worked in a factory. And she tells the story that every night her mother would come home with these, like, stained hands. Because she died. Grandfather clocks in a factory and worked her work to the bone every day and still didn’t have money for like, nice vacations or Christmas presents since she started to think like, how is this fair? My poor mother comes home from work every day, and we still can’t afford the things that other people have.
Allison Aubrey 00:30:05 And so she developed this question that really centered her life on what is fair. And she said to herself, she made a pledge to herself that if she ever became the boss, life would be different for anybody who worked for her or with her. Well, lo and behold, she is the boss. Like she is CEO of a company that is valued in the billions of dollars, and she has private equity investors. And what she has done is she has made sure that every single employee has an equity stake in the company so that when the company resells, if she makes money, if the bankers make money, everybody gets a payday because to her it’s solving for fairness and that is her. Why? So I think that when we’re going through these hard times, difficult, challenging, when we’re asking, is all of this worth it? Right. Because there’s work involved with any of our big ambitions or any of our ideas, it’s always important to come back and ask that question. What is my why?
Eric Zimmer 00:31:29 Eight years ago, I was completely overwhelmed. My life was full with good things, a challenging career, two teenage boys, a growing podcast, and a mother who needed care. But I had a persistent feeling of, I can’t keep doing this, but I valued everything I was doing and I wasn’t willing to let any of them go. And the advice to do less only made me more overwhelmed. That’s when I stumbled into something I now call this still point method, a way of using small moments throughout my day to change. Not how much I had to do, but how I felt while I was doing it. And so I wanted to build something I wish I’d had eight years ago. So you don’t have to stumble towards an answer that something is now here and it’s called overwhelm is optional tools for when you can’t do less. It’s an email course that fits into moments you already have. Taking less than ten minutes total a day. It isn’t about doing less, it’s about relating differently to what you do. I think it’s the most useful tool we’ve ever built.
Eric Zimmer 00:32:33 The launch price is $29. If life is too full, but you still need relief from overwhelm, check out overwhelm is optional. Go to oneyoufeed.net/overwhelm. That’s oneyoufeed.net/overwhelm. And so as you’ve navigated a little bit of this shift by writing the book, by living it yourself. What do you feel has emerged as your. Why?
Allison Aubrey 00:33:03 My why is I feel at my best when I am interviewing people and helping people see things that synthesize information and help people see things in a very simple and relatable way that they might not see for themselves. So I feel like in 25 years of reporting and most of its science reporting, what I’m really doing is sort of taking complex information and I’m synthesizing it or marinating it down to the few key things that you need to know. And trying my best to explain methodologies and the why, and to put a story in there so that it’s relatable. And I think what I realized is that I love doing that and my why has not changed, but what has changed is how I want to do what I want to do, right? So when I go on Morning Edition or All Things Considered, with a three minute story about here’s what the Cyclospora outbreak is about, right? I’m giving you information and that is a public service.
Allison Aubrey 00:34:08 It is part of the job. What I’m not able to do in a news setting is to do what my heart is now calling me to do, which is sort of to fuse my knowledge with my wisdom, because I think at this age, we’re in the wisdom stage of life, right? Yeah. And in an essence, that’s kind of like why I wrote this book and why I’m sort of casting a different future for myself. I think back to this dream that I had when I had a book proposal sitting on the side of my desk, unsure if I was going to finish it right. Because it’s hard to write a book proposal. And I had a dream that woke me up. In a start, I was in the dream. Steve Inskeep, who’s the host of Morning Edition, was saying. And NPR’s Allison Aubrey joins us now. And it was just dead air because like, the on air light was on. But I was stuck in my bed and in my dream, I was literally, like, stuck in my bed.
Allison Aubrey 00:34:59 I couldn’t get out. Right. And so I woke up and I was like, oh my God. Like, what day is it? What time is it? I grab my phone. I’m like, did I just miss Morning Edition? Right? Was I supposed to be on up first? I had this panicky sensation, so I had scheduled this interview with this guy named Ian Williams, and he has live interpreted 10,000 or some thousands numbers of dreams on the BBC. He’s a British guy. And we started the interview and I told him about this, this recent dream I had that had woke me in a start and he said, oh, very interesting. What do you think that dream is about? And I said, I don’t know. I feel like it’s like an anxiety dream, that I’m fearful that I’m getting too old to wake up at 5:00 in the morning or I’m fearful of missing a deadline. And he said, how many deadlines have you missed in your career? I thought about it.
Allison Aubrey 00:35:48 I answered zero. I have literally never missed a deadline. And how long have you been doing your job? He asked. It was like decades, and he said, in over 20 years you’ve never missed a deadline. And now you think that dream was that you’re scared to miss a deadline? I don’t think that’s it. I kind of sat there quietly. I said, well, what do you think it is about? And I’ll never forget this, he said. I think you have something to say that you can’t say on Morning Edition. And when he said that, every cell in my body knew it to be true. And over the next months I realized, you know what? I’m going to finish this book proposal. I’m going to go on this curiosity tour because I realized many months into it, that thing that I can’t talk about on Morning Edition, which is a news show, is this idea of merging wisdom and knowledge to help people find their own third turns and to talk about like, meaning making and purpose in this stage of life.
Eric Zimmer 00:36:51 You led me right where I wanted to go next, which was into dreams. You have a whole chapter on dreams. Tell me what your relationship was like with dreams, and then what you learned about dreams and how that shaped what came together in the book.
Allison Aubrey 00:37:07 When I was a kid, my mother was a very vivid dreamer, and I can remember her coming into my room, like in the summertime, and she’d be morning time and she’d be like, oh my God, I had the most amazing dream. And I’d be waking up and she’d be telling me about this, like specific dream with all these, like, very like loose, like so much detail and imagery. And I was like, wow. And I didn’t have those kind of dreams very rarely. Right. And so I thought, okay, well, I’m just not like one of those kinds of dreamers or like maybe my mom’s embellishing a little bit here. Right. And so my idea about sleep, because I’ve done tons of stories about the importance of sleep.
Allison Aubrey 00:37:48 I was very committed to my position that nighttime was for sleep, and sleep was the important thing, and dreams were some sort of artifact of sleep. Right. Well, little did I know, there’s a whole body of evidence, and a lot of it is just going back to myth. Really. Like, way, way, way, way back thousands of years. And I got very interested in this notion that dreams might be able to sort of make us aware of things that were too busy to see during the day, or hesitant to see head on or face head on. I think for me, it was during the pandemic and ironically, I was awake at like midnight or 2:00 in the morning, my bed and I just like, oh, I can’t sleep. So I opened up the New York Times app, and there was this obituary of this woman named Rosalind Cartwright, and she’d been dubbed the Queen of dreams. She’d been a researcher studying dreams, like starting back in the 1970s. And she died at age 98, I want to say.
Allison Aubrey 00:38:40 And I read the whole article, I read it again, and then I read it a third time and I thought, I have got to know more about this because she posited that our dreams are kind of like a free therapist, that when we can learn to recall them and talk about them, that it’s a coping mechanism and that our dreams have a lot to say to us. It’s something that I then remember my mother sort of talking about, and I think I was hesitant to hear my mother’s messages on this. So anyway, I kind of just did this dive into current literature, and it turns out that there are some fairly recent studies on what’s called dream incubation. And the idea of dream incubation is that you can kind of like plant little dream seeds. You can tell yourself before going to sleep, like I have a problem or a challenge and please, the dream maker within, help me think about this challenge during my dream. It sounds totally hokey, but it turns out it’s real. And there’s a couple of published studies that show that when you introduce people to the idea of dream incubation that many, many of them actually will have dreams about the very problem that they asked their dream maker to dream about.
Allison Aubrey 00:39:52 And they wake up feeling like almost like a sense of resolution, or at least a clue. And so I just became like, wow, this is real. So I went down this whole path of sort of like practicing dream incubation, interviewing a bunch of experts about dream incubation, and have really decided that dreaming is yet another self excavation tool. Right? Like in this stage, when we’re searching for what’s next, we need to sort of know what’s inside. How many tools do we have to see inside? Well, we can journal, we can talk to our friends. And I feel like dreaming is one of those tools that’s hidden in plain sight.
Eric Zimmer 00:40:32 How do we get better at using our dreams than to be another source of knowledge for ourselves?
Allison Aubrey 00:40:40 Yeah, I think that is a complicated question. One thing I will say is that I’m not here to say that every dream that you have means something, and I still have dream droughts, right? If I’m really busy, I don’t remember any of my dreams.
Allison Aubrey 00:40:52 So you have to really, really intentionally. Like when I first started keeping a dream journal, I was sometimes only able to write down an image, like one word of an image that I salvaged, right? And then over time, when I realized, like, oh, you have to write them down, like right when you wake up, or if you wake up in the middle of the night, write them down there because they’ll be gone in the morning. Right? When you get better, it’s like a muscle. What I’ve realized is dream recall is absolutely a muscle. The more you work it, the better you get, the more you get, right? There’s a lot of, like, dream decoding tools. Lisa marciano wrote this amazing book about decoding your dreams. And so you can use different devices to help you sort of index for what does this dream mean? You can also be part of like a dream circle. One of the most fun things I did on my curiosity tour is I signed up to participate in a Dream circle, and it was about 8 or 10 women.
Allison Aubrey 00:41:45 It was very kind of ritualistic. There was we sat sort of criss cross applesauce style and had candles and did some. There was some sort of music playing, and we were guided by this woman who helped us each recall a dream. And then every single person went around in the circle and offered a little guidance about what they think that person’s dream might mean. And what’s so interesting about that? You don’t have to go to a formal dream circle, but you can do this with your friends. What you’ll find is that if that interpretation is right, you’ll know it right away. And if it’s not right, it’s just their fantastical thinking. Because they don’t know you as well as you do, you’ll know that too. So it’s great insight. It’s sort of like you have ten minds helping you figure out what the dream means. And you, the dreamer, will know right away what it means.
Eric Zimmer 00:42:34 Yeah, I was going to ask that question about, like, to what degree is there any homogeneity in what people think dreams mean? Or if you start talking to the experts, they all interpret them in very different ways.
Allison Aubrey 00:42:46 Well, I don’t think very different ways. I think there’s two school of thoughts broadly. I mean, there’s probably more school of thought because in life everything’s more complicated than that. But what I’ve came to deduce is that there’s sort of two main schools of thought. There’s sort of like the Jungian school of thought, which there’s literally this internal dream maker inside, like this other within that is connecting you with sort of the broader consciousness, like the global consciousness, like connecting you to the whole, like dreaming is your way to connect with the whole of universal consciousness, which is lofty thinking and sort of out there and takes a while to sort of understand it. But in the Jungian approach, there are lots of different ways to sort of look at symbols, right? That symbols are one way to decode dreams. Like in one of my dreams I dreamt about stars and stars in Jungian psychology have like a certain meaning. Also, if you dream about a best friend, for instance, you might think that that dream is about your best friend, but oftentimes it’s a reflection of your dark side, the side of you you don’t want to see.
Allison Aubrey 00:43:56 And so if you wake up and you’ve had. Yeah, if you wake up and you’ve had the dark day, if you wake up and if you’ve had a dream and your best friend was the person in the dream, you have to ask yourself, oh, wow, wait, maybe that dream was really about me, about my shadow side. Your shadow side is the part of you you don’t want to face or you you don’t want to see. And so maybe that shadow side turns up as another person. Anyway, there are so many complex ways and like the onions have literally like, I’m not doing it justice because there is so much written on this and I feel I’ve sort of got the tip of the iceberg. Reading through this decoding book and talking to Lisa marciano, I feel like there’s layers and layers and layers more to go. It’s really cool on the other side, except there’s sort of two schools for the sort of Jungian side. The other way of interpreting your dream is more like the way that Ian Williams does it.
Allison Aubrey 00:44:53 He’s got this book called the 100 Top Dreams. He claims these are over and over and over again. He’s heard these dreams from people. These are sort of the universal dream themes. He basically says there’s a way to interpret them that is pretty on the mark. Standardized. So for instance, I’m just going to read you a few because these are fun. Like if you’re being chased, he says that’s a sign that you can run from something, but you can’t shake it. Whatever is chasing you is always some aspect of yourself. Another one is teeth falling out. Apparently people dream a lot about their teeth falling out. He says there’s some fear or anxiety in this dream. Yeah, it can suggest you’re losing confidence or your sense of power is waning. Really interesting. This is another one. You’re unable to find a toilet. Well, it says this one is about a situation that is very unhealthy, but you’re not sure how to let go of it. Yeah, and this one. I don’t know anybody who hasn’t had this one.
Allison Aubrey 00:45:51 You are unprepared for an exam. You walk in. You’re not ready. This is so familiar, you realize you haven’t studied for the test. This is interesting. Well, it says this really represents self critique, right? We are our own worst critic. So are you living up to whatever standard that you have set for yourself? Exams are really the way that we’re judged for the first 22 years of our lives, or longer, and this reflects how we’re judging ourselves. I love that, and the last one I’ll do is Dreams of Flying. I’ve had those dreams. So if you dream that you are floating or you’re in flight, it’s really about letting go. It’s a sign that you have let go of a situation that has weighed you down. You’re like releasing it from the limitations in your waking life. So I include both in the book because I feel like it’s not one or the other. It’s a both.
Eric Zimmer 00:46:45 And I’m fascinated by the exam one. Is he saying that we are critiquing ourselves too harshly, or that we’re not living up to or not the latter?
Allison Aubrey 00:47:00 I think it’s you’re not living up to the standard you set for yourself, because what is life at this point? Right? Like, I mean, who else is setting standards for you? Like you are setting standards for yourself, right? If you’re raising the goalpost because you think success is here, but oh no, it’s here. Oh no, it’s here. It’s higher and higher. Nobody’s doing that to you except you. So that’s what it means.
Eric Zimmer 00:47:20 My common dream is not that I’m unprepared for an exam. It’s that I haven’t been to class for, like, the first five weeks of the semester, and I know I should go. The answer to this is to go to class. But of course I’m like, I can’t go to class, I haven’t been. Now this dream happens to reflect reality a little bit because I did everything I could to not go to class. A lot of people I respect have gone deep into dreams, and it’s just never an area I’ve really ventured. But I’m always a little bit curious about.
Allison Aubrey 00:47:53 Me too. Yeah, it was writing the dream chapter and learning about the research on dreams. Being able to start this dream incubation process really was one of the most exciting parts of the book, because a lot of what is in the book is stuff I’ve been reporting on for 20, 25 years.
Allison Aubrey 00:48:12 And this was me really sort of taking a fresh look at something that I had kind of judgment about, right? I assumed that this was soft or not real, and I was stunned to find out. There is a lot of research going on about dreams. You know.
Eric Zimmer 00:48:27 It’s the research that shows that. Working on your dreams can lead to better psychological outcomes. When you say research like, what are we seeing?
Allison Aubrey 00:48:36 Yeah. Well, for instance, some researchers at MIT lab, they created this little device called a dormitory. And it helps you to do this practice of dream incubation. Right. And they wanted to know, like, is there a way to systematically help people through this dormitory advice that kind of sends you these these messages, like a recorded voice will be like, it’s time to dream about trees. And it sends this message to you at the very moment that your brain is sort of like switching over to that state of sleep. And so they’re doing some research about when is it that you can be prompted to actually set dream intentions.
Allison Aubrey 00:49:16 And then there’s also some research going on at Stanford University about, you know, how to use dreams and incorporate them into, into therapy. And I would say that people are casting a wide net, and there’s sort of a resurgence of interest in dreams by, you know, sophisticated researchers.
Eric Zimmer 00:49:37 Interesting. So the latter part of your book deals more with our bodies, primarily around this idea that if we are going to thrive in midlife, that taking care of ourselves is sort of a non-negotiable. Taking care of ourselves physically, mentally, emotionally. You’ve been reporting on this sort of stuff for for many years. I’m curious, as you worked your way through this book, did you learn some new things or have some new realizations that went beyond like, oh yeah, I should sleep well, I should exercise, I should eat right, I should spend time with people I love.
Allison Aubrey 00:50:14 I would say that for me, the big realization is that I had what I would call a knowledge Action gap. And what I mean by that is that it is not the knowing of things that makes a difference, right? Sure, you have to know them. It’s the doing of things. Garrett had that great quote. It’s not the knowing, it’s the doing. And I have been reporting on these things, as you say, for decades. And it’s really an easier task to distill information into, like an evidence based report than it is to take that information and put it to action in your life, because.
Allison Aubrey 00:50:51 So many crosswinds. And I would say we all have a knowledge action gap, right? And so I started thinking a lot about, well, how is it that we can close our knowledge action gaps. So I went back to my own reporting. It’s almost like I was like reading the work of someone else, right? I went back to take advice from things that I’d written like 15 or 20 years ago. And so, like a lot of things, it’s about priorities. And when you’re not doing something you want to be doing your goal. Your job is to identify the obstacle. Because if you’re saying this is important to me and you’re not doing it well, there’s got to be a reason.
Allison Aubrey 00:51:32 So I will give you one example of, you know, sort of like how my behavior changed at the beginning of writing this book. I had a battery of tests at Northwestern University, at a longevity lab that was getting underway there. And one of the things that I learned is that I was quote unquote, under muscled, like, even though I have a normal body weight and I exercise for whatever reason, walking in yoga wasn’t really giving me the muscle composition that is ideal. And one thing I knew already was that strength training was important. I had reported on that, but for some reason I wasn’t doing it and I was examining my own knowledge action gap. Well, I was in why don’t you? And I started to realize, oh, I have all kinds of preconceived ideas about people who go to the gym to lift weights. Right. Like my comfort zone is doing yoga. My comfort zone is walking. And so I had to overcome sort of like biases about what weightlifting or strength training really looked like.
Allison Aubrey 00:52:35 And I needed to find a place in a way to do that. And that just took time. It took me out of my normal routine. And so I would say that one by one, I kind of faced like the knowledge action gap and looked at the obstacles to try to get to. How can you get a strength training workout in 25 minutes three times a week? Like, that’s not too hard. It’s a matter of calendarizing. It just the way you calendarize, your kids dentist appointment and your work interviews and every other obligation that you have. I think one of the things for busy working moms is that we tend to have this pecking order of work kids, And then when there’s time, us. And I think that’s part of this whole midlife process of like taking the time for yourself.
Eric Zimmer 00:53:24 Yeah, that knowing, doing gap, I feel like has been at the heart of what I’ve worked with and taught people for years and years as a behavior coach, that exact thing. Like, we kind of know what to do. It’s just like, why aren’t we doing it? And there are so many factors that go into it. One of the things I think is challenging in this area is that there are so many things that we potentially could do to take care of ourselves. We’re overwhelmed with this kind of information. How do you think about like, I’m prioritizing, right? Dream incubation and writing down dreams takes time. Journaling takes time. Yoga takes time. Cardio. There’s this big list of things that we could do to take care of ourselves. How do you prioritize?
Allison Aubrey 00:54:12 I think one of the best tools in the book is called the Brain Care Score. And I bring it up to answer your question, because it’s a very simple questionnaire that anybody can take for free online. It was developed by physicians at Massachusetts General Hospital, namely Doctor Jonathan Rosand. He is a neurologist who has seen many, many, many people with brain injuries and dementia. And people are always asking like, doctor, doctor, what can I do? So I make sure I don’t end up like my mother or my husband, what have you.
Allison Aubrey 00:54:41 And it turns out that what promotes good brain health also promotes good heart health, right? What’s good for the heart is good for the brain. Like we are not separate organs. We are one body. And increasingly, even though our medical system is broken up into all of these specialties, it’s incredibly clear that what’s good for the brain also helps stave off depression. Also helps stave off heart disease, right? Like it’s all the same stuff. And so when you take steps to protect the brain, you’re also protecting the heart. You’re protecting your mental health. you’re protecting your overall wellness and health span. So the reason why I’m parrying the question a little bit is that, and I’ll tell you what I do. But the reason that I think listeners could be helped by just taking 15 minutes to fill out the brain care score, is because it creates an action plan for you. You answer a series of questions about your lifestyle, habits, everything from like, are you eating three? You know, greens a week? How much alcohol are you drinking? How much sleep are you getting? What is your agency? What is your body weight? Your cholesterol? All these factors.
Allison Aubrey 00:55:45 A few questions also about the social dynamics. Do you have friends? Do you have a sense of purpose? You get a number answer for each of these based on how you answer. And then you tally your score. And then what you can do is you can choose where to start. You now have in front of you a single sheet of paper that says, here are the 13 factors that move your health span and increase the likelihood of you aging well and you can’t do all at once. But pick the thing you can do today. I mean, here’s an easy one on the alcohol question on the brain care score. If you have three or fewer drinks per week, you get points. Once you go over that, then you’re going down in points. So one place to start if you’re looking to prioritize your health, is that nobody is here to tell you to be a teetotaler, but can you reduce how many drinks you’re having a week down to this number? That’ll get you an easy point.
Allison Aubrey 00:56:40 Can you double down on greens? You know, can you meet this threshold of vegetables. That’ll get you a point. So some of them are low hanging fruit. It’s an easy way to up your score. And so because nobody wants to be told by somebody else what to do, this brain care score and what comes with it is a way to gamify good health. And it’s sort of like a do it yourself adventure. You get to pick where you start. Are you starting with the social relationships? Are starting with finding a new hobby because, you know, a sense of purpose. It’s important. Are you starting with finally getting that 150 minutes of physical activity every week? It’s up to you.
Eric Zimmer 00:57:19 Yeah. Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. I’ve really enjoyed the conversation. I really enjoyed your book. We’ll have links in the show notes where people can get access to the book, and I wish you the best with it. Thank you.
Allison Aubrey 00:57:31 Thank you. It’s wonderful to be here.
Eric Zimmer 00:57:33 Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend. Share it from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don’t have a big budget, and I’m certainly not a celebrity. But we have something even better. And that’s you just hit the share button on your podcast app, or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom one episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the One You Feed community.
